The early years of the sixteenth century saw some elements of uncertainty as to the Isle of Man's position resolved. Despite the disgrace of Alexander, son of James II of Scotland, Alexander's son John returned as regent during James V's minority; but, after leaving the country in 1523, he died in 1536 leaving no heir, and his honours, including his claim to the Isle of Man, became extinct. There were now no ‘live’ claimants to the Island among the Scottish nobility. There was also considerable change due to the Reformation and to the further consolidation of Stanley lordship which might have produced a more straightforward set of constitutional, political, religious, social and economic relationships governing the island's development, dominated by the axis between the English monarchy and Man. Yet this chapter will set these developments alongside the evidence for continuing complexity in the status of the Island.

The dissolution opened the possibilities associated with royal landownership in the Island for the first time. It did so, however, in the face of possible alternative local solutions, and ones which ultimately were predominant. The dissolution of Furness Abbey in April 1537 provided an opportunity to become involved in Manx issues which the English Crown appears to have attempted to take. The Island is specifically referred to in the valuation of the house in the Valor Ecclesiasticus, and in the surrender documentation.

Readers of skaldic poetry will frequently have encountered kennings such as sverð-Freyr ‘sword-Freyr’ and Baldr skjaldar ‘Baldr of the shield’. Both of these kennings have the referent warrior or, more generally, man, and they reflect the general kenning type ‘god of weapon’. A comparable kenning model is used to refer to women in skaldic poetry, but here the determinant typically refers to some kind of valuable object, such as jewelry or gold, a piece of clothing worn by women, or something offered by women, usually drink. The underlying kenning models are thus ‘goddess of valuables’, ‘goddess of flax’ etc. As examples, one may mention steina Gná ‘the Gná of [precious] stones’ and lín-Gefn ‘flax-Gefn [Freyja]’, both woman. This remarkable usage of theonyms as basewords in kennings with the referent human, which will be referred to as theophoric kennings, may be seen as elevating humans and their activities out of the ordinary sphere and placing them within a grand cosmological framework. One particularly striking example of this is found in st. 14 of Einarr skálaglamm's Vellekla:

For many Londoners, the American Revolution had been a conflict far away, to be observed, not actively participated in. But for James Marriott (1730–1803) it was a matter of personal and professional importance. Sir James Marriott was the Judge of the High Court of Admiralty in London from 1778 until his resignation in 1798. The son of a London attorney, he was admitted to the College of Advocates in November 1757 and fulfilled the position of King's Advocate for four years from 1764 to 1768. He resided over the court throughout the course of four different wars, often struggling with the amount of work created by them.

Marriott was or certainly styled himself a zealous patriot and ardent anti- Americanist, both in the field of politics and in international law; for example, describing Britain as a “Nation […] too dazzling not to be seen by some of the Maritime Powers with Malevolence”. According to him, the civilian united the characteristics of “the scholar, the gentleman and friend of their country”. This patriotic flair can also be found in his judgments, such as in one case before the High Court of Admiralty, where he went so far as to say:

That this [British] nation (now fighting for its domestic preservation, as well as empire) had its cruelest enemies within its own bowels [America]; that he [Marriott] would be bound by the act in regard to costs. The American prohibitory act regulated, like other prize acts, the modes of proceeding, but did not take away the general powers of the Court; that the act required bail for double costs from the claimants [Americans]; but there were other costs beside those upon bail.

Before the live-action Transformers films that began in 2007, The Transformers: The Movie (1986) was the brand's only foray to the box office, and it featured star-studded voice work by Leonard Nimoy, Judd Nelson, Eric Idle, Robert Stack, and Orson Welles. Explorations of medievalism in the Transformers have been few and brief, and none has yet explored Transformers: The Movie.

To say that Adalbert Stifter was born on October 23, 1805, and died on January 28, 1868, may be technically true, but as with so many aspects of his life and work, details of this sort are both murky and misleading. The Ordnung—whether ethical order or petty orderliness—that ruled his existence and dominate his oeuvre is often but a front concealing deeper unrest, including chronic melancholy, self-destructive passion, and existential despair. Thus, to rectify the ignominy of his premarital conception and restore some semblance of order to his very origins, Stifter often tweaked his professional résumés and autobiographical accounts by shifting his birth year to 1806. (His parents, Magdalena Friepes and Johann Stifter, were wedded on August 13, 1805, hence just over two months before his birth.) The circumstances surrounding his death were likewise disorderly, if not messy. Around 1:00 am during the night of January 25–26, 1868, Stifter slit his throat with a razorblade yet did not expire from this self-inflicted wound until two days later. This act of (attempted) suicide might be interpreted as the culmination of Stifter's tumultuous life as lived between the lines of his self-corrective fiction and well over a century's worth of largely reverent literary-historical scholarship. It is, at any rate, an eerie enactment of a lamentation expressed through his analogue Augustinus in the fourth version of Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters (My Great-Grandfather's Notebook) which was written during the final years of his life and published posthumously in 1939.

This chapter examines the structure of Walter Map's De nugis curialium in order to ask how comparative approaches to a compiled book can inform comparative approaches to a compiled text. As we have seen, Part I of Bodley 851 preserves the sole surviving copy of Map's only life work (fols. 7ra–73v), a collection of historical accounts, folk tales, classical references, political jibes, and courtly witticisms (among other competing generic forms) in Latin prose, originally composed at the close of the twelfth century. Within Bodley 851, the De nugis is preserved in five distinctions, and each distinction is broken up into smaller chapters of disparate length. These textual divisions postdate Map's death. One section of the De nugis circulated widely as the Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum (4.2–5), a fervently hyperbolic antifeminist epistle commonly attributed in manuscript witnesses to authoritative sources such as St. Jerome and Valerius Maximus. In the version of the Dissuasio preserved within the De nugis, Map acknowledges the popularity of his epistle, noting that “it is snatched up greedily, copied passionately, and read with great delight” (“auide rapitur; transcribitur intente; plena iocunditate legitur;”; fol. 47r, 4.5). Immediately, he complains that “nevertheless, some people – vulgar people! – deny that it is mine” (“meam tamen esse quidam sed de plebe negant.”; fol.47r). Apart from the Dissuasio, Bodley 851 constitutes the only material evidence for any transmission of the De nugis – and so, too, for any possible medieval readership of Map's life work.

With the exception of the last work in the series, Beethoven's ten violin sonatas were all composed within the space of some six years, between 1798 and 1803. Of his chamber works in other forms, only the five string trios are more closely bunched together. Moreover, if that last sonata, op.96, occupies a lone position chronologically, then its predecessor – the ‘Kreutzer’ op.47 – stands apart stylistically: it is, as Beethoven was at pains to point out, less an intimate chamber work than a piece in concertante style. The Sonata op.30 no.1 to which its finale originally belonged is one of Beethoven's most subtly understated works, and perhaps for that reason one of the least performed of the series. But even among the remaining works, only the C minor op.30 no.2 and the ‘Spring’ op.24 appear with any regularity on concert programmes outside of a complete cycle of the sonatas.

There is no evidence to suggest that Beethoven himself was a string player of more than modest ability. Among his violin teachers in Bonn was Franz Georg Rovantini, a distant cousin of Beethoven on his mother's side, and a member of the Electoral orchestra. However, Rovantini died of dysentry in 1781, at the age of only twenty-five, and Beethoven received further tuition from the court orchestra's director, Franz Anton Ries, the father of his future pupil Ferdinand Ries.

With the difficulties caused by Hinck settled satisfactorily, Henry's business recovered and went from strength to strength. We are able to follow the family's fortunes through Eliza's diary, which she continued for the rest of her long life.

In June 1848 their last child, a daughter, Anna, was born and the older children began their schooling at Mrs Smallwood's Academy in North End.

Henry's reading rooms flourished, moving in 1849 to new and presumably larger premises in Heath Street, which they shared with the library. He kept on the old rooms at New End for the younger boys, many of whom came to him in the evenings at home, and he continued with the Latin classes. Their annual parties for the reading room members were a regular fixture.

Their social life was as lively as ever. Eliza records an amusing encounter at one of their dinner parties in October 1849: ‘Harriett Martineau with the Gibsons, Sam and Dan, dined here, a very pleasant dinner till HM got to clairvoyance, when finding we none of us agreed with her she got rather hot. Is not it incredible how clever people can believe such nonsense.’

THE 1850s – YEARS OF LOSS

The 1850s were years of bereavement. When the duke of Wellington died in 1852, Cockerell gave them tickets for the lying in state and Eliza went to see his funeral. On the domestic front, Samuel Rogers had a terrible accident in 1850, aged eighty-seven, being knocked down by a coach in Berkeley Square and breaking his hip.