“If There Be Among You a Prophet of the Lord”

The creators of the Welles-Ros Bible were keen to enhance the illustrations’ topicality as well as their exegetical and didactic efficacy, to make the Bible a personalized primer for its intended owner. They achieved these aims through an astute choice of visual models, and by carefully editing both text and imagery to relate them to aspects of the Welles family's history, experience, and thought-world. Several images were designed to encourage John de Welles's identification with the protagonists of the biblical books they introduce, including the pious courtier and administrator Nehemiah and the prophets Micah and Jeremiah. The prophets are accorded a notable prominence in the Bible's decorative program. The richly narrative historiated initials for the Prophetic books range from 16 to 24 lines in height. The largest of them, including the initials for Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Joel, are therefore among the largest images in the Old Testament as a whole, a visual emphasis that is in line with Carmelite historiography and spirituality.

The prophetic role or vocation entailed not only seeing but also hearing and speaking. The prophet hears the Lord's words and enters into dialogue with God in order to communicate the divine message to people who may be reticent to receive it. The forest, a key locus in the Welles family's story, is also a vital site of prophetic experience in the Bible's illuminated pages.

For medieval Christians the Bible gave history its “time scale” and its purpose, in the words of Beryl Smalley, as well as its narrative arc. Extending from Creation to the Last Things, history “unrolled” through the two testaments to the reader's present and beyond, offering an account of both “exploits actually performed” in the past, as the Rhetorica ad Herennium (first century BC) put it, as well as events foreseen or prophesied – that is, the whole history of human salvation according to the Christian worldview. For authorities and their audiences living in Augustine's sixth, present age, the Bible and its exegesis offered a means to understand observable historical change, and the thread with which to tie together the eternal and the mundane. The rise and fall of empires, kingdoms, and cities, the advent of new religious and political movements, the fortunes of armies and dynasties, the deeds of individuals, and even global catastrophe could be related to both biblical events and biblical prophecy by means of allegory and analogy.

Also integral to the Christian perception of the Bible as a template for human history are its numerous genealogies. In the Old Testament genealogies are concentrated in Genesis, 1 Chronicles, and 1 and 2 Esdras (Ezra and Nehemiah), with briefer genealogies and dynastic lists scattered throughout other biblical books; the gospels of Matthew and Luke contain two differing genealogies of Jesus. While many biblical genealogies are simple lists of names, even the tersest genealogy is a form of narrative.

Personal Life and Operatic Works

The Diary

Smetana bore his fate with unparalleled heroism. Initially, neither he nor anyone else around him fully grasped the magnitude of the impending catastrophe. Throughout the preceding, tumultuous years, he diligently chronicled not only theatrical events but also political and national developments in his diary. It is intriguing to examine the external events Smetana documented in the period leading up to his illness, as we can observe his selflessness and tendency to prioritize broader issues over personal matters. His spirit remained indomitable, and he was profoundly affected by both personal and national circumstances. In August 1868, he recorded the Viennese government's persecution of Czechs and those who dared to voice even the slightest opposition to the authorities: “In this manner, they will not win our affection.” Another entry, from February 1869, reflects his frustration with the political climate, including martial law: “Vienna is the undoing of Prague.”

His tone softened somewhat in March 1869, when martial law, which had suspended constitutional rights like free press and assembly, was repealed. Following the September 1869 elections to the Viennese Parliament, which favored the Czech opposition (the “Declarants”), Smetana noted: “A turning point for the Czechs … They are ready to settle. We have only one response: ‘State Rights for the Bohemian Crown’.”

No chamber work of Beethoven more openly invites comparison with a masterpiece by Mozart than the Quintet op.16, scored for the same ensemble – piano, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon – as Mozart's Quintet K.452. Mozart's piece was composed in the wake of his piano concertos K.450 and 451, the former of them his first piece of the kind to throw the spotlight on the wind instruments of the orchestra. In the concerto's variation slow movement, their appearance is long delayed: the first half of the piece is scored exclusively for piano and strings, and when the wind instruments finally appear they make a radiant entrance against a gentle background of pizzicato strings and delicate piano tracery. Even then, Mozart manages to reserve an entirely new wind sonority for the finale, which introduces for the first time in the work the sound of a flute whose first solo entrance, hovering high above sustained strings and widely spaced piano arpeggios, comes as a breath of fresh air.

One of the striking features of Mozart's K.452 Quintet is the remarkable variety of its scoring, coupled with the manner in which each of the five instruments involved is allotted its own distinctive character. Mozart himself thought highly of the work: ‘I have written two grand concertos, and then a quintet which received extraordinary applause’, he proudly told his father on 10 April 1784. ‘I myself regard it as the best thing I have so far written in my life.’

The influence of K.452 on Beethoven's op.16 extends far beyond its instrumentation.

The term ‘Literary Fiction’ exists implicitly in contrast with the notion of ‘genre fiction’, suggesting a degree of profundity or artistic merit that is presumed to be absent from, or in short supply in, say, thrillers, romances, fantasy or science fiction novels. Of course, as the now common publishing industry label ‘Lit Fic’ suggests, it is also often little more than a marketing term, a way of characterising and selling certain types of book that will appeal to groups of people who may perceive their tastes as being in opposition to what are thought to be mainstream or even ‘low-brow’ products. From this latter perspective, ‘Literary Crime Fiction’ might not be the oxymoron it could initially seem, but a kind of branding strategy that seeks to situate a popular form within a more respectable-feeling ‘high culture’ framework. Yet surely there is something to the idea of the ‘literary’ novel. The anti-canonical drive of literary criticism since the theory boom of the later twentieth century may make the language of ‘quality’ difficult to define or maintain, but there are most certainly differences of ambition, depth or challenge that raise some works of fiction beyond the generic. And in the case of crime fiction, there are definitely degrees of departure from conventionally plot-driven stories that moot a form of writing in which something is happening that takes the reader beyond the realm of orthodox practice and into an experience of something more complex, nuanced, elusive or, indeed, more ‘literary’.

Dedicated to the memory of Dorothee Schubarth

When Margit Frenk's Nuevo corpus de la antigua lirica popular hispanica (siglos xv a xvii) was published in 2003, it provided philologers and humanists with a colossal encyclopaedia and an extraordinarily precise research tool. This allowed for a significant synthesis and enrichment of prior knowledge and a more rigorous and systematic planning of the subsequent study of the Hispanic world's oral and popular cancionero. Not only did it cover the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries as its title promised, but it also extended to more recent times, as each entry included an erudite (and open to additions) ‘Survivals’ section. This fundamentally changed and substantially extended the chronology and what was known at the time of the tradition covering both the ancient and modern repertoire.

It has perhaps not been sufficiently emphasised that the cancionero is a literary and cultural genre that possesses the merit (shared with its relatives the romancero, the folktale, the legend, the proverb, the prayer, the riddle…) of having accompanied the journeys of all Ibero-Romance speaking peoples across various continents, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Nor that it is a crucible of all conceivable forms, themes, tropes, stylistic devices, and expressions, which in many of its manifestations excel with very high and refined qualities. It is not an exaggeration to say that the cancionero, in all its languages of expression, is the genre in which both literary memory and poetic creativity are best documented.

The Sharpes had been in the trade of needle-making in Blackfriars for several generations. Henry's father Sutton Sharpe, born in 1756, ‘though brought up to trade and always engaged in business, was particularly fond of the fine arts’. He was a man of intellectual curiosity and wide reading who had from childhood been fond of drawing, and in his leisure time from business attended classes at the Royal Academy, a privilege which was then open to all. There he gained the friendship of John Flaxman, John Opie, Thomas Stothard and many other highly regarded artists. He also ‘took a lively interest in public affairs, his political interests being on the progressive side at a time when the expression of such opinions risked the restraint of personal liberty’.

In 1779, he married Catharine Purchas, by whom he had one daughter, also called Catharine, born in 1782; but her mother died when she was only nine. By that time Sutton was a man of ample means and not long afterwards gave up the needle business, which economic conditions in the City made increasingly difficult to carry on. He had lent his brother Joseph, an extravagant young man, a considerable sum of money to start a brewery, and felt it necessary to join him in this business with the idea of restraining his brother's expensive habits. He also went to live with him at his house in King Street, Golden Square, where his daughter Catharine could be cared for by his brother's wife. She became deeply attached to her uncle and his children, her cousins.