The medieval Christian author-scribes, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of Old Norse mythology, framed their narrative materials using explanatory and interpretive models prevalent in their time. Euhemerism is a particularly powerful model that prompts us to question where the lines are drawn to distinguish divinity from humanity and what those lines consist of. It seems clear that the dualism that sharply distinguishes between the divine and the human and envisions a vast impassable gulf between the two – a dualism that is prominent in the Judeo-Christian religious worldview and saturates the Western mentality today – was less discernible in the pre-Christian period in Scandinavia. During that time, the divine was conceived as both an immanent quality and a transcendent one, capable of revealing itself in many forms. When one encounters this strict bipartition between godkind and humankind in the mythology that has been preserved in our main sources, chances are that one is faced with highly selective and mediated material that has undergone a complex process of modification and adaptation, refined to the extent that it represents a literary mythology rather than a lived religious system. This mythology unfolds in a separate story world with no real place for human beings. When comparing Norse mythology to other mythologies, it is striking that the mythological sections of the two Eddas show little or no interest in and no concern for the human world and human affairs. Instead, the gods are mainly preoccupied with interactions among themselves and with the jǫtnar and other beings in the mythological universe. Part of the challenge for anyone wishing to study these materials is to ground them, bringing them back to earth and tethering them more securely to human concerns. The dearth of explicit theological reflection in the materials from the pre-Christian era means that one is forced to tackle this question of divine immanence through earlier non-mythological sources, as has been done in the preceding chapter, or perhaps through later sources that are unsympathetic to the idea and find it incompatible with their notions of divinity.

Theater Life in Prague

It was the dream of Czech patriots to establish an independent Czech theater, as they believed its absence hindered the development of Czech drama and opera. Although Czech performances were permitted twice a week in the Estates Theater, these productions were often suspended during periods of political unrest. In the period before the 1848 revolution, the Bohemian Diet owned two building sites in Prague, and in 1845, Prague citizens petitioned to have one of these sites dedicated to the construction of a Czech theater. This request was granted to an organization formed on May 3, 1845, which was tasked with coordinating all necessary arrangements for the theater.

This pivotal date in Prague's theater history also marked the rise of František Ladislav Rieger, a key political figure who would later influence Smetana's career. Born into a wealthy miller's family, Rieger combined his legal studies at the Prague university with a keen interest in economics and politics. At the time, the Society of Industry in Bohemia was the only Czech organization in Prague allowed to engage in political activity. Initially limited to nobility, the Society began admitting ordinary citizens in 1843, and Rieger quickly became its leading figure for the next twenty-five years. Rieger, with his youthful energy, stirred public interest in the idea of an independent Czech National Theater as early as 1844. His influence extended beyond organizational efforts into the artistic realm. By 1848, he had become a central figure in Czech political life, advocating for a new constitutional charter and championing the revolutionary principle that legislative power should originate from the people.

Wagner had finished the poem of the Ring by the end of 1852. He first read Schopenhauer almost two years later, in October, 1854, when he was working on the composition of Die Walküre, and The World as Will and Representation was, he told Liszt, “like a gift from heaven.” He wrote to Röckel that Schopenhauer's philosophy “completely demolishes the nonsense and charlatanism of the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel view,” and that it repudiated what he now thought of as the “heartless unreasoning optimism” of Judaism. The philosopher had somehow known what he himself had intuited but not recognized, that the Ring was a demonstration of the nothingness of all existence, and Schopenhauer's ideas had led him to “the only adequate key-stone to my poem in keeping with the whole idea of the drama, which consists in a simple and sincere recognition of the true relations of things and complete abstinence from the attempt to preach any particular doctrine.” Yet he left the text of the dramas and their all-important stage directions unchanged. With respect to the Ring Schopenhauer offered little, it seems, but an after-the-fact interpretation, making Wagner the first of the many commentators on his work.

The suddenness of this conversion calls for an explanation. Wagner’s own thinking had looked back to the philosophy of the first quarter of the century, and he may well have felt an affinity for Schopenhauer because Schopenhauer was, in reality, firmly in the tradition of early German idealism. The philosopher's persistent polemics against “the Fichte-Schelling- Hegel view,” as Günter Zöller says, “appear more as deliberate attempts to distance himself from competing approaches and to more starkly highlight his own philosophical contributions than might have been warranted by the fact of the matter.”

To the extent that it is about anything at all, Heiner Goebbels's theater installation Stifters Dinge (Stifter's Things) is as much about the atmosphere in the theater as it is about the things on the stage. In a press release upon its 2007 premier, the Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne, Switzerland, described it as a “composition for five pianos with no pianists, a play with no actors, performance without actors—one might say a no-man show.” Music from mechanically played pianos is interspersed with sounds from archival recordings, while lights illuminate a pool of dry ice, from which smoky tendrils curl into the air. The Théâtre Vidy says of Stifters Dinge that the things (they list “light, pictures, murmurs, sounds, voices, wind and mist, water and ice”) do not function in a merely illustrative role, but rather become the protagonists. The installation is, in that sense, uncanny, but its uncanniness is an atmospheric effect because it arises out of the interplay between the solid objects, components of the atmosphere as a geophysical system, and both pictures and sounds. Goebbels himself says that his aim was to afford the audience “die Entdeckung des freien Raums” (the discovery of free space). “Free space” is not empty space because the theater is not a vacuum. Rather, what the “discovery of free space” means in practice is that the atmosphere in the theater is both a part of and a result of the composition.

7 February. Sunday morning. My Journal has been discontinued for more than two months, my mind having been for a great part of the time too much filled with dismal views of our business to like to set down my thoughts. At times it oppressed me so much that I could only sit brooding, or at best occupy myself with a novel … I have generally found sufficient interest in my Reading Room occupations and other active employments, but even then, I was afraid to collect my thoughts and sit down to write. Just at present things look a little brighter, as a little of Hinck's money has come, there is some prospect of more, and the Lisbon business seems inclined to revive from its six month's almost total stagnation. The state of things is still dismal enough, but there is no good dwelling on it. We have no reason to despair of being able to earn a moderate livelihood, and more we need not ask for. At Hampstead we continue to endeavour to make every possible retrenchment without actually altering our mode of living; whether we shall reduce the number of our servants from three to two, is a point not yet decided upon; we could then hardly keep up what are called decent appearances in our present house. At Broad St. Buildings we have made still greater changes having parted with all our full paid clerks except Fitton; Henry Eddis leaves us on Lady Day.

Scholarly discussion of medievalism is no longer limited to heterocentric and androcentric approaches. However, at the intersection of these two concerns, there remains a neglected area of inquiry: how do women, whose cultural productions can be profitably understood within a “lesbian” and/or “queer” framework, respond to medieval texts and tropes? This chapter responds by examining two case studies from the modernist period: Gwen Lally's medievalist pageant held at Wroxton Abbey in 1928 and (John) Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness, sometimes referred to as the “bible of lesbianism,” published in the same year.

The upheaval of the conquest provided fertile soil for Mathilda of Flanders to expand the privileges and responsibilities of queenship. Amongst these developments was her participation in justice. Mathilda's judicial activity was truly woven throughout her reign. It consumed a signifcant portion of her time and was a defning factor of her queenship. Tat Mathilda acted as a royal judge is not a matter for debate; evidence is found in Domesday Book and the monastic chronicles surveyed below. The subject of this chapter is how she came to be there when previous English queens were not. The following discussion suggests that Mathilda drew from two sources that encouraged her to imagine herself as a judge: one practical and one ideological. The frst was the legal praxis of Norman female abbatial authority with which she was familiar. In Mathilda's duchy of Normandy, some women – particularly abbesses – handed down verdicts in their own manorial courts. This stands in contrast to eleventh-century English courts that were based on the assembly of the hundred, shire or county. The English structure allowed less room for lordly women to create manorial courts over which they had control. The second was the ideological foundation of the Ottonian empresses for whom Mathilda of Flanders was named. Ottonian traditions created a space for imperial women to preside over legal conficts. The imperial identity adopted by her mother may have predisposed Mathilda to assume prerogatives her English predecessors did not. Just as in earlier chapters, Mathilda can be found occupying unexpected spaces. This chapter shows her in the seat of justice.

The A major Cello Sonata op.69 and the two piano trios op.70 belong to one of the most fruitful creative periods in Beethoven's life. The main work on the sonata was carried out in 1807 and 1808, following the completion of the Mass in C op.86, and at a time when Beethoven was also devoting his energies to his Fifth Symphony. By the time the piano trios were ready, in the following year, not only had the symphony been completed, but also its successor, the ‘Pastoral’ op.68. The five instrumental works are astonishingly different in character and outward form. Indeed, the cello sonata and the first of the trios – both of them among Beethoven's most original and perfectly achieved chamber works with piano – are in a sense complete opposites: while the sonata lacks a self-contained slow movement, and has a scherzo as its centrepiece, the trio's exceptionally quick and dynamic outer movements obviate the need for a scherzo, while at the same time necessitating the presence of a broad slow movement at the heart of the work. The success of the op.69 Sonata's plan is due not only to the largely relaxed nature of its opening movement, but also to the short Adagio preceding the finale – not so much an introduction, as a drastically abridged slow movement proper.

While the op.5 cello sonatas had often been weighted in favour of the piano, op.69 is the first work of its kind to find a successful solution to the problems of balancing and blending the two instruments with an equitable distribution of material between them. Beethoven's compositional draft of the first movement reveals the extent to which he refashioned the music's texture in order to achieve a satisfactorily balanced sound.

The unrestrained circulation of foreign texts and ideas was seen by English authors from the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth century as a central factor in enabling the crisis. Significant portions of book sales catalogues and inventories of private libraries of individuals belonging to the English educated elite consisted of books written and/or published in Europe, which came to England mostly in Latin, or in French vernacular via the Dutch Republic and France, and which were often translated into English to satisfy a growing demand for foreign books and ideas. However, not all these books exerted the same impact on English intellectual culture. The analysis of English debates shows that there were just a few authors and books that most recurrently appear in contemporary discussion about the crisis and that generated serious apprehension for their actual or potential impact on a rapidly expanding readership. In this chapter, I will focus on the reception of the ideas and works of Descartes and Spinoza, and examine the contemporaries’ perception of their impact on English culture. Other names appear in English accounts of intellectual change, such as those of Galileo, Socinus, Gassendi and Bayle, and developments in disciplines other than natural philosophy, such as biblical scholarship, were accused of generating the crisis. But the main targets of apologetic literature in England were the French and the Dutch philosophers.

Although the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza differ in many aspects including, most notably, the ‘mind-body problem’, the two authors were often coupled as promoters of a new mechanical strand of philosophy that, according to their early modern detractors, had potentially disruptive consequences for the churches and organised religion.

Bayard had vested many of his hopes in the commission of the Jay Treaty's London commission. In Article VII, the Jay Treaty specified that five commissioners were to meet in London for eighteen months to discern and evaluate: “Complaints […] made by divers Merchants and others, Citizens of the United States, that during the course of the War in which His Majesty is now engaged they have sustained considerable losses and damage by reason of irregular or illegal Captures or Condemnations of their vessels.”

The aim of this commission was to agree on and pay out an “adequate Compensation” to such merchants, to be covered by the British (or American) government. This systematic and formalised arbitration was new, introducing what has been termed as “the modern era of arbitral or judicial settlement of international disputes”.

For the London commission, American commissioners Christopher Gore and William Pinckney were ‘mixed’ with British commissioners, Dr Nicholl (who later resigned to take on the position of King's Advocate and was replaced by Maurice Swabey) and John Anstey. Therefore, the commission “consisted chiefly of lawyers with a wide cultural background”. Gore had studied law under John Lowell, a judge on the US Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture – the first federal US court and incidentally a law court that dealt in prize.