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73812 results in Boydell & Brewer

Page 1314 of 3691

  • The Catalogue

  • Argent Alan
  • Book:
    The Richard Baxter Treatises
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 August 2018
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 9-264

  • Summary

    Treatises, i. 1 [1685]

    Brief of the charges against Baxter

    ff 2–13b (ff 2v, 3v, 4v, 5v, 6v, 7v, 8v, 9v, 10v, 11v are blank)

    Brief of the charges against Baxter arising from his publication of A Paraphrase on the New Testament, 1685.

    See Rel. iii. 198.

    ff 2–3: The Accused Words

    372 x 304 mm.

    ‘I. On Math. 5.19. Whosoever shall break one of these least Commandments, and shall teach men so, shall be called least in the Kingdome of God.’

    With Baxter's corrections and crossings out.

    For an improved copy of this, see Treatises, i. 5.

    ff 4–5: Untitled

    375 x 305 mm.

    ‘II. Mark 3:6, When Christ had by Miracle cured a Man, its said “The Pharisees went forth ' straightway took Councell with the Herodians against him, how they might destroy him.”’

    With Baxter's underlinings and crossings out.

    ff 6–7: Untitled

    375 x 305 mm.

    ‘III. The next Accusation is Mark. 9:39. [“Jesus said forbid him not, for there is no man who shall do a Miracle in my Name that can lightly speak evil of me; for he that is not against us is on our part.”’

    With Baxter's insertions and crossings out.

    f 8: Untitled

    195 x 305 mm.

    ‘IV. Mark 11:31. The Text is [“They reasoned with themselves saying If we shall say from Heaven he will say why then did ye not believe him? But if we shall say of men, they feared the people, for all men counted John that he was a prophet indeed: And they Answered we cannot tell.”’

    With marginal note in a clear hand.

    f 9: Untitled

    190 x 305 mm.

    ‘V. Mark 12.38.39.40. Beware of the Scribes who love to go in Long Cloathing, ' love Salutations in the Market places, who devour Widows, Houses, ' for a pretence make long Prayers: These shall receive greater damnation.’ Some crossings out and underlining by Baxter.

    f 10: Untitled

    228 x 305 mm.

    ‘VI. Luk. 10.2. The Harvest truly is great, but the Laborers are but few: Pray ye therefore the Lord of the Harvest that he would send forth Laborers into his Harvest.’

  • 3 - Identifying Clothiers

  • John S. Lee
  • Book:
    The Medieval Clothier
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    02 June 2021
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 115-156

  • Summary

    LOCATING CLOTH-WORKERS AND CLOTHIERS

    Evidence for the extent and distribution of cloth-workers and clothiers in the late Middle Ages can be drawn from a range of sources, including the poll tax returns of 1377–81, the ulnage accounts recording subsidies paid for cloth sold, the rolls of the Court of Common Pleas, and from the travel writings of John Leland, the Tudor antiquarian. These sources each present their own challenges of interpretation.

    The ulnage accounts, despite their many limitations, can be used to explore the changing distribution of the cloth industry. In 1356–58, the leading counties for cloth production were, in descending order, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, London and Middlesex, Somerset (including Dorset), Lincolnshire and Kent (see table in Appendix 1). The industries were predominantly urban based, and these county totals mainly reflect production in Winchester, Bristol, London, Wells, Bath, Lincoln and Canterbury, which together with Salisbury and York, were the leading centres of cloth-making at this time. The south-west region, stretching from Southampton and Winchester through Salisbury to Bristol and Gloucester, and comprising the five counties of Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset and Gloucestershire, accounted for over half the total cloth sold in England. By 1394–98, Somerset had become the leading county for cloth production, followed by Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Yorkshire and Warwickshire. Although the large towns of Salisbury, Bristol, York and Coventry still comprised one-third of the total cloth sold, many smaller towns and rural communities were now supplying cloth for sale, perhaps accounting for up to half of all output. The southwestern counties still made up over half of the total sales in the country, and the other major textile-producing areas comprised the Suffolk–Essex border, the city of York and the growing industry of the West Riding, the city of Coventry, and Berkshire. By 1468–73, the ulnage totals suggest that Suffolk had become the leading county, with Somerset close behind, followed by Yorkshire, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. The industry was now becoming increasingly based in small towns and rural communities. While the general trend was for cloth production to increase during the fifteenth century, the 1460s were a period of downturn, so a comparison of the total cloth sales recorded in the ulnage accounts between 1394–98 and 1468–73 shows a fall of 20 per cent.

  • 6 - Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and Suicide

  • Noble Jonathan
  • Book:
    That Jealous Demon, My Wretched Health
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 September 2018
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 143-186

  • Summary

    We poets in our youth begin in gladness:

    But thereof come in the end despondency and madness

    William Wordsworth, ‘Resolution and Independence’, 1807

    Some Psychiatric Disorders

    A. Non-organic disease

  • Neuroses

  • • Anxiety

  • • Depression

  • • Obsessive-compulsive disorder

  • • Paranoia

  • Psychosis

  • • Schizophrenia

  • • Bipolar affective disorder (previously known as manic-depressive psychosis)

  • Personality disorder

  • • Alcoholism

  • • Other addictions

  • • Psychopathy

    • B. Organic brain disease

  • • Dementias

  • - Alzheimer's disease

  • - Niemann Pick disease (aka Pick's)

  • - Senile dementia (arterio-sclerotic)

  • • Wernicke's encephalopathy (alcoholism)

  • • General paralysis of the insane, or GPI (third-stage syphilis)

    • Diseases in group B, unlike those in A, are diseases whose consequences would be identifiable at an autopsy.

    Introduction: Mental Illness Having already regarded alcoholism as a mental disturbance, we now consider other psychiatric disorders. It is a complicated group of disorders and more difficult to categorise than physical diseases, but the list above attempts a simple, if somewhat dated, classification. At some stage in their lives at least 25% of the Western population will report psychological illness. The question is where variations within a socially accepted range of normality merge into an illness. There have been repeated attempts to assess the role of madness in creativity. Is mental illness a positive driving force or an inhibition when considering the end product, be that a painting, novel or symphony? In a review of mental illness the names of great composers featured less than those of painters, poets or writers.

    If we consider composers discussed in other chapters, it is clear that many fit into the list. Ravel (Chapter 3) had pre-senile dementia, and Rachmaninov (Chapter 10) and Elgar (Chapter 2) were melancholic, if not frankly depressive. Sibelius (Chapter 2) sometimes drank too much. Musorgsky (Chapter 5) did suffer from alcoholic dementia. Donizetti, Smetana and Wolf (Chapter 4) developed general paralysis of the insane (GPI). This chapter is confined to composers with major non-organic psychiatric problems (group A) which were sufficient to affect their compositional abilities or become life-threatening and/or to require periods of institutional care.

    It is interesting to reflect on past psychiatric care. Straitjackets and padded cells are all but gone, and with them immersion in hot and cold baths.

  • 3 - Phrase Rhythm and the Expression of Longing in Brahms’s “Gestillte Sehnsucht,” Op. 91, No. 1

  • Edited by Scott Murphy
  • Book:
    Brahms and the Shaping of Time
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 May 2021
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 83-109

  • Summary

    Brahms's “Gestillte Sehnsucht” [“Satisfied Longing”] opens with an undeniably warm and lush atmosphere. The score is marked adagio espressivo, and rolling sextuplets immediately provide a sense of motion and an aura of comfort. The harmonic language also contributes to the rich soundscape: dissonant harmonies regularly occur in metrically accented positions—the downbeats of measures 1, 3, and 5 are respectively ii7, vi7, and IV7 chords—and suspensions decorate almost every chord. Finally, the combined timbre of mezzosoprano, viola, and piano (often with both hands notated in bass clef) is low and rich. The instrumentation reflects the function of the op. 91 songs: they were written to be played by Brahms's good friends Joseph and Amalie Joachim, who were a world-class violinist and amateur singer. Perhaps Brahms chose to write for viola (over violin) because the timbre would better blend with Amalie's voice; or, perhaps Brahms simply wanted to write for one of his favorite stringed instruments. Opus 91, no. 2 (1864) “Geistliches Wiegenleid,” was written to commemorate the birth of the Joachims’ child. Opus 91, no. 1 (1884), “Gestillte Sehnsucht,” was Brahms's contribution to the Joachim's (unsuccessful) marital reconciliation; he presumably hoped that performing this piece together would help them smooth over their differences.

    One needs only to read the first line of Rückert's text to understand Brahms's careful creation of the atmosphere: “In gold’nen Abendschein getauchet” [“Dipped in the golden evening glow”]. In addition to numerous other instances of clear and beautiful text painting, less obvious connections between text and music permeate the piece at deeper structural levels. Expression of a text can occur in ways other than basic text painting, unusual modulations, or form. Phrase rhythm can also be added to this list of techniques. For this analysis, it is, arguably, the primary technique for expressing the essence of the poem: longing. A detailed examination of phrase rhythm reveals metric manipulations of unusually long twelve-measure basic phrases. The musical material within these twelve-measure phrases unfolds at a luxurious pace that contributes greatly to the general sense of longing permeating “Gestillte Sehnsucht.”

  • 9 - Durational Enharmonicism and the Opening of Brahms’s “Double Concerto”

  • Edited by Scott Murphy
  • Book:
    Brahms and the Shaping of Time
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 May 2021
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 260-294

  • Summary

    At least three features are peculiar about the opening of Brahms's Concerto for Violin and Cello, op. 102. Example 9.1 provides a two-staff reduction of the cello's opening cadenza, plus the orchestral introduction that precedes it and a couple of measures of orchestral music that follow it. Two of these three peculiar features are found as prescriptions for the cello soloist's entrance in the fifth measure. One of these two is the relatively rare notation of a half-note triplet. The other is the direction to play the music “in the style of a recitative, but always in tempo,” which is remarkable for the apparent exclusivity of its two constituent phrases. The first part of this chapter explores these peculiarities a little further, and investigates how cellists, at least as portrayed in multiple commercial recordings of the concerto, appear to respond to their co-occurrence. The second part of this chapter explicates a third peculiarity, which resides in the four-measure introduction and resists easy summary here. It then combines this third feature with the first two, giving rise to one form of what I will call “durational enharmonicism,” which in turn suggests one possible resolution to the paradox of an in-tempo recitative. The third part of this chapter deals with theoretical ramifications of durational enharmonicism.

    A biographical connection concludes the chapter. Clara Schumann referred to this concerto as one of Versöhnungswerk or “reconciliation,” because Brahms wrote it, at least in part, for Joseph Joachim, a distinguished violinist and long-time friend, with whom he had fallen out of favor due to a rather unfortunate turn in the proceedings of Joachim's divorce from his wife Amalie (née Schneeweiss). This divorce arose from Joachim's mistrust of Amalie, which in turn arose from—as Brahms described it—Joachim's absurd self-deceptions regarding Amalie's inclinations toward other men. Durational enharmonicism can also perpetrate convincing deceptions, and in so doing conjure experiences similar to those that Brahms claimed were vexing the work's dedicatee.

    Performing the “Third Notes” in the Fifth Measure

    The prescription of a notated half-note triplet occurs in the cello's first and fourth measures (mm. 5 and 8) but then never again, in any part, in the concerto. Compared to many other notated durations, the duration of a “third note,” as Henry Cowell preferred to call it, is scarce both in common-practice music overall and in Brahms's music in particular.

  • 1 - Making Cloth

  • John S. Lee
  • Book:
    The Medieval Clothier
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    02 June 2021
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 39-76

  • Summary

    Anyone producing a piece of cloth from raw wool needs to undertake several different activities (Figure 3). Specialised cloth-workers including carders, combers, spinners, weavers, fullers and dyers emerged during the Middle Ages, skilled in specific aspects of cloth-making. We still use terms from cloth-making processes in our everyday speech, when we talk of being ‘dyed in the wool’ or ‘on tenterhooks’. Spinster originally denoted someone who practised spinning, but from the seventeenth century, unmarried women have been designated in legal terms as spinsters. Common surnames reflect the processes carried out by various textile workers, including Weaver, Webb, Webber, and Webster (weavers), Fuller and Walker (fullers), and Dyer and Lister (dyers). This chapter explores these activities, taking a step-by-step approach from the buying of wool to the finishing of the fabric. Clothiers coordinated these processes, and in some cases carried out stages of production themselves.

    PROCESSES IN THE MAKING OF CLOTH

    The main product of the medieval textile industry was broadcloth, made from short staple wool, which was densely woven and heavily fulled. By the later Middle Ages this had been standardised at 26 to 28 yards long and 1¾ yards wide, produced by two weavers working on a broadloom. The type and price varied according to the quality of the wool used, the dye and the degree of finish. Some cloths were woven on a narrower loom, requiring only one person to weave. These were half the width of a standard broadcloth and known as straits. Worsted, made from long staple wool, was made mainly for the home market and was far less heavily legislated. Linen was produced from flax, and harden cloth from hemp or flax.

    The clothier's first task was to obtain wool. Its quality, its source and the frequency with which clothiers bought it varied according to the resources at their disposal. A document of 1615 shows how clothiers procured their wool in different ways according to the money they had available. The wealthiest bought from wool producers in wool counties, made their provision for the whole year beforehand, and had the wool spun, woven and fulled by their own employees. Less affluent clothiers travelled little to wool-producing counties but borrowed money to buy wool, mostly at the market, had it made into cloth to sell, and then borrowed more money.

  • 9 - Breathless: Respiratory Diseases

  • Noble Jonathan
  • Book:
    That Jealous Demon, My Wretched Health
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 September 2018
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 257-284

  • Summary

    As tho’ to breathe is life

    Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’,1842

    Introduction

    After heart failure, we pass to the other common causes of breathlessness and weakness, namely bronchial and lung conditions. There is a popular image of the tragic composer coughing his last in an impoverished attic. Although it is almost a cliché, there have been examples, with some raising the question of how composition occurred at all.

    Respiratory disease affects either the airways to the lungs or the lungs themselves. The airways convey inspired air through the larynx (voicebox) to the trachea (windpipe) and thence to the bronchi and their smaller multiple divisions, the bronchioles. The action of the chest is to expand, thereby creating a negative pressure in the pleural cavity, which is the membranous sack surrounding a lung. That in turn causes the sponge-like lung to expand, sucking the fresh air in during inspiration. The basic lung mechanism is an exchange membrane, wherewith oxygen in the inspired air is transferred to the blood. Then, as the chest pressures reverse, the lung shrinks as we expire and exhale carbon dioxide.

    There are several broad groups of lung disease:

  • Pulmonary embolus (PE), which we encountered in Chapter 8, involves a circulating blood clot, usually from a deep veino thrombosis (DVT), obstructing the pulmonary artery, the main blood vessel through which stale blood is pumped to the lungs, in order to be refreshed with oxygen and relieved of carbon dioxide. Sadly a PE can be fatal.

  • Lung cancer is usually (but not always) a malignant tumour of the lining of the bronchi. Although a very serious condition, it carries a better prognosis with modern treatment than it did twenty-fi ve years ago.

  • Chronic obstructive airways disease (COAD) is a group of diseases wherewith there is partial obstruction to air being exhaled. Th is causes back-pressure, one result of which is that the actual lung tissue becomes distended (emphysema); that, in turn, causes the chest to apparently enlarge (barrel chest). Th ere are several classic causes of COAD:

  • a Asthma – because of spasm in the walls of the bronchioles, which narrows them, making it more diffi cult to exhale.

  • 14 - Hans Keller: The Making of an ‘Anti-Critic’

    • By Patrick Zuk, Durham University and a specialist in Russian and Irish music and cultural history.
  • Edited by Jeremy Dibble, Julian Horton
  • Book:
    British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850–1950
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 328-344

  • Summary

    IN Britain, as elsewhere, the post-war years brought a far-reaching transformation in the intellectual and artistic climate. Its effects were equally felt in musical life: despite the continued creative activity of Vaughan Williams, Walton, and other composers who had dominated the scene during the 1920s and 1930s, by the late 1940s there were already signs of a shift in tastes and attitudes that would become increasingly pronounced over the next decade. The causes of this change of outlook were complex, but an important factor was the presence of a community of émigré musicians who had fled Nazi persecution. In their capacities as composers, performers, journalists, scholars, pedagogues, and administrators, members of that community exerted an influence far out of proportion to its comparatively small size, in some cases making exceptional contributions to the cultural life of their adopted country. One such was Hans Keller (1919–85), whose activities as a writer on music, broadcaster and teacher enriched and enlivened the British musical scene for almost four decades.

    Although a number of publications have appeared since Keller's death that illuminate aspects of his life and work (notably, those by Christopher Wintle and Alison Garnham), the task of appraisal is still far from complete – especially when it comes to his copious writings. The nature of his output places considerable practical obstacles in the way of anyone wishing to get to grips with his thought, as much of it comprises fairly brief articles (often under 1,500 words in length) contributed principally to popular magazines and periodicals. Only a small proportion of these have been republished (in this respect, the collections edited by Christopher Wintle have rendered Keller an especially valuable service), and although some of the journals in which the articles appeared can now be consulted in digital repositories, this is by no means universally the case, and many items are not so easily accessible. The only extended book-length treatment of any topic that he published in his lifetime, the idiosyncratically titled 1975 (1984 minus 9), did not appear until 1977, eight years before his death. (It was posthumously reissued under the new title of Music, Closed Societies and Football.)

  • 2 - Temporal Disruptions and Shifting Levels of Discourse in Brahms’s Lieder

  • Edited by Scott Murphy
  • Book:
    Brahms and the Shaping of Time
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 May 2021
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 49-80

  • Summary

    In his articles on Brahms's lieder in the 1915 Musical Times, Ernest Newman maligned the composer's rhythm as “primitive,” and opined that many instances of supposed rhythmic subtlety are merely manneristic “metrical fidgetiness.” Although a century has passed since these aspersions were cast, only in recent decades have music theorists developed the types of analytical tools needed to refute criticisms such as Newman’s, and to fully grasp the complexity and expressive power of the rhythms in Brahms's lieder. Yonatan Malin has offered one of the most significant contributions to this endeavor. Drawing on the rhythmic theories developed by Harald Krebs and Richard Cohn, he parses lieder using the types of syncopations and hemiolas that Krebs labels as displacement and grouping dissonances, respectively. Notwithstanding the acuity and sensitivity of Malin's analysis, these are not the only rhythmic techniques that contribute to the expressiveness of Brahms's lieder. In this article I will explore the types of abrupt temporal disruptions and subsequent slowing of the prevailing pulse that Frank Samarotto has termed changes in temporal plane. The most startling of these types of shifts occur in shorter songs, which do not include other strongly contrasting passages, and the new pulse is maintained for a brief time before the initial pacing is restored. These contrasting planes are not accompanied by notated changes in tempo or labels such as recitative, but they are paired with dissonances that usually create a harmonic diversion. Despite their disruptive character, the rhythms and harmonies of the slower temporal plane are tightly integrated with the surrounding phrases. Moreover, their expressive or dramatic power is a significant element in Brahms's perceptive interpretations of his songs’ texts, and in many cases their relationships to the sections in the prevailing faster pace (including the conflicts they might create) are crucial to a song's dramatic trajectory.

    I will focus on two songs, “O kühler Wald” (op. 72, no. 3) from 1877 and “Mein Herz ist schwer” (op. 94, no. 3) from 1883–84, in which the appearance of unexpected elongated pulses is coordinated with changes to other elements, including harmony, phrase structure, texture, or dynamics. In both songs, the arrival of the slower temporal plane is preceded by an abrupt discontinuation of the established pacing.

  • 5 - Alcoholism

  • Noble Jonathan
  • Book:
    That Jealous Demon, My Wretched Health
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 September 2018
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 125-142

  • Summary

    Drunkenness is a temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness

    Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930

    Introduction

    Just as syphilis has been over-diagnosed, we come to alcohol, another perceived result of over-indulgence. Of Breitenfeld's seventy- seven ‘substance abusers’ amongst composers, the major culprit was alcohol. So we see reputations inaccurately disfigured in musical pathography. An even more vital question is whether alcohol fuels creativity. Alcoholism is a disease and not a crime, although sadly either may lead to the other. There are good basic definitions of alcoholism. Pragmatically, the wisest one is possibly that the sufferer is a person who apprehends that he or she has a problem but is incapable of doing anything about it. The World Health Organization categorises criteria, but Kessell and Walton stressed the importance of a diagnostic gradient; this is difficult with today's national obsession with tick-boxes. They also highlighted the permanent physical damage that is a consequence of chronic alcoholism. That the social drinker, who deliberately and enjoyably gets tipsy occasionally, is not an alcoholic has been a comfort for many of us. More importantly, the excessive drinker is not necessarily an alcoholic, being separated from the latter by the absence of an inexorable deterioration over the years. The key is decline and dependence, and in 2001 there were said to be 2.8 million dependent drinkers in the UK.

    With some alcoholics the condition initially is a pleasure; they are usually the self-indulgent type. For most it is a condition from which the patient would dearly love to be free. One day an inborn error of metabolism may be discovered with, hopefully, cures structured thereupon. Reformed alcoholics have to remain teetotal because drinking any alcohol may trigger their illness. Such self-discipline is admirable. Meanwhile, there are identifiable psychological, social and geographical factors predisposing to alcoholism. What is striking is the paucity of true alcoholics amongst composers. There is one simple reason for composers being so relatively free of this disease: established alcoholism is inconsistent with sustained, serious musical composition. That novelists and poets may have been apparently more susceptible is beyond the scope of this book.

  • 6 - Brahms at Twenty: Hemiolic Varietals and Metric Malleability in an Early Sonata

  • Edited by Scott Murphy
  • Book:
    Brahms and the Shaping of Time
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 May 2021
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 178-204

  • Summary

    Brahms's career does not fit a standard early/middle/late paradigm, in part because it had not two but three significant points of internal articulation: the death of Robert Schumann in 1856, which triggered a four-year publication hiatus; the success of the German Requiem in 1868, which thrust Brahms permanently into the public eye; and his premature retirement in 1890, which preceded an unanticipated final compositional burst. The terms with which musicologists reference these four stages fluctuate, yet one marker has achieved some measure of permanence. It was evidently Donald Francis Tovey who attached “first maturity” to the compositions of the 1860s. The term was appropriated by James Webster and Walter Frisch, and eventually canonized in George Bozarth's contribution to the New Grove Dictionary in 2000.

    The canonized term casts a shadow on the earlier music, as it leaves little room to escape its cardinal implication: that the music of the 1850s is immature, premature, juvenile, or some other similarly deprecatory term. That response is in acute tension with Robert Schumann's famous judgment that the twenty-year old Brahms, “like Minerva, sprung fully armored from the head of Zeus.” The same tension is internal to a claim of Michael Musgrave: “the early works presage virtually all of the elements of the mature style.” If the elements are present, then why does Musgrave sense the absence of the quality constituted by them? Perhaps Brahms had acquired the armaments by age twenty, but not yet mastered their deployment in compositional combat.

    This paper seeks to stimulate a re-evaluation of these implications, focusing on the first movement of the early composition that has the best claim to an enduring position in the concert repertory: the Piano Sonata no. 3 in F minor, op. 5. Composed at the Schumann home in Dusseldorf during October 1853, just a few weeks after Johannes first met Robert and Clara, this movement evinces five characteristics that were integral to Brahms's compositional personality throughout his career. More than local elements, features, or “devices,” each of these five characteristics involves some measure of ordering, pacing, and large-scale planning. To that extent, the characteristics are worked into the bones of the movement.

  • Introduction

  • John S. Lee
  • Book:
    The Medieval Clothier
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    02 June 2021
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 1-38

  • Summary

    This was a gallant clothier sure, Whose fame for ever shall endure.

    Thomas Deloney, Jack of Newbury (1597)

    A handful of clothiers earned vast fortunes making and marketing cloth in the later Middle Ages. Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall, the Springs of Lavenham, William Stumpe of Malmesbury, and John Winchcombe of Newbury are still remembered in their communities, five centuries after their birth. These were the multi-millionaires of their day, often rising from humble origins to fame and fortune. In some cases, their children even joined the ranks of the gentry. Such rapid social mobility intrigues us even today. These clothiers extended, enlarged and rebuilt parish churches, and left instructions for elaborate remembrance practices to ensure that they and their families were commemorated after their deaths. Their names were celebrated in verse: the poet of the royal court John Skelton wrote of his contemporary, ‘Good Spring of Lavenham’, while two generations later Thomas Deloney celebrated the life of John Winchcombe as ‘Jack of Newbury’, a pioneer of factory production. This book examines these individuals, together with their less prominent and prosperous contemporaries, the far more numerous group of clothiers who might be described as the ‘jacks of all trades’. What were their origins and how did they accumulate their fortunes? To what extent were they responsible for transforming the cloth industry and their wider communities?

    The Oxford English Dictionary defines a clothier as ‘one engaged in the cloth trade’. The entry in the dictionary also includes ‘a maker of woollen cloth’, ‘one who performs the operations subsequent to the weaving’, and ‘a seller of cloth and men's clothes’. For the purposes of this book though, we need to define the term more precisely. The clothier was involved in both the making and marketing of woollen cloth. He, or occasionally she, was not usually a maker of clothes, which was the role of the tailor. Both contemporaries and historians have seen clothiers as a distinctive group of entrepreneurs who emerged during the later Middle Ages to coordinate the different stages of production within the textile industry, and to control an increasing share of the cloth trade.

  • Introduction: Trends in British Musical Thought, 1850–1950

  • Edited by Jeremy Dibble, Julian Horton
  • Book:
    British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850–1950
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 1-8

  • Summary

    THE last forty years have undoubtedly witnessed a renaissance of interest and scholarly activity in British music of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Our view of this period, in terms of its musical repertoire and historical context, is now much more richly detailed and our appreciation of its cultural issues, complexities and tensions is that much greater; moreover, our familiarity with the music has been greatly aided by the supporting literature of monographs, essays and articles, by the research evinced at conferences (such as the biennial ‘Music in Nineteenth- Century Britain’ meetings) and by the increasing availability of commercial recordings, live performances and broadcasts. Yet, while we may now have a more thorough understanding of the period in terms of its chronology, its works and composers, its key educational institutions, performing venues, conductors and performers – indeed a more complete picture of British artistic trends, stylistic influences and prevailing aesthetic characteristics – we lack a proper contemporary perspective of the world of criticism and intellectual thought which fruitfully coexisted alongside its creators and music-makers. Certainly, the diversity and individuality of this somewhat neglected facet of British musical life has yet to be fully understood or evaluated. This study, in the form of a series of individual essays, seeks therefore to identify its main participants, its key writings and publications, and those central features of an intellectual tradition which developed quite independently of its continental counterparts in Germany, France and Italy. Just as Britain's geographical ‘separateness’ had determined its own course of intellectual development, so it can be demonstrated that the nation's understanding and appreciation of music was governed by a set of criteria entirely different from those that informed, for example, Germany's most prominent musical thinkers (where the emphasis was essentially on metaphysics, dialectics and aesthetics), even though, as we know, German musical processes of composition deeply influenced British music before the First World War. National musical life was coloured by the lionization of Handel and Mendelssohn, by Anglican liturgical music, choral societies, the popularity of the domestic piano, the ascendancy of the cathedral organist, and the notion that concert music and opera were essentially foreign commodities; as such, British musical criticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century emerged from very particular circumstances and with a set of quite different philosophical precepts, social values and aspirations.

  • George Gascoigne at Oxford

  • Edited by Sarah Carpenter, Gordon Kipling, Meg Twycross
  • Book:
    Medieval English Theatre
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 126-140

  • Summary

    Anyone who has read the diary of Richard Madox, Elizabethan Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, will know that he should probably not be valued as England's greatest theatre critic. On 22 February 1582, for example, he writes ‘We went to the theatre to see a scurvie play set owt by one virgin which ther proved a fyemarten with owt voice so we stayd not the matter’. Fyemartin here refers to a ‘freemartin’, which is a bovine term, used to describe a hermaphroditic calf. Had Madox been more interested, we might have been able to identify the ‘scurvie’ performance that he had left, but it has sadly not proved possible so far.

    We should be grateful that he was slightly more careful with his record of 8 January 1582, therefore. Madox, his brother, and their friends, Richard Lateware of St John's College and George Abbot of Balliol College, go out ‘clubbing’, a use of a term which incidentally predates the OED's earliest identification of it by over fifty years. Clubbing in early modern Oxford seemed to consist of wandering between colleges and greeting friends with improvised orations. Madox's party ultimately reach their destination for the evening, Trinity College, and he records the following, ‘We supt at the presidents lodging and after had the Supposes handeled in the haul indifferently’. We might speculate about the production's failings, but there is scholarly consensus that the play referred to here is George Gascoigne's Supposes, a translation of Ariosto's erudite comedy, I Suppositi (1509). We know from the text, first published in 1573, that the play premiered at Gray's Inn in 1566 and, with the subsequent edition of 1575, we also have a hint at its initial reception; Gascoigne modestly added a brief Latin note to confirm that the audience had applauded, Et plauserunt.

    Recent interest in the Inns of Court as a cultural context has helped to focus attention on both Gascoigne and the festive entertainments, such as the Revels at Gray's Inn, at which Supposes was first performed. We know rather less about drama at Trinity College, Oxford, however, although what we do know is relevant to an erudite performance.

  • 5 - Will of Thomas Spring III of Lavenham

  • John S. Lee
  • Book:
    The Medieval Clothier
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    02 June 2021
    Print publication:
    15 June 2018, pp 297-299

  • Summary

    • 1. In the name of God Amen. The 13th day of June in the year of Our Lord God 1523 and in the 15th year of the reign of King Henry VIII, I, Thomas Spring of Lavenham in the county of Suffolk and in the diocese of Norwich, cloth-maker, being of whole mind and memory and perfect remembrance and verily knowing that there is nothing more sure or more certain to any creature in this wretched world than death, which every creature living inevitably must suffer, and nothing more unsure and uncertain than the dreadful hour thereof, fully disposing and purposing myself by the mercy, grace and help of the most merciful Lord Christ Jesus to be at all and every time and hour ready, do make my last will and testament in manner and form following:

    • 2. First I annul and revoke all other wills and testaments ever afore this day made and declared, and will that every of them shall be of no strength nor effect.

    • 3. Item, I bequeath my soul to Almighty God, to his Blessed Mother Mary, and to all the holy company of heaven, and my body to be buried in the church of Lavenham before the altar of Saint Katherine where I will be made a tomb with a parclose thereabout by the discretion of mine executors.

    • 4. Item, I bequeath to the high altar of Lavenham for my tithes and offerings negligently forgotten and not paid 100s.

    • 5. Item, I will that satisfaction and restitution be made to every person complaining and duly proving any injury, wrong, extortion, oppression, deceit or any misbehaving or demeaning against reason and conscience by me to them done in any wise.

    • 6. Item, I will that immediately after my decease in as hasty time as it may be conveniently done, there shall be a thousand Masses sung for the wealth of my soul.

    • 7. Item, I give and bequeath to every of the houses of friars of Clare, Sudbury, Babwell, two houses of friars in Thetford and the nuns of Thetford to pray for my soul and all my benefactors’ souls and to every of them 40s.

Medieval English Theatre

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