Creation of single-movement works was one of the dominant features of compositional thinking in the second half of the nineteenth century. The idea of a single-movement composition was first implemented in symphonic poems. As a rule the formal structure of these works is based on the linking of several sections with different tempos into a single uninterrupted stream. But examples of this principle may be found already in works by composers like Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. The most thoroughly elaborated conception of a single-movement work arising from the linking of successive sections of various emotional character was created in 1854 by Franz Liszt in his Piano Sonata in B minor. However, the grandiose form of a singlemovement composition ran into a potential problem of monotony, or on the other hand the danger of incoherence of the work as a whole. A solution of the issue of the relation between rudimentary themes and formal layout, thus satisfaction of the principle of unity in variety, is found in the process of thematic transformation, whereby a thematically-diverse whole arises through progressive transformation of the opening thematic substance.

Transformation of a theme is in many respects similar to the compositional principle of developing variation, i.e. a method based on derivation of far-ranging relations from narrowly-bounded material. This technique, originally used most often for evolutionary purposes in development sections of sonata forms, became the guiding principle for a whole movement, as documented especially in the chamber works of Johannes Brahms. The starting point of Liszt's method, however, consists in motives that are reshaped characteristically and then formed into smaller or larger themes. The main result of this procedure is that all the themes in a work are closely related, though they may differ greatly in expression. By contrast with developing variation, in thematic transformation the diastematic substance or at least the melodic outline is usually preserved, whereas the rhythm is often changed so radically that the listener does not notice the motivic relationship without seeing the musical notation. Liszt's art does not consist in transformation itself, but in the dramatic effect of the change in the character of the music.

CROWDS HAVE ATTRACTED the interest of historians, sociologists, philosophers and psychoanalysts. British crowds in the second half of the eighteenth century get special attention from historians in relation to political unrest, and whether riots were a form of popular revolt against forms of power. What can this illuminate about crowds at balloon ascents? How did the massing of people into crowds help to shape and spread balloon madness?

Elias Canetti's landmark book Crowds and Power begins by cataloguing crowds: ‘we discover that there are: baiting crowds, flight crowds, prohibition crowds, reversal crowds, feast crowds, panic crowds, double crowds, invisible crowds, etc. (No lonely crowds!)’ Charles Tilly analyses what he calls Contentious Gatherings from 1758 to 1834 and also finds a rich vocabulary: they involve 2,500 distinct verbs, he says. ‘The category of verbs whose share increased by at least a third 1758–1820 were cheer, disperse, meet, petition and support’. Just for that movement of gathering which creates a crowd, Tilly supplies a long index of terms: abandon, abate, accompany, accost, advance, appear, approach, arrive, ascend … and that's just the As. The lexicon of crowds is complex.

The grammar of crowds is also complex, but it has a tendency to turn singular. Mark Harrison suggests that crowds fascinate us because many individuals seem to become one: ‘the sea of faces becomes, paradoxically, a single-headed entity. … reduced to a single, coherent, entity, they are presented, either by their spokespeople or outside commentators, as representatives of a single, coherent, belief.’ This unifying language can change fast: a crowd becomes a mob when it acts to offend. Some activities described as riots in this period were not necessarily violent; Tilly shows that food riots, for instance, were protests where fighting was uncommon. There were many shades of riotous behaviour in everyday life, and especially at elections; lobbing a brick or a stone was a common art. Violence at balloon launches usually had a trigger point, when an erstwhile peaceable and patient crowd grew restive, boiled over and attacked balloon, aeronaut and authorities – and each other.

Discussions of operatic dramaturgy lie at the intersection of musicology, theater studies, and to some extent also literary criticism. Perhaps this is why efforts toward a theoretical grasp of issues related to operatic dramaturgy appeared relatively late on the international scene, not until the 1960s. The most influential conception of the evolution of operatic dramaturgy and libretto construction was created in German musicology, especially in the works of Carl Dahlhaus. In his concepts, but also in the works of authors of the younger generation, such as Albert Gier, we naturally find continuity with the tradition of German literary and theater studies, which are represented by Volker Klotz3 and Peter Szondi.4 In recent decades these interdisciplinary concepts have significantly inspired even Anglophone musicology, which was previously oriented primarily toward the purely musical analysis of operatic works. It can only be regretted that the pioneering work of Czech aesthetician Otakar Zich during the interwar period did not enter into the international discourse surrounding such topics.5 It is in the light of these interdisciplinary concepts that we will look at the issues pertaining to Janáček's operatic musicalization of Čapek's Věc Makropulos (The Makropulos Case, or The Makropulos Affair) and at the issue of the effect of traditional operatic aesthetic norms and principles in modern forms of opera of the 1920s.

Leoš Janáček first encountered Čapek's play in December of 1922, thus shortly after its premiere. He soon asked Čapek for permission to create a libretto based on the theatrical drama. Čapek agreed without any objections that Janáček could manipulate the work according to the composer's own discretion, even though Čapek considered the genre of conversational comedy to be unsuitable for operatic treatment.6 He was not interested in collaborating with Janáček on the libretto, as he regarded the musicalization of the play a lost cause from start.7 Janáček began work on the opera in November 1923 and finished it, after some revisions, in December 1925. A year later TheMakropulos Case opera had its premiere in Brno. It was first performed in Prague on 1 March 1928; its first foreign performance came in Frankfurt am Main in February 1929, thus six months after Janáček's death.

Farm servants were agricultural workers who lived on the farm, traditionally hired for up to a year at a time, providing farmers with a continuously available supply of labour. While domestic servants were also employed in farmhouses, some farm servants worked both in the house and on the land. The extent to which farm service declined, survived or adapted in different parts of England during the nineteenth century has been a focus of historical debate since the 1980s. Ann Kussmaul argued that farm service declined in the south and east of England until it was virtually non-existent by the mid nineteenth century. This decline was associated with rapid population growth, a rise in poor relief expenditure, falling real wages for agricultural labourers and the rise in the cost of living. Consequently, the benefits of securing a constantly available supply of labour on the farm by employing live-in workers diminished. Conversely, Kussmaul argued that the north of England was a stronghold for the survival of farm service due to shortages of labour and competition for employment with industry.

This idea of a north–south divide of survival versus decline has increasingly been challenged. Alun Howkins and Nicola Verdon argued that in some southern and midland counties, farm service survived after the 1850s due to its ability to adapt. Farm service, they argued, might not have been the dominant system but it certainly continued to be important. They identified a link between farm service and areas where climate, soil and farming systems created a preference for a resident workforce, for instance as a result of dairying or close proximity to industrial employment. The work of Caunce and Moses on the East Riding of Yorkshire, and of Mutch and Gritt on Lancashire, has reinterpreted nineteenth-century farm service in the north as an important adaptation which was beneficial, if not crucial, for the development of modern capitalist farming, rather than an archaic survival of an outmoded practice. While collectively this work enhances our understanding of regional variation in farm service, and contributes an alternative northern perspective, nineteenthcentury farm service in many northern counties has yet to be studied.

Brita Olofsdotter died in 1713 in the very same house in which she had been born seventy-three years earlier. Being born to a freeholder family, and with both parents alive during her youth, she and her five brothers had had a good start in life. Her parents also provided her with some of the social capital she would come to need in life; according to a notation in a church register they had given her an ‘honest Christian upbringing’ and made sure she learned to read her Bible. Her two oldest brothers stayed with their parents and in time they took over the farm and formed families of their own. As both daughters and sons inherited real estate by Swedish law (if the parents owned any), Brita inherited a sister's part of the farm. She did not, however, stay at the farm in the parish Moklinta. Instead she became a live-in servant ‘in her youth’. But unlike the majority of women in her position Brita never married and she stayed in the service of others for most of her life. By the turn of the century she moved back home to her relatives in Moklinta. Then she turns up in the records as a lodger in the house of her younger brother Erik. When she eventually died she did so in the house of her (older) brother's grandson, Anders Eriksson. It is likely that her claim in the farm was never realized into real estate or money but instead used as an insurance of care and a home in her old age. Even so, after her death the local priest noted that she had received help from the parish poverty funds. The life as a live-in servant did not, in the end, provide Brita with enough savings to live out her life independently or as comfortably as she might have wished.

European early modern live-in servants have, as a group, been categorized as young, unmarried, dependent, subordinate and vulnerable. The work they performed has been labelled as unskilled and the time they spent as a live-in servant has been perceived as no more than a phase in their life cycle.

In the Introduction, I alluded to the debate regarding the appropriateness of applying the term ‘publishing’ to manuscript culture, since both popular and scholarly conjecture often suggest that the publishing trade only began with the arrival of print. This contention is frequently linked to the notion that printed books so quickly overtook manuscripts as the predominant format for textual dissemination that it supposedly marked a very immediate, and irreversible, change in book production, one which in effect underpinned the formation of a brand new industry. For example, in Elizabeth Eisenstein's well-known book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, the author emphasises the ‘instability and infidelity’ of manuscript transmission and thus how it succumbed very early following the introduction of the new technology. However, various scholars from a broad range of disciplines have put forward cases over the years, including my own brief prolegomena on the matter in relation to the Conte's Continuations, that contrastingly and persuasively support the idea that the process of change was far more complicated and protracted than this would suggest. For example, in their Introduction to The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, Walsham and Crick state of recent scholarship on the matter that:

In spite of this change of emphasis, medievalists are evidently still wary of the term. For example, in his study of Christine de Pizan's deep involvement in the production of her own works, James Laidlaw ensures to caveat his designation of Christine as a publisher as ‘a deliberate anachronism’. This said, even if the term ‘publication’ and its derivants are still cautiously applied, scholarly work that discusses manuscript culture and secular literature of the Middle Ages (including examples regarded as seminal) has readily made use of publishingrelated terms. The most notable example of this is probably Elspeth Kennedy's field-shaping piece, ‘The Scribe as Editor’, in which Kennedy authoritatively sets out the editorial and creative agency of scribes during the copying process.

IN 1786 JANE CAVE PUBLISHED a volume of poems. Literally provincial – she was from Brecon and the book was published in Bristol – many of the poems feature air as an imaginative medium. Balloons make an appearance:

The literature of balloons had a wide reach, encompassing many amateurs and anonymous writers. This chapter explores some of them.

Aerostation was incontestably a new science, yet the literature of aerostation draws deeply on old genres in its fashioning of imaginative possibilities. A rare surviving handbill from a provincial press, for instance, uses a fire balloon as a vehicle for a sermon. In prose, balloons had their own new genres, from the formal accounts of aerial voyages (in English, using French narratives as starting points) to the looser life-writing of aeronauts about experiences aloft. These accounts did empirical work and reflected upon imagination, especially through the sublime, but they were not leading influences on imaginative responses to balloons. Among letter writers there was a common fantasy of balloons shrinking distance between correspondents: ‘If air balloons were as common as Hackney coaches and as easily managed, you might call and spend an evening with me once a week, and I could do the same with you, but ‘til this new mode of travelling is more improved, we must be content to go on in the old way, and converse by paper.’ In different ways, different literary forms engaged with questions of distance raised by balloons.

The literature of balloons is extensive and my account of it is necessarily selective. One way to explore it is through genres, covering – appropriately – both high and low. In poetry, balloons appear in odes and acrostics and pretty much everything in between; they also run the gamut of seriousness, from attempts at epic to mock-epic and very light verse.

THE IDEA OF THE PARACHUTE is conventionally attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, who in 1485 sketched a pyramid-shaped canopy attached to a wooden frame, with a pole from the apex and cords from the corners to which a person could hang on. Its purpose was to enable anyone to let themselves down from a height without danger; its particular application would be to persons escaping from buildings on fire. But Leonardo's design stayed unpublished until the end of the nineteenth century, and although some early experiments by Joseph Montgolfier made use of the idea of using resistance to slow descent in air in ways common both to balloons and parachutes, the development of parachutes as separate entities proceeded slowly. There were successful tests at Avignon, it was said, using first a sheep, then a condemned prisoner.

Inspiration – and explanation – came from the umbrella, commonly in use as a protector against rain. In October 1784, Thomas Martyn published a design for a globe balloon that explicitly included an ‘Umbrella to afford easy descent’ should the balloon burst. It was dismissed by Blanchard, who said Martyn was welcome to take what little credit there was in such a useless device. Despite this fart in Martyn's general direction, Blanchard was himself experimenting with designs of ribs attached to a silk canopy, and by June 1785 he was making test drops above his Aerostatic Academy in Vauxhall. One was to have starred a sheep – but just as the balloon launched, a lady tripped over the cords which connected sheep and parachute to the balloon, which shot off and burst.

JANÁČEK AND RUSSOPHILISM

Janáček's first opera Šárka, JAWO I/1 (1887-88), it has been argued, owes much to Wagner. At this stage Janáček's knowledge of Wagner was limited to an unspecified piece that he heard at a Vienna Philharmonic Concert on 4 April 18804 and the prelude to Tristan und Isolde (on which he had published an analytical article in 1885, JAWO XV/30). In fact, most of the “Wagnerian” traits in the opera go back to the libretto by Julius Zeyer, a poet with a wide European culture and extensive knowledge of what was going on elsewhere in Europe. Since Šárka was written in the mold of a traditional Czech mythological/historical opera, a more convincing model for it, proposed by Vladimír Helfert, is Smetana's heroic opera Libuše: in terms of story Šárka is a sequel to Libuše, taking up the story after the death of Libuše. While the path that Janáček was following at the time climaxed with this opera it also came to an abrupt end with it. Not consulted until Janáček had composed the opera, Julius Zeyer refused to give permission for him to set his text and thus doomed any attempt at the time to stage the opera. It was first performed only in 1925, thirty-eight years later, by which time Janáček was famous and Zeyer was dead. This fiasco was, however, a turning point that sent Janáček off in the direction of Moravian folk music, which he assiduously collected, edited, and arranged, with a discernible impact on his own style: most of his compositions between 1889 and 1894 were in some way related to Moravian folk music, including his second opera Počátek románu (The Beginning of a Romance, JAWO I/3, 1891-92).

This abrupt turn of style was not entirely new. Pavel Křížkovský (1820- 85), in charge of music at the Augustinian Monastery in Brno, where Janáček was a chorister from 1865, did not give his young pupil composition lessons, but his “ohlasový” choruses—choruses using folk texts and attempting to “echo” folksong in their simplicity of style—became models for Janáček when, some years later, he began composing his own choruses for the malevoice amateur choir “Svatopluk” that he conducted from 1873. Arguably, Moravian folksong had been familiar to Janáček from his childhood and had simply been overlaid with current European music.

WHY DID PEOPLE talk of ‘balloon madness’? What did they mean by it? The language around balloons after 1783 indicated their effect was startling. ‘Balloon madness’, a phrase widely used in the first two years of aerostation, has simple and deep meanings. Superficially, ‘madness’ refers to an abnormal, unstable cultural phenomenon, like the use of the word ‘craze’ in the twentieth century to describe mass enthusiasm for something. Close to ‘craziness’, the term ‘craze’ signals that a significant number of people is affected, and lightly pathologises their obsessiveness in terms of mental disorder. Madness and craziness involve disturbing ways of behaving. In the 1780s, this language of disturbance had resonances that came from deep-running ideas. ‘Balloon madness’ drew on at least four currents of thought that flowed together in intricate ways from medicine, politics, religion and fashion; each had a way of explaining how ideas caught on and spread. The force of the term ‘balloon madness’ in the 1780s came from a confluence that held an easy position in everyday language but was all the more powerful for being continuously fed by explanations also themselves evolving. ‘Madness’ seems obvious, and we still use it obviously to describe what we disagree with. What it meant in the 1780s also had a hinterland of ideas not all familiar to us now.

The pathology of madness had a large literature in the late eighteenth century. As Enlightenment medicine moved on from old models of imbalance of humours accounting for illness, it kept a sense of aggression as relevant. So do we: wounds can still be described as angry. A key term, ‘rage’, described how epidemics spread. In 1782 the sentimental novelist Henry Mackenzie wrote to the economist Adam Smith hoping he had escaped ‘the Influenza, which has raged in London and now begins to rage here’. Disease raged through bodies: in 1784 a treatise on farriery discussed the staggers ‘that rage so furious and fatal among Horses at this present Time’.

In the chapters of this study so far, the importance of patronage has been underlined several times, and its significance pertains to several functions in terms of a text's publication. In Chapter 1, for example, we saw patronage play a central role in defining a text's initial moment of publication, as well as in providing the preliminary permission for the text's further dissemination – that which Riddy referred to as the ‘authorial mode’ (cf. p. 20). In Chapter 2, we witnessed the frequent presentation of patronage within ‘blurbs’ and, in Chapter 3, we saw patronage often depicted, visually and textually, as playing a key part in validating an author's authority. Finally, in Chapter 4, we learnt that textual compilation had a given volume's patron at its heart, being a physical reflection of his or her agenda through the careful and calculated assembly of a book's contents. Patronage in its various incarnations, therefore, is closely linked to everything from the genesis of texts to their initial publication and marketing, as well as from their reception amongst audiences to their eventual re-packaging, re-publication and re-marketing. It is one of the unifying elements of this study, and it thus presents itself as a germane subject with which to complete this analysis of publication within French Grail texts.

Patronage in the Middle Ages and Renaissance seems, at first glance, to be a commonly understood concept: one attracting scholars from across various disciplines, such as book history, bibliography, literary studies, cultural history, social history and more. Owing to the subject's breadth of coverage, patronage in this period is broadly understood to involve the creation of a literary product in order to please a patron, often at his or her behest, and frequently in exchange for something of value, be that financial remuneration, status or influence. But for all the straightforwardness implied by this, it transpires to be difficult to find a scholarly source that states it this plainly. The reason for this, I suggest, is rooted in the existence of a conflation of identities that muddies the waters. There are, I contend, at least two – if not three – different kinds of patrons at work in our period of concern. These various patrons conduct discrete relationships in the world of book production, whilst often co-existing at various moments in time.

In the later Middle Ages the power of the French king was personal. Its sacred character manifested itself in the contact the king established with his subjects; in practice, the physical presence of the king was a major political factor. The slow growth of administration did not displace this, but rather reinforced the king's ‘power in representation’. In this paper we shall study the absence of the king, but instead of examining political theory, we shall follow the king on his journeys and observe him through the reactions of public opinion. The itinerary of the king draws a kind of ‘customary map’, showing the proximity of power to its subjects: by default, the map suggests how distant power was, or how it was delegated. And on this map two scales overlap, a geographical one and a social.

The French kings could not cover the whole of the 400,000 km2 of their kingdom. They tended to stay in the ‘country’ of France, around Paris – which was their original domain. They visited other regions for specific purposes only. Ultimately, for many areas on the periphery of the kingdom, the absence of the king was the political norm. But absence also meant social distance: as princes, the kings maintained firm social barriers between themselves and their subjects. Between the reign of Charles V (1364–80) and that of Francis I (1515–47), these two aspects of royal residential practice changed significantly. In terms of geography, the royal space was reduced after the defeats of the first Hundred Years War (1337–75); during the second Hundred Years War (1411–53), it moved to a new area, the Loire Valley, under Charles VII (Map 1). Finally, from the reign of Charles VIII (1483–98) the kings had at their disposal a kingdom that was united and tightly held; it was from there that they were able to launch their conquest of the Italian principalities. Political stability and an expanding administrative machine allowed them to reduce their travels through France (Map 2). At the same time, the social distance between court and bourgeois increased: the king deserted the locations where he had been traditionally present, in particular Paris, his capital. How did the kings of France manage this transformation of the space they inhabited, and what were the political consequences?