FRENCH INTELLECTUALS have continued to be fascinated by air and to write about the history of aerial culture and the culture of aerial history. Some Enlightenment rationalists mocked this affinity as typical of an airy nation: in Britain, ‘airy’ becomes ‘airy-fairy’ very readily. That expression, meaning insubstantial, superficial, impractical and foolishly idealistic, carries fears about effeminacy and witchcraft, yet its lightness gestures to a good-humoured enchantment with air too. The British are a nation enthusiastically engaged with air now: seafarers and shopkeepers have become frequent flyers. The French remain the boldest explorers of the aesthetics of air, though artists, photographers and architects worldwide have played with air to see in it new things, subtle forces, expansive and shaped freedoms. Balloons still cross our imagination in particular and colourful ways. Among these are many instances which contain traces of meaning carried over from the eighteenth century, airborne ghosts which help explain why we still love balloons. The aesthetic work balloons do for us has adapted to meet modern ends, made possible by long memories that reach back to the beginnings of balloons in the late eighteenth century. Air has a culture rich, various and persistent.

We know balloons best as toys, little airy spheres that have shed the apparatus to carry humans aloft, except in spirit. They're affordable and disposable – too much so, since cast-away balloons contribute significantly to marine litter. Filled with human breath or by the simplest pumps, they eliminate all dangers other than the way they make us jump when they burst loudly; they expire by withering away, as if naturally. Toy balloons came about because new materials enabled cheap, safe mass production. Rubber balloons, first devised by Michael Faraday in 1824, were sold as toys in 1825; vulcanised rubber balloons, the prototype of toy balloons, were manufactured by a London company in 1847.

BALLOON NEWS SPREAD fast around Britain. Newspapers printed detailed accounts, local and international, so that readers in notionally provincial towns were often as well-informed as those in London. Some magazines too had national distribution, and private letters carried by an efficient postal system told of sightings and ascents. The balloon-mad read and talked avidly of aerostation in their area and worldwide. Benedict Anderson's classic work on the communication of ideas puts newspapers as a pillar of imagined communities, connecting people through common readership. That model holds good for balloon news though with a question of tone. Eighteenth-century newspapers, like newspapers now, combined apparently dispassionate reporting with commentary or tone that angled the subject in positive or negative ways. Many newspapers published accounts sent by witnesses with explicit views; many also printed balloon materials – advertisements, poems, periodical-style pieces, some serious, some humorous – that both reflected and created a composite tone about balloons. Newspapers expressed pride, civic and national; they also poured scorn. Their volatile views on balloons embraced scepticism, enthusiasm and contempt; like crowds at balloon launches, their mood could suddenly turn hostile. So although they are an index of public opinion, they were not always in sympathy with the balloon madness of other actors, including their contributors and readers.

Enthusiasm for balloons created activity all round Britain. Some of it was independent of events in London, though metropolitan ascents were widely reported and made aeronauts known in provincial places. Lunardi, for instance, started in London and then toured north, taking in York, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow. But he did not bring balloon madness to a new audience: Edinburgh had had its own inventor, and York had aeronauts who came flushed from success in Norwich and Bristol. The wildfire spread of balloon madness had hotspots other than London. Liverpool in the northwest of England, York in the north-east, Norwich in the east and Bristol in the west were centres of trade that looked outward to the world.

In the literary world, there are few bedfellows better acquainted than the publishing trade and Arthurian literature. Ever since Geoffrey of Monmouth first brought the legend of King Arthur to a European audience in his twelfthcentury Historia regum Britanniae, book trade professionals have copied, rewritten and exploited Arthurian material with seemingly unceasing enthusiasm, with countless examples of Arthurian literature having been produced in manuscript, print and digital formats. Whilst Geoffrey, a Welshman, may have brought us the legend of Arthur, though, it was in fact the romance of Arthur, written by a Frenchman in the twelfth century, that gave rise to one of the most recognisable, and yet enigmatic, motifs in all literature. For his fifth and final romance, left incomplete after his death around 1180–90, Chrétien de Troyes composed Le Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail). Its central motif, the Grail, might be easily recognisable to us today, but at the time it had never before been written about, and Chrétien's death prevented him from ever explaining the true nature of this enigmatic object.

It may be just as well that Chrétien did not complete the tale, though, since the lack of explanation regarding the nature and precise meaning of the Grail invited a swathe of successors to continue, reinterpret and rewrite the story, initially in France, but later also across Europe, with ever more diverse recastings of the material. Indeed, the attraction of the Grail was precisely in its inexplicability; it positively dared others to provide the answers. The resulting multiplicity of responses of Continuators and sequelisers in France in the thirteenth century laid the foundations for what, over the course of several centuries, was to become a genuinely international publishing phenomenon, one which continues today on a global scale, not only in print, but also in film, gaming and other new media.

In the Middle Ages kings and princes often found it difficult to exert personal authority over territories that could be very extensive. This led them to act through the mediation of multiple agents; they also resorted to symbolic expressions of their authority. Through these intermediaries the presence of the ruler was made virtually effective, which was perceived as being sufficient. This was because medieval mentalities and sensitivities were familiar with the potential for signa to replace what they expressed. For instance, this was an essential principle in the context of religious and liturgical practices, where images (whether statues or pictorial representations) were seen as expressing divine or saintly presence. In this context also the consecration of the daily Eucharist produced the transubstantiated presence of Christ. On another level, this process led to reifying the presence of those who exerted some political authority: this was achieved through the use of symbolic attributes which they delegated to their representatives, as well as through the use of seals and heraldic emblems.

From an early date, shields of arms were vested with the ability to manifest in absentia the presence of their owners (Plate 1). Heraldic insignia were developed as specific images, and they were increasingly perceived as a kind of double of their bearers. This reality is rarely described as such, yet it is readily perceptible in the manifold practices of medieval heraldry. In the Middle Ages coats of arms meant for display were becoming increasingly popular, and they were seen as an essential element in the exercise of power.

Heraldry, Blazon and Presence in absentia

Heraldic insignia were established during the twelfth century and soon followed defined rules of composition – called ‘blazon’ since the early modern period. These rules stress what is specific about the heraldic image and distinguish it from other types of emblem. They also account for the complexity of what we may term the semiological features of the coat of arms, such as the organization of the various levels of the picture, the way charges are set on the field, colours assembled and so on. The sources for these principles of composition are still shrouded in obscurity.

Without doubt one of the main weaknesses of the ‘Burgundian State’ which was progressively built up by the Valois dukes of Burgundy was its dual structure: only the person of the prince could warrant its unity. In this specific political context, the physical absence of the dynast was a real source of vulnerability. The first Valois duke, Philip the Bold (1363–1404), was all the more ‘absent’ since his political and dynastic ambitions often kept him in Paris, at the heart of royal government. This evolution became even more marked in the 1390s. At that time the governmental partnership formed by the princely couple – Duke Philip and his wife, the heiress Margaret of Flanders – seems to have been, on a daily basis and on the ground, an efficient palliative to the physical absence of the prince.

Two cases concerning the practice of power in the Comté of Burgundy should enable us to test the efficiency as well as the ideological and structural limits of this singular political construct. In order to do so we shall stress the problems linked to the circulation of information and to decision-making within the Burgundian state.

In absentia: The Absence of the Prince in the Specific Context of the Burgundian State

The geography and structure of the Burgundian State of the Valois dukes were obviously a source of fragility. Two blocks co-existed: the northern territories and the possessions which are properly termed Burgundian. The duke's demesnes were undergoing a process of extension but they remained badly connected and only the person of the prince gave them some unity. Circumstances, however, meant that the duke was only occasionally present in each of the areas composing this motley assemblage. This was particularly true in the case of Philip the Bold, whose role in the central government of the kingdom required his constant presence in the capital, especially in the troubled context created by the illness of Charles VI from the summer of 1392. As a son, brother and uncle of kings, Philip the Bold was naturally close to the young Charles; this was not the case with his son, John the Fearless, whose rank was only that of first cousin of the king.

During the first decades of the twentieth century Vítězslav Novák was one of the best known Czech composers. His works were played by famous performers, and their premieres in the Czech lands were followed by performances abroad, mainI also thabnk youly in German-speaking areas. Novák corresponded with Eusebius Mandyczewski, archivist of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music) in Vienna, who praised some of his works in his letters and promised help in arranging for their performance in that city. In 1902 Novák received a letter from the conductor Arthur Nikisch, who was enthusiastic about his works and promised to perform them in the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Ferruccio Busoni, too, in a letter sent to Novák in 1904, expressed interest in his works and regretted that the program for his Berlin concerts for the next season was already set before he came to know them.

Performances of Novák's works were often an impulse for their publication abroad, as in the case of the Trio in D minor “quasi una ballata,” Op. 27, which was issued by Simrock shortly after its 1903 performance in Vienna. The most important event marking Novák's growing esteem and the penetration of his works on the broader foreign market was his contract with Universal Edition in Vienna. During the first decades of the new century the most prominent Czech music publishers—F. A. Urbánek and Mojmír Urbánek—were technically and financially able to publish only solo and chamber works, so Novák had no publishers at home for his large orchestral works.

In March 1910 representatives of the Umělecká beseda (Artists’ Society) invited the director of Universal Edition, Emil Hertzka, to Prague for the premiere of Novák's overture Lady Godiva. Hertzka expressed interest in Novák and proposed to the Artists’ Society's publishing house Hudební matice that it could publish this work together with Universal. However, Hudební matice lacked sufficient funds for such an enterprise. Hertzka therefore suggested that Novák himself engage in the enterprise as a shareholder. Novák turned to the Czech Academy, which promised him a subsidy for this publication. In the meantime Universal, whose primary interest was publication of works by composers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, decided to become Novák's exclusive publisher.

During the Middle Ages, the English upper classes and those in power over them used geographical movement as a key index by which they could register their respective concerns. We see this most clearly in those who were either forced to leave, or who left by choice, the English king's dominions during the later medieval period. From the earl of Norfolk fleeing England after the 1075 revolt to the duke of Exeter's escape to the Continent in the early 1460s, voluntary or forced foreign exile was a powerful statement either of the intent of the individual or of those in charge. However, there is an equally potent, though far less well examined, form of ‘geographical statement’ connected with the later medieval nobility and gentry: the situation arising when an individual fell out of favour with the king, court and/or those in power, but remained, or had to remain, in the area under the English king's control – either in England itself or in lands the king ruled elsewhere. After all, though a few high-profile nobles – most notably, Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV – successfully returned from foreign exile, most of those returning found their felicity transient at best. Whether Thomas Becket's return to Canterbury in 1170, or Henry VI's reappearance during the Adeption crisis in 1470–1, most such homecomings contained a rather obvious ‘worm in the bud’, which soon broke out. That said, if by the exercise of free will, by necessity or by force, those outside royal, governmental and/ or political favour remained within the king's dominions (if not always England itself), things could be quite different. While in some ways such individuals had publically ‘opted out’, or been forced out, of the right to help govern the kingdom, they were still on the stage, or at least in the wings, and therefore could never be entirely discounted.

The fourteenth century offers a useful case study of the idea of ‘internal exile’ in the later Middle Ages. During this period there were an unusually large number of cases of official and unofficial internal exile, often due to the changing fortunes of the various factions within the royal court (e.g. 1308, 1310, 1312, 1316, 1318, 1322, 1326–7, 1328, 1330, 1340–1, 1376–7, 1388, 1389, 1397, 1399);

In 1634 in the parish of Brampford Speke in Devon, 22-year-old Mary Smith returned home to care for her sick mother. She remained there for around three months before her neighbours complained to Sir Nicholas Marten, the Justice of the Peace, that Mary was ‘not living with a master’. Questioned by the Justice, she was forced to ‘procure a Master’ but left his service after only a short time. Mary was reported again, the Justice this time threatening to send her to the Bridewell if she did not leave her mother's home and retain a position in service. By December 1635, Mary had conceded defeat, at least temporarily, and had taken up employment as a servant in the household of a 64-year-old widow named Katherine Mogridge. She remained there for at least five weeks before disappearing from record.

Sara Mendelson suggests that Mary's movement back and forth from her mother's home was a relatively common experience for unmarried women and that the ‘survival of the family unit was of higher priority than a young woman's career outside the home’. Returning to the family home was certainly not uncommon for female servants. In 1609, Catherine Hatton of Bisley in Gloucestershire was forced to leave service upon the death of her mistress, Margery Shoell. Instead of finding employment elsewhere, Catherine returned home to her parents. Mary Bond, who worked in service alongside Mary Smith in Katherine Mogridge's home also periodically resided with her father between positions she held in service. However, as Mary Smith's story indicates, such transient living and working arrangements were not tolerated by law. The complaint that her neighbours made to Sir Nicholas Marten that she was ‘not living with a master’ appealed to the legislation set out in the 1563 Statute of Artificers, which ruled that:

IN NOVEMBER 1784 three plays were reviewed by The Universal Magazine. One, Frederick Pilon's Aerostation, explicitly jokey about balloons, had a cast of characters with European interests. A second, John O'Keeffe's Fontainbleau, included a comic character called Colonel Epaulette, a French fan of England who came on stage humming ‘Britannia rules the waves’. The third, a farce by Thomas Linley called The Spanish Rivals, included a Cumberland boy speaking in broad dialect who had been taken prisoner at the siege of Gibraltar and thereafter kept in Spain. In each of these plays people crossed national borders and still kept local identities. Comedy staged inter-nationalism while recognising national characters and conflicts. Comedy also questioned simplistic ideas of British national character:

The self-styled Lounger who penned this portrait is thinking humorously about patriotism. Just as balloons were both serious and comic, national character was solid enough to survive ironies – or, looking the other way round, national character was solidified by irony. (The British are still inclined to be defined through their sense of humour.) Satirical prints showed that people were perfectly used to reading a language of exaggeration in which truth could be found. Truth might even be easier to recognise when it was dressed in exaggeration. But for all the playfulness about national character, in 1783 and the years immediately following there was a seriousness in discussions about the state of the nation that reflected deep uncertainties and worry about Britain's prospects.

Zrání (Ripening) is a poem in sound—a poem of dreams, with a rich, detailed, tapestry-like form of interwoven voices. It is so intuitive and personal that it is difficult to analyze by conventional methods. Suk himself tells us,

Characteristics of the structure of Ripening can help us infer what these influences might have been. Above all, Dvořák's late symphonic poems seem to lead directly to one of Suk's most distinctive traits: music is used to convey empathetic thought and human experience to the listener. The works of Mahler and Bruckner that were popular in Prague from 1900 to 1914 would have given Suk practical examples of large-scale compositions for orchestra whose impetus was emotional and descriptive content. It is quite possible that Suk attended the open rehearsals for the world premiere of Mahler's Seventh Symphony in Prague in 1908; we know that his mentor Hanuš Wihan did attend them.

Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande was performed in Prague in 1908, and Strauss's Elektra in 1910. These works would have given him an example of expressive musical texture built on sound itself rather than thematic material. Like Debussy's great orchestral works, Ripening is not built of fixed, easily analyzable architectural forms, but of organic, constantly changing tissue. Like D'Indy, he uses linked, episodic segments that give the impression of natural breath rather than deliberate pattern. He may have heard Rimsky- Korsakov's suite from Tsar Sultan in 1914. Like that Russian master, Suk has an impressive command of orchestration which permits all of the parts to be clearly heard, even in complex textures. This skill is especially evident in the final corrections made to the autograph; extremely fine adjustments are made to the voicing of chords, to the shape and length of figurations, to unusual combinations of instruments.

In this chapter, I explore the medieval and early-modern compilation of French Grail texts, viewing it as a method of ‘packaging’ and ‘re-packaging’ that is analogous, in respect of its purpose and effect, with the development of a modern publisher's list or series. Following an initial discussion of this model, I mostly adopt in this chapter a more data-led approach than used in previous chapters, whereby I set out and interrogate two key datasets in respect of the compilation of Grail literature in our previously delineated corpus of artefacts. The first dataset is found in Table 2, which sorts the corpus of artefacts, first, by the particular Grail text(s) contained within and, second, by their known (or assumed) date of copying. The second dataset is contained in Table 3, in which all of the artefacts are listed according to their chronological composition, thereby giving an overview of developments across the entire corpus. I take each of these datasets in turn, and underpin my enquiry with several key questions: are Grail texts compiled alongside contents with identifiable generic connections (at least from our modern perspective), for example, (pseudo-)historical, religious, literary, romance, verse or prose texts? Can any such generic connections be relied upon to have been recognisable to medieval audiences? What types of agency drive the compilatory context(s) of a given text? Can trends be seen in how Grail texts are interpolated, compiled and bound in volumes as time moves on? What does this suggest about changing perceptions of Grail texts, and the ways in which different medieval audiences might have categorised and contextualised them? I contend that the information contained in these two datasets is strongly indicative of there having existed a growing awareness of a form of ‘generic’ relationship between Grail texts between 1200 and 1530, one which became firmly established, and almost exclusively so, from the late thirteenth century onwards.

Medieval Compilation and Publishers’ Lists: Transcending Genre

In the past, it was something of a commonplace to suggest that medieval manuscript compilation was haphazard, often following no particular agenda. So-called ‘miscellanies’ were regularly held up as chief perpetrators thanks to their apparent lack of any cohering content or theme.

TO WHOM DID THE FUTURE BELONG?

Otakar Ostrčil (25 February 1879 - 20 August 1935) was one of the figures in Czech musical life who acknowledged Bedřich Smetana's position in Czech music as undisputed, and who knew both Antonín Dvořák and Zdeněk Fibich as mature and remarkable composers. The deaths of Fibich in 1900 and Dvořák in 1904, perhaps too early and too unexpected, created space in the Czech musical “heavens” for the young generation, confronting them with numerous tasks: besides their own work as composers, they had to safeguard the legacy of their predecessors, to perfectly master the art of composing, to succeed abroad, and also to become top performers and organizers of musical life. Their fates were also affected by the unexpected vigor with which Otakar Hostinský's pupils dominated official discourse. The two founders of Czech musicology, Zdeněk Nejedlý and Vladimír Helfert, were well aware of the power of both spoken and written words; the escalation of the so-called “Dvořák battles” before the First World War was one of their more doubtful achievements. Thankfully, after he had settled in Brno, Helfert reassessed his earlier opinions; he was able to recognize Josef Suk's and especially Leoš Janáček's qualities. On the other hand, Nejedlý remained stubbornly determined: even in the new setting of an independent Czechoslovakia, he was unable to break away from his superficial judgments, making personal preferences and biases part of his music criticism.

The life paths of the musicians who emerged following the deaths of the founding troika (Smetana, Dvořák and Fibich) are in several ways almost too obviously similar: they boldly came to the forefront around 1900, they wrote a number of high-quality compositions before the First World War, and they did valuable work as performers, critics and teachers. After the war, they were overwhelmed by their work for important national institutions. This distracted them from further composing and sometimes quickened their retirement, or made them unable to build on their earlier achievements. After 1918, Josef Suk taught composition at the conservatory in Prague, gradually and voluntarily withdrawing from public sight. He eventually left the Czech capital for the provincial town of Benešov and composed only small piano pieces. Oskar Nedbal assumed the leadership of Bratislava's main theater, but proved unable to ensure its financial stability.

MUCH OF BALLOON MADNESS was joyous and excited. But there was also resistance and opposition. Aerostation seemed to move fast in its developments; in the first years, comments on voyages note record-breaking achievements in distance, height and time which raised expectations for other flights. Many satirists concentrated on ineptitude in particular failures; some cast doubt on the whole enterprise of aerial endeavour. The old trope of bubble connected folly and politics, and balloons drew satirists in flocks. Attacks were often personally directed. Thus The Lunardiad, or, The Folly and Madness of the Age (1784):

Balloons as a form of folly feature in another print of 1784 – The downfall of taste & genius or the world as it goes – that satirised topical amusements in popular culture, including mountebanks, performing animals and freaks.2 Vehicles of folly in themselves, balloons revealed the folly in people too, in unchecked ambition, deviant escape from norms, loose behaviour, upside-down values, greed, fraud, appetite, gullibility and credulity. This chapter explores that world in relation to the rage for balloons – a world not simply of scandal, politics or fashion but the intersection of all three. It was possible to be famous for being famous – and fatuous. What historians call the public sphere included in 1783 much personal life aired through personalities and sexual affairs, especially those conducted publicly by the aristocracy. The fashionable world was also a political world; balloons contributed to fashionable politics.

Josef Bohuslav Foerster (1859-1951) came from a musical family. His father Josef Förster taught music theory at the organists’ school in Prague and was music director at the church of St. Vojtěch (St. Adalbert), where from 1874 to 1877 the organist was Antonín Dvořák. During his long lifetime J. B. Foerster met many leading figures in both Czech and international musical culture; his literary works and the papers from his estate offer valuable testimony concerning Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Edvard Grieg, and especially Gustav Mahler. Foerster was an outstanding organist, composer, and writer about music. His best musical works are probably those from the last decade of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, extending to the outbreak of World War I. A major factor in the course of his life was his marriage to the soprano Berta Lautererová of Prague's National Theater, who was hired by Mahler for the opera in Hamburg where she sang from 1893 to 1901, then later for the Court Opera in Vienna, 1901-13. Foerster worked as a music critic for both Czech and German periodicals, and taught at conservatoires as well as privately. He continually followed happenings in the Czech lands and saw to it that his works were performed in Prague.

Foerster was a popular composer of songs, because he was able to capture sensitively the poetic nuances of poems and at the same time achieve proper rhythmic declamation of their texts, in both Czech and German. He was also fond of the genre of concert melodrama. His supreme song cycle Milostné písně (Love Songs) with orchestra, Op. 96, to words by Rabindranath Tagore, comes from 1914. His choruses, especially those for male voices, retain a place in concert repertoire to this day. Outstanding among his symphonic works are the Symphony No. 3, performed by Mahler in Hamburg in 1896, and Symphony No. 4, Easter, premiered in Prague in 1905. He wrote numerous concertos and solo sonatas. Also copious is his output for piano. Noteworthy among his chamber works is a wind quintet from 1909. For the theater he wrote incidental music as well as six operas, of which the best is probably Eva.