IN THE BEGINNING

In the beginning and the end was … the battle. This book opens with the word “convulsions” in its first sentence and closes with a chapter on conflict. In between we get a fascinating kaleidoscope of insights, stories, viewpoints, and yes, confrontations around the question of Czech music by some of the leading scholars in the field, much of which has never before been available in English. These approaches not only involve local concerns, but raise significant questions about the nature of music and its relationship to the rest of the world.

AESTHETIC WARS AND THEIR POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES

In the final chapter, Lenka Křupková outlines the differing viewpoints of two leading musicologists from the period, Zdeněk Nejedlý and Vladimir Helfert. Nejedlý, she writes, insisted that “only through knowledge of an author's inspirations was it possible to fully understand that author's work”; Helfert, in her words, was equally certain that the history of music was “the history of musical thinking,” and thus what is important is “knowledge of the structure of a musical work, not its extra-musical background.” Because such questions have no right and wrong answers, and because such expressions as “author's inspirations” and “musical thinking” may suggest so many things, these viewpoints concerning musical meaning and value are an invitation to endless polemics, and that is precisely what happened in the Czech lands at the turn of the century. Except for the most deranged conspiracy types, people who believe the Earth is flat may eventually retreat from the main stage as more evidence against them comes in; such a surrender has never happened and will never happen in the subjective world of musical aesthetics.

One could easily take a negative view of all this, and conclude that Czech-speaking composers for twenty-five years on either side of 1900 were enervated, undone, undermined, and fundamentally distracted by overheated arguments, which rose to almost unsurpassed heights of nastiness (see the aforementioned last chapter for some choice examples). You have already encountered the expression, “The graveyard of the hopes of Czech music” in the Introductory Remarks, used by one commentator to describe the period covered by this book. And indeed, one could also point to these verbal wars as an explanation for why so few compositions and composers from that period have gained any notice on the world stage.

Vítězslav (real name Viktor) Novák (1870-1949) was one of the best pupils of Antonín Dvořák, with whom he studied at the conservatory in Prague in 1891 and 1892. In the generation of Czech composers who entered into Czech culture with their works around 1900 he occupies a prominent position. His early works do not depart from an epigonic romantic style, showing signs of the influence of such composers as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Johannes Brahms, and his teacher Dvořák. On his trips from Prague to the east during summer vacation periods Novák found the most important source for his music in Moravian and Slovak folklore. After he transcended a certain ethnographic descriptiveness, for which he was chided in his first compositions having such inspirations, melodic-rhythmic components of folk music continued to be represented even in his later works. He applied the specific features of his new style first in chamber works and piano music, in which genres his masterpieces are mainly works composed from 1899 to 1910: the Trio in D minor “quasi una ballata,” Op. 27 from 1902, his first two string quartets (1899 and 1905), his Sonata eroica for piano (1900), and the sets of piano pieces Písně zimních nocí (Songs of Winter Nights, 1903) and Pan (1910). But already in the first years of the twentieth century he also wrote large symphonic works—the symphonic poems V Tatrách (In the Tatra Mountains, composed 1902, revised 1907), O věčné touze (Of Eternal Longing, 1905), and Toman a lesní panna (Toman and the Forest Maiden, 1907)—then above all the cantata Bouře (The Storm, 1910), whose premiere by the Philharmonic Society in Brno in 1910 was a major event in the whole Czech musical world.

Within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy Novák was able to earn a reputation relatively early on as one of the best-known composers, whose works were premiered in the Czech lands but soon performed elsewhere as well. His Second String Quartet even had its world premiere in Berlin, in 1905; Prague heard this work only a year later. In 1909 the Vienna Philharmonic performed In the Tatra Mountains, and in 1914 a three-day series of concerts of his works was given in that city. Highly celebrated was the Vienna premiere of The Storm, given by the Tonkünstler-Orchester in 1913.

German publishers soon showed interest in Novák's works.

Servants have attracted relatively little attention in German rural history. This neglect is quite striking, since in many parts of Germany peasant farms passed on undivided, and fluctuations in the workforce provided by family members were balanced by additional workers. From the perspective of the peasant household, servants helped to bridge family phases with either a high burden of small children or after adult children had left the paternal home. The employment of servants, or alternatively day labourers, depended on regional practices and ecotypes, such as the prevalence of animal husbandry, grain cultivation or other forms of agriculture. Agricultural modernization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to a large degree driven by increasing labour input, but in general there has been little research on rural labour markets. J. Schlumbohm has shown that many landless families were affiliated to peasant farms as ‘Heuerlinge’, renting rooms or small houses from peasants, often with the obligation to work on demand. In return, peasants made their farming equipment available, and supported their lodgers in times of crises. His analysis of a series of contracts between peasants and lodgers revealed the highly individual relationships between peasants’ and day labourers’ households. If arrangements and relations between peasants and day labourers are one open research issue in German rural history, the relationship between peasants and servants is another. After discussing the current state of scholarship on servants, this chapter analyses a set of census lists, gathered on the instruction of the prince-bishop of Munster, for Munsterland in 1749/50. This source has been little used for academic research, although parts have been incorporated into a larger research project on European census lists. With the exception of one detailed village study discussing many aspects of historical life and economy, it has not previously been used to investigate servants.

Legal relationships between servants and their masters have attracted the attention of historians for a long time. The concept of the ‘Ganze Haus’, put forward by Otto Brunner in 1968, provoked research but also severe criticism by historians of early modern Germany. The basic idea of paternalistic and attentive togetherness within premodern households was criticized as a modern romanticizing of unequal and authoritarian relationships.

At the start of the eleventh century the bishops of northern Italy were among the most powerful figures in the region. They typically held a broad array of lands, rights and jurisdictions and, as a result, they featured prominently within the politics of the Empire. By the early decades of the twelfth century, the position of many of these bishops had changed dramatically and in many cities their temporal role was drastically reduced. This collapse of the secular authority of the Italian bishops is often linked to the Investiture Contest and a broader failure of imperial power in northern Italy. It is argued that the Investiture Contest and, in particular, the installation of reforming bishops in Italian cities during this period caused the decline of their secular power. This is in stark contrast with the bishops of the ‘Imperial Church System’ of previous centuries, who are traditionally presented as loyal supporters of the emperor, chosen from his court and empowered through his intervention. The bishops were no longer magnates of the empire concerned with upholding imperial power, but rather tools of the Gregorian reformers dedicated to removing themselves from the corruption of the secular world. This broad narrative of the Investiture Contest has overshadowed analysis of political change on a local level. Many bishops did lose their secular roles during this conflict, but closer inspection of the charter sources suggests that this was more a result of prolonged physical or political absences from their see than an immediate consequence of changing ideologies. This paper will take the bishops of Parma as a case study to demonstrate the gradual nature of this transformation of the political position of the Italian bishops and to highlight the importance of the absence of the bishop in this transition.

Twenty-first-century studies by Miller, Cushing and Stroll, among others, have provided extensive and insightful accounts of historiographical trends relating to the Investiture Contest. As they observe, various historians have highlighted inconsistencies within the narrative of the Investiture Contest and the Gregorian reform movement and how these interacted with the Imperial Church System of the German Empire. Two themes raised by these authors are especially relevant here.

How did royal authority manifest itself on a local level in the Middle Ages? In my book Unpredictability and Presence: Norwegian Kingship in the High Middle Ages, I tried to demonstrate what happened in the king's physical presence in high medieval Norway. My argument was that in spite of a well-developed royal legislation, administration and ideology, kings frequently appealed to a variety of other cultural norms, the most important being their demand for respect in a public political arena highly sensitive to honour and demonstrative gestures. Struggles and negotiations concerning such signs are what medieval sources often circle around.

The next historical challenge lies in retrieving what happened when the king was absent, and how it was possible for him to govern at a distance, considering that norms of obedience were hardly internalized. Late medieval Iceland provides an excellent example for studying absentee authority, since the king never set foot on the island after it became part of Norway in 1262/64. This signalled the end of the king-less Free State period (930–1262/64), and henceforward Iceland was ruled by bailiffs and law men appointed by the Norwegian king. Nordic integration went a step further from 1397, when Denmark, Sweden and Norway formed the Kalmar Union. Iceland now became a Nordic periphery instead of a Norwegian one.

This article will focus on fifteenth-century Iceland. This period has suffered from a particularly bad reputation among Icelandic historians, partly since Iceland was finally hit by the plague (in 1402–4 and 1494–5), partly because the lack of central power led to discord of all kinds, and partly because of the source situation: contemporary sagas were long-since gone, annals were not written after 1430 (until c. 1550), and we retain very few diplomas. Yet, politically speaking, this was a golden century in Icelandic history, as English merchants and fishermen started sailing to Iceland in large numbers, placing the island in midst of a power struggle in the North Atlantic and earning the period the label ‘The English Century’. Moreover, though the period was marked by violence and homicide, these struggles show some regularities that are not concomitant with lawless chaos, as pointed out by Helgi Þorláksson.

In recent years, historians of medieval administration have become increasingly interested in hierarchies of power and the delegation of power. A number of significant studies have focused on the administrative organization of the Church, covering such topics as papal legates and judges delegated by the papacy, or the conflicts provoked by the emergence of a new figure in the bishop's administration, the official. Analysis of the enhanced distinction between the power of order and the power of jurisdiction has also led to new approaches to the study of medieval ecclesiology. Equally, accountability has been the subject of growing interest, whether in the monastic world or more recently in the context of clerical administration. To some extent, this rich historiography reflects the existence of contemporary debates which led to a more precise vision of the internal structure of the Church, whether it concerned papal authority, or the respective areas of action of the bishop and the other dignitaries of the cathedral church – as illustrated by the conflict between Bishop Grosseteste and the chapter of Lincoln Cathedral between 1239 and 1245.

When it comes to the exercise of temporal power, however, complex theoretical arguments appeared later than in the Church. In the later Middle Ages and early modern period, civilian lawyers put into place a hierarchical conception of authority and power in the temporal field, based on the concept of imperium. In France, the most complex expression of this is found in the work of Jean Bodin (1530–96). As David Johnston has shown, in the treatise Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566), Bodin divided the authority of a magistrate into two parts: one was attributed to the magistrate by law, while he received the other by virtue of his office, a distinction Bodin borrowed from the Roman jurist Papinian. Bodin's aim was to limit the degree of merum imperium which any magistrate could claim to hold. In the Six livres de la république published ten years later, the agenda was different. In a conceptual framework that borrowed heavily from civil law, Bodin now aimed at defining the nature of sovereignty (which he identified with the concept of maiestas): this he did by determining which powers the sovereign could concede without any loss to himself.

ONE DAY AT THE end of December 1784, several thousand people crowded into an inn yard in a town in the middle of England. It was cold; sky and rooftops merged in winter gloom. The shivering mass stood patiently. Many had travelled for miles, coming in by coach, by horse, on foot from distant towns and outlying villages. Some had spent the night half-frozen in stables, doorways, any kind of rough shelters. Assembled with an excitement barely dulled by cold, they waited. They waited for an hour, two hours, three hours, four … even rumours moved slowly. Nonetheless, the crowd did not thin; at its edges more latecomers arrived, all hopeful for a sight of the balloon. There was a promise it would ascend that day, with an aeronaut who would rise to the skies, a sight unlike anything most of the crowd had ever seen before. Many of them did not know quite what to expect. The demonstration was, the crowd understood, a beginning – and there was much that could go wrong. It was heroic to make the attempt. If it succeeded, the world of the air was a step closer to being open to human endeavour. The sea had once been uncharted; now the skies were on the brink of discoveries. Who knew where those would lead? What would it mean if people could travel like birds, as easy as eagles in the upper atmosphere? Here in Birmingham they were about to see a flight of imagination and new reality.

This crowd was enormous. Beyond the inn yard they swelled out into the streets, where all the shops were shut up in expectation of an event bigger than commerce. Some of those attending had followed the progress of this new invention through newspapers, pamphlets and the first of the new books discussing it.

If he is to govern anywhere, the king cannot be everywhere. In the struggle to gain influence over an ever-increasing number of territories and a diversifying society, communicating royal power in the absence of the king becomes a key concern. This holds true both for political kings and for those whom I would like to call the ‘other’ kings in the following pages: for in late medieval and early modern France, ‘professionals’ such as minstrels and mercers had kings of their own.

The first dimension of this inquiry concerns the ways in which these professionals maintained their king's presence during his absence. They used the title of ‘king’ in the same way as in the political sphere, which raises the question of whether their representative strategies were likewise borrowed from their political counterparts. The second aspect of the present research deals with the connection between these ‘other’ kings and political kings. Did the ‘other’ kings belong to an independent organization? Or were there connections between the sphere of the political king and that of professional kings in the areas of government and authority? Some of the evidence suggests that these ‘other’ kings originated as leaders of autonomous professional associations, but that political kings later turned them into deputies and representatives of their own authority by incorporating them into the court. This meant that political power was extended by integrating whole sections of society, such as minstrels and merchants, under the royal rule. This was done by turning the ‘other’ kings into representatives of royal political authority.

By focusing on the development of the professional groups of minstrels and mercers, and on their relationship with the king of France during the transition from the late medieval to the early modern world, this paper will first seek to explore how these groups of professionals dealt with the absence of their own kings. Second, it will be asked how the French kings used their ‘other’ counterparts in order to be present in new areas.

The social developments that transformed late medieval Europe saw an increase in the centralization of power, a monopolization of power by a few chosen rulers. This is especially true of France, where a process of State formation had been at work since the thirteenth century.

This chapter offers a consideration of the notion of blurbs, commencing with a discussion of blurbs in the modern context, before exploring what kinds of medieval/early-modern textual apparatus in our Grail texts can legitimately be seen as fulfilling similar functions. I investigate publishers’ strategic manipulation of these blurbs, both textually and within the mise en page, and develop conclusions as to what we might understand as having been the key marketing factors for French Grail texts, and whether such trends developed over time.

Blurbs, in the modern sense of the term, are one of the most pivotal marketing tools in convincing a customer either to engage further with the product or to purchase it. In 2010, for example, The Bookseller reported on a study by Book Marketing Limited, which had shown that ‘the blurb makes 62% of consumers buy a particular product’. The value added by the blurb, therefore, cannot be overestimated. The narrative structure, presentation and positioning of blurbs as we know them today are, of course, rather modern devices, developed to complement shifts in book production and marketing, particularly since the turn of the twentieth century. The term itself appears only to have come into use in 1907, when Gelett Burgess, an American humorist, published a book called Are You a Bromide? and was promoting it at a trade show. Burgess persuaded his publisher to produce a special dust jacket depicting a young woman calling out alongside the usual cover copy. This copy was written to sound as if the young lady was speaking out in praise of the book and it carried the title ‘YES, this is a “BLURB”!’ Additionally, the image was captioned: ‘Miss Belinda Blurb in the act of blurbing’. The term gained swiftly in popularity and soon came to be used to describe the marketing copy displayed on book covers, a device which had been in use for some time. There is, though, a certain vagueness about what kinds of cover copy might be counted as a blurb according to Burgess’ definition. Is it material written by the author, or rather publisher-authored copy? Are endorsements from other authors included? Does it matter where it is positioned (back cover or flap)?

‘In the name of the community of the realm of Scotland’: 1286–c. 1314

On 19 March 1286 tragedy befell Scotland: its king, Alexander III, died unexpectedly as the result of an accident at the age of forty-four. Remarkably, there seems to have been no immediate headlong rush for power; unlike the period of Alexander's own minority reign from 1249 to 1258, there was no overt struggle for regency between the foremost noble families of the kingdom. This may have been because there was no heir to the throne present in Scotland: control of the kingdom could not therefore be gained through possession of the monarch's person. Alexander's three children had all predeceased him: the eldest, Margaret, born in 1261, had been married to Eric II of Norway in 1281, but died, probably in childbirth, in 1283; the older son, Alexander, died at the age of twenty in 1284; and the younger son, David, had suffered a childhood death in 1281. Following Prince Alexander's death in 1284 the succession to the kingdom had therefore, perhaps controversially, been settled by entail upon the king's infant grand-daughter Margaret, the offspring of Princess Margaret and Eric II of Norway, failing the king's having any direct heirs. The document witnessing this agreement, bearing the seals of all thirteen earls and no fewer than twenty-four of the foremost barons of the kingdom, was dated 5 February 1284, only eight days after the death of the Prince Alexander: the issue of the succession was vital, and the king was obviously aiming to ensure as little conflict as possible in the event of his early death.

It appears that Alexander's second queen, Yolande de Dreux, whom he married in October 1285, was believed to be pregnant at the time of the king's death. Certainly, there is an indication that she was known to be pregnant by September 1286, in that a pact made that month by Robert Bruce (grandfather of the future king) and others in support of Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, included a coincidental reference to ‘whoever’ would gain the throne ‘by reason of the blood’ of the late king. The immediate business of government in March/April 1286 was therefore to ensure the immediate political, military, administrative and economic stability of the kingdom, in support of either the infant Margaret or the king's posthumous child.

My aim in this book has been to use publishing concepts as a lens through which to enhance and enrich our understanding of pre-print and early print production of French Grail literature, and my study has achieved the objectives set out in the Introduction. Whilst it cannot by its nature be completely exhaustive, and of course there remain further avenues to be explored I hope that I have offered new and useful insights into the developing tastes of the audiences for Grail literature in medieval and Renaissance France, and have identified and analysed some of the most impactful tactics that medieval and early-modern publishers in France used to target and, in a sense, manipulate these audiences.

Chapter 1 synthesised and evaluated existing scholarship on the issue of publication in Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It offered a clearer definition of what it meant, practically and logistically, to ‘publish’ a text prior to the advent of print. Throughout this chapter, I argued for a more nuanced understanding of the transition between manuscript and print as more fluidly linked practices and purposes, suggesting that print standardised, rather than revolutionised, many book production processes – a large number of which were already in place in some form or another. I also set out the rationale for understanding the book trade that produced Grail literature in France as firmly rooted in commercial strategy by discussing how the dynamic and collaborative ways in which book production professionals worked together for financial gain could be seen as an early form of the modern publishing house. Additionally Chapter 1 concretised the notion of the pre-print moment of publication by showing it as being defined by the first instance of a product's authorised distribution amongst a reading (or listening) public. Through demonstrating the interconnected and interdependent relationships between pre-print and print production, these discussions legitimised the application of publishing terminology not only to our corpus of Grail literature, but also to medieval vernacular literature more generally, as a means of drawing out a greater understanding of both publishers and audiences in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.