‘O komme, holde Sommernacht’ Op. 58 no. 4 (comp. by autumn 1871, publ. Dec. 1871)

IN 1871, when Op. 58 was published, Brahms had to confirm Grohe's name to his publisher Rieter-Biedermann, possibly because of the risk of confusing this littleknown figure with the better-known Groth. Brahms found the poem in Grohe's 1861 collection Reime und Reisen. This is a typical lyrical-pastoral collection, with short verses on topics such as love, roses and the moon, and some reflections of Grohe's exotic travels. In the brief introduction to the volume, Grohe acknowledges that Romantic subjectivity is passé, but declares that he cannot help but write poetry. Although none of Grohe's verses made it into Brahms's poetry notebooks, his battered paperback copy of the Reime und Reisen bears many signs of reading. Brahms marked the poems ‘Abends’ and ‘An die Sterne’ in pencil, and the pages of ‘Mein Bächlein’ and ‘Nach Mitternacht’ are dog-eared. The poem ‘Abends’ particularly reflected Brahms's other poetic preoccupations at the time, namely the poetry of figures like Platen and Schack. It ends with the lines:

Various other poems have corrections pencilled in, although is not clear that all these are in Brahms's hand.

There is no marking on the poem Brahms set, which is titled simply ‘Sommernacht’.

At the heart ofYasser Abdel Hafez's novel The Book ofSafety is a mystery: what drove Mustafa Ismail,one of the main characters in the novel, to abandon his jobas a professor and engage in breaking into the homes ofwealthy people. Was he motivated by greed, revenge, somecombination thereof or something else? Various theories arepresented throughout the novel to explain his motivationswhich the reader will have to evaluate for himself.

This is a novelof ideas in the vein of Julio Cortazar'sHopscotch where most of the charactersare of the intellectual type and are trying to make sense oftheir own thoughts, desires, and the deteriorating situationin their city – Cairo. But despite the preponderance ofideas, the novel is not a mere vehicle for presenting ideasbut is populated by characters with distinct andrecognizable personalities.

Among thesepersonalities is Nabil Adli (the interrogator of MustafaIsmail) and Khaled Mamoun (the transcriber of theinterrogations). The relationships between these charactersas well as others who are less central to the novel arecomplex and hard to pin down. Many of these relations veerbetween polar opposites of desire and denial, obedience anddefiance, passion and rejection.

The ambiguityis not just in the relations between the characters butextends to attitudes towards history, nationalism, science,the supernatural and other topics. No subject seems to beoff limits. The novel, however, is less concerned withdescriptions of life in contemporary Cairo than indeconstructing it – a measure of how far the Egyptian novelhas come since the days of Naguib Mahfouz's realistnovels.

Perhaps as partof the postmodernist urge to avoid linearity, the charactersjump from one idea to another, one subject to another, neverlingering on one topic for too long, giving a disjointed andincomplete picture of whatever they are discussing andleaving it to the reader to try and complete the picture, ifhe or she, can.

The novel seemspreoccupied with reflections on the nature of art,specifically writing and photography and the boundariesbetween reality and fiction. It is full of puzzles,paradoxes, and mind-games. As part of this preoccupationwith aesthetics, even the places where the novel takes placehave eye-catching titles such as the Palace of Confessions,the Cafe of Lunatics, the Lotus House, and Sappho (abookstore).

‘Never look anAmerican in the Eye’, warned Ochendu, Okey Ndibe's uncle athis farewell family gathering in Nigeria before the youngOkey sets off to the United States to edit a new magazineAfrican Commentary. Although the unclehad never travelled outside of Nigeria, Okey took the adviceto heart and assiduously avoided eye contact with anyAmericans he met until that fateful day while standingwaiting for a bus in Amherst, MA. He looked up straight intothe eyes of a police officer waiting in his cruiser. Thelight changed and the officer drove off around the corner.The next minute Ndibe felt a hand on his shoulder, ‘Sir, doyou mind stepping out to the back of the bus stop?’ (72).Only 13 days in the country and he was mistaken for a bankrobber! With no identification on him, the officer askedthat he put his hands over his head while he was frisked.What was frisking Ndibe wondered? And what must the othersat the bus stop think was happening to him? The officer thendrove him back to his residence where he produced hispassport and was cleared of any suspicion. In retrospect,the writer was able to recreate the terror he felt, theembarrassment, and the mental agony as he thought about whatthe police were like and could do in Nigeria under similarcircumstances,

Okey Ndibe'smemories of the early clashes in etiquette are equallyamusing and penetrating. An American woman invited him tolunch so they could continue their discussion on her desireto trace her Nigerian father whom she had never met.Assuming this to be a case of free lunch, it turns into anembarrassing lesson in going Dutch:

This chapter focuses on what is arguably nineteenth-century Spain's greatest contribution to philosophical debate about wrongdoing, and to natural philosophy more broadly: the work of Dr Pedro Mata (1811–77), Chair of Legal Medicine in Madrid from 1843 to 1874. The essay centres on the intellectual implications of Mata's ways of thinking about the workings of the brain and what they tell us about our responsibility for our own actions. Mata's arguments amount to a series of bold claims. Rather than appealing to some governing, executive, conscious subject that would be accountable for our actions, Mata looks instead only to the multifarious interactions of different parts of the brain and body. He sees reasoning and decision-making as something involving much more than an intellectual process. He argues that study of our biology is sufficient to provide us with normative criteria for judging whether someone is responsible for their actions. He sets out an ethics within natural philosophy which combines universal applicability with an inevitable diversity in modes of thought. Mata's wide-ranging work and rich life, political as much as academic, have been studied in relation to the historical development of nineteenth-century Spanish society and culture. He figures in monographs on medical philosophers, for example (Carreras y Artau 1952 was a seminal study). His works have been usefully summarized in their immediate context, for instance in María Nieves López Fernández's account of his views on psychology (1993). Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García have made striking use of his work and influence in explicating how Spanish medical science understood sexual identity and related legal issues during the century (2009: 89–96). The emphasis of this present essay lies elsewhere: in exploring Mata's ideas in relation to ongoing debates, putting them into play with more recent philosophers. Above all, I seek to draw out here what specifically makes Mata's thought a compelling contribution to natural philosophy and to our understanding of moral and legal responsibility. At the heart of all this is Mata's understanding of states and functions of the brain.

Mata was a hugely influential individual in the development of thinking about wrongdoing and criminal responsibility in the Spain of his time. He founded his university's curriculum in legal medicine, and authored a standard Spanish textbook on medicine in law which ran to six editions by 1903, updated by other authors.

This book is the first large-scale study of the medieval funerary monuments of south Wales, an area blessed with an eclectic, but largely unknown, monumental heritage. Ranging from plain and decorated cross slabs at one end of the design scale to richly carved effigial monuments on canopied tomb-chests at the other, there is plenty to repay the attentions of the historian. As a group, the monuments closely reflect the turbulent history of the southern March of Wales, its close links to the West Country and its differences from the ‘native Wales’ of the north-west. As individuals, they offer fascinating insights into the spiritual and secular concerns of some of the leading families of the southern March, many of whom we otherwise know little about. Church Monuments in South Wales offers a much-needed Celtic contribution to the growing corpus of literature on the monumental culture of late-medieval Europe, which, for the British Isles, has been dominated hitherto by English studies. Recent research, most notably in Nigel Saul's study of the Cobham brasses and his survey of medieval English monuments, as well as in the scholarly journal Church Monuments, has demonstrated that the study of funerary sculpture is a multi-disciplinary subject enabling a view of the spiritual, social, political and cultural lives of the late-medieval gentry and aristocracy which can rarely be achieved through documentary evidence alone.

In the last few decades a paradigm has been established for the history of the stylistic development, production and patronage of the funerary monument up to the Reformation. However, Church Monuments in South Wales shows that in many ways the story of this unique part of the British Isles is substantially different to that of the better-studied English regions, such as East Anglia, the Midlands and Yorkshire, and is therefore a timely reminder that our understanding of British monumental culture as a whole is still skewed towards the richer and better-populated areas – a shortcoming which this book aims to address. Church Monuments in South Wales provides a comprehensive illustration and explanation of the monumental culture of this region at a time of great social change. It focuses heavily on the social groups who commissioned and were commemorated by funerary monuments, and how their changing fortunes, tastes and pre-occupations moulded the distinctive attributes of that culture as an organic product of its time and place.

Egypt, an independent Islamic sultanate, had been ruled from 1250 CE up until the time of the Ottoman conquest of 1517 by the Mamluks, a military caste that had arisen from the ranks of central Asian slave soldiers. Despite possession of a coastline bounding two sides of the eastern Mediterranean and stretching approximately 900 miles, the Mamluks had seen little value in the creation of a permanent navy. Instead, they had relied upon the assembly of naval fleets on an ad hoc basis, these designed to meet a need of the moment, galleys constructed for an invasion of Cyprus in the 1420s and a further fleet for a series of plundering raids in the 1440s. The adoption of sail or, perhaps, more correctly, a heavier reliance on sail over oar, came about during the opening years of the sixteenth century when, once again, a fleet was created to meet the demand of the moment, that of attempting to counter a Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean.

It was towards the end of May 1498 that Vasco da Gama hove to off Calicut (Kozhikode), having confirmed that a sea route existed between Europe and the Indian sub-continent. It was a voyage made possible through the use of square-rigged carracks of approximately 90 tons and a smaller lateen-rigged caravel, vessels which, at that time, were in the forefront of a technology unwitnessed in the Islamic world. These vessels were ideal for the carriage of ordnance, the carracks having a high stern and forecastle that could serve as platforms for six small guns, with eight larger cannons positioned on the lower quarterdeck. Financed by King Manuel I of Portugal (1495–1521), the aim of the expedition was to gain entry into the profitable spice trade, this previously monopolised by Venetian merchants using the land route between the Mediterranean and Red Sea.

The aim of this essay is to analyse the concept of distortion in relation to the transmission of textual objects through the creation of facsimiles. The general claim of the essay is that, paradoxically, the process of distortion is itself an essential means to get rid of distortion; this concept will become clearer as we explain the different kinds of distortion that we encounter in the process of producing a facsimile edition of a medieval manuscript. Each type of distortion comes from a specific stage of the facsimile-making process.

As we retrace the process from start to finish, the four main stages of production will be described; namely, the photo-setting, pre-press, printing and binding stages. Each stage will be discussed in relation to the type of alteration it deals with or causes. With reference to practical examples, it will be argued that distortion can be either positive or negative depending on context, use and aim. A sequence of manuscripts will be taken into consideration to further demonstrate how distortion plays a main role in the art of facsimile making.

Starting from the definition of perception as the means by which we determine alteration, there will be a discussion of how the use of different colour systems can lead to different outcomes, in terms of perception and distortion. This discussion will take place in the context of the pre-press and printing stages. The latter will allow us to talk about how perception is fundamental in the creation of a facsimile; although based on science and technology, it can be safely stated that the process of facsimile making is far from being an exact science and it involves technical skills, art and craftsmanship in almost equal measure. For example, the process of colour proofing is a testament to such abilities and it relates to the concept of distortion, for its purpose lies in limiting distortion to create a printed facsimile as close as possible to the original document.

One last aspect of distortion – the ‘commercial’ or exogenous – will also be evaluated. With this terminology we are indicating nothing less than the alteration of facsimiles to the point where they can no longer be considered as such.

‘Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer’ Op. 105 no. 2 (comp. Aug. 1886, publ. Oct. 1888)

ACCORDING TO Kalbeck, ‘Immer leiser’ was recommended to Brahms by Hanslick. He recalled:

At the time of writing Engida is the most popular play in production among some fourteen shows on offer each week in the state theatres of Addis Ababa. It is also one of two plays written and directed by Manyazewal Endeshaw (from here on in, Manyazewal in keeping with Ethiopian usage where the first name is the given name and the second is the father's first name) currently being performed in the Ethiopian capital, which is, with the possible exceptions of Cape Town or Johannesburg, the most consistently prolific location for the production of professional live theatre on the African continent. As with all plays put on in these theatres it was written and performed in Amharic, the language of the Amhara people who make up just over a quarter of the Ethiopian population, who ruled the Ethiopian Empire for hundreds of years before it was overthrown in 1974, and whose tongue has become the language of commerce, state and culture.

Manyazewal was born into urban poverty in 1960 in Addis Ababa. His father was uneducated and his mother disabled, and Manyazewal rose through the hugely over-crowded public school system to gain a place at Addis Ababa University as one of the first students of Theatre Studies in 1977. He also grew up during a hugely politically traumatic time period.

In 1974 the ancient Ethiopian Empire and its ancient monarch, Haile Selassie, were overthrown by a military junta, the Derg that, in the process of establishing its dictatorial authority, imposed a reign of terror over the people, particularly in the capital. Like many of his contemporaries the young Manyazewal was involved in opposition socialist politics. As he recalled: ‘Most of us were members of different opposition political parties. There were many types of brutality. You could lose your life or be imprisoned because of a small incident, and you could be forgotten in a prison. It was a dark atmosphere, and the hope of survival was meagre.’ Manyazewal himself sees his attraction to absurdism as originating in the world of what came to be known as The Red Terror:

After passing through such experiences, I never thought that people would start to live properly and plan the future.

Embarking on the compilation of a universal history, the Polychronicon, sometime shortly after 1327, Ranulph Higden opened the work with some consideration of the reasons for reading about history: ‘In historico namque contextu chronographorum nobis diligentia delegato relucet clarius norma morum’ (in John Trevisa's later fourteenth- century English translation, ‘in þe makynge and bookes of stories, þat is to vs i-sent and byqueþe by grete besynesse of þe writers of cronicles, blaseþ and schyneþ clerliche þe ri3t rule of þewes’). In other words, through reading accounts of past history we can learn how to live properly (‘þe ri3t rule of þewes’). Some paragraphs further on Higden returned to the desirability of cultivating learning that would equip people to understand history:

To fully comprehend what you read, he suggests, you need not just a properly informed understanding of history, but to know something about places and cultural difference (‘dyuerste [sic] of liuynge’) too. For these reasons Higden began the Polychronicon with a description of the known world, which takes up the first book, calling this section of the work a ‘mappa mundi’, a term sometimes used by later readers of the whole of the Polychronicon. While Higden advanced ethically aspirational reasons for learning about the world, other late medieval authorities drew attention to the more practical advantages such knowledge might confer. A very short English account of world geography, surviving in its earliest form in a printed edition from c.1502, was to be recommended to sixteenth-century readers as ‘Uery necessary for all Marchauntes and Maryners And for all such as wyll labour & traueyle in the countres of the worlde’: knowledge of the world around you helps you to get your work done and make some money.