OLD ENGLISH POETRY is currently undergoing something of a renaissance in contemporary culture. Whereas several decades ago only a minority of nevertheless important and influential twentieth-century poets had taken a direct interest in Old English verse in their own work, so far the twenty-first century has seen a far larger number of poets turning to Old English at least occasionally in their writing, to the point (unimaginable during the 1960s, 70s or 80s), where Old English is becoming part of mainstream practice in contemporary poetics. This chapter will survey and close read some of the poems of this ‘New Old English’ for the first time, and in doing so will offer several observations about the differences between twentieth- and twenty-first-century practice. While a primary focus of this chapter is therefore on contemporary literature, I will also seek to advance arguments about the nature of Old English poetry itself, arguments which I intend to be provocative.

Although some of the poets considered here translate, either partially or wholly, examples of Old English poems, many cannot be said to ‘translate’ Old English in the line-by-line, poem-for-poem sense in which that word is most commonly used. Instead, as we will see shortly, contemporary poets often move ideas from, or even ideas about, Old English poetry, taken from a select group of source texts, into their own work. In this chapter then, I am interested in ‘translation’ in its broadest etymological sense (a bringing or carrying over) and in the translation not only of individual poems, but also of a whole body of poetry, a set of texts: the wholesale translatio of Old English poetry from the first millennium CE into the third. That being the case, it is necessary to begin by delimiting that set of texts, and that in turn begs the seemingly stupid question: what do we mean by ‘Old English poetry’? It is indeed an ingenuous question, but ingenuousness can often expose unquestioned assumptions, and this particular question is not asked often enough, especially as both scholarship and (more arguably) practising writers are changing the kinds of answers that might be given to this inquiry. After all, we cannot sensibly discuss the translation of ‘Old English poetry’ until we know what we mean by that term.

The Index of Middle English Prose project was launched at a conference in Cambridge in 1978 on the initiative of A. S. G. Edwards and Derek Brewer. From its inception, the aim of those involved was a publication analogous to Carleton Brown and Rossell H. Robbins's Index of Middle English Verse. But when Brown and Robbins published their seminal volume, more than three decades of manuscript study and indexing lay behind it; the editors, whatever the limitations of their product, had a hands-on knowledge of the materials they presented. At the time when a comparable tool to present Middle English prose was conceived, such work had scarcely begun in this area.

Hence, a number of scholars, working independently, undertook to identify relevant materials on a collection basis. The results of these investigations, a listing of all Middle English prose items uncovered after careful searching, were to be presented in a sequence of stand-alone volumes (or ‘handlists’) published by Boydell & Brewer. The first appeared in 1984, and the present volume is the 23rd in the series. The main body of text in each volume identifies and contextualises, manuscript by manuscript, the Middle English prose material found in a given collection or collections. At the back of the volume are indexes derived from these descriptions, and it is those indexes which will form the basis of the final Index of Middle English Prose.

The IMEP is concerned with material composed between c. 1200 and c. 1500. For the terminus a quo this means as a general rule that if a manuscript is not included in N. R. Ker's Catalogue of MSS Containing Anglo-Saxon, it is considered to be Middle English. In addition we aim to include all later transcriptions of Middle English texts produced before 1750.

There have been adjustments in detail over the years, but the handlists now follow an established format. Each volume contains an introduction with a general account of the history, development and scale of the particular collection or collections described. This is followed by a summary list of the Middle English prose contents of the volume.

The relevant materials discovered in the manuscripts are presented in the order of the shelfmarks of the collection described. Each entry begins with references to published descriptions of the manuscript in question. The Middle English prose items in the manuscript are then numbered and presented in sequential order.

It is a truism that the medieval Icelandic saga avoids emotive or subjective positioning, preferring an objective narrative style that favours subtle situational or behavioural hints over explicit verbalisation or gestural behaviour when it comes to emotions. Yet there is ample evidence that beneath the apparently calm surface of many saga characters there is an abundance of passion and emotional turbulence. The deceptively laconic reactions and lack of verbalisation of internal emotional states or feelings are not due to a lack of literary means of displaying emotion – as is evident from emotive portrayals in other Old Norse literary genres – or a fundamental impassiveness of saga characters. Rather, such passages suggest an emotive script that favours somatic indicators over verbal expressions and indicates a valuation of reticence modulated into action over emotive expressiveness.

This volume considers the representation of emotion in Old Norse literature as a means of exploring the modes of emotive staging and the potentially associated generic, gendered, linguistic or cultural parameters. It is argued that the literary heritage of Iceland presents multiple different literary identities and that these literary identities in turn exhibit a complex system of emotive scripts (defined in chapter 1) that inform their generic borders and their signifying potential. It considers the transformations of the intrinsic emotive code of the continental romance once refashioned into Norse as well as the reformulation of the generic (and signifying) functionality of romance as an indigenous genre in the fourteenth century. Moreover, it considers the ambivalence of emotive scripting evident in the borders between prose and poetic language, and in the articulation of gendered behavioural codes. The concept of voice provides one of the theoretical tools utilised to tease out instances of emotive expressivity. Voice is theorised as a critical concept in chapter 3, but the tension between emotive vocalisation and reticence motivates to a certain extent the discussion throughout. The theoretical framework is intended to articulate and illustrate the literary staging of emotive interiority in Old Norse literature.

The volume spans a wide array of Old Norse materials – from translated romances through Eddic poetry and Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders) to indigenous romance.

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, writing in 1878, had to wait. It would be seven more years before the first German history of classical chamber music was published: Ludwig Nohl's Die geschichtliche Entwickelung der Kammermusik und ihre Bedeutung für den Musiker (‘The Historical Development of Chamber Music and its Meaning for the Musician’). Even then, Nohl's history served to cement the trend that Riehl had observed, of elevating canonical composers to the exclusion of others. Nohl's book, which focuses mainly on Beethoven's string quartets, helped to set the tone for the scholarly treatment of classical chamber music's history to the present day.

This book may represent a partial fulfilment of Riehl's wish, although it is more broadly and more critically conceived than he would probably have imagined it. And it does not see the ‘other’ composers as necessarily having merely ‘connecting and mediating’ roles. This study of the Viennese culture of string quartets in Beethoven's era offers new insights into neglected composers and repertoire, understudied private music-making, and a social milieu that is far more complex than scholars of music have usually recognised. The period in question, during and immediately after the Napoleonic wars, was a crucial time of social and musical change: previously ‘private’ music started to be performed publicly and published, but private and semi-private music-making remained vital. The book offers critical perspectives on three paradigms still found in modern-day scholarship, which have since the nineteenth century skewed the understanding of this repertoire: (i) a near-exclusive focus on the canonical composers, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; (ii) a tendency to neglect other contemporary composers’ chamber music, except for limited attention to their string quartets, or to measure them against narrow or anachronistic aesthetic ideals; and (iii) a perception of works of instrumental chamber music as ‘autonomous’, cut off from social situations and meanings.

Fifty years ago in Germany, there were three groups of quartet friends. The first of these played Haydn and Mozart, plus Boccherini, Pleyel, Gyrowetz, Neubauer, Kozeluch, Dittersdorf … From Krommer they took at most the early works into their programme; Beethoven lay far from them … The second group played the quartets of Beethoven next to Mozart and Haydn … but they did not usually go further than Op. 74 … To these main girders of their programme were then added: Krommer, Peter Hänsel, Fesca (etc.) … There came yet a third group of quartet friends … this third group placed and places Beethoven's quartets high above those of Haydn and Mozart …

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl left an illuminating account of German chamber music culture around the time of Beethoven's death. He characterised three groups of ‘quartet friends’: amateur performers, who would also be the primary listeners; more advanced amateur performers, virtuosi, and their audiences; and connoisseur listeners, advanced performers, and virtuosi. This chapter investigates a period in Viennese quartet culture ten to twenty years later than that covered in Chapter 2, considering how composers addressed ‘quartet friends’ in Vienna in the 1810s and 1820s. I will discuss each of Riehl's three groups in turn, under the headings ‘sociability’, ‘showmanship’, and ‘study’, which signify their distinguishing aspects.

Riehl also observed how the culture of chamber music had changed during and after the period central to this book. He noted that as private quartet soirées gave way to semi-private house concerts, and as public concerts became established, the repertoire of string quartets performed became ever narrower. Eventually the quartets of Krommer, Hänsel, Fesca, and other once popular composers disappeared from the repertoire. The third group of connoisseur quartet friends, he observed, were at first a very small minority, but by his day they had become powerfully influential, a phenomenon explored at the end of Chapter 8.

A new generation of string quartet composers had risen to prominence by the 1810s and 1820s, not all of them Viennese. I attend particularly to the works of three of the composers Riehl considers, who are little known today – Krommer, Hänsel, and Fesca, with mention of Eybler, Onslow, and Mayseder – rather than to the usual triumvirate, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

IN the second quarter of the thirteenth century groups of Tuscan hermits were forming, a generation after St Francis’ band of poor itinerant preachers and St Dominic's group of anti-heretical preachers. Agreeing to follow the rule of St Augustine, the hermits came together and became a new mendicant order of friars in 1256, the Order of Augustinian Hermits. With this background, the interests and the inclinations of the brothers faced in different directions: the hermit tradition demanded isolation and favoured rural settings; the newer mendicant movement emphasised preaching and therefore lived more happily in towns. The hermits had reached England before their formal unification, probably establishing their first English house on the edge of the small Suffolk wool town of Clare by 1249. From this base the order spread to numerous English towns in the second half of the century, and the order and its houses became known as the Augustinian or Austin friars.

The Augustinian friars probably established their London house in the 1260s, slightly later than the date of 1253 given by the Tudor historian John Stow. Significantly, the Augustine friars – unlike the other mendicant orders – are not included in a list of recipients of royal alms given in Lent 1260. The first definite mention of this order of friars in London comes in 1271. Stow names Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and Essex, as the founder of the friary and de Bohun also made substantial gifts of land to other religious houses in England and Wales. Perhaps he founded the London house in or soon after 1265 when he was the royalist keeper of the city of London, guarding against a potential attack by Simon de Montfort (another friary founder!) and the barons.

The friary housed about sixty friars by the end of the thirteenth century. Although fluctuating and temporarily declining as a result of the Black Death, the numbers were broadly maintained throughout the fourteenth century but then fell in the fifteenth century. The friary was probably reasonably financially stable, having a rental income of nearly £60 by the sixteenth century, and receiving good support in the bequests given by Londoners in their wills.

The Red Sonnet

In the first twenty years of her life, Parra witnessed a torrent of events that were to have a devastating effect on Chilean history. Following the massacre of San Gregorio (in 1921), the Communist Party, which Parra was part of for a short time in 1946, was formed. The government of Arturo Alessandri Palma, a conservative with reformist pretensions, was overthrown by the armed forces, reinstated and then expelled again within less than a year, to be replaced with a military dictatorship headed by Coronel Carlos Ibáñez del Campo. Ibáñez would also be overthrown, in turn, by another major reversal on the part of the Chilean Navy under the reactionary direction of its officers. He would have time, however, to hand the nation's copper over to the North Americans, the Telecoms Company to the ITT Corporation and to unleash a violent repression of trade unions that triggered masses of barbaric killings, imprisonments and riots. From her family home Violeta would experience first-hand, as we all did, the style of a right-wing government concealed by the military cloak.

In 1929 the saltpetre crisis hit. It plunged the country into chaos, exacerbating social polarisation and throwing a hungry mass of workers, their wives and children on to the streets of Chile. This precipitated two things: the fall of Ibáñez and the ‘squad revolution’, a naval mutiny that resulted in the imprisonment of all the officers. The mutiny brought fifteen thousand armed men and twenty-three naval units under its control and sought to repeat the experience of the battleship Potemkin in Chile. The shake-up in the consciousness of the country was alarming: the movement failed, however, because the pusillanimity of the existing proletarian political parties left it without support, but it was enough to stir new undercurrents in the depths of society. Significantly, the Chilean government asked the North Americans for direct armed intervention to neutralise the crisis and the power vacuum. Another of the consequences of the political upheaval was the founding of the Socialist Party shortly after the military coup of Marmaduke Grove and his short ‘Socialist Republic’ of twelve days. Arturo Alessandri Palma (known as ‘the Lion’) then returned to government and, therefore, the repression of the trade union movement continued.

On 16 September 1903 Colonel T. Walter Harding unveiled a statue of the medieval English chivalric hero, Edward the Black Prince, in Leeds City Square before a crowd of thousands (see Figure 1). Harding, a former Lord Mayor and prominent Leeds industrialist, had commissioned the statue in 1894 as a gift in celebration of Leeds gaining city status the previous year. Harding had entertained the possibility of other heroic figures; contenders included the medieval warrior king, Henry v, the political reformer, Simon de Montfort, and the Protestant Tudor queen, Elizabeth i. Instead, he chose the Black Prince because of his unique combination of ‘high chivalry and public service’. Harding's desire to place a statue in Leeds of an historical figure to engender civic pride was hardly original. Indeed, in 1901, the city of Winchester had erected a statue of its own hero, the Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred the Great. On the day of the Leeds ceremony, the Leeds and Yorkshire Mercury reminded readers of Edward's historical significance as a defender of the English people and a successful warrior. Postcards circulated the image of a fully armed Edward on horseback atop a pedestal (see Figure 2). A souvenir pamphlet informed readers about the special place occupied by the late Middle Ages in the history of their nation as the zenith of chivalry and a time of constitutional progress.

Edward of Woodstock, prince of Wales, prince of Aquitaine, earl of Chester and duke of Cornwall as he was known in the fourteenth century was born on 15 June 1330. He was not known by his more colourful sobriquet the Black Prince until the sixteenth century. During his lifetime, the prince was a celebrated warrior whose victories at Crécy, Poitiers and Nájera garnered him fame across Europe. At sixteen, the young prince ‘won his spurs’ at the battle of Crécy in 1346, fighting in the army of his father, Edward iii, against the French.

In 1801, the year in which Beethoven published his first set of string quartets, Op. 18, the Viennese correspondent of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported: ‘Among composers most treasured and often played by the cognoscenti, the highest honours are rightfully accorded to Haydn.’ For composers of chamber music in Vienna around 1800, Haydn's name loomed large. This can be seen in the many compositions dedicated to Haydn or modelled more or less overtly on his chamber music (Beethoven's Op. 74, for instance), and in the large number of reprints of his works. In 1805, for example, the prominent Viennese publishing house Artaria issued Haydn's six ‘Tost’ Quartets Opp. 54 and 55 (first published 1789–90). The following year the quartets Op. 74 and Op. 77 (first published in 1796 and 1802) were reprinted. In 1807, the six string quartets that Mozart dedicated to Haydn were re-issued by Artaria, twenty-two years after their first publication. These ‘Haydn’ Quartets were especially popular, attesting to the posthumous status of Mozart as well as Haydn's celebrity. In 1803 another important Viennese publisher, Traeg, also re-issued Mozart's ‘Haydn’ Quartets.

This chapter considers the late phase in Haydn's career as a chamber music composer, and Beethoven's early career in ‘Haydn's Vienna’. I then take several career snapshots, comparing three other key composers of chamber music working in this ‘city of Haydn’ around 1800 who are little discussed today: Paul Wranitzky, Forster, and Gyrowetz. Rather than considering the influence of Haydn and Beethoven on their careers, as would befit a ‘grand narrative’ of chamber music's history, I focus on a significant source of inspiration for all these composers, Haydn and Beethoven included: theatre.

Around 1800, the theatre was central to Viennese culture, for musical, social, and political reasons. It provided entertainment and a congenial site for social interaction, and also a relatively safe place for representing and working out social problems and ideals. In turn, chamber music – like a miniature, non-verbal, semi-private theatre – offered an interactive, flexible, and potentially even safer medium in which to express and renegotiate social and aesthetic ideas. Such a medium was worthy of careful cultivation in the social upheaval of the Napoleonic era, and then in a post-Congress Vienna subject to stringent censorship.

The rise of Bristol to a position of commercial prominence was very much bound up with the transatlantic economy, so that any long-term transformations to that economy inevitably affected its status. The war with America and the eventual declaration of independence wrought significant changes in Bristol's relationship with the North American colonies; by extension it also altered the dynamic of its trade with the West Indies. In the decade after the Seven Years’ War Bristol's American trade grew spectacularly. From September 1763 until September 1764, eighty-one ships entered Bristol from British North America, carrying 6798 tons of merchandise; the corresponding figures for 1774–75 were 175 ships and 20,561 tons, a three-fold increase in tonnage and two-fold in ships. In 1775, the first year of the war, the number of ships entering Bristol from America fell to 125; in 1780 it was just 1. The corresponding figures for ships clearing Bristol for North America were 57 and 9. Vessels entering Bristol from the West Indies also showed a decline, from 85 to 66 over the same period, so that the overall volume of incoming transatlantic trade was seriously affected by war. According to Ken Morgan's figures, it fell from an average of 21,202 tons in 1772–73 to 12,326 tons in 1778–80, the lowest level of trade since the War of Austrian Succession in the 1740s.

The result was lay-offs and higher poor rates. Without reciprocal trading, local businesses came under attack. Some serge and stuff-manufacturing firms collapsed; tobacco-pipe making for the American market disappeared. With a credit crisis in America and the reneging of many debts by American merchants and planters, bankruptcies also took their toll. There were over five hundred during the course of the war, at a rate three times as high as Liverpool. These included a number of leading Bristolians: Sir James Laroche, the master of the Merchant Venturers in 1782 and MP for Bodmin in Cornwall, 1768–80; the Farr brothers, prominent Presbyterian merchants from the Lewin's Mead chapel, one of whom (Thomas) was the mayor in 1775 while his brother (Paul) was the master of the Merchant Venturers.

It is possible to exaggerate the depth of the economic crisis, at least at the top of the merchant hierarchy.