Contractual agreements and female economic security

IN the analysis of property and legislation, we found that the economic balance within families did not always favour women. Both law and custom tended to give priority to males and place decision-making in the hands of fathers. Overall, the process of modernisation only shifted the power from male family members to husbands. Within this crossfire of male interests lay, however, the economic survival of women, when no longer in the hands of male relatives connected by birth or marriage. While contracts stipulating the transfer of economic assets have had a place in European history for centuries, there would seem to have been a link between the increasing property control of husbands, premarital contracts and settlements for widows. The marriage contract was used extensively to safeguard widowhood, but economic security was also achieved in other ways, such as de jure (if not de facto) divisions of property. Property transfer contracts with retirement clauses have sometimes been interpreted as if extracting assets and setting up a new household would be the only true measure of economic authority for a widow. However, studies of living arrangements and the contracts themselves often indicate family interaction.

When examining taxation records and inventories, we were alerted to the fact that these do not reveal the property held by widows for life. Such assets virtually disappeared when the widow died and would, therefore, not be available for scrutiny, as would any pension a widow enjoyed. These provisions are to be found in contracts of various type, primarily marriage contracts, retirement contracts and wills. We intend to demonstrate that the standard of living of a considerable number of women in the past was secured in widowhood through the usufruct of family property.

The retirement contract has often been associated with certain parts of rural central Europe, particularly German-speaking areas, and with the Nordic countries. It is, indeed, true that these areas form the heartland of this custom; but one should, however, remember that similar arrangements can be found elsewhere in Europe, for example in France, Spain and Britain, in marriage contracts or in wills.

From late autumn 1811, more by accident than intent, the story divides broadly into three threads: Cockerell's travels in Asia Minor, Sicily, Albania and Italy; the excavations by Haller and others at Bassae; and the intricate history of the Aegina sale, with its threads running from Zante to Athens, Malta, Munich and London.

On November 30, 1811, Cockerell, Foster, Douglas and North, all dressed as Turks, landed at Candia (now Heraclion) in Crete. All but North, who evidently did not want to make the effort, spent the next few days in an expedition to Mount Ida, and after paying formal visits to the Pasha and the Archbishop, set out again for what was then thought to be the Labyrinth, a complex, largely man-made cave system in a steep hill side overlooking the plain of Messara. They reached Chios, where North, frightened by the horrors of sailing, decided to abandon the Egyptian scheme, so Cockerell and Foster, bitterly disappointed, agreed to make a tour of the coast of Asia Minor and its Greek cities. They sailed together for Smyrna, arriving finally after eight terrible days riding out a violent storm.

Once safe in Smyrna, they stayed for a while to recover, and, with Thomas Burgon, paid a visit to Bodrum, spending a few days among the ruined temples, without apparently knowing (or at any rate mentioning) that this was the site of the famous Mausoleum. When they returned to Smyrna, they found that HM Frigate Frederiksteen had arrived, with her Captain, Francis Beaufort, an accomplished antiquarian, employed in charting the neighbouring coastlands, a man in whom Cockerell found a kindred spirit. By now, Foster had fallen in love with a local woman, so on March 1, Cockerell set out alone for what he called his tour of the Seven Churches.

Cockerell's work on the antiquities of Asia Minor, while lacking the dramatic results achieved at Aegina and Bassae, and often hurried, forms a significant complement to what he did in Greece, giving his understanding greater breadth and depth. Among other things, it opened his eyes to the sheer size and scope of the Greek remains in the peninsula.

Grammar schools played an essential role in the education of clergy for the Established Church. A very large proportion of those sent to university had spent some part of their schooling at a grammar school, learning the Latin and Greek languages which formed the core of a ‘liberal’ education – and for some clergy, grammar schooling had not only introduced them to classical learning and created in them a desire for a ‘learned’ or literary occupation, but had also prepared them directly for the pulpit.

In this chapter, the role of such schools in the supply of non-graduate clergy is examined. Two aspects are considered: firstly, the advanced-level teaching in classics and divinity offered by specialist grammar schools, which fitted students to take orders directly without further tuition; secondly, those men who prepared for orders whilst employed as schoolmasters or assistants, some of whom received assistance with their studies from their employers. This basic division is sometimes blurred, since there were many students who were educated in those schools capable of preparing men directly for orders, who left at a younger age and supported themselves in teaching roles until they were old enough to take orders.

Advanced grammar schools and divinity schools: educating for orders

In the late eighteenth century, ordination-focused, tertiary education in schools was significant in two regions. In South Wales, the long-standing practice of preparing for orders at a school was gradually brought under the bishops’ oversight between the 1780s and 1820, so that specific schools were designated as suitable, syllabuses were provided, students were monitored and – at their most developed – financial assistance was given to students. In the far north-west of England, a fairly small region of Westmorland and its immediate bordering area also had a number of grammar schools which provided advanced education, whose students not only took orders in the local area but also found titles throughout the Northern Province, and sometimes beyond. Although the northern bishops took an interest in the schools, the relationship between schools and bishops remained much looser than in Wales.

The licensed grammar schools of St David's diocese

In the middle of the eighteenth century, most clergy prepared for orders with a good classical education at either an endowed or private grammar school, or at a dissenter-led academy open to pupils of all denominations.

Helene Rosen was born in 1868. Known to all as Jelka, she was a painter from a Schleswig-Holstein family with distinguished figures in music and diplomacy. After this dinner, the hostess implored Jelka to sing for the company:

Delius brought his Seven Songs from the Norwegian and played for her one of the songs that Grieg had also set, probably ‘Twilight Fancies’, and informed Jelka that he considered his version the superior one. If it was through Grieg's music they had made their introductions, it was an author who bound them together: ‘At that time I was full of enthusiasm for Nietzsche's Zarathustra’, she related, ‘and I was greatly surprised when this young Englishman said he knew and loved Zarathustra’.

Jelka frequently entertained Delius at her studio and as winter turned to spring in Paris she enjoyed ‘a happy, wonderful time’. They would sometimes take the train out from the city and go for long walks in the countryside. After submitting her latest canvas to the spring Salon des Indépendants, Jelka indulged herself with a few days of holiday in the village of Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau. Delius arranged to be visiting at the same time the neighbouring village of Bourron, where his friend Charles F.

IN 1934, Newman published a sensational biography of Franz Liszt. For all intents and purposes it was an exercise in character assassination, even though Newman refused to admit it. During the 1910s and 1920s Newman had written favourably on Liszt, but by the 1930s his position had changed completely. The book's critical reception was devastating and caused Newman a crisis in confidence: he temporarily abandoned volume 2 of the Life of Richard Wagner and never wrote another musical biography. Although The Man Liszt remains a bête noir of Liszt literature, an overview of its genesis, intent and reception illustrates the ethics, scope and financial imperatives of musical biography in the 1930s. It also demonstrates the low esteem in which psychobiography was held by scholars, especially musicologists, in the 1930s and 1940s.

Genesis of The Man Liszt

Newman's first article on Liszt, ‘A Study of Liszt’, published in 1900, gives no hint of the author's grievances with the composer. Newman wrote favourably of Liszt's ‘thoroughly musical imagination’, his ‘stupendous charity and generosity’ and ‘unparalleled’ musicianship. Similarly, in an article in the Nation of 28 October 1911, Newman wrote appreciatively of Liszt as man and musician, arguing that ignorance and neglect of his music stood in the way of a sound knowledge of the composer in England, though Newman was not convinced of Liszt's dexterity with musical form. However, in a separate series of articles published in the Musical Times in late 1911, Newman was mildly critical of Liszt. Called simply ‘Franz Liszt’, the articles were written to mark the centenary of Liszt's birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the German Musical Association. The first article comprised a short biographical sketch of Liszt and an analysis of some of the composer's early songs. The second article dealt with Liszt's influence on later composers such as Wagner and Strauss, while the third article concentrated on issues concerning aesthetics and form. Although each article was severely critical of some of Liszt's works, Newman nevertheless gave high praise to some of Liszt's other compositions, which are discussed below. Newman's dislike of Liszt's personality is not immediately apparent in these articles: that would come later.

BALZAC AND HIS INFLUENCE represent Romantic rapport in two planes. First of all, he is a recipient and transmuting figure of Romantic norms moving into late nineteenth-century realism: that is, his oeuvre tends to move away from the bizarre frenzy and pretentiousness of earlier Romanticism while maintaining the opposition to neat rationalism and anti-individualism characteristic of the early movement (Brooks 1976 and Smoot 2008) and, second, his work has a resonance across disciplines, in this case, between literature and cinema. The latter relationship yields an especially interesting line of inquiry because filmmakers in Europe and Hollywood from the silent era to the present have long relied on Balzac as a source of cinematographic inspiration. According to Kevin J. Hayes, “Among numerous other important writers, Balzac offered early filmmakers potential narratives that could elevate the motion picture above the level of cheap amusement parlors and attract middle-class audiences to the theaters” (1). In the early days when film was a novelty and not yet considered a legitimate art form, filmmakers chose to adapt widely respected classics—whether novels, short stories, or plays—by renowned authors in order to heighten the prestige of film. Cinema could then become a conduit for the dissemination of literary and highbrow culture and detach itself from its humble origins as cheap carnival and exhibitiontent entertainment. Although Balzac was immensely popular as a source for film adaptation, most of these adaptations during the silent era were whitewashed versions of Balzac's original works, the realism, tragic endings, and deviant behavior having been greatly altered in order to comply with early twentieth-century moral norms. Morally ambiguous plots and deviant behavior were often reduced to conventional stereotypes (14). Hollywood in particular had a mania for happy endings, thus many American adaptations of Balzac's works completely eliminated the realism and social criticism inherent in his message. These films tended to stress the melodramatic aspects of Balzac's works, his complicated and suspenseful plots, the psychological dynamism of his passion-driven characters, his lengthy descriptions that conform so well to costume dramas, and his broad range of characters drawn from every level of society.