NEWMAN'S early reading and book-buying habits focused on musical history, literature, philosophy and fine arts. From a young age he developed a love of music, especially opera, and as a student at University College Liverpool in the 1880s, Newman immersed himself in studies of literature and languages. While living in Liverpool he encountered rationalism through his college lecturers as well as the speeches and literature by freethought radicals such as Charles Bradlaugh and John M. Robertson. The ways in which Newman's writings on music in particular reflect the rationalist agenda were complex, and they provided a critical framework that set Newman apart from most of his contemporaries. By the 1890s Newman had positioned himself as a key figure in an emerging new school of music criticism.

Childhood and Early Schooling

The only account of Newman's upbringing comes from his second wife, Vera:

Newman's parents were Anglican although the extent to which they practised their religion is unknown. He wrote little about his life except for a series of articles he labelled ‘Confessions’ in the early 1920s, from which a portrait of his youth can be discerned.

Newman attended St Saviour's School in Everton, then the Middle School of Liverpool, in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In 1885, aged seventeen, he entered University College Liverpool on a scholarship and left the following year, without matriculating. Formal institutional instruction was not Newman's only avenue of learning: he taught himself musical composition until about 1889, aged twenty-one, when his first articles were published. He was a voracious reader: in his early twenties he had acquired a good knowledge of literature, philosophy and biology, and a working knowledge of many languages including German, Russian, Greek, Swedish and Hebrew.

ON 3 September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany. As an imperial power, Britain, like France, Germany and Japan, expected to use the resources and ‘manpower’ of each colony and territory for the war effort, making the war truly global. As Ashley Jackson points out, the ‘[British] Empire and Commonwealth was the world's largest political, economic and military unit, and it went to war as one’. Millions of colonial and dominion troops fought and millions more produced uniforms, exported foodstuffs and military material, served as medical and nursing personnel and provided homes for child evacuees, servicemen and women stationed on their shores. Home fronts around the world were transformed and militarized for use by, and for, the imperial power. Civilians were conscripted as agricultural labourers, workers in munitions factories, shipbuilders and aircraft builders. They would work alongside military personnel. Henceforth, home fronts throughout the empire experienced increased policing, shortages of consumer goods and food rationing, underwent the pressures of Air Raid Precautions (ARP) and lived with curfews, censorship and curtailed travel.

As a scholarly topic of investigation, the British home front during the Second World War has received considerable attention, especially in areas documenting the experiences of women, children and refugees and the work of men and women codebreakers. As Linsey Robb argues in this volume, women's wartime work experience is largely celebrated but, at the same time, the masculinity of men in reserved occupations came under scrutiny, since the ideal masculine image was the man in uniform. This was particularly the case for the men of the Royal Air Force, whose image was immortalized in national memory after the Battle of Britain. Indeed, the Battle of Britain, the devastation of the British home front during the months of bombing and the way civilians and officials responded continue to be the subject of new studies. In this volume, Mark J. Crowley illustrates the ingenuity and technological innovations that allowed the Post Office to continue functioning and even to improve services during the bombing.

Section A: Absolute numbers of entrants to the diaconate

Contextualising recruitment needs

During the late Hanoverian period, England and Wales experienced an unprecedented change in social and economic environment, fuelled by dramatic population increase and major technological innovation in both the agricultural and manufacturing economies. Demographic growth was by no means evenly spread across the country: sparsely populated areas with a low density of parishes became major urban industrial centres in just a few decades, whilst some migrants left their birthplaces in such numbers that significant rural depopulation resulted. With the concomitant parochial pastoral challenges, the Church of England struggled to respond. Whilst the true extent of the overhaul needed by the Church in its administrative structures and financial foun-dations probably did not become clear to those in a position to bring about root-and-branch reforms until the end of this period, prelates, parliamentarians and parishioners were nevertheless active in searching for the causes of pastoral inefficiency, proposing remedies, devising legislation, implementing enactments and resourcing a whole host of measures. Although significant structural alterations to Church administration and modes of operation – part of what Thompson has classified as an ‘organisational revolution’ – followed the establishment of the Ecclesiastical Commission and thus belong to the 1830s and later, reform had its origin in the recognition of late Hanoverian churchmen that the way in which the Church went about its work could, and should, be better.

In the sixty years covered by this study, change was, to use Peter Virgin's term, gradualist. Kenneth Thompson summarised those actions which aimed to solve the Church's problems in this period as essentially a series of modest adjustments, acting through existing agencies, facilitated by legislative solu-tions. Gradual the reforms may have been – in some cases, ineffective and counter-productive – and with justice it may be said that concern for established interests prevented the bishops from exercising their regulative powers fully, and made all but the most radical shy away from proposing drastic reform; however, at the diocesan level, administrative machinery was being developed and more management data about a wide range of activities was being collected, and amongst the clergy, many were delivering ministries based on an enlarged pastoral vision to ever-expanding populations.

JEAN Sibelius once facetiously remarked that a monument had never been erected in honour of a music critic, implying that critics were irascible and unworthy hacks whose opinions were best ignored. Yet a monument—of sorts—was erected for Ernest Newman. It was not of the bricks and mortar variety, but of the literary kind, a clerihew:

Monuments, of course, are not always accurate representations of their subject. Rodin's controversial sculpture of Balzac, first displayed in 1898, is a case in point. Although Rodin believed the artwork accurately captured the writer's persona, the critics and public, expecting a true likeness of Balzac, were let down. The same is true for what this clerihew tells us about Newman. Its suggestion that Newman was preoccupied with Wagner is rather wide of the mark, as this book will show.

Although Newman's work was at times dominated by writings on Wagner, it was not his sole focus. His essays and books spanned a wide spectrum of national literatures (novels, poetry and plays) and biographies (or biographicalstyle books) on composers including Gluck, Elgar, Strauss, Wolf, Beethoven and Liszt. He wrote extensively on rationalism and evolutionary theory, the reception of Russian and English music, and a host of other literary, social and musical topics. Underpinning most of Newman's writings was a commitment to critical and historical method derived from British and European critics, historians and biographers, though such methods were not always faithfully applied.

This book explores the wide-ranging intellectual influences that affected Newman's life work as exemplified in a broad selection of essays and books that I think best represent his work as a music historian, critic and biographer. It is not a book about Newman the great Wagnerian (though his work on the composer occupies parts of chapters 3 and 7 and all of chapter 9). Nor is it a book that merely records his critical responses to particular composers on whom he wrote extensively, such as Berlioz. Rather, this critical biography is concerned with the motivations—intellectual, personal and economic— behind Newman's work. It examines the circumstances that gave rise to particular books and articles and the reasons for their creation. I show that a cast of European intellectual writers influenced Newman's work, although this influence is not always apparent.

Near the beginning of Goethe's autobiography Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, the narrator describes a series of enclosures that the child Goethe overlooks as he strolls along Frankfurt's city walls.

In this panoramic view from atop the ramparts, the child's entire visual field is replete with enclosed spaces. Frankfurt becomes a walled-in “small world” of endless, confined small worlds. The view is created through the topological operation of enclosure, which separates an inside compartment from the outside environment. Enclosures shape and thereby create space. In this passage, they create spaces that consist in their subjective experience: they ignite a curiosity in the child by making him aware of a space hidden from his immediate perception.

While widows and abandoned women are frequently found in conjunction in British poor-law records, and in studies of working-class families, the situation was slightly different in Scandinavia. Before the nineteenth century, we primarily find abandoned women in the turbulent times of the seventeenth century, when husbands who had been drafted into the army never returned home. One of the reasons was the extensive record-keeping of the Lutheran Church. Since the seventeenth century, a person in Finland and Sweden moving parish had to request a certificate from the clergy for introduction into the registration of the parish of destination. During the eighteenth century, the necessity to comply was repeatedly underlined, because of the need to determine which parish would ultimately be responsible for the poor-relief costs, an issue not dissimilar to the problems facing the authorities in Britain. By the nineteenth century, it was rare for people to move without a certificate. In addition to the name and origin of a person, the certificate also contained information about marital state, which made bigamy more difficult than, for example, in Britain. As the destination was registered, as well as the point of departure, a certain amount of control over the whereabouts of people could be exercised. Because of this system, errant husbands could be searched for as long as they stayed within the country. After 1812, a similar system was widely in operation in Norway. While people did manage to slip through the net, particularly in the seventeenth century, even some of these were eventually caught: the question was put to them as to why they had not asked for a divorce, as they had been living apart, in different countries, for many years, and wanted to attach themselves to new partner. Divorce had been available since the introduction of the Reformation in the Nordic countries and in the Protestant parts of Germany. In Sweden, as in other Lutheran states, the reasons for divorce were abandonment and infidelity. However, if the Church authorities were unwilling to grant a divorce, other causes could be put forward in an application to the king. Generally, incarceration or chronic contagious disease were seen as adequate reasons.

In 932 Juan and Paterna exchanged a vineyard that they owned in Turieno for another in Basieda, given to them by Bagaudano and Faquilona to complete the deal. Bagaudano and Faquilona's acquisition of a vineyard in Turieno comes as no surprise, and is indeed of a piece with many similar transactions completed by this ambitious couple. Rather more interesting though, is the story of how Bagaudano and Faquilona came to possess the vineyard in Basieda in the first place, which can be reconstructed thanks to the narrative content of the charter. Therein we are told that an individual named Toribio handed over the vineyard to Bagaudano and Faquilona in order to meet a judicial fine. Although it has been seen as such, this was no arbitrary seigneurial imposition: Toribio had hidden his brother – a thief – from justice, and Bagaudano and Faquilona received the fine that this crime was deemed to merit at court. Significantly, although Bagaudano and Faquilona held no public office or honorific title, the judicial procedure was framed very clearly within the context of standard public justice; a decision was reached because ‘the law and the truth’ were uncovered. But what sort of justice was this, and who decided what was to be paid as compensation, and to whom? Moreover, was this not more properly the business of the count?

This brief vignette brings us face to face with one of the central dilemmas of any study of tenth-century Christian Spain, namely, the role of authority figures and the frameworks within which they operated. This chapter will consider these matters afresh, examining how, in what ways, and by whom the Liébana was governed. It will also look at what it was that powerful people seem to have done in the Liébana, paying particular attention to what their political and social functions tell us about how wider society worked.

Public power

Public power is a term that causes consternation among early medievalists. This is because it is frequently used without clear definition and has held such a wide range of associations and meanings that it risks complicating rather than clarifying any understanding of medieval politics and society.

SINCE ALI AND NINO WAS WRITTEN in German and for a German audience attracted by exotic and oriental settings, Kurban Said's book became well known in Western Europe. It took a much longer time for the book to get its place within the Azerbaijani canon of literature. Due to the international success of Ali and Nino, the book's reputation expanded in the eyes of Azerbaijani readers so that for them the book is now increasingly seen as the country's gift to world literature. Although elements of the story are influenced by classical Azeri and Persian literature such as Nizami's Layla and Majnun, the book and its author differ from other Azerbaijani prose and writers.

By leaving Azerbaijan and his Jewish heritage behind, subsequently converting to Islam and migrating to Germany, Lev Nussimbaum, or Kurban Said, himself becomes a colorful figure with a self-invented fictional dimension. In this sense, Nussimbaum has more in common with other struggling cultural Grenzgänger —like Swiss writer Isabelle Eberhardt, the English authors Richard Francis Burton, T. E. Lawrence, Aleister Crowley, and the Greek-Armenian Georges I. Gurdjieff—than with traditional and contemporary Azerbaijani authors such as Səməd Vurğun, Afaq Məsud, Anar, Kamal Abdulla, Rafiq Taği, and Elçin.

In particular, Nussimbaum's contemporary, Səməd Vurğun, is considered an important twentieth-century Azerbaijani writer. Through his folk poetry, which was tolerated by the Soviets, Vurğun (1906–56) shaped a nationalist Azeri literary language. Several monuments, streets, and public places in Azerbaijan recall Vurğun's importance. In addition to his prose, poetry, and dramas, he was also known for his affiliation with the Academy of Science in Baku (Azərbaycan Milli Elmlər Akademiyası). Just as it is today, it was not unusual in his time for Azerbaijani writers of the establishment to fill vacancies within the state's cultural and scientific institutions. Like Səməd Vurğun, Anar (born 1938) also occupied important positions in the state writers’ organization in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. During the Communist reign, Anar was a typical representative of Socialist Realism. His most important work is Beşmərtəbəli evin altinci mərtəbəsi (The Sixth Floor of a House with Five Floors) from 1982.

IN her 1984 article ‘Women without men’, Olwen Hufton queried why women have persistently been viewed primarily as wives and household members, as additions to men and not individuals, in family history research. In 2001, the same question was repeated by Lynn Abrams.1 The tendency to discuss women as having been in need of the protection of a man and, therefore, assumed to have desired marriage and remarriage in the past, while not always explicitly stated, seems often to be implied in studies of demographic history.

There are two popular and widespread images of widowhood in the past: one is the young widow with many fatherless children, in need of assistance; the other is the old, lonely and poor widow, also in need of help. It is likely that these images originate in poor-relief records, but it is unclear how representative they are of the historical past. We have seen that the law and property systems protected a not insignificant part of widows from such a fate. We will discuss the demographic parameters underlying the structure of widowhood and the effects such parameters could have on access to family and the opportunities for collaboration from the point of presence of children.

How many widows were there, were they old or young, did they rush into remarriage or enjoy their freedom, were they burdened by large numbers of children or had the children been scooped up by infant mortality?

The Proportion of Widows – There's One In Every Street

It is difficult to find information about the number of widows, on a national level, in the pre-industrial period. Local studies, however, have revealed that thirteen percent of household heads and fifteen percent of the female population in seventeenth-century Britain were widows. In urban areas, like Southampton, as many as sixteen percent of all adult women were widowed. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German and French towns display a variation between eleven and fourteen percent. The situation was not very different in the countryside. Rural eighteenth-century French communities included twelve to fifteen percent widowed female household heads, and, for example in Austria, ten percent of the non-servant adult females were widowed.

Frederick Delius was born in Bradford in 1862.

Around 1800, Bradford was a rural market town deep in the rolling moorland landscape of western Yorkshire, and with a population of six thousand. Just a half century later, the industrial revolution had transformed the town beyond recognition. Industrialists wishing to invest in wool found there the conditions they sought: sandstone, an excellent building material; large deposits of iron ore and coal; and the soft water that was a prerequisite for scouring wool. By the middle of the century, Bradford was responsible for some two-thirds of Great Britain's wool production and was at the centre of much of the world's wool trade. A large part of the export trade was with Germany and inevitably many of the investors attracted by the town's industrial muscle were German – including Julius Delius. He moved from the textile centre of Bielefeld to Bradford c.1850, when he was twenty-eight years old. At that time the town's eighty textile factories gave work to a population that had risen to 180,000. Julius quickly expanded his export company, Delius & Co., Wool & Noil Merchants, and by 1871 could build new, modern warehouses and offices. He married Elise, also from Bielefeld, and together they had fourteen children. Child number four, the next eldest boy, was christened Fritz. (Only from 1902 would he adopt an English variant of the name, Frederick.)

The head of the family demanded an almost military discipline from his offspring. From an early age the sons were left in no doubt by Julius that they were expected to follow him into the family business. From the culture of his homeland, however, Julius also brought a deep love of music, and Delius recalled that his father ‘was a great concert-goer and he often had chamber music in the house’. The children were encouraged to play music: ‘I cannot remember the first time when I began to play the piano: it must have been very early in my life. […] When I was six or seven, I began taking violin lessons from Mr Bauerkeller of the Hallé Orchestra, who came over from Manchester especially to teach me.’

THE late-medieval Christian believed that after death souls entered purgatory to expiate their sins, and that the prayers of the living – especially of reputable devout men and women, such as anchorites and anchoresses – could significantly reduce the period of their suffering. The early fifteenth-century visionary text A Revelation of Purgatory promotes the intercessory powers of a woman recluse who intercedes for the release of a soul from purgatory. Scholars have identified the first woman as a Winchester anchoress and the second as a former nun of the Benedictine convent of St Mary, also known as Nunnaminster. An examination of hitherto unstudied manuscript and testamentary evidence, however, urges a re-consideration of this historical identification and suggests that the shared textual ancestor of the three extant copies of A Revelation – in Longleat House, MS 29 (c. 1425–50), Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 91 (c. 1430–40) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. th. c. 58 (possibly c. 1450–75) – may originate from an anonymous source, to which a scribe affiliated with Nunnaminster added local references in order to adapt the narrative for the convent. Consequently, these references may not reflect the work's historicity, but, rather, the work's historicisation. I suggest that neither the potential anonymous source nor the historicised version of A Revelation were tied to a single historical context but were, on the contrary, designed to be adapted to any number of local situations in which late-medieval convents interacted with their extramural lay communities. In such a context, A Revelation could cater to both religious women and the laity; the former could identify with the woman recluse and the latter, identifying with the purgatorial soul, could ask the ‘recluse’ to intercede for their souls in purgatory by organising masses. As we shall see, religious women customised and disseminated copies of the work in order to associate their institutions with ‘anchoritic intercessors’ and present these institutions as powerhouses of intercessory prayer. This enabled them to compete for and attract testators who would leave substantial bequests in return for their spiritual intercession.

Identifying A Revelation's ‘Anchoritic Intercessor’

A Revelation presents a three-part vision, experienced over three consecutive nights, beginning on 10 August 1422, in which an unnamed woman recluse tells of her encounter with the soul of Margaret, a deceased nun.

WHEN Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939 it simultaneously – and unilaterally – committed India to the conflict. The Indian National Congress (INC), which had maintained a consistent anti-Fascist stance throughout the 1930s, insisted that, for India to support the war effort, Britain must loosen its imperial stranglehold on the country. It asked Britain to commit to a post-war constituent assembly that would determine the political structure of a free India, while establishing immediately ‘something like a genuine responsible government in the centre’. Britain's response was underwhelming. Almost a decade after the INC's pürna swaraj (complete independence) declaration of 1930, Britain only reiterated earlier offers of dominion status, to be granted sometime in an indefinite future. Indian nationalists stressed the obvious contradiction between Britain holding India as a colony while fighting a global war, premised on the issue of self-determination. The British raj, however, remained unaffected. Thus, refusing ‘any responsibility for India's war contribution’, INC members resigned from the several provincial ministries to which they had been elected in 1937.

Like those of Britain's other colonial possessions, India's human and material resources were swiftly commandeered in support of Britain's war effort, and India was transformed into a home front. Consequently, both contemporary and scholarly analyses of India during the Second World War have focused on parsing the extent and variety of India's contributions to the Allied war effort. These contributions were substantial. Over two and a half million South Asians served in the war. Yasmin Khan estimates that over 50,000 enlisted in the first eight months and almost 20,000 a month were joining up by late 1940.

One of the most interesting aspects of the ninth-century Liébana documents analysed in the previous chapter is the apparent absence of lay persons who sought to engage on a regular basis in transactions and deal-making within their local community. Some villagers occasionally bought, sold or donated amongst themselves or with the Church, but they do not seem to have engaged in the construction of large property portfolios by means of frequent purchase, or to have consolidated this position by securing strategic marriage alliances with suitable families. Prominent landowners of this sort, whom we might imagine to have stood out in the documentary record, are simply nowhere to be seen in the ninth-century charters, although donations from before 900 do at least make differences in wealth and social prestige clear enough.

Making sense of these trends in transactional density presents a considerable challenge, especially when working with a small corpus of charters; after all, it may be the case that the intensive and consistent purchase of land by ninthcentury Lebaniegos did indeed take place, but that the records of such activity have since been lost. On the other hand, given that the evidence from across the northern third of the peninsula suggests that the written recording of such deals was an established practice in the ninth century, the existence of any persons who had made themselves substantially rich by means of recurrent purchase would probably have led to the retention of at least some of the documents recording that process. Large-scale private property ownership almost always leads to the production of title deeds, and these are almost always worth keeping because of their inherent and multivalent usefulness. For this reason, fourteen Santo Toribio documents from the first third of the tenth century are very revealing, because the transactions they record describe for the first time the rapid rise to prominence of a local lay couple in the Liébana, Bagaudano and Faquilona, whose entrepreneurial instincts saw them and their children attain and consolidate significant landed wealth during the tenth century.

First documented in 914, this couple came to own substantial landed holdings in the Liébana, but it is the extension and enlargement of their property portfolio via the regular acquisition of land that marks them out in the documentary record of Santo Toribio from what came before.