THE opportunities to be found in a city have always had a considerable level of attraction, relative to the countryside, and by the year 1700, Paris, Venice, Milan, Moscow, Vienna, London, Rome, Lisbon and Prague, to name but a few, had populations exceeding 100,000. However, urban living could be of more modest proportions, as in the Nordic countries, and the increase in people in Europe living in cities of more than 5000 persons grew only from ten to twelve percent between 1600 and 1800.

The physical environment of pre-industrial European small towns was sometimes not unlike the countryside. Old maps and place names reveal the locations of areas where the town burghers grazed their cattle or grew cabbages. The buildings were set around a yard, with cowsheds and stables. The wives of craftsmen and tradesmen were milking, baking and brewing, salting meat and making textiles. Artisans’ households were not very different from farms engaged in household production. While the apprentices had clearly defined tasks, servants and family members could be participating, not only in housework, but also in the workshop. Bakers and brewers seem to have favoured such arrangements, but they were not unknown in other fields.

The population of early modern towns was divided into hierarchical groups. A considerable proportion of manufacture was controlled by the guilds; however, the rate at which these gained control over operations varied. In certain parts of northern Europe, their control over the local economy was not achieved until the seventeenth century. Some manufacture remained outside guild control, as did, of course, a certain proportion of manual work. Although the most influential citizens were to be found among opulent merchants, or within the guilds, it should be remembered that these represented only one part of the urban population. In German towns, and along the Baltic, a distinction was also made between those engaged in local trade and those involved in overseas trade. The most important distinction was, however, that between legal urban dwellers with town privileges or citizenship, and outsiders. Even a menial manual worker, legally domiciled in a town, bestowed upon his widow the right to reside, remain and apply for the privilege of engaging in a trade.

LEV NUSSIMBAUM—alias Essad Bey, alias Kurban Said—situated the eponymous hero and heroine of his 1937 novel, Ali and Nino, at linguistic, geographic, national, religious, and cultural crossroads. The love story begins in the city of Baku in the Caucasus, a region with a checkerboard of over fifty ethnicities, among them Armenians, Azeri, Daghestani, Georgians, Persians, Russians, and Turks. The Caucasus region is geographically situated along the historical borders between Europe and Asia, between Christianity and Islam, and between the Shi'ite and Sunni branches of Islam. Most of the action takes place in Azerbaijan with one significant sojourn into Persia, which in the imaginary space of the novel becomes a secluded haven isolated from political strife.

In an attempt to understand themselves, each other, and the intersecting positions they occupy, the Muslim Ali and Christian Nino must respond to and assess their constantly shifting and opposing environments against the backdrop of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. They seek and briefly find a middle ground, a utopian space of understanding and acceptance that historical reality renders impossible. One's understanding of the characters becomes more entangled still upon realization that their story was penned in German by a Jewish Azeri, Lev Nussimbaum, who converted to Islam, published under two pseudonyms, and died in Italy while fleeing the Nazis. Such complexity defies attempts to settle on a definitive interpretation of the text while demanding exchange as a prerequisite to deeper understanding: exchange between the text, its readers, and a wide range of other sources. This insistence makes Ali and Nino an ideal text for teaching textual analysis as a hermeneutic process, and for helping students develop interpretive and research skills.

As authors of this article, we come to our subject from different disciplinary (German studies and Near East studies), national (American and Iranian-Canadian), and religious (Christian and Muslim) backgrounds. Our discussions have led to our use of the novel in three very different classroom settings (a senior capstone course, taught in German, on encounters between East and West, and two junior-level courses, taught in English, on women and Islam and on women in Near East history) at two different universities.

The Song of the High Hills can be regarded as a true culmination – a ‘crowning peak’ – of over a hundred years of musical attempts to associate or equate musical expressions with mountain nature, as interpreted in a Romantic aesthetic. For Delius's work to rise to this height, three different timelines had to cross at the right moment:

1. • He was at a moment in his life, marked by the vicissitudes of ill health and middle age, when his personal outlook seems to have magnified for him the frailty of human existence and the intransience of nature;

2. • He was at a moment in Western music when it was becoming easier for composers to distance themselves from Austro-German traditions;

3. • He was at a moment in Western civilisation when scientific enquiry had given individuals new understanding of their place in historical time and the eternity of the cosmos.

Before we turn to look in some detail at the score, it will be useful to trace how these three timelines come together.

In the Paa Vidderne melodrama of 1888 we saw Delius for the first time experimenting with effects of distance. His striking attempts here to equate musical expressions of majesty and bleakness with the high moorlands were replaced in On the Mountains with Wagnerian heroics and Lisztian drama. A sense of wonderment and introspection returned with Over the Hills and Far Away, then in parts of A Village Romeo and Juliet there followed a refinement of the Alpine ranz des vaches trope to suggest an escape route for the trapped lovers into timeless, nameless mountains. For A Mass of Life Delius adopted for the last time a Wagnerian language to extol the heights – in this case the metaphorical heights of Nietzsche's spiritual aristocrat, Zarathustra. Even then, with his ‘Auf den Bergen’ prelude to Part II of the Mass, the metaphorical landscape was changing character.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy. Trans. Margaret Kirby. Indianapolis: Focus/Hackett, 2015. 194 pp.

To translate a text requires a unique skill set involving knowledge of the subject, acquaintance with the targeted material, and the keenest technical facility for rendering the idiom of one language into another. Translating Goethe's Faust is all the more daunting because it requires a clear understanding of the German Enlightenment as well as of the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of this monumental work. Moreover, any new translation of Faust is doubly problematic because it invariably lends itself to comparisons with previous successful editions: the Walter Kaufmann, Peter Salm, and Barker Fairley versions of the sixties (Doubleday, 1961); the Walter Arndt and Cyrus Hamlin Faust from the seventies (Norton, 1976); the more recent David Constantine edition (Penguin, 2004), the sumptuously illustrated John Anster and Henry Clarke version (Calla, 2013), the recently revised Martin Greenberg version (Yale University Press, 2014, originally 1992), and sundry other Fausts. Aware of such pitfalls, Margaret Kirby thankfully provides us with an introduction to her new translation that lays out her perspective and methodology. In large strokes, Kirby's introduction focuses on Faust's feelings of confinement, his alienation from nature, and his misplaced dependence on knowledge, “discursive reason,” and “academic learning” (xii). Despite these feelings, Faust, as Kirby points out, is curiously charmed by Gretchen's satisfaction with the nearly cloistered living conditions in which he finds her room and even allows “that there is something of substance in finitude” (l. 1338; xiii). Kirby also points to the irony that Gretchen feels similarly confined both physically and mentally while imprisoned. But unlike Faust's nearly existential angst, her feelings of entrapment are strictly the result of her own transgressions, for which she says she will pay, one way or the other (ll. 4544–49; xv).

However enlightening this argument might be, Kirby nonetheless seems not to understand precisely just how negatively Faust's feelings truly affect him; in fact, they have made him something of a manic-depressive.

Cockerell invested most of his twenties in his travels in Greece and Greater Greece, and in a substantial spell in Italy, staying considerably longer than intended, in part at least because of the lure of Greece. He went out with a knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin, with technical architectural skills, which he had learnt in his father's and Smirke's offices, and with a natural hand for sketching, together with his considerable native abilities. During his time away, he worked very hard indeed, if somewhat intermittently, on his studies of Greek material. His landscape sketches and his direct knowledge of genuinely Greek temples and their sculptures brought him a dazzling reputation, especially in Italy, but it was the brooding consideration of his work, more substantial and more detailed than any which had been brought to Britain since Stuart and Revett, at the Parthenon, Aegina, Bassae and Agrigentum, among others, which generated his deep responses to ancient Greek culture, and it is these which will be discussed here.

The ‘lure of Greece’ could be described as the grand idea in European early nineteenth-century culture. For the fortunate few of Cockerell's generation, the first to wander relatively freely in Greece and come to know it for themselves, Greece was the love of their lives. It had a wonderful light and climate, particularly delightful to people from the north; it had dramatic mountains, valleys and sea coasts; its cities and plains could be joyfully recognised as the real places where events which the travellers had known about all their lives had actually happened. These travellers wanted to experience the ‘spirit of the place’, part of the new romantic feeling for the specific and the historic, experiences which Greece offered in abundance.

Philologists argued that Greek, like Indo-European languages in general, had a privileged capacity for fine meaning through its complex systems of tenses and inflections. This was bound up with the view that the Indo-European homeland lay somewhere north of Caucasus, from which proud warriors and noble women had descended into Greece and western Europe to become the ancestors of the ancient and present populations; western Europeans, especially Germans, therefore, not only shared Greek ideals, moral and aesthetic, but were their close blood kin, and their natural heirs.

IN their summary of the contributions to the volume Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Cavallo and Warner underline the different positions of widowed women and men. While men continued their lives as before, at least in some parts of Europe, women had considerable difficulties in accessing and utilising the property and autonomy to which they were legally entitled. In their efforts to generalise, the experiences of noble widows from southern Europe are amalgamated with and believed to illustrate those of women from other social groups and geographic areas. The noble and propertied members of socio-economic élites are, of course, more easily traced in historical records. However, the struggle of noble women to control their property is likely to provide a poor guide to the experiences of women of less lofty status. Many widows with access to property would have been of ‘the middling kind’, rather than the highest in the land.

While we might find that widows in general were not the holders of large property portfolios, it would seem that many husbands trusted the ability of their wives to hold on to their houses, holdings and small businesses and take care of the children as well as provide for their future.

The aim of the present chapter is to examine the economic situation of widows using nominative data like wills, inventories and taxation. One of the issues that will be discussed is the difference between men and women in the amount and type of property that they owned. Another is to what extent transfers were linked to legislation or provisions in wills. Some efforts will also be made to compare the inventories of widows with those of old men, instead of all men, to gauge the effects of life transitions. When equal stocktaking was done at the end of life, were women seriously disadvantaged?

Widows, Taxation and Real Property

Studies of property transfers in early modern Europe have revealed that, in certain regions, half of the widows received land or house property when their husband died, but in other areas, little is known about landed property.

THE idea for this book presented itself in the early 1990s. I was a postgraduate student at Monash University writing a dissertation on Berlioz, which inevitably led me to Newman's essays on the composer. Shortly thereafter— on a visit to the Grub Street Bookstore in Brunswick, an inner suburb of Melbourne—I chanced upon Newman's 1895 biography of Gluck. I read the introduction while standing in one of the bookshop's narrow passages, and was transfixed: his introductory essay on the necessity for historical method in musical criticism intrigued me. I wondered why a British writer on music was taking up the cause for this kind of history so late in the century and why no one had made much of it in the literature I had read on the history of musicology. I knew then that I wanted to find out more about Newman and what made him tick. And so I set to work.

For access to archives relating to Ernest Newman I would like to thank staff at the following libraries and archives: Bodleian Library, Oxford; British Library, London; Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham; National Library of Scotland; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; Houghton Library and Isham Memorial Library, Harvard University; Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University; Juilliard School Library, New York; King's College Library, Cambridge; Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth College; and Special Collections at the universities of Glasgow, Liverpool and Cambridge.

Thanks are due to Odin Dekkers at Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen who provided access to the personal research papers of various scholars in the Department of English Literature and Culture relating to the Dobell collection at the University of Oxford. Nigel Scaife kindly loaned his personal notes relating to the research he undertook on Newman for his 1994 doctoral dissertation.

Thanks to the University of Melbourne for permission to reproduce a part of the following article in chapter 8, ‘Ernest Newman's The Man Liszt of 1934: reading its freethought agenda’, Context: A Journal of Music Research 31 (2006): 193–205.’

I am grateful to the universities of Glasgow, Oxford and Texas at Austin, and the National Library of Scotland, for permission to reproduce copyright material in their collections. I am deeply indebted to Mary Parkin, Vera Newman's neice and the executor of the Newman Estate, who has given permission to reproduce all copyright material in this book.

The story of Faust has an extraordinary, abiding and increasing appeal, and for that there can be little doubt that Goethe is largely responsible. The story of Faust is a modern myth, and in Goethe's treatment it becomes a myth of modernity. His play is about what it means to be a modern human being: what is the point and value of human life in the modern world. ‘Modern’ is shown by Goethe in this work to mean, quite explicitly, post-Christian. In order to make modernity the theme of his play, and not just its precondition, Goethe made two fundamental changes to the structure of the myth that he inherited. The first change enabled him to start writing the play in the early 1770s: he introduced the story of Faust's love for Gretchen. The second enabled him, around 1800, to work out how to complete it: he changed Faust's agreement with the Devil from a pact, or contract, to a wager. By comparison with these two adaptations to the core of the myth, Goethe's most notorious change – his allowing, or apparently allowing, Faust to go to Heaven – is little more than a flourish, and not even original to him. It is through these two distinctively Goethean features, and not through a superficial embellishment of its conclusion, that Goethe's play asks and answers its deepest questions. The moment when Goethe's Faust shakes hands with the Devil is a moment of the deepest possible seriousness: in this episode everything is at issue – life and death, value and emptiness, personality and modernity. If we turn first to the origin, as far as we know, of all versions of the Faust story, the anonymous Volksbuch, or chapbook, published in Frankfurt in 1587, we find that the original Dr Faust's agreement with the devil is spread over three conversations with Mephostophiles, as he is here called. In the first conversation Mephostophiles asserts that it is beyond his power to make any agreement with Faust until he has returned to Hell to seek authority from Lucifer, his infernal master (17–19 = 1587, 11–14).

When Wilhelm suffers his first great loss in the Lehrjahre, that of Mariane, he recovers his spirits on his travels by re-immersing himself in the natural world. He is revived by the rejuvenating power of nature, but also by the animating power of memory:

This passage illustrates what Novalis, partly on the basis of this novel, identified as one of the central hallmarks of Romanticism: the mysterious play of memory and premonition: “Nichts ist poetischer als Erinnerung und Ahndung oder Vorstellung der Zukunft” (Nothing is more poetic than remembrance and premonition or imagination of the future). For Hardenberg, the sense of presence proper to the poet is not a punctual “now” ordered within a linear series of “nows.” The poet's “geistige Gegenwart” (spiritual present) is rather a present “die beide [Erinnerung und Ahnung] durch Auflösung identifiziert— und diese Mischung ist das Element, die Atmosphäre des Dichters” (Novalis 2: 468, n. 123; that dissolves [memory and premonition] into an identity— and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet). In creating the “atmosphere” of Poesie, the pre-rational communication between past and present, present and future, becomes a distinctive feature of Romantic interiority.

IN examining the relationship between Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours, both of thirteenth-century provenance, this essay concerns itself with the entangled worlds of female Christian readers, male Christian book producers and illuminators, and the Jews living in their midst. In particular, it will raise questions about how we can conceptualise the entangled medieval process whereby Christian devotional art is realised and recalibrated in relation to Jewishness. In this way, my article discusses marginal and occasionally hidden communities connected to the Ancrene Wisse – rich, married lay readers, male artisan book illuminators and the Jewish communities of the West Midlands. As well as accounting for the gender dynamics in texts such as these – especially within the triangulated relation between female reader and (often) commissioner, male scribe and illuminator, and the image of male Jewishness – this chapter will draw upon the theories of entanglement and ‘intra-action’, as posited by Karen Barad, to deconstruct the totalising idea of a ‘grotesque hall’ of antisemitic images, particularly those appearing in the Egerton Hours BL MS Egerton 1151. Finally, it will evaluate how the interactions of these groups gather together for moments of ‘intra-action’ on the manuscript page in order to produce Christian material devotion for female lay communities. The queerness of this indeterminate, unfixed, constantly forming Jewish/Christian identity made possible by encounters between these different communities is at this essay's foundation.

In Jewish/Christian Entanglements: Ancrene Wisse and Its Material Worlds, I argue that the beginning of Middle English literary production is inextricably entangled with Judaism. My exploration of the Ancrene Wisse manuscripts as well as the associated visual tradition in the Egerton Hours (London, British Library MS Egerton 1151) examines how the Jews, present in the thirteenth-century Welsh border area of England where Ancrene Wisse was probably composed, helped shape English literary production. In the twelfth century, there were established Jewish communities in Worcester, Hereford, Gloucester, Coventry, Bristol and Oxford, and while Ancrene Wisse's early manuscripts date from before 1250, the Egerton Hours was produced in Oxford in c. 1260–70 just before the Expulsion.

The idea of a Faustian project was something that Ferruccio Busoni (1866– 1924) contemplated throughout his entire career, either directly or via what he considered alternative Faustian figures, such as Leonardo da Vinci or Don Juan; and while the actual composition of the opera Doktor Faust occupied him from 1916 until his death, many of his compositions prior to this time are directly related to the Faust project. Doktor Faust not only codifies many aspects of Busoni's theory, but it also stands as a highly individual treatment of the Faust legend deeply rooted in the traumatic era in which it was formed. It is therefore central to any consideration not only of Busoni's music but also of his theoretical ideas and his importance in the transition to modernism in the early twentieth century.

The early years of the twentieth century saw Busoni rethinking his aesthetic position, outlined in his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst [Sketch of a new aesthetic of music], the first version of which was published in 1907. The book is indicative of Busoni's new-found freedom from nineteenth-century Germanic musical thinking and marks the first step towards his formulation of what he termed ‘Junge Klassizität’ [Young Classicism] in contrast to the overripe romanticism of many of his contemporaries. The ideas were developed further for a substantially revised version, published at Rainer Maria Rilke's suggestion in 1916, and continued to be refined in later essays, including his preface to the score of Doktor Faust. Busoni concluded Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik by quoting in full section 255 of Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Beyond Good and Evil], which outlines the necessity for rejection of the dominant Wagnerian cultural ideology:

Frederick Delius travelled to Norway on twenty occasions during his adult life, visiting the south-eastern coast and the central mountains for periods of one to three months. Although he was initially attracted to the country for the same reasons as many other Britons fleeing their industrialised landscape, his Norwegian journeys assumed ever greater significance in his career. He came to regard them as crucial to the health and survival of his artistic process. If prevented from visiting Norway for more than two summers he would become restless, sensing that his creative direction was becoming more difficult to determine. One such break in the chain of visits was caused by the First World War, when submarines and mines made sea crossings too hazardous; in a letter to her husband, Jelka Delius bemoaned the turn of events: ‘It is dreadful that we are cut off from Norway, I never felt so strongly that it is really a necessity to you.’ On another occasion she described Norway as ‘the land of Fred's constant longing’.

Delius identified subtropical Florida as the place where he, as a young man, had determined on a life as a composer. On returning from America he studied at Leipzig and then moved to Paris, where he enjoyed the Bohemian pleasures sought by many artists there in the 1890s. For the last thirty-five years of his life his home was in a French village. Places rich in colour, or exotic nature, or urban energy – such sensual locations always beckoned to Delius. Nevertheless, at regular intervals he needed to flee northwards in order to get his ‘old self back again’, as he put it. His physical energy was restored by weeks of bathing by the Kristiania Fjord; to reinvigorate his self-belief and to re-envisage his artistic direction he travelled on to the great Norwegian mountains. Again and again.

Norway became an essential active ingredient in his creative processes, easily recognisable in his output. Some thirty-three compositions, large and small, were inspired by his Norwegian experiences or were settings of texts by Norwegian poets.