The end of aeons of unfettered natural development on St Helena was signalled in 1502, when the Galician commander João da Nova (1460–1509), with a modest flotilla under his command, is said to have happened by chance on the island on his return voyage from India. The year is commonly acknowledged, but narrowing the date with greater precision is problematic. The island had become widely known by its present name during the 1500s before Jan Huygen van Linschoten first asserted in his Itinerario of 1596 (translated into English as a Discours of Voyages two years later) that it was so named ‘because the Portingales discovered it uppon Saint Helens day, which is the twentie one of May’. The testimony of such a venerable authority became widely accepted, not least by the island's first historian, T. H. Brooke, on whose volume of 1808 subsequent generations of writers have leaned heavily. Under the more sceptical gaze of recent scholarship, however, and with recognition of the disparity between the calendar of saints’ days that would have been observed by the Protestant Dutch merchant van Linschoten and the (necessarily pre-Reformation) feasts celebrated in Nova's day, certainty evaporates. It seems apposite that the very moment of European contact with the South Atlantic island should be clouded by dispute, for many years of contested ownership of the island paradise lay ahead, with claim and counter-claim asserted by nations lying thousands of miles to the north.

The Portuguese, Dutch, and the British

Little more than a decade after its precipitous outline first materialized before the eyes of the lookouts at the mast-heads of the homeward-bound Portuguese fleet – and doubtless after fleeting opportune visits from other vessels of the same nation – St Helena received its first long-term settler in the form of the unfortunate Fernão Lopez, once noble and now an abject specimen after being tortured and maimed by his compatriots in Goa.

THE PAST THIRTY years have seen significant growth in high-quality research focusing on exemplary literature. Publications of round-table discussions have clarified the status of the medieval exemplum, and resulted in the publication of works such as the Thesaurus Exemplorum Medii Aevi. In this context, the Ci nous dit, a fourteenth century collection of 781 exempla that take the form of short, moralising narratives, has been the subject of several studies. According to Jacques Le Goff, an exemplum is a short story, given as true. It provides a moral lesson with a didactic and convincing aim and it is designed to be included in an oral discourse, often of a religious nature. More recently, scholars have developed the idea of a process of ‘exemplification’ of any kind of narrative form, a process that renders it difficult to confine exempla to a single literary genre.

The oldest French copy of the Ci nous dit was written by an anonymous author between 1313 and 1330 in the North of France. Given the 812 images that come with the 781 exempla in this manuscript, it seems to have been written for a lay aristocratic readership. Why should we begin yet another study of this collection of exempla? Simply because, until now, the place of vegetation in this collection has not been examined by the academic community. A book about animals in exempla was published in 1999, but representations of the vegetal world, which occupy a significant place in collections of exemplary literature, have yet to be explored. A number of questions might be asked. What kinds of plants are used? What do they represent? And what are their functions within exempla? This list of questions is far from exhaustive. Rather than concentrating on providing direct answers, the aim of this chapter is to outline a new area of research and a series of pertinent issues. The chapter will not broach the question of sources for the exempla, which is addressed in Gérard Blangez's edition of the Ci nous dit. I will begin by proposing an overview of the vegetal world in the collection before classifying the different uses of vegetation in the exempla (decorative roles, supporting roles, key roles) and finally present the symbolic function of vegetation when it appears in supporting or key roles.

George Foreman

At 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, June 15, 1869, the anticipation and excitement that had filled the city of Boston for months reached a climax. The eager audience packing the immense coliseum marveled at the gigantic organ and the musical forces that numbered in the thousands arrayed before them. After a prayer offered by Rev. Edward Everett Hale, a welcome from Boston Mayor Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, and a lengthy speech by Alexander H. Rice, P. S. Gilmore finally entered the stage. The ovation from audience and musicians alike that greeted Gilmore in what he called “the proudest moment of his life” swelled ever larger as he mounted the podium. On his downbeat, ten thousand voices in the chorus, a thousand orchestral musicians, and the gigantic festival organ responded with Martin Luther's hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. “The grandest volume of song that ever filled human ear,” wrote Gilmore, “rolled like a sea of sound through the immense building.” Conceived by Gilmore to commemorate the end of the American Civil War, the National Peace Jubilee, which the Boston Herald called “the grandest musical feast of all time,” had begun.

Everything about the week-long National Peace Jubilee was big. The coliseum, which Gilmore declared to be “the largest [building of its kind] ever erected in America,” was immense—as wide as a football field, almost twice that long, and as tall as a ten-story building. Bostonians had followed the progress of the construction of the coliseum for weeks. The chorus was huge. A rehearsal in the Boston Music Hall shortly before the festival began included 3,000 voices, which was less than a third of the 10,404 singers who eventually formed the chorus for the jubilee performances. The orchestra included 525 members. For certain works, a 486-piece military band joined with the orchestra, for a total of 1,011 musicians. Even the bass drum was enormous. Emblazoned with “Let Us Have Peace,” the motto of the jubilee, the monster-sized drum towered over the musicians of the orchestra and band.

In 1872, buoyed by the success of the National Peace Jubilee three years earlier, Gilmore organized the World Peace Jubilee to mark the end of the Franco-Prussian War.

Despite widespread rumors that John Philip Sousa would retire at the end of World War I, the sixty-four-year-old bandmaster almost immediately returned to his vigorous prewar touring regime in 1919. The issue at hand was age rather than popularity or financial success. Before the war the Sousa Band maintained an exhausting touring schedule while playing before soldout houses to immense profit. His early successes at the 1893 World's Fair continued unabated for two decades. When war broke out Sousa reduced his touring commitments, but this was less an indication of intent to retire than it was a wartime necessity. His level of activity remained high given his services as director of the four-hundred-strong Naval Reserve Band in Great Lakes, Illinois, which itself toured to play for bond rallies and recruitment drives.

The peacetime 1919 summer season proved to be a key mile marker in a career that was not as monolithic as might be assumed. When the Sousa Band returned to full-time touring, it did so as if nothing had changed. Audiences were beginning to change, however, and within just five years (by 1924) the band's character underwent several experimental changes as the director dabbled in jazz and created variety sideshow ensembles to try to keep pace with audience taste. These efforts largely failed to reinvigorate box office sales. The ensemble's return to its usual prewar fare of marches and classical arrangements in 1926 indicated the now seventy-one-year-old Sousa's desire to maintain the band's long-established characteristics in the face of inevitable decline for as long as he possibly could.

What follows is a detailed examination of the forces that led to this decline and the decisions made by Sousa and his business partners to maintain the status quo as much as possible. Where some historians maintained the myth that Sousa “stayed in the harness” until the very end, others have acknowledged in passing that age (Sousa’s, his managers’, and his audiences’) and the Great Depression led to a slowing of the band's touring schedule over its final decade. Documents presented in what follows demonstrate that the former position denies the band's actual dissolution in 1931, albeit just months before Sousa's death. The latter position, taken out of convenience given the dates involved, glosses over an informative discussion of how the Sousa organization dealt with these existential challenges in real time.

For almost seventy years, early modern historians have debated the impact of the Military Revolution on warfare, politics, and state formation. Often forgotten in this debate is how the emergence of early modern armies transformed masculine norms in European societies. Medieval European societies relied upon a martial code, known as chivalry, to indoctrinate noblemen into conforming to gendered behaviours. These behaviours in turn facilitated their participation in warfare. In France, the Military Revolution, along with other social changes, altered the nobility's role in combat and transformed chivalry into an obsolete masculine code. As the Military Revolution led to larger armies comprising primarily men from the Third Estate, knighthood ceased to reflect the role of noblemen in combat. The nobility soon became an officer class, and their new role required the construction of gender representations that redefined the relationships between nobility, masculinity, and martial violence.

Martial violence refers to certain forms of violence that enable warfare in a particular society. Martial violence is always culturally specific, because societies glorify only those forms of violence that they deem acceptable in warfare. In French society, the Military Revolution contributed to the emergence of the captain as the predominant depiction of noblemen in combat. Militarily active noblemen-turned-authors, who adopted the norms of the Military Revolution, transformed the representation of the nobility at war. In military memoirs, biographies, and treatises, these authors outlined the gender expectations of noblemen in combat. The tales of two of the most famous noblemen from the sixteenth century, Pierre Terrail, chevalier de Bayard, and Blaise de Monluc, marechal de France, offer snapshots of this transition in the representation of noble masculine norms in sixteenth-century France.

Existing studies present the Military Revolution as a watershed in the history of European warfare. Coined by Michael Roberts in the 1950s, the term originally referred to the increased size of armies, the development of new bureaucratic systems, and the introduction of gunpowder technologies in western European states. In the 1980s, Geoffrey Parker sparked a heated debate over the nature of these changes when he proposed an earlier starting date for Roberts's Military Revolution and argued that the introduction of quadrilateral-angled bastions in European fortifications had provided its catalyst.

ARBORE AL RE PRESE NTATIONS AND symbolism in the premodern Islamic imaginary are extensive and multidimensional. They can be traced in both religious and non-religious literature as well as in art and architecture. In the non-religious sphere, we find rich poetic and aesthetic engagements with the tree's perceived feminine form and beauty by poets and scholars indulging in recreational activities in gardens and natural settings. We also find discussions of the tree's social, emotional, and medicinal benefits in various literary texts and botanical manuals. In historical and biographical accounts, we find trees presented as markers of significant events. The shajarat al-bayʿa (‘tree of the pledge’), for example, is a famous tree at al-Ḥudaybiyya (a place located 14.5km outside Mecca), under which the Prophet Muḥammad is said to have received his companions’ pledge to fight the tribe of Quraysh that had prevented them from reaching Mecca. The tree was subsequently venerated by Muslims, as the pledge of allegiance to Muḥammad marked the start of a series of victories that culminated in the triumph of Islam. The pledge became known as bayʿat al-riḍwān (‘pledge of gratification’) and was mentioned in the Quran. In art and architecture, consistently recognisable arboreal imageries and patterns covered the surfaces of Islamic buildings, carpets, textiles, objects, and illustrated manuscripts across the great cultural and regional diversity of the vast Islamic world. This ubiquitous presence of arboreal representations has shaped Islamic artistic taste and influenced Muslims’ aesthetic preferences for abstract expressions of natural beauty. In the religious sphere, the focus of this chapter, we find ample references to trees in the sacred texts of the Quran and Hadith, and the extensive commentaries on them, as well as in the religious and mystical discourses associated with them.

This ess ay be gins with a whakataukī (Māori proverb), because this is the way Māori impart knowledge and present their taonga (treasures). There is no specific term for the word ‘value’ in Māori; objects of good or cultural value are taonga. Whether these are tangible or intangible remains of the past, whether their end value is material or spiritual, they are classified ngā taonga a ngā tūpuna (ancestral treasures) and ohaaki a ngā tūpuna (guidelines, maxims of the ancestors). Knowledge itself is taonga and so too are whakataukī. At a formal level this article follows the guidelines mapped out in the whakataukī cited above. It was conceived as a conference paper and therefore presented orally, as sound. Its transformation from spoken word to written record, that is, from intangible sound to material image, aims at fixing awareness in materiality. With this push, and in accord with the whakataukī, the research sends out tendrils of new growth to promote understanding, knowledge, and well-being. There is a creative process outlined in the whakataukī that this work strives to emulate. It also seems fitting, in a study juxtaposing indigenous New Zealand and European cultures, that both spoken and written words are used in its transmission, for Māori had no written language before Europeans settled in New Zealand. Repetition and oral presentations are what kept and continue to keep Māori culture alive. By adhering to Māori practice and seeking to present taonga in the Māori manner, I can contribute to and become part of a living culture. Only working within its frame can I understand Māori culture and begin to compare it with that of western Europe on equal terms.

This study works in wide open spaces. It looks across the hemispheres at Māori and European use of arboreal imagery around the time of the Middle Ages. Both cultures made significant metaphorical use of trees and plants in their struggle to commit their histories to memory for future generations well before European explorers Abel Tasman and Captain James Cook arrived in New Zealand in 1642 and 1769.

So begins the story of Francesco Fanciulli (1853–1915) as told by his wife Amanda (1861–1958). The remarkable composer wrote a fantasie for band that P. S. Gilmore purportedly called “the greatest piece of descriptive music ever written.” As a bandmaster and conductor who followed John Philip Sousa as leader of the United States Marine Band in 1892, Francesco Fanciulli inspired a reporter to write, “Never before in the history of the Marine Band has the harmony among the members been so complete and the feeling of contentment so general.” Even so, most historians remember Fanciulli more for an unfortunate incident on Decoration Day in 1897 and its aftermath than for his remarkable achievements. Posterity—virtually from 1897 to the present—has been unforgiving: the Marine Corps belittled him as “the piccolo player” and a Wall Street Journal reporter called him “a Salieri to Mozart's Sousa.” Fanciulli's accomplishments and stature merit a deeper investigation into his life, work, and importance as a bandmaster.

Most of Fanciulli's manuscript scores—as well as the four scrapbooks compiled after his move to the United States—are now in the Fanciulli Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Of perhaps greater importance as a resource for exploring Fanciulli's biography are the hundreds of photographs, concert programs, correspondence, business papers, manuscript materials, and personal effects that Fanciulli's family has carefully preserved. Additionally, the extensive handwritten notes compiled by Amanda shortly after his death in 1915 provide a rare, and potentially unique, perspective on the life of a major bandmaster through the eyes of his wife. Fanciulli's own words, those of Amanda, and accounts in the press reflect his stature and influence; they also allow for a more thorough examination of a historical figure whose complex career has been largely dismissed.

Childhood and Early Career

Francesco Fanciulli was born on May 29, 1853, in Porto San Stefano, Italy, about ninety miles northwest of Rome. His father, who previously had been a farmer, moved to this seaport town of five thousand people to work as a tailor.

Between 1885 and 1899, the C. G. Conn musical instrument manufacturing company of Elkhart, Indiana, aggressively advertised its world-renowned “Wonder” line of products, along with the artist musicians who played them, in several different types of print media. These included the company's early house organ, Trumpet Notes, its successor, C. G. Conn's Truth, Conn's occasional publication, C. G. Conn's Pictorial Truth, and their product catalogs, testimonial compilations, flyers, trade cards, and business cards. Perhaps the most extravagant marketing items published during this period were the several series of lithograph posters featuring prominent musical artists who proselytized Conn's products using both their images and handwritten testimonials.

These artist endorsements were more often than not encouraged by presentations of opulent, custom-made, gold-and-silver-plated, sometimes even diamond-studded, brass wind instruments from the Conn factory, prepared for the musicians’ testing and often for their own personal use. Alessandro Liberati was so enamored of Conn's products and reputation that he was among the very first to contact C. G. Conn following the devastating fire of January 29, 1883, that leveled the Elkhart facility. Liberati recalled, with relief, that he had safely received the diamond-studded, gold-plated Ultimatum model cornet custom-made for him just a few weeks before the fire. He was also among the first to arrive in Elkhart after Conn proudly opened the doors of his new factory, which had already been engaged in manufacturing musical products since mid-March—a mere six weeks after Conn chose to rebuild on the very spot where his previous factory burned to the ground on his thirty-ninth birthday. The local paper noted the likelihood that Liberati would be asked to play the “first cornet made by Conn since the fire” at a concert to benefit Conn's employees and to celebrate the factory's reopening.

Conn spared no expense rebuilding both the “horn factory” and his printing and publishing department, located in a secondary building annexed to the instrument plant. As he prepared to step up his advertising campaign following the fire, Conn contracted with several lithography and engraving firms. The exquisite, detailed engravings of the new factory and Conn's musical products in the originally biweekly Trumpet Notes were prepared by engraver Joe K. French, of French Bros. (Toledo, Ohio).

Permanent settlement of the island so profoundly changed its face that within half a century the continuing viability of maintaining a foothold there was called into question. At his arrival as governor in 1714, Isaac Pyke was moved to wonder whether the population then established might not be better decanted in its entirety to Mauritius, which had recently been abandoned by the Dutch. For his ultimate superiors, the Court of Directors of the East India Company, however – no matter their disappointment at the seeming incapacity of the island to sustain itself independently – St Helena's strategic significance ruled out such a possibility. The viability of the island as a permanent settlement would continue to be questioned for decades to come.

Populating the island

Having received a charter to govern St Helena from Oliver Cromwell in 1657 (all copies of which appear to have been lost), the directors of the EIC – whose homeward-bound vessels had for the past nine years been formally ordered to assemble there to form convoys for the final leg of the voyage northwards – now found it expedient to establish a permanent presence on the island. Having debated the proposal on 15 December 1658, the directors decided on a show of hands ‘to send 400 men with all expedition to remayne on the island, with conveniences to fortifie and begin a plantation there’. Accordingly, a fleet commanded by Captain John Dutton sailed for St Helena the following February, escorted by the Marmaduke man-of-war, though evidently carrying rather fewer men than originally envisaged. Dutton was to become the first governor of the island (1659–61), with authority over the whole population of ‘planters’ – the term accurately reflecting both the population's status as Company-sponsored migrants and the expectation that one of their immediate priorities would be to render the settlement economically self-sufficient.

With this aim in mind, Captain Bowen of the London was instructed to set a course via St Jago on the Cape Verde Islands in order to acquire ‘all manner of plants, roots grains, and all other things necessarie’ for the establishment of the plantation, as noted in the previous chapter.

Founded in 1871, Berlin's Kaiser-Cornet-Quartett was arguably the foremost small brass ensemble of its time. During its thirty-seven-year existence, from 1871 to 1908, the group undertook long concert tours through at least seven countries. The quartet pioneered and popularized the idea of a small brass ensemble, both in Europe and the United States, and they had a broad influence on the artistic capabilities of brass instruments in a chamber-like setting. Their performances at P. S. Gilmore's 1872 World's Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival in Boston, and the American tour that followed, showcased them as one of the few small brass ensembles crossing the ocean from Europe. During the quartet's two months in the United States, they played for extraordinarily large audiences, and that success would lead to imitators.

This essay examines the nature, organization, reception, and influence of the Kaiser-Cornet-Quartett's performances in America in an effort to better understand the forces that propelled them to fame and a multidecade existence. Previously overlooked documents and news reports offer the opportunity to examine the ensemble's origins, player biographies, instruments, and repertoire in detail.

Origins: Berlin, 1871–1872

Trumpeter and cornetist Julius Kosleck (1825–1905) founded the quartet early in 1871. A member of the Berlin court theater orchestra, and Royal Chamber Musician since 1853, Kosleck had already appeared at home and abroad as a cornet soloist and performed frequently at the palace of King Wilhelm of Prussia (eventually Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany) and his son Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm.

The 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War led to a wave of patriotic concerts in Berlin in which Kosleck performed solos, most often in collaboration with military bands and civilian choirs. Just a week after the surrender of Paris, a turning point in the war, a concert on February 5, 1871, saw Kosleck joined by three brass colleagues on stage. During this, the first-known performance of the foursome, Kosleck was said to have “again proved himself a master on the cornet à piston, excellently supported by Messrs. Philipp, Senz, and Teichen.”