Reverence for J. S. Bach's music and its towering presence in our cultural memory have long affected how people hear his works. In his own time, however, Bach stood as just another figure among a number of composers, many of them more popular with the music-loving public. Eschewing the great composer style of music history, Andrew Talle takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach's Germany. Talle focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. As he ranges through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, Talle brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals--amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners--inhabited a lost world, and Talle's deft expertise teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, his nuanced re-creation of keyboard playing's social milieu illuminates the era's reception of Bach's immortal works.

Beards and Texts explores the literary portrayal of beards in medieval German texts from the mid-twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries. It argues that as the pre-eminent symbol for masculinity the beard played a distinctive role throughout the Middle Ages in literary discussions of such major themes as majesty and humanity. At the same time beards served as an important point of reference in didactic poetry concerned with wisdom, teaching and learning, and in comedic texts that were designed to make their audiences laugh, not least by submitting various figure-types to the indignity of having their beards manhandled. Four main chapters each offer a reading of a work or poetic tradition of particular significance (Pfaffe Konrad’s Rolandslied; Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm; ‘Sangspruchdichtung’; Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Ring), before examining cognate material of various kinds, including sources or later versions of the same story, manuscript variants and miniatures and further relevant beard-motifs from the same period. The book concludes by reviewing the portrayal of Jesus in vernacular German literature, which represents a special test-case in the literary history of beards. As the first study of its kind in medieval German studies, this investigation submits beard-motifs to sustained and detailed analysis in order to shed light both on medieval poetic techniques and the normative construction of masculinity in a wide range of literary genres.

An environmental scientist has chosen to spend the winter on a remote peninsula in the far north of Norway in order to collect data on the activities of the seabird population. She is determined to prove a link between climate change and the decline in numbers of various species. She is also waiting for her lover to arrive. But cut off from human contact, tested by the primal forces of nature, she finds herself drawn into a dark and uncomfortable place that defies scientific logic. As she delves into the past, she has to face up to her earlier decisions. What are her true motives for coming here? Why has she left her young daughter and ex-husband behind? And will her lover ever join her?

By the early ninth century, the responsibility for a series of social, religious and political reforms had become an integral part of running the Carolingian empire. This became especially clear when, in 813/4, Louis the Pious and his court seized the momentum generated by their predecessors and broadened the scope of this correctio ever further. These reformers knew they constituted a movement greater than the sum of its parts; the interdependence of imperial authority and ecclesiastical reformers was driven by comprehensive, yet surprisingly diverse expectations. Taking this diversity as a starting point, this book takes a fresh look at these optimistic decades. Extrapolating from a series of detailed case studies rather than presenting a grand narrative, it offers new interpretations of contemporary theories of correctio, and shows the self-awareness of its main instigators as they pondered what it meant to be a good Christian in a good Christian empire.