In 1582 Cambridge's vice-chancellor, William Fulke, wrote to his superior, William Cecil, reporting that ‘the whole bodye of the Universitye is oute of frame’. Among the many problematic matters that he described to the chancellor was a ‘new practise’ which, he claimed, various Heads of Houses had noted and reported to him. Men, including those ‘not preachers or ever lyke to be reteyned as Chapleines, but of the most dissolute and disobedient sorte, have procured them selves to be admitted as Reteyners to diverse honorable personages, and some of them have openly worne their Masters cloths’. This behaviour, Fulke claimed, had first been spotted in Gonville and Caius, a college which in the same letter he described as so far from religious orthodoxy that it risked becoming a ‘an Asylum Papisticum or Seminarium hominium Neutrorum’. Fulke's letter suggested that the way to settle these problems both in this college and across the University as a whole was for Cecil to initiate a ‘generall commissione or Visitatione’.

Fulke's letter neatly demonstrates some of the contradictions surrounding the role of interactions between the university and outside authorities – men associated, in one form another, with the government of the Church or State – in its wider processes of religious change. External authority is seen as a key, perhaps as the only, way to bring Cambridge to religious orthodoxy. Yet outside influence could also protect and encourage the dissolute and disobedient. To reconcile this contradiction distinctions have to be drawn between legitimate and illegitimate authority, between Cecil's official role as chancellor and the more amorphous and informal, perhaps insidious, influence of various court patrons over university men. In reality, no such sharp dividing line existed and a diversity of external influences shaped and complicated the reformation of Elizabethan Cambridge. The university had, of course, never been closed off from outside forces. But by the later sixteenth century old channels of influence had been deepened and new ones formed by a confluence of factors both within and outside the universities. Wider changes in the Tudor Church and State made lay elites increasingly attractive patrons for university men. At the same time, these elites themselves became – or at least were felt to become – a growing and perhaps distorting presence among Cambridge's undergraduates.

I saw the political and social changes as if through a mist. A single thought excited me: my school years and my military service were over, and I had an entire life to spend however I wanted.

During the war I had been in charge of bringing two troop transports to General-von-Pape-Straße in Berlin, and during the trip I had been able to fulfill my greatest wish: I'd attended a [Max] Reinhardt production at the German Theater. I saw Othello with Paul Wegener in the title role. It was a brilliant performance in many respects, but it failed to attain the full scope and substance of Shakespearean drama, and I was disappointed. The second time, I went to a production of Wedekind's Earth Spirit on the Königgrätzerstraße stage, with Ludwig Hartau in the role of Dr. Schön. Wegener's Othello had been the product of meticulous intellectual craft smanship; Hartau was the first great actor I ever saw on stage. He was the decisive encounter for the direction my career was to take, a direction I'd first perceived in the clattering phonograph, in Marcel Salzer, and in the readings with my friends of the literary group. I wanted to be an actor. The only thing standing in my way was my father.

I signed a contract with a traveling theater for the roles of the youthful bon vivant. The director may have believed what I said about having performed small parts with the Posen City Theater, but he hired me for the good clothes I owned. Elegant civilian dress was very expensive and hard to come by after the war. I kept putting off mentioning the enterprise to my father, and the family discussions of where I would start my medical studies—wartime volunteers who had finished their high school education were exempted from admissions exams—continued harmoniously. When I finally told my father that I had decided to pursue a career on stage, and that I had already signed a contract, he laughed and walked out of the room. I got my suitcase and began to pack.

We have observed in chapter 5 that reversal, as a formal concept, is apparent on several compositional levels in Purcell's sonatas. Subjects may be devised as pitch palindromes (as in the Vivace of Z. 791), and when structural features within movements are abstracted into labels they sometimes create palindromes (as was the case with the combinatorial permutations in the Largo of Z. 802). On a higher level of multi-movement form, movement types can be arranged in reverse, with or without a clear da capo effect (as in Z. 794), and the order of material appearance may be reversed toward the end of the piece in a way that resembles arch form (as in Z. 792).

However, these reversals are not necessarily the strongest influence on the overall form of movements. Only in those works cast in arch-form structures did we observe the direct influence of reversal on the form. Otherwise, palindromic subjects or order of the entering parts may have very little influence on the overall form. To take an example, an exchange of the violin parts halfway into a movement, while it may upset the chiastic structure of the movement, does not necessitate essential alterations to what the movement sounds like. When reversal applies to the order of material, it exerts direct influence on the form, and this happens when Purcell combines chiastic structures with fugues that have more than one subject. Of the various rhetorical figures surveyed in chapter 5, commutatio is the closest in scale and in nature to thematic chiasmus patterns of that kind.

Let us first analyze the second section of the G minor Fantazie from Locke's Consort of Four Parts (Suite no. 5, example 6.1). On the surface, the use of three distinct subjects in this section (labeled “A,” “B,” and “C” in example 6.1) and the consistent imitative texture make “triple fugue” the most appropriate term. This, however, helps very little in the distinction between different stages of the unfolding of the music—the term “triple fugue” says nothing of the structural division of the movement into an opening procedure (such as the n-fold rotation), a closing procedure (such as a close), or a middle episode of the kind one may find in many Purcellian canzonas.

IN THE ARTHURIAN SOCIETY of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur (c. 1471), both the enforcement of social order and the accrual of social status are largely achieved by means of violence. Living in fifteenth-century England, Malory no doubt witnessed, and may have participated in, the familial feuds of that century that culminated with the Wars of the Roses in the 1460s and 1470s. Malory himself was charged with several crimes and was often incarcerated, and it is likely that he had some familiarity with English law. As Larissa Tracy explains in the introduction to this collection, throughout the medieval period, ‘murder’ (or unpardonable homicide) referred to intentional homicide committed from ambush or in secret, and Malory's treatment of the crime reflects that definition in his conception of the Arthurian past. Those who murder in Malory's work are usually motivated by pride and reputation, the defence of family honour or an individual knight's sense of ‘worship’. When the satisfaction of honour cannot be achieved by lawful means, King Arthur's knights will at times resort to murder, giving rise to the potential for an escalating cycle of fatal vengeance and posing a threat to the cohesiveness of the Round Table. To counter that threat and encourage adherence to the law, King Arthur formulates the Pentecost oath, the only formally expressed code defining chivalric behaviour in the Morte. The oath prohibits Arthur's knights from resorting to murder and requires them to grant mercy to whomever asks it, but the pledge proves an insufficient deterrent. However, King Arthur's prominent knights are rarely tried for murder, while Queen Guinevere is, and murder in Malory's work becomes not so much a legal charge as an appellation, a name that adversely affects the level of worship an individual knight may reach within his career. Gawain's reputation as a murderer, which Malory chooses to construct, creates factionalism within the Round Table, and when many knights reject him on that basis in favour of Lancelot, their final feud over the death of Sir Gareth and the resulting division among Arthur's knights plays a crucial role in the destruction of Arthur's kingdom. Malory creates an imagined version of Arthurian chivalry, which relies upon a system of ritualised violence, and in creating it, he must negotiate whether law can be impartially and consistently applied in that society.

Hobbes and Democracy

Machiavelli laid the foundations for modern politics through his reconsideration of the political capacities of ordinary people. Although Machiavelli had few illusions about the weaknesses of Florentine republicanism and was prepared to tack between open flattery and oblique criticism of Medici princes, Machiavelli's abiding aim was to advance the prospects for a new democratic republicanism. If Machiavelli is the first modern democrat, Hobbes is the first modern antidemocrat. In so naming Hobbes, I want especially to emphasize Hobbes's hostility toward the moral dynamics of democracy—what he once described as “envy in the likeness of zeal to the public good.” This hostility is the bedrock of his political theory and the origin of his novel vantage point (T, 15).

Placing Hobbes's attitude toward democracy at the center of his “civil philosophy” also raises new questions about his masterwork, Leviathan. Hobbes's fame as a political theorist rests upon this celebrated book. Yet, as a political proposal, Leviathan, according to Richard Flathman, is a “gimcrack contraption,” and Flathman says that Hobbes knew it. Hobbes's political aims are better understood not as advocacy of a certain kind of regime but rather as a Machiavellian counterpoint. He wielded his civil philosophy as a club with which to beat back the political energies unleashed by Machiavellian republicanism and revolutionary Protestantism. Hobbes accepted much of the political landscape recast by Machiavelli, such as his broad division of regimes into principalities and republics as well as his discoveries regarding the moral-political energies of the democratic sense of injustice. In this regard, Hobbes was especially interested in the relationship between the felt sense of “oppression” among ordinary people and their inclination to what he called “sedition.” Hobbes was also a student of the Reformation and of the growing social fluidity of his own society. But what would have given Machiavelli hope for the prospects of democracy, in Hobbes aroused fear.

Disillusionment in Many Voices

IN HIS 2016 NOVEL about Shostakovich, The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes writes: “When the threats against him had first begun, he told friends: ‘Even if they cut off both my hands, I shall continue to write music with my pen in my mouth.’” For all this noble intention romanticized in contemporary fiction, Shostakovich found himself in a near-impossible tugof- war with Soviet authorities, from his first denunciation in 1936 and his second in 1948 to his joining the Communist Party in 1960. In Cold War East Germany, Hanns Eisler faced less violent threats but remained under suspicion for his musical and political elusiveness. Even as the post- Zhdanov thaw occurred in the Soviet Union, allowing Shostakovich's once-banned violin concerto to be performed in 1955 (also following the death of Stalin in 1953), Eisler's fall from favor in the GDR haunted him until the end of his life in 1962. He became a target of surveillance in the Stasi's early years, with reports on his drunkenness (the episode in West Berlin, in which he had not had enough money for cab fare) and his own housekeeper's notes on his travel plans and whether or not his bed had been used. Back in Berlin after a time of reckoning in Vienna, following the violently crushed workers’ protests of 1953 and his own humiliation at the Akademie der Künste, Eisler found himself on difficult personal ground as well. He and his wife Lou separated in 1953. Though he later formed a fruitful partnership with the pianist Steffy Wolfs, he continued to struggle with depression and alcoholism. During this decade Eisler also continued to compose, in collaboration with Brecht and Johannes Becher. His 1955 film score for Alain Resnais's controversial Holocaust documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog or Nacht und Nebel, with the German translation by poet Paul Celan) was borrowed from his own earlier music under pressure of a deadline but won the Jean Vigo Prize for film music. In 1956 Eisler set texts by Kurt Tucholsky, a satirist in the Heinrich Heine vein who had been active in the Weimar Republic and committed suicide in Swedish exile in 1935. Like many of Eisler's projects in the 1950s, these settings expose discrepancies between utopian ideology and reality; they are parodic but employ more simple caricature than the grotesquerie of his early Kunstlieder and Heine choruses.

OLD IRISH LEGAL TEXTS, dating from the seventh and eighth centuries, recognise four types of killing: kinslaying, illegal homicide, legal killing and secret murder. The term for secret killing, duinetháide, is comprised of duine [person] and táide [theft], which implies kidnapping, with or without a connection to murder; however, legal commentary classifies a murder as duinetháide if the victim's body is hidden or left in the open and the killer does not acknowledge the crime. It is an offence that involves not only homicide (one person killing another) but also secrecy and intent. Duinetháide is directly associated with killing by means of magic in Cáin Adamnáin [Law of Adomnán], an early medieval Irish list of ecclesiastical regulations. Section 46 of Cáin Adamnáin requires a person who kills another by the use of a charm to pay the penalty of secret murder: ‘Mát epthai día n-apallar dabera nech do alailiu, féich dunetáiti ind’ [If it be charms from which death ensues that any one give to another, the fines of murder followed by concealment of the corpse (are to be paid) for it]. Early Irish legal and ecclesiastical penalties for magic and murder suggest that the direct association between duinetháide and supernaturally-induced homicide is unique to Cáin Adamnáin. The majority of penalties associated with supernatural practices in these sources relate to drawing the affections of another to oneself and the purposeful or unintentional obstruction of procreation, indicating insecurity over the potentially harmful, and even lethal, consequences of love magic. Further analysis of the early Irish legal penalties required for both secret murder and magical practices reveals that with the exception of using supernatural methods to hinder reproduction, and therefore inhibit the potential of life, there is no explicit punishment for taking the life of another human by magic in early Irish secular law. Indeed, extant early Irish law appears less troubled about murder by magic than certain other medieval legal cultures. Rather, the lethal effects of magic appear as a particular anxiety of the Church in the early Irish penitentials.

Cáin Adamnáin straddles the ecclesiastical concerns of the penitentials and the fiscal reparation for crimes required of secular law. The severe penalty for murder by magic in Cáin Adamnáin demonstrates the intention of the author(s) to align Irish law with contemporary ecclesiastical attitudes towards the use of illicit supernatural practices.

JUST as early modern football later evolved into different forms whose rules changed over time, from soccer and rugby to American football, horse racing likewise has evolved rules for different types of race, ranging from those for specific ages to handicaps and selling plates. Rules formed part of racing's growing rationalization but, to be viewed as ‘modern’, rules had to set out the constraints within which races had to be run and be universally applied and accepted, not differing from place to place. Sportization theory suggests that formal, standardized and written rules form part of the ‘ideal type’ of modern sport.

So how ‘modern’ were eighteenth-century racing's rules? Though it has been argued that eighteenth-century racing was already ‘highly organized, standardized and bureaucratized … and was truly national in scope’, while the Jockey Club had ‘administrative and legal control’ this view is in error. Eighteenth-century races, not yet fully modern, occupied a proto-modern transitional phase, with only some elements of standardization. Contrary to conventional belief, the Jockey Club was not founded in c.1750 but first appeared earlier in the eighteenth century. Its actual power was much more limited than many historians have mistakenly claimed, since its rules only applied to Newmarket, but its cultural significance meant its rules were sometimes copied elsewhere. Across Britain, race rules varied from place to place and over time, but were moving towards growing standardization.

A first tentative schema of the chronology of rule development in horse racing by economic historian Wray Vamplew largely focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter extends his analysis by examining the important proto-modern period in more detail.3 It focuses on rules relating to the horses, the course and race riding, and not those aspects concerned with organizational issues such as judging, dispute resolution or gambling, which are addressed later.

The rules governing contests were almost always written down and contractual in nature. They were usually called ‘Articles’ (an abbreviation of Articles of Agreement). They evolved during the process of issuing and accepting a racing challenge. They were needed to prevent or minimize disputes and cheating by people testing the limits of arrangements. They clarified various aspects of play and set out the terms of the wager. Initially there were separate ‘Articles’ for each racing match or contest, and despite increasing consensus and emulation there was much local variation.

VENENUM, OR POISONING, takes a small but interesting role in the early medieval Edictus Rothari, the first written version of the Lombard laws, promulgated in the name of King Rothari on 22 November 643. In two adjacent clauses in the Edictus, the Lombard law-givers outline the extent of composition due in compensation for the act of killing with poison: Rothari No. 141, in which the perpetrator is free, and Rothari No. 142, in which the perpetrator is a servus aut ancilla [enslaved man or woman]. In both clauses, the composition due is equal to the financial worth of the victim according to their status in Lombard society, to be paid by the poisoner or their owner if the deed was committed by a servus or ancilla. Poison seems, by its very nature, to be ideally suited for secretive, nefarious killings, and modern scholars have considered poisoning as a means of murder, or attempted murder, within the legal contexts of early medieval law as a whole. Two other clauses in the Edictus address cases where a ‘homo liber aut mulier libera’ [free man or free woman] either plots to poison someone (Rothari No. 139) or else actually administers poison but fails to kill their victim (Rothari No. 140). Rothari No. 142 also discusses plots and non-lethal outcomes of a poisoning attempt when committed by a servus or ancilla. The Lombard law-givers, then, arranged the clauses on poisoning along two axes, first by descending social class of the perpetrator, free and unfree, then subdividing these in increasing severity of the outcome. The Lombard law-givers never specify the actual types of poison that may have been employed, be it the wrong type of mushrooms ending up in the cooking pot or arsenic left over from silver smelting. Instead, the concern in the Edictus is simply that a person, man or woman, free or enslaved, poisoned another. The main focus here is to problematise the relationship of poisoning to killing and murder in the Lombard legal imagination of the mid seventh century, to break the assumed connection between poisoning and murder, nefariousness and shameful acts, and to demonstrate, instead, that poisoning in the Edictus, while still a crime, should be considered in relation to deliberate, open means of killing, but aligned with a broader spectrum of class and gender than killing with more ordinary weapons.