Books published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd

The classic guide to exploring English local history, brought up to date and expanded.This is a book for anyone wanting to explore local history in England. It summarises, in an accessible and authoritative way, current knowledge and approaches, bringing together and illustrating the key sources and evidence, the skills and tools, the contexts and interpretations for successive periods. Case studies show these ingredients in use, combined to create histories of people and place over time. A standard text since its first edition in 1992, this new edition features extensive fresh material, updated to reflect additional availability of evidence, changing interpretations, new tools and skills (not least the use of IT), and developments in the time periods and topics tackled by local historians. The interdisciplinary character of twenty-first-century local, family and community history is a prominent feature. Complemented by 163 illustrations, this book offers an unrivalled introduction tounderstanding and researching local history. KATE TILLER is Reader Emerita in English Local History at Oxford University, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Historical Society and a founding fellow ofKellogg College, Oxford. Over a career of 40 years, based at Oxford's Department for Continuing Education, she developed and implemented courses in local history from community evening classes to new master's and doctoral programmes. In 2019, she was appointed OBE for services to local history.

Essays on crucial aspects of late medieval history.

A new survey of major Templar landholdings offers fresh insights into key questions about their medieval history.

First printed edition of a hugely significant source of knowledge of a turbulent period in England's history.

Groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender.Conflicts over treason tormented English political society in the later Middle Ages. As legal and political historians have shown, treason was always a constitutional matter as well as a legal one because it was pivotal in mediating the relationship between English kings, their political subjects and the abstraction of the crown. However, despite renewed interest in constitutional history, there has been no extended examination of treason in medieval England since the 1970s. This pioneering study presents a new interpretation of treason, not only as a legal construct, a political weapon and a tool for constitutional thinking, but also as a cultural category, aligning it withquestions of gender, vernacularity and national identity. It examines cases from the 1380s to the 1420s, revealing how kings defended their claims to sovereign authority by using the laws of treason to bind their mortal male bodies to the enduring body politic of the realm, and explains how that body politic was masculinised through its entanglement in contests over manly honour and homosocial loyalties. Drawing on evidence from trial records, legislationand chronicles, it illuminates the ways in which cultural ideals of manhood reinforced or subverted government responses to crises of legitimacy, and demonstrates that gender conditioned understandings of treason in the politicalarena as well as the definitions embedded in statutes and case law. At the same time, it explores the varied ways men defended themselves from accusations of treason by invoking, and in the process helping to transform, shared beliefs about what it meant to be a man in medieval England. E. AMANDA MCVITTY is a Lecturer in History in the School of Humanities, Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Fresh insights into the development of the tournament as an opportunity for social display.

The music of clarinetists Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras is iconic of American klezmer music. Their legacy has had an enduring impact on the development of the popular world music genre.

First full-length study of the campaigns led by Henry of Lancaster in Aquitaine, including a detailed biographical study of the individuals involved.

Howard demonstrates that Machiavellian discourse had a profound impact on early modern Spanish prose treatises.

An examination of Argentina's "Dirty War" in films made after the advent of democracy in 1983.

The epic tales of medieval France, called chansons de geste, or "songs of deeds", provided the chief means of cultural and imaginative expression in the French language for over one hundred and fifty years (c.1100-1250), during one of the most significant periods of social change in the history of Western civilisation. Yet they remain largely unknown to most English-speaking readers of the twenty-first century. In Heroes of the Old French Epic (Boydell, 2005) Michael Newth translated a selection of the traditional militaristic narratives dominated by male heroes. This oral-based epic genre was increasingly influenced by the ethos of romance, and the present volumeoffers full English verse translations of six more of these songs, each chosen this time to illustrate the range of roles gradually accorded to women in these originally militaristic narratives. Four key narrative roles have beenselected - woman as helpmeet, woman as lover, woman as victim, and woman as spiritual model - in order to illustrate some major changes in the social status of women that took place during the period of this popular genre's existence. These poems are a key witness to the final stages of the chansons de geste before they were overtaken by the new fashion for the fictions of courtly romance. Apart from "The Capture of Orange", which has never been translated into modern English verse, none of the poems have yet appeared in English translation.

A captivating account of an interracial jazz opera that took apartheid South Africa by storm and marked a turning point in the nation's cultural history.In 1959, King Kong, an interracial jazz opera, swept across South Africa and became a countrywide phenomenon. Its performances sold out, its LP record was widely heard, and its cast became recognized celebrities. Featuring an African composer, cast, and orchestra but predominantly white directors and producers, this interracial production seemed completely distinct from any other theatrical production in the country's history. Despite being staged over a decade after the enacting of apartheid, the interracial collaboration met widespread acclaim that bridged South Africa's racial, political, ethnic, and class fissures. Widely considered a watershed moment within the history of South African theater and music, King Kong encapsulated key currents within South African cultural history. Author Tyler Fleming's gripping narrative unpacks the life of the musical, from the emergence of the heavyweight boxer "e;King Kong"e; Dlamini to the behind-the-scenes dynamics of rehearsals to the musical's 1961 tour of Britain and the later experience of cast members living in exile for their opposition to apartheid. Opposing Apartheid on Stage: "e;King Kong"e; the Musical explores the history of this jazz opera and its enduring legacy in both South African history and global popular culture.

Marking the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth, this volume presents twenty-one completely new essays on aspects of Beethoven's personal life, his composing process, his manuscripts, and his greatest works.

A close examination of the prayers in Chaucer's poetry sheds significant new light on his poetic practice.

First detailed exploration of the role played by Bohemian tradition and customs in the court of Richard II.

A new investigation into the twelfth-century accounts of the First Crusade, showing their complex relationship with the Bible.

Major interdisciplinary study of medieval church porches, bringing out their importance and significance.The church porches of medieval England are among the most beautiful and glorious aspects of ecclesiastical architecture; but in comparison with its stained glass, for example, they have been relatively little studied. This book, the first detailed study of them for over a century, gives new insights into this often over-looked element. Focussing on the rich corpus of late-medieval East Anglian porches, it begins with two chapters placing them in a broad cultural outline and their context; it then moves on to consider their commissioning and design, their architecture and ornamentation, their use and their meaning. This book will appeal to all those interested in church fabric and function. Dr HELEN LUNNON, an Honorary Researcher in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, is Head of Learning at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery.

This book explores the exchange of music, musicians and musical practice between Britain and the Continent in the period c.1500-1800.

The Codex Buranus, compiled, in all likelihood, in South Tyrol in the first half of the thirteenth century, has fascinated modern scholars and performers ever since its rediscovery in 1803. Its diverse range of texts (some famously featuring in Carl Orff's Carmina Burana) and music gives testimony to the intensely vibrant, plurilingual, and multicultural milieu in which the Codex Buranus was compiled, but poses a challenge to modern users. Perhaps more so than many other medieval manuscripts, it is an artefact which demands, and benefits from, an interdisciplinary approach. The chapters here, from scholars in a variety of fields, enable the less well-known aspects of the Codex Buranus; textual, musical, and artistic; to receive greater scrutiny, and bring new perspectives to bear on the more thoroughly explored parts of the manuscript. Making accessible existing discourse and encouraging fresh debates on the codex, the essays advocate fresh modes of engagement with its contents, contexts, and composition. They also examine questions of its reception history and audience. TRISTAN E. FRANKLINOS is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. HENRY HOPE has taught at the universities of Oxford and Bern; his research centres on the musical aspects of Minnesang. Contributors: Gundela Bobeth, Charles E. Brewer, Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann, Albrecht Classen, Johann Drumbl, Tristan E. Franklinos, Peter Godman, Henry Hope, Racha Kirakosian, Heike Sigrid Lammers-Harlander, Jonathan Seelye Martin, Michael Stolz, David A. Traill, Kirsten Yri.

A new and wide-ranging collection of essays by leading international scholars, exploring the concept and practices of virtuosity in Franz Liszt and his contemporaries.In the annals of music history, few figures have dominated the discussion of virtuosity as much as Franz Liszt. A flamboyant performer whose hair-raising technical feats at the piano created a sense of awe-inspiring excitement andan icon whose star power radiated far beyond the realm of music, Liszt was, along with his early model, Paganini, among the first major performer-composers to define himself principally by virtuosity. Featuring new essays by an international group of preeminent scholars, Liszt and Virtuosity offers a reevaluation of the concept and practices of virtuosity as shaped and defined in Liszt's multifaceted oeuvre, as well as a reconsiderationof Liszt's relation to other major and lesser-known musical figures, including Czerny, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, and Marie Jaell. Set in the context of larger trends within the fields of music history, musicanalysis, intellectual history, and performance studies, these capacious explorations demonstrate that Liszt's uniqueness and significance resided in his ability to transform virtuosity into a revolutionary musical force, pushingthe piano aesthetic to the limits of sound and poetic meaning.

The first thorough theoretical study of Janacek's compositions, focusing on motivic and rhythmic structure and identifying elements that give the music coherence, character, and interest.

A long-needed overview of, and guide to, the principles behind the treatises on music theory written in ancient Greece and Rome and continuing through the Middle Ages.

A contextualizing overview of the polarized critical reception of Willa Cather, one of the pre-eminent US authors of the twentieth-century.

The first detailed study of Schenker's pathbreaking 1906 treatise, showing how it reflected 2500 years of thinking about harmony and presented a vigorous reaction to Austro-Germanic music theory ca. 1900.

The first scholarly English translations of thirteen vital texts that elucidate the central role mountains have played across nearly five centuries of Germanophone cultural history.Mountains have occupied a central place in German, Swiss, and Austrian intellectual culture for centuries. This volume offers the first scholarly English translations of thirteen key texts from the Germanophone tradition of engagement with mountains. The selected texts span over 450 years, ranging from the early modern period to the postmodern era, and encompass several discursive modes of the mountain experience including geographical descriptions, philosophical meditations, aesthetic deliberations, and autobiographical climbing narratives. Well-known figures covered in this translational sourcebook include Conrad Gessner, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, G.W.F. Hegel, Alexander von Humboldt, Georg Simmel, Leni Riefenstahl, and Reinhold Messner. Each text is accompanied by a critical introduction that places the translated text within a broader cultural context. The dual translational-interpretational approach offered in this volume is intended to stimulate new international and interdisciplinary dialogue on the cultural history of mountains and mountaineering. Contributors: Paul Buchholz, Sean Franzel, Gundolf Graml, Kamaal Haque, Harald Hobusch, Dan Hooley, Sean Ireton, Jennifer Jenkins, Jens Klenner, Martina Kopf, Seth Peabody, Caroline Schaumann, Christoph Weber, Wilfried Wilms. Sean Ireton (University of Missouri) and Caroline Schaumann (Emory University) are also the editors of Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (2012).

Essays dealing with the question of how "sense of place" is constructed, in a variety of locations and media.