By examining theoretical debates about the nature of nineteenth-century German opera and analyzing the genre's development and its international dissemination, this book shows German opera's entanglement with national identity formation. The thorough study of German opera debates in the first half of the nineteenth century highlights the esthetic and ideological significance of this relatively neglected repertoire, and helps to contextualize Richard Wagner's attempts to define German opera and to gain a reputation as the German opera composer par excellence. By interpreting Wagner's esthetic endeavors as a continuation of previous campaigns for the emancipation of German opera, this book adds an original and significant perspective to discussions about Wagner's relation to German nationalism.

In the mid-1780s Bentham drafted his first sustained discussions of political economy and public finance for Projet Matiere (itself part of Projet d'un corps de loix complet). Those discussions are now lost, but the corresponding marginal contents open this volume, followed by three closely related appendices. The volume continues with Defence of Usury, first published 1787, which was well received, quickly translated, and established some reputation for Bentham in political economy. In 1790, whilst preparing a second edition, Bentham drafted the raft of additional materials included here in five appendices. At the same time he began Manual of Political Economy, an introductory handbook which he never finished, while the surviving text appears here, supplemented by seven appendices. In March 1793 Bentham reacted to press reports of the Irish Budget by composing A Protest against Law Taxes, a trenchant critique of the taxation of legal proceedings, and the denial of justice to the poor, which was printed in 1793, published in 1795, and extended in 1816, and which completes the volume.

Motivated by a theology that declared missionary work was independent of secular colonial pursuits, Protestant missionaries from Germany operated in ways that contradict current and prevailing interpretations of nineteenth-century missionary work. As a result of their travels, these missionaries contributed to Germany's colonial culture. Because of their theology of Christian universalism, they worked against the bigoted racialism and ultra-nationalism of secular German empire-building. Heavenly Fatherland provides a detailed political and cultural analysis of missionaries, mission societies, mission intellectuals, and missionary supporters. Combining case studies from East Africa with studies of the metropole, this book demonstrates that missionaries' ideas about race and colonialism influenced ordinary Germans' experience of globalization and colonialism at the same time that the missionaries shaped colonial governance. By bringing together religious and colonial history, the book opens new avenues of inquiry into Christian participation in colonialism. During the Age of Empire, German missionaries promoted an internationalist vision of the modern world that aimed to create a multinational, multiracial "heavenly Fatherland" spread across the globe.

The modern research university originated in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, largely due to the creation and expansion of the teaching and research laboratory. The universities and the sciences underwent a laboratory revolution that fundamentally changed the nature of both. This revolutionary development began in chemistry, where Justus Liebig is credited with systematically employing his students in his ongoing research during the 1830s. Later, this development spread to other fields, including the social sciences and the humanities. The consequences for the universities were colossal. The expansion of the laboratories demanded extensive new building programs, reshaping the outlook of the university. The social structure of the university also diversified because of this laboratory expansion, while what it meant to be a scientist changed dramatically. This volume explores the spatial, social, and cultural dimensions of the rise of the modern research laboratory within universities and their consequent reshaping.

In 1588, the Spanish Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra published a history of the English Reformation, which he continued to revise until his death in 1611. Spencer J. Weinreich's translation is the first English edition of the History, one fully alive to its metamorphoses over two decades. Weinreich's introduction explores the text's many dimensions-propaganda for the Spanish Armada, anti-Protestant polemic, Jesuit hagiography, consolation amid tribulation-and assesses Ribadeneyra as a historian. The extensive annotations anchor Ribadeneyra's narrative in the historical record and reconstruct his sources, methods, and revisions. The History, long derided as mere propaganda, emerges as remarkable evidence of the centrality of historiography to the intellectual, theological, and political battles of early modern Europe.

Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400-1700) addresses historians and literary scholars. It aims to recapture oral culture in a variety of literary and non-literary sources, tracking the echo of women's voices, on trial, or bantering and gossiping in literary works, and recapturing those of princes and magistrates, townsmen, villagers, mariners, bandits, and songsmiths. Almost all medieval and early modern writing was marked by the oral. Spoken words and turns of phrase are bedded in writings, and the mental habits of a speaking world shaped texts. Writing also shaped speech; the oral and the written zones had a porous, busy boundary. Cross-border traffic is central to this study, as is the power, range, utility, and suppleness of speech. Contributors are Matthias Bahr, Richard Blakemore, Michael Braddick, Rosanna Cantavella, Thomas V. Cohen, Gillian Colclough, Jan Dumolyn, Susana Gala Pellicer, Jelle Haemers, Marcus Harmes, Elizabeth Horodowich, Carolina Losada, Virginia Reinburg, Anne Regent-Susini, Joseph T. Snow, Sonia Suman, Lesley K. Twomey and Liv Helene Willumsen.

The De Europae dissidiis et republica (On Conflicts in Europe and on the Commonwealth) is a collection published by Vives in 1526 that has been called his "summa politica." It contains five letters, to Henry VIII and three prelates including Cardinal Wolsey; a Lucian-style underworld satire on European wars and the Turkish threat; and Latinizations of two political speeches by Isocrates. It counsels the pursuit of peace following Christian principles, but it also explores the possibility of an aggressive war against the Turks as the means of unifying and saving European Christendom. It urges the calling of a council to deal with Luther. We present critical Latin texts and, for the first time, English translations, with introduction and notes.

Surely, Christian history in Germany principally followed the outlines of a Catholic and Protestant narrative, right? On the contrary, for Hesse, Hanau, and Fulda this dominant framework largely obscures the historical experience of most Christians, specifically rural Christians. The rural Christian narrative, animated for more than a millennium by agricultural and communal forces, principally followed an indigenous path characterized by long-term surges and setbacks. This path eventually bifurcated not in the 1517-1648 period but rather in the wake of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and it did so not into Catholic and Protestant storylines but rather into those Christian corpora (Gemeinden) which maintained their local civil-sacred unity into the twentieth century and those which lost that unity after succumbing to Westphalia's divisive effects.

Circa AD 750, both the Islamic world and western Europe underwent political revolutions; these raised to power, respectively, the 'Abbasid and Carolingian dynasties. The eras thus inaugurated were similar not only in their chronology, but also in the foundational role each played in its respective civilization, forming and shaping enduring religious, cultural, and societal institutions. The 'Abbasid and Carolingian Empires: Studies in Civilizational Formation, is the first collected volume ever dedicated specifically to comparative Carolingian-'Abbasid history. In it, editor D.G. Tor brings together essays from some of the leading historians in order to elucidate some of the parallel developments in each of these civilizations, many of which persisted not only throughout the Middle Ages, but to the present day. Contributors are: Michael Cook, Jennifer R. Davis, Robert Gleave, Eric J. Goldberg, Minoru Inaba, Jurgen Paul, Walter Pohl, D.G. Tor and Ian Wood.