Volunteer bands and local identity in Caithness at the time of the second Reform Act

Caithness lay outside the national railway network in 1868, but as this article demonstrates, used the band music of its local volunteer military units, embedded within a wider contemporary British context of imperial music-making, as a means to express and shape local political identities. The second Reform Act of 1867, enacted in Scotland by the Representation of the People (Scotland) Act 1868, prompted wider reimagining of what it meant to be a citizen of Scotland and Britain. Regular references to civic bands in contemporary newspapers and carefully posed photographs in local archives provide evidence for the popularity of Silver and Brass bands connected with the Caithness Volunteer movement. As they marched around towns, villages and countryside, especially around the time of the national elections and local by-elections of 1868–9, their music created powerfully affective soundscapes that connected traditional local identities with the modern British fiscal-military state, helping people to imagine their place as British citizens in a period of widening political engagement. The county’s band music provides a microhistory that allows exploration of contrasts between rural and civic patterns of political behaviour in this period.Peer reviewe

Book trade catalogues : from bookselling tool to book historical source

Publisher PD

MediaNet

This article reflects upon the director’s experience of directing Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride with a student opera company (Byre Opera) in June 2015, and in particular insights gained about the topical issues raised by this work. Discussion of this particular production is laid alongside reviews of other, professional productions of this piece in the same year, which reveal a range of possible reactions to the potential for Gluck’s composition to be read as reflecting contemporary anxieties and concerns. The article engages with an earlier essay by Michael Ewans in SMT 9:2, 2015, developing and qualifying suggestions made by Ewans about the classical framing of Gluck’s opera to make the work relatable for modern audiences. It concludes that the classical location is used to position a very specific and not necessarily trans-historical set of topical and political resonances; this places a gap between mimetic representation and reality that should be carefully considered by any company hoping to produce the work using a contemporary realist staging.PostprintPeer reviewe

Publicity and its uses. Lost books as revealed in newspaper advertisements in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic

Publisher PD

News, neighbours, and commerce : newspaper advertising in the information culture of the Dutch Republic

The Dutch did not invent the newspaper – their genius lay, as in so many aspects of industry, in the refinement of the mechanisms of production and sale so as to maximise efficiency and profits. One of their imaginative contributions was the early adoption of paid advertising. The first advertisements appear in Dutch papers within years of their establishment, and by the middle of the century, many tradesmen and professional groups were beginning to recognise the benefit of using the newspaper to advertise their goods and services. Increasingly, too, the advertisements were mingled together with various sorts of public announcements, placed either by official bodies or private citizens: the notification of an upcoming market, appeal for help in the search for a missing child or fugitive servant, the offer of a reward for the return of lost or stolen goods. This article focuses on these public announcements; more specifically, it investigates the contribution made by newspaper advertising to the domestic information culture of the Dutch Republic.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

What was published in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic?

The seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was a highly literate society. The Dutch produced, and consumed, more printed items per head than any other people in Europe. Books were imported from all the major European centres of production, and exported to markets the Dutch soon came to dominate. In the seventeenth century Amsterdam was already ‘the bookshop of the world’. Yet there has never previously been an attempt to estimate the full extent of print production undertaken by the Dutch printing industry. Building on the foundations of the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN), we undertake such a systematic evaluation here, beginning with classes of print excluded from the terms of reference of the STCN, such as broadsheets, newspapers and printed diplomatic despatches. We then assess how many books will be located in libraries abroad not included in the STCN survey. In a methodological innovation, we also attempt to reconstruct the population of books known to have been printed, but not found in libraries today: ‘lost books’ identified in auction catalogues, publishers’ stock catalogues and newspaper advertisements. Finally we integrate information from archival resources, which helps us offer a survey of the total output of two genres of print extremely susceptible to loss, government ordinances and printing for universities. In total, we postulate that, at a conservative estimate, Dutch printing houses published at least 357,500 editions: over five times the number registered in the STCN. This higher figure should be the starting point for any attempt to examine the economic structures of the print trade, and the impact of print on Dutch society.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Book trade catalogues: from bookselling tool to book historical source

No abstract available

After Peter Burke: the popularity of ancient historians, 1450-1600

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record.The histories of ancient Greece and Rome are part of a shared European heritage, and a foundation for many modern Western social and cultural traditions. Their printing and circulation during the Renaissance helped to shape the identities of individual nations, and create different reading publics. Yet we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the forms in which works of Greek and Roman history were published in the first centuries of the handpress age, the relationship between the ideas contained within these texts and the books as material objects, and thus the precise nature of the changes they effected in early modern European culture and society. This article provides the groundwork for a reassessment of the place of ancient history in the early modern world. Using new, digital resources to reappraise existing scholarship, it offers a fresh evaluation of the publication of the ancient historians from the inception of print to 1600, revealing important differences that alter our understanding of particular authors, texts, and trends, and suggesting directions for further research. It also models the research possibilities of large-scale digital catalogues and databases, and highlights the possibilities (and pitfalls) of these resources