Any attempt to write a history of the libretto is fraught with paradox. Almost without exception, a text is the starting point for any opera. Indeed, before Mozart, and often after, the libretto was normally complete before the composer put pen to paper, for all that it might then be revised according to the musical and other demands made upon it. As we shall see, its poetry usually had quite precise musical implications. Moreover, in early opera the poet was normally the prime mover in the operatic enterprise, not just by devising the subject and fleshing it out with appropriate words, but also given his often standard role as director of the production. The libretto was itself the public face of opera in terms of the artefacts that survive to record a given performance: libretti were usually printed for general consumption inside or outside the theatre, whereas musical scores were, on the whole, regarded as more ephemeral performance materials, to be adopted, adapted, and disposed of at will. Poets also acted as the chief ideologues of opera, promoting and defending the genre against its detractors and inserting it into broader literary and cultural debates. In a very real sense, the history of the libretto is the history of opera tout court.1

The ‘old regimes’ in Europe marked happy occasions such as births, birthdays, and weddings as conspicuously as they could, often in a series of sumptuous events. For the general public, there might be street processions, races, jousts, and religious rites made special by richly decorated liturgical spaces and extraordinary music. The nobility, however, expected private festivities suited to their place in society. They held banquets and balls for each other and often prepared staged entertainments. Across Europe, the nature of such private amusements varied from palace to palace and court to court; but it is as one of the varieties of occasional celebrations at court that opera began, borrowing and transforming different features from them. It shared with them song, dance, instrumental music, and poetic texts delivered by costumed figures. A set of songs and dances could be held together loosely by a theme. Recited poems and solo songs could pepper a pantomimic ballet; musical intermedi could lighten a spoken play. Any representation could focus on astonishing stage machines – flying dragons and chariots for gods and goddesses, sudden transformations of scenery, or the spouting of fountains. Poetic recitations or musical tableaux could justify or merely adorn these technical wonders. Although opera took on features of court spectacle, it never displaced the other forms. Not only were its special requirements onerous – a stable of singers with the time and ability to memorise and deliver extended roles – but it also demanded acceptance as poetic drama.

The chapter outlines the origins and development of philosophical hermeneutics and argues for its relevance for biblical interpretation today.

Methods of biblical historical criticism are interpretive strategies analyzing texts and significance and the infinite contexts and contacts of history. Examining the histories of individual biblical writings, noncanonical writings, and biblical canons encompass a variety of endeavors deployed in limitless configurations.

The birth of opera around 1600 is intimately tied to singers. Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini are known not only as composers of the first complete published operas but also as superb vocalists. In October 1600, as part of the Florentine celebrations for the wedding of Maria de’ Medici to Henry IV of France, Peri starred as Orfeo in his own setting of Ottavio Rinuccini’s Euridice.1 On stage with him were Caccini’s daughters, Francesca (1587–after 1641) and Settimia (1591–c. 1660), who, instead of performing Peri’s music, sang the settings their father had insisted upon inserting. In future years, Francesca would go on to be celebrated for both her vocal prowess and her compositional acumen: she was the first woman to compose an opera, La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola di Alcina (1625).2 The spread of opera thus cannot be separated from the talented performers who brought the works to light on the stages of courts and public theatres over the course of the century.

This chapter examines how historical and critical modalities of reading sacred scripture became central to modern biblical studies. It examines what “criticism” was, whence it came, what it did, and which critiques it sustained, before considering its prospects for future historical and literary analysis of the Bible.

This essay looks at the acts of saving that unfold in the maritime spaces of the Mediterranean as they are represented in Helon Habila’s 2018 novel Travellers. Habila’s radical proposition links the sea crossings undertaken by refugees to slavery. But rather than positing violence against black people as what structurally ties the refugees to the slaves, Habila’s novel suggests it is saving and its politics that establish continuities between slavery and the so-called refugee crisis. Probing eighteenth-century insurance discourses, I argue that the paradigm of saving that emerged from those discourses, can be found and operates in the Mediterranean scenes of rescue. Looking at what happens in the Mediterranean through the lens of the logic of slavery derived from the eighteenth century allows not only to discern how contemporary acts of saving thrive, politically and economically, on the utility of the refugees’ life rather than death but also to reveal a set of other significant and related claims: that refugee deaths in the Mediterranean are not exceptional; that structural unsaveability is a form of border control; and that the maritime borders redefine refugees as those who fail to arrive.

In the predecessor to this volume, John Barton observed that the interpretation of the Bible is never finished because new readers in a new time will inevitably ask new questions. Now almost a quarter century later, this is as true today as it was in 1998. Yet, it is not only that the results of the interpretive task change but that the concept and nature of interpretation itself undergoes transformation. Barton’s volume already noted the significant paradigm shifts in the field that were unfolding in the 1990s, in which the dominance of historical-critical methods as nearly synonymous with the idea of “biblical scholarship” was giving way to a range of competing approaches, several of which claimed affinity with older, pre-Enlightenment approaches. However, in his own essay in that volume, he also cautioned against a tendency to dismiss historical criticism (or, as he prefers, biblical criticism) too readily, making a strong case for the ongoing importance of the specific kinds of questions it poses to the text.

‘Public opera’ famously commenced in Venice in 1637 at the Teatro S. Cassiano, owned by the Tron family, with Andromeda (libretto by Benedetto Ferrari, c. 1603–1681; music by Francesco Manelli, 1595–1667). In this account, that theatre’s foundational role in the history of opera scarcely matters to the author, for the most important opera theatre in Venice in 1663 was SS. Giovanni e Paolo. The other opera theatre, S. Salvatore (also known as S. Luca), had only presented its third season and, quite possibly, its first one of excellence. (The man in charge that year was Vettor Grimani Calergi, cousin to Giovanni Grimani, and a seasoned connoisseur of music, theatre, and singers).

This chapter reconsiders chattel slavery’s legacy in contemporary stories of migration, highlighting the inadequacies of reading these works through memories of the Middle passage alone, while analyzing the insidious new forms of enslavement that African boat narratives expose. When read through the prescient work of Frantz Fanon, these stories present us with nothing less than revolutionaries of the crossing; those whose resounding “yes to life,” in the words of Frantz Fanon, is a deafening rejection of European anti-blackness, challenging border logic and the political machinations of inhospitality for a world in crisis. Migration, especially in today’s climate crisis, is above all else a human impulse that challenges the logic of inequality that slavery and colonialism have cast upon black lives, offering up movement as the dynamic imperative of life today.