In Erasmus' time, Catholic critics circulated the tag, 'Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched it.' The idea that Erasmus was a 'pre-reformer' and that his theology is best studied in the context of Luther’s thought has been perpetuated by modern historians. Protestant theologians, of course, capitalized on the doctrinal differences between the two men rather than on their common ground. This approach prompted Ernst-Wilhelm Kohls to accuse them of using Erasmus as a 'dark foil against which their own hero could shine more brightly'. Alternatively, Erasmus' religious thought has been viewed in the context of Christian humanism, which seems to me a more productive way of examining his theology. In either case, however, Erasmus' lack of a systematic approach has raised serious questions for the would-be interpreter and has led some historians to deny him the title of theologian altogether. Any investigation of his theological concepts must therefore begin with the subject of Erasmus' own claim to the title and the testimony of his contemporaries on that point. Although Erasmus’ professional status may be in doubt, it cannot be disputed that he engaged in activities that come within the purview of a theologian. He formulated a curriculum for theology students; he edited, translated, paraphrased, and expounded biblical and patristic texts; he commented on doctrinal questions; and he offered spiritual advice in devotional tracts. From these writings emerge the main points and general features of his religious thought.

Something odd happens to the popular Turkish Tale in Byron's Mazeppa, a poem that is rarely discussed because the accident of its publication in June 1819 meant that it was almost completely overshadowed by the first cantos of Don Juan. Following the verse narratives of The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos and The Siege of Corinth, Mazeppa's octosyllabic couplets, triplets and quatrains sweep its readers along in a pulsating adventure story. In Mazeppa, however, the thrills and spills of another set of fugitive exploits are mockingly undercut by a narrative frame which draws attention to boredom in the audience. King Charles requests the tale but, as we discover at the end of the poem, he falls asleep almost as soon as it commences:

Romantic egotism (Mazeppa’s pride in being ‘haunted . . . With the vain shadow of the past’, 229–30) comes up against a more recalcitrant physical domain. King Charles demonstrates what Byron suspected of his own and all writing – that it was a literature of exhaustion.

My essay is concerned with the overtures (sinfonie) and preludes; the storms and battle scenes; the stage music accompanying marching armies, religious ceremonies, dances, and balls; ballets, and shorter episodes of pantomime; and certain other episodes where the burden of the musical argument is carried by the orchestra. This is the music by means of which Verdi places his operas in their social frame; since so much of it functions as sounding décor and sounding spectacle, it provides some of the most thought-provoking insights into how he wished his operas to be staged; it also forms the locus for some of his boldest experiments in exploring the balance between “realism” and stylization in the operatic medium.

Verdi's overtures enjoy a life of their own – that is, independent of the operas to which they belong – less securely than those of the German tradition, less securely indeed than Rossini's overtures. One reason is certainly that they are less firmly rooted in a Classical, sonata-based symphonic ideal. Verdi knew those German overtures, and occasional traces of their influence are discernible; but in general his sinfonie occupy a space fascinatingly poised between the symphonic ideal and the idea of a potpourri, a medley or parade of themes from the body of the opera. What gives them their distinctive Verdian character is the manner in which the themes are set out: the formal framework plays on our sense of movement, alternating kinetic or transient episodes with episodes that seem suspended in time, in a manner that is surely evocative of an operatic scena. And though they may fall into several movements, they typically highlight a slow cantabile and a rousing Allegro.

In 1997, when a friend of Andrew Cunanan wanted to defend the gay serial killer's posthumous reputation, Byron helped him to make his case:

For this writer, invoking Byron raised Cunanan from the sordid world of drugs, violence, and queer sex with which the media surrounded him. Byron appears in his letter as an icon of high culture, a canonical British poet whose works appear in 'beautiful' books and are appreciated by sensitive men. While it would certainly be possible to read a gay subtext into this letter, in which giving a young man Byron's poems on his coming of age introduces a gay cultural past, the writer says nothing about sexuality, either his, Cunanan's, or Byron's. Instead, the gift of Byron's poems simply proves Cunanan's good character; a man who could like Byron and encourage others in that admiration could not be all bad.

Introduction

After the mid-nineteenth century, it became a stereotype that asylum inmates imagined themselves as the omnipotent Napoleon - but also the brilliant Byron. Extreme as it seems, this desire for vicarious experience, this tendency to translate one's life into the idealization of another, is common - so common that it led Albert Camus to define biography itself as 'nostalgia for other people's lives'. Camus notes that our fascination with the careers of the famous stems from our belief that such lives have strong plots, while our own seem fragmentary and directionless. However, since even the careers of celebrities are not as neatly plotted as we could wish, the production of that 'nostalgia' has required an unholy alliance between fiction and biography. Lord Byron knew this as well as perhaps anyone in history. In writing his own story and seeming to live what he wrote, he made it impossible to discuss his work apart from his life. The vignettes and anecdotes he relished and promulgated produced a tale unified around themes of sex, violence, genius, and adventure, or - in the case of hostile biographers - sex, violence, cruelty, and hypocrisy. But in either case, the indivisibility of the life and work explains much of the delight and frustration to be found in the immense canon of Byron Biography, everything from laurel wreaths to slash-and-burn character assassination, from factual accounts to encounters beyond the grave, such as Quevedo Redivivus's A Spiritual Interview with Lord Byron (1840) and Amanda Prantera's Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 Years after His Lordship's Death (1987).

The Eighteenth Century was the first to be mythologised as a century. This happened almost as soon as it was over. Byron gives us the reason for this:

Byron means here that in seven years he has witnessed Napoleon's surrender, escape from Elba, defeat at Waterloo, and death on St Helena, together with the restoration of the old dynasties that ruled Europe before the French Revolution; but for him, as for us, these changes are all part of a larger single change. For virtually all Europeans, the bewildering events from the Fall of the Bastille in 1789, to the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, shaped and symbolised a decisive break between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history. When the cultural events initiated by or accompanying these socio-political changes came to be retrospectively characterised as a single phenomenon called 'The Romantic Movement', then it was natural that this 'movement' should be contrasted with 'The Eighteenth Century' which itself was seen as a single age.

In Verdi's operas words are set to music in order to produce drama, to establish communication between the stage and the audience. Words and music are never entirely separate or completely independent domains, and therefore can never be fully understood in isolation. This aesthetic principle and its interpretive corollary have not always been obvious to Verdians, but now seem to be accepted by most. However, as soon as attention turns to the ways in which the aesthetic principle has been translated into practice, which involves applying the hermeneutic corollary to concrete examples, matters become more complex. There is no simple answer to the question of how drama is produced in Verdi's operas. Communication between the stage and the audience can be established at any given moment in many different ways. Moreover, both the concept and the practice of drama evolve through time. This means not only that Verdi's ideas on how communication might be established changed during his very long compositional career, but also that our ideas of drama might be significantly different from Verdi's and from those of his original audiences.

The paths to drama in Verdi's operas are not infinite, however, since interaction of words and music is always filtered through a set of conventions. Far from being a constricting presence – and notwithstanding what Verdi might have said about the matter in his letters – conventions make theatrical communication possible, and dialectic engagement with them seems to have been the composer's attitude through most of his career. Much of this chapter will therefore be devoted to operatic conventions that impinge on the relationship between words and music. I have decided to concentrate on three areas that best demonstrate Verdian conventions and their evolution: the interaction between text and music within the movements that constitute an operatic number; the so-called “parola scenica” and other moments of especially important communicative significance; and word painting.

The general councils of the medieval Catholic Church were instruments for crisis management. This was particularly true in the early fifteenth century, when the church was divided by two, and then three, rival claimants to the papal throne. Unlike chapter meetings and episcopal visitations, councils were not a routine part of the church’s self-governance. When the Council of Trent finally convened in 1545, it was only the nineteenth general council in the long history of the Catholic Church.

The crises that provoked councils might be internal to the Catholic Church, such as the rise of the Joachite heresy, or stimulated by external pressures such as the Turkish invasion of Europe. They might touch on matters of the church’s doctrine or of its practice. Early councils articulated the dogmas of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ. Later councils decided on the place of icons in Christian worship, defined the doctrine of transubstantiation, and ended the scandal of a divided church.

Popes were often reluctant to take the risks inherent in the convocation of a general council. They were painfully aware that the Council of Constance had deposed three competing popes and installed a fourth. By the time of Luther, however, it was generally conceded, even by theologians who were jealous defenders of papal power, that under certain circumstances the convocation of a general council might be the church’s only recourse to resolve a crisis that had proved impossible to resolve in any other way.

In the opening lines of the third canto of The Corsair (1814), Byron sets the mood for his narrative of the tragic death of Conrad's faithful wife Medora, by means of a sunset evocation of Greece, as the radiant sun of antiquity sinks over a land no longer consecrated to the antique spirit. The fact that Byron 'borrowed' the bravura sunset passage in its entirety (1-54) from his 'unpublished (though printed) poem' (CPW, iii, 448), The Curse of Minerva, suggests that he was particularly wedded to the sublimity of sunset as a melancholy symbol of modern Greece. In the latter poem, the same lines introduce another betrayed female, the battered and insulted goddess Minerva, who curses Lord Elgin for despoiling her temple, as the shades of evening lengthen over the plundered ruins of the Parthenon. Byron's recycling of his lines suggests a conscious connection between the values of Conrad's apolitical love for the 'housewifely' Medora, and the philhellenic ideology flagged by Minerva.

'Louis XIII being aged only nine, Parliament gave the regency to his mother Marie de Médicis. Intrigue and ignominy were rife at the court . . .' ['Louis XIII n'ayant que neuf ans, le Parlement donna la régence ê Marie deMédicis sa mère. L'intrigue et la bassesse régnaient ê la cour . . .' (OJ 3)]. So wrote the nine-year-old Gustave Flaubert, no doubt identifying with the boy king, in a text dedicated to his own mother for her name-day on 28 July 1831. With this, the first text in the new Pléiade edition of Flaubert's early works, begins a lifelong passion for history and historiography. Encouraged from 1835 onwards by his teacher Chéruel, Flaubert devotes much of his early writing to historical subjects, with a preference for the Middle Ages, and an obvious fascination too for Ancient Rome.

Yet what strikes any reader of the early work is the sheer range of subjects and styles to which this extraordinarily precocious writer turns his pen. Alongside the historical stories and dramas, we find philosophical and moral tales, journalistic and critical essays, tales of the fantastic, mystery plays, and realist or psychological stories. To a scatological early piece on constipation, we can add the bilious humour of an 1837 sketch, owing much to Balzac, in which the young writer derides the habits and the clichés of the office clerk (Une leçon d’histoire naturelle: genre commis).

Flaubert is the foremost nineteenth-century French innovator in prose style. But he had pioneering predecessors and like-minded contemporaries: the century was one in which the best writers treated prose as an experimental medium. Its relationship to poetry was both manipulated in practice and discussed in debates that became ideological as well as aesthetic. There is no sharp chronological dividing line. In the first decade or so of the nineteenth century, prose works such as Constant's Adolphe (1816) were still using a spare, maxim-studded style that owes much to the deft economy and bareness of the best seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers. However, a new kind of prose had been emerging as from the end of the eighteenth century: Rousseau's Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782) has been hailed as the work that began to move towards the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century, not only because of its often wistful introspection but also because of the fluid, rhythmic style in which it celebrated both thought and 'nature'. And in the same period that Adolphe was being composed, Chateaubriand was writing lush narratives like René (1802), reliant on a vocabulary designed to evoke an undefined awe ('immense', 'confused', 'majestic'), on sighing cadences, on self-pitying exclamations and on extended similes. Whilst some of these similes are successful, others strike us now, at least, as clumsily overelaborate (such as one in which Chateaubriand compares the setting sun to the pendulum of the clock of the centuries slowly oscillating in a golden fluid). However that may be, Chateaubriand did have a 'poetic' conception of prose, and his stress on the imprecision of feelings (le vague des passions) bore fruit.

Huldrych Zwingli was born in January 1484, just six weeks after Luther. His life and ministry developed differently from Luther’s and some of the differences in context, education, and experience are factors in explaining the differences in their ministry and theology. Swiss patriotism influenced Zwingli as a boy, as Swiss humanism influenced him as a young man. His education in Vienna and Basel introduced him to scholasticism as well as to humanism, with the study of the writings of Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and Johannes Duns Scotus. The influence of the old way (via antiqua) contrasts with the influence on Luther of the modern way (via moderna). Zwingli was ordained in 1506 and served for a decade as priest in Glarus. His patriotism was expressed in his earliest surviving work, The Ox, an attack on Swiss mercenaries fighting for foreign powers. His experience of war as a chaplain deepened this opposition, especially the battle at Marignano (1515), in which thousands died fighting as mercenaries against the French. While at Glarus, Zwingli met Erasmus, who had a decisive impact on him. His crucial turning 'to Christ and to scripture' dates from this period. As a result, his reading shifted from the classics to the fathers, not least Augustine, and scripture.

After two years in Einsiedeln, a great centre of pilgrimage and Marian devotion, Zwingli was called to Zurich. His ministry there began on 1 January 1519 and lasted till his death in the battle of Kappel on 11 October 1531. In that period his influence went beyond Zurich to other cities in Switzerland and south Germany. His writings often reflect his engagement with supporters and opponents, especially conservatives and radicals in Zurich and Luther in Wittenberg. His early death meant that his theology was mediated in large part by others, especially Bullinger.

Fifteenth-century Europe viewed Jan Huss and the Hussites as heretics, while the latter perceived themselves as reformers. Conflict was inevitable. Huss was burned at the stake in 1415 and crusades were dispatched to suppress his recalcitrant followers. Despite these adversities, Hussitism aimed at reforming church and society. This reform programme codified its goals in the 'Four Articles of Prague', promulgated in 1420: free preaching of the Word of God, communion in both kinds for all believers, elimination of ecclesiastical secular power, and the punishment of serious sins. Free preaching existed virtually everywhere in Hussite Bohemia and utraquism - both bread and wine for all believers - began in 1414. Divesting ecclesiastical wealth became a consequence of the Hussite wars, and by the 1420s an office was established to deal with punishing sin. Across the broad expanse of Hussite theology, these 'Four Articles' functioned as a reform focus. Hussite reform can be fully understood only within an eschatological consciousness. This awareness can be detected principally within the radical dimensions of the Hussite movement.

In its earliest stages, the fifteenth-century reformation in Bohemia was neither doctrinal nor theological, but moral. This can be traced to a reforming tendency in the fourteenth century associated with Jan Milíč of Kromĕříž, Matĕj of Janov, and others. Huss stood in that tradition. Eventually, doctrinal reform and theology merged with moral renewal in an effort to reform the church ‘in head and in members’. Reform advanced along several theological fronts, but three are especially important: sacraments, scripture, and soteriology. Before turning to these issues, it is important to note that the guiding principle for Hussite theology and reform lay in an idea called ‘the law of God.’

It would be a mistake to suppose that all theologians who remained loyal to Rome during the first three decades of the Reformation were exclusively engaged in polemical activity against the 'new' gospel. For many academic theologians, perhaps for most, business would have gone on much as usual. But at the very least, especially for those in lands most affected, the religious upheavals altered fundamentally the context in which their theology was done. At the same time, their ranks were swelled considerably by those without academic appointments. Bishops, chaplains, members of religious orders lacking university connections - even kings, dukes, and lesser laypeople - all took up the pen in defence of traditional religion. For Catholics as much as for Protestants, theology became too important to be left to the divines.

The widely differing backgrounds of the Catholic controversialists alert us to the fact that their theological approaches differed as widely, and it is not surprising that the clamour of voices that would make themselves heard in the debates at Trent (Thomist and Dominican, Scotist and Franciscan, Augustinianist and Augustinian, to name but the loudest) could also be heard in earlier decades. It is no longer possible for us to speak of ‘pre- Tridentine Catholic theology’ in the singular, as Lämmer could in the middle of the nineteenth century; rather, we have to deal with a number of theologies and their exponents.