bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Return of the repressed: The prima donna from Hoffmann's Tales to Offenbach's Contes
Authors: Hadlock Heather
Published: August 2008

The operatic diva, a singer of strange songs, and too often a turbulent, unkind girl, haunted the nineteenth-century imagination, as evidenced by the musical tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and numerous retellings of those tales in theatre, ballet and opera. Each adaptation of Hoffmann's ‘Rat Krespel’, ‘Der Sandmann’ and ‘Don Juan’ reflects an ambivalent attitude towards women performers, whose potent voices make them simultaneously desirable and fearsome. How do these stories about female singers contrive to contain and manage the singing woman’s authority? And how does the prima donna's voice repeatedly make itself heard, eluding and overcoming narrative attempts to shape or contain its turbulent noise?

Let me begin with an excerpt from ‘Rat Krespel’ (1818), which might serve as a parable for relationships between female singers and male music lovers in the Romantic imagination. Krespel, a young German musician, travelled in Italy and was fortunate enough to win the heart of a celebrated diva, Angela, whose name seemed only appropriate to her heavenly voice. Unfortunately, her personality was less than heavenly, and when she was not actually singing he found her violent whims and demands for attention very trying. One day, as he stood playing his violin:

[Angela] embraced her husband, overwhelmed him with sweet and languishing glances, and rested her pretty head on his shoulder. But Krespel, carried away into the world of music, continued to play on until the walls echoed again; thus he chanced to touch the Signora somewhat ungently with his arm and the fiddle bow.
Discourse and the film text: Four readings ofCarmen
Authors: Leicester H. Marshall
Published: August 2008

‘Quoi du reste’, to paraphrase Derrida on Hegel inGlas, ‘ici, maintenant, d'uneCarmen?’ What's left ofCarmenhere and now? Aside from its intrinsic interest, the question seems worth asking in light of a bias that recent treatments of opera – particularly those influenced by poststrucuralist theory – seem to betray. The most prominent, Catherine Clément'sOpera, or The Undoing of Women, Michel Poizat'sThe Angel's Cryand Jeremy Tambling'sOpera, Ideology, and Film, regard opera as an institution rather than as a body of texts. Each of the authors, to my mind at least, allows a prior structure or structures – the systemic presence of male domination and its construction of women in society, a quasi-Lacanian understanding of unconscious fantasy, the bourgeois construction of operatic experience – to constrain what operas, and opera, can mean. They thus produce what are in effect reception studies or analyses of the audience, which is perhaps why they operate at some distance from the detail of the texts, musical or verbal, of the operas they analyse.
‘A wall of darkness dividing the world’: Blackness and whiteness in Louis Gruenberg's The Emperor Jones
Authors: Metzer David
Published: August 2008

In Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, Brutus Jones undertakes a fatal flight through the jungle, near the end of which he stumbles into a clearing and ‘incoherently mumbles’: ‘What is – dis place? Seems like – seems like I ben heah befo’.’ He's right – he has been there. Jones's frantic run has brought him full-circle, leading him to roughly the same place where he began. However, Jones retraces his steps in more man just O'Neill's drama: he repeatedly rushes through die same jungle in the numerous adaptations of the play that followed its successful 1920 première. The first progeny of die Emperor – Louis Gruenberg's opera performed at the Metropolitan and Dudley Murphey's film starring Paul Robeson – appeared in 1933. Surprisingly, given die dated and, to present-day audiences, offensive racial depictions, the work is still being translated into other media, including Sven-David Sandström's 1985 opera and a 1986 dance version by Donald McKayle set to music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Despina, Cupid and the pastoral mode of Così fan tutte
Authors: Goehring Edmund J.
Published: August 2008

One of Così fan tutte's more amusing episodes occurs in the first-act finale when Despina marches on stage disguised as a doctor and, in a spoof on Mesmerism, produces a magnet to heal the stricken Albanians. She introduces this little scenario with a ridiculous salutation: ‘Salvete, amabiles, bones puelles’. The source of this mangled Latin is interesting: it is present in Mozart's autograph, but not in Da Ponte's libretto, where the Latin appears in its proper form, ‘bonae puellae’. Only two words, to be sure, but they have attracted attention because of the rare glimpse they offer of Mozart's direct intervention in a Da Ponte text, of a parting of ways between composer and librettist. Mozart's change has traditionally been interpreted not as an error at all, but as a kind of ‘correction’ of Despina's character: since the servant Despina lacks the status and education to know proper Latin, Mozart portrays her in a way that is true to her station. As one commentator says, she ‘understands only half of what she says; she imitates what she has picked up from frequent doctor's visits to her masters’.
On the dramaturgy of Zemlinsky's Eine florentinische Tragödie
Authors: Bek Mikuláŝ
Published: August 2008

Finally, love, – love retranslated again into nature! Not the love of a ‘cultured maiden’! No Senta-sentimentality! But love as fate, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel, – and thus true to nature! Love, which in its expedients is the war of the sexes, and in its basis their mortal hatred.
TheRingand the conditions of interpretation: Wagner's writing, 1848 to 1852
Authors: Treadwell James
Published: August 2008

It is sometimes remarked that Wagner's prose works would not be of much interest if their author had not also turned his creative energies in a very different direction. What is not often observed, however, is the influence this truism has exerted on critical approaches to the theoretical writings. A tacit consensus dictates that these texts be seen as marginalia, ancillary documents whose value lies in the light they shed on immeasurably more important achievements. We have inherited the prose works in the form of useful gnomic tags:Gesamtkunstwerk, ‘endless melody’, ‘deeds of music made visible’ – fragments of text extracted from their context and pressed into service as authoritative pronouncements about the operas. More extensive analysis has usually been concerned with the relation between the written theories and the works they are understood to describe. There is a powerful hierarchy implicidy at work: text (theory) is subservient to music (practice); the former is at best an interpretative tool.
Syphilis, sin and the social order: Richard Wagner'sParsifal
Authors: Hutcheon Linda , Hutcheon Michael
Published: August 2008

In the age of AIDS, few would be surprised to find sexuality connected to suffering and disease; in the age of syphilis – from its arrival in Europe in 1492 to today, when it is on the rise once again – the connection is equally strong, though many of us have forgotten this. The brief respite offered by the discovery of a cure for syphilis (through the use of penicillin) in the 1940s ended with the appearance of AIDS. Over the last five hundred years, the Christian reading of syphilis as the scourge of God directed against the sexually sinful has merged with societal sexual anxieties about the effects of syphilis on the general social fabric and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the family in particular. The perhaps surprising focus of this discussion (by a literary theorist and a physician) of suffering and social decline in the context of sexually transmitted disease is Richard Wagner's last music drama,Parsifal, finally completed in 1882 and called aBühnenweihfestspiel(a stage consecration festival play) for his Bayreuth theatre.
The castrato as history
Authors: Bergeron Katherine
Published: August 2008

One of the final scenes of Farinelli, Il Castrato, dir. Gerard Corbiau (Sony Pictures Classics, 1994), shows a solar eclipse witnessed, eighteenth-century style, by members of the court of Philip V of Spain around 1740. Restless spectators squint through pieces of tinted glass prepared in the smoke of a small fire. It is a precious visual detail, a jot of history in this sumptuously though often inaccurately detailed film that offsets the melodrama to follow. Without warning, a wind, helped along by corny, time-lapse photography, ushers in a sea of Goya-like clouds. A murmur passes through the entourage; eerie blackness falls on the court.
Mozart's Fiordiligi: Adriana Ferrarese del Bene
Authors: Gidwitz Patricia Lewy
Published: August 2008

Mozart's ability to craft music closely suited to his singers took a remarkable turn with the soprano Adriana Ferrarese del Bene. This singer's career, from sporadic prominence in serious opera to notoriety as a prima donna in Viennese opera buffa in the late 1780s, was capped by her association with Mozart and Da Ponte in Così fan tutte (1790). Certain reports notwithstanding, Ferrarese seems to have been far from a great artist; her successes were modest and she never before or after attained the artistic triumph she achieved in the Mozart–Da Ponte opera. Reviews and contemporary comments suggest that her comic and dramatic skills were uneven, her vocal equipment impressive but incomplete and her performances less than inspiring. Mozart's achievement was to transform a particular set of vocal skills and limitations into something of exceptional artistic value; Fiordiligi was fashioned out of the temperament, vocal style and dramatic abilities – and limitations – of his soprano.
In the house of disillusion: Augusta Holmès and La Montague noire
Authors: Henson Karen
Published: August 2008

Among surviving portraits of Augusta Holmès is a photograph taken towards the end of her life (Fig. 1). The setting is her home: possibly the main room, but more likely a study, since the picture is dominated by a grand piano at which the composer stands imperiously. Images such as this – emphasising professional zeal rather than feminine charm – were the exception in the representation of women composers at the end of the nineteenth century. A vase of flowers, a flowing gown and a recumbent posture would have been typical. In high-necked blouse and dark skirt, hair pulled back severely to reveal a large, pale face, Holmès is less alluring; but she is ready to compose. The image also engages with contemporary conventions of representing male composers. Within the photograph is another, a framed portrait on the piano, positioned so that it reproduces Holmès' features. Richard Wagner: same bushy cravat, same forbidding pose. Almost the same, but not quite.
Female operatic cross-dressing: Bernardo Saddumene's libretto for Leonardo Vinci's Li zite 'n galera (1722)
Authors: Treadwell Nina
Published: August 2008

Leonardo Vinci's Li zite 'n galera (The Newlyweds on the Galley) has been afforded a moderate degree of attention by musicologists because it is the first Neapolitan commedia per musica to survive with music almost completely intact. It is also Vinci's first extant opera, and has thus been considered in terms of the light it sheds on the style of his later drammi per musica for which he is better known today.
Donizetti's first ‘affare di Parigi’: an unknown rondò-finale for Gianni da Calais
Authors: Johnson Janet
Published: August 2008

Donizetti's involvement with Paris has been understood to date from February 1834, when Rossini, acting as the Théâtre Italien's music director, commissioned Marino Faliero for performance the following winter. Though written in Italy, the work was substantially revised in Paris during the two months Donizetti spent there before the première on 12 March 1835, hence William Ashbrook's assertion that Donizetti ‘wrote for the first time for Paris, absorbing the musical tastes of that city, when he presented Marino Faliero at the Théâtre Italien’. While this opera unquestionably remains the one that officially launched the composer's Parisian career, new manuscript and printed musical sources reveal that Donizetti's ties to the city actually date back to 1833, when plans were laid for productions of two of his earlier operas: Gianni di Parigi (1831) and Gianni da Calais (1828). Like Marino Faliero, the first of these works was composed in Italy with a Paris (or a London) première in mind, Donizetti having hoped diat Giovanni Battista Rubini would introduce it at one of his benefit performances soon after rejoining the Italiens (part of the troupe spent spring and summer seasons at the King's Theatre). A close study of the work might shed light on the composer's understanding (or ignorance) of operatic practice in the city at this point in his career; indeed, it was precisely because Gianni di Parigi was so French at least in terms of its libretto (Felice Romani's adaptation of Claude Godard d'Aucour de Saint-Just's libretto for Boieldieu's classic and closely protected Jean de Paris, in the repertory of the Opéra-Comique since 1812) that the comic melodramma was never mounted in Paris. But it was the second work, composed for the Teatro del Fondo in Naples (where it was premièred on 2 August 1828), and performed at the Théâtre Italien twice, on 17 December 1833 and 4 January 1834, that Donizetti actually helped adapt to Parisian taste.
‘Wie die Hans Heilings’: Weber, Marschner, and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus
Authors: Hughes Derek
Published: August 2008

The protagonist of Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus (1947) is the composer Adrian Leverkühn, whose Faustian pact with the demonic consists of a long, voluntarily untreated syphilitic infection, which his brain craves as an exhilarating if destructive liberation from its icy germanic discipline. The craving is implanted on the very day on which, having renounced the call to theology, he commits his life to music. Arriving in Leipzig late in 1905 to take up his studies, he has a guided tour of the city, among other things visiting Bach's Thomaskirche. But his guide concludes the tour by dumping him in a brothel. Confused, he heads for the piano and tries to work out a harmonic problem: ‘Modulation from B major to C major, … as in the hermit's prayer in the finale of the Freischütz … on the six-four chord on G’. Then he rushes out, but not before a prostitute has brushed him on the cheek and indelibly fascinated him.
Welcome to the machine! The representation of technology inZeitopern
Authors: Mehring Frank
Published: August 2008

Condemned as degenerate art during the Third Reich, GermanZeitopernand their artistic treatment of technological infiltration during die Weimar Republic have sparked a variety of new research projects, world-wide musical performances and CD releases from Decca/London in a continuing series entitled ‘Entartete Kunst.’ Manifestos were written in response to the penetration of technology into nearly every aspect of human life, envisaging a future where human beings would interact organically with their new urban environments. Expressionism, Americanism and the concept ofNeue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity) symbolized fresh driving forces that emerged most visibly in opera. In contrast to pre-war Romanticism and Wagnerian mythology, the ‘New Objectivity’ demonstrated a radical commitment to the modern environment, focusing on visible, objective reality rather dian on the emotions of the artist. Particularly inZeitopern, composers like Max Brand, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek embraced contemporary ideas of progress, new technological inventions, modern electronic communication systems and means of transportation as props, story topics and artistic vehicles to introduce new sound-effects. In several instances modern technology appeared as simply anodier stage-prop in die long history of opera stage design. In die context of European conceptions of Americanism, technology was pardy understood as a threat to the establishment's reverence for Romantic high culture. And yet in many instances it was also a welcome tool in the project of redirecting all the arts from their stagnant, inflexible pasts to modern, progressive forms of contemporary entertainment. Such diverse attitudes to the potent symbolism of the machine indicate a conflict inherent in aesthetic practice at the time and raise fundamental questions. Do composers successfully represent human beings as creative and autonomous individuals while simultaneously introducing technological images of dominance and depersonalization? If there are contradictory aspects in the representation of technology, how do they relate to the various aesthetic views of the 1920s? Max Brand's central work and acclaimed prototype ofZeitopern, Maschinist Hopkins(1928), brings the world of technology and its sophisticated artifacts to the musical stage. A close analysis reveals basic contradictions, symptomatic of the era, in the composer's embrace of modern technology.
Social control and the censorship of Giuseppe Verdi's operas in Rome (1844–1859)
Authors: Giger Andreas
Published: August 2008

In the 1840s and 1850s, four operas by Giuseppe Verdi (I due Foscari, La battaglia di Legnano, Il trovatore, and Un ballo in maschera) premiered at the theaters Argentina and Apollo in Rome. Two of these works (I due Foscari and Un ballo in maschera) had been rejected at other theaters because the authorities did not consider them concordant with the censorial requirements, and none of the four would have been permitted in Rome had the authorities applied the usual criteria. That they accepted them anyway suggests the process of censorship did not follow strict rules but was handled arbitrarily. These premieres are even more astonishing when we take into account that Rome, in contrast to most other cities on the peninsula, had very rigorous standards of censorship.
On Ruslan and Russianness
Authors: Frolova-Walker Marina
Published: August 2008

And so yet again we are to consider the Russianness of Russian music. Is there some peculiar shortcoming afflicting Russian music that prevents us from discussing it except in terms of nationality? Although Richard Taruskin has asked why we cannot simply take Russian music out of the surrounding nationalist discourse in order to examine it per se, such an approach may require, even as a precondition, a radically revisionary account of the music's highly mythologised history. So much critical' writing, so many articles, monographs and textbooks of the last 150 years cannot blithely be set aside: they continue to feed programme and liner notes, encouraging and reinforcing audiences' fond belief in an intrinsic Russianness that mysteriously subsists beneath every note of this perennially popular repertoire.
Reading a staging/Staging a reading
Authors: Levin David J.
Published: August 2008

In February of 1929, the German National Party raised a matter of pressing concern in the Prussian State Parliament: the party requested a parliamentary investigation into ‘the transformation of the State Opera at the Platz der Deutschen Republik (popularly known as the Kroll Opera) into a laboratory for Bolshevik art experiments’. The crisis had become particularly acute in the wake of the Kroll Opera's production ofDer fliegende Holländer, which had been premièred a few weeks earlier on 15 January 1929 and which, according to the party, brazenly ‘mocked the spirit of Richard Wagner’. For anyone who has worked on Wagner or, for that matter, simply attended performances of his works, the sentiments come as no surprise. Indeed, the fact that they arose in the wake of Otto Klemperer's and Jiirgen Fehling's famously abstract production (with sets by Ewald Dülberg) make them almost predictable. Fehling and Klemperer incurred the wrath of the National Party for producing what I want to call a ‘critical reading’ of Wagner's text. In Klemperer's and Fehling's reading, the Dutchman's ship may be anchored in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is not permanently mired there. And that is precisely what enraged the National Party, just as years later Patrice Chereau would incur the wrath of countless like-minded Wagnerians, whose recourse to the official channels of government for the redress of their aesthetic grievances was, however, no longer so direct.
Technology of the archaic: wish images and phantasmagoria in Wagner
Authors: Williams Alastair
Published: August 2008

How can Wagner simultaneously herald modernism, express the quintessence of romanticism and evoke primeval experience? This question is illuminated by the constellation of advanced production and desire that Walter Benjamin finds in the process of commodity manufacture, dwelling on the tendency for new technologies to create repetitive conformity while recognising their capacity to trigger unfulfilled prospects in older forms of knowledge. When, however, Adorno frames the dilemma posed by Wagner he finds mythic deception, not a release of archaic subjectivity. These two currents in modernity cannot be easily segregated, but reading Adorno's Wagner through Benjamin's appraisal of modernity facilitates a more sanguine interpretation of Wagner's evocation of ur-forms through advanced compositional technology. The rigidity of Adorno's interpretation is further softened by Jacques Derrida's reading of Karl Marx's distinction between use-value and exchange-value, while, on a broader front, Derrida's attention to the reader also suggests that commodity production need not dominate reception strategies. Indeed, Adorno, in an essay on film first published in 1966, acknowledges that intention and effect frequently do not coincide.
Ariane et Barbe-Bleue: Dukas, the light and the well
Authors: Suschitzky Anya
Published: August 2008

Five women have been blinded by the darkness of Bluebeard's castle, each punished for the same fatal curiosity, the same whimsical refusal to obey her husband. Roaming in a vague, useless search for freedom, unable — perhaps unwilling—to find a way of escape, they can no longer remember how long they have been captive, and have even forgotten their vanity. It seems they will wait forever.
Some difficulties in the historiography of Italian opera
Authors: Seta Fabrizio Della
Published: August 2008

The historiography of Italian opera is particularly well suited to illustrate some problems in the general field of music history and musicology. On the one hand, there is little doubt that Italian opera belongs to the canon, not to say the museum, of learned western music; indeed, today's opera houses surpass concert halls in projecting the ‘museum character’ in which musical tradition seems ‘frozen’. On the other hand, it is also true that only in recent years has international musicology accepted Italian opera as unquestionably deserving of attention. The reasons for this delay are clear enough. Some were easily overcome, connected to the very history of our discipline: since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the musical language of Italian operatic composers diverged from the mainstream Austro-German tradition; the dramaturgy of Italian opera was difficult to understand in a cultural context moulded by Wagnerian theory and practice (in part also by Shakespeare, Schiller, etc.). Other factors, however, are more deeply embedded, and continue to have an effect even in intellectual conditions very different from those of traditional musicology. These include: the manner in which extra-artistic factors determine the operatic work; the various creative competencies that take part in operatic production; the considerable importance accorded to performers, particularly singers; the possibility that parts of an opera may be moved from one work to another, or from one author to another; the fact that in die history of Italian operatic conventions, shared codes and repetition of formulas often prevailed over the search for novelty.
Debussy's phantom sounds
Authors: Abbate Carolyn
Published: August 2008

Towards the end of a life spent meditating on music, philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote that ‘music is the silence of words, just as poetry is the silence of prose’. With this lapidary remark, he bottled up essences of French symbolist musical doctrines, their elevation of music above language, their impulse to urge poetry towards the condition of musical sound, and their sense that music is ineffable. ‘And the ineffable’, Jankélévitch wrote, ‘cannot be expressed because there are infinite and interminable things to be said of it’. Denying that music was inarticulate – that what it invokes isindicible, unable to be said – he saw instead a hall of sonorous mirrors, saturated with implications and suggestions diat draw the mind on to a vanishing point that can never be reached. Music has the perfect apparitional quality that others would deem characteristic of symbolsper se, as that which materialises in the distance and cannot be caught when we journey towards its meaning: it will always recede, leaving us with our glowing trail of assumed connotations. Thus symbolist literature, with its rhapsodies to musical mystery, dealt profitably in poetic images of suggestive but unimaginable sound. Such sounds have their most famous incarnation in the melody of Mallarmé's faun's flute, repository for all that cannot be thought, said or remembered. Mallarme created a poetic symbol, verbally couched, which as symbolper seborrows the ineffability of music. It is a mirage, which we approach and lose even as we imagine its meaning. By choosing amusicalobject (a flute melody), Mallarmé drew doubly on music's apparitional quality — as if to say: even if the impossible could occur and we were to grasp the symbol and its single luminous meaning, hearing what the flute plays, that sound, like all music, would merely send us wandering onwards again.
Between opera and reality: the BarcelonaParsifal
Authors: Macedo Catharine
Published: August 2008

At midnight on 31 December 1913 the low string melody ofParsifal'sopening rose upwards in the Teatre Liceu, Barcelona. That year-turn marked the end of the copyright period within which performances ofParsifaloutside Bayreuth were prohibited, and made Barcelona the first city in the convention-governed world to stageParsifallegally. Of course, the timing was a marketing ploy, but for many it was also a gesture of outreach, of stretching beyond the mountainous boundary of the Iberian peninsula and of hoping to become a credible cultural and political power in northern Europe. Alas for Barcelona, Europe didn't notice.
(Re)presenting Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie
Authors: Burgess Geoffrey
Published: August 2008

Each year for the past decade, the French vocal and instrumental ensemble Les Arts Florissants has visited the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In that time, three of their productions stand out as particularly significant: Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys (1989 and 1992), Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Medée (1994) and Hippolyte et Aricie by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1997). This trilogy of landmarks in the history of French opera was presented in fully staged productions conceived by stage director Jean-Marie Villegier and conductor William Christie.
‘Le théâtre ne change qu'à la troisième scène’: the hand of the author and unity of place in Act V of Hippolyte et Aricie
Authors: Burgess Geoffrey
Published: August 2008

In the original version of the libretto of Hippolyte et Aricie, the librettist Simon-Joseph Pellegrin prefaced Act V with the rubric ‘le théatre ne change qu'à la troisiéme scéne’ [‘the stage changes only at the third scene’]. This is one of the few acts in the entire repertoire of tragédies en musique where the conventional formula ‘le théatre représente …’ [‘the stage represents … ’], followed by a description of what the stage was intended to depict, was not used. The annotation in Hippolyte warned audiences that, instead of the change of scenery that would normally occur during the entr'acte, the first two scenes of Act V retained the setting of Act IV (‘a wood by the sea, consecrated to Diana’), and the new décor (‘a delightful garden comprising the avenues of the Forest of Aricie’) was revealed only in the third scene. The sense of discontinuity at this ‘internal’ scenery change was also heightened by a break of liaison de presence (that is, none of the actors in scene 2 remained on stage for scene 3). A dispute arose over this breach of convention, and resulted in the first two scenes being omitted from performances sometime during the opera's first season in 1733, ostensibly to avoid the breach of unity of place caused by the change of scenery. This was not the only revision made to the opera in that season, but it was arguably the most significant.
Response to James Treadwell
Authors: Levin David J.
Published: August 2008

James Treadwell's perceptive and suggestive discussion raises a number of important questions that I am eager to engage. And while Treadwell was rethinking some of my arguments, the Met has unveiled a production of Lohengrin (directed by Robert Wilson) that challenges some of my claims about the Met's steadfast conservatism, especially when it comes to staging Wagner. So I am grateful for the opportunity to rethink some of my original claims and buttress a few as well.
Talking back: the female voice inIl ballo delle ingrate
Authors: Gordon Bonnie
Published: August 2008

Suzanne Cusick has recently argued that the musical processes of Monteverdi'sLamento d'Arianna purge Ariadneof passion and desire in order symbolically to make her a good wife. Written for the 1608 marriage of Francesco Gonzaga to Margherita de Savoy, the lament, according to Cusick, reflects Renaissance marriage and gender ideologies that were determined to silence women and put them in their place. Ariadne has dared to choose her own mate and therefore must suffer. Her fate is dramatised by her uncharacteristically long lament, which enacts the transformation women experienced as they gave up their own desires to the constraining institution of marriage. Cusick's argument is in line with recent critical tendencies to read early modern culture in terms of the opposition between passive female silence and active male desire.
Effectiveness of a redesigned iron supplementation delivery system for pregnant women in Negros Occidental, Philippines
Authors: Risonar Maria Grace D , Rayco-Solon Pura , Tengco Lorena W , Sarol Jesus N , Paulino Lourdes S , Solon Florentino S
Published: August 2008

Objective

To determine the effectiveness of a redesigned Fe supplementation delivery system (ISDS) in improving Hb concentrations and compliance among pregnant women.

Design

A controlled before and after study design was used. Interviews and Hb measurements of randomly selected pregnant women in both treatment areas were conducted at baseline and after 6 months. The redesigned ISDS, reached by consensus based on the surveys and focus group discussions, involved the health workers in spot mapping and clustering; Fe tablets’ distribution, monitoring and promotion; and counselling of pregnant women.

Setting

Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental, Philippines.

Subjects

In total, 1180 pregnant women given Fe/folic acid tablets daily through the redesigned ISDS in the experimental areas and the existing ISDS in the control areas.

Results

There were significantly more anaemic pregnant women in the experimental than in the control area at baseline (50·7 v. 37·3 %; P = 0·001). However, at endline, the anaemia prevalence rate in the experimental area was comparable to that of the control (35·6 v. 33·1 %; P = 0·530). Also, the mean Hb concentration increased significantly in the experimental area by 0·5 g/dl (P = 0·002). An increase in the actual number of prenatal visits/trimester in the experimental area was observed (from 0·99 to 1·66; P < 0·0001). Pregnant women in the experimental area were four times more likely to take Fe tablets (OR = 3·79; P < 0·001) and sixteen times more likely to being monitored for Fe intake (OR = 16·86; P < 0·001) compared to the control.

Conclusions

The redesigned ISDS was effective in improving the Hb concentration and health-related behaviour of pregnant women.
The History of European Archaeology as Evidence for a Philosophy of Science?
Authors: de Regt Herman C.D.G.
Published: August 2008

A further vindication of Hodder's theory on european archaeology Jan Slofstra's article on the twentieth century history of Dutch Archaeology should be included in the next edition of Hodder'sArchaeological Theory in Europe(1991a). When we consider Hodder's own contribution to the collection of essays on the history of European archaeology (Hodder 1991b) we find that the history of Dutch archaeology nicely illustrates most of the themes which are uncovered by the many detailed historical studies of European archaeology. (Throughout my commentary I will assume that Slofstra's reconstruction of the history of Dutch archaeology is correct, though (perhaps) incomplete).
Tradition and change in the interpretation of burial practices
Authors: Drenth Erik
Published: August 2008

Lohof's paper represents a brave attempt to relate burial ritual of the Late Neolithic, Early and Middle Bronze Age in the north-eastern Netherlands to social change in general. Being the first study of its kind for this area, it certainly deserves our attention.
Whispers from the context of real life
Authors: van der Leeuw Sander E.
Published: August 2008

‘We live in the dark, we do what we can, the rest is the madness of art.’ (Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons)

‘We must again become a people making our own history. To be able to make our own history is to be able to mould our own future, to build our society that preserves the best of our past and our traditions, while enabling us to grow and develop as a whole people.’ (Robert Andre)
Contentious Landscapes
Authors: Bender Barbara
Published: August 2008

Roymans' paper is ambitious – and short. Perhaps a little too short: there were a good many junctures where I felt there was much more that could be said, and certainly the bibliography could be greatly extended. The excitement of the paper lies in the methodological cross-over between archaeological and folkloric materials, which I found both convincing and informative, and in the time-depth that Roymans permits himself. In a rather odd reversal, I felt that the paper was more interestingly complex than the Introduction suggested.
From Landscape to Individuality
Authors: Gurevich Aron Y.
Published: August 2008

Several years ago, when I visited the Netherlands for the first time, a famous historian with whom I was walking along a road through the polders observed that the national character of the Dutch had formed through many centuries of efforts to shape nature, and that nature in its turn bears the imprint of their character. I was greatly interested by this remark on the interaction between mentality and landscape and I asked my colleague to write an article on this subject for the periodical Odissei. Chelovek v istorii (‘Odysseus. Man in history’), which focused on issues of historical anthropology and which I am publishing for several years. Although unfortunately I did not receive the article as such, I was all the more interested to read Nico Roymans' work. The perception of space and landscape does in truth change through history and it would be incorrect to interpret the natural environment as a rigid framework in which the history of mankind unfolds. It is said that culture is man's second nature – but would it not be nearer the truth to say that it is his only nature? Man is a symbolical being (animal symbolicum), who finds his way in this world by means of symbols and who perceives reality through these points of reference, which he creates or reproduces. There is no sphere of activity beyond the boundary of this symbolical world. For this reason the perception of human activity cannot go beyond or neglect this all-embracing symbolical universe. Nevertheless far from all historians have mastered the art of reading or deciphering the sign systems of the past or present, since it is by no means easy to learn to read in this manner.
A précis of Time, Culture and Identity
Authors: Thomas Julian
Published: August 2008

Time, Culture and Identity is a book which attempts to write about prehistory while at the same time meditating on what that writing involves. It is composed of two sections, one of which addresses a number of philosophical issues, while the other presents a series of case studies. This structure might easily give the impression that I first formulated a theoretical position and then proceeded to impose it onto particular sets of evidence. In practice, the book was written in a much less linear fashion, tacking back and forth between conceptual problems which were set up by the evidence and onslaughts upon the material which were suggested by the developing fabric of ideas. In a sense it represents a very personal (and perhaps rather indulgent) piece of work, since it is the outcome of my own process of working through a series of problems which appeared to me to be unresolved when I had finished my first book, Rethinking the Neolithic (Thomas 1991). Writing is thinking, and my hope is that others will find this record of my own learning process instructive.
Can we take the Aryan out of Heideggerian?
Authors: Gosden Chris
Published: August 2008

In his book Time, Culture and Identity Thomas proposes the adoption of a Heideggerian archaeology. This is consonant with the adoption of Heidegger's thought in a number of neighbouring disciplines, including anthropology (Jackson 1989). For many Heidegger heralds the end of modernity and an attempt to overcome habits of thought that have become engrained over the last few hundred years. This is also Thomas' starting point. Thomas begins with a critique of habits of thought and particularly Cartesian dualisms such as mind::body and culture::nature. He then emphasises the nature of lived experience as a seamless whole, which breaks down these distinctions putting people within the flow of life, rather than seeing them as subjects confronted by a series of external objects. One result of the erosion of the object-subject dualism is that there are no such things as social relations: all relations between people involve relationships to things and all connections to things are structured through the networks of bonds to other people.
The liquidation of material things
Authors: Küchler Susanne
Published: August 2008

Thomas' paper and manuscript are ambitious. He aims at nothing less than opening up for discussion fundamental concepts which have informed archaeological writings to date. While in principal laudable and exciting, the chosen concepts – time, culture and identity – are broad, each one on its own of daunting complexity. The vastness of the project is handled by setting up an opposition at the outset between the Cartesian and modernist reading of these concepts adopted by archaeology and an anti-Cartesian and anti-modernist reading facilitated by Heidegger. At issue is less the validity of Heidegger's writings or their deployment in contemporary theory-making, a fact which the author is at pains to defend, though leaving the novice at pains guessing what his writings are actually about; at issue is whether the future of archaeology should rest on developing an anti-Cartesian theory in the first place. The mind/body dualism associated with Descartes has been the subject of much critical work, so much so that it seems at best unnecessary to have to revive Heidegger to give Cartesianism the final blow. One may further question the opposition itself; is it not Kant who is the foundation of post-Enlightenment thought, rather than Descartes, and would thus not his writings be the point of departure for any rethinking of theoretical assumptions that may have guided archaeological theory and practice? A third reservation may be voiced about the validity of the interpretative approach itself; it rests on the assumption, also known as the logocentric paradigm, which holds that a relation exists between an object or image and a narrative description of it which is ‘found’ outside the object and thus may vary according to the context in which the object is seen. The most serious criticism to this assumption is that it ignores the immediacy of understanding which allows images to play a fundamental role in social transmission. Thomas' use of Heidegger's notion of Being appears to strive towards precisely such an immediacy of understanding, yet fails to do so by leaving accounted for the materiality of images. In advocating the interpretative approach, Thomas sets out less a new direction for archaeological theory than captures post-modernist writing which dominated across disciplines for the past decade and left a whole generation of scholars trained during this period ill-equipped to deal with artefacts in more than an exemplary manner. In the late 90s, however, due to advances in cognitive psychology and our day to day experience with cyberspace, this neglect of the image, material and conceptual, and its role in transmission has become glaringly obvious and unacceptable. Critical in their inception, however, paper and manuscript are intently thought provoking, stimulating and timely in calling for a rethinking of archaeological theory to accommodate the contemporary perception of material things. In my discussion I aim to both paraphrase the main points of Thomas's paper and manuscript and to offer comments and questions.
Sherlock Holmes and Martin Heidegger
Authors: Weiner James F.
Published: August 2008

Let me begin my commentary on Julian Thomas' provocative and stimulating project by invoking, as anthropologists seem to do from time to time, the figure of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, as we know, classified types of persons, livelihoods, mentalities and criminalities by, among other things, the varieties of dirt on their shoes, the characteristic calluses and grooves on their hands, the imprints they made upon different utensils, the kinds of tobacco, food scraps, and bits of clothing they left behind as traces of their presence. Holmes made a living out of deducing the motivational and moral contours of a human personality from such material indices. He knew the physical components of his environment – the different soils and plants of London, which stores purveyed which implements and goods characteristically utilised by criminals – and he catalogued the sartorial and other visible indices which marked inhabitants of different districts, and socioeconomic and ethnic categories. We also learned that he was not unfamiliar with the Who's Who of London society of his time, not to mention the London constabulary and the organisation of various other professions whose activities related to his interest in crime solving.
The history, theory and methodology of regional archaeological projects
Authors: Dommelen Peter van , Prent Mieke
Published: August 2008

The papers collected in this special section ofArchaeological Dialogueswere first presented at the fifth Symposium on Archaeology and Theory, held in Leiden on January 17th to 19th 1996 under the general heading ofThe history, theory and methodology of regional archaeological projects. The choice of regional research as the main theme provided the opportunity to discuss current theoretical perspectives on the basis of specific case studies, thus reflecting the concern ofArchaeological Dialoguesto balance theoretical and practical aspects of archaeology. Through the invitation of archaeologists from various backgrounds and countries across Europe, the diversity of research traditions was not only acknowledged but debate between them was also stimulated. Regional research projects had been chosen because they usually last for a considerable period of time, in the course of which theoretical insights, methodological premises and available techniques are likely to change. In this way, regional projects have repeatedly been suggested to represent a critical element in Dutch archaeology, setting off ‘the Dutch experience’ from developments in both Anglo-American and continental European archaeology (cf. Slofstra 1994; Hodder 1994). The past decades have moreover been especially prolific in generating new theoretical perspectives which may now often coexist with older ones. One of the key issues addressed at the symposium therefore concerned the interaction between changing theoretical and methodological perspectives and the practice of fieldwork. The effects of these relationships were critically assessed by several speakers in the context of a specific regional archaeological project, while others reviewed long-term developments of regional archaeological projects both North and South of the Alps.
Inside and outside the landscape
Authors: Attema Peter
Published: August 2008

This paper on perceptions of the Pontine Region in Central Italy starts out with a discussion of a map by the Renaissance artist and engineer Leonardo da Vinci which he made of the Pontine marshes in the early 16th century A.D. Since this map is the earliest rendering known of this former wetland, it is an important document for the reconstruction of the wet areas of the Pontine Region, a landscape unit that falls within the wider survey area of the Pontine Region Project.1 The example shows how deconstruction of historical documents, whether texts or maps, is a prerequisite for an understanding of how landscapes were differently perceived over time. After all we perceive what we want to see. A valid interpretation of Da Vincis's map for archaeological purposes requires, however, insight into both the context of the map and the way in which Leonardo da Vinci handled landscapes in his work. I discuss the map to demonstrate how archaeologists using historical and ethnographical documents run the risk of dealing with ‘outsider’ information whilst thinking they are dealing with sources that take them right inside the landscape, i.e. into the landscape of its past inhabitants. To avoid the pitfall of perceiving what one wants to see, the archaeologist is recommended to obtain insight into the various historical perceptions of his study area. I cite some instances from my work that show how it is possible to extract inside information from ‘outsider’ maps and texts concerning the Pontine Region. It is argued that such inside information is needed to complement Mediterranean survey methodology if the discipline is to develop landscape perception models of Mediterranean regions in antiquity that are not based on a priori notions. The delineation of preference surfaces in the landscape such as forwarded by the archaeological record, is proposed as a starting point for reconstructions of past collective perceptions.
Archaeology between the invention and the destruction of the landscape
Authors: Lemaire Ton
Published: August 2008

Car j'ai découvert une grande vérité. A savoir que les hommes habitent, et que le sens des choses change pour eux selon le sens de la maison. Et que le chemin, le champ d'orge et la courbe de la colline sont différents pour l'homme selon qu'ils composent ou non un domaine. (A. de Saint-Exupéry, 1948: Citadelle, 28).
Working the land: imagining the landscape
Authors: Bradley Richard
Published: August 2008

Archaeologists are prone to retrospection. In 1974 Gordon Willey edited a book in which a series of writers looked back over their most famous projects. Some of their contributions were both revealing and frank but in other cases, I suspect, the authors were trying to write themselves into history. It can be dangerous to retrace our steps over the same intellectual ground, but we may still want to attempt this so that we can come to terms with unfinished business. We study some problems which will not let us go. This paper considers a typical example.