Heidelberg University Publishing

Dowagers played an active role in politics and culture at the courts of the Holy Roman Empire. They were mothers, advisers and patrons of the arts. The rulers had to provide them with an appropriate dowry and a residence. For the first time, the book describes the architecture and the ceremonial use of dower residences from the 15th to the 17th century from an art historical point of view. Focusing on functional changes and conversion of the castles, the author shows how the dowagers expressed their new independence in an architectural and spatial way.

The Albertine Prince’s Schools Pforta, St. Afra, and St. Augustin considerably contributed to the consolidation of Lutheran church music. The three schools, their teachers, and their alumni transformed Central Germany into a flourishing musical landscape. This study traces this process in detail, thus filling the musico-historical gap between the Wittenberg Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War and describing one of the most significant musical landscapes of the German-speaking lands.

The emergence of Linearity at the beginning of the 20th century represents a remarkable but yet rarely dealt with phenomenon in music history. Two main protagonists of the time were Ernst Kurth (Bern) and Sergei Taneev (Moscow), whose counterpoint theories formed the basis for the work of numerous musicians of the time. Although concerning the same subject, both theories show fundamental differences, in music-theoretical as well as in music-aesthetic respect. It turns out that these different philosophies are reflected in numerous works by composers such as Ernst Křenek, Artur Schnabel, Alexander Scriabin, Nikolaj Metner and many others.

This book contributes to the study of oceans, seas, coastal waters, and rivers within blue humanities by broadening, circulating, and interweaving knowledge about such waters, ocean epistemologies, and sea narratives from pluriversal epistemological, geographical, cultural, and disciplinary perspectives. The contributors from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, North America and the Pacific explore the interconnections between oceans, coastal areas, rivers, humans, animals, plants, organisms, and landscapes in the fields of cultural history and cultural studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, marine and environmental studies, linguistics, literature, film and media studies.

The significance of allegorical personification as a cultural technique can hardly be overestimated for the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern era. Particularly in the French-speaking world, this period shows a distinctive intensification. 

In a consistently cross-media approach, the interweaving of images, texts, and theatrical stagings with its decisive changes is demonstrated by means of allegorical personification. The allegorical mode emerges as the dominant practice of an imagery that was subjected to a fundamental standardization only with the dissemination of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia from 1593 on. Personifications represent a largely overlooked source for explaining an image theory and practice that until then had only been developed in fragments.