Heidelberg University Publishing

Since the Middle Ages, next to churches the courts have been the most important employers for professional musicians. The important role of court music in European and particularly German music history has not been reflected in the efforts made by musicological scholarship in the past. Although there are numerous studies on particular courts, comparative studies are still lacking.

This publication documents the current state of research on the most important court chapels, as well as selected smaller aristocratic chapels in southern Germany during the eighteenth century.

This volume is the outcome of the conference “Studying Documents in Premodern South Asia and Beyond: Problems and Perspective”, held in October 2015 in Heidelberg. In bringing together experts from different fields—including Indology, Tibetology, History, Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Digital Humanties—it aims at exploring and rethinking issues of diplomatics and typology, the place of documents in relation to other texts and literary genres, methods of archiving and editing documents, as well as their “social life”, i.e. the role they play in social, religious and political constellations, the agents and practices of their use, and the norms and institutions they embody and constitute.

The book is the first volume of the Documenta Nepalica – Book Series, published by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in collaboration with the National Archives, Nepal.

The topic of slavery is largely under-represented in the historiography of Nepal. This source book, aware of this disparity and wishing to encourage future studies on the topic, provides the reader with editions, translations and a study of selected documents and legal texts of Nepal from the period of the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. These sources are concerned with such different aspects of slavery as donations, transactions, bondservitude, forced labour, emancipation, and law.

This volume presents the religious, architectural, and textual background of Vãbāhā, one of the 16 main monasteries of Patan, located in one of the three royal cities of the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal. The history of the Buddhist monastic courtyard and its objects is presented along with 42 inscriptions, dating from 1596 CE to 2021.

The Mulukī Ain of 1854—the law code with constitutional features drafted at the initiative of Prime Minister Jaṅga Bahādura Rāṇā—is the foundational legal text for modern Nepal. It covers almost every aspect of public, criminal, private and religious law, ranging from the organisation of the state and courts to murder and other delicts, the workings of the caste system and the joint family, matters of purity and penance, customary law, widow-burning and witchcraft. As such, the Mulukī Ain is a unique source not only for the political, social and economic life of 19th-century Nepal, but also for the place of traditional Hindu jurisprudence in South Asian legal cultures.

This publication documents the papers presented at the symposium "The Stamitz family and European musician migration in the 18th century", which took place in Schwetzingen on 17 and 18 June 2017 on the occasion of the 300th birthday of Johann Stamitz. The conference was organised by the Research Centre for the History of Southwest German Court Music of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and the Mannheim State University of Music and Performing Arts.

Johann Stamitz, a figurehead of Mannheim’s court music, and his family are exemplary for the musician migration of the eighteenth century in Central Europe. Based on this, the papers will examine various aspects of the topic. It was part of the conference’s concept to offer not only experienced experts in this field but also young scholars a platform for their own research and for the presentation of the results.

The main ambition of this book lies in a detailed analysis of the formation and enforcement of Nepal’s Mulukī Ain of 1854, specifically focusing on the provisions regarding homicide within the Mulukī Ains of 1854 and 1870. This study also examines contemporaneous legal records, revealing the complexities of the Ain’s implementation. The articles on homicide serve as a microcosm illustrating the broader evolution of Nepal’s legal code, which departed from outdated punishments like genital mutilation and introduced fines and imprisonment instead. Still, the innovations introduced into the Ain of 1854 were not uniformly progressive. The Ain in its various stages of development thus showcases the complex ways in which legal systems inevitably undergo transformation.

In academic research, princely summer residences are regarded as places of longing, where rulers sought to realize their dream of an earthly paradise and escape the constraints of courtly ceremonial. Traditionally, this research has been based in history of art. What music was made in the summer residences, and how it might have differed from that of the main residence, has not yet been systematically studied. The conference made a contribution to this by examining the musical life at selected European summer residences of the eighteenth century and relating it to one another. The individual contributions present the respective situations of the cultivation of music at selected summer residences in the German-speaking countries as well as in Italy, Spain, England, Sweden and Russia.

This groundbreaking publication offers a unique resource of information about one of the most glorious and diverse musical cultures of the Himalayas. The numerous drum traditions of Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley are a vibrant aspect of traditional Newar culture that saw its heyday between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. The three Malla kingdoms of Bhaktapur, Lalitpur and Kathmandu competed in art, architecture, music, dance and opulent town rituals celebrating the presence of the gods. Music served as a portal between the human world and the realm of the gods.

This study documents the role and repertoires of the different percussion genres in a transcribed and commented form for practical use and as a teaching aid. It also includes a dictionary of Newari terms related to music. As it focuses on the musical life of Bhaktapur during the decade starting from 1983, it could serve as a point of reference for comparison with the present situation. This publication is an outstanding contribution to the preservation of Newar culture.

Carl Stamitz (1745-1801), Johann Stamitz's eldest son, is well known for his works, as his compositions can be found on numerous recordings and concert programmes in today's music scene. Musicologists though do not pay the same attention to this composer, who came from the ranks of the court musicians of the Electoral Palatinate. The dissertation by Friedrich Carl Kaiser (1931-2008), submitted in 1962, is still the only monograph that systematically deals with his life and his orchestral music, which was a major part of his creative work. It is a standard work that rightly appears in every bibliography on the subject. Up to now it has only been possible to view the compulsory typescript copies of the dissertation, which are distributed among a few libraries and which differ in detail from one another. The reason for this is the somewhat unusual genesis of the text, as Kaiser repeatedly made changes and additions to his Stamitz monograph over a long period of time. The present edition, which also includes Kaiser's personal copy from his estate, now provides musicology researchers with a reliable edition of this fundamental text.

This volume, which accompanies the exhibition of the same name, honours Leopold Mozart (1719-1787), who was not only a musician, composer and teacher, but also a well-informed observer of his time. His letters contain numerous details on music and cultural-historical themes, and his notes on his stay in the summer residence of Schwetzingen in the Palatinate are invaluable. The authors investigate this information and relate it to the knowledge of their respective disciplines. The result is a comprehensive picture of the Electoral Palatinate summer residence of 1763, a music-historical focal point in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.