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the paradigm of the Habermasian public sphere in musicology by
looking for an audience outside the concert hall. In her talk on
‘German Opera and Politics from the Enlightenment to Napoleon’
she pointed to the wide distribution of musical scores, the hearing
and singing of popular tunes from operas in public spaces, and the
reports on music in newspapers and journals as areas deserving further
research. In addition, she presented a number of case studies,
among them Mozart’s Magic Flute and Beethoven’s Fidelio, to highlight
various modes of thinking about civil society in musical inventions.
The last paper of the session, ‘Pest in Thorn im 16.–18. Jahr -
hundert: Politisierung von Krankheit’ by Katarzyna Pekacka-
Falkowska (Nicholas Copernicus University, Torun) introduced the
audience to the social history of medicine which proceeds from the
assumption that diseases are socially and politically construed. In the
case of Torun, a multi-confessional and multi-ethnic city in Poland,
this means that the outbreaks of epidemics classified by contemporaries
as plague have to be seen as social phenomena. In her talk
Pekacka-Falkowska therefore investigated the discourse of mortality
as it can be reconstructed from printed texts by medical practitioners,
clergymen, and representatives of secular authorities. In particular,
she dealt with the contemporary idea that imagination was a transmitter
of disease in order to give prominence to the linkage between
medicine, politics, and religion in dealing with the plague.
The first afternoon session, chaired by David Lederer (National
University of Ireland, Maynooth), was dedicated to early modern
religion. Scott Dixon (Queen’s University, Belfast) in his paper, ‘The
Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: History and Histori -
ography in the Work of Johannes Letzner (1531–1613)’, presented a
fairly unknown historian working in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
century to illuminate trends in Protestant historiography
after the Reformation. The picture of Letzner that emerged from
Dixon’s talk was of a man fascinated with the German past who tirelessly
visited monasteries, private libraries, and country houses and
was in constant contact with other antiquarian scholars to collect the
material for his works which gained him the status of a local celebrity.
In his writings he betrayed a concern for the Catholic past and the
disappearance of its material and literary remnants that led to suspicions
about crypto-Catholic leanings. At the same time, however, he
felt an urge to enlighten the younger generation, who had grown up
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