This lecture will take place in hybrid format. To join online using Microsoft Teams, please use this link. 

The lecture will consider the cases of the Federal Reserve Board, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England and the People’s Bank of China. It will examine the patchy record of the western Banks in controlling inflation and avoiding major downturns. It will consider political involvement through choice of Governors, intervention over interest rate changes, revision of inflation targets and supervision of Quantitative easing. It will examine influence over Central bankers by Parliaments, the media and public opinion, and the occasions when a Governor seems to be pursuing a political agenda through Central bank policy. 

Please note that due to the ongoing pandemic, these lectures will be  delivered in hybrid format. Capacity is restricted so please arrive early to avoid  disappointment. If capacity is reached, attendees will  be turned away.

For those attending in person, these lectures will take  place in the Old Library, All Souls College, OX1 4AL (enter via the Lodge).   Registrations close at 12 noon the day before the lecture. Please register using this form.

The lecture will chart the continued dependence of the world on fossil fuels this decade. It will assess the growing divide in approach between the UK and EU on the one hand and China, Russia and India on the other. It will ask how green are  various technologies recommended for the transition and warn against compliant countries importing products with a high carbon content to lower their own CO2 scores. It will argue that the green revolution needs to be a popular revolution, driven by the wishes and needs of billions of consumers, just as the digital revolution has been. It will examine the way in which China and Russia might exploit their positions in industrial manufacture and oil and gas to shift the balance of world power. 

Please  note that due to the ongoing pandemic, these lectures will be delivered in hybrid format. Capacity is restricted so please arrive early to avoid  disappointment. If capacity is reached, attendees will be turned away.

For  those attending in person, these lectures will take  place in the Old  Library, All Souls College, OX1 4AL (enter via the  Lodge). Registrations close at 12 noon the day before the lecture. Please register using this form.

Please register for this seminar here. 

As we complete our research into England’s first major printed music treatise, we take this opportunity to share our current thoughts about Morley’s A plaine and easie introduction, and explain our strategy for publication. Underlying our work is a focus on ‘making’ – the processes of making a manuscript for the printer, and of making a printed book from that manuscript. Morley’s manuscript does not survive, so must be inferred from the finished book; but an investigation of its text does draw us into the materiality of his working methods, as he ‘tombles and tosses’ his various sources, whether acknowledged or not, and transforms them both to reflect his own understanding and priorities, and to make them conform to his design and purpose. The identification of Morley’s extensive ‘library’ of sources reveals a complex and multi-layered text, created in part from pre-existing materials and in part from his own experience and training as a musician. His distinctive voice emerges from the tantalizing accounts of musical practice evident in action verbs like foist, shift, stir, hang. Our investigation of the 1597 edition itself – the book qua book – has led to unexpected discoveries. We now believe that Morley, quite exceptionally, may have devised his treatise largely as a sequence of double-page spreads, and hence composed its literary content, music examples, tables and diagrams to fit into two-page openings. If our theory is correct, then layout is in effect an integral element of Morley’s text: pedagogy and design proceed hand in hand. Initially we had planned to publish a three-volume study in which our new edition of Morley’s text (vol. 1) is accompanied by a critical apparatus (vol. 2) and a set of essays by a distinguished cohort of musicologists (vol. 3). Our approach, however, has been transformed by the decision to add a full colour facsimile of a copy of the 1597 edition itself (vol. 4), allowing the book’s remarkable properties to be fully savoured and appreciated.

Please register for this seminar here.

In 2019 and 2020 two largely intact parchment bifolios containing Ars nova polyphony were found independently in Milan-area libraries: one at the Biblioteca Universitaria in Pavia by Giuseppe Mascherpa (independent scholar) and Federico Saviotti (University of Pavia) and the other at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan by Anne Stone. In May 2021, Saviotti, Stone, and Antonio Calvia realized that the two bifolios belonged to the same original manuscript, and began a joint project to study them together. This talk presents findings from our initial research into the origins, provenance, and contents of the “Codice San Fedele-Belgioioso,” a compilation of mass ordinary movements and secular songs whose internal evidence points strongly to a provenance in the Milan area c. 1400. The 12 compositions that survive appear to be unica: three mass ordinary compositions and nine French-texted songs with two surviving voices. The measurements of these bifolios (approximately 465x620 mm, with a page size of approximately 465 mm tall and 310 wide) are larger than any surviving manuscripts of polyphony contemporary with them, and the quality of the parchment and the elegance of the hand make it clear that the manuscript was professionally copied for an institution that had considerable resources. These finds thus have the potential to significantly expand our scanty knowledge of cultivated polyphony in late medieval Lombardy.

Discussants:  Blake Wilson (Dickinson College (PA)) and Elena Abramov-Van Rijk (Jerusalem)

Please note that registration is required and closes at 12 noon on Wednesday 23 February