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Chapter seven discusses the place of music in the education and leisure time of boys and men who had no intention of pursuing musical careers. Unlike their female counterparts, male amateur musicians were encouraged to cultivate knowledge of music theory and to celebrate the social opportunities offered by music making, especially in university Collegium Musicum ensembles. This chapter draws from diverse sources including novels, poems, music manuscripts, and diaries. It concludes with case studies of two jurists: Johann Stephan Pütter of Göttingen and Johann Heinrich Fischer of Fulda. For Pütter, a musician of limited skills, performance quality was less important than the social aspects of making music. For Fischer, music theory was of great interest and led him to admire the music of the Lutheran composer J. S. Bach, despite the fact that Fischer was Catholic.

During the 1950s, intensive debates over the potential supply of nuclear weapons systems to the Bundeswehr, the newly founded West German army, agitated the public in the Federal Republic. During the conflicts over the NATO dual-track solution since 1979, a similar set of anxieties was widely articulated and internationally registered as a specific German angst. In both cases, peace protesters, politicians and Bundeswehr officers shared the perception that nuclear war would very likely entail the self-destruction of the German nation. This notion of a ‘nuclear war in front of the apartment door’ was a crucial feature of the Cold War as an imaginary war in the Federal Republic.

Chapter 16 discusses further evidence for the systematization and rationalization of the language / dialect distinction in the period 1650–1800, the age of rationalism and the Enlightenment. On the one hand, a kind of dialectological tradition emerged. The study of regional variation became a subfield of philology, albeit never an autonomous one; occasionally, it even now received the label of dialectologia, apparently introduced in 1650. For the first time, philologists presented dissertations on dialectal diversity that were no longer exclusively focused on the Greek dialects. On the other hand, scholars adopted more rational attitudes towards the conceptual pair. Some chose to supplement the binary contrast with new concepts. Others advocated distinguishing more clearly between different interpretations of the language / dialect distinction. Confusion persisted, however, throughout the early modern period. The first vocal sceptic of the conceptual pair was Friedrich Carl Fulda, who made it painfully clear how arbitrary and imprecise the distinction actually was.

The book ends by returning to questions of music, technology, and the aesthetic stakes of early formalist experimentation. This conclusion traces how the cantus-firmus transformations so integral to the composition of fifteenth-century sacred music have been characterized in the generations since—mostly in their rejection by theorists and historians alike. It proposes a set of criteria for understanding notational aesthetics and musical riddles, and offers some terms for describing the relationship between notation and the musical creations it affords. We find ourselves again in an age fascinated with the ways that media, materials, and technology condition musical works and experiences. Reconsidering the unsung technology of medieval music notation can give us a conceptual distance that makes it possible to recognize new facets of our own relationship with musical media. It invites us to deepen our engagement with the sources and the music, while changing how we think about music’s literate traditions in the late Middle Ages.

Chapter 1 examines Gottschalk’s legal case against Abbot Hrabanus Maurus of Fulda, at the Synod of Mainz, 829, where he alleged that Hrabanus had illegally forced him to become a monk while still a child. In order to understand why the bishops at the synod freed Gottschalk from his monastic oath and restored his liberty, this chapter contextualizes his court case in the history of the Saxon conquests and conversion, Frankish monasticism at Fulda, Carolingian monastic reform, the publication of the Old Saxon epic the Hêliand, and legal issues related to his case. The chapter finds that Gottschalk won influential allies, who supported him as a Carolingian nobleman while condemning Hrabanus’s actions in a moment of religious crisis and reform in the empire. Hrabanus, however, recast Gottschalk’s arguments as an anti-monastic heresy condemning child oblation in order to silence any opposition to his rule among the Fulda monks.