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This chapter explores the potential for musical medievalism within metal, exploring the ways in which metal musicians have sought to include ‘authentic’ medieval musical languages within their music. The medieval repertoire poses many challenges even for early music specialists, and the musical idioms of metal and medieval music rarely overlap, leading many medievalist metal bands to rely instead on normative metal styles with occasional references to specific identifiable melodies. The chapter focusses particularly on the American metal band Obsequiae, who have drawn inspiration particularly from the medieval polyphonic repertoire, which required creating much more oblique musical connections. Obsequiae’s albums feature acoustic guitar and harp arrangements of medieval polyphonic works, but their metal songs likewise adopt some general qualities of medieval polyphony. The obscure nature of the connections is likely beyond many listeners, but paradoxically the lack of obvious musical medievalism can also cultivate the appearance of a deeper connection.

Zech’s so-called Nachdichtung or ‘adaptation’ Die lasterhaften Lieder und Balladen des François Villon is one of the most printed books of German lyric poetry and has been widely misinterpreted as a translation of French medieval poet François Villon. The erroneous attribution of these texts has caused an immense amount of confusion and misinformation to spread in relation to the authorship of several poems due to the popularisation of these supposedly medieval texts by medieval metal bands In Extremo and Subway to Sally. Zech’s fascinating artistic fraud forms the framework for questioning how source material, which ranges from authentic historical texts through to ex nihilo pseudo-medieval writings, is situated between the related, at times conflicting, norms and traditions of medieval market music and mittelalter metal.

This chapter analyses the different ways in which metal album covers draw upon medieval media. The analysis is situated within the broad theoretical frame of intermediality, and more specifically view the process where medieval media cross the borders and find their way into metal album covers as media transformation. Four different types of media transformation are analysed, and it is argued that the medievalism of album covers can be defined in terms of media transformation. Likewise, neomedievalism is defined in terms of second-order media transformation. The album cover is described as a media patchwork, and the chapter gives examples of the patches in terms of relationship and properties.

The chapters in the Nationalism and Identity in Metal Medievalism section consider a range of historical figures and practices as presented in metal music. Amaranta Saguar García’s analysis of references to El Cid in ‘The Return of El Cid: The Topicality of Rodrigo Díaz in Spanish Heavy Metal’ focusses on issues of nationalism and the varying representations of El Cid in a range of songs. In a similar manner, Annika Christensen’s ‘Making Heritage Metal: Faroese KvæÐi and Viking Metal’ looks at the interplay of medieval ballads and modern folk metal as part of the group Tyr’s investment in celebrating and articulating Faroese identity. While these two essays work with specific examples of national identities, Shamma Boyarin’s ‘The Prophet Himself Had Knowledge of Him: Nile’s “Iskander D’hul Kharnon” and a Different Kind of Metal Medievalism’ uses the figure of Alexander the Great to address the broader question of the ways that representations of classical and medieval figures define civilisations. Dean Swinford’s ‘Black Metal’s Medieval King: The Apotheosis of Euronymous through Album Dedications’ examines the medievalisation of Euronymous and its relation to black metal’s medievalist self-representation. Within this collaborative chapter, the authors explore the areas of greatest overlap in our explorations of metal music and medieval culture: nationalism and identities, neofascism, the whitewashed Middle Ages, and issues of historical authenticity in neomedievalism.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.

This study explores the yet understudied productive aspects of uncertainty in the organization of creative collaboration and scrutinizes the practices that allow participants to fruitfully use it as a resource for the creation of novelty. In contrast to former conceptualizations of uncertainty as a quantity to be reduced through organizing, we apply a qualitative heuristic where uncertainty may shift different dimensions regarding participation (who?), procedure (how?) and content (what?). Based on eight creativity biographies in two creative fields, music production and pharmaceutical development, encompassing 36 semi-structured qualitative interviews, we identify embracing, ignoring, and fixing uncertainty as three distinct, yet interrelated practices to engage with uncertainty and thereby enable the emergence of valuable novelty in interaction. We further discover that the participants shift these practices between the different dimensions of uncertainty during the process of creative collaboration. Moreover, we argue that these shifts are necessary to maintain creativity in collaborative processes. Thereupon, we contribute insights to the so far enigmatic notion of organizing for collaborative creativity.

This is the sixth article on social science, humanities, news and general (SSH) databases in a continuing series of articles summarising and commenting on new database products. There are two companion articles, one covering science, technology and medicine (STM) which appeared in the August 1995 issue (Online & CDROM Review, vol. 19 issue 4) and the other covering business and law (BSL) which will appear in the December issue of this journal (Online & CDROM Review, vol. 19 issue 6). The articles are based on the newly appearing database products in the Gale Directory of Databases. The Gale Directory of Databases (GDD) was created in January 1993 by merging Computer‐Readable Databases: A Directory and Data Sourcebook (CRD) together with the Directory of Online Databases (DOD) and the Directory of Portable Databases (DPD).