It is now some years since the publication of my Theory and Practice in Late Nineteenth-Century Violin Performance 1850–1900. In the intervening time, nineteenth-century performing practices have become a more normative part of performance scholarship; many new studies have been completed, and resources have been unearthed that enhance our understanding. The few of us involved in this pursuit twenty years ago have been joined by another generation of scholar-performers.

Tempting as it might be to write something of a sequel to my 2003 book, this is not what the present handbook is about. My earlier monograph represents a useful survey of key topics, arranged in logical (but perhaps rather prosaic) order. It also attempted to review core forms of performance evidence – treatises / word texts, and recordings – as a way of gauging the relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. The aim, to paraphrase Leopold von Ranke's famous dictum, was to try to understand the past as it truly was from an observational perspective, and to report with a degree of scholarly distance in the hope of objectivity. This said, as I acknowledged at the start of the text, ‘we all respond to our temporal and cultural environments’, and I was happy to accept the inevitable limitations of my own study. It would be disingenuous, though, to assume that my aim then was merely to ‘report’. As I commented,