The Wildest Adaptation Yet

The costumes are deliberately inaccurate. The story begins in the 1780's but the costumes have no connection to the era. The chunky jewelry is of the sort which may have been worn in Imperial Russia but are out of place in a film about Yorkshire gentry. As for the casting, Margot is lovely but too old to play teenaged "Catherine Earnshaw," the "Edgar Linton" character is too dark for Catherine's pallid husband. I do think Jacob Elordi is perfect for "Heathcliff." Having an Asian actress for the part of Ellen is odd since the whole point of Ellen is that she is a tough, no nonsense Yorkshire woman, the same age as the protagonists but reared to be a servant. Ellen as principle narrator has a decidedly unromantic view of the characters as expected of a person with such a background. Replacing her with an Asian adds an air of exoticism to the Earnshaw household, which was a place of dreary abuse and harsh fanaticism. From Country Living:

Our first clue that Fennell’s version might be unlike any that came before it is the quotation marks around the title: “Wuthering Heights”.

It’s a subtle typographical choice that has sparked intricate discussion online – from TikTok speculation to serious cultural debate. Some fans on social platforms posited that this punctuation choice hints at a narrative choice – that someone from a later period is reading the book or imagining themself within it.

But in a recent Fandango interview, Fennell herself put these theories to rest and explained her reasoning: that a novel as "dense, complicated and difficult" as Brontë’s resists a straightforward cinematic translation – you simply can’t adapt it faithfully scene by scene.

“I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights," she explains. "It’s not possible. What I can say is I’m making a version of it. There's a version that I remember reading that isn't quite real, and there are things I wanted to happen that never happened.

"So, it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t – but really I'd say that any adaptation of a novel should have quotation marks around it." (Read more.)

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Crackdown in Minneapolis

 From Mr. Snerdley:

A crackdown on protesters in Minneapolis appears to be underway following “good talks” President Donald Trump had with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.

The crackdown came as Border Czar Tom Homan was set to arrive in the city amid growing tensions between anti-ICE protesters and federal immigration officials, leading to two deaths in recent weeks.

Trump has characterized the calls as being positive, while reiterating his administration’s demands that the city and state turn over criminal illegal aliens.

It’s unclear whether the calls prompted what appeared to be a crackdown by local law enforcement, clamping down on protesters congregating outside a hotel suspected of housing ICE officials.

However, the Department of Homeland Security posted a video on X showing law enforcement going after “rioters.”

“Local Minnesota Police arrested violent rioters last night. Glad to see some state and local government cooperation. It’s a start,” DHS posted.

Earlier on Monday, the president announced that Walz had reached out to him, requesting the two work together.

In Trump’s Truth Social post Monday announcing Homan’s impending arrival in Minneapolis, the president said the border czar would be reaching out to Walz in an effort to obtain “criminals that they have in their possession.” (Read more.)

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The Lost Tomb of Thutmose II

 From Earth:

Archaeologists from Egypt and Britain are credited with identifying the tomb of King Thutmose II, the last Eighteenth Dynasty ruler whose burial place had never been located. Crews traced an entrance marked Tomb C4 into a valley 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) west of the Valley of the Kings. Survey maps from the University of Cambridge helped guide the mission across Luxor’s west bank. Fieldwork was led by Piers Litherland, an honorary research associate whose excavations track early royal burials outside the main valleys. Careful digging mattered because the first cleared corridor ended in collapse, giving no quick name for the owner. Location near tombs of royal women made the burial look like another consort’s chamber, not a king’s. Archaeologists treat the landscape as evidence, since builders often grouped wives, children, and officials in separate parts of the cliffs.Nearby openings include burials linked to wives of Thutmose III and an intended resting place for Queen Hatshepsut. That context shaped early expectations and delayed a royal claim until later fragments provided a clearer signature. (Read more.)

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'Priceless' Medieval School Text Found to be Unique

 

The book was written in the 14th century. From the BBC:

A "priceless" manuscript held in a school library has been confirmed as the only surviving complete version of a work by an early medieval writer. Shrewsbury School said it was gifted a copy of Richard Rolle's Emendatio vitae - or The Emending of Life - in 1607 and it had been kept in its Ancient Library ever since. Dr Timothy Glover, a specialist in medieval literature, said he was the "only person since the Middle Ages to have read [the book]" knowing that it was Rolle's original. The discovery provided "fresh insight into the development of medieval Christian writing and English literary culture," said the school. (Read more.)

 

From the University of Cambridge:

How does a hermit become England’s most widely-read author in a period sandwiched between the Great Famine and the Wars of the Roses?

It’s a question many scholars have considered but a once-in-a-lifetime discovery by Dr Timothy Glover brings us closer than ever to the enigmatic author Richard Rolle.

In a study published in Mediaeval Studies, Dr Glover, a medieval literature researcher, demonstrates that manuscript ‘MS 25’ in Shrewsbury School’s Ancient 'Taylor' Library contains the only complete surviving copy of Richard Rolle’s original draft of Emendatio vitae (The Emending of Life).

He also shows that all other copies known to survive actually contain an abridged version made by someone else. This makes the manuscript one of the earliest surviving collections of Rolle’s work in Latin. The priceless text offers unique insights into how Rolle worked, disseminated his writing and who his initial reader was.

“I'm the only person since the Middle Ages to have read this knowing that it’s Rolle’s original,” Dr Glover says. “It's such an important manuscript and it offers a direct connection with an author who deserves far greater recognition.”

“Medieval people struggled with distractions as we do today. They were trying to still their wandering minds. Rolle offered practical strategies to help, and some people treated him like a saint for it.”

Dr Glover published his findings while working at Corpus Christi College, following a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College. He recently moved to the University of Bergen.

Leo Winkley, Headmaster of Shrewsbury School, said: “This is an extraordinary discovery for Shrewsbury School. We are honoured to be the custodians of the original and only surviving complete version of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae since it was gifted to the School in 1607. The manuscript reveals the text as it was actually written by one of the most influential English authors of the medieval period.

“It is also a powerful reminder of the depth and continuity of our Ancient 'Taylor' Library, founded in 1606 as a place of universal learning for the pupils of Shrewsbury School. The Library holds an exceptional range of material, including medieval manuscripts, incunabula printed before 1500, Newton’s Principia, and books and manuscripts associated with figures such as Samuel Butler and Old Salopian Charles Darwin." (Read more.)

 

More on Richard Rolle, HERE.

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The Terrible Price America Will Pay Because Liberals Believe the Rules Don’t Apply to Them

 From Culturcidal:

You see this repeated endlessly in the way that liberals behave. They don’t see the need to have one set of standards for everyone and ALWAYS seem to have completely different standards for liberals and non-liberals.

They held the police back and allowed left-wing riots all over the country in 2020. They allow their liberal compatriots to break the law at will in places like Portland and Minneapolis. They literally support mobs tearing down statues of people it’s trendy to dislike on the Left. They support sanctuary cities and oppose deporting even rapists, pedophiles, and wife beaters who are illegal aliens because they’re a favored class on the Left. They demand an open border because too many Americans don’t support them, and so, they need to bring in new voters who will support their agenda.

In professions they dominate, they openly despise and discriminate against people who have political differences with them. Even if you argue that some of the prosecutions of Trump were legitimate, there’s no question that all the prosecutions in NYC were purely driven by politics.

Every single story in the media they control tilts in one direction or another based on what liberal narratives they’re trying to push or protect. They’ve hijacked our schools and funneled tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into funding and promoting their agenda. They support judges who rule based on politics, not the Constitution. They’re openly trying to make elections less secure to make it easier for their liberal compatriots to cheat.

When they get back in power, they’re talking about doing away with the filibuster, expanding the Supreme Court, and adding new states to pad their Senate margins, all of which are highly likely to destabilize the whole country. Of course, we also can’t forget that we just had one of the most shameful incidents in all of American history, when a liberal assassinated Charlie Kirk and millions of other liberals publicly celebrated it and declared that he deserved it for disagreeing with them. (Read more.)

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When Was Catherine Howard Born?

 From Gareth Russell:

Henry’s fifth wife Catherine Howard had, at one point, a date of birth that was almost as imprecise as Anne Boleyn’s. In Catherine’s case, the traditional date was c. 1522, but this was contested by later generations of historians until, by the twentieth century, there was a nine-year window between 1518 and 1527.[3] This would have made her in her early twenties or twelve-thirteen at the time of her marriage to Henry VIII in 1540 and about twenty-three or fourteen when she was executed in February 1542. An argument will be made here that the traditional date of birth for Catherine is almost certainly the correct one and that she was born in c. 1522-1523, making her about seventeen at the time of her marriage and about nineteen when she was executed.

The mystery of Catherine’s age is, to some degree, perplexing, in that, unlike Henry’s other three English wives, we do have a specific statement on the subject from a contemporary, who met Catherine on numerous occasions. Charles de Marillac, who served as the French ambassador to England throughout Catherine’s time as queen, wrote that Catherine was eighteen.[4] The letter’s utility is admittedly complicated by the fact that de Marillac was referring to an incident earlier in Catherine’s life, before he knew her. We know that the referenced incident occurred in late 1539, but de Marillac, writing in 1541, seemed to think it had happened in 1540. This places Catherine’s birth to 1521, if de Marillac was correct about the timing of the incident, but to 1522 if, as seems likely, he had misdated the incident to a few months later.

The incident in question – Catherine’s alleged betrothal to Francis Dereham – was something about which de Marillac heard for the first time in late 1541. While it is understandable that the rumours he was hearing were incorrect in their details, it is not credible that de Marillac would have stated that Catherine was eighteen when it happened, if she was in fact several years younger. De Marillac had spent weekends as Catherine and Henry’s guest in 1540 and 1541, he knew her personally, and it stretches credulity that he could have gotten wrong such a basic fact as the Queen’s age, particularly by such a margin.

​Another specific complicated by context are the details of Catherine’s debut at the Tudor court in late 1539. She joined the royal household as a maid of honour to Henry’s fourth wife Anne of Cleves, whose arrival in London was anticipated in late 1539, only to be delayed to January by the weather. Maids of honour were a queen’s unmarried ladies-in-waiting and fourteen was too young to serve. Even young women from prominent and well-connected families were not permitted to take their oath as a maid of honour until they were sixteen.[5] When the household was reconvened in 1539 for Anne of Cleves, we know that it stuck rigorously to the rules about composition.[6] This would date Catherine’s year of birth to 1523, likely in the second half of the year. (Read more.)

 

 My review of Gareth's book on Queen Katherine, HERE.

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The Testament of Ann Lee (2026)

 

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

The Testament of Ann Lee, a new film by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, is a bold example of what I have come to call Hollywood’s retroactive repression.

Retroactive repression is when the film industry, eager to virtue signal and punish historical America for its unenlightened ways, makes a movie depicting our past as a hellscape of racism, sexism, homophobia, and the usual catalogue of our supposed original sins. Examples abound: The Help. Mississippi Burning. The Long Walk Home. Men of Honor. Mona Lisa Smile. Pleasantville. Remember the Titans. 

Retroactive repression is the artistic cousin of “punitive liberalism,” a term coined by James Piereson, which describes the left’s desire to punish America for her sins.

Retroactive repression films can be technically quite good, even as their plots can be plodding and annoying as they put America in the stockades, every time.

Such is the case with The Testament of Ann Lee. Amanda Seyfried stars as Lee, a real person who was born in 1736 in Manchester, England. Lee loves God and works hard, but she is put off by the number of babies her mother is having. Lee eventually marries a blacksmith (Christopher Abbott’s Abraham), but she feels called to celibacy and to expressing the charisma of God through dance and movement. The high mortality rate of newborn children at the time in Ann Lee is depicted in gruesome, horror-movie detail. Lee herself loses four children in childbirth. She begins to think she is being punished by God for ignoring her belief that celibacy is the path to true holiness.

Disillusioned, Lee joins a group of “Shaking Quakers,” whose services are akin to what we might associate with hippie ecstasies of chanting, ululating, and dancing. Lee is so charismatic that she attracts her own followers, who will come to be known as Shakers.

She becomes known as Mother, and her brother William (Lewis Pullman) helps her run the new sect. The Shakers suffer persecution in England and, in 1774, they came to North America, settling in upstate New York. 

Technically speaking, Ann Lee is a fantastic film. The movie is narrated by one of the film’s secondary characters, Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie), who makes it authentic and easy to follow. Cinematographer William Rexer shoots the early part of the film set in Manchester as crowded, claustrophobic, and dirty, then opens the lens to reveal the gorgeous vistas of rural New York, a land that represents freedom.

In parts of the film the characters sing and dance, and the repetitive, trancelike effect is transporting. Amanda Seyfried is fantastic in the lead, at once vulnerable, inquisitive, and infused with the kind of confidence characteristic of the spiritually zealous. “For those who confess, shams are over, and reality has begun,” a religious leader tells them. They truly believe they are building a Utopia. Soon, they are declaring “Mother” Ann Lee the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Of course, Utopia on Earth is not possible, and the New World turns out to be a place with its own repressions. Lee is called a witch. Her preaching is considered blasphemous—and not without cause, as she claims to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Ann’s sermons are violently disrupted. Of course, according to the rules of retroactive repression, this must end badly. In the end, Lee is deified by the filmmakers as a woman far ahead of her time, a rebuke to wallflowers and patriarchal America.

The writing and directing team of Fastvold and Corbet is the married couple whose last film was The Brutalist (2024), a film that had a similar theme of a dreamer who comes to America only to tumble headlong into prejudice and corruption. I remember being excited to see The Brutalist, the story of a great architect who arrived in America after World War II. I thought it would be an ode to America’s creative post-war boom. Instead, it was a long gripe about how the evils of capitalism destroyed a gifted artist’s dreams and work.

There’s nothing wrong with being reminded of the mistakes of previous generations, of course. Indeed, in many cases, it is perfectly legitimate for a movie to use retroactive repression to show us what we can learn from the past about what we hope to avoid doing in the future. But it would be so much better if that device were used more often to blast  communists and left-wing bigots, or at least treat these right-wing boogeymen characters with more complexity. (Read more.)

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Minnesota as a Systems Failure

 From DataRepublican:

The current unrest in Minnesota is an example of an order that has reached equilibrium through mutual dependency between antagonistic subsystems.

After the Cold War, the Western world organized itself around a single moral injunction: Never again. Never again fascism. Never again totalitarianism. Never again a unified ideology capable of subordinating it to a single vision of man.

To prevent another Nazi Germany or another Soviet Union, the post–Cold War order built immunity to totalitarian ideologies.

Grand narratives were treated as dangerous. Politics was re-engineered away from totalizing visions and towards norms and institutional mediation.

For a time, this worked.

But Marxism could not simply vanish in the West. It was too culturally embedded, too intertwined with labor and academia. At the same time, the system could not tolerate permanent insurgency. Thousands of bombings, riots, and underground cells per year were incompatible with stability. That level of disorder threatened the system’s own survival.

An honest reckoning with Marxism as a coherent rival risked reopening the same ideological conflict the post–Cold War order had been designed to avoid.

So, instead of crushing Communist subversives, the system adapted.

Dissent was absorbed into civic infrastructure: NGOs, foundations, advisory boards, grant programs, legal advocacy, compliance regimes, and professionalized activism. Radical energy was translated into careers and metrics.

The result is a structural inversion. The Western order that was constructed to neutralize Communism now depends on its managed presence to generate legitimacy. At the same time, contemporary revolutionary movements depend on the same institutions they once sought to overthrow; for funding, protection, and survival. (Read more.)

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Hijacking America’s Story

 From The Claremont Review of Books:

Upon his death in 1799, George Washington was hailed as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” It is no wonder, then, that a statue of the “Father of His Country” has stood in front of Independence Hall, our country’s birthplace, since the mid-19th century. It is here, after all, that Washington was unanimously chosen in 1775 as commander-in-chief of the fledgling Continental Army, which he led to an upset victory at Yorktown six years later that “turned the world upside down.” It is here that he was unanimously chosen by his fellow delegates to be the president of the Constitutional Convention. And it is here that, having been the presidential electors’ unanimous choice as the nation’s first chief executive, he served the bulk of his two successful terms, guiding the new government through its crucial early years and setting well-considered constitutional precedents at every turn.

And yet, visit Independence National Historical Park as run by the National Park Service and its allies, and you’ll find that Washington is more heavily criticized now than King George III. He is an irredeemable slaveholder, a hypocrite for the ages, his actions characterized as “deplorable,” “profoundly disturbing,” and as having “mocked the nation’s pretense to be a beacon of liberty.” He stands accused, with other founders, of “injustice” and “immorality.”

Authorized by an act of Congress in 1948 and officially established in 1956, Independence National Historical Park is tasked with “preserving for the benefit of the American people as a national historical park certain historical structures and properties of outstanding and national significance…associated with the American Revolution and the founding and growth of the United States.” Covering about 50 acres in the middle of historic Philadelphia, the park includes a variety of buildings familiar to lovers of American history, such as Carpenter’s Hall (where the First Continental Congress met), the First and Second National Banks, and replica versions of the Declaration House (where Thomas Jefferson wrote his draft) and City Tavern (where statesmen met throughout the founding period), both of which were (re-)built for the Bicentennial.

The most frequently visited portions of the park are the two square blocks framed by Market Street, Walnut Street, and 5th and 6th Streets. Of these two blocks, the southern one is Independence Square, which features Congress Hall, where the House of Representatives and Senate met for most of their first decade in existence; Old City Hall, where the Supreme Court met over that same span; and Independence Hall itself, where American independence was declared and our Constitution framed. The northern block includes the Liberty Bell Center, where the famous bell hangs, and the President’s House Site, which features the ruins of where Washington and John Adams each lived and worked during most of their presidencies.

The National Park Service’s “interpretations” at these sites leave much to be desired. The President’s House exhibit, at which visitors will read sign after sign suggesting how selfish and unprincipled Washington was, opened in 2010, during the Barack Obama presidency, at the beginning of the woke era. As with many deleterious shifts in our society, however, the change in the park’s tone actually began during George W. Bush’s presidency, if not earlier. The Park Service’s “Long-Range Interpretive Plan,” released in 2007, repeatedly emphasizes “diversity.” It bizarrely characterizes our national motto, E pluribus unum—out of many, one—as meaning that diversity is our strength; inanely juxtaposes Benjamin Franklin’s signing of the Declaration of Independence with “his attempt to control his children’s choices,” and views the world through the lens of “class, religion, ethnic[ity], rac[e], gender,” and “haves” and “have nots.”

At least there are no longer big video screens in the windows of the Declaration House, filled with the much-larger-than-life eyes of the descendants of Monticello slaves, as was the case in the summer of 2024. That display was a product of the National Park Service’s partnership with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (which maintains Monticello) and artist Sonya Clark, whose works “address race and visibility, explore Blackness, and redress history,” and who said that the eyes were “bearing witness. (Read more.)

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