The Remarkable Rise of Empress Theodora

 From Risto Gjorgjiev:

 Born around 500 AD in the vibrant city of Constantinople, Theodora’s early life was far from royal. Her father, Acacius, was a bear trainer for the city’s grand Hippodrome, a colossal stadium renowned for its chariot races and theatrical spectacles. After his untimely death, Theodora’s mother, a dancer and actress, found herself struggling to provide for her three daughters. To make ends meet, young Theodora was thrust into the world of entertainment, becoming an actress and dancer in the very Hippodrome her father had worked.

 The Hippodrome was not just a place of entertainment; it was the beating heart of Byzantine social life. Here, factions clashed, politics played out, and the mood of the populace was gauged. Theodora, with her keen observation, learned to read the crowd’s behavior, understanding their passions, grievances, and loyalties. This knowledge would later prove invaluable.

However, life in the limelight was not without its challenges. Theodora faced societal disdain due to her profession, which was often associated with promiscuity. Her travels across the Eastern Mediterranean exposed her to various cultures and experiences, including a tumultuous relationship with a Syrian official that left her stranded in North Africa.

In a twist of fate, Theodora’s return to Constantinople marked a new chapter in her life. Embracing Christianity, she left behind the world of entertainment and joined a community of devout women. It was during this period of reflection that destiny played its card: she caught the eye of Justinian, the nephew of the reigning emperor and the empire’s most eligible bachelor. (Read more.)

 The Mad Monarchist has a post about one of the most colorful women who ever lived, the Empress Theodora.

Together with her husband Empress Theodora oversaw the rebuilding of Constantinople into one of the most spectacular cities in history. She helped in the building of hospices, churches and refuges for the poor. She is also credited with influencing new laws to protect women, making rape and kidnapping capital offenses, no matter if the woman was noble or common born. Women could not be forced into the entertainment industry or prostitution and could not be put in prison for debts. Instead they were to be placed under the supervision of religious women to work off their debt. This was necessary because of the rape and abuse women often suffered in prison. She cracked down hard on prostitution, buying the freedom of many girls herself, meting out harsh punishment to their captors and setting up establishments to help them get back on their feet in legitimate ways. (Read more.)

Empress Theodora did much to protect women during her husband's reign. From The Collector:

The origins of women’s rights can be attributed to Empress Theodora. Probably her experience as a young woman marginalized by the institutional system of that time pushed her to work on the improvement of women’s rights in the Empire. She elaborated on The Corpus Juris Civilis, a series of juridical reforms included in Roman law, and laid the foundation for a framework for Western legal heritage for women’s rights, including the English Common Law, the American Constitution, and even contemporary international public law. Additionally, under Empress Theodora, rape became punishable by death. No matter their position or status, everyone present during the rape was affected by this rule, and the rapist’s property was handed over to the victim. (Read more.)

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The Death of Truth

 From Gavin Ashenden.at New English Catholic:

The death of Professor Jason Arday is a great tragedy, and those who pray will immediately want to pray for his soul, but not just for his own soul, but for the souls of those who manipulated, used and abused him by finding in him a useful instrument for the progressive fantasy of diversity, inclusion and equity.

Suicide always leaves anybody touched by it, which includes those who read about it, with a sense of guilt. We cannot escape the question of whether or not there was anything we could have done to save a life from despair, or whether there was anything we did to contribute to the despair?

And so, in order to face those questions, many of the people who found in Professor Arday a useful tool for their propagandisation of progressive ideology need to divert and deflect the blame to others.

Already the accusations have been made that those who asked questions about the truth were to blame for placing a fragile man under pressure, as if there is some kind of trade-off between personal fragility and claims for truth. (Read more.)

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The Absence of Young Male Novelists

 From Chronicles:

Acclaimed novelist Joyce Carol Oates had no issue tweeting that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.” And, without a hint of irony, followed up that statement with “this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’” Although she is willing to recognize that young white men may be talented and barred from literary opportunities, she cannot help but equalize the statement with ludicrous notions of “privilege” where there is anything but.

None of this is especially controversial within the industry itself. By 2021, there was not a single white male millennial on the Times’s “Notable Fiction” list; the same was true in 2022, and only one appeared in each of the next two years. Demographic transformation of American publishing is measured, publicized, and, in many quarters, celebrated. The question is not whether the literary establishment has changed, but whether its new priorities have altered the kind of literature it is capable of producing. If the aspiring Roth or McCarthy today finds fewer editors willing to take his manuscript seriously (not because of its prose but because of the demographic profile of its author), that represents more than an injustice to individual writers. It represents a narrowing of the imaginative possibilities of American literature itself.

Beyond the disparities in race among novelists and literary agents lies the much more pervasive racial disparity in short-form magazines where fiction writers can build a portfolio. These magazines brazenly cater to just about every favored identity group imaginable. They offer fee-free submissions for minority groups; they have exclusive windows to segregate who may submit; and they champion these groups as combating historical overrepresentation from white men. This, of course, can only go on so long before these identity groups, themselves, become the overrepresented ones.

The most commonly offered explanation for this obvious discrimination against white men is that publishing is simply “correcting historical imbalances.” An industry that once professed indifference to the identity of the author increasingly treats identity as a meaningful criterion in and of itself. Literary merit is now expected to coexist with representational goals, institutional diversity targets, and a moral vocabulary inherited from Marxist cultural theory. The result is a publishing culture that increasingly evaluates fiction not as art but rather as an instrument of social justice.

What does this mean for us? What does this mean for the West? (Read more.)

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Queenship and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Henrietta Maria and Marie-Antoinette

Marie-Antoinette de Lorraine d'Autriche

Henriette-Marie de France

From History of Royal Women:

Queen Marie-Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI of France and Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I of England were two of the most notorious queens in European history. They both faced accusations that they had transgressed social, gender and regional norms, and attempted to defend themselves against negative reactions to their behaviour. Each queen engaged with the debates of her time concerning the place of women within their families, religion, politics, the public sphere and court culture and attempted to counter criticism of her foreign origins and political influence. The impeachment of Henrietta Maria in 1643 and trial and execution of Marie Antoinette in 1793 were also trials of monarchical government that shaped the English Civil Wars and French Revolution.

I was lucky enough to receive a copy from Palgrave Macmillan of Queenship and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Henrietta Maria and Marie Antoinette by Carolyn Harris, which is a part of their Queenship and Power series. Marie-Antoinette has had much written about her, while Henrietta Maria seems to have been quite forgotten. I only recently received a new biography about her.

The comparison between Marie-Antoinette and Henrietta Maria is perhaps not one that immediately comes to mind, but both women lived in a time of civil unrest, albeit over 100 years apart. Both women were childless for the first part of their marriage and suffered for it. It’s a rather interesting comparison, and I especially enjoyed reading about Henrietta Maria’s impeachment, about which so little appears to have been written. Henrietta Maria managed to escape to France, but without her husband who was eventually executed in 1649. Marie-Antoinette and her family also attempted to escaped, but they were caught, and both Marie-Antoinette and her husband were executed by guillotine. (Read more.)

  My books on the two Queens available HERE. Share

Racialized DEI Hiring Is Bad for Everyone

 From AMAC:

Jason Arday was found dead on Friday. After large parts of the black Cambridge academic’s work and life story were revealed to be fraudulent, the 41-year-old chair of sociology of education resigned in early August and, many suspect, took his own life.

Western liberals have rushed to blame those who criticized Arday, accusing them of “racist” attacks that led him to commit suicide. But while Arday’s death is undoubtedly a tragedy, it does not illustrate the dangers of anti-black racism. Instead, it demonstrates the destructive nature of so-called “antiracist” DEI policies to everyone involved. Those who pushed Arday forward because of his race and not his merit and those who for years turned a blind eye to his dishonesty bear far more blame than any supposedly “racist” critics.

Jason Arday was the hero of a fairy tale irresistible to western liberals. The son of immigrants from Ghana to the U.K., he told people his childhood was spent in special education schools for physical and intellectual disabilities. He also said that he didn’t learn to speak until age 11 and to read until 18. Dyslexic and deaf in one ear, he said he developed epilepsy as a teen from enduring beatings by neighborhood kids. (Read more.)

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Did the Hittites Record the Fall of Homeric Troy in Cuneiform?

 From The Collector:

Homer’s account of the Trojan War in the Iliad, written in the 7th century BC, is one of the world’s most enduring stories. But was it purely fantasy, or based on real historical events? In the search for confirming evidence, scholars have examined clay tablets containing the historical archives of the Hittite kings at Hattusa. They preserve details of Anatolian politics in the 13th century BC, the time when the Trojan War was supposed to have been fought. While these administrative texts do not speak of golden armor or meddling gods, they do record a century of real conflict over the legendary city the Hittites called Wilusa, which many scholars believe was ancient Troy.

The Hittite Empire ruled over much of Anatolia throughout the Late Bronze Age, the era between approximately 1550 and 1150 BC. Numerous Hittite documents have been uncovered and translated. In particular, thousands of clay tablets were unearthed at Bogazköy in modern Turkey in the early 20th century, containing administrative records kept by Hittite royal scribes of the Hittite capital of Hattusa. This collection contains diplomatic letters between rulers, quite a few of which refer to attacks on western Anatolia by a nation called the Ahhiyawa. While not universally accepted, the majority of scholars agree that the Ahhiyawa were the Mycenaean Greeks. The ethnonym “Ahhiyawa” is held to be a Hittite version of “Akhaioi,” the Greek form of “Achaeans.”

As soon as these documents were uncovered and translated, historians began to realize their potential significance regarding the Iliad. According to Homer’s epic poem, a thousand Greek ships were launched against Troy in western Anatolia in the 13th century BC. This was not a war against just one city but against Troy’s many allies all over western Anatolia as well. Hittite documents dating to the same period appear to confirm that the Ahhiyawa were engaged in large-scale warfare in western Anatolia at this time. (Read more.)

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The Forgotten Prince of Versailles, Part I

 

From Philip Diaz-Lewis at Rationis Fines:

In December 1765 the heir to the French throne died at Fontainebleau, aged thirty-six. Louis-Ferdinand, Dauphin of France, had been trained from childhood for kingship and had spent fifteen years attending the councils of his father Louis XV. He would never reign. Three of his sons eventually did. The (in)famous career of his son, Louis-August, the future Louis XVI, would overshadow the memory of his father.

The funeral preaching at once made him into the exemplary figure of an ideal Christian prince. First the Jesuits, then the bishop Loménie de Brienne, then the abbé de Boismont, lined up to preach orations. In their eyes Louis-Ferdinand was a model of rational religion (religion eclairée), and piety (pieté).1 His former confessor, the abbé Soldini, then composed in 1766 the work Essai sur la vie de Mgr Louis Dauphin. He set Louis-Ferdinand against the sensualism and materialism that had come to characterise the radical French Enlightenment of the philosophes.2

Scarcely had his body been laid to rest, however, that his legacy would be contested. For the poet and literary critic Antoine-Léonard Thomas had written a great elegy in his praise, likening the prince to ancient Roman heroes and sages like the general Germanicus, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Catholic admirers complained that he was turning the late Dauphin into a virtuous pagan instead of a Christian.3 (Read more.)

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A Flawed Covid Study and the Amish

 From Sharyl's Substack:

A study was published entitled: “Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” It appeared in the Journal of Religion and Health on June 11, 2021.

But I noticed serious flaws with the study and decided to challenge it. Among the problems I saw:

• For their study population, the researchers grouped together a sample of Mennonite and Amish— even though Mennonites typically followed CDC guidelines while the Amish did not.

• They excluded the largest Amish population in the US in Lancaster, the one that was actually the subject of the news reports.

• And their study headline was at odds with what their own data showed: even with their skewed sample, the Amish fared no worse than the rest of the US for not having shut down.

After examining the study, I tried to get further information to determine if corrections were warranted. Among other things, I wanted to know:

• Who were the peer reviewers who had signed off on a deeply flawed study?

• What did the actually study notes and data show about why the most obvious study sample population was excluded?

• What were some of the internal communications before and after publication?

With scientific studies, all the data is supposed to be available for public review and replication for obvious reasons. Studies aren’t considered scientifically valid without this kind of transparency. And. in many cases, we actually own the data because our tax money paid for the study—or some of it— or pays the salaries of some of the people involved.

But in this case, as with other with other times I’ve pursued study information, the scientific establishment found a way to exempt itself from the common sense oversight guidelines. (Read more.)

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The Terrain of Neuroscience: Brain, Consciousness, and Identity (Part 1)

 From Church Life Journal:

Philosophers use the terms “identity,” “self,” and “subject” frequently, yet much less frequently do they define them adequately; something similar is true for neuroscientists studying self-awareness. In my historical work, I have shown that “identity” has meant three distinct but related ideas in the history of philosophy and related disciplines.[4]

The first meaning, or Identity1, is endurance through time. I am the same person I was yesterday, and I will be the same person if I wake up tomorrow. This is the most basic sense of identity, as well as the most ancient meaning of the term. Identity2 concerns what the Platonic schools called the “true self.” When I answer the Delphic Oracle’s command to “know yourself,” what is it that I know? Identity2 is the most central meaning of identity. Identity3 is how I experience and know myself, both emotionally and cognitively. This is the realm of consciousness, and it is the most accessible aspect of identity.

Here I will focus on the last meaning of identity, for the simple reason that neuroscientists tend to reduce this multivalent term to this one meaning. They are not alone in doing this; the whole trajectory of modern thought on identity promotes this reduction, as I show in my book Body and Identity. Like all reductions, however, much is lost, and it promotes many unnecessary confusions.

After surveying common patterns and specific proposals in the field of consciousness studies (analytic philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience), I will at a later time describe the various conceptual problems that arise within it. There I will sketch a better account of consciousness and bring us back to the topic of identity and draw a few conclusions. (Read more.)

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