Tea at Trianon: Scottish Women

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Scottish Women

And the Wars of Independence. To quote:

I have chosen to retell this moving story of an obscure Scottish peasant woman because it enables me to raise questions that historians have not frequently cared to raise. Although historians have occasionally discussed the participation of women in the Wars of Independence, no one has systematically examined the variety of ways in which women experienced a conflict that was in large part imposed upon them by their husbands and fathers, brothers and sons, lords, bishops and priests. Yet the role of women in the Wars of Independence should be of interest not only to social historians but also to students of Scottish literature and to feminist critics, for the memory of the varieties of women’s wartime experience was perpetuated in such works as Barbour’s Bruce and Blind Harry’s Wallace. (Read entire article.)