Tea at Trianon: Irish Monks and Climate Change

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

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Irish Monks and Climate Change

From The Irish Times:

Could the writings of ancient Irish monks and scribes hold a key to our cold weather patterns? A group of Irish and international researchers think so. Studying descriptions of weather in the medieval Irish writings and comparing them with measurements taken from ice cores, researchers have successfully linked the climatic aftermath of volcanic eruptions to extreme cold weather events here over a 1,200-year period. Researchers from universities including Harvard, UCC, UCD, Trinity College and Queens University Belfast assessed over 40,000 Irish and Latin entries in the Irish annals. Kept by educated scribes in monastic centres until the 13th century and by historians until 1649, the annals describe major events in Ireland’s history. (Read entire post.)