Tea at Trianon: The Coligny Calendar

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 10, 2013

The Coligny Calendar

From English Historical Fiction Authors:

The Coligny Calendar is an engraved copper alloy tablet which was originally 1.48 metres wide and 0.9 metres high. It is broken and incomplete, but the 73 fragments preserved in the Gallo-Roman Museum in Lyon gives us a great deal of information about how the calendar was structured. It dates to the late 2nd Century AD, by which time Lyon and its surrounding district was, in most respects, thoroughly Romanised, yet the months it lists are not the familiar ones of the Julian Calendar.

Presumably it mattered, at least to some people, to keep in mind the calendar of their pre-Roman ancestors. Since Julius Caesar and other writers emphasise the unity of Gaulish and British culture, with druids moving freely across tribal boundaries, the likelihood is that this calendar, or some variant of it, applied in Britain just as it did in Gaul. (Read more.)