Tea at Trianon: Bone Of Contention?

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

Saturday, March 13, 2021

Bone Of Contention?

From Radio Free Europe:

Alena Slamova, a Czech graduate student in archaeology, was routinely washing some animal bones that had been recovered from a dig in an early Slav settlement in southern Moravia when she noticed unusual scratchings on the surface of one fragment. So she decided to show it to her colleagues.

Her sharp-eyed intervention was not just fortuitous but momentous.

Her discovery sparked three years of meticulous research that has now resulted in a paper that has reignited historical controversies and shed new light on a murky period in Europe's past.

"It was absolutely surprising for us," says Jiri Machacek, head of the Department of Archaeology and Museology at Masaryk University in Brno. Machacek is the co-author of the groundbreaking report on the significance of the find uncovered in the Lany locality near the Czech town of Breclav.

According to Machacek, the engravings his student found turned out to be runic lettering, something he had never expected to see in an early Slav settlement. (Read more.)