Tea at Trianon: The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery

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

Wednesday, March 10, 2021

The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery

From The Irish Examiner:

Seb Falk is the latest - alongside the likes of Professor Rodney Stark and James Hannan, author of God’s Philosophers- to enter the lists against glib dismissers of the Middle and (so-called) Dark Ages; those who, scientifically speaking, see little but wasted years dominated by quackery and superstition, stretching from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance.
These naysayers have received opinion on their side. An off-hand tweet by a celebrity historian, or a journalist’s lazy invocation of the Middle Ages when pouring scorn on something they don’t like, are merely distillations of centuries of self-serving contempt. Anyone who takes up the cause of promoting a more balanced view of medieval science must fear that they are on a hiding to nothing. Even if many professional historians have moved beyond it, the anti-medieval reflex is now deeply and unforgivingly embedded in popular and media culture. Nothing, surely, can dislodge it?
[...]
Falk hangs his story on the life and times of a single, astronomy-obsessed monk, John Westwyk, who entered the monastery of St Alban’s to the north-west of London in the 1370s; a man who, chanting the psalms every day, would have sung of the fingers of God, who had set the moon and stars in place, who had set them to govern the night while the sun governs the day, and who numbers the stars and calls them by their names. (Read more.)