Tea at Trianon: Variations in the Saints

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

Friday, September 9, 2022

Variations in the Saints

From The Missive:

The list of saints in the Communicantes, as we now have it in our modern Roman Missals, proceeds hierarchically through the Apostles and a number of Popes and bishops, finally concluding with martyrs, almost all of whom are Roman and date from the mid-300s or before. The last ones named are Cosmas and Damian.

However, in a number of older rites and liturgical manuscripts, particularly those from France and Milan, additional local and later saints appeared in this list as well. In the Bobbio Missal, for example, which is thought to represent a Celtic or Gallican Rite of the 600s, we find listed after Cosmas and Damian: Ss. Hilary, Martin, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, and Benedict.

In the Gelasian Sacramentary of the mid-700s are added Ss. Dionysius, Rusticus, Eleutherius, Hilary, Martin, Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, and Benedict–most of these extra names were partially erased in some manuscripts but remain still visible; other derivative copies have variations of this list. (Read more.)