Scientific Wonders from Versailles

Clock of the Creation of the World, 1754

 From The Art Newspaper:

Versailles: Science and Splendour at London’s Science Museum aims to highlight the French royal palace’s position as the crucible for scientific and intellectual innovation in the 17th and 18th centuries, under the patronage of Louis XIV and XV.

The exhibition—a reworked version of a 2010 show at Versailles—is designed to illuminate a momentous “scientific shift”, says the associate curator Matthew Howles. “In this period you see an increasing emphasis on the importance of observation; experiments that can be repeated to demonstrate their accuracy and reliability; and the development of more precise instruments to measure those scientific discoveries.”

Much of this activity appears to have been a result of royal prestige and enthusiasms. The palace contained Louis XIV’s menagerie of exotic animals, the first modern-style zoo, which became a centre for zoological study. The Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris has loaned the remains of one of its most celebrated inmates, an Indian rhinoceros given to Louis XV in 1770 by the French governor of Chandannagar in West Bengal.

Another technical innovation was the Marly machine, a pumping system built to supply Louis XIV’s elaborate fountains with water from the Seine river.

“There’s a two-fold phenomenon going on,” Howles says. “You’ve got these things like the menagerie and the fountains that are in themselves demonstrations of the monarchy’s power and prestige, but at the same time it gives scientists this great resource. With the menagerie, scientists from the academy could study these creatures while they were alive and dissect them after they’re dead and end up with much more detailed studies of animal anatomy.” (Read more.)

Louis XVI et La Pérouse

Map of the Moon, 1679

More HERE.

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Major Arrest in NYC

From Sara Carter:

Two members of the vicious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have been arrested in New York City in a major drug and credit card scam bust, according to the New York Post. An “arsenal of deadly assault rifles” was also found in the bust.

Denyeer Aramillo Meneses, 23, and Edison Pena Angulo, 25, were arrested in the bust during an early morning raid in the Bronx. The two were allegedly part of the apartment complex takeover in Aurora, Colorado which drew national attention as their antics were caught on camera inside the building. Warrants for their arrest were issued on October 1 by local police after the incident. Somehow, they made their way to New York City and were caught on Wednesday, November 27. (Read more.)

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The Medicines of Henry VIII

 From Historic Royal Palaces:

Some of Henry’s ingredients are poisonous, whilst others seem simply bizarre. Litharge of gold is actually a lead compound, named for its reddish-gold colour, whilst the 'unicorn’s horn' referenced in the recipe above was probably narwhal horn. Other recipes call for ceruse (white lead), nightshade and – a personal favourite – ‘long worms of the earth’ or as we know them today, earthworms.

Various non-toxic herbs and flowers, white wine and rose water are all also frequent ingredients in Henry’s recipes. The second recipe devised by Henry whilst he was staying at Hampton Court is a poultice, the ingredients for which include violet leaves, apples, mallow flowers, linseed, and a newly laid egg. This would have been a topical compound applied to the body on a cloth, possibly used to treat Henry’s leg ulcers.

Although the pain caused by Henry’s legs was public knowledge, medical treatment probably took place in the King's private apartments.

A Tudor medical text by one of his nurse-physicians, titled Bullein’s Bulwarke of Defence against Sickness and Disease (1562), repeatedly urges patients to lie upon their bed when receiving topical treatments – including a treatment for swollen legs. Among the numerous medical recipes in Bullein's Bulwarke is this particularly strange 16th-century recipe for Oleum vulpinum, or fox oil:

Take a whole Foxe, except the bowels, and put hym in a vessel, and powre uppon him Welle water, and salte Water, [and] old oyle. Seeth thys over a softe fyre, with Salte untyll the Water be consumed. Then put it into a vessel and powre to it sweete Water, wherein the herbes were sodden and […] seeth them again, till the Water be consumed.

Possibly one of the more disturbing recipes in Bullein’s book, this Oleum Vulpinum was recommended as a remedy against arthritis, back pain, and gout. Henry himself suffered from gout and may possibly have used something like this when under the care of Bullein. (Read more.)

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When the Sickle Swings: Stories of Catholics Who Survived Communist Oppression

I recently read When the Sickle Swings by Kristen van Uden. From Sophia Institute Press:

For over half of the twentieth century, across nearly half the globe, the Catholic Faith was repressed, restricted, or outright illegal. Since 1917, the atheistic, false messianic doctrine of communism found its expression in state powers, whose promises of “equality for all” routinely descended into totalitarianism, slavery, and slaughter. The Catholic Church was a principal target of these regimes.

From secret Masses in the prisons of Cuba, to clandestine clergy in the catacombs of Bratislava, to showdowns with Soviet tanks on the streets of Brno, Catholics resisted communist persecution in every way they could. Like their ancestors before them, they risked it all for their Faith — imprisonment, torture, death — knowing that the preservation of the Faith, and their immortal souls, was the only worthwhile option — and their greatest victory.

In these pages, you will read about:

• Heroic priests and bishops martyred by their governments
• The resilience of political prisoners who refused to submit to “re-education”
• Freedom fighters who died proclaiming “Viva Cristo Rey!”
• The underground Church in Czechoslovakia, where bishops secretly ministered to the faithful and continued apostolic succession
• How Catholics’ peaceful, prayerful protests were instrumental in the downfall of communist governments 
• The daily “white martyrdom” experienced by Catholics who refused to join the Communist Party
• Why communism’s doctrine of worldly utopia is antithetical to the Faith
• The role Our Lady plays in defeating communism

Just as the Church is universal, Catholic resistance to tyranny is universal. These inspiring, modern-era stories, while geographically and materially disparate, demonstrate the same devotion and fortitude common to saint heroes of every age. (Read more.)

At a time when we are constantly hearing from the Left that "Trump is Hitler" and that, in spite of zero evidence, a new totalitarian government is about to be unleashed upon us, it is good to read a book which  tells what it is really like to live under a dictatorship. While Nazis are preferred to Communists as the bogey-men of the Progressive elite, Kristen van Uhden's 2023 book When the Sickle Swings is a series of accounts by survivors of Marxist nation states, some of which, like Cuba, still exist. The horrors of persecution, particularly of Catholics, belong to living memory. Kristen skillfully gathered evidence and testimonies from eye-witnesses of Communist oppression, all of whom have lost family and friends to murderous tyrants. 

What is really disturbing is how those who have escaped to America see in the present-day Wokeness the growth of Marxism. In the words of one political prisoner of the Castro regime:

Here in the United States, there is much ignorance about Marxist ideology, of how it is disguised with a populist language of social justice that is never carried out. Gender ideology, which they carry out with unnatural sexual education given to children, along with the changes they want to carry out with the New World Order, is all part of the communist doctrine based on neo-Marxism. None of these will be able to triumph. (p.43)

Let us hope that we have escaped full-blown Marxism for the time being. Meanwhile, I recommend Kristen's book as a stocking stuffer guaranteed to provoke thoughtful political discussions.

Order When the Sickle Swings, HERE.

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Eat Healthy

 

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Rice Pudding

A beloved poem in our household. From Poems Ancient and Modern:

Children naturally find this kind of thing very funny. Sometimes it’s only children who find this kind of thing very funny. But what impels children to listen over and over and over to poems from Milne’s 1924  When We Were Very Young is the same thing that makes even sensible grownups consent to read them aloud. These poems do far more than simply push that button of the child’s desire to delight in getting one over on the adults.

In “Disobedience,” for example, the precise Latin hexameters give the tale of James and his mother its irresistible bounce, even while they are an echo of something more elevated. That frisson of dissonance extends the joke. In today’s Poem of the Day, in which the adult speaker can’t figure out why Mary Jane is kicking and screaming, the humor is similarly twofold and embedded in its form. (Read more.)

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