Tea at Trianon: A Renowned Medievalist, Poet, and Fencer

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

Sunday, December 28, 2025

A Renowned Medievalist, Poet, and Fencer

Professor Rachel Fulton Brown from the University of Chicago. From The European Conservative:

Conservatives need to stop letting the Adversary define the terms of the debate, starting with the concept of sin. The very concept of sin is anathema to modern feminism, convinced as it is that men are to blame for all the woes of human existence. I exaggerate, but only slightly. The gender debate, such as it is, is a debate about where to place blame for the differences between the sexes, with women claiming that they should be able to behave like men sexually while at the same time blaming men for behaving like men. The upshot is that everyone is unhappy, blaming each other for not being empathetic enough to anticipate each other’s every need. There is no antidote because nobody is willing to acknowledge his or her role in creating the situation, famously encapsulated in that moment in a certain garden when, convinced it would give them power to overcome their own nature, the first woman and the first man ate of the fruit they had been forbidden to eat thinking it would make them “as Gods” (Gen. 3:5). This original sin of disobedience has, according to Christian teaching following the Apostle Paul, defined human nature ever since: women being persuaded that God lied to them about who they are, and men going along with the women like so many Macbeths.

And yet, into this tale of sorrow comes the Virgin Mary, our second Eve, who rather than fighting God’s will for her, consents to become the Mother of God. Mary’s obedience presents modern feminism with an insurmountable challenge. Was this not rape, as so many have argued; after all, how could Mary have possibly said, “No”? Everything hinges on this question. In the 12th century, Mary’s consent would become axiomatic for the sacramental definition of marriage: just as God would not have taken flesh from the Virgin without her consent, so both the bride and the bridegroom must make verbal consent (“I do”) to their marriage. Ironically (our story is filled with irony), from a Christian perspective, the feminist rejection of patriarchal marriage is a rejection of the one institution founded on a woman’s God-given right to say, “No,” precisely because God did not rape the Virgin Mary, but rather sent his messenger to obtain her consent (“Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum,” “Let it be to me according to your word,” Luke 1:38).

But why did Mary say, ‘Yes’? ‘She was special, alone of all her sex; nobody could be as perfect as she,’ reply her feminist sisters. ‘She sets an impossible ideal.’ To me, as a daughter of Eve, this has always sounded like envy: ‘I wish I could be as beautiful and beloved as she.’ Modern women will deny it, but their taste in romance literature suggests otherwise; likewise, the sorrow they express at not being able to find the man of their dreams who will treat them like the queen they know (and tell each other) they are. As I have tried to show in my scholarship, what they fail to appreciate is how much their fantasies depend on stories told about the Virgin Mary, specifically, stories told about the Virgin Mary through commentaries on the Song of Songs in which stories Mary is given the role of the bride pursued by the bridegroom to become his beloved queen. “You are all beautiful, O my love, and there is no spot in thee,” the bridegroom tells her (Song 4:7). “My soul melted when he spoke,” she tells her companions (Song 5:6). “One is my dove, my perfect one is but one, she is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her,” he tells his associates (Song 6:8). Every modern romance novel that casts the hero as elusive, strangely powerful, ancient and brooding draws on this tradition; every woman who imagines herself pursued by a loving God-man is heiress to the medieval tradition of mystical longing. (Read more.)