Loverboy Chivalry vs Martial Chivalry

 

I love Arthurian legend, the basis for "courtly love" which the article refers to as "Arthurian" chivalry or "loverboy" chivalry. Courtly love was essentially invented by Eleanor of Aquitaine, inspired by the troubadour culture of the south of France, cultivated by her grandfather Duke William of Aquitaine. Queen Eleanor founded the "courts of love" in which great ladies would play lawyers and debate the highly romanticized and highly idealized matters of the behavior of their knighted admirers. It allowed women to hold forth upon matters of deportment and courtesy as well as discussing poems,songs and ballads. The bottom line was the respect and reverence which noble men were expected to show to noble ladies. It gave agency to women in an era of arranged marriages, when people did not marry for love. Women of all classes could be beaten by their husbands and mistreated in any number of ways. There was always the danger of both men and women finding love outside of marriage. Courtly culture acknowledged that such forbidden love happened but channeled it into chaste manifestations, because when actual adultery occurred it could lead to war, imprisonment or corporal punishment,  depending upon the rank of the lady and her husband. Not a Christian ideal but then many think it was influenced by the Cathars, as I explore in my novel The Night's Dark Shade. From The Chivalry Guild Letters:

Carolingian chivalry is the essentially French version, and its mythos is the chansons de geste (“songs of great deeds”) involving Charlemagne and his paladins—the most famous of which is The Song of Roland. Carolingianism is about war and God. It is the chivalry, Gautier writes, of the “11th and 12th centuries—that of the crusades, that of our [epic poetry]. It will appear rude and barbarous to some people, but in truth is strong and healthy, and has formed for us the powerful race whose glory has filled the world.” Roland and company don’t have much time for the finer points of etiquette and don’t dedicate themselves to idealized romantic love; they are too busy fighting Saracens and protecting Christian civilization.

As for the more popular Arthurian or English chivalry, Gautier has less fond things to say. He writes:

The romance of the Round Table spread amongst us the taste for a less wild but also a less manly chivalry. The elegancies of love in them occupied the place formally reserved for the brutality of war and the spirit of adventure in them extinguished the spirit of the crusades. One will never know how much harm this cycle of the Round Table inflicted on us. It’s civilized us no doubt; but effeminated us. It took away from us our old aim, which was the tomb of Christ gained by blood in battle. For the austerities of the Supernatural it substituted the tinsel of the Marvelous. It is to this dangerous but charming literature that we owe for theatrical, the boastful, rash chivalry which proves so fatal during the Thirty Years’ War.

This kind of chivalry also gives birth to the satires of Cervantes and company, which aren’t making fun of paladins defending Christendom but instead the errant knights roaming the countryside looking for damsels to rescue. “And we must confess,” Gautier notes, “that some complaints of the great satirist are not without foundation.” (Read more.)

 

 From Becoming Noble:

Modern discourse offers only impoverished models for women. Feminism dismantled an older understanding of womanhood without replacing it with a sustainable alternative. It treats the household as a prison, motherhood as an obstacle to self-realisation, and the virtues historically cultivated by women as instruments of oppression. Ironically, in so doing, it foreclosed many of the domains by which women wielded substantial influence over civilization.

The reaction is equally impoverished despite its superficial conservatism. The trad-wife thing, to take the obvious example, is a performance of homemaking that lacks any serious theological or historical foundation. It reduces womanhood to a visual display of domestic labour, detached from the actual structures of authority, education, and spiritual responsibility that characterised the aristocratic household. At bottom, it is a reaction to feminism conducted on feminism’s own materialist terms.

The home-schooling mother model is a significant improvement but still shares a visceral and fatal error which precludes its wider adoption. These approaches treat the domestic as something small. None advances the majesty of the Christian aristocratic tradition: that the household is the foundational unit of civilisation, that its proper ordering is a matter of cosmic significance, and that the woman who presides over it wields a form of distinct and profound authority. (Read more.)

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All's Not So Quiet on Any Front

 From James Howard Kunstler:

Project Freedom. Cute move! Notice that it’s not Operation Freedom. That would frame it as a military move. The President is tactically framing this as a humanitarian action. Mr. Trump has advised Congress as of May 1 that hostilities with Iran (Operation Epic Fury) are terminated, at the 60-day limit of the War Powers Resolution. Commercial ships from countries not involved in the Iran / US dispute will now get escorted safely through the Strait of Hormuz by US naval vessels. (Later amended by CENTCOM, around 9a.m. Monday as being protected by US Navy vessels “in the vicinity.”)

Any attack on these ships by Iran would prompt a forceful response and trigger a re-wind of the clock on the War Powers Resolution (WPR), meaning, another sixty days to conduct military operations, such as the destruction of key bridges and electric power plants promised earlier. Iran’s leadership — whoever that is — thought it could juke Mr. Trump on the 60-day deadline by stalling negotiations while it reorganized its remaining missile launchers. Tactical fail. Incidentally, the Supreme Court has never directly ruled on the WPR’s constitutionality or enforced the 60-day limit.

Also, by the way, the “neutral and innocent bystanders” designation means that oil tankers from Kuwait, the Emirate states, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia will be given safe escorts out of the Persian Gulf. That will have two effects: 1) avert the “shutting-in” of their productive oil wells (and the prospective geological damage to the oil fields); and 2) alleviate the price pressure on oil generally with new supply reentering the global oil market. (Read more.)

 

From John Zmirak at Chronicles:

Conflict between popes and secular leaders has been a running theme of Western history since Constantine’s conversion. It’s all too tempting for my fellow Catholics today, surveying such incidents, to thoughtlessly side with the papacy in any conflict. But countless faithful believers over the centuries did not.

The Ghibellines, who backed the Holy Roman Emperors against the grander claims of medieval popes, were equally Catholics in good standing; they simply regarded the pretensions of given popes as excessive, misguided, or wrong. The great theological poet Dante was technically a Guelph (the pro-papal party), but he wrote in De Monarchia that a strong, faithful emperor was equally crucial to the health of Christendom. Going back to the 10^th century, it took the Emperor Otto the Great invading Rome and deposing a corrupt pope to free the papacy from what historians call the “Pornocracy,” or “rule by harlots,” the dominion of local nobles who picked the popes, sometimes delegating that power to influential courtesans.

Sometimes God uses Caesar to rebuke or correct sinful heirs to St. Peter. I’d like to see the Trump administration act in that direction, relying on the faithful Catholics in its midst, such as JD Vance and Marco Rubio, to explain to the public that it’s acting on behalf of Catholic laymen against corrupt and politicized clerics. While too many online Catholics are busy complaining about Jeffrey Epstein and his depraved network it’s easy to forget that the U.S. bishops in the past 40 years have enabled far more sex crimes than Epstein could have imagined. (Read more.)

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Preoccupation with Sexual Sin

 From Catholic Culture:

In the rising tide of sexual immorality—or in judging the pitiful state of the world—devout Catholics tend to remember the famous statement by Our Lady of Fatima that “More souls go to hell for sins of the flesh than for any other reason” (July 13, 1917). Ever since that time, we have been citing this statement as an indication that more souls go to hell for sexual sins than for any other cause. But this is not necessarily what Our Lady meant, and we will certainly not achieve Heaven simply by avoiding these sins ourselves.

It is perhaps more likely that Mary had in mind the declaration of the Holy Spirit through St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians:

Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. [Gal 5:19-21]

But there are a great many self-identified Christians who, in the midst of their sexual purity, indulge in the non-sexual sins in this list. (Most of us have done so.) Moreover, in his letter to the Colossians, Paul further warns his readers: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (3:5). For Paul, in effect, it seems that the sins of the flesh are all of those sins that arise from our wayward passions—that is, the sins that are triggered by unregenerate desires of every kind, which have not been conquered and transformed through our participation in the grace of God. In this sense, we might say that “sins of the flesh” are not simply sexual sins but rather all the sins we commit when we are not living in the Spirit, in accordance with the grace of Jesus Christ. (Read more.)

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Lady in White

The Duchesse d’Angoulême, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Via Vive la Reine.

As for Thérèse, the long-cherished wish of Artois was fulfilled, for she consented to purchase a new gown for the occasion. In the dawn glow of her chamber at Hartwell, her ladies had breathed forth their admiration at seeing this princess swathed in softly shimmering folds of oriental silk, a flowing, voile shawl trimmed with silk tassels, high kid gloves and satin slippers, all in purest white. The double band of pearls which bound her head and chestnut coils, the white plumes, the ivory fan, and the nosegay of camellias, accented the simple elegance, modest grandeur, and self-effacing majesty of her slender form. ~from Madame Royale by Elena Maria Vidal

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Defending Hereditary Titles

 From Tatler:

Charles Courtenay, the 19th Earl of Devon, is the latest member of his family to sit in the House of Lords, a tradition that has passed through the generations from father to son for 900 years. He will also be the last.

The passing of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill this March finalised the abolishment of peers who inherit their titles through their family, a process that began in 1999, under the last Labour Government. As he prepares to step away from the role, the Earl of Devon has lamented the loss of ‘collective memory’ in British politics. 

 

‘A country that forgets its history forgets its responsibilities,’ Courtenay told Channel 4 News. The Earl, who argued that he provides Parliament with a valuable connection to the past because his ancestors fought in the Crusades, added: ‘Having members in one chamber of your Parliament who have that collective memory that goes back centuries allows you as a government, as a Parliament as it were to retain that memory.’ (Read more.)

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The Hector’s Veto

 From The New Criterion:

In contemporary Western society, taking offense (and encouraging others to do so) appears to have become a major pastime. Increasingly few people seem simply to reflect silently on odious behavior when they witness it, or are inclined simply to put it down to ignorance and move on. The required response has become, to use a popular modern term, “performative.” Making it clear to the world that one is graphically offended by anything approaching racial unpleasantness and certain other modern taboos—many of them bred of identity politics of one sort or another—has now become something of a social necessity. It was interesting to note, at the time of the death of George Floyd in 2020, how many of those (around the world) who sought to use this regrettable event for political purposes were white, middle-class people who have never been at the receiving end of racial abuse of any sort in their lives. Some such people who expressed outrage did so, we must be sure, from fellow feeling about the needless death of another human being, some out of guilt at their “white privilege,” but some, unfortunately, because they saw this man’s death as a political opportunity to entice others, of all ethnicities, into a coalition of grievance against the established order.

Only a brute would dispute the ignorance and vileness of overtly racist behavior or attempt to condone it, and society rightly deplores it. But the treatment of this justified taboo has advanced to an extreme degree: to behave as a racist, even without causing physical harm or material loss, has become one of the worst acts in which anyone in Western society can engage. Society always used to punish those who breached taboos by straightforward disapproval or ostracism—in Britain until the 1950s, for examples, divorcées were not welcome in royal circles, because the Established Church disapproved of divorce (remember Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson) and the monarch was the Supreme Governor of that church. But now, ostracism and disdain are not enough; legal remedies are demanded against perpetrators. Why has social vindictiveness reached this pitch? There have been indisputable outrages in which people are injured or die in attacks in which the motivation is plainly the assailant’s hatred of them on account of their race. That, though, is not the sole reason for the taboo’s elevation to a criminal act. In certain parts of society, offensiveness can be and is weaponized by those with political causes to pursue.

The practice of virtue signaling, if perhaps not the virtue signaler, is in its ubiquity relatively new. There is a class of person who covets approbation from his or her peers by pointing to breaches of a taboo and publicly shaming the person who has breached it. These types have always existed—one came across them at school—but now they abound and are encouraged in their quest. Such people do not always by accident come across language or conduct that offends them: they go and look for it, in keeping with taking offense having become something of a pastime. They also look for it in order to exploit it, or to attempt to exploit it, for political reasons. The strategy includes the need to persuade others less alert than themselves that they, too, should be offended. And no one can claim credit from their peers as a virtue signaler more rapidly and comprehensively than someone who has identified anything that might qualify as “racist” behavior. It is not merely a taboo now, it is a bludgeon; it can be career-ending and reputation-wrecking. The more terminal the damage the virtue signaler can inflict on the alleged racist, the more worthy of respect (in the world of virtue signaling) that person is. Winning esteem in the world of virtue signalers brings deep satisfaction to the politically motivated and the self-righteous. In addition to using this tried and tested reason for vilification, the community is always on the lookout for new taboos, or acts or language that can become taboo, to expand the repertoire. (Read more.)

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This Unconventional Swedish Country Home

 

 

From Architectural Digest:

“My mother is an artist who’s passionate about botany,” explains architect Daniel Fagerberg, who was recently tasked with fashioning an unconventional Swedish country home for her to the west of Stockholm. For this highly personal project, he wanted to honor the intricacies of the flora and fauna that his mother has “dedicated her entire life to studying,” while paying homage to the cozy, light-wooded interiors that Scandinavian cottages are known for. The resulting property is a dream home for anyone who wants to be immersed in nature, botanist or not.

 Fagerberg describes the site as a “gentle westward slope, with oak and fruit trees, overlooking a vast landscape of meadows with a dense forest as a backdrop.” The home itself is a tribute to the famous Erskine Villa, a 1963 home by architect Ralph Erskine located a few miles away. The 2,260-square-foot structure was divided into four spaces with vaulted ceilings that was originally conceived as a stucco building (the white facades were intended to serve “as a canvas on which to display botanical studies.”) After a more detailed analysis, the architects decided that a façade of wooden panels would be more appropriate, as they provide “detail and texture,” while the size of the project also grew in tandem. (Read more.)

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The Silenced Generation

 From Daniel McCarthy at Chronicles:

Are America’s college students doing to themselves what the Chinese Communist state does to its citizens? An Ivy League professor—an old-fashioned liberal who actually cares about free speech—recently warned me about what’s happening in classrooms like his.

He encourages class discussion of the great books he teaches in class—but students are afraid to speak, not because they’re afraid of the professor but because they fear each other.

Communist regimes have tried to stamp out dissent for more than a century. Tyrants and totalitarians have always tried to sow suspicion among their subjects, turning friends, neighbors, and even family members into informers against anyone who won’t conform to the party line.

That’s the scenario in George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it’s the intention behind China’s insidious “social credit” system today. What Orwell never imagined, though, was that young men and women in a free society would one day willingly impose “political correctness” on their peers—and use the 21^st century’s decentralized social media to do it.

Students, the professor told me, are afraid to be recorded on their classmates’ cellphones talking about politics and political philosophy—the subjects he teaches—and don’t want to disagree with their fellow students about anything because the person they’re arguing with might belong to a “disadvantaged” group.

It’s not only what you say that’s dangerous, but who you say it to.

A young man getting into an argument with a young woman, or a white student with a black student, is not a “good look” on social media, and a classroom conversation runs the risk of leading to an online inquisition. Conservative students, who often have to face ostracism for their dissenting views, might be less intimidated than liberals and progressives, who aren’t used to not fitting in. (Read more.)

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Wonderland

In Victorian days, an infraction of etiquette could alienate people from each other. It did not need to be something unspeakable. Also, Prince Leopold was not Prince of Wales. But it is still an interesting account. From Marlene Wagman-Geller:

One of the strangest creatures that Alice encountered in Wonderland was the Caterpillar who inquired who she was. Her response: “I-I hardly know, sir, at present-at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.” Alice’s nonfictional counterpart was literary muse Alice Liddell.

A classic had its genesis when Alice’s father, Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ’s Church, Oxford, invited Charles Dodgson to his home. The lonely bachelor, who only lost his stutter around children, became an adored surrogate uncle to Henry’s three daughters, Lorina, Edith, and Alice. An avid photographer, Charles captured the image of the eight-year-old Alice in numerous portraits; his most well-known work showcased her as the scantily clad girl from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Beggar Maid” that contained the quotation, “This beggar maid shall be my queen!”

On July 4, 1862, Charles, along with the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the Liddell sisters for a rowboat ride along the Thames River. To entertain the youngsters, Charles made up a tale of the adventures and misadventures of a girl named Alice. Thrilled with her inclusion, Alice begged Charles to write it down as a proper book. For Christmas, he presented the ten-year-old girl with his handwritten manuscript, along with illustrations, entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. All the members of the boating party made an appearance: Alice, the protagonist, Dodgson, the dodo, the Reverend Duckworth, the duck, Lorina, the lorry, Edith, the eaglet.

Three years later, under the pen name Lewis Carroll, Charles published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Queen Victoria was so taken with the book she asked him to include her name in any future’s book’s dedication. A century later, The Beatles placed Charles’ image on the cover of their Sgt. Pepper album between Marlene Dietrich and T. E. Lawrence. Captain Robert Falcon Scott took the novel along on his Antarctic expedition.

The demise of wonderland arrived when Mrs. Liddell, an enraged Red Queen, gave her variation of, “Off with his head!” Something upset her to such an extent that she forbid Charles to have any contact with her family. She consigned all his letters to Alice to her fireplace. The end of their relationship was enough to wipe the grin off the Cheshire Cat. What the mama saw has never been made public—the Liddells remained mum. After Charles’ death, his family destroyed the pages of his diary concerning his banishment. The enigma surrounding Charles: was he a Nabokov who did more with Alice than talk about cabbages and kings? Was he merely an odd man who only felt comfortable in the world of childhood innocence? The truth lay in Charles’ own looking glass. (Read more.)

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My Little Sister

Today is her birthday. She's sixty!

 

Happy Birthday, Andrea!

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Do GOP Voters Recognize How Trump Saved Them From Trans Barbarism?

 From Chronicles:

Two years after the Biden-Harris Administration hijacked Easter Sunday to push transgender ideology, President Donald J. Trump delivered a decisive blow against one of the most destructive social and political experiments in modern American history.

The Biden-Harris agenda wrought indescribable harm, but this Easter season, the nation witnessed not just policy reversals but also the forceful, unapologetic reclamation of sanity. Trump ended the Democrats’ “Transgender for Everybody” agenda that treated biological sex as optional, children as experiments, and women’s rights as collateral damage.

Trump banned federal funding, sponsorship, or promotion of the chemical and surgical mutilation of minors. He protected children from irreversible physical and psychological damage, ordering agencies to cut funds from institutions involved in these practices.

More than three dozen health systems, including Kaiser Permanente, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Children’s Minnesota, Denver Health, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Stanford Medicine, and NYU Langone, then announced they would stop or suspend child mutilation programs.

These concrete results followed directly from executive resolve. If returned to power, Democrats will undo every one of them. Their woke base demands it. Republicans cannot afford to forget this reality as the midterms approach.

Trump further dismantled indoctrination in schools.

His administration terminated federal support for transgender ideology and its attendant so-called equity curricula. States now face clear notice: remove such content or lose funding. Parents regained ground against an un-American, and arguably inhuman, assault on their rights and their children’s minds.

This action exposed the galling hypocrisy of Democrats who claimed to champion families while funding confusion and erasure of biological truth. (Read more.)

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Ray Bradbury, American Individualist

 From Modern Age:

Did this opposition to liberal attacks on free speech indicate that Bradbury had embraced conservatism or libertarianism? In fact, he may not have moved to the right politically so much as the ground beneath his feet had shifted. Bradbury had been voicing concerns about free speech since his 1950 novel The Martian Chronicles, which also features book-burning: “How could I expect you to know blessed Mr. Poe?” says the character William Stendhal. “He died a long while ago, before Lincoln. All of his books were burned in the Great Fire. . . . He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce and all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror and, for that matter, tales of the future were burned.” The politically correct censorship started small and then grew: “They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures.” And it was based not on pure ideals but on fear: “There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.” 

Stendhal continues, “Every man, they said, must face reality. Must face the Here and Now! Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air.” For Bradbury, censorship wasn’t just about proscribing certain kinds of speech but about hobbling the imagination. “So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 1975; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose—oh, what a wailing!—and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More!” 

Bradbury continued to develop the theme of the violent effects of censorship in the name of lofty ideas in Fahrenheit 451. There, authors were seen as a threat to the leveling pressures of mass democracy. The novel’s Captain Beatty puts it like this: “The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.” The death of literary culture “didn’t come from the Government down,” Beatty says. “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.” (Read more.)

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The Daily Life of a Medieval King

 

The great Charles V of France. From Medievalists:

A medieval king’s day was carefully structured, balancing prayer, governance, and moments of rest. Thanks to Christine de Pizan, we can follow the daily routine of Charles V of France in remarkable detail, offering a rare glimpse into how a ruler lived and worked in the late Middle Ages.

Around the year 1404 Christine de Pizan finished her work, Livre des faits et bonnes mœurs du sage roy Charles V, which was both a biography of the French king who reigned from 1364 to 1380, and a guide to how an ideal monarch should live and rule. Christine had a good vantage point to tell this story, as her father, Tommaso di Pizano, was a personal physician and astrologer at Charles’ court, so one can assume that she was sometimes at the court herself. Moreover, in later years she was able to consult other men and women who served the king, including his chamberlain and valet.

Her section on the daily life of Charles V begins with him rising from bed in the morning, typically between six and seven o’clock. After saying a prayer, the king would chat and joke with his servants. Christine writes:

 When he had been combed, dressed, and outfitted according to the demands of the day’s program, his chaplain, a distinguished person and honourable priest, brought him his breviary and helped him to say his hours, according to the canonical day of the calendar. Around eight o’clock he would go to mass, which was celebrated each day with glorious, solemn singing.

(Read more.)

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The Iranians Ask Us To Surrender

 From AND Magazine:

The Iranians have trotted out a new “peace” plan, which the United States says it is currently reviewing. The exact text of the proposal has not yet been seen publicly, but multiple press outlets, including those tied to the Iranian government, have made clear that the plan includes all of the following points:

• An end to all hostilities within 30 days. This includes Lebanon.

• The complete withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from the region. Understand what this means. This is a demand that the United States remove its military forces from the Middle East. This is a demand that we pull out of Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, and anywhere else we have bases in that part of the world.

• A guarantee of non-aggression from both Israel and the United States. We are expected not only to end hostilities and withdraw from the region but to promise that we will never again attack Iran. Ever.

• An end to the naval blockade and all restrictions on Iranian ports and shipping.

• The lifting of all U.S. and international sanctions. Iran will be free to buy whatever it wants, including components for advanced weapons, and to sell whatever it wants to allies and surrogates around the globe.

• The release of all frozen Iranian assets. This means billions of dollars currently locked up in accounts all over the world will be handed over to the world’s number one sponsor of terrorism.

• Reparations. As we leave the Middle East with our tail between our legs, we will be expected to pay Iran for all the damage we have caused, not just in the bombing but by virtue of the sanctions we have imposed for many years.

• The creation of a new mechanism for control of the Straits of Hormuz. One must assume, from the overall tone of the demands, that this will boil down to a recognition that Iran controls this crucial waterway and will charge a fee to anyone who wants to pass through it.

(Read more.)

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How the Thirty Years’ War Ravaged Europe

 From The Collector:

The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history. What began as a religious struggle in the Holy Roman Empire soon expanded into a continent-wide power struggle involving nearly every major state. Entire regions were depopulated, armies grew to unprecedented size, and the war changed how Europe understood sovereignty and statehood. By the time peace finally arrived in 1648, the war had not only shattered old medieval structures but helped lay the foundations of the modern nation-state.

The Holy Roman Empire in the early seventeenth century was a fragmented and decentralized political entity, composed of hundreds of independent kingdoms, principalities, bishoprics, free cities, and minor lordships. While these territories owed nominal loyalty to the Emperor, real power rested with local rulers, many of whom guarded their autonomy jealously.

This loose structure had endured for centuries, but it was placed under immense strain by the religious divisions unleashed by the Reformation. By 1600, the empire was split between Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist states. Although the Peace of Augsburg (1555) had attempted to stabilize relations by allowing rulers to choose between Catholicism and Lutheranism, it excluded Calvinists and failed to resolve underlying tensions.

Religious identity became closely tied to political authority, with rulers using confessional allegiance to assert independence from imperial control. The Habsburg emperors were staunch Catholics and increasingly sought to reverse Protestant gains and strengthen central authority within the empire.

These pressures erupted in Bohemia in 1618. Protestant nobles, alarmed by perceived Habsburg encroachments on their religious and political rights, threw imperial officials out of a castle window in Prague, in the Defenestration of Prague. The initial rebellion was against Habsburg rule rather than a purely religious uprising. Although framed in confessional terms, the conflict centred on resistance to imperial centralization. (Read more.)

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Raymond Ibrahim's Trilogy

Baucent of the Templars

 "Not to us, O Lord, not to us; but to thy name give glory." Psalm 113 (Vulgate), motto of the Templars

Once in a discussion with a fellow historical novelist I was informed that the crusades are the earliest examples of genocide. I was surprised that the novelist, being Jewish, seemed unaware of the various ancient persecutions against her own people, including that of the Greeks in the days of the Maccabees, that might be considered genocidal. I reminded her of that, as well as of the fact that there were twelve major crusades, taking place over nearly three hundred years. They were led by different people, with the principle goal of liberating the Holy Land from Muslim rule and thus delivering the Christian population from slavery and oppression. Some were more successful than others. Some, like the Fourth Crusade, were total disasters. In fact, the Fourth Crusade is the one which most people think of when they view the crusades as orgies of mass murder. In that case, those being killed were other Christians. Did other massacres of the innocent occur during the course of the various crusades? Yes. So, did the crusaders journey hundreds of miles to the Middle East, braving fatal diseases, pirates, brigands and an ocean of foes, just for the joy of killing people? That is one of the questions answered by Raymond Ibrahim in his brilliant trilogy about the centuries-long conflict between Christianity and Islam. Ibrahim's books are The Sword and the Scimitar, Defenders of the West, and The Two Swords of Christ. The books present a background to the crusades, containing detailed information of which most contemporary people are unaware, as well as the histories of heroes like El Cid and the rise of the two greatest military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers.

In the early Church the practice of Christians was, even in the era of persecution, to visit the places where Jesus Christ had been born, lived, died and risen. Pilgrimages were regarded as highly penitential, in which the pilgrim would not only risk life and health, but leave behind property, home, family, occupation and offices. The Romans built pagan shrines over the venerable spots like the stable at Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulcher but those temples only served to remind everyone where the sacred sites were hidden. When Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the Fourth Century, his mother Empress St. Helena went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she discovered not only the True Cross, but found and reopened many of the other places sacred to the memory of the Savior. This ignited centuries of pilgrimage to the Middle East. Rich and poor would go, often in parish-sponsored groups as now. Special costumes were worn when on pilgrimage, and one was often regarded as being temporarily in religious life when journeying to a holy site. For Jerusalem was not the only destination; there were shrines throughout Europe, including Rome and Compostela. But the pilgrimage to the Holy Land remained the ultimate of penitential practices, with many indulgences attached. People would go for themselves and for loved ones who were sick or who had died.

All this changed with the rise of Islam in the 7th century, meticulously described by Ibrahim in his book Sword and Scimitar. Founded by Mohammed, an Arabian who claimed to be a prophet of the One True God, Islam combined elements of Nestorian Christianity and Judaism with the prophet's own inspirations, many of which included teachings abhorrent to Judeo-Christian morality. One such teaching permits Muslim men to take a non-Muslim "infidel" woman by force. Mohammed commanded his followers to spread Islam by warfare. Within 200 years, the Christian lands in North Africa, Spain, Arabia, and the Middle East were conquered. Great Christian cities like Antioch and Alexandria, which had been Apostolic sees, fell to Islam, with the churches and basilicas becoming mosques. Christians, especially children, young men and young women, were made into sex slaves and concubines, including monks and nuns. Many boys were castrated to be eunuchs in the harems of the various Muslim elites. Hatred in the form of desecration was lavished upon Christian shrines, churches, monasteries, and cathedrals, with special contempt reserved for icons, church bells and crosses. The latter were dragged upside down through the streets, to be spat and urinated upon by the disciples of the prophet. Altars were sometimes desecrated by the gang-rape a Christian virgin. Those Christians and Jews who were not killed or sold were subject to oppressive laws and taxes in their own lands. This is documented in Muslim sources which repeatedly rejoice when describing the oppression of "infidels" and especially the defilement of Christian women.

A war-like, nomadic people called the Turks embraced Islam; they eventually overran the old Roman province of Anatolia so it became "Turkey." In the late 11th century, Jerusalem, which had fallen into Muslim hands before, was captured by the Seljuk Turks, who tortured, raped, and sold into slavery the Christians of the region. Those who were killed were regarded as lucky. The violence disrupted the flow of pilgrimages from Europe to the Holy Land. The Muslims made a point of harassing and robbing pilgrims, sometimes capturing them to be sold into slavery. Blond and red-haired girls and boys with blue, gray or green eyes were especially favored for the slave markets. Although one beautiful abbess from Germany, traveling with a group of pilgrims to Jerusalem, was waylaid by Muslim bandits and raped to death in front of her fellow Christians, who were also mistreated in various horrific ways. This led Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095 to call for a crusade of Christian soldiers to deliver the Christians in the Holy Land. Thus began the era of the crusades. Defenders of the West describes some of the great heroes of Christendom who kept Islam out of Europe, including at least one from Albania whom I had never heard of before. My opinion of Richard I "Lionheart" had suffered in the past but in Defenders he is revealed as among the bravest of the brave. The Two Swords of Christ traces the history of the two great military orders in a deeply inspiring way. For when the weak and innocent are attacked, it is unquestionably the duty of Christians who are able to defend them.

From The Chivalry Guild:

If I had to pick the best way to describe the recent works of Raymond Ibrahim—Sword and Scimitar (2018) and Defenders of the West (2022)—I’d call them no-going-back books. The equally chilling and invigorating experience of his histories cannot be undone and you cannot see the world the same way afterwards—especially since it’s not just history, but a forgotten prelude to what we’re living with today. Reality looks different post-Ibrahim.

Sword and Scimitar takes the reader through fourteen centuries of warfare between Islam and the West, with emphasis on eight great battles within that conflict. Better than any book I know, it dynamites the old public school narrative about the Crusades as a brutal act of Christian aggression against those poor, peaceful, tolerant Muslims. Ibrahim tells a much darker story about our ancient adversaries, documenting the scale of their conquests and the horrors that followed pretty much everywhere the armies of the prophet went. What we call “the West,” he writes, is but “the last and most redoubtable bastion of Christendom not to be conquered by Islam. Simply put, the West is actually the westernmost remnant of what was a much more extensive civilizational block that Islam permanently severed.” Three-quarters of the formerly Christian world was conquered by these people. It is both chilling and invigorating, like I noted, to think about how much danger we were in—and what kind of virtue was required to meet that danger and triumph over it, at least for a time.

Defenders of the West is an even more important book. It’s personal and compelling, and it reverses a long trend of hiding Christian heroes from those of us who need to learn about them. Thanks to Enlightenment propagandists, a vague narrative persists that heroism basically died out after the assassination of Julius Caesar and wasn’t revived again until Napoleon and George Washington walked the earth. The intent is a broadside against the Faith, leaving you with the vague impression that the teachings of Christ and his Church effectively snuff out all martial virtue, as though heroics cannot co-exist with the Gospel. Ibrahim shows this to be absolute nonsense. With his chronicles of Godfrey of Bouillon, El Cid, Richard the Lionheart, Fernando III, Louis IX, John Hunyadi, Scanderbeg, and Vlad Dracula, he brings to life eight legends whose deeds rival or exceed those of any heroes of any age.

These works are, in my humble opinion, on the shortlist for books of the century. So it was with special interest that I anticipated his follow-up effort. The Two Swords of Christ (published November ’25) continues with his major theme but looks at a different aspect of the conflict: the crucial work done by the Templars and the Hospitallers, basically the special forces of Christendom.

Ibrahim’s title comes from Luke 22, in which Jesus tells his disciples to buy a sword. When they reply, “Look, there are two swords here,” Jesus says, “It is enough!” What’s fascinating is his use of the singular pronoun it rather than the plural they. It suggests not the swords, but a way of life that employs “a spiritual sword against spiritual enemies, and a physical sword against physical enemies.” If your religious education was anything like mine, your teachers blithely passed over this and similar passages in favor of all the nicer-sounding directives about loving everybody and just being nice, along with never fighting—because fighting is unchristian. For those looking for simplistic formulas for life, it’s far easier to reduce the character of the Lord to that of a harmless meditation instructor, rather than wrestling with the much more challenging and dynamic truth.

The two swords also work as a metonymy for the knightly orders, filled with men whose particular way of serving God and their neighbors was with weapons. (Read more.)

  All three books are so detailed in citing source material that one comes away with a refreshed world-view, for a deeper understanding of history leads to a more profound comprehension of the present. Plus Raymond Ibrahim is an engaging and descriptive writer so that I often felt I was watching a film of the events he has so richly described. I recommend this excellent trilogy for every home library and every college history class.

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The Iranians Are Recruiting Worldwide – But For What?

From AND Magazine:

The Iranians have launched a worldwide campaign to sign up Iranian citizens living abroad to be ready to sacrifice their lives and embrace martyrdom for the homeland. Iranian embassies have been directing people to log in to the Mikhak system using their national ID and click the Jan Fada option to sign up.

Analysts assess that the move is mostly a propaganda campaign designed to show that the regime in Tehran has broad support. The so-called Jan Fada campaign launched in March/April 2026.

Iranian state media and officials claim tens of millions have signed up (figures like 10–30+ million are reported but unverified independently). This includes officials, athletes, and public figures. Iranian Embassies are promoting the campaign online using language like “give our bodies to be slain” or “sacrifice life for Iran” to show solidarity and national will. There have been no reports of actual training, deployment, or transport of overseas registrants. (Read more.)

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Women Are Having Fewer Kids Because They Don’t Want Them

 From Chronicles:

Most conservatives are too afraid to admit what many feminists proudly own: The decline in fertility rates is the direct result of the feminist project and women prioritizing careers over childbearing. Since the 1970s, when the feminist movement transformed gender dynamics and women entered the workforce by the millions, the fertility rate has been below replacement, and there is no prospect of this changing. In 2025, the fertility rate hit another record low, according to CDC data.

Women in their early 30s now have the highest birth rate of any age cohort, a profound cultural shift without precedent in history. This pattern aligns with the feminists’ ideal timeline: Climb the corporate ladder early, have kids later, or not at all. Roughly 85 percent of women aged 20-24, and 63 percent of women aged 25-29, are now childless.

The high cost of housing, healthcare, and childcare are the usual culprits cited in the fertility discourse. There is something to this, of course, and sound policy initiatives to address it should be implemented. But it should also be remembered that having a family has never been easy or cheap. Moreover, fertility was already in sharp decline when housing was much more affordable, and the Boomers were buying their homes. So something more than that cost explains declining fertility. The extraordinary cost of childcare, though also real, is an entirely newfangled problem that seeks to rectify the severe, and vastly underreported, shortage of full-time mothers. (Read more.)

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State Dinner at the White House, April 2026

 

From The Independent:

The full menu for the has been revealed as President Donald Trump and Melania Trump welcomed King Charles and Queen Camilla as part of their state visit on Tuesday evening.

The dinner celebrated the relationship and came alongside the King’s speech, which thanked Mr Trump for a “wonderful dinner” and touched on the two countries’ “moments of difficulty”.

The menu contained many classic French dishes, including a Dover sole meuniere and potatoes pave, and elements of the banquet presentation were chosen to reflect “the long and enduring friendship” between the UK and the US. A spring theme was also echoed throughout the dinner, with fresh seasonal flowers on the table that were said by a White House spokesman to have been “inspired by the beauty of English gardens”. First course: garden vegetable veloute, hearts of palm salad, toasted shallots, micro mint.

Second course: spring herb ravioli, ricotta cheese, morel mushrooms, light parmesan emulsion.

Third course: Dover sole meuniere, spring ramps, snow peas, potatoes pave, parsley oil.

Fourth course: White House honey and vanilla bean cremeux, flourless chocolate gateau, almond jaconde, creme fraiche ice cream....(Read more.)

 

 

 

Photos from The White House.

More photos from USA Today.

 From Tatler:

Queen Camilla is no stranger to delivering all-out glamour when the dress code calls for it, and the White House state dinner on Tuesday night was one such occasion.

Arriving on the arm of King Charles III, Queen Camilla gave a masterclass in eye-catching eveningwear, debuting a standout fuchsia pink gown complete with embellishment from favourite couturier Fiona Clare, which she paired with a bespoke handbag from Queen Elizabeth II's go-to accessories designer, Launer London. Although some royal watchers (and those at Tatler Towers) had been hoping to see Queen Camilla follow in the footsteps of Queen Elizabeth II and showcase one of the glittering heirloom tiara for the most formal night of the US state visit, this was not to be. Camilla chose to leave her most impressive jewels at home, even though the dress code allowed for them....Adorning Her Majesty's wrist were two of the bracelets from the Queen Mother's suite of Art Deco Cartier bracelets. Two of the bracelets are set with all diamonds and the other three pair diamonds with a different precious stone: rubies, sapphires and emeralds. For the White House state banquet, Queen Camilla opted for one of the diamond bracelets on her left wrist, and a ruby bracelet on her right. While these gems are undoubtedly impressive, it was the rare demi-parure on display at her neck and ears that grabbed the most attention. Queen Camilla made her debut in the jewels known as the Kent Amethysts, which are among the oldest suite of gems currently in the hands of the Royal Family. Queen Elizabeth II memorably wore the necklace, earrings and brooch from the demi-parure for her state visit to Portugal in 1985. She also notably wore one of the brooches, featuring three pendants attached to a central stone, during a state visit to the US in 1991. However, one of the subtler brooches, a single amethyst surrounded by diamonds, was a favourite of the Queen's for decades. She often wore it with her vibrant purple ensembles. (Read more.) 

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What Americans Can Learn From China’s Dating Hellscape

 From Chronicles:

In a Substack post titled, “You Are Not the One—Chinese Dating Dystopia,” a writer using the pseudonym Terminally_Drifting describes a dating crisis so deep and extensive that even the word “dystopia” seems like an understatement. The essay centers on a young single man, Wang Wei, an unremarkable worker at an iPhone factory who cannot find a girlfriend and spends his nights (and disposable income) watching an e-girl play on her phone, answering questions from fans, and giving shoutouts to men who send her money.

Apparently, Wei is just one among millions of excess men (sex-selective abortions have resulted in men now greatly outnumbering women in China) who will never have a wife and kids.

Even so, love and marriage should at least be possible for a man like Wei, right? Maybe he just needs to introduce himself to a girl he likes, court her, and persuade her to build a life with him? As Terminally_Drifting  explains, however, romance as such does not exist in China today. Finding a spouse has everything to do with material assets and nothing to do with real affection. This means that Wei will never find a wife “because the price of being considered eligible in his home province requires a car (minimum 80,000 RMB), an apartment (minimum 200,000 RMB down payment), and a caili, a bride price, that in rural Henan currently averages around 188,000 RMB,” and his “annual salary is approximately 42,000 RMB.”

Worse still, Wei’s mother tries to help her son by visiting the People’s Park in Shanghai and posting his personal information on an umbrella, where other concerned parents might look for a match. Sadly, this strategy rarely bears fruit and is undertaken mostly to make mothers feel like they are doing something to help.

For its part, the Chinese government appears aware of this issue and has sought to mitigate it through increased censorship, regulation, and propaganda. Evidently, a nationwide public meltdown threatened to overturn the country when a girl on a popular dating show rejected a guy because he was too poor. The government flew into action, condemned the girl, and set new parameters so that poorer men had a better chance on the show. Additionally, it has imposed restrictions on online gifts to e-girls and the time spent watching them. It even tried shaming women into marriage by warning them about the supposed growing number of old spinsters who regret their decision not to marry—all of which is pure fabrication in China. (Read more.)

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How the Fall of Rome Created the Power of the Medieval Papacy

 From The Collector:

In the Early Middle Ages, after the fall of the Roman Empire left the existing government structures in shambles, the papacy established itself as the preeminent authority in the West. Indeed, in a post-Roman world, where there was no large political structure to ensure stability in Europe, the Roman Church emerged as the only force able to provide some unity. Led by a series of popes functioning as both spiritual and temporal rulers, the papacy came to dominate the intellectual life, political landscape, and culture of the so-called Dark Ages.

In 476, the German chief Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, ending the succession of Roman emperors inaugurated by Augustus. He then proclaimed himself king. The event is traditionally considered the end of the Roman Empire. By then, the so-called “barbarian invasions,” or the migration of Germanic peoples into Roman-controlled Europe, had already significantly altered the social and political composition of the empire.

In 406, the Vandals, Suebi, Alani, Burgundians, and Alemanni, fleeing from the advance of the Huns, crossed the River Rhine, pouring into Gaul. Some years later, they arrived in Spain. Meanwhile, the Visigoths established themselves in Narbonensis and Aquitania (the territories in Gaul). Though partially successful in regaining control of portions of Gaul, Roman general Constantius was unable to expel the “barbarians” from the country.

In 410, Alaric, at the head of the Visigoths, sacked Rome, pillaging the heart of the Roman Empire for three days. Only the churches were spared, as Alaric had converted to Christian Arianism. In the first half of the 5th century, other Germanic peoples began to establish themselves in the Roman territories. In 435, the Vandals conquered Carthage in North Africa. In 450, Attila and his Huns invaded Italy. Only Pope Leo the Great managed to persuade them not to sack Rome. (Read more.)

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The Lost Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe

 

Marilyn worked very hard to better herself, as an actress and as a human being. She studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasburg and while in New York became friends with journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. She was good with money, too. She lived frugally and invested wisely. She was no spendthrift, as some people might think. From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Marilyn Monroe read books. A lot of them. That’s the revelation of Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe, a fascinating new volume by Gail Crowther. It isn’t a grasping-at-straws attempt to make Monroe a literary figure based on her love of a few good novels. Crowther has done her research, itemizing the books Monroe owned when she died, finding receipts for books she bought at the Ivy Bookstore in Los Angeles, and going through old letters in which Monroe discussed her favorite books. Monroe was a reader, which may explain why she was drawn to one of her husbands, the playwright Arthur Miller—a man who made his living with words.

When Monroe died in 1962, her collection included more than 400 books. “These books,” Crowther notes, “some dating from her childhood, had followed Marilyn around from one address to another.” Crowther describes the collection: 

The scope of Marilyn’s personal library and the number of genres it contained was impressive. She read literature from all around the world, America, England, France, Germany, but certainly favored Russian novels. She enjoyed poetry, politics, psychology, plays, biographies, science, short stories, cookbooks, horticulture, contemporary novels, children’s books, religion, crime, adventure, art, pets, music, reference, and self-help. She was probably one of the few readers in the world whose personal library contained a biography of herself (Marilyn Monroe “Her Own Story,” 1961, by George Carpozi). 

Monroe loved D. H. Lawrence and owned a poetry collection, the novel Sons and Lovers, a collection of his travel writings, Etruscan Places, and a critical study of Lawrence and his works by Mary Freeman. She also owned copies of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. She owned a first edition of Ian Fleming’s From Russia, With Love, a book that included a chapter titled “The Mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” Monroe loved Russian literature, bonding with actress, columnist, and writer Sheilah Graham over Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Turgenev, and Pushkin.

Monroe also had “an edgy liking for banned books.” This included The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis. Monroe’s copy of the novel sold for $3,220 in a 1999 auction. She also owned a 1934 first edition of Ulysses, published after the ruling that the James Joyce novel was not obscene and could not be banned. (Read more.)

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Wes Moore's Key Bridge Mess

 From Direct Line News:

Rebuilding the Francis Scott Key Bridge is not just another public works project; it is one of the most consequential responsibilities Wes Moore faces. By any honest measure, it is already veering wildly off course. The numbers don’t add up: either the state’s original cost estimates, once pegged far lower, were wildly unrealistic, or the current bids are spiraling out of control, with contractor proposals reportedly well above the state’s $4.3 to $5.2 billion range.

The state’s decision to walk away from Kiewit Corporation, one of the largest and most experienced infrastructure builders in North America, after failing to agree on price is not a sign of discipline; it is a flashing warning light that Maryland’s management process itself may be breaking down.

Three Failures the Math Cannot Excuse

The first problem is the estimate itself. Releasing a $1.8 billion figure thirteen days after one of the most complex marine infrastructure disasters in modern American history was not good governance. It was financial improvisation dressed up as planning. Officials have since called those projections “rudimentary” and “hasty.” Their words, not mine. The problem is those numbers were used to set public expectations, secure federal commitments, and justify a project management timeline that simply could not hold. When a project more than triples in cost from initial estimate to revised estimate, the initial estimate was not an estimate. It was a placeholder with political utility.

The second problem is the contractor debacle. Maryland selected Kiewit Infrastructure Co. in August 2024, awarding a $73 million initial contract for pre-construction and design services. Kiewit spent months advancing design work to the 70 percent completion threshold. Then, when it came time to price Phase 2, the company’s bids reportedly exceeded $5.2 billion. State officials called that figure unreasonably high. Maybe it was. But this raises an obvious question: what was the procurement process telling Maryland about the market before Kiewit submitted those numbers? Strong contract management does not wait for a bid submission to discover that cost expectations are misaligned. It builds in rigorous interim checkpoints, independent cost verification, and transparent public reporting. Maryland’s project website reportedly went months without an update. That is not transparency. That is a door quietly closing.

The third problem is the rhetoric gap. Governor Moore has repeatedly described this project as the nation’s fastest-moving large infrastructure effort. Federal Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has been pressing Maryland on costs since September 2025, offered a considerably more measured assessment. When asked directly about Moore’s claim, Duffy did not validate it. His department’s public communications have instead focused relentlessly on fiscal oversight and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars. The contrast between state messaging and federal response is not a matter of partisan politics. It is a governance signal. When the entity writing the check does not endorse the project manager’s narrative, the public deserves to know that. (Read more.)

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Shakespeare’s Lost London Home

 From Mental Floss:

History never truly disappears in London. It lingers in forgotten corners and cobblestone crevices until rediscovered, sometimes in unexpectedly poetic ways. For centuries, scholars knew that William Shakespeare had owned property in the city, yet its exact location remained unknown, existing as more of a rumor than an actual record. A recent deep dive into the archives uncovered an overlooked map that transformed four centuries of speculation into fact. Instead of finding a newly built structure or sorting through debris, the discovery revived a piece of the past that had presumably been lost forever. Let's examine Shakespeare's personal life, property, and potential revelations about his later years.

Though his name is synonymous with London's theatrical reputation, Shakespeare's personal life remained rooted in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was born there in 1564 and maintained strong ties to the town throughout his life, even as his career flourished. His wife and children stayed behind while he spent extended periods in London, working as both a playwright and an actor. 

By the late 1500s, Shakespeare had become a familiar presence in the entertainment world, collaborating with fellow performers and writing plays for Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Despite this, he never fully relocated his household to London. Instead, his life traced its arc across two places: one a family home, and the other a stage. (Read more.)

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5 Early-spring Garden Tasks

From Homes and Gardens:

March 20th marks the Spring Equinox, the first day of spring. As sunnier days arrive, our backyards begin to wake up and thaw out. It marks the beginning of long days spent in outdoors, and a reminder there is much to do for us gardeners.

Whether you have already put together a spring gardening checklist or you feel lost with where to get started, there are a few tasks to prioritize for early-spring. Getting your outdoor space prepared for the growing season is key to creating the thriving garden, and there is limited time to get this preparation done.

No matter the spring garden you envisage, horticultural experts say to start by getting these early-spring gardening tasks ticked off. We promise they're all easy to do and will leave you with an immaculate space ready for spring and summer gardening. (Read more.)

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