Fighting Feminism

 From Christine Niles at Forward Boldly:

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Scientists Detect Highest-Energy Light Ever Seen From The Sun

 From Science Alert:

The most energetic light ever seen emanating from the Sun has just been detected, creating a new puzzle for solar physicists to solve. A 6-year observing campaign by more than 30 institutions across North America, Europe, and Asia has resulted in the first ever detection of solar gamma radiation in the teraelectronvolt (TeV) range. But, contrary to what you might expect, it did not correlate to heightened solar activity; or, indeed, any solar activity. Rather, the Sun was pretty calm at the time of the detection, and our current models of the Sun can't quite account for it.

The Sun is the most intensely studied star in the cosmos. We have observations that span the entire spectrum, from low-frequency radio waves to the most energetic light in the Universe, gamma radiation. For all that, though, there's a lot we don't know about our home star. Details about its processes still elude us. We know that magnetic fields are important, playing a crucial role in pretty much all the solar activity we observe, but the mechanisms thereby are poorly understood. We study the light emitted by the Sun to try to gain a deeper understanding. The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory in Mexico is one of the tools we use for studying the gamma and cosmic radiation from space that collides with Earth's atmosphere. (Read more.)

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The Fascinating Marital Exploits of Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent

 From Sharon Bennett Connolly:

In the mean time, England itself was in the grips of the Black Death, the bubonic plague. In order to lift the country’s spirits the king, Edward III, had arranged a grand tournament at Windsor, on St George’s Day, 23rd April 1349. The knights in contention were founding members of the Order of the Garter; England’s greatest chivalric order, consisting of the king and 25 knights, it was probably founded in 1348, though the date is uncertain.

Joan herself is a part of the legend of the foundation of the Order of the Garter. She is said to be the lady who lost her garter during a ball celebrating the fall of Calais. Edward III is said to have returned the item to the 20-year-old damsel with the words “honi soit qui mal y pense” (evil to him who evil thinks).

Although the story is probably apocryphal, Joan’s connection with the inaugural tournament is all too true; she brought an added bit of spice to the St George’s Day tournament of 1349. Her current husband, the Earl of Salisbury, fought on the king’s team, while Sir Thomas Holland was on the side of Prince Edward. Joan’s two husbands faced each other across the tournament field, with the object of their affection watching from the stands.

Although I couldn’t find the results of the tournament, Joan’s marital status was decided by Papal Bull on 13th November 1349, when the pope ordered her to divorce Salisbury and return to Holland. Which she did. I suppose we will never know if Joan had married Holland at the age of 11, or if they had an affair that only started after Holland moved into Salisbury’s household, and the claim of a pre-contract was a clever ploy to get Joan out of an unhappy marriage.

It is easy for the cynic of the 21st century to nod their head sagely and say ‘good plan’. However, Joan and Thomas Holland were risking their eternal souls if they lied to a church court; such an oath was not to be undertaken lightly. It may be the romantic in me, but I cannot help but believe that Joan and Thomas were telling the truth about their promises to each other.

Joan succeeded her brother, John, as Baroness Wake of Liddell and Countess of Kent in December 1352 and was confirmed in her new titles in February 1353. Sir Thomas Holland, therefore, became Earl of Kent by right of his wife. (Read more.)

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C. S. Lewis Against the Darkness

 From The National Review:

There was a lot to think about. Great Britain had survived eight months of a Nazi bombing campaign against London and other strategic cities, but at the cost of 43,000 civilians killed and 1.1 million homes damaged or destroyed. In April, Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, the latest states to be absorbed by Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Europe. In every state controlled by the Nazis, deportations and massacres of Jews became a routine occurrence. In May, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, sending 3.5 million troops across a front stretching 1,800 miles. It was the largest military operation in history, and it caught the murderous communist regime of Joseph Stalin completely off guard. In November, Isoroku Yamamoto, admiral of Japan’s Imperial Navy, issued Top Secret Order No. 1, the plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Within a month, Japan was at war with the United States.

Amid the chaos and suffering of the Second World War, Lewis began writing a sequel to his first science-fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet (1938). Perelandra picks up the story of Elwin Ransom as he travels to Venus (Perelandra), a planet that, in biblical terms, has not experienced a fall from divine grace. Ransom’s mission is to prevent a satanic figure from luring an Eve-like character into a fatal temptation. In a letter to his friend Sister Penelope, dated November 9, 1941, Lewis explained what he was attempting:

I’ve got Ransom to Venus and through his first conversation with the ‘Eve’ of that world, a difficult chapter. . . . I may have embarked on the impossible. This woman has got to combine characteristics which the Fall has put poles apart — she’s got to be in some ways like a Pagan goddess and in other ways like the Blessed Virgin. But if one can get even a fraction of it into words it is worth doing it. 

Lewis succeeded beyond his imagination. As James Como argues in Mystical Perelandra: My Lifelong Reading of C. S. Lewis and His Favorite Book, of all Lewis’s books — over 40, in addition to hundreds of essays, poems, lectures, and sermons — no other single work so successfully intertwines his intellectual and imaginative powers, while revealing the breadth and depth of the man himself. Como, professor emeritus of rhetoric and public communication at York College (CUNY) and a leading C. S. Lewis scholar, delivers a profound meditation on the enduring importance of Lewis’s novel: He helps us to recognize our desire for the holy. “The power of Perelandra,” Como writes, “derives from the fact that it offers a convincing portrayal of that Truth for which, knowingly or not, we have always longed.”

Yet Como achieves something more. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of Lewis’s corpus, he reveals the connective tissue between the works, uniquely embodied in the epic narrative and resplendent imagery of Perelandra. Even Lewis devotees may be surprised to learn how some of the key themes of the story — the nature of evil, the idolization of the self, the moral law, the significance of human freedom — also manifest themselves in such works as The Abolition of Man, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Chronicles of Narnia. (Read more.)

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DNA of Enslaved Iron Workers illuminates African American History

 From Reuters:

Not far from Camp David, the U.S. presidential retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland, lies the remnants of an iron forge called Catoctin Furnace founded in the late 18th century, an important site for understanding the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in early U.S. history. The site now also is providing unique insight into African American history thanks to research involving DNA obtained from the remains of 27 individuals buried in a cemetery for enslaved people at Catoctin Furnace. The study reveals the ancestry of some of the enslaved people who toiled there in the decades after the nation's founding and identified thousands of living relatives, many still in Maryland. The cemetery was used from 1774-1850. The remains, held at the Smithsonian Institution since being excavated in the 1970s due to highway construction, were of 16 males and 11 females, ranging from infants to adults over age 60. They were found to have descended from just a few African populations, in particular West Africa's Wolof and Mandinka peoples and Central Africa's Kongo people, and have strong genetic connections to present-day populations in Senegal, Gambia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Read more.)

 

From Nature:

Starting in the 1770s, hundreds of enslaved and free African Americans lived and worked at an industrial iron forge in Maryland. Dozens died at the Catoctin Furnace, their remains and lives largely forgotten until 1979, when part of the site was excavated to make way for a highway.

Now, in a landmark study, researchers have analysed DNA from more than two dozen people who were buried at the Catoctin Furnace and used that information to identify tens of thousands of living descendants whose data were in a consumer genetics database.

The study¹, published on 3 August in Science, could open the floodgates to linking the genomes of historical people to their present-day descendants — some direct, but most very distant. This approach could be especially resonant for African Americans and members of other populations around the world who trace some of their ancestry to enslaved people, say researchers.

“Each time we are able to find an enslaved ancestor, we are defeating the purpose of slavery. The purpose of slavery was to rob us of that information,” says Henry Louis Gates Jr, a scholar of African and African American studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was part of the effort. “This is a major development in the history of the use of genetics to trace ancestry.”

None of the Catoctin Furnace descendants identified in the study — customers of the personal genetics company 23andMe in South San Francisco, California, who had consented to the use of their data in research — have yet been informed of their connections. Providing this information raises important ethical questions, say scientists. (Read more.)

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Women in a Hell of Their Own Making

 An interview with Mary Harrington.

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Two Englands: Albion and Logres

 From Charles Coulombe:

If Ireland is the spiritual home of many of the Catholics and Orangemen scattered around the Anglosphere, the next Kingdom, England, is surely still the centre of everything and one else. Open the popular imagination, and what comes tumbling out? A cavalcade of King Arthur, Robin Hood, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Mummer’s Plays, Morris Dances, Jack in the Green, Foxhunting, Harvest Festivals, Lessons and Carols, Boar’s Head feasts dance in the head. As Orson Welles put it,

…I think there has always been an England, an older England, which was sweeter, purer, where the hay smelled better and the weather was always springtime and the daffodils blew in the gentle, warm breezes. You feel a nostalgia for it in Chaucer, and you feel it all through Shakespeare.

There are certainly two Englands – the one that Orson Welles described, and that Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis dubbed Logres, and the other, which they called Britain, and William Blake Albion. The former is the one that haunts the imagination, and is filled with Knights and Cavaliers, Saints and shrines. The other is the land of Henry VIII and Cromwell, of Puritanism and “dark satanic mills.” We sought the first. (Read more.)

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Family Over Everything

 

Melody Krell interviews Lara Trump.

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DNA Analysis Reveals Minoan and Mycenaean Genetic Origins

 From The Greek Reporter:

Dr Iosif Lazaridis from Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts and colleagues focused on burials from the Minoan civilization, which flourished on the island of Crete from 2,600 to 1,100 BC, and the Mycenaean culture, which existed across Greece from 1,600 to 1,100 BC. Dr Lazaridis explained that most of the people who created these civilizations appear to be local, deriving between 62 percent and 86 percent of their ancestry from people who introduced agriculture to Europe from Anatolia (modern Turkey) in Neolithic times beginning about seven thousand years ago.

But the Bronze Age Mycenaean and Minoan skeletons revealed ancestry from populations originating in either the Caucasus mountains or Iran. Between 9 percent and 17 percent of their genetic make-up came from this source. In addition, the team’s paper in the journal, Nature, reports, the Mycenaeans—but not the Minoans—show evidence of genetic input from people who lived further north on the flat grasslands that stretch from eastern Europe to Central Asia. Between four percent and sixteen percent of their ancestry came from this northern source.

While the Mycenaeans are known to have spoken an early form of Greek, the earliest recorded language spoken by the Minoan people on Crete, known as Linear A, can be read but not translated, implying that it belongs to a distinct but unknown group of languages. (Read more.)

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