In the Footsteps of William Wallace in Scotland and Northern England

A work of genuine and solid scholarship, Young and Stead’s In the Footsteps of William Wallace compensates for its dry prose with stunning photography of the places once haunted by the Scottish hero and his comrades. While tracing the Wallace legend back to contemporary sources, the authors sift fact from fiction with careful historical exegesis as with the spirit of detectives they try to determine who the real William Wallace was. That Wallace was indeed a larger-than-life character in the eyes of his contemporaries can be determined from the way he burst into the chronicles out of nowhere to avenge what must surely have been an outrage to his family. Although there are more extant accounts from his enemies than there are from his friends, it is still possible to piece together a coherent portrait of the warrior who came to represent all that was heroic and noble in the Scots and their struggle for independence. This is a work worthy of the most serious historians as well as casual lovers of history.

This review originally appeared in the August 2012 edition of the Historical Novels Review.

(*NOTE: This book was sent to me by the Historical Novel Society in exchange for my honest opinion.)

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Drama at Home

Some lessons from Whistler's Peacock Room.

In Washington...[Michael S. Smith] discovered a similar treasure trove of Gilded Age splendor: the Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art. Awash in rich Prussian blue and turquoise-y green laced with gold, the dining room was hand-painted in the 1870s by James McNeill Whistler for British shipping magnate Frederick Leyland. The over-the-top details were sparked by the owner's collection of Chinese porcelain. "I love the controlled exoticism here—the mix of blues and greens accented with gold gives it an Art Deco feel," said Mr. Smith. "Whistler's extreme point of view is what makes this room feel so ahead of its time. Although it's immersive, the décor inspires a number of takeaways. You could do a very modern reinterpretation of this scheme by using wallpaper or paint in that peacock blue, and then adding gilded touches and blue-and-white accents." (Read entire article.)

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Education at Home

Quinn Cummings writes about her experience as a homeschooling mother.

Imagine that your high-school junior spends half of every day at the brick-and-mortar school up the street. Two afternoons a week, he logs into an art-history seminar being taught by a grad student in Paris. He takes computer animation classes at the local college, sings in the church choir and dives at the community pool. He studies Web design on YouTube. He and three classmates see a tutor at the public library who preps them for AP Chemistry. He practices Spanish on Skype and takes cooking lessons at a nearby restaurant every Saturday morning.

Is this home schooling or regular school? Who cares? He's learning. More important, his curriculum hits the basics but also works for him. Nobody expects all young people to download the same 20 or 30 songs on iTunes. Why should they be limited to the same dozen or so classes for school? And if you think that public education will never change because it's too big, I'd point out that the music business looked like an invincible Goliath before digital technology raised its slingshot.

Some lessons are best learned at a kitchen table, others in a lecture hall, a chemistry lab or a gym. It would be nice if students everywhere had access to every option, and more of them will, I expect, over the next decade. With each passing year, the division between home schooling and institutional schooling will continue to dissolve. We will go to the education, and the education will come to us. The bad news is that it doesn't work that way yet. The good news is that we get to build it. (Read entire article.)

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A King and His Books

The libraries of François I.

Educated according to humanist principles, François spent his youth reading the works of the ancients in Latin, as well as poetry and chronicles composed in French. Determined to see his kingdom achieve the intellectual and artistic renown Italy enjoyed, he supported the literary arts once he ascended to the throne, patronizing, among others, the poet Clément Marot and composing some two hundred poems of his own (Knecht, Francis I, 84). So great was François's love of letters that he created the post of lecteur du roi, an attendant whose chief duty was to read aloud to the king, particularly at mealtimes. Whenever François traveled, two chests filled with works of Roman history and French romances accompanied him. (Read entire post.)

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Television in the Late Sixties

Some insights from A Conservative Blog for Peace. To quote:

Then the networks actually forgot about ratings and profits, about giving the customers what they want, and decided (I don’t know why) to preach: to indoctrinate Middle America with all the rubbish from the then-New Left. So in the summer of ’71 ABC fired Welk with a phone call and CBS yanked all of its down-on-the-farm sitcoms; enter Lear. (Read entire post.)

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Louis XVI before the Convention

September 26, 1792. The King is accused. More HERE. Share

Single Motherhood

An economic catastrophe.

The single-mother revolution has been an economic catastrophe for women. Poverty remains relatively rare among married couples with children; the U.S. census puts only 8.8% of them in that category, up from 6.7% since the start of the Great Recession. But more than 40% of single-mother families are poor, up from 37% before the downturn. In the bottom quintile of earnings, most households are single people, many of them elderly. But of the two-fifths of bottom-quintile households that are families, 83% are headed by single mothers. The Brookings Institution's Isabel Sawhill calculates that virtually all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at 1970 rates.

Well, comes the response, maybe single mothers are hard up not because they lack husbands but because unskilled, low-earning women are likelier to become single mothers in the first place. The Urban Institute's Robert Lerman tried to address that objection by studying low-income women who had entered "shotgun" unions — that is, getting married after getting pregnant — on the theory that they represented a population roughly similar to those who got pregnant but didn't marry. The married women, he found, had a significantly higher standard of living than the unmarried ones. "Even among the mothers with the least qualifications and highest risks of poverty," Lerman concluded, "marriage effects are consistently large and statistically significant."

Women and their children weren't the only ones to suffer the economic consequences of the single-mother revolution; low-earning men have lost ground too. Knowing that women are now expected to be able to raise children on their own, unskilled men lose much of the incentive to work, especially at the sometimes disagreeable jobs that tend to be the ones they can get. Scholars consistently find that unmarried men work fewer hours, make less money and get fewer promotions than do married men. (Read entire article.)

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Louis XVI Examines Locks

The King appreciated and admired the skill of ordinary craftsmen. He strove to become a master locksmith. (From Art Renewal.) Share

Cornwall: Land of Saints

From Fr. Angelo:

Christianity arrived in Cornwall in the 5th century, at places like Lanherne, at what became various monastic centers situated around the area.  That was at the time of the legendary Arthur Pendragon, who is said to have been born in Tintagel, which is about a half hour north of here on the coast, where the friars play tennis once a week with a local priest and friend, Fr. Brian Storey. Glastonbury, or the legendary Avalon is about one hundred miles to the north.

Celtic monks founded a monastery at Lanherne in the 6th century the site of the present convent, which later came into the possession of the bishops and still later of the great English noble family of Arundell.  The present building is the medieval Manor House of the Arundells, which is the center of Catholicism in the area. The estate provided work for many people and the family built the Medieval Church of St. Mawgan which you can see in the background of the picture above.  The parish church is now in the possession of the Church of England and the convent is separated from the church property by an ancient wall.

The Arundells remained a faithful Catholic family that suffered terribly throughout the period of the English Reformation. They used the manor house to hide Catholic priests, who were in threat of certain death if captured.  Not least of these courageous priests was St. Cuthbert Mayne, who was eventually captured nearby at and hung drawn and quartered at Launceston, his quarters being sent to the four corners of the realm, his head being placed on a pike.  The top of his scull is in the possession of the convent and is venerated here every Sunday after Mass.  One can clearly see the hole in the top of the cranium from where his head was placed on the pike.

Local historians know more or less where the hiding places for priests (priest holes) were built into the manor house walls.  One of them is believed to be in the present chapel of the friars, though modern paneling currently prevents its definitive discovery.

The Manor House was also a way station along the route of the Welsh pilgrims to St. James of Compostella. The scallop shell of St. James is engraved in stone above the front door.

In 1794 the Manor House was offered by the Arundell family to a group of English Carmelite nuns who were fleeing France because of the persecution of the French Revolution.  From that time until fifteen or so years ago the Manor house has been a carmelite monastery.  The Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate took it over and it remains the place of their enclosure as contemplatives consecrated unlimitedly to the Immaculate. (Read entire post.)

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