Linen for the Wash

From Gio:

If the family washing be done at home, the duty will either fall upon the maid, or she will have to assist the washerwoman who may be engaged for the purpose. In some families, everything is washed at home; in others, only the coarse things, such as sheets, towels, &c., are washed at home, and the rest are sent out to the laundress; and in others, again, everything is sent to the laundress.

In either of these cases, the maid will probably have to collect and sort all the dirty clothes, and to make out a list, or lists, of the different articles for the wash, and to see that everything is right, in state and number, when the washing and ironing are over. In some families, the mistress, or one of her daughters, likes to make out the list, or lists, as .the maid calls the things over. (Read more.)

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Real Love Equals Truth

 From Pat Archbold: "Well, guess what.  You can't have real love without real truth, even the uncomfortable truths." (Read more.)

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An Elusive Queen

Marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York

What was Elizabeth of York really like? I never knew that they had addressed her as "Madame la Dauphine."  From Nerdalicious:

At a 500-year remove, in an age that seldom recorded women’s lives, her character remains elusive. It’s hard to separate the flattering and politically aware descriptions ambassadors and contemporaries made about Elizabeth of York from the private woman. While chroniclers were not above obliquely criticizing queens, the most that we can assuredly ascertain from many of their remarks is that she was close to her family and relatively inoffensive — or shrewd enough not to reveal her true feelings. The portrait that comes down to us is, in some ways, the stock portrait of many medieval queens: kind, charitable, selfless, and loving — the ideal queen.

Yet most medieval nobles were not necessarily renowned for being loving and kind. Hugh Trevor-Roper once cynically remarked, “Why must the tomb be prefabricated, the masses prepaid? It is because, in spite of all this lip service to family, nobody really trusted anyone else, not even his sons, once his power over them was gone. In reality the family was not cultivated as such: it was a necessary alliance from which every man hoped individually to profit.” ¹

Today many of us believe that the proverbial apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and neither of Elizabeth’s parents hesitated to exercise power. Elizabeth was raised to be a queen, addressed as the dauphine, and, as the eldest, privileged beyond all her other siblings, except maybe her brothers. It pushes credulity to believe that Elizabeth would grow up to be kind and humble despite all childhood indications that she would be as power hungry as her family or contemporaries – unless, of course, something changed.

Elizabeth’s childhood vacillated between privilege and anxiety. Perhaps, after her father’s death, anxiety ultimately overrode what might have been a tendency towards arrogance. (Read more.)

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The Crack of Doom

From Father Angelo:

In medieval English churches a standard architectural/artistic element of the liturgical environment was the Doom painting in the tympanum of the western wall of the Church. This depiction of the Last Judgment was located above the doors of the Church, so that it could be seen by the people as the exited the building.  ”Doom,” in this sense, is a synonym for Judgment Day.  Thus, the Crack of Doom, does not refer to some opening in the earth from which proceeds the apocalyptic judgment, but, the moment in time when the impending judgment is announced by the “crack” of thunder and trumpet blast.

The Doom within the church building, like the Rood, separating the sanctuary from the nave, marks out a place and time toward which the faithful must orient themselves and though which, like a frame, we are able to experience the liturgy.  The apocalyptic moment is the age to come already present in the here and now, especially in the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  The faithful, nourished by the Eucharist, are sent forth to face the end of time and the cosmic battle that leads to it.  Christ extends his hands over the entire panorama of space and time, showing the living and the dead the marks of His passion and His victory over death.  The faithful leave the Church with the sense that at any moment He may come.

But our doom is not only an end.  Perhaps it is important that in the Sistine Chapel and other post-medieval Churches, the Doom was transferred from the western wall to the eastern wall over the altar of sacrifice.  Benedict XVI has reminded us that facing East in the liturgy we are led by Christ into eternity.  The heavens open, eternity invades time, and we are taken from this present age into the age to come.  Our doom is victory.

At the end of this time, which is is 2013, we have an opportunity to make an assessment of our own spiritual orientation.  In the context of such an assessment Bob Moynihan, publisher of Inside the Vatican has pointed to the reference Pope Francis made in November to Robert Hugh Benson’s The Lord of the World, which is a novel about what would happen if the principles of Freemasonry were universally adopted, and the effect it would have on those who believe in Christ.   The Holy Father’s statement was a commentary on the persecution of the Jews by the pagans in the Maccabean period and how some believed they could negotiate a peace with the world that would be compatible with the worship of the true God.  But Pope Francis called this “adolescent progressivism” and “the ‘globalization of hegemonic uniformity,’ a uniformity of thought born of worldliness.”  He called such a compromise “apostasy” and “adultery.”  He said that Robert Hugh Benson’s book was prophetic of this kind of apostasy which was to come, and in fact, has come. (Read more.)

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Atheism and Orthodoxy in Modern Russia

A thought-provoking analysis from Mystagogy:

I should like to begin with the following questions. How did it happen that the country known as 'Holy Russia', with such a long history of Orthodox Christianity, was in a very short period of time turned by the Bolsheviks into 'the first atheist state in the world'? How was it possible that the very same people who were taught religion in secondary schools in the 1910s with their own hands destroyed churches and burned holy icons in the 1920s? What is the explanation of the fact that the Orthodox Church, which was so powerful in the Russian Empire, was almost reduced to zero by its former members?

I should say at once that I cannot interpret what happened in Russia in 1917 as an accident, the seizure of power by a small group of villains. Rather I perceive in the Russian revolution the ultimate outcome of the processes which were going on within the pre-revolutionary society and so, to a considerable extent, within the Russian Church (as there was no separation between Church and society). I would claim that the Russian revolution was the offspring of both the Russian monarchy and the Church. The roots of the post-revolutionary atheism should be looked for in pre-revolutionary Russian society and in the Church.

It has been said that Russia was baptised but not enlightened. Indeed, as far as the 19th century is concerned, it is clear that enlightenment was very often in conflict with religion: the masses of illiterate peasants kept their traditional beliefs, but more and more educated people, even from a purely religious background, rejected faith and became atheists. Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov are classic examples: both came from clerical families, both became atheists after studying in theological seminaries. For people like Dostoyevsky religion was something that had to be rediscovered, after having been lost as a result of his education. Tolstoy, on the other hand, came to a certain type of faith in God but remained alien to the Orthodox Church. It is clear, when one looks at the pre-revolutionary period, that there was a huge gap between the Church and the world of educated people, the so-called intelligentsia, and this gap was constantly growing.

But on the eve of the revolution it became more and more clear that atheism had also invaded the mass of ordinary people. Berdyaev wrote at that time that the simple Russian baba, who was supposed to be religious, was no longer a reality but a myth: she had become a nihilist and an atheist. I would like to quote some more from what this great Russian philosopher wrote in 1917, several months before the October revolution:

"The Russian nation always considered itself to be Christian. Many Russian thinkers and artists were even inclined to regard it as a nation which is Christian par excellence. The Slavophils thought that Russian people live by the Orthodox faith, which is the only true faith containing the entire truth... Dostoevsky preached that. The Russian nation is a bearer of God... But, it was here that revolution broke out, and it...revealed a spiritual emptiness in Russian people. This emptiness is a result of a slavery that lasted too long, of a process of degeneration of the old regime that went too far, of a paralysis of the Russian Church and moral degradation of the ecclesiastical authorities that lasted too long. Since long ago the sacred has been exterminated from the people's soul both from the left side and the right, which prepared this cynical attitude towards the sacred that is now being revealed in all its disgust." (Read more.)

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The Real Snow White

In reality, her name was Margaret and she never woke up after being poisoned. To quote:

Many fairytales are based on real persons and events. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm made it their mission to preserve Germanic folktales.

One of the most popular tales is for sure Snow White. But few people know that the story is based on a cause célèbre that took place in royal circles. It involves star-crossed lovers, child labor and death by poison. The tantalizing tale starts with the beautiful Margaret, daughter of Count Philipp IV of Waldeck-Wildungen and Margareta of Eastern Friesland. Margareta was Philipp’s sixth child. Her mother died when she was four. Her father remarried. His second wife Catherine of Hatzfeld was a strict stepmother. She died childless a few years before Margaret herself passed away.

Margaret grew up in Freidrichstein Castle near the German town of Waldeck.  Life for many was far from a fairytale exisance.

For one, the area was known for its mining activities. The Waldeck family owned gold, silver, copper, lead and iron mines. In the local copper mines, much of the work was done by small children. The brutal working conditions and malnutrition stunned their growth. They were referred to as “dwarfs”.

Furthermore, Margaret’s hometown was the hunting ground of a grisly murderer. A local man suspected some children of stealing from him, decided to take matters in his own hands by giving the little suspects poisoned apples.

By the time Margaret turned 16, her relationship with her stepmother had turned so bad, that her father decided to send her abroad. She went to live at the court of Brussels under the protection of Mary of Hungary. Needless to say, her father also sent her there to marry well. (Read more.)

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The Westminster Gate House

From Nancy Bilyeau:

The Tower of London holds claim to being the prison of greatest tragic renown, where queens were feted and beheaded and Jesuit priests screamed on the rack. But the Westminster Gate-House has many stories to tell too, holding errant clerks, poets, legendary Englishmen such as Sir Walter Ralegh and Samuel Pepys and a great many anonymous debtors.

In a description of the Gate-House Prison written in 1768, it "is situated near the west end of the abbey, entering into Tuttle Street, and the Almery...it is the chief prison for the City of Westminster liberties, not only for debt, but treason, theft and other criminal matters."

In the beginning, the prison was more connected to Westminster Abbey, which makes sense. Some say it was a powerful abbot who transformed the gatehouse into a prison, but documents point to William Warfield, the cellarer of Westminster Abbey. In 1370 he arranged for the gatehouse’s upper storey to house a jail.

But why? (Read more.)

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A Pelisse

This is something Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte would have worn. (Via Tiny-Librarian.) Share

The Popularity of the Romanovs

Today. To quote the New York Times:

A replica of Russia’s grand imperial crown, made of nearly 11,500 diamonds, will be on display in Moscow until early January at the State Historical Museum near Red Square, the latest of dozens of exhibitions across Russia devoted to the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Romanov dynasty.

The exhibitions are on a wide range of subjects related to the dynasty, which came to power with the election of Mikhail Romanov in 1613, and ended with the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family in 1918.  On Saturday an exhibition called “Sports and the Romanov Family” opens in Sochi, the Black Sea resort city that will be hosting the Winter Olympics in February.  The overriding theme, however, has been the glory of the Russian state under the Romanovs, and its links to Russia today.

In November, a high-tech exhibition at the Manege hall near the Kremlin wall was attended by President Vladimir V. Putin and drew more than 300,000 visitors during its three-week run. It highlighted the Romanovs’ achievements, and underscored the dangers of revolt.

References to Mr. Putin scattered through the exhibition drew fire from critics who said the show was intended to give historical credence to what some see as his czar-like tendencies.  The exhibition ended with a banner displaying a quote from a much-cited speech in September.  “Too often in our nation’s history, instead of opposition to the government we have been faced with opponents of Russia itself,” Mr. Putin said.  “And we know how it ended, with the demolition of the state as such.”


The Manege exhibition was organized by Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov, the abbot of Moscow’s Sretensky Monastery, who has a reputation for being close to Mr. Putin. It is scheduled to travel to several Russian cities. Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s culture minister, has said that it might eventually become a permanent exhibition in Moscow.  Nicholas II, his wife and five children were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000 as “passion bearers” for their “humbleness, patience and meekness” during their imprisonment and execution by the Bolsheviks. (Read more.)

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