Miraculous Statue of the Infant Christ

What is referred to in the article as a "doll" is actually a statue. From The Catholic Herald:

A 15th-century doll of the Christ Child that survived an Italian earthquake will be displayed as part of a forthcoming exhibition in Cambridge. The Christ Child had been confirmed as an object of the “Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy” exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum before the earthquake took place last year. But in October, the monastery of Santa Chiara, where the doll is venerated, was struck by an earthquake which reduced most of the building to rubble. Miraculously, the doll survived unscathed. The doll will leave Italy for the first time to be featured in the exhibition. It was created in the 15th century for St Camilla Battista da Varano, a princess-turned-nun who had visions of the Madonna kissing the Christ Child. St Camilla Battista was canonised in 2010.

During the Renaissance era, many Italian women had similar dolls which they dressed and cared for to mimic the Virgin Mary’s bond with the baby Jesus. Every year, hundreds of people make pilgrimage to the church where the doll is kept to kiss it during the feast of the Epiphany. The exhibition will also feature three groups of ex-voto paintings from the 15th and 16th centuries, none of which have ever been on display in Britain before. Ex-voto paintings were created as offerings to the Church in acts of gratitude or devotion. The exhibition aims to challenge the “idea of the Renaissance as an age of increasing worldliness” and “shows how religion remained a powerful force that coloured every aspect of daily life”.(Read more.)

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The Art of Noticing

From Michele Quigley:

Photography is an art form and art has a way of changing you –if you let it. I’m not new to photography. I’ve had a camera in my hand for the better part of the last 35 years but one of the unexpected benefits of doing a 365 project a few years ago was how it changed me. It didn’t just change how I take photographs, it changed how I see the world.

In many ways it’s brought out the child in me. Colors are more vibrant, light and dark more striking. I see ordinary details and I notice the little things. I stop and look much more now because it’s all so interesting. I cannot help but notice how the color of the light changes throughout the day and how it’s different from day to day and season to season. A simple tree in the distance set against a backdrop of a blue sky jumps out at me and I have to remark on how beautifully the sun shines on it.

The moon on a dark cold night catches my attention. The rain as it hits the highway intrigues me. A cup of coffee, warm, comforting and full of meaning speaks volumes to my senses. I think that sometimes we can become jaded by all the images around us in advertising and media. It can be such an assault to our senses that we have to turn it down, turn it off. We stop noticing things as much because we’re so used to them.

Early on in my project I wondered if frequently having a camera in my hand would prevent me from me from being “in the moment”, but what I discovered was that it actually reminded me to really absorb the moment, to capture the feeling of what was going on –not just the technical details of it. As I look back through my photos and it’s almost like being transported. I can get lost there for hours. (Read more.)

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A Lowcountry Boil

From Inside Chic:

The Lowcountry boil, also known as Frogmore stew, has a storied history, though of comparatively recent vintage. Its roots extend farther back in time and place, however, to the Creole-style cuisines of the Gullah, the descendants of African slaves, who have long populated the Sea Islands and coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida. Lore credits the original recipe to Richard Gay, of Gay Fish Company, who hailed from Frogmore on St. Helena Island, deep in the heart of the Sea Island Gullah community. (Read more.)

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The Media's Moment of Truth

A must-read from Maggie Gallagher writing for the Catholic Herald:

A culture war is a struggle over who has the power to name what is real. For generations in America there was a central source of information in the body politic for naming what was real, at least at the level of simple fact. Over time it became clearer and clearer that the Left could use its influence over these elite information streams to deprive the conservative movement of the capacity to make changes. Republicans lived in fear of being branded a bigot, a hater or a racist, and so the circle of what counts as bigotry, hatred and racism expanded to include more of the Left’s social agenda (particularly, but not exclusively, around gay issues).

It was an effective weapon and it worked, until Trump refused to be cowed by this narrative and still won.

Benedict XVI prophetically foresaw the challenge of truth in our times in his Regensburg address. If we only accept scientific proof as rational and declare everything else irrational, then, Benedict pointed out, we exclude from rational reflection most of the searching and deepest questions human beings face: those areas in which empirical proof is not possible, which require rational reflection – judgment, not proof. (Read more.)

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How the First Americans Arrived

From Mental Floss:

For much of the 20th century, scientists believed that the first settlers of the Americas could only have arrived one way. As the conventional story went, an ice-free super highway opened up across the Bering Land Bridge toward the end of the last ice age, allowing people from Eurasia to follow big game like bison and mammoths down through the interior of North America. New archaeological discoveries have challenged that narrative in recent years. And a study published in the journal Nature offers further evidence that this northerly corridor wasn’t the first route to the continent.

University of Copenhagen researchers Eske Willerslev, Mikkel Pedersen, and their colleagues found that this harsh route only became viable for human migration 12,600 years ago—when the first plants and animals showed up in the region. Meanwhile, archaeologists have ample evidence that people were living in the Americas long before then. (Read more.)

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Crown of Margaret of York

The crown of Margaret of York is an extremely rare example of English medieval metalwork, dating from c. 1461. A sister of Edward IV, the princess wore this crown at her wedding to Charles the Bold in Bruges, 1468. Share

Tales of the King of Rome

In spite of the egalitarian nature of the French Revolution, the son of Napoleon Bonaparte was being brought up in a manner befitting a dauphin. His story is a sad one. From Shannon Selin:

On January 24, 1814, the King of Rome saw his father for the last time. Napoleon left to campaign in Germany, in a failing attempt to prevent his enemies from entering France. On March 28, as the allies closed in on Paris, Napoleon wrote to insist that his wife Marie Louise and their son leave the city. Marie-Marguerite Broquet, the mother of Napoleon’s valet Louis-Joseph Marchand, was a nurse to the King of Rome. She told Marchand how the boy resisted leaving the Tuileries Palace.

The King of Rome…grabbed onto each piece of furniture so as not to go to Rambouillet, which he deemed too ugly. Made impatient by the force used on him – and force had to be used to get him into his carriage – he said in anger: ‘I don’t want to leave Paris, Papa is not here, I am the master here.’ (5)

When Napoleon was exiled to Elba, Marie Louise took the King of Rome to Vienna. He spent the rest of his life there, in the court of his grandfather, Emperor Francis I of Austria, who gave him the title of Duke of Reichstadt.(Read more.)

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Last Footage of the Tsar

Tsar Nicholas II with his children in Mogilev, 4th October 1916. This is probably the last footage taken of the Imperial Family.

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John Quincy Adams and Napoleon

From Shannon Selin:

John Quincy Adams accompanied his father on the latter’s posts as American envoy to France (1778-1779) and to the Netherlands (1780-1782). He also, at age 14, acted as secretary to the US minister to Russia. Adams himself served as US minister to the Netherlands (1794-1797) and Prussia (1797-1801). He was thus familiar with Europe and its diplomacy. Adams learned to speak several European languages, including French. In 1809, Adams became the US ambassador to Russia. As such, he reported on Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of that country and the disastrous retreat.

It may well be doubted whether in the compass of human history since the creation of the world a greater, more sudden and total reverse of fortune was ever experienced by man, than is now exhibiting in the person of a man whom fortune for a previous course of nearly twenty years had favored with a steadiness and a prodigality equally unexampled in the annals of mankind…. It has pleased heaven for many years to preserve this man and to make him prosper as an instrument of divine wrath to scourge mankind. His race is now run, and his own turn of punishment has commenced. (5)

Adams admired Napoleon’s intelligence and military talent. However, he thought they were overshadowed by flaws in the Emperor’s character. In January 1814 he wrote to his brother from St. Petersburg:

The events of the last two years opened a new prospect to all Europe, and have discovered the glassy substance of the colossal power of France. Had that power been acquired by wisdom, it might have been consolidated by time and the most ordinary portion of prudence. The Emperor Napoleon says that he was never seduced by prosperity; but when he comes to be judged impartially by posterity that will not be their sentence. His fortune will be among the wonders of the age in which he has lived. His military talent and genius will place him high in the rank of great captains; but his intemperate passion, his presumptuous insolence, and his Spanish and Russian wars, will reduce him very nearly to the level of ordinary men. At all events he will be one of the standing examples of human vicissitude, ranged not among the Alexanders, Caesars, and Charlemagnes, but among the Hannibals, Pompeys, and Charles the 12th. (6)

In 1814, Adams was recalled from St. Petersburg to become the chief US negotiator of the Treaty of Ghent. This ended the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain. In 1815, he was appointed US ambassador to Britain. Before leaving for London, Adams spent time in Paris, where he learned of Napoleon’s escape from Elba. He was as surprised as anyone. On March 19, 1815 he wrote to his mother:

At the first news of his landing I considered it as the last struggle of desperation on his part. I did not believe that he would be joined by five hundred adherents, and fully expected that he would within ten days pay the forfeit of his rashness with his life. (7)

(Read more.)

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