sententiae et clamores

The Feast of the Holy Innocents

2009-12-28T12:13:00.006-05:00

Cornelis van Haarlam, Massacre of the Holy Innocents, 1590.

Today is the feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating Herod's massacre of infants as described in Matthew 2:16-18. I just wanted to share a few artworks on the subject.

The theme seemed to appeal to late Renaissance and Baroque artists because of the treatment of violence against the innocent and the drama inherent in the tortured faces of the mothers who try to defend or mourn their slaughtered children. I remember being mesmerized by a set of polychrome figures on the theme by José Ginés in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. The series, given the graphically Spanish title Degollación de los Inocentes ("the throat-cutting of the innocents"), got its power from the naked brutality of the slaughter and the crazed, twisted faces of the women as they tried in vain to either hide their children or fight off the soldiers -- a moment described also by Shakespeare in Henry V:

Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.

After extensive googling that resulted not only in the frustration of failure to obtain results but also repeated Mozilla-crashing, I was able to to find only one figure from the series, but it should give you a feel for it:

And here are some other versions:

Guido Reni, 1611.

Peter Paul Rubens, also 1611.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

2009-12-24T21:08:00.001-05:00

random cool picture

2009-12-04T08:48:00.006-05:00

From fons veritatis, Pope Sixtus IV appoints Bartolomeo Platina prefect of the Vatican Library, fresco by Melozzo da Forlì, c. 1477 (Vatican Museums).

Teaching has rendered me with no time to blog -- perhaps I'll sharpen the cyberquill during the holidays. Meanwhile, this is a pretty picture (I love the background -- I have mentioned before how much I love architecture in paintings). I found it on the fons veritatis page on Bartolomeo Platina, Renaissance humanist and author of the first printed cookbook, De honestate voluptate et valetudine. The cookbook was what I was checking on, as some of the recipes have been adapted in the Historical Cookery webpage (h/t Jeffrey Smith). So here it is, it's very nice.

this is why I always feed her when she demands food...

2009-11-29T17:02:00.001-05:00

h/t The Quack Doctor.

it's official

2009-10-21T18:01:00.002-04:00

Sorry blog activity has been nil... I have been very busy with classes. But! I have an announcement:

October degrees were conferred by Columbia today. I am officially a PhD.

amusing if it weren't terrifying

2009-09-26T12:40:00.002-04:00

Qaddafi would be hilarious if he didn't actually hold power over an entire country:

"We want to know who killed [JFK]. Somebody by the name of Lee Harvey and then...another, Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey. Why did this Israeli kill the killer of Jack Kennedy?... The whole world should know that Kennedy wanted to investigate the nuclear reactor of the Israeli demon."
-- Muammar Qaddafi, addressing the UN for the first time. His personal translator collapsed 75 minutes into the 96-minute speech, reportedly shouting, "I just can't take it anymore."

(h/t Doonesbury)

felix triumphator et semper groovius

2009-09-18T07:39:00.004-04:00

I realize that although I did comment on twitter, I didn't make it clear on the blog -- I did pass my dissertation defense. It went very well. Some important points and difficult questions came up, but more in the spirit of what I should do when I turn the study into a book rather than as commentaries on deficiencies of the thesis itself.

I was given a "Pass with Minor Revisions" (for the most part typos) and then my colleagues welcomed me into the circle of PhDs by banging on the table and chanting, "We accept him, we accept him! One of us, one of us! Gooble gobble."

defense

2009-09-11T09:34:00.004-04:00

Well, today, Sept. 11 (!) at 4:30 PM EST, I will be defending my dissertation before a committee of five professors. Please say a prayer for me.

Today is the feast of St Cyprian, who actually shows up and hangs around in my second chapter as patron of the cathedral of Leon, the bishop of which at one point was also named Cyprian. The chapter section is called "The Two Cyprians." So maybe that's a good sign.

On the other hand, I could swear I saw vultures circling over me on Staten Island yesterday.

So, prayers, please.

the terrible turkish executioner (1904)

2009-08-25T14:36:00.002-04:00

By Georges Méliès.

Melies - The terrible turkish executione
by kinetoscope

(h/t Voyages Extraodinaires).

rachid taha

2009-08-20T16:10:00.003-04:00

I love this song by the French-Algerian singer Rachid Taha. The video is pretty funny as well. The lyrics can be found here.

He also does a version of "Rock the Casbah" in Arabic!

viva barney

2009-08-19T13:18:00.001-04:00

belgian pulpits

2009-08-11T15:39:00.005-04:00

O lazy August! When I should be preparing for my fall classes, or comparing microfilms of manuscripts for my research job, or even blogging out my bile towards the politics of the day, I find myself drooping in the heat and hearing the sweet siren call of the sofa, cat & nap. Yet there are things that I have yet to confess to blogdom - such as the fact that I had a surprise trip to Belgium two weeks ago. The reason why I shall leave to another day: I will just say that it involved a cat, a crisis, and a happy resolution. I took a number of photos when I was there, but today I want to share just one category -- beautiful wood and marble Baroque pulpits that seem to have been installed in every church that was around in the seventeenth century. I have no idea why there was a fancy-pulpit-carving craze in the Low Countries in this period, but I suspect it has something to do with preaching, the Counter-reformation and the fact that Belgium was right on the frontier between Protestant and Catholic Europe. Anyway, beautiful stuff and here are my photos.

oh no!

2009-08-05T14:43:00.003-04:00

He wasn't really born in the United States! He isn't a legitimate medievalist! Where's the long form, Liam?

Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator (h/t TPM).

new post on frammenti e rovine

2009-08-03T16:54:00.001-04:00

Dies Irae at the Elmore Ranch.

jazz mass

2009-07-31T15:48:00.001-04:00

At America Magazine, a video about the Jazz Mass at my parish:

new (old) story...

2009-07-16T12:20:00.000-04:00

at frammenti e rovine.

feast of st benedict

2009-07-11T10:56:00.003-04:00

Happy Feast of St Benedict!

In his honor, I am embedding a 1965 video of The Monks -- like Benedict himself, ahead of their time.

new post on frammenti e rovine

2009-07-04T16:20:00.001-04:00

The Lion in the Machine.

new blog for old stories

2009-06-22T23:30:00.002-04:00

Many of my regular visitors have given a glance at my old ugly geocities site which features fragments of my creative writing. It seems that Yahoo is closing down geocities later this year, so to save my imaginative progeny, as well as to present them anew and more attractively, I have created an ancillary blog, frammenti e rovine. I will add one story/fragment to the blog at a time, starting with The Fog. My plan is to canibalize the old site, but who knows? New creations may appear. Enjoy.

big things going down in Iran

2009-06-15T10:19:00.005-04:00

Medieval Persian miniature.

Big things going down in Iran. As I write this, thousands have gathered in Tehran to an officially banned protest at which Mousavi and Khatami have called for new elections. There are reports of violence and apparently plainclothes police and Ahmadinejad supporters (there are a lot of them and they are thugs) have brutally beaten Mousavi supporters in the streets. Meanwhile, at 9:00 pm last night, Mousavi supporters registered their protest by shouting Allahu Akbar from the rooftops -- apparently something that was done in the 1979 revolution.

The supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, apparently the person ultimately behind the election fraud (though some suggest it was orchestrated by more secular elements in the army and the police) initially declared Ahmadinejad the winner, but today he has agreed to look into allegations of voter fraud. This could either be a trick to lessen the intensity of the protests, or it could be evidence of disagreement within the clerical hierarchy.

People across the world have been asked to wear green today in support of the protesters.

The government successfully shut down Facebook and text-messaging, which have been powerful tools in organizing popular protests, so this time the revolution is on Twitter. There is an English language twitter feed you can check out (#iranelection). Andrew Sullivan is also following things closely, as are the Huffington Post and The Lede Blog at the NY Times.

Pray for the Iranian people.

our lady of firearms

2009-06-05T17:21:00.006-04:00

Let's see... no, no guns...

So, a Kentucky pastor is inviting his flock to bring their guns to church (H/T Andrew Sullivan). Says our pistol-packin' man of God, Ken Pagano,

As a Christian pastor I believe that without a deep-seeded belief in God and firearms that this country would not be here.

Well. This is the type of story in which reality outpaces parody. The jokes write themselves and it is impossible to tell whether we're reading the Times or the Onion.

The obvious question to pose here, of course, is whether or not it is really appropriate to celebrate instruments of death in a church whose founder preached love and nonviolence (how many people die from gun violence in this country every year? 30,000?). Going more deeply into the story reveals how strange the extreme religious right in this country is in their approach to reality, and how much issues that have at first sight very little to do with religion become sacralized for these people. I disagree with the right-wing's approach to abortion laws and gay marriage, but I see where it comes from. People like Pastor Pagano, however, speak about issues like gun ownership and (I suppose) tax relief as if they were as deeply rooted in Christian scripture as questions more obviously concerned with morality. Fundamentalist religious ideas have had great impact on the GOP platform, and it seems that the GOP platform has become enshrined in toto in church.

The distrubing gun fetishism that makes the NRA so powerful has become part of what passes for liturgy in Pastor Pagano's church. This man, the pastor of a Christian church, seems to put belief in God on the same plane as gun ownership (so much for sola fide) and tie both inimately to one particular country when considering how worship is to be carried out for his congregation. "Without a deep-seeded belief in God and firearms..." A deep-seeded belief in firearms?

Strange. And very, very disturbing.

the dissertation has been distributed...

2009-05-20T19:51:00.005-04:00

All 478 pages of it.

So... I'm pretty much done. The defense will be in September and the PhD will be awarded in October.

Very tired now. Happy, but tired.

el hechizado (she's my daughter... she's my sister...)

2009-04-15T07:19:00.009-04:00

We sort of knew this, didn't we? I mean, look at the dude.

An article in the Independent completes the following exchange:

"Carlos II, el Hechizado (1661-1700) was so inbred..."

"How inbred was he?"

The answer to that question, according to the article, is that he "was the offspring of a marriage that was almost as genetically inbred as an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister or parent and child."

That can lead to something really nasty such as, say, the War of Spanish Succession. Those wacky Hapsburgs -- keeping it all in the family.

Of course, there were hints of problems with our poor "bewitched" chin-rich monarch:

Charles II not only suffered an extreme version of the Hapsburg lip, his tongue was said to be so big for his mouth that he had difficulty speaking and drooled. He also suffered from an oversized head, intestinal upsets, convulsions and, according to his first wife, premature ejaculation.

"He was unable to speak until the age of four, and could not walk until the age of eight. He was short, weak and quite lean and thin. He was described as a person showing very little interest in his surroundings," Professor Alvarez said. "He looked like an old person when he was 30 years old, suffering edemas [swellings] on his feet, legs, abdomen and face. During the last years of his life he could barely stand up and suffered from hallucinations and convulsive episodes," he said.

Yeah. Sometimes when you marry, you should make the effort to go out of the immediate family.

(h/t: Adrian Murdoch).

Have a good Holy Week

2009-04-09T17:51:00.002-04:00

Last Supper, Ethiopian Orthodox Icon.

I wish everyone a prayerful Triduum and a glorious Easter. I'll be offline for the next couple of days.

if Cleopatra were on Food Network

2009-04-08T07:59:00.002-04:00

From The LATIN QVARTER via rougueclassicism: