Driving Eastward on the Friday after Ash Wednesday

Unlike John Donne, I am going the right direction as I travel on a Lenten Friday, east toward Fort Scott, Kansas.

Of course, I'm referring to John Donne's poem, "Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward":

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne?
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They'are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee,
O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree;
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face.

My road, Highway 54, actually goes through the old railroad towns along the way, in counties Sedgwick, Butler, Greenwood, Woodson, Allen, and Bourbon. Thus, I'll drive through or alongside El Dorado, Prospect, Rosalia, Eureka, Neal, Toronto, Yates Center, Piqua, Gas, La Harpe, Moran, and Bronson before I reach Fort Scott. 

Piqua piques my interest because it is the birthplace of Buster Keaton and there is a beautiful church, St. Martin of Tours, maintained by the Catholics nearby. I will pay tribute to The Great Stone Face while I visit Piqua. His parents were in vaudeville and his mother Myra gave birth to Joseph Frank while they were on the road. Bronson, Kansas has a Civil War memorial, so I might stop by the city park to take a photo. 

Each of these towns and cities has a history and it has been fun to spend some time on the internet to find out a little about each. For instance, Gas, which is just a few miles east of Iola, was indeed named for its raison d'etre, natural gas. Rosalia was named by the first postmaster after his wife and was platted in 1883. John C. Woods, a native Wichitan who served as an executioner (hanging Frank, von Ribbentrop, and others) at the Nuremberg trials, is buried in Toronto. Debra Dean Barnes, Miss America 1968, was born and raised in Moran, Kansas.

Once I arrive in Fort Scott, I'll check into my hotel, reconnoiter about town, and then meet the other speakers at the History and Heretics Symposium for dinner. I'll publish updates on my drive east soon.

St. Augustine and His Dog in Venice

Willard Spiegelman, the editor-in-chief of the Southwest Review at SMU in Dallas,writes about Vittore Carpacio's Cycle for the Scuola de San Giorgio Degli Schiavoni in Venice for The Wall Street Journal's Masterpiece column. I thoroughly appreciate and agree with his first paragraph:

After a first visit, every tourist to a famous place begins to turn from the hot spots, the three-star must-sees and the crowds—to yearn for intimacy, something out of the way. Nowhere is this quest more natural or essential than in Venice. Forget St. Mark’s Square, the Doge’s Palace and the Rialto. Forget Murano and its glass. Look for the big rewards that come from small packages.

Between the Bellini family, which came before him, and Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, who followed, the most important Venetian artist was Vittore Carpaccio (1465-1525). He bridged the turn to the new century. His large cycle depicting the legend of St. Ursula is one of the prizes of the Accademia. (These rooms were closed on the days I visited the museum, owing to “weather,” whatever that meant.) But for sheer intensity, variety, elegance and charm, nothing can beat his nine paintings that hang above eye level, beneath a coffered ceiling on the ground floor—they were on the second story until a mid-16th-century rearrangement—of the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, the Dalmatian Confraternity. This lovely spot is both a (long) stone’s throw and a world away from bustling Piazza San Marco.

"After a first visit" assumes that the tourist or traveler goes back to the same city again to see it beyond the tourist's highlights--something about the city or location is so attractive that we want to go back and explore further.

St. Augustine in his study receives a vision of St. Jerome as the latter dies. He stops writing, looks out the window--and his little dog looks up at him, wondering what's outside. As Spiegelman concludes:

We are not in north Africa in the fifth century. We are in Venice, at the turn of the 16th. La Serenissima is the queen of the Adriatic, the point of contact between the riches of the Orient and the western Mediterranean. The Renaissance has begun.

From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Thomas Cahill Strikes Again!

Years ago I read Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization (which should probably be titled "How the Irish Saved Western Civilization") and several years ago I toted Mysteries of the Middle Ages with me on a trip to Paris--it was fun to read about Heloise and Abelard in situ, especially one day while seated in Au Sauvignon, hearing two American ex pats discussing the end of one of their love affairs. I almost wanted to tell them that love affairs can end much more badly! Cahill's animus toward St. Bernard of Clairvaux and his relentless hatred of any pope or bishop, any member of the Church's hierarchy, wore on me after awhile. As an antidote, I went to the Musee de Cluny and reveled in some of the great religious art of the medieval era. My journal for that visit includes the note that Cahill really didn't understand the Middle Ages, because he didn't understand the Church or the Catholic faith--and his hermeneutic of understanding the past by how much it conforms to current values, specifically his values, kept him from entering in to the past and trying to comprehend it.

Sounds like that's the issue with his latest book in the "Hinges of History" series, according to Michael B. Kelly in The Catholic World Report:

Since publishing the amusing How the Irish Saved Civilization in 1995, best-selling author Thomas Cahill has added five further volumes to his history of the West, the Hinges of History series. The latest volume, Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Changed Our World, contains Cahill’s take on the great European intellectual, cultural, and religious movements of the period now commonly referred to by historians as “early modern”. According to the author, this series aims to “retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West.” Such “gift-givers” left behind “a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong” than the one they had entered. . . .

But over-simplifications and reliance upon older scholarship aside, the main problem with the book is its neglect of its advertised task, i.e., explaining “How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Changed Our World.” Heretics and Heroes, at length, is essentially a search through history for characters presenting features that appear “modern” to the searcher. He then provides lively biographical vignettes that emphasize these features, and (as it were) announces—“Voila, modernity in the Renaissance (or Reformation).”

But simply identifying new trends and developments in art and religion in the early modern period is not the same as explaining how modernity came to be. Emblematic for the whole work may be Cahill’s account of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, when it was momentously resolved that each prince in the Empire could decide his own domain’s religion (cujus regio, ejus religio)—Cahill snappily explains, “And so it became” (262). And apparently that is that. Readers wishing some sustained argument about the gestation of the modern world will be disappointed.

In the end, Heretics and Heroes is not an attempt to understand, or explain, the past from the perspective of the people of the past. It is a history of progress towards us, or, rather, towards those of us who are truly modern, in the right way. It is a peculiar kind of hagiographical enterprise—the scouring of history to find the people that are most like us. In fact, in his final chapter Cahill apologizes that, notwithstanding his good intentions, he has produced so many pages about “know-it-alls . . . prescribers and proscribers,” the “excluders” and limiters, “who want their circle—the circle of the saved—to be exclusive, as small and as (uncomfortably) intimate as possible.”

Read the rest here. Can you imagine what Cahill will do when he discusses the French Revolution? Surely the Enlightenment and the "Age of Revolution" will be the next "Hinge of History"!

Peter Paul Rubens and the "Counter-Reformation"

The Wall Street Journal reviews this new book on the Catholic art Peter Paul Rubens created in Flanders as part of the Catholic Church's famous effort to revive religious art in the service of reviving religious devotion and doctrine. The cover of the book is well chosen, as it presents an obviously Catholic and Marian interpretation of St. John's vision of the Woman Clothed with the Sun, fleeing the dragon that threatens to devour her and her baby, Jesus Christ (Mary, the Mother of God!). But according the WSJ reviewer, the author of The Catholic Rubens begins with Ruben's famous Deposition from the Cross in Antwerp Cathedral, because Sauerländer wants to emphasize Rubens' work in situ, not in a museum:

Today most of the significant altar paintings by Rubens (1577-1640) have been transplanted to art museums. There, scholars have concentrated on their formal qualities and more overt religious subjects. Often overlooked are the additional meanings tied to the pictures' original ecclesiastical settings.

This lacuna has now been brilliantly filled by Willibald Sauerländer in "The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs." An esteemed historian of medieval Christian art, Mr. Sauerländer follows the ways in which Rubens's pictorial inventions accorded with the doctrinal changes set in motion by the Council of Trent (1545–63). 

"The Catholic Rubens" begins with the artist's most famous altarpiece, "The Deposition" (1611-14), still at the Antwerp Cathedral. Since it serves as a model for understanding Rubens's religious genius, it is considered at length. . . .

In keeping with ecclesiastical tradition, the center panel offers a major episode from the Passion, the crucified Christ's lifeless body being taken down from the cross. Clearly working in concert with Rome's goal of the renewed veneration of holy persons, Rubens portrays differing figures beginning the process of carrying Jesus' body to the tomb. The Virgin Mary too is present, standing on the left. Rubens's innovations are seen here in the way he brings the scene toward the viewer and sets the body on a bold corner-to-corner diagonal, with the participants gathered around to receive it. 

"The Deposition" is only one of 20-some altarpieces of saints and martyrs discussed by Mr. Sauerländer in this amazing book. These include Rubens's church commissions for pictures about the Disciples, early Christians St. Paul and St. Stephen (the first martyr). His lingering caveat is that Rubens's narratives "belong to an order of terrestrial and celestial things that is deeply foreign . . . to us." To the secular world, perhaps, but the import of Rubens's "Deposition" is still familiar to many of the faithful.

 

I visited Antwerp Cathedral during a trip to Belgium when my husband went there for business. I went on a bus tour which included a stop at a diamond store! and then dropped us off at the Grand Place. Great as the Deposition is, I was most inspired by the Resurrection of Christ, with Our Lord striding forth from the tomb, with the soldiers huddling in darkness while He is radiant!

 

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen! Happy Third Sunday of Easter!

 

More about the book here--and remember that this Catholic Rubens was one of Charles I's favorite painters!

Becoming Jane Austen, 21st Century Style

From The Wall Street Journal, Joy Y. Wang writes about her attempt at time travel, including wearing clothing from Jane Austen's era:

IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a spare room must be in want of a lodger.

That was the case, at least, with the room in London I booked through the home-rental website Airbnb. My host was an attractive 33-year-old Australian solicitor, and for a spell I imagined a romance playing out like a Jane Austen plotline.

Such an encounter would fit neatly into the story arc of the trip. Days before my 30th birthday, I was on a mission: to experience Jane Austen's England and decide if that world holds any relevance for a single woman of today—especially one who, by the standards of Austen's time, would be considered positively spinsterly.

I've been an Austen devotee since first reading "Pride and Prejudice" at the age of 15, and my milestone birthday felt like the right time to explore a country I'd read about extensively but never visited. I'd see if the mineral waters of Bath could cure me of too many hours spent in front of a computer screen and too few spent at the gym. Perhaps a visit to Jane Austen's house in the village of Chawton, where she lived when "Pride and Prejudice" was first published 200 years ago, would fire up my writerly ambitions. I would wander the grounds of Chatsworth, the grand estate in Derbyshire that is thought to have inspired Austen's description of Pemberley in "Pride and Prejudice."

Read the rest here.

The word "devotee" intrigues and puzzles me. Merriam-Webster's on-line dictionary defines "devotee" as  being "an ardent follower, supporter, or enthusiast (as of a religion, art form, or sport)". I am not a devotee of Jane Austen: I am a reader of Jane Austen; I have written about Jane Austen (I wrote my M.A. thesis on "Jane Austen's Persuasion and Hugh Blair's Rhetoric"); I appreciate Jane Austen's art and ability; I enjoy watching adaptations of Jane Austen's works--but I am not "ardent follower, supporter, or enthusiast". I will stipulate that I am odd, but I don't think that Austen needs me to follow, support, or enthuse about her.

On the other hand, the question of Jane Austen as "an ardent follower, supporter, or enthusiast" of Christianity is a topic seldom addressed in criticism of her work, because, as this author notes, her works seem so secular and her clerical characters are so often mocked. Yet, he concludes his analysis of religion in her works in the context of her age:

I read Jane Austen’s novels against a “long eighteenth century” in which Austen firmly stood; against the intellectual prisms that dominated the period—neoclassical hermeneutics, British Empiricism, and Georgian Anglicanism; and against the pervasive and unrelenting reality of unregulated capitalism. My reading does not seek to make theological that which is not theology; but it does seek to make religious that which, for too long, has been misunderstood as secular. In Austen’s world, religious issues are indivisible from secular issues; and religious observance still has a public importance and is not a matter of private observance or psychological journey as it is now considered to be.

If we have become so dedicated to understanding Austen’s novels in the context of their period, then recognizing the unity of Austen’s social and religious vision, whether we choose to believe in it or not, is an urgent critical task. Austen is a Christian humanist who belongs to the neoclassical Enlightenment. She is not a secular humanist whose work can be appropriated to validate the post-Enlightenment critique of the traditional western and Christian world-view. Austen may be a feminist and a capitalist but she is also an Anglican who writes Christian stories. If we—her readers, biographers, and literary critics—fail to grasp the centrality of that fact, and do not rise to the challenge that it presents to reading, biography, criticism, then we will misunderstand her life and misread her novels at their most profound level of interpretation.

Michael Giffen has written a book about Jane Austen and religion, titled Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England, available from Palgrave Macmillan in the UK (Print on Demand):

Jane Austen is often thought of as a secular author, because religion seems absent from her novels, because she satirises her clerical characters, and because history and literacy criticism - and the literary sensibility of the twenty-first century reader - is overwhelmingly secular. Michael Giffin offers a reading of Austen's published novels against the background of a 'long eighteenth century' that stretched from the Restoration to the end of the Georgian period. He demonstrates that Austen is a neoclassical author of the Enlightenment who writes through the twin prisms of British Empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. His focus is on how Austen's novels mirror a belief in natural law and natural order; and how they reflect John Locke's theory of knowledge through reason, revelation and reflection on experience. His reading suggests there is a thread of neoclassical philosophy and theology running through and between each of Austen's novels, which is best understood in its cultural context.

Around the World with the Wichita Public Library

My husband and I have vicariously visited four European capitals in the past couple of weeks: Paris, London, Rome, and Prague--via Naxos Musical Journey DVDs combining video of famous sights in each city with appropriate classical music. We thought two were very effective and two less effective. We have been to all but one of the cities, Prague.

The DVD on Paris, which also includes Chantilly, Versailles, and Chartres, was one of the effective presentations, with scenes from all the famous sights, including Notre Dame, the Musee D'Orsay, Sacre Coeur, etc, and of families in the parks at Luxembourg, the interior of Le Train Bleu in the Gare de Lyon (we ate dinner there twice on business trips to Paris). Good detail in Chantilly, Versailles, and Chartres, too. The music ranges from Marais to Wagner; Mozart to Satie; Meyerbeer to Puccini--all appropriately chosen for the venue and choreography of the video presentation.

The DVD on Rome we thought less effective, primarily because the video concentrated so much on street scenes, the Spanish Steps (we thought we'd never stop seeing them), and did not even visit all four major basilicas in Rome--no St. Mary Major, St. Paul Outside the Walls or St. John Lateran at all. The views of the Roman Forum were effective. The musical selections were great, however:

The music here included is all associated in one way or another with Rome and its traditions. It ranges from the overture to Mozart's Roman opera La clemenza di Tito to Wagner's Tannhäuser, whose hero seeks pardon for his sins in the Eternal City, from Puccini's opera Tosca, set in Rome dominated by a corrupt chief of police, to Berlioz's evocation of the city in the age of Benevenuto Cellini, his Roman Carnival Overture.

Again, the DVD for London we thought was great: lots of sights, including both Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and the bonus of Oxford, including Christ Church and Christ Church Cathedral. The music was beautiful, with many selections from the Enigma Variations by Elgar, including "Nimrod" during the scenes of Christ Church. The Verdi selection was interesting--the chorus of the Scottish Exiles from Macbeth (accompanying images of the Tower of London). The video ends with a bang: fireworks and Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks!

But the DVD for Prague seemed a little dull--not even a good view of the Charles Bridge! The video did include many beautiful scenes along the river and of countryside and parks--and again, the music was great:

The music included here is associated in one way or another with Prague or Bohemia. It includes works by the Bohemian composers Smetana and Dvořák, by the Moravian composer Janáček, and by Fibich who, with Mozart, always found a ready welcome for his music in Prague.

There are more DVDs in the series, including Salzburg (lots of Mozart), Vienna, and Madrid, and DVDs that encompass highlights from the entire country, like Finland, Germany, and Uzbekistan, as well as two videos dedicated to regions of France, the chateaus of the Loire and Brittany & Normandy--the easy way to armchair travel, without luggage or crowds, or really being there!

When They Began the Beguines (And the Last Beguine)

Thanks to Elena Maria Vidal's Tea at Trianon blog for this story from The Telegraph about the last Beguine:

In the late 12th century a Flemish priest named Lambert le Begue established a community in Liège for the widows of crusaders who had not returned from the Holy Land. Without a protector, such women often felt obliged to seek security by joining a religious order, but many of them did not wish to devote their lives exclusively to religion. Called Beguines, the women lived in walled districts called beguinages.

Beguines took no religious vows. They could leave and marry, if they chose. They could own property and took no alms. Women of all classes were welcomed, and wealthy Beguines often brought their servants with them. They carried on professions, often in the textile industry; they did good works, such as teaching or caring for the sick. They elected women — Grandes Dames — to lead their communities. Each Beguine was expected to support herself and make a contribution to the beguinage, through work or rent payments. They had no motherhouse, no common rule, no general of the order. Every community was run according to its own rules.

Such institutions flourished in northern Europe in the High Middle Ages, particularly in the Low Countries, in northern France and the Rhineland, although they never took off in England, Norwich being the only city where there is evidence of such informal female communities. . . .

Marcella Pattyn was born in the Belgian Congo on August 18 1920 and, as a child, dreamed of entering a missionary religious order. But as she was almost blind she was rejected by several communities. It was only when a rich aunt intervened with a donation that she was accepted into the beguinage of St Amandsberg in Ghent in 1941.

There, and at the beguinage of St Elizabeth at Courtrai, where she moved in 1960, she spent her days praying, knitting clothes, weaving and making Beguine dolls, which she sold to tourists. She played the organ in the chapel and gave comfort to the sick by entertaining them on the banjo or accordion. In her later years she became a familiar figure in the streets of Courtrai, whizzing around in a motorised wheelchair.

In 1960 she was one of a community of nine. By 2008, when she moved into a nursing home, she had become, officially, the only surviving Beguine in the world.

On two trips to Belgium at the beginning of this century, I saw several of the beguinages in Flanders, especially in Leuven, Bruges, and Tongeron, and the accompanying "Beguinage Churches", where the Beguines attended Mass. In Bruges I remember the tour guide's flippant remark that there just weren't enough men to go around, so the young women starting living together. I particularly enjoyed a visit to Tongeren, the home of my hostesses' grandmother, with its great beguinage and St. Catherine's Church. For me, Tongeren was doubly fascinating not only because of the beguinage, St. Catherine's and the beautiful Gothic basilica of Our Lady, but also because of  its Gallo-Roman museum and its great hero Ambiorix, who rebelled against the Romans and Julius Caesar. Unfortunately, at that time during my travels, I was not a very good photographer, as my husband often complained. (And at the time, we did not have digital cameras!) Not much to share, I'm afraid. (photo source: Wikipedia commons.) More on Tongeren here.

Returning from our first trip to Belgium, I did some research and reading into the history and spirituality of the beguine movement and found this book: Brides in the Desert: The Spirituality of the Beguines by Saskia Murk-Jansen. She focuses on the mysticism of Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Beatrijs of Nazareth. I also dipped into Bernard McGinn's Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete. I think now the standard work is by Walter Simons, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press: Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565, part of The Middle Ages Series:

In the early thirteenth century, semireligious communities of women began to form in the cities and towns of the Low Countries. These beguines, as the women came to be known, led lives of contemplation and prayer and earned their livings as laborers or teachers.


In Cities of Ladies, the first history of the beguines to appear in English in fifty years, Walter Simons traces the transformation of informal clusters of single women to large beguinages. These veritable single-sex cities offered lower- and middle-class women an alternative to both marriage and convent life. While the region's expanding urban economies initially valued the communities for their cheap labor supply, severe economic crises by the fourteenth century restricted women's opportunities for work. Church authorities had also grown less tolerant of religious experimentation, hailing as subversive some aspects of beguine mysticism. To Simons, however, such accusations of heresy against the beguines were largely generated from a profound anxiety about their intellectual ambitions and their claims to a chaste life outside the cloister. Under ecclesiastical and economic pressure, beguine communities dwindled in size and influence, surviving only by adopting a posture of restraint and submission to church authorities.

Walter Simons is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College.

I wonder if I will ever have the opportunity to return to Belgium, to Brussels and Bruges, Antwerp and Leuven, Mechelen and Tongeren--and visit Ghent for the first time to see the "Mystic Lamb"--this time with a digital camera and taking lots of pictures!

How to Prepare for a Pilgrimage

Vanessa Denha-Garmo asked a very good question at the end of her interview of Father Steve Matejas and me on Catholic Connection last week: How should people prepare for going on the Catholic Martyrs of England Pilgrimage? Here are some hints:

1) All travel involves planning and preparation. When my husband's career provided him with many opportunities to travel and I could go with him, I would plan and prepare my own itinerary for our destination. I would usually research three or four categories of things to see and visit: churches, bookstores, and colleges or universities, plus the usual monuments or museums as applicable. At first, back in the twentieth century, that often involved buying guidebooks or writing to tourism offices for brochures. Now, of course, the internet provides those resources. Corporate Travel Services, Father Steve, and I have taken care of some that planning--CTS books the flights, makes the hotel reservations, arranges the tours; Father and I have given our input to the itinerary.

Pilgrims might want to do their own planning about what they want to do in the evenings when the tour events are over--what sights to see or other places to visit; where to eat in York or London when dinner is not part of the schedule, for example. And there is a half-day in London "on your own" before we conclude the pilgrimage with a visit to St. Etheldreda's for Mass and the Tyburn Convent for a visit to the Martyrs' Shrine and Relics.

2) Pilgrimage travel involves not only practical but spiritual preparation. The Canterbury pilgrims, pictured above, went on pilgrimage for a spiritual purpose: expiation of sin; as penance after confession; for healing; for some other special intention. Pilgrims to England in September this year might prepare a special intention on the tour. The overall intentions of the pilgrimage, as Father Steve and I articulated them, are for us all to increase our devotion to these English martyrs and to meditate on their sacrifices for Jesus and His Church--considering the implications and impact on each of us today. Before a pilgrimage, we should go to Confession, receive Holy Communion, and pray, pray, pray for the grace to complete the tour with devotion, compassion for each other, and for the success of all the travel arrangements, connections, and reservations.

3) A participant on a tour like this might indeed benefit from some supplemental reading and viewing. A copy of my book, Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation, is part of the package from Corporate Travel Services. Father Steve mentioned two other good books to read: Edmund Campion by Evelyn Waugh and The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest by Father John Gerard, SJ. I'd also recommend Saint Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet: A Study in Friendship by Philip Caraman, SJ and Into the Lion's Den: The Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England and Wales, 1580-1603 by Robert E. Scully, SJ, published by The Institute of Jesuit Sources (St. Louis, Missouri), c. 2011. They could read about St. Thomas More in various biographies, including this one I reviewed last year. With some reservations about Robert Bolt's view of conscience, they could watch A Man for All Seasons, or watch some of the Mary's Dowry productions on the Catholic Martyrs of the English Reformation. They could watch Playing Elizabeth's Tune for some musical background on the era and the conflicts caused by the State imposition of religious orthodoxy. There are more reading ideas for the Stuart era and even more for Blessed John Henry Newman (Oxford) and St. Thomas a Becket (Canterbury), but the works listed above are more accessible.

Book Review: The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England

I received this book as a Christmas gift from a kind friend--and I'd to read Ian Mortimer's "sequel": The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England. Mortimer writes this book as guidebook to England in the fourteenth century:

 

The past is a foreign country - this is your guidebook. Imagine you could travel in time, back to the fourteenth century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? Should you go to a castle or a monastic guest house? And what are you going to eat? What sort of food are you going to be offered by a peasant or a monk or a lord?

This radical new approach turns our entire understanding of history upside down. It shows us that the past is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived. It sets out to explain what life was like in the most immediate way, through taking you, the reader, to the middle ages, and showing you everything from the horrors of leprosy and war to the ridiculous excesses of roasted larks and haute couture.

Being a guidebook, many questions are answered which do not normally occur in traditional history books. How do you greet people in the street? What should you use for toilet paper? How fast - and how safely - can you travel? Why might a physician want to taste your blood? And how do you test to see if you are going down with the plague?

The result is the most astonishing social history book you are ever likely to read: revolutionary in its concept, informative and entertaining in its detail, and startling for its portrayal of humanity in an age of violence, exuberance and fear.

The Contents:

Introduction: Welcome to Medieval England
1. The Landscape
2. The People
3. The Medieval Character
4. Basic Essentials
5. What to Wear
6. Travelling
7. Where to Stay
8. What to Eat and Drink
9. Health and Hygiene
10. The Law
11. What to Do
Envoi
Notes

I agree with the publisher's blurb: this is a very entertaining book, filled with detail about daily life, customs, clothing, music, religion, food and drink--so many insights into daily life. It is written as non-fiction but as if the reader is there, experiencing and learning about life in the fourteenth century for peasants, clergy, knights, lords, nobility, and monarchs.

Ian Mortimer's website is also filled with detail and information about this book and The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England.

The Spanish Netherlands and Scherpenheuvel

Mentioning the Archduke Albert and the Spanish Netherlands in the post about composer Peter Philips the other day reminded me of our visit to Scherpenheuvel (Sharp Hill) in Belgium during the 2000 Jubilee Year. During our second visit to Belgium (work related for my husband; fun related for me), our hosts took us to the Basilica of Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel in the Flemish Brabant region of Belgium. A series of accidents led both Mark and I to the shrine--the wife of the manager of the parts distribution company located near Brussels was taking me to Scherpenheuvel; her car broke down; she called her husband and her cousin. Her husband (and my husband) left work to meet us at her cousin's house/business (he had a tow truck) to drive us on to Scherpenheuvel. On the way to her cousin's house, the brakes failed on the tow truck as we exited the highway! He had to use the handbrake.

We waited at her cousin's house for her husband--everyone spoke Flemish in the household but we did have the universal language of a silly little jack russell puppy who played fetch and tug of war. The cousin's daughter was a flight attendant on the now defunct Belgian airline, Sabena, and when she spoke English she had a perfect Midwest American accent. Mark and his contact arrived, and we went off to Scherpenheuvel. This was in the days before digital cameras when, gasp, we took pictures and then came home, took the film out of the camera and went to a store to have it developed, waited for the store to call us and then went to the store to pick up the pictures!! (I am speaking of 12 years ago, in the Dark Ages of 35 mm and APS film.) That explains why the two pictures I've posted are from the wikipedia commons on Scherpenheuvel:

 

And the websites for Scherpenheuvel are in Flemish, so here's a link to the wikipedia entry for the Basilica and its role as a Marian pilgrimage shrine in Belgium. The Archduke Albert whom Peter Philips served, and his wife, the Spanish Infanta Isabella (Philip II's daughter) gave funds for the establishment of the shrine, the town, and the basilica. It was a major pilgrimage site and the city that grew up around it provided all the services of lodging, restaurants, and shopping--and protections with its walls. We ate lunch, as I recall, in a big restaurant called The Golden Ram, large enough to accommodate the big pilgrimage groups during the season from May to November.

A couple of years later, I read this book about the Archbishop of Mechelen, Mathias Hovius, by Craig Harline of BYU and Eddy Put: A Bishop's Tale: Mathias Hovius Among His Flock in Seventeenth-Century Flanders (which is now out-of-print at Yale University Press). Charlotte Allen reviewed it for First Things here:

 

Fortunately for scholars (and for us), Hovius kept a detailed daybook of all his activities—his building projects, his ceaseless and wearying parish visits, and the endless round of petitions and disputes, on issues ranging from pornography and marriage annulments to questions of heresy—that he adjudicated in his busy ecclesiastical court. Most of the journal has been lost, but in 1987, Harline, a history professor at Brigham Young University, and Put, a Belgian archivist, discovered in a seminary library in Mechelin the last volume, covering the period from 1617 to Hovius’ death. This book is the fruit of their reconstruction of Hovius’ life from that diary and other contemporary documents.

Harline, author of the well–received Burdens of Sister Margaret: Inside a Seventeenth–Century Convent, decided to focus on Hovius for his second book as a corrective to the worthy but perhaps exaggerated preoccupation of today’s medievalists with eclectic and colorful “ordinary” Catholicism in contrast to the official kind. Harline and Put decided that the career of a bishop would offer as good a vantage point as any for looking into the seventeenth–century social world. They thought that since “religious life was a constant negotiation among all parties rather than a simple matter of the hierarchy proclaiming and the flock obeying, then being a bishop was hardly the mundane, absolutist task it has been made out to be.”

Making one’s way as a Catholic prelate in seventeenth–century Flanders required negotiating skills and many other skills besides. To the north lay the staunchly Calvinist Dutch Republic, product of a protracted war of secession that had begun in the 1560s, when Hovius, born in 1542, was a young man. Until the Dutch formally declared their independence in 1581, more or less ending the strife, all of the Low Countries belonged to Philip II of Spain, who had inherited them from his father, the Flanders–born Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

After the Dutch breakaway, Flanders became known as the Spanish Netherlands, an uncomfortable moniker. Even the Catholics of the Low Countries detested the dour and culturally alien Philip, who tried to reduce their once–auto­ nomous territories to a Spanish province and who introduced the Inquisition to Flanders. At the very end of his life in 1599, Philip turned the Spanish Netherlands over to his daughter Isabella and her husband, Prince Albert of Austria, and made it a quasi–independent archduchy. Isabella and Albert were popular sovereigns, and a measure of peace finally prevailed.