1670

I just finished watching 1670, a serial TV historical by Netflix about Poland in the era of Louis XIV. It's a savage satire that reminds me of The Servant of the People, which showed the Ukrainian people as very much responsible for buying into the corruption of their country. In 1670, there is one sensible charachter: a visiting Lithuanian. Recommended.

Hear what the Spirit is saying to the church

That is what yesterday's response by the congregation  to the First Reading at my church, Micah 6: 1-8.  The Prophet Micah is spelling out what God expects of Israel.  My wife tells me the response to Biblical  readings used to be more uncompromising: "this is the Word of the Lord." 

But I can't help looking at Old and New Testaments and trying to reconstruct the scene when these readings were first written or read out.  When we read psalms which scholars believe may have composed in the time of David, what they mean to that  king?  Indeed, what did David and his audience?

How about Zion, sometimes known as Mount Zion?  Here it is:

Mountain, Royal city (or castle), whatever, it sure gives a different impression  than the endless talking up of Zion.

I am by no means the first historically-minded person to take this approach, but it sure is interesting.

 

 

This touched me

Kremlin lashes out at Poland for siding with Ukraine

“I never thought we had this in us,” a Polish student told the New York Times of these developments. “Nobody knew we could be mobilized like this.”

Attention, all you Poles and Lithuanians!

From the Medieval Review, an excerpt from a long and positive book review. I know some of my friends and readers will be very interested!

To see this review with the correct diacritical marks, please see the web archive: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/22603/28523

Frost, Robert. The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania, Vol. 1: The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385-1569. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xxv, 564. £85.00/$135.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-820869-3.

Reviewed by Piotr Górecki

University of California-Riverside

piotr.gorecki@ucr.edu

This could (but will not) be a short review. Robert Frost has written an outstanding book, as good as it is big--a major contribution to the history of the polity linked by the hyphen in its title, and to the history of early modern Europe. The book is a major benchmark in Frost's distinguished output addressing specific aspects of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's history, situated in the broad context of its contemporary Europe. [1] It consolidates Poland-Lithuania's entrance into top-tier scholarship conceived and written in English over the past twenty years or so [2]--a process parallel, and related to, an analogous inclusion of Poland, Lithuania, and East Central Europe in the general historiography of medieval Europe. [3]

Frost introduces his book as an histoire événementielle, prompting my one (slight) disagreement with him. The tag is too modest and self-effacing. The book's story frames, and brilliantly develops, a wide range of subjects, all visible to the reader. This is in fact a profoundly thematic book. That said, it is indeed structured as one continuous, seamless narration, huge in its scope and its particulars. Its subjects are, so to speak, layered throughout the text, and developed in its course. As a result, the book is best read in its entirety, from beginning to end--a most worthwhile exercise, because Frost's prose is outstanding: tightly-packed yet translucent, highly engaging and interesting in basic storytelling terms, and witty. We have here a lovely example of the current return of "narrative" history at its best, into the core of what we do.

Especially conspicuous are three interrelated subjects: people, places, and constructs. The book is a biographical gallery of a huge number of individually etched actors: kings of Poland; dukes and grand dukes of Lithuania; contenders for those two offices; and a myriad other specific protagonists who made up the political worlds presided by these rulers. No less important is a collective generic actor: the political community, [4] above all the royal or grand-ducal "council"; the noble, or knightly, "assembly," or "general assembly"; and higher-level collectivities, such as the "nobility," "boyars," "Poles," "Lithuanians," and, perhaps most recurrently, "community of the realm." The places are: the major realms, or polities--Lithuania, Poland, Masovia, and "Royal" Prussia [5]--of which the first two formed the principal union, the second two joined it through unions with Poland; the localities where the major phases of the story occurred, and left a written record; and the localities relevant to the governance and administration of the four polities comprising the union.

And there is much more...

Senegal, Madagascar and Dr. Amadou Ba

Dr. Ba, who teaches history at Nipissing and Laurentian Universities, yesterday presented a paper entitled "African Soldiers in the French Colonial Army during the Conquest and  Colonization of Madagascar."

The several points of interest included:

•  the fact that there were a lot of colonial wars in  Madagascar, which pretty much no one  knows anything about. (Madagascar must count as  the most obscure country in the world.)  
• that the French waged these wars mainly with West African troops, who were all called Senegalese, whether they came from Senegal or not.
• that there are descendants of the Senegalese still in Madagascar, where they are a despised symbol of colonial oppression.
• that the  French are not blamed at all for the abuses of their regime. Indeed they are remembered as mitigating the brutalities of their Senegalese enforcers.
• that no one in Senegal  is at all aware  of this Madagascar connection.

Somehow it was that last point --- that lost history -- that  struck me the most. There is so much that falls through the cracks.

UPDATE 2023-02-04 

I don't know if Madagascar still counts as the most obscure in the world.  It showed up in newsfeeds several times in the last week or so in connection with the papal visit to Africa.  Madagascar is now a typical poor country with food security problems.  South Sudan also now gets attention as "South Sudan," as a country and not just as a part of Sudan afflicted by civil war.  Why?  Papal visit. And a papal visit brought the Democratic Republic of the Congo for something beyond internal warfare motivated by a desire for valuable rare earths.

Papal visits!   Some time around 1000 CE it was papal recogition (and recognition by the German emperor, representing Rome the empire) that made the King of Poland a real Christian monarch.

Another case of "the more things change..."

My thought was ---

"How Carolingian!"

A giant Jesus in Poznan, Poland.  Thanks to MSNBC.com

Katyn: the Germans did it, not us

The Economist reports on an ominous sign of official Russian backsliding. After the fall of Soviet Communism, the new Russian government admitted that Stalin's secret police had killed 40,000 Polish officers in Katyn forest, not the Nazis as Stalin claimed.

Now Putin's government is back to peddling the party line.

Read the column in the Economist for how ominous this is.

Curiously, this incident (Katyn) just came up in a World History seminar this afternoon.

You are the crown of creation...

...and you've got no place to go!

Less than two weeks ago, the government of Poland was arguing in EU councils that its voting weight should take into account all the Poles slaughtered by Germans in World War II and the natural increase of population that might have taken place had there been no war.

Yesterday the online Guardian ran an article on the harrassment of gays in Poland, including a government body tasked with "curing" them, which has led to an exodus of gays to countries like Britain.

Between 1989 and 1991, the countries of eastern Europe were freed from Soviet domination with hardly a life being lost -- the most miraculous public event I've witnessed, and probably will ever witness. Some of those countries have yet to decide what that freedom means; for some of their people it seems that the nationalist/racist nightmare that was 1930s Europe is attractive. It's not just Poland, and it's not just this issue. The mistreatment of the Roma (otherwise known as the gypsies) is a running scandal.

There has been speculation about whether the Turks, the old enemy of Christian Europe, can really fit into the EU. Incidents like this make it clear that even within its current boundaries there are big issues to be sorted out.

Link: the song on YouTube.