David's Oath of the Tennis Court

A student in the Early Modern Europe class knows more about this painting than I do , having studied it in Art History, and kindly corrects some of the statements I made about it (click it to see it larger).

For the benefit of the rest of the class I post part of her e-mail, with permission.

The central figure in the drawing is in fact the Assembly President Jean-Sylvestre Bailly, not Sieyes as you thought. You are correct in saying that the men below represent the creation of a new order. These men are three ecclesiastics, and members of the Third Estate, who joined the revolution. From left to right they are: A Carthusian Monk named Dom Gerle, who was not present at the original gathering, Abbe Gregorie and Rabaut Saint-Etienne. They stand for the regular and secular clergy and the Protestant Church. In addition, right of Bailly is Robespierre.

The people above the assembly are the witnesses of this event. As well, the drawing is littered with Freemasonry symbols, of which David was a member. As you may know Freemasonry helped spread the liberal ideas fueled by the revolution. Common imagery used in revolutionary art was the all-seeing eye (representing vigilance) and the square or level (representing equality).

You mentioned how this drawing is reminiscent of David's Oath of the Horatii, yes this is true, he saw this drawing as an expansion on ideas expressed in the Horatii; the heroes in the Horatii are represented in a modern context as the deputies present at the assembly.

Thanks, the correction is very much appreciated! Further reading, from the same correspondent:

Lee, Simon. David. London, England: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1999.

I'm fascinated by David and am glad to have the reference.

Histories of the Near North Conference continues

Today I was at the first session of the community history conference and enjoyed myself immensely. Tomorrow (Sunday April 2) the conference continues @discoverynorthbay, the old CPR station at the foot of Ferguson Street. Parking's free on the weekend, as is the conference itself. Remember that the clock "springs forward" tonight. Here's a link to the schedule.

NU History students --- money going begging

NU History students who are in their final year of full-time study, who plan to pursue a Bachelor of Education degree in the following year, either at Nipissing University or at another university, may be eligible for the Smith Award. Check with the Student Awards Office (F218) for the process and eligibility.

See this link.

The secret chocolate recipe of the later Medicis

Thanks to the student who sent me a link to a really interesting piece from Discovery.com on the efforts of Cosimo III (above), Grand Duke of Tuscany, to counter Spanish domination of "chocolate culture."

In the 17th century, chocolate was a hot, usually bitter drink. The Spanish, who had conquered the Central American originators of chocolate, set the standard for the substance. Cosimo III, whose state of Tuscany was pretty much a Spanish satellite, decided to fight back by having a superior jasmine chocolate blend created so that Florence, not Madrid, would dominate the world of chocolate cuisine.

A museum display in the Civic Museum of Monsummano Terme reveals Cosimo's secret and if the Discovery.com version is indicative, gushes over the brilliance of Cosimo's gastronomic coup.

However, there is another way of looking at it: the site from which I borrowed the portrait, paradoxplace.com characterizes Cosimo as one of the worst of the generally worthless later Medicis: "a disaster or the State of Tuscany, and the penultimate nail in the coffin of the Medici dynasty."

I'm generally a Tom Paine man: "the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise;" but occasionally, I must admit, that some benefits trickle down to us unwashed masses. Paradoxplace attributes the invention of the pianoforte to Bartolemeo Cristofori, an instrument maker of Cosimo's time.

Here's the jasmine chocolate recipe from Discovery.com:

10 librae of roasted cocoa, cleaned and coarsely minced (1 libra = 12 oz.)
fresh jasmine petals
8 librae white sugar
3 ounces vanilla flowers
6 ounces cinnamon
2 scruples (7.76 grams)ambergris

Put layers of cocoa and jasmine flowers in a box, one layer over the other. Let it rest for 24 hours, then change the jasmine flowers with fresh ones. Repeat 12 times. Add the other ingredients and combine them on a warmed marble surface until the chocolate dough forms.

Have fun, and let us know how it turns out. Especially the ambergris part.

The war continues

World War I is not over yet.

In October of 1916, Private Harry Farr, after two years of fighting in the trenches, refused to return to the front. He was tried for cowardice and on conviction was executed. He refused a blindfold before the firing squad.

His 92-year-old daughter, Gertrude Harris, has been trying for the past 13 years to get Harry a posthumous pardon. She has evidence that he suffered from shell shock, or in today's terminology, post-traumatic stress disorder. The British defense minister, who refused Gertrude's request in February, has decided to reconsider.

Good luck, Gertrude.

This is not a unique case. According to The Times, to which I am indebted for this information, "17 alleged cowards in the British Army [were executed] during the First World War [and] a further 289 soldiers were shot for desertion and disobeying orders."

Here's Harry. Remember him when you think of "the Great War."

Update: Harry may get his pardon.

A whole new world of knowledge

Something very interesting happened on the Internet this past week.

The Washington Post web site hired a young right-wing blogger to comment on news and policy. A lot of readers were outraged that he was hired, considering him to be a shallow, dishonest bigot.

But that's not the interesting part. Within a couple of days other bloggers, using only Google, dug up numerous examples of this young blogger's repeated plagiarism, and he was forced to resign.

All sorts of questions arise from this, like why was he hired in the first place, but the really crucial aspects are this: 1. It took next to no time for the young blogger's critics to nail him to the wall; and 2. the Washington Post web site seems to have made no effort to check out his past commentary.

The second point indicates that we are in a whole new world of knowledge. Supposedly authoritative institutions and individuals as well are going to be under constant scrutiny by thousands if not millions of people who were not long ago forced to be a passive audience.

And authoritative institutions are having a hard time facing this fact. See the reader commentary directed at the editor of the online version of the Post here.

A national custom

I disavow the common Anglophone attitude -- at least in North America -- of baiting the French, as though they were some uniquely risible nation. Start looking for risible nations and you'll have a long list and rankings on it will be hard-fought-for.

However, I don't consider it ridiculing the French to point out that when they -- or at least enough of them -- get upset with their government, demonstrators and rioters pour out in the street. As the Early Modern Europe course approaches the Fall of the Bastille (above, and see a contemporary account here) it's worth knowing that urban riots and peasant uprisings -- both features of France in 1789 and the years that followed -- were pretty common parts of early modern society. There's an interesting description of a French bread riot in 1725 here, for instance. Note that the women of the town were usually the ones who led bread riots, which will be relevant to those of us in class when we reach "the October Days."

Burke, some of you will remember, thought that the October Days, because of the unprovoked killing of certain royal retainers at Versailles and the insult to the Queen, was the realization of a totally evil human impulse. Whether or not he was right about that, the spectre of widespread disorder was frightening to respectable people like Burke, and not necessarily a remote threat. (The British upper class energetically hung and "transported" many thousands of its poor and unruly lower class.)

One of the issues surrounding the French Revolution is that it was a riot -- and a peasant revolt t00 -- that got out of hand. Perhaps other people in France thought, "just another Parisian riot." Once they got the idea that this riot wasn't going to stop, it's easy to imagine that some of them were even more frightened and angry than they were initially, and that others who had welcomed the downfall a corrupt and disfunctional royal government got profoundly uneasy.

I'm not going to make the shallow claim that the current French urban riots are just like those of 1789, 1648, or 1356, but it is interesting that these things happen in France more often than in other rich countries.

For those interested in more, here's what appears to be an Anarchist account of May 1968. Last fall's riots are discussed by the Christian Science Monitor here, and the current ones are discussed in several articles listed in the Guardian here.

UPDATE: The Guardian has alerted me to an Unrest in France blog.

Not a lynx?

There is some evidence that the big cat at NU may have been a cougar. It's not impossible.

Treasures from an Egyptian dump

As has been noted before, Egypt is a very dry place, unless you are on the old Nile flood plain. Unfortunately nearly every inhabited place is on the flood plain, and most perishible remains of normal life have rotted away, just like they have in most other countries.

But the old town of Oxyrhynchos (now el-Bahnasa), located as it is on dried up canal, is different. And because it has been unaffected by flooding since the 7th century CE (AD), its dump has preserved unparalleled treasures: a huge selection of the documents, public and private, of a Hellenistic and Roman-era town in Egypt. We can read all sorts of literary, legal, and personal writings, and so for us, Oxyrhynchos is one of the best-known cities of the Roman empire.

According to Wikipedia, which has the most extensive discussion of the site and its importance that I could find, excavation of the dump for documents began in the late 19th century, during the British occupation of Egypt, under the supervision of some Oxford scholars. They hoped to find the lost works of antiquity, and eventually some were in fact found. But perhaps more important than the literary works are the personal records and correspondence of ordinary Egyptian townspeople of the Roman era. We'll be discussing some of these in class tomorrow. For distant readers, have a look here (following the excerpt from Strabo).

The most interesting thing I found out while writing the post is that 100,000 papyrus fragments have been found, and 4,700 have been published. And this with an energetic publishing program of about a volume a year. Clearly a project without end.

Update: For more material, see the Papyrology site at Oxford.

Greuze and David

Today's lecture in Early Modern European history discussed how Simon Schama in his 1989 book on the French Revolution, Citizens, used the artists Greuze and David as indicators of dissatisfaction that existed in France with Old Regime culture just before the Revolution.

I looked around for good site and this is what I found:

For Greuze, World Wide Art Archive has a long list of links to on-line paintings and on-line museum exhibits featuring the artist.

For David, Artchive has an introduction, a list of links to other articles on the artist, and a link to images of his work.

Above you will see one of those images: his grim portrayal of 1789 of the original Brutus of early Roman times, receiving the bodies of his sons, whom he'd had executed to save the early Roman Republic. Clicking on it may get you a larger version of the painting.

NU: Lynx spotted near Chancellor's House Mar 20

For those of you out-of-town, this is an unusual sighting. More often, it's bears.

Roman villas

In the book I referred to in today's lecture, Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome, the author argues that the Romans at their height created a level of physical comfort not attained in many later centuries. Some of what Ward-Perkins says is controversial, but certainly the Romans knew a great deal about comfort.

One symbol of Roman comfort is the villa. One meaning of "villa" is a rural mansion which was the center of an extensive aristocratic estate. Such villas brought urban comfort into the countryside.

Using Google Images I found one particularly nice site, a Virtual Visit to Torre Llauder, a villa of the late 2nd or early 3rd century in Catalonia, Spain.

The picture above is a Roman villa in Norfolk, England, as seen by aerial photography. The complex was revealed by the contrast between crops growing on the old walls and those growing elsewhere. We owe much of our modern archaeological knowledge to quite recent technological advances such as this.

Study sheets for final examinations

These are available at my office, H 312.

More seriously now...

We've passed the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and there is no sign that peace will return any time soon.

Since I teach the History of Islamic Civilization in 2006-7 I follow developments in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world pretty closely. For those of you who want to know more than the very little that appears in the average media outlet, try Today in Iraq. You quickly will find that it has an editorial point of view -- anti-war -- but there is no other site that will give you as much access to reports on Iraq as this one. If there is a better one, I'd like to know about it.

I cited some links to Iraqi-written weblogs in an earlier post.

Mary Queen of Scots' football?

If the Scotsman is not putting us on, this football may actually be connected with Scotland's most popular queen. This charming story came to me via the Archaeology in Europe blog, which I learned of from Explorator, an ancient history newsletter you can sign up for via Yahoogroups.

Friends of the Mediaeval Studies Society Symposium

The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is sponsoring a symposium next weekend -- specifically on Saturday, March 25 -- on behalf of its Friends of the Mediaeval Studies Society, a new special interest group. I will be speaking on the text illustrated above -- the chronicler Froissart's account of a chivalric deed of arms with political implications.

What you see above is a joust between the French lord of Clary and Sir Peter Courtenay, an Englishman, over whether Courtenay had "spoken too freely" about French courage, or the lack thereof. Since the French and English had just finished campaigning against each other and the French had won, you'd think that such a private confrontation would have been beside the point. But then, explaining why the deed made sense at the time is what the paper is all about.

More information about the symposium is here.

St. Patrick was a Briton

Most of the pictures of St. Patrick I could find on the web are for some reason done in a Byzantine style -- there seems to be a modern artistic/devotional movement inspired by the traditional icons of the eastern churches.

So I decided to celebrate St. Patrick's Day with a different kind of popular image.

Something I like to point out to people who feel more Irish than me is that even though Patrick was the apostle of the Irish and is now their patron saint, he was a Briton, or a Roman, or both. In any case, he came from the other big island next door. Don't be deceived by the possibility (see the old Catholic Encyclopedia) that he was born in present-day Scotland. Patrick was not a Scot. In his time, the 5th century, "Scotia" was a name for Ireland. The name has migrated.

And to be quite clear, Britons in the 5th century were not English. The English (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) back then mostly lived in present-day Germany and Denmark, in the Angle, though a few pesky immigrants were showing up in Roman Britain.

Missed the Ides of March -- the Roman Calendar

I was too busy this week to remark in class on the Ides of March, the day on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE. (Above is a reproduction of a coin issued by his assassins, which shows the daggers and displays a freed slaves cap, as a symbol of the liberation of the Roman people from Caesar's tyrrany.)

Before 44 BCE, the "ides of March" was just the name of a day on the Roman calendar. The Romans had a very peculiar way of keeping track of the days and those who want to study them seriously have to wrestle with that calendar at some point. To be brief, there were three days in the month that acted as reference points: the ides (1st) , the nones (5th or 7th, depending on the month), and the ides (13th or 15th). Other days were designated by counting backward to the next reference point. What we call the 2nd of March was identified as the "6th of (or before) the nones of March," while the next day was the 5th of the nones.

One result is that "days of the kalends of March" are all (except for the kalends itself) are in the month of February!

There are plenty more complexities in the Roman calendar. An attractive and detailed site, Calendars through the Ages, is here.

Next, I guess, I'll be looking for an excuse to explain the not-quite-so-arcane "pounds-shillings-pence (Lsd)" currency system used by the English and many other Europeans in the past.

Nipissing Students: Job on Parliament Hill

This just came in the mail and has a deadline of March 20. "The Parliament Hill Players" -- AKA your government -- are hiring "first-person historical costumed interpreters at Parliament." If you are bilingual and have the talent, you can play Sir John A, Lady Agnes Macdonald, Maria Lipinska, Sir Georges Etienne Cartier, and others, for money!

There is a poster outside my office, H 312, with details.

You must be available for auditions sometime between March 25 and April 2, and for the whole program period of June 5 to September 4.

We might call this a variant on public history...

More ancient manuscripts

There is a new Carnivalesque, a collection of historical items found in various blogs and news sources, posted at Archaeoastronomy. This one is Carnivalesque XIII and is dedicated to ancient and medieval history.

Included in this collection is my previous entry here on the Gospel of Judas. It's been interestingly paired with a post at Varnam about the oldest Buddhist manuscripts known, which have also been a subject of controversy, explored in more detail at the site for the Buddhist Channel. These manuscripts, you see, were smuggled out of Afghanistan from their former home, Bamiyan, the location of a historic early monastery. Smuggling antiquities out of their country of origin is widely disapproved, but given the destruction of Buddhist monuments at Bamiyan (above) by the former Taliban regime, which may not be out for the count yet, their sale may have saved them.

The Gnostic Gospel of Judas

Just as interesting and significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls are the Gnostic Gospels, known mainly through manuscripts discovered in Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1948 (about the same time as the Dead Sea Scrolls were found). Like the DSS (briefly described here and here), the Nag Hammadi collection includes a lot of non-canonical religious literature from later antiquity. "Non-canonical" means that these are writings that did not get on "the list" of approved or authoritative works drawn up by "Church Fathers." In other words, there are surviving gospels that are not included in the standard New Testament, including for instance the Gospel of Thomas (a page is pictured above). Most theologians do not believe that these non-canonical writings go back to the times of the apostles, or necessarily represent the views of the people after whom they are sometimes named, but that they were written later to promote "gnostic" interpretations of Jesus's message. (Here is one view of gnosticism by people who take it pretty seriously.)

Mainstream scholars see these works as a gateway into the rich religious world of the 2nd and 3rd centuries C.E. (A.D.); however, you can understand that lots of people get excited when the word goes out that the Gospel of Judas may become available, published by the National Geographic Society next month.

As important as what the text may actually say -- given that it is probably a 2nd century creation -- is the ethical question posed by the NGS publication. This manuscript has been known to exist since at least 1983, and it hasn't surfaced yet because it can be regarded as stolen property -- it was dug up and taken from Egypt without authorization, as in the case of so many finds before. The current owners (holders?) have been trying to sell it for millions ever since.

Scholars have been torn. Pony up the money and get the text into the public forum? Indeed, save what may be a very brittle manuscript by making sure it's being cared for properly? Or will paying the holders legitimize their activities and make sales of illegally obtained manuscripts more likely and more lucrative in the future?

A tough question indeed.

Curiously, I was unable to find a copy of the National Geographic Society's official statement on their site. The best treatment is the Christian Science Monitor's story.

UPDATE on April 6, from National Public Radio. Also see my more recent post.

Voice of America Pronunciation Guide

Just came across this site, which contains many difficult names of people and place who are or might be in the news.

Warning: It loaded very slowly when I visited it.

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke has come up in Early Modern Europe more than once. Here's a portrait and a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

NUSU's trip to "Medieval Times" Friday March 31

NUSU, the student government here at Nipissing University, has arranged a trip to the medieval dinner-theater presentation, "Medieval Times."

For more details see the NUSU events page.

End of "feudal" government on Sark

Above you should see "La Seigneurie," the home of the hereditary lord of the English Channel Island of Sark. In my Early Modern Europe course I've often talked about how the big-name countries of Europe are really made up of little enclaves with distinct histories, customs, and laws. Sark's a great case of this: very close indeed to the coast of England (but closer yet to Normandy), it is neither part of England nor part of the United Kingdom. It is a lordship founded in the 16th century and dependent directly on Her Majesty Elizabeth II. There is a seigneur or lord and a mostly hereditary parliament (the "Chief Pleas"), whose seats are chiefly allocated to the holders of the original 40 tenements into which the island was divided on settlement.
At least, that's how it worked until recently, when the petty lords of Sark decided, following the advice of human rights lawyers, to bring in universal suffrage. A good portion of the 600 people who live on Sark will now have some say in how things are run. This is being ballyhooed in the media as the end of "feudalism" (see this Telegraph article) but as a medievalist I have to say I admit the term only under protest. (Ask me about my reluctance if you are interested.)

Sark's own website is here.

Nipissing University Conference on the Near North

On April 1 and 2, Nipissing University faculty and students will join community members for a conference entitled "Histories of the Near North: Discovering our Community's Past. See this PDF of the program. The conference grows out of the commitment of NU's History Department to the community history of North Bay and its region, and our desire to work with community-based historians and our own undergraduate students to document and disseminate that history.

If you are interested, write historyn AT nipissingu.ca. (AT=@)

And while you are at it, visit the home page of NU's Institute for Community Studies and Oral History, ICSOH.

Ancient Civilizations will not meet on Monday

There will be no class on Monday, March 6. See you on Wednesday!

The cinematic time machine

Seventy years after her movies were originally released, Shirley Temple is once again receiving huge amounts of fan mail from kids who are seeing her on DVD. For more on this unusual life, see the LA Times.

Empire of the Sun -- telling the truth about history

In today's Guardian J.G. Ballard, who I always think of first as a science fiction writer, reflects on his boyhood in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, the novel he wrote about it, and the movie that was eventually made about it.

How deadly was gladiatorial combat?

Next Wednesday I'll be lecturing in Ancient Civilizations on the gladiatorial games, so I was very interested to hear an archaeologist commenting on the subject on CBC Radio's As It Happens. The occasion was the analysis of gladiatorial remains found in Ephesus, now in Turkey. It seems that the wounds found were limited in number and type, suggesting that the combat was limited by certain rules and perhaps was not fought to the death. The Austrian archaeologists have found a number of fighters who seem to have been killed by a "squarish hammer-like injury to the side of the head," which they speculate may have been administered to wounded gladiators backstage.

Earlier research by a friend of mine, Prof Steve Tuck of Miami University of Ohio, research based on comparing ancient depictions of gladiatorial combat with medieval treatises of arms, suggested that the fighters were highly trained and supervised by referees. He and others have argued that most of the time gladiators did not die, or even suffer incapacitating wounds. They were too expensive and popular for that.

I'd be very interested to hear what Prof. Tuck has to say about the new archaeological evidence.

A new era of knowledge?

Toronto's Globe and Mail has this interesting article on how you can tap into the collective wisdom of interconnected humanity.

Can you copyright ideas about history?

Two of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, who probably made a pretty penny off of their book, are suing the author The Da Vinci Code, who has made a J.K. Rowlingesque mountain of money off his.

The grounds? Brown stole their idea that Jesus and Mary Magdelene were married.

Problem is, that in HBHG the authors claimed this was fact, while Brown says it's fiction.

So if Jesus and Mary M. really were married, how can you copyright that fact? Riddle me that!

A nice short summary in the Guardian.

I have to wonder how this ever got into court.

P.S.: A Guardian Special Report includes a bunch of interesting links on the Da Vinci Code phenom.

Demystifying academic argumentation

I was send this book by a publisher this past week and I'm very impressed by it. It's called "They Say / I Say" The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. Here's what the publisher says about it, which sums up pretty well its attraction for me:

"They Say / I Say" shows that writing well means mastering some key rhetorical moves, the most important of which involves summarizing what others have said ("they say") to set up one’s own argument ("I say").

You can have a look at it here.

Everyone in NE Ontario has a snow story

Mine is that we've had knee-deep snow. On the roof.

(This is not actually my house. Ours was worse before we cleared it.)

Acts of Augustus

The Acts of Augustus, discussed today in class, were published throughout the empire. This wall from the Temple of Augustus in Ankara, Turkey, preserves the text. Here's a description of the site from Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

What you need to know about the 19th century

My journey south took me away from a terrific snow storm in my part of Ontario. Nevertheless, even before it hit, I experienced a comfortable but contemplative train ride through a very snowy landscape. And once again I thought -- what the heck were they ever thinking? Those people who left everything to cross the oceans to farm and lumber and mine in this country where -- at least where I live -- we may have snow on the ground five months of the year? They lived here with no electricity.

And all I can figure is: what they left was worse than risking their lives in a harsh climate in an unknown country. Here, there was hope.

House of Commons, 1808

Today I'm lecturing on the evolution of the English/British constitution after the Glorious Revolution. Looking for some other information (when did the House of Commons burn?) I found a better picture of the early 19th-century House than I found earlier when putting my in-class PowerPoint presentation together. Here it is. If there are earlier pictures I'd love to know about them.

Light blogging for the next week

I'll be away from my usual computer and my usual business for the next week. No guarantees I'll be able to contribute much -- or have much to contribute.

No, I will not be sporting in the tropical sea, though I'll be in a no-snow zone.

Habs vs Leafs at Agincourt -- the poster

Here's a copy of the poster I was talking about: Shakespeare's Henry V reinterpreted as the 1967 Stanley Cup series.

For those of you in the North Bay area, it's at Widdifield Secondary School at 8 pm on February16-18, 22-25, with a 2 pm matinee on February 19. Call the "Henry Hotline" at 752-1486 for more info. Cost: $18.00/12.00 (whatever that means).

Thanks to the reader who provided this.

The London Gazette

For all you readers who were not in my HIST 2155 class, here's the reading for today, an issue of the London Gazette, a newspaper from the 1690s. This is the era of the great struggle between William of Orange, the Dutch Statholder who became King Billy on his white horse, and Louis XIV, the Sun King. The issue of the Gazette we looked at today is provided thanks to Rochester University in New York State. It's a little tough to get into, with its first paragraph devoted to unexplained royal doings in Vienna, but with a little patience you can begin to see a sketchy portrait of public-minded men of the era. And wait till you get to the unclassified ads!

The Gazette is still published and is still the paper of record for England (Belfast and Edinburgh have Gazettes of their own).

Teaching with the Old Bailey Online

I referred to the Old Bailey Online in a recent post. One person who read that post is a historian at a neighboring university. Her discussion of how she's used this resource in a methods/historiography course is too good not to link to.

Peppercorn rents

In my upcoming lecture on the Gracchi I refer to "peppercorn rents." Tiberius Gracchus, when he became tribune in the 130s BCE wanted to reform the Roman state by distributing state-owned land to poorer Roman citizens, instead of allowing the rich to rent huge estates at "peppercorn rents." A republic with many landowners would be healthier and more military capable than one where poor Romans -- including soldiers and veterans -- were increasingly forced off the land.

I expect I'll have explain the phrase "peppercorn rents" which is rare in Canada but still alive in Britain and elsewhere in the Commonwealth. An online tax guide from South Australia defines "peppercorn rent" as a "nominal rent," i.e. an insignificant sum. The traditional peppercorn rent was "one peppercorn."

If you search the web for examples of "peppercorn rents" you might find some interesting sites. For instance, there is on the British History Online site a Historical gazetteer of London before the Great Fire which has minute details of downtown London properties like St. Pancras Soper Lane 145/27 which once upon a time was let out for an unspecified peppercorn rent.

Of course, there's more recent stuff as well. There's a BBC article for instance on Prince Michael of Kent's "peppercorn rent" for apartments at Kensington Palace. Price of a peppercorn? 69 British pounds a week. Still, pretty cheap for royal digs in Central London.

More from Iraq -- via blog

Rather than read it in the Washington Post, you might like to get your reportage straight from Iraq -- via blogs written by Iraqis. There's an extensive list at Iraq Blog Count.

Of course, you get to decide how reliable any of them is. But how does that make them different from anything else?

News from Baghdad

I felt compelled to pass on a link to a Washington Post article on life in a Baghdad neighborhood.

Especially for readers of the Golden Ass

Some of my Ancient Civilization students are writing a paper on Apuleius's Golden Ass. They and other readers might be interested in an article from the L.A. Times on a modern manifestation of veneration of the Divine Feminine. It concerns a woman named Karen Tate whose religious inspiration led her to travel the world to site devoted to goddess worship and run tours for others.

For those who might be interested in some scholarly discussion of goddesses and ancient society, you might give Diotima: Women and Gender in the Ancient World a try. The front page gives little hint of how much material there is on varioius parts of the site. There's a section of original, peer-reviewed essays, a collection of links to other resources, many of them of high quality, and an anthology of primary sources, including a link to a whole site on Apuleius's Apology.

New tomb found in Valley of the Kings!

Not since the 1920s, when King Tutankhamen's dazzling tomb was unearthed, has anyone found another tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

But now, says the Globe and Mail, the curse is broken!

Now that scholars aren't so sure there is nothing to look for, they may look harder...

(Clicking on the picture will show you a bigger image in which old tomb entrances can be seen.)

Crossing the Floor

There is a lot of talk in Canada at the moment about "crossing the floor," due to a couple of high-profile instances in recent politics. Since I'm talking about important developments in the English and British Parliaments in class, I thought a post on this might be relevant, or at least fun.

Here's the background for those who don't know: Back in 2005, after Stephen Harper became leader of the revamped Conservative Party, Belinda Stronach, one of his rivals, left the Conservatives and crossed the floor to the governing Liberals, where she instantly became a cabinet minister. Her vote saved the government from a non-confidence situation soon afterwards.

This week, Stephen Harper and the first Conservative government in 13 years was sworn in. Among the new cabinet ministers was David Emerson, who had just been elected as the Liberal MP for Vancouver-Kingsway. Harper had made an offer to Emerson because the Conservatives had no members in Vancouver (or Toronto or Montreal, for that matter).

There was a big fuss over Stronach's defection last year, but an even bigger one over Emerson's. Emerson's riding (=constituency) has many NDP voters who supported him and the Liberals rather reluctantly, and only to keep the Conservatives out of power. The Liberal constituency organization wants Emerson to return the $100,000 they spent on his election, and individuals who contributed to Emerson's campaign are pretty steamed, too.

The relationship between elected legislators and the people who vote for them is a classic question. In the late 18th century, the English Parliamentarian Edmund Burke told the electors of Bristol that he was not the Member for Bristol but a Member of Parliament and that he would use his judgement, not follow theirs. (They gave him the boot, and Burke got into Parliament in a "pocket borough" or safe seat controlled by a peer.)

A quick look shows that in countries where individual legislators are elected by name and not as part of a party list, the issue is still alive. On the Web I found material on South African developments of a few years back, and an official research piece on Australian floor crossing. CBC News In Depth has a summary of recent Canadian incidents, though it doesn't discuss the recent brouhaha.

Gateway Theatre Guild -- Agincourt as Hockey

Posted at NU, but nowhere on the Web I can find, is an amazing poster advertising a local production of Henry V, with the Hundred Years War reinterpreted as the 1967 Stanley Cup Series between the Leafs and the Habs.

I didn't grow up with hockey, but I have to say this intrigues me.

If anyone has information or better yet the poster in an image file, please send them to me.

Bringing two recent themes together...

In my History 2155 class today I expressed the tentative opinion that the Old Bailey, featured in a high quality historical site, might still be the venue for London criminal trials. Then today I saw this on the Guardian site:

"Old Bailey jury finds Muslim cleric Abu Hamza guilty of inciting murder and racial hatred."

I guess I was right!

The story associated with this blurb is here, but it doesn't mention the Old Bailey.

Angry

Teaching history means teaching about injustice -- again and again and again. And after a while you think you've got over being angry about it. But tonight, preparing for tomorrow morning's early, early lecture on 17th century imperialism, I was looking at the accompanying PowerPoint presentation and realized that (even though I don't think Europeans, in the Early Modern period or at any other time are uniquely depraved) I'm still angry!

Caricaturing the Prophet

This uproar about caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed may seem more like news than history, but the issues -- whatever your position -- have a long background. I'll look for a good link on that background, but in the meantime, for detailed information on the recent events themselves, have a look at this fact file at Juan Cole's site, Informed Comment. His remarks on the scale, nature and motivation of the angry reactions are also worth a look.

More early modern than you can shake a stick at!

There are a lot of academic bloggers out there. Most academic blogs include more about the Woes of Academe than I care to read, but being generally smart people the academics also talk about interesting material they have been looking at recently.

One institution that has emerged is the "Carnival," the origin of which is a mystery to me. It appears that bloggers volunteer to post a collection of interesting recent links concerning some wide area of interest. Other bloggers are notified of the upcoming carnival and send their favorite recent reads.

A blogger called Pilgrim/Heretic has just posted up "More early modern than you can shake a stick at" part of a series called Carnivalesque. This edition of Carnivalesque includes a wide variety of material about Early Modern Europe. Have a look.

(The picture above is an 1808 view of the Old Bailey, a law court in London. The complete records of trials there between 1674 and 1834 are available at http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ which I learned about at Pilgrim/Heretic's Carnivalesque. What a find!)

Biblical interpretation

Explorator comes out on Sunday, and this one had, besides links to articles on Superbowl numeration, a link to a National Public Radio (US) interview with a Jewish Biblical scholar on the various approaches to the interpretation of the Bible. There's both print material and an audio file of the interview itself.

Superbowl and Roman numerals

Here it is Superbowl XL and I've never watched one. But there are some historical laughs to be got from it. Not even counting the Rolling Stones.

Worst Britons, by century

A few days ago a friend sent me this BBC list of "Worst Historical Britons," one per century since the 11th c. It includes such famous people as King John, Thomas Becket, Jack the Ripper, and less famous ones, outside of Britain at least, such as Oswald Moseley and the "Butcher" Duke of Cumberland, responsible for the massacre at Culloden.

Some things worth remarking on. This might as well be a list of worst historical Englishmen, since they are all men and none of them came from some other part of Britain. (Whether King John or the Butcher Duke were English instead of Poitevin or Hanoverian might be an interesting debate.) Anyone want to nominate for "worst British or English woman"?

Also, it looks to me like a "people you despise on a visceral level" list. The choice of Jack the Ripper speaks for itself. As a sometime student of the late 14th century, I gave a hearty assent to the choice of Archbishop Thomas Arundel, illustrated above, who was chosen for his 15th century career as a burner of heretics. But he has plenty more on his record. Though he's obscure to most people, to know him is to loathe him, and I know him.

It would also be interesting to see what foreigners (even non-English Britons) might say. The Hammer of the Scots, anyone? Henry V, who massacred prisoners at Agincourt?

Bolivian baroque

During the 17th and 18th century, the Jesuits maintained a major missionary effort in central South America (as seen in the 1986 movie, The Mission). Eventually the Crown of Spain decided that this was too much like a state within a state, and the Jesuits were expelled, leaving behind a baroque architectural legacy.

Apparently there was a musical legacy, too. Recently it has emerged that the local people preserved baroque music, which is now being published, performed and recorded.

I heard about this on this morning's 8:00 newscast on CBC Radio One, and there will be more said about it on The World At Six on the same network. Oddly, there's very little on the Web as yet. I only found a brief mention on the BBC 3 site. When I find out more I will post it here.

Confronting Tyranny: A new book from N.U.

My colleague at Nipissing University, the political scientist David Tabachnick, has just received copies of the book he co-edited with Toivo Koivukoski. It's a collection of articles on the usefulness of the classical political concept of tyrrany now. As I was talking to David -- in the hallway, where most useful university discussions take place -- I had a quick look at the table of contents, and the articles look quite interesting.

For more information see the website of Rowman and Littlefield, the publishers.