Her Earliest Bow Upon the World's Stage

THE WELL-LADEN SHIP by Egbert of Liege was written between 1010 and 1026, as a classroom text in Latin for his young students at the cathedral school at Liege, where he taught the trivium. TOF is sore tempted to say that he was a trivial teacher, save that he had a brilliant notion. Observing that it was difficult to teach his young charges the intricacies of Latin -- though Latin was notably less intricate in the 11th c. than it had been in Cicero's more convoluted day -- Egbert decided that he could better teach the little terrors darlings by creating a reader with proverbs and folk tales with which they were already familiar in the vernacular. He wrote it, as he explained, "not for those who are already perfected to manly strength by careful attentive reading, but for those timid little boys still subject to discipline in school; so that, when their teachers are absent, while that band of youths is babbling to one to one another certain ditties (though none of them to any purpose) in order to sharpen somewhat their meager talent by practicing and frequently chanting those little verses, at such times they might rather use these."

Thus, instead of chanting in the absence of magisterial authority,

"I see Paris. I see France. I see Childeric's underpants."

They could instead recite

"Dum deerit cattus, dicurrens conspicitur mus."

That way, already knowing what the Latin meant, they could more easily grasp its forms. He divided the text into two parts: the Bow and the Poop. The Bow apparently consisted of pithy quotations and proverbs and the Poop of stories and fables. Since these texts were all hand-written, there could not have been very many of them, but an original copy survives and was translated fairly recently.

 Among the proverbs are some with a familiar ring:

• While the cat’s away, the mouse is seen scurrying about.

Dum deerit cattus, dicurrens conspicitur mus.

• When a horse is offered for free, you should not open its mouth.

Gratis equo oblato non debes pandere buccas.

• I’ve never see a wagon go when placed in front of the oxen.

Ante boves versum non vidi currere plaustrum.

• One ought to strike iron while it’s hot.

Dum calidum fuerit, debetur cudere ferrum.

 The currency of these proverbs -- Don't put the cart before the horse! When the cat's away, they mice will play! Don't look a gift horse in the mouth! -- indicate how deeply rooted in the medieval our culture is.

BUT ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING TIDBITS in the Well-Laden Ship, indicating how well-laden indeed she is, is the following fable, set in unrhymed dactylic hexameters. Egbert says that it is a rendering of a tale he had heard told among the peasants -- though one doubts he heard them tell it in dactylic hexameters. Remember, Latin poetry traditionally based itself on the length of syllables, not on stress, although in Late Latin, stress was coming into use.

This tale marks the first appearance in literature of one of our enduring heroines: 

First, in Latin:
De puella a lupellis seruata

Quod refero, mecum pagenses dicere norunt,
Et non tam mirum quam ualde est credere uerum:
Quidam suscepit sacro de fonte puellam,
Cui dedit et tunicam rubicundo uellere textam;
Quinquagesima sancta fuit babtismatis huius.
Sole sub exorto quinquennis facta puella
Progreditur, uagabunda sui inmemor atque pericli,
Quam lupus inuadens siluestria lustra petiuit
Et catulis predam tulit atque reliquit edendam.
Qui simul aggressi, cum iam lacerare nequirent,
Ceperunt mulcere caput feritate remota.
"Hanc tunicam, mures, nolite", infantula dixit,
"Scindere, quam dedit excipiens de fonte patrinus!"
Mitigat inmites animos deus, auctor eorum.

In English:

Concerning the Girl Saved from the Wolf Cubs

The story I tell, the country folk know how to tell me,
and it is not so much marvelous to believe as it is very true.
A certain man raised a girl from the sacred font,
and he gave her a tunic woven from red wool.
Shrove Sunday was the holy day of this baptism.
When the sun had rise, the girl now five years old
set out wandering, heedless of herself and of danger.
A wolf attacked her and headed for his woodland haunts;
and he took her as prey to his cubs and left her to be eaten.
They approached her, and gnawed at her cap; but unable to tear it,
they began to caress her head, their fierceness having been allayed.
The little infant said, “Oh mice, don’t rip this tunic
which my godfather gave me, taking me from the font!”
God, their creator, softens savage souls.

That's right, sports fans, it's Little Tunicam Rubicundo, Little Red Cape, making her first appearance in recorded history! And wearing her red Pentecostal baptismal cloak, too, which protects her from the devil-wolves of the dangerous woods. So much for Michel Foucault and the red hood representing menstrual blood and her sexual awakening. (Why are Moderns and Postmoderns so obsessed with their pelvises! An Early Modern French version has Red stripping naked and hopping in bed with the Wolf and ends with a warning not to do that.)

In early medieval Europe, baptisms were performed twice a year: at Easter and Pentecost, but the trend was toward more frequent baptism dates to protect the children as early as possible. 

The story was elaborated as time went on. In an episode from a Norse saga, in which Freyja has been betrothed to a giant named Thrym, Thor disguise himself as Freyja and goes with Loki (disguised as a serving maid) to a banquet thrown by Thrym. The giant grows suspicious and asks many questions about his bride-to-be.

“Why are Freyja’s eyes so sharp?” Thrym calls to [Loki]. “They burn me like fire.”
“Oh” said the cunning serving-maid [Loki], “she has not slept for a week, so anxious has she been to come here, and that is why her eyes are so fiery.”

How Old is Little Red Riding Hood?: Tales Over Time, by Gwen Thurston Joy

Interestingly, some of the earliest versions present a more resourceful Red (or Granny, when she makes an appearance) than the more modern ones. She doesn't have to be rescued by woodcutters or hunters. But all of them, including Granny (who came from a separate story-tradition) were later additions. The original story of Red was simple and unadorned tale of an innocent beset by evils and protected by God's providence.

Medieval Proverbs from The Well-Laden Ship
November 12, 2013 by Medievalists.net  

 The Earliest Little Red Riding Hood Tale - Medievalists.net

 How Old is Little Red Riding Hood?: Tales Over Time
Gwen Thurston Joy

The Earliest Little Red Riding Hood Tale
November 10, 2013 by Medievalists.net 

A Fairy Tale from before Fairy Tales: Egbert of Liège's "De puella a lupellis seruata" and the Medieval Background of "Little Red Riding Hood" Jan Ziolkowski
Source: Speculum, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Jul., 1992), pp. 549-575
Published by: Medieval Academy of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2863656

 

Special Offer: Save 25%

TOF is excited. The collection Medieval Science Fiction, which contains TOF's essay "Discovering Eifelheim," is coming out at last! It's a hefty tome. Both the book and its price are measured in pounds! But you can get it for 25% off if you act now. 

There is also an essay by Vatican Astronomer Guy Consolmagno on medieval world-building and cosmology; essays on courtly love in Edgar Rice Burroughs; a study of Connie Willis' Doomsday Book; the medieval Dying Earth; and more. A TOC appears below.

The publisher's flier:

MEDIEVAL SCIENCE FICTION
Edited by CARL KEARS & JAMES PAZ

This volume brings two areas of study that have traditionally been kept apart into explosive contact. For the first time, it draws the historical literatures and cultures of the Middle Ages into the orbit of modern science fiction, aligning the cosmologies, technologies and wonders of the past with visions of the future. The essays it contains consider where, how and why “science” and “fiction” interact in medieval literature; they explore the ways in which works of modern science fiction illuminate medieval counterparts; and they also identify the presence and absence of the medieval past in science-fiction history and criticism. From the science and fictions of Beowulf to the medieval and post-medieval appearances of the Green Children of Woolpit; from time travel in the legend of the Seven Sleepers to the medievalism of Star Trek; from manmade marvels in medieval manuscripts to the blurring of medieval magic and futuristic technology in tales of the dying earth, the chapters repeatedly rethink the simplistic divides that have been set up between modern and pre-modern texts. They uncover striking resonances across time and space while also revealing how arguably the two most popular genres of today, science fiction and fantasy, have been constructed around conceptions, and misconceptions, of the Middle Ages.

CARL KEARS is currently based at King’s College London, where he teaches Old and Middle English Literature; 
JAMES PAZ is Lecturer in Early Medieval English Literature at the University of Manchester.

A Special Offer: Save 25%
£60.00/$99.00, June 2016
978 0 95398 388 9
9 colour illus.; 328pp,
23.4 x 15.6cm, HB
Kings College London Medieval Studies
King’s College London CLAMS
Offer Price
£45.00/$74.25

ORDER FORM Order online at www.boydellandbrewer.com – just enter offer code BB125 at the checkout

Table of Contents
Foreword by James Hannam
Introduction
1. Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy?
Carl Kears & James Paz
Science and Fiction in the ‘Dark Ages’
 2. Is Beowulf  Science Fiction?
 Daniel Anlezark
Time and Space Travel
3. The Future is a Foreign Country: The Legend of the Seven Sleepers and the Anglo-Saxon Sense of Past
 R.M. Liuzza
4. Untimely Travel: Living and Dying in Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book
Patricia Clare Ingham
5. ‘On Second Thought, Let’s Not Go To Camelot…‘Tis a Silly Space’: Star Trek and the Inconsequence of SF Medievalism
 Jeff Massey
The Alien
6. ‘Those two green children which Nubrigensis speaks of in his time, that fell from heaven’, or the Origins of Science Fiction
 Mary Baine Campbell
7. Edwin Morgan’s Aliens and Anglo-Saxons
 Denis Ferhatović
Technologies and Manmade Marvels
8. The Riddle of Medieval Technology
 Andy Sawyer
9. Dreams of War, Dreams of Dragons’ Fire: Conrad Kyeser’s Bellifortis
 Alison Harthill
Distant Planets, Distant Futures
10. Courtly Love on Mars: E.R. Burroughs and the Medieval Lineage of Planetary Romance
 Andrew Scheil
11. The Medieval Dying Earth
 James Paz
Making Medieval Science Fiction
12. Catapunk: Toward a Medieval Aesthetic of Science Fiction
 Minsoo Kang
13. Medieval Cosmology and World Building
Guy Consolmagno
14. Discovering Eifelheim
 Michael Flynn

The Pear of Anguish

The pear of anguish

It would seem that all those medieval torture devices one sees described hither and yon are either a) not medieval, b) not torture devices, or are c) just made up. A discussion can be found HERE:

It's not that the medievals did not use torture, but they were not very imaginative about it. The iron maiden was first described toward the end of the 18th cent.

The pear of anguish is another late fabrication. Supposedly, it was inserted into a bodily orifice and then cranked open. Engineering studies -- let's hear it for engineers! -- showed that the springs were too weak to open up the aforesaid orifices. Fact is, no one knows what the dang thing was for and the Usual Suspects simply imagined that it must have been a torture device because medieval. Speculation is that it was used as a shoe extender, like this more modern torture device:

It might be amusing to select modern devices, suppose that in a few centuries their purpose has been forgotten, and then re-imagine them as torture devices. Such as the double-handed hand burners. Since they have been found in the ruins of many 21st century homes, we assume they were used to discipline children, whose hands were inserted into the slots. Depending on the severity of the infraction, the device could be set to different times.

Then there was the white noise machine which was intended to keep the victim in a state of heightened agitation:

Galley Slave

Received a pdf of my article "Discovering Eifelheim", to appear in Medieval Science Fiction, Oxford Univ. Press. Release date figured to be ca. late this year, or early next.

An excerpt:

One question in this volume is whether medieval culture and the SF genre
intersect. At first glance, it would appear that they do not. First, the medieval
world lies in the past and SF deals with the future. Second, SF (as distinct from
fantasy) deals with the impact of speculative science on the lives of human beings
and, according to conventional wisdom, there was no science in the Middle Ages.
Third, when the medieval past does appear in SF, it provides only a cardboard stage
set and caricatures the past without illuminating it. Therefore, SF and the medieval
world do not properly intersect.

On the other hand, we find such novels as Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade
(1960), Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book (1993), Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial
Matters (1996) and my own Eifelheim (2006), as well as short fiction like Sean
McMullen’s ‘Tower of Wings’ (2001). So clearly there is an intersection.

My own response is that medieval culture and science fiction may intersect in
two distinct ways, within which several further distinctions can be made.

Medieval Science Fiction

The collection of essays is supposed to come out this month from Oxford University Press. Meanwhile, themes are being presented at history conferences.

The motto of the blog Beoshewulf is Þæt wæs god blog!, a reference to a line from Beowulf (Þæt wæs god cyning!)

The TOFian contribution to the anthology begins thusly:

I have been asked to contribute a few words about how I came to write Eifelheim, a science fiction novel in which aliens are marooned in the Black Forest in the fourteenth century. Although I have always had an interest in history – I had the good fortune to take my freshman survey course from John Lukacs – my training was in mathematics and the sciences, and my professional practice has been in statistics. My interest in the Middle Ages, and specifically in the science of the Middle Ages, actually stems from my experience in writing Eifelheim and the paradoxical fact that it was easier to write about the alien Krenken than about the fourteenth century Germans.

Some people, it seems, are more alien than others.

One question in this volume is whether medieval culture and the SF genre intersect. At first glance, it would appear that they do not. First, the medieval world lies in the past and SF deals with the future. Second, SF (as distinct from fantasy) deals with the impact of speculative science on the lives of human beings and, according to conventional wisdom, there was no science in the Middle Ages. Third, when the medieval past does appear in SF, it provides only a cardboard stage set and caricatures the past without illuminating it. Therefore, SF and the medieval world do not properly intersect.

On the other hand, we find such novels as Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade (1960), Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book (1993), Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial Matters (1996) and my own Eifelheim (2006), as well as short fiction like Sean McMullen’s ‘Tower of Wings’ (2001). So clearly there is an intersection.

My own response is... 

A Medieval Moment

At medievalists.net, the following nice video appears.

There is one major error: Copernicus was  neither a priest nor an astronomer.  He was a canon lawyer (and medical doctor and economist) who pursued mathematical astronomy as a hobby.

And at the Onion, America's newspaper of record, we have a columnist who pines for the 60s. 

The 960s. 

Again, one major error: medieval women were not regarded as chattel.

A Few Cutting Remarks

Don't mess with Teodorq or Conan

Teodorq sunna Nagarajan, a supporting character in Up Jim River and the protagonist in "The Journeyman: On the Shortgrass Prairie," now finds himself confronted with a duel in "The Journeyman: In the Stone House."  The duel is being fought with longswords, since the society he finds himself among is of a late medieval character. 

Don't mess with the chicks, neither

 

 

Now, TOF has never dueled with longswords, nor indeed with any fell instrument, so for versimilitude, he consulted that Font of All Wisdom; viz., the Internet, to obtain nuggets of neepery with which to strew his narrative.  There is a veritable cornucopia of such info Out There, which TOF judges reliable since it does not involve God or Darwin.  Fighting with longswords is quite intricate, with a number of guards and thrusts, a three-fold division of the combat, and sundry other technologia.  Who knew.  Those Western oafs, unlike the refined Japanese samurai, were supposed to merely flail and hack at one another with big clumsy blades of sharp steel.  But it seems there was some art to it after all. 

Though they did not pirouette.  All the great fightmasters were agreed on that.  Exposing your back to your enemy while you spun around was a great foolishness, since the enemy was, you know, trying to kill you? 

For one thing, the longsword was a complicated gizmo.  The strong and the weak are parts of the blade, but are translations from MHGerman starke and schwech, and refer to the leverage you get from them.  The strong is the part where you try to catch or parry the enemy's blade, and the weak is the part that moves fast and possesses the pointy thing.  The fuller is not to let the blood run off but to lighten the blade without weakening it. 

Half-swording meant gripping the blade along the strong in close combat.

The fight manuals also mention the long edge and the short edge, which is funny since both edges are the same length.  Imagine you have gripped the sword in the picture.  The long edge is the edge that runs from where your knuckles are, facing down.  If you were thinking of chopping onions, this is the chopping edge.  The short edge is the upper edge, used in the backhand stroke.  If you hold the sword out flat and you are right handed, the long edge is the edge you use swinging left to right. 

There were two main schools of longsword art: the German and the Italian.  The Germans emphasized the attack and the Italians emphasized the defense.  Go figure. 

The pommel was more than decorative.  TOF had always imagined that the longsword was gripped in both hand like a peasant wielding an axe or Duke Snider a baseball bat, and indeed there are thrusts and guards where this is done.  But in many of the postures, the two hands work independently.  Primarily, the strong arm (usually the right, as shown) grips the sword below the cross guard, sometimes placing the thumb against the crossguard for better control.  The off hand grips down by the pommel and apply the laws of leverage by pulling or pushing on the pommel while the strong hand acts as a fulcrum or moves in the opposite direction. 

Left-handed Ox-Guard.

 

A most awkward-looking guard is the one called the Ox.  The name comes from a fanciful resemblance to the horn of an ox.  The hilt is held high on the side of the head and the point is aimed that the enemy's face.  (This guard disuades him from rushing forward and blocks downward attacks.) 

But look at the wrists.  They are crossed.  The strong hand is gripping at the crossguard, but the off hand is crossed under it and is gripping at or near the pommel.  This means that if you thrust from this position, you give an additional push on the pommel with your other hand.  This gives the thrust greater strength.   

The problem with neepery is one can get sucked deeply into it, leading to the dread Infodump in one's writing.  So much of what TOF is presently reading will vanish into the narrative, revealing like a fan dancer just enough to show there is substance underneath.  So I must take care in the narration not to describe every guard and every thrust. 

The German Longsword
Meyer Frei Fechter Guild

The Fundies are Coming! The Fundies are Coming!

The Huffington Post, a news repackager privileged by AOL, has an interesting tidbit entitled:
Louisiana Private Schools Teach Loch Ness Monster Is Real In Effort To Disprove Evolution Theory

The story opens thusly:

Some students at private schools in Louisiana are being taught that Scotland's fabled Loch Ness monster is real, a claim that is then held as evidence disproving Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the Scotsman reports [on 29 June 2012].

Heavens!  Nellie, bar the door!  "Some" students equals how many exactly?  A colleague of mine is a creationist -- and a Ph.D. chemist.  He is a gentle soul, and funds out of his own pocket a microlending bank in West Africa, helping African women become economically self-sufficient.  Truth to tell, I'd rather know such a man than a snarky atheist who does nothing to help. 

Evolution inaction

As far as I know, the theory of natural selection does not require that when a new species emerges that the old species must vanish in an instant.  The facts may tell us that no dinosaurs survived to human times, but the theory of natural selection does not.  I have seen people claim that "birds are dinosaurs," which is tantamount to the claim that men and dinosaurs have existed at the same time.  So I guess sometimes it's okay to make that claim. 

I don't know which is funnier: creationists who want to downgrade the Bible to a science text or people who get attacks of the vapors over creationism. 

The real puzzle is: Why should The Scotsman care about Louisiana private academies?  Well, the Loch Ness connection may be sufficient for a human interest story.  But where did The Scotsman get the story? 

Hard to say.  The Scottish Sun ran a similar story four days earlier, on 25 June, but it is only a precis.  And on 24 June, the Herald of Scotland ran the Scotsman story almost verbatim. 

The earliest report seems to be the Times Educational Supplement - Scotland, dated 31 July 2009, but "updated" on 28 June of this year.  It focuses on UK recognition of the curriculum rather than on Louisiana.  The TES quoted extensively from one "Jonny Scaramanga, a music lecturer who attended an ACE school in Bath as a child."  That is, given Scaramanga's age (27), the story is at least a decade and a half old.  And notice how the thrust changed from the UK approving the curriculum in TES in 2009 to "Louisiana" in 2012.

So why the sudden interest three years later?  There is a Romney connection. 

• Romney advocates school vouchers
• Some parents use vouchers to send their kids to schools using these books
• These books have some mighty silly or obnoxious stuff in them.  
• Therefore, we suppose, we should vote for Obama. 

HuffPo cited all "four" Scottish sources, although three of them seem to be simply cut 'n paste.  Curiously, no US sources were cited.   (A Google search on turned up numerous blogs repeating the story like a head cold at a day care center, but no independent confirmations that I saw.) 

The Scotsman story states:

Critics have slammed the content of the religious course books, labelling them “bizarre” and accusing them of promoting radical religious and political ideas.

Well, we can't have religious course books promoting religious and political ideas.  They should be more like regular text books which never do any such thing. 

But who were these unnamed "critics"? 

Who Are the Critics?
Apparently, the untermenschen teach that if the Flood happened only 4000 years ago, then a sea serpent could have survived.  Actually, it's hard to see how a flood at any time would bother a sea serpent at all.  What would it do, drown?  But then why is it necessary that dinosaurs perished in a Great Flood?  What in the story of the Flood, even if we take it at face value, requires that no other animals ever went extinct prior to it? (Remember, the Biblical clock starts running, as it were, with the beginning of human history; and that seems to have gotten rolling in the Middle East around 6000 years ago.) 

A little further on, The Scotsman tells us of "one former pupil, Jonny Scaramanga, 27, who ... now campaigns against Christian fundamentalism."  Hard to see how someone who campaigns against X would ever distort X, especially after his nervous breakdown.  This fellow is the only source mentioned in the Times Educational Supplement article. 

The other source mentioned in The Scotsman (and therefore in the Huffington Post) is one "Bruce Wilson, a researcher specializing in the American political religious right," who tells The Scotsman:

"It has little to do with science as we currently understand. It’s more like medieval scholasticism."  

The first thing to note is that "a researcher" apparently means someone who co-founds a blog as a sort of professional anti-rightist.  Calling him a "researcher" sounds so much more academic. 

The second thing is that this Wilson is also a blogger for ... (wait for it) ... none other than the Huffington Post.  This makes HuffPo blogger Laura Hibbard somewhat disingenuous when she refers to Wilson as a "researcher," if he were an outside source.   

And the third thing, which is what actually got my attention in the first place was that neither Wilson (who said it) or Hibbard (who "reported" it) seem to have a clue about medieval scholasticism.  They seem to think it has something to do with Late Modern, scientificalisitc fundamentalism. 


The scholastics, it is well to recall, had no reason to suppose that there were such a thing as evolution, having never seen an example of a new species arising.  In fact, all the kinds known to Aristotle were known to Darwin; and those known to Darwin within Aristotle's geographic scope were already known to Aristotle.  There is no reason to concoct a theory to explain a phenomenon that has never been observed. 

Tommy Aquinas

One scholastic who did consider the concept in passing was Thomas Aquinas (aka Da Man), who wrote:

Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning.

-- Summa theologica, Part I Q73 A1 reply3

IOW, if any new species ever did arise, they would do so through the immanent powers of nature actualizing the existing potentials.  (Much as the word "gat" exists beforehand in the word "cat," being actualized by a simple mutation/phonemic shift.)  Moderns, who do not believe in immanent natures, have a mechanical philosophy "in which nature is seen as a kind of unnatural composite of passive, unintelligent, preexisting matter, on which order has been extrinsically imposed."  This led inevitably to Paley and Dawkins. 

The Louisiana textbook material is further presented as saying:

"God created each type of fish, amphibian, and reptile as separate, unique animals." 

Gus Hippo

But there is nothing that actually requires this, and it is a belief that dates pretty much to the 19th century novelty sects.  If we go back a millennium and a half, we find Augustine (who was not a medieval scholastic, the middle age having not yet quite begun).  He wrote:

It is therefore, causally that Scripture has said that earth brought forth the crops and trees, in the sense that it received the power of bringing them forth.  In the earth from the beginning, in what I might call the roots of time, God created what was to be in times to come.

-- On the literal meanings of Genesis, Book V Ch. 4:11

IOW, various species need not have come into being at the same time, since God created "what was to be in times to come."  Not only that, but it was the "earth," that is, the natural world, which received from God the immanent power to do this, Gus citing the Bible as his source. 


Were I of a puckish frame of mind, I might even say that this means that evolution can be found in the Bible.  Fortunately, I am not; and so I will not. 
+ + +

This is too good.
On his blog, Wilson sheds crocodile tears because the fundamentalist textbooks he cites denigrate Catholicism and Mormonism, although they apparently do not say anything about them that atheists don't say as well.  (Fundies and atheists share a remarkable overlap of beliefs.)  He also finds it strange that Mr. Romney advocates school vouchers even though some parents use them to send their kids to schools that use books that disparage Mormonism.  He has apparently never heard the dictum "I may not agree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it."  It's called freedom of speech; but in the circles inhabited by Mr. Wilson it is evidently considered normative to shut down any expression with which one disagrees. 

He goes on to write:

In the economic realm, as researcher Rachel Tabachnick describes, the texts "teach a radical laissez-faire capitalism. Government safety nets, regulation, minimum wage, and progressive taxes are described as contrary to the Bible."

This strays a bit from the narrative of scientific illiteracy into kvetching that the untermenschen do not share the orthodox belief in Marxism or the Bismarkian welfare state.  By associating these stances with creationism he apparently hopes to color opposition to laissez-faire capitalism with the aura of being scientificalistic.  Being a man of the left, he cannot imagine a safety net not held in government hands, or how nets can be used to entangle the prey in captivity.  But that is another question entirely and does not have a categorical, ideologically-defined answer. 

And there is the further irony that Darwinian evolution is clearly modeled on laissez-faire capitalism.




But notice we once more see a "researcher" being cited.  Wilson fails to mention that by an amazing coincidence "researcher Rachel Tabachnick" is his partner.  (Undoubtedly, Tabachnick also refers to the "researcher Bruce Wilson.")  This is a little like the old 60s gimmick in which a small group of activists would form several organizations, all with pretty much the same membership, so that the SDS could cite the MEVW and the YSL as being "in solidarity" with them. 

This whole thing reminds me of what Kissinger allegedly said about the Iran-Iraq war.  Why can't they both lose? 

What Happens When a Pair of Irishmen Go to France

In the early 800s?  The Monk of St. Gall (probably Notker the Stammerer) tells us:

Now it happened, when [the illustrious Charles] had begun to reign alone in the western parts of the world, and the pursuit of learning had been almost forgotten throughout all his realm, and the worship of the true Godhead was faint and weak, that two Scots came from Ireland to the coast of Gaul along with certain traders of Britain. These Scotchmen were unrivaled for their skill in sacred and secular learning: and day by day, when the crowd gathered round them for traffic, they exhibited no wares for sale, but cried out and said, "Ho, everyone that desires wisdom, let him draw near and take it at our hands; for it is wisdom that we have for sale."

Obama, Ockham, Wind Turbines, and Sex

Another Milestone Passed!

An anonymous Twitter notes that "Obama has launched more cruise missiles than all other Nobel Peace Prize winners combined."

Witchcraft and the Dark Ages

Although some folk apply the term "Dark Ages" to the entire medieval period, others apply it only to the early middle ages and refer to the High Middle Ages as the Early Renaissance.  This is done in service to belief, of course.  It is not how the historians generally view things.  (In fact, those have been abandoning such propaganda labels in favor of century labels.)  But in any case, one of the most cherished foundation myths of the Modern Ages is that of the West's struggle to free itself from the violence of religious intolerance.  This is almost as basic as the myth of Galileo springing pristine from the brow of Copernicus. 

One aspect of that violence was the witch mania. 

1. The Age of Faith

Now, belief in sorcery had been common enough among the Romans, who distinguished three classes of witches and prescribed death for the worst class.  It was common, too, among the Germans, though the details differed.  So it's no surprise if the folk of the Middle Ages, who were after all the descendants of those self-same Romans and Germans, also believed in such things. 

The Church however either ignored magic or treated it leniently; this for the very good reason that she taught that magic was a mere superstition.  St. Patrick's Synod in the 5th century anathematized anyone who believed that there really were witches with magical powers.  Charlemagne issued a Capitulary for Saxony that declared it criminal for anyone acting on a heathen belief in magic to burn or devour the flesh of accused sorcerers.  (This suggests that pagan Germans did not treat sorcerers very nicely.)  The Canon episcopi about the same time declares that women who believe they fly through the air in Diana's train are simply deluded and orders expelled from the congregation anyone who insists on the reality of it. 

How the Greeks Lost Their Groove

On the Origins of Science

An alert reader wrote privately with the following question:

My understanding of Greek thought was that it made real science impossible by attributing "essences" and "natures" to things which acted according to their own powers, rather than according to physical "laws." Hence, ...attempting to experiment on such an object under artificial conditions is useless, because the object will have its nature "disrupted," .... Also, since things (chairs, plants, planets, etc) moved according to their own inner principle, rather than due to some external physical law, there is no need to attempt to "reduce" objects to component parts (atoms, cells, molecules, etc) and therefore no need for subjects like chemistry.

My understanding of the Christian contribution to science was in mechanizing the universe, so that objects behave according to external laws and can be reduced down to its components.

However, ... Edward Feser's The Last Superstition ... argues that the mechanistic worldview of the Enlightenment eliminated formal and final causes ... on philosophical rather than scientific grounds, and that classical theism ... requires a belief in formal and final causes.

...what about Greek thought prevented it from developing science, if there is nothing anti-scientific about viewing the world in terms of essences, powers, final causes, etc.
 

I can only give my own amateur take on this. 

Many folks, like the estimable Mr. Carrier or the less estimable Mr. Walker, would claim that the Greeks did develop science.  But this is based on equivocation on the term science.  It has multiple meanings.  Depending on which meaning you use, you could make Otto Benz or Thomas Edison into scientists.  But in numerous discussions with creationists, partisans of science have time and again emphasized that science is not merely an accumulation of factoids.  A pile of bricks is not a house.  Nor is it a bunch of lucky guesses or rules of thumb worked out by tinkering and by trial-and-error.  Nor is it technology, a point obscured in our day by the fact that science and engineering really are now conflated in many ways.  Whereas previously the ur-scientist sought to explain why what an engineer had done worked, nowadays the engineer often realizes that something might work because the science predicts it. 

One of the genuine contributions of the positivists, although one now strongly objected to by such luminaries as P.Z.Meyers, is what is sometimes called the Layer Cake, but which I will render as a triangle. 


Start from the bottom, at which we find Empirical Experiences.  Things that we see, hear, feel, etc.  Both science and philosophy start here. 
1. Facts.  When these experiences can be operationally measured, they become facts.  In fact, factum est being the participle of "to make," a fact is something made, a "feat."  Measurement creates facts because the same thing measured in two different ways will often produce two different results.  But the experiment is the premier fact-producing machine.  Fact is also used as a courtesy for meticulously described qualitative observations, such as those Darwin made. 
2. Laws.  Regularities or patterns in the facts are called laws, especially when they can be expressed in mathematical terms.  But they can also be expressed verbally.  Newton did so.  The equations associated with his three laws came later - and don't quite correspond to the three laws.  There is no math at all in Darwin. 
3. Physical Theories.  These are stories or narratives in the context of which a specified body of facts "makes sense."  Newton's theory of gravitation "made sense" of all those astronomical observations and, more importantly, made sense of Copernicanism, which until then had been merely ad hoc.  (Ironically, the empirical evidence for Copernicanism was not found until around 1800.)  Given a physical theory, the natural laws may be deduced and the facts predicted.  When facts are predicted beyond those originally used to develop the theory and then are subsequently found, the theory is supported.  The Third Wave positivists regarded theories as neither true nor false, but only useful. 

Now, if we regard the laws as simply the interface between Fact and Theory, we are ready to commence. 

The Archimedes Palimpsest

I have not forgotten my promise to explain the topology of function spaces.  Part II is coming soon!  Meanwhile....

Some may remember our friend Mr. Walker and his marvelously reductive and tendentious rendering of something he called "The Christian Dark Ages," by which he meant what regular historians call the Middle Ages.  In a curmudgeonly mood, I commented on it with The Age of Unreason.  Eventually, someone kindly informed him of this -- his own site makes no provision for contrary voices thinking freely contrary to his dogma -- and he responded with Mike Flynn Discovers the Dark Ages, where he declared that he he was "not a Middle Age scholar" and then he set about proving it.  This led to a riposte of my own Return of the Age of Unreason Part I and II, before I got bored.  This sort of thing is like goat barbecue.  The more you chew it, the bigger it gets.  Walker makes a one sentence ejaculation of faith; the response is a paragraph or two; but then Walker's next antiphon is a series of paragraphs to each statement, sometimes even to a word or two, each of which garners another paragraph in the harvest, and soon we have something very much like the expansion of the early universe a la Alan Guth's gloss on the Big Bing.  There is a lot of dark energy here, if there is any at all. 

In any case, in the True Spirit of the Web, some dude named Richard Carrier has now weighed in with Flynns Pile of Boners.  Now, first, I am astonished that anyone still uses the term "boner," but aside from that Mr. Carrier really is an historian - at least he has a Ph.D., which is no small potatoes - but he is no less tendentious.  His degree is in ancient history, and so he owns a lot more factoids from that era; but not necessarily of the medieval period.  His tendentiousness takes a novel twist.  He agrees that Walker was full of it.  The Christians, he admits, did not deliberately destroy ancient learning etc.  They simply neglected it because they did not care.  Presumably, they were busy thumping their Bibles and shouting "Do Jesus!" or something. 

Return of the Age of Unreason - Part II

This is a continuation of this: m-francis.livejournal.com/ and/or the preceding post here. 

In this part, we will take up two questions rather than pick over this or that misconception in Mr. Walker's essay.  Instead, we will make the positive case.  And because the case is medieval and I just plain feel like it, I will cast them in the form of the medieval Question genre.  The format runs as follows: 

1. The Question to be answered; sometimes broken down into separate articles. 
2. The principles Objections (Antitheses) or arguments against the questions.  (It would seem not, because...)
3. The principle argument in favor of the question (the Thesis)   (On the contrary...)
4. The determination of the question (Synthesis)  (I answer that...)
5. The specific rebuttals of the Antitheses. 

The arguments are typically in abbreviated form, as writing materials were expensive and the medieval student was assumed to be familiar with the required readings and would recognize an entire argument from a "key phrase."  To the modern ear, Questions seem oddly verbose -and- curt.  In those days, texts did not have standard pagination, so the "key" phrases were the way they "referenced" or "footnoted."  The necessary texts are listed at the end of the Questions. 

Question I.  The nature of the Scientific Revolution. 
Article 1.  Whether there was in fact a Scientific Revolution.  

Return of the Age of Unreason - Part I

Returning from a trip one day and noodling in re medieval science led me to an astonishing web-essay by someone calling himself Jim Walker on a religious belief site called Nobeliefs.com for Freethinkers.

Being trip-weary and in a curmudgeonly mood, I commented on the irony of someone denouncing religious belief while believing in so many myths and legends of his own at The Age of Unreason: or Pfui

Now, thanks to the Galileo Effect -- there is always someone willing to point out an affront to another -- we have a response from Mr. Walker.

He writes that he is "not a Middle Age scholar" and then sets about proving it. 

Being a free-thinker, all his thoughts are free and apparently worth the price paid.  The response generally repeats well-worn fundamentalist tropes long adopted by atheists, misses the point of several things I said.  Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it also leaves one open to being misconstrued.  In places, he mistook my intention, and in some places noted incompleteness or omission. 

Naturally, being a freethinker, Mr. Walker makes no provision for comment [let alone disagreement] on his site, and so we must once more make do here, where comment [as well as thinking] really is free -- and freely debated. 

A Message to the Anonymoi:
As usual, I ask only that non-members identify themselves in some way in their comments, lest we confuse one Anonymous with another.  Use whatever screen name you please.  Those responding over on   m-francis.livejournal, the same rule applies.

1. A Few Preliminary Comments
Mr. Walker has a marvelous technique for assigning things to the Medieval Period [bad] or to the Renaissance [good].  Namely, whenever he encounters something he considers good in the Medieval Period, he declares that to have really been the Renaissance.  He also uses the term "Dark Ages" to refer not only to the actual Dark Age, but to the entire Medieval period up to the point where he wishes the Renaissance had begun.  It never seems to occur to him that people whose beliefs he does not share could ever have accomplished anything of which he approves.  The cognitive dissonance must at times be painful.   

Another marvelous tool is to construe any glimmering, hint, or lucky guess in antiquity, China, Islam -- anywhere but in Europe! -- as the really-truly beginning of something, while dismissing any development during the Middle Ages as mere glimmerings, hints, or lucky guesses.  Now, it is true that the Victorian Triumphalism of the Age of Science and Industry needed to be tempered.  The Old Europeans tended to dismiss everything done by non-Europeans.  However, the post-modern impulse to dismiss everything done by Europeans is equally wrong-headed. 

A third technique he uses is a sort of guilt-by-association.  The debate Question is the origin of modern science.    However, Mr. Walker also brings up the crusades, the inquisition, the execution of Bruno, the trial of Galileo, the murder of Hypatia by a mob of Greco-Egyptians, even the sale of indulgences (I kid you not).  Now, he shows no actual knowledge of most of that stuff; but even if we grant him the premise, good science can be done by bad people.  The best science of the early 20th century came out of militaristic, jingoistic Wilhelmine Germany and its national socialist successor.  But we don't say that rocket ships or jet airplanes are bad because they were invented by Nazis or that the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis is wrong because the Kaiser invaded Belgium.  So these arguments are mere red herrings.  If I have time, I may come back to them later. 

Related to number three is number four.  And that is the association of one innovation with another on not better basis than a chance correlation.  For example, in his anxiety to show that medievals never did nothing nohow he equates pickled herring with the fish relish used for οπσον by the ancient Greeks.  Apparently, since both involve fish....  Of course, the technological innovation of pickling enabled Baltic fishermen to preserve and ship their catches over longer distances, and opened a source of protein and omega-3 oils to vast numbers of people.  Greek fish relish was an appetizer for meals. 

Mr. Walker is entirely correct to say that historical period-names are arbitrary.  This goes double for self-congratulatory names like "Renaissance" or "Age of Reason" as well as for deliberately-chosen derogatory names like "Dark Age."  Mr. Walker takes this as permission to name the historical periods as he damn well wishes.  Modern historians prefer objective descriptions like "early 14th century Burgundy" to tendentious labels from propaganda mills.  I find that some of the names are useful, because there really are sea-changes in people's mental picture of the world.  The ancient world really did end, so did the medieval world, and so is the modern world even as we speak.  That the changes were gradual and seamless does not change matters.  The existence of dawn and dusk does not invalidate the distinction between night and day. 

2. A Note on the Dark Age
The dates are conventionally taken to run from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West to the Carolingian Ascendancy, roughly AD 500-800.  Two good histories covering the run-up to and most of the Dark Age is Barbarians and Romans: The Birth Struggle of Europe, A.D. 400-700 by Randers-Pehrson and The World of Late Antiquity AD 150-750, by Peter Brown. 


The age was dark because a lot of barbarians burned down a lot of stuff, and a lot of documentation went up in smoke.  It is a Dark Age because we "see" by documentation, and very little has survived "the shipwrecks of time."  It is not called "dark" because the people in it suddenly became stupid.