The Assumption of Our Lady

 

The Dormition and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Bl. Fra. Angelico  

Dated to 1424-34 and originally an altarpiece in the Basilica of San Marco in Florence, now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

Image:anastpaul.com

To mark this weekend’s great feast, and to remind readers of the traditional observances around the celebration of Our Lady’s entry into Heaven the website OnePeterFive has a linked set of articles about the customs of past generations and centuries, and indeed encourages their revival, which can be accessed at The Forgotten Customs of Assumption Day

A joyful and splendid celebration of the Assumption of Our Lady to all my readers

Eclipses - past, present, and future

Yesterday’s almost total eclipse here in the UK, and the total eclipse in Iceland, parts of Ireland and in Spain caught the imagination of very many of us. In my case it sent me on a quick internet search for recorded eclipses in the past.

Wikipedia and NASA both have articles which indicate the not only when they occurred but also which places were more likely to experience them.The articles can be accessed at List of solar eclipses visible from the British Isles and at Solar Eclipses Visible from London, England

The coverage on television from Iceland made the point that the last total eclipse was visible from Reykjavik had been in 1433.

Here in Britain there were no total eclipses between  1485 and 1598, with one annular eclipse in 1547.

More remarkable is the fact that there were no total eclipses visible in Great Britain between 1724 and 1925 ( only visible off shore of the outer Hebrides) and 1927 on the mainland. Putting it another way King George III and his sons, Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, the Duke of Wellington, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone and Newman, and many others besides, had no chance to see a total eclipse whilst at home.

 Mind you next year’s eclipse visible from Sydney in Australia will be the last one visible there for more than the on next eight centuries.

Historically Scotland, especially the far north, is more likely to offer opportunities for eclipse sightings.

  

Live Science has reproduced the first written account of a total eclipse. It was written by Archilochus in the seventh century BC. He lived in the island of Paros and witnessed a total eclipse there on April 6th 648 BC. The account of the author, and his reaction, seen at 'No longer will anything seem impossible or marvellous': How an 'immoral, foul-mouthed and violent man' wrote the first eyewitness account of a total solar eclipse​​

I watched the last near total eclipse in Oxford in 1999. I recall the strange, eerie greyish light as the maximum point approached, the strange quiet that accompanied it. Watching the coverage yesterday evening on the television coverage and looking out from my window it was again, not surprisingly, very much the same, a uniquely distinctive phenomenon. 

 

IMAGE SOURCE,m

An excellent architectural website

Recently whilst searching online for an image to illustrate an article I had written for a magazine I came upon the work of David Bridgwater and his meticulous work on historic buildings at his blog Bath, Art and Architecture

This appears to have begun with studies of the architecture of the city of Bath, but on occasion extends to cover other cities and buildings. I sensed a kindred spirit in his concern to record not only what survives, but also what has been lost, and his sense of place and belonging.

 

Three examples of his work can be seen. Firstly there is his account of the Oxford Arms in the west side of Warwick Lane. Farringdon Within. I had seen photographs of this galleried inn before, but it was good to have more information about the buildings and their history. It is tragic to think that such a remarkable, albeit very decayed, building survived until 1876 - into the childhood of my grandparents - and that no-one saved it. Indeed it is remarkable how many buildings of this era, pre-dating the Great Fire, survived into the late nineteenth century only to be destroyed at the time when there were moves to not just record but to preserve such buildings.

The Oxford Arms

Demolished 1876

Image: Bath, Art and Architecture 

The article can be seen at Oxford Arms, Warwick Lane, Faringdon Within, City of London

The second study concentrates on a fine plaster ceiling rescued in 1961 from the former Feathers Inn in Nottingham city centre. This was a time when city and town centres were being bulldozed with little or no concern for the losses to the local and national heritage. I do not recall seeing the building on my visits as a child to Nottingham in those years, but I may have. I have checked with David and the ceiling is still in store awaiting a new home. 

The article can be seen at Introduction the Wheelergate Nottingham Ceiling.

The third article looks at Cumberland shipbuilding in the eighteenth century and at a series of carved wooden portrait busts.

The article can be accessed at Five Carved Wooden Busts with Cumberland Shipbuilding Connections, Part 1.

This is definitely a blog to keep an eye on and I have added it to the side bar.

David happily agreed m to my original request and to allow reproduction of his photograph, but more of that in another post.

The Stone of Scone

On this day in 1296, 730 years ago, soldiers from the army of King Edward I of England removed the ‘Stone of Destiny’, the Stone of Scone, from inside the abbey church of the Holy Trinity and St Michael at Scone and began the process of taking the traditional seat for Scottish coronations to Westminster, and its eventual inclusion in St Edward’s Chair.

Despite the agreement of the English government to its return in the Treaty of Northampton in 1328, the Stone remained at Westminster. Not until the coronation of King James VI as King James I in 1603 did a King of Scots, in effect, sit on it again. In 1996 the British government returned the Stone to Scotland and it was displayed with the Honours of Scotland in the Crown Room in Edinburgh Castle.

In 2023 it returned to Westminster with appropriate ceremony for a temporary return to St Edward’s Chair for the Corination of the present King. It was then returned to the new Museum in Perth, very close to the site of its ancient home at Scone Abbey.

A replica of the Stone of Destiny outside the seventeenth century chapel where King Charles II was crowned in 1651 on the Moot Hill at Scone

Image: Facebook/ Soul of Alba Photography

 

Wikipedia has a detailed account of the Stone, its legends and history at Stone of Scone

The World History Encyclopaedia has more about the legends associated with it at Stone of Scone

The Stone at Edinburgh Castle in 2023 before it was taken to Westminster for the Coronation.

The Duke of Buccleuch KT, Captain General of the Royal Company of Archers, stands behind it flanked by two members of the Court of the Lord Lyon

Image: NBC News

I have long been of the opinion, and said so on this blog  that I would favour the restoration of the Scottish Coronation within the constitution of the United Kingdom. There is however the problem that both the original Sword of State and the Sceptre are now said to be too fragile to be handled. That is very unfortunate but it is good to see the Crown in use at the Lying-in-State of the late Queen and the ceremonial opening of the Scottish Parliament.

  

The Seal of Scone Abbey dating from about 1250 depicting the coronation of a King of Scots

Image: Wikipedia 

End of Empire

220 years ago today the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II sent his herald into central Vienna to announce the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. 

  

The Holy Roman Emperor Francis II  

Imperator Romanorum Semper Augustus

He is wearing the crown made for the Emperor Rudolf II 1576-1612, which became the Austrian Imperial Crown

Image: Wikimedia 

 

The proclamation did not cause much stir as for the last two years the Emperor had also borne the title Emperor of Austria and he retained his authority over the Austrian crown lands as well as the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, and the lands taken in the Partitions of Poland plus what was accessible of the Habsburg dominions in Italy. It was the threat posed by the French under their self-proclaimed Emperor, and soon to be son-in-law of Emperor Francis, that appears to have decided the Habsburgs to dissolve the Empire rather than have it broken apart by the French.

As Emperor Francis I he was to join the coalitions that eventually wore the “Corsican ogre” down and he was to host the Congress that sought to re-establish order to Europe in 1814-15.  

 

So ended the formal existence of the Empire officially established by the coronation by Pope Leo III in St Peter’s Rome of Charlemagne on Christmas Day 800. Territorially the Empire was the Frankish kingdom already ruled by the new Emperor Charles.

As the Carolingian domains fractured there had been a time without an Emperor until Otto the Great revived it in 962. From 1250 to 1273 there was no Emperor, but several claimants, until in the latter year the Electors, fearing a Papal imposition of the King of France, as a compromise, offered the crown to a relatively unknown man in the person of the ruler of Austria, Rudolf of Habsburg. He was the last Habsburg Emperor until Albert II in 1437-39, but from then onwards the Imperial title and crown was theirs - with the exception of a Wittlesbach with a Habsburg mother who felt he had missed out with the Pragmatic Sanction and held the title as Emperor Charles VII in opposition to his cousin Maria Theresa’s husband Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who thenbsucceeded as Emperor Francis I, grandfather of the last Holy Roman Emperor. The Imperial House took a poor view of other rulers, be they Peter the Great or Napoleon, assuming the title of Emperor. 

As we are in the later eighteenth century let us dispose of that pretentious windbag Voltaire’s description of the Holt Roman Empire as being neither Holy, Roman nor an Empire. All it shows is his ignorance of medieval political and religious thought on the nature of government and of the concept of Empire, and its complementary position to that of the Church in the good ordering of a large part of Europe.

  

Wikipedia appears to have a good overall history of the Holy Roman Empire and its institutions based on Peter H Wilson’s important 2016 book on the subject at Holy Roman Empire 

After 1815 the Emperor presided over the German Confederation - which had replaced the Westphalian definition of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation - and, after a few local difficulties in 1848-9, retained that status until 1866. Nevertheless the Austrian Empire was the custodian of its traditions, including the Imperial insignia, in Vienna until 1918. 

When Emperor Francis lay dying in 1835 his five year old grandson the Archduke Francis was much distressed. When he in turn died in 1916 as Emperor Francis Joseph his coffin was followed by his successor and his consort and their four year old son, Archduke Otto, who died in 2011 - and whom I heard speak in Oxford in 1994 - so in a very few handfasts the centuries slip away.

 

Blessing of Grapes on The Transfiguration

Fr William Rock of the FSSP often writes insightful articles online on their website about liturgical and other matters. 

Today he has a very interesting account of the origins and development of the tradition of blessing grapes on the feast of the Transfiguration. He shows how it was interpreted in spiritual terms by William Durandus at the end of the thirteenth century, but that its origin actually was over a thousand years earlier in the pontificate of St Sixtus II in the early third century. That rite has, it seems to me, similarities to the four seasonal ember days as a thanksgiving for the harvest of seasonal crops. From Rome it appears to have spread east into what became the world of Orthodox Christianity and merged with local traditions there.

The article brings out the antiquity of the custom, and the stability of the liturgical texts.

It is also worth noting that it was not until after 1456 that the Transfiguration came to be universally observed on August 6th. That was the day on which news of the Ottoman retreat from the siege of Belgrade on July 22nd reached Rome, and Pope Calixtus III ordered that henceforth August 6th would be the universal celebration of the Transfiguration in thanksgiving.

    

Pope Callixtus III

Image: Wikipedia 

Fr Rock’s erudite article can be read at Blessing of Grapes

 

There is also a detailed article on the Othodox understanding of the Transfiguration and the tradition of blessing grapes on The Catholic World Report website at Blessed grapes and hymns of glory: The Feast of the Transfiguration in the East

Life’s little luxuries at Eilean Donan castle in the medieval period

Recent archaeological discoveries in excavations at Eilean Donan castle on the north-western coast of Scotland have revealed fascinating insights into life there in the medieval centuries.

Eilean Donan has become famous as a symbol of Highland Scotland in the past century since the restoration, indeed the reconstruction of the castle, which the Royal Navy bombarded to ruins in 1719 after it had been occupied by Spanish troops to support a prospective Jacobite rising.

Eilean Donan Castle

Image: visitinvernesslochness.org 

Wikipedia has a history of the castle and its architectural development at Eilean Donan

Medievalists.net has a report on the discoveries from the excavations which can be seen at Rare Medieval Hair-Styling Tool Found at Eilean Donan Castle

The outstanding discover was a gravoir for styling a woman’s hair. This is only the third to be found in the whole UK and immediately suggests that at very least the wife of the Lord of Eilean Donan aspired to present herself in the latest international fashion. The fact that it was apparently made locally reinforces the image of a cultured society.

Other finds included gaming counters, toys for children made from bone, and small pottery crucibles for metal working in copper, silver and gold. These may have been for making personal adornments, or, maybe, for alchemy.

Eilean Donan is remote by land but by sea could connects to other parts of the Highland coastline and the Isles, and beyond that to the culture of western and Scandinavian Europe and to their markets.

Life could no doubt be harsh and demanding in the Gaelic world but these discoveries indicate that it was bound into a wider set of relationships and that fashion and recreation were part of Highland life.

Bl. Salvio Huix Mirelpeix

On this day ninety years ago, in 1936, Bl. Salvio Huix Mirelpéix C.O. Bishop of Lerida (Lieida) in Spain, together with twenty of his clergy, many of whom he had recently ordained, were murdered by the Republicans in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. 

By the end of the war in 1939 6,832 priests and religious, including 12 bishops and 283 religious sisters, had been murdered. These atrocities were particularly common in Catalonia where Lerida lies. 

Bl. Salvio Huix Mirelpéix 

A modern painting in the Oxford Oratory created to mark his beatification

Image: Oxford Oratory

 

 Image:Washington Oratory 

The Oxford Oratory has two posts about him at Blessed Salvio Huix — The Oxford Oratory

and at Blessed Salvio Huix — The Oxford Oratory

The Bournemouth Oratory also has a post at Blessed Salvio Huix-Miralpeix - The Bournemouth Oratory

The Birmingham Oratory has a post on their website 

at Blessed Salvio Huix 

Wikipedia has a biography of him at Salvi Huix Miralpéix

He was beatified as one of 522 martyrs of the Spanish Civil War in 2013. More have been beatified since. He is the first Oratorian martyr to be declared a beatus. 

    

Bl. Salvio Huix Mirelpéix

Oratorian Protomartyr

Image: Birmingham Oratory

May Bl. Salvio Huix Mirelpeix and his companions pray for Spain and for us all