Too darn hot

As the temperature breaks the record that goes all the way back to yesterday a friend shared with me a note he had received.via X:

Not saying it’s hot on the London Underground today. but I’ve just seen Virgil leading Dante down the steps at Baker Street tube station. They’ll be taking the Circle Line.

Dante and Virgil at the Gates of Hell

by William Blake

Image: niceartgallery.com

Investigating Medieval Sicilians

A study of the genetic make-up of the medieval population of Sicily is reported upon by Phys.org

The evidence across something like a millennium indicates a complex pattern of migration and also mixing of ethnic groupings. This complements and confirms the historic and cultural evidence of the island being at the cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean for centuries.

The article can be read at Sicily remained a medieval melting pot despite major political and religious upheavals, ancient DNA reveals

I would disagree with the final comments in the article that Sicily became part of the Holy Roman Empire. More accurately it came under the rule of the Holy Roman Emperor as King of Sicily from 1194 to 1250, but not part of the Empire as such. The formal territory of the Empire extended as far south as the Papal States, or could be seen to include them, but no further south. 

The arms of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies 

1816-1861

 

Image: Wikimedia

The complexity of the armorial bearings reflects the complex history of the two kingdoms and the engagement of many dynasties with their governance from the high middle ages onwards.

Today there is still a tendency, perhaps a strong one, to see Sicily as the European back-of-beyond, poor, corrupt, run by the mafia, nestling under a volcano - nice for the occasional holiday but not somewhere to spend a long time.

This is in part a consequence of the unification of Italy, when the north asset-stripped the south and stationed troops for decades in the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to keep it compliant. It might have been a useful stepping stone in 1943 for the Allies, but the post 1945 division of Europe rendered it once more a run-down region dreaming dreams of its past as it decayed and was a dubious political fiefdom in the post 1946 Italian state.

 In the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries however it was vibrant society, linking Western Europe to the Byzantine Empire, and to the Crusader states in the Holy Land, with strong ties to Spain and the North African coast. The art and architecture of these centuries is amazing and it was a wealthy society. There is little wonder that it was the especial jewel in the crown of the Emperor Frederick II, and coveted by other monarchs in the decades and centuries following his death.

I do recommend the works of John Julius Norwich “The Normans in the South” and “The Kingdom in the Sun”, David Abulafia’s “Emperor Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor”, and for the later centuries Harold Acton’s two very detailed volumes on “The Bourbons of Naples 1734-1825” and “The Last Bourbons of Naples 1825-1861” and Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s “The Leopard”.

The Kingdoms of Naples and of Sicily in 1794

Image: Geographicus Rare Antique Maps

A Tapestry returns to Oxburgh Hall

It is always satisfying when an historic item returns to its home after a long interval. The BBC News website recently reported the return to Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk of a tapestry from the house which was sold more than a century ago. 

The tapestry depicts a scene from the story of Esther, which appears to have been a popular subject in the sixteenth century with patrons and artists.

The illustrated report can be viewed at Lost Tudor tapestry returned home to Oxburgh Hall after 100 years

Nuns and Bankers

The Conversation has an interesting online article about the role played in late medieval Vienna by women religious as fining bodies for annuities and other financial loans. I had heard the author speak to an online seminar and was pleased to have a written summary of her research. I do not know how widespread this practice was but it was clearly part of Viennese economic and social life.

The article can be seen at Before banks, nuns lent money: how convents helped power medieval Vienna’s economy

Feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist

Today is the Feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist

He is one of only three figures in the New Testament - the others being Our Lord and Our Lady - to have a feast to celebrate their birthday. His death is commemorated separately at the end of August.

Most depictions of the Great Forerunner show him as a solitary figure in the wilderness or concentrate on his martyrdom. This illumination showing his birth is unusual amongst his iconography.

The Birth of St John the Baptist

Silvestro dei Gherarducci

1370-71

Image: Walker Art Gallery Liverpool

A tempera painting on vellum showing the letter D, taken from an illuminated choirbook at a Camaldolese monastery in Florence. The letter is decorated on three corners with floral motifs. The image set within the letter is of the birth of St. John the Baptist. The Virgin Mary is holding the infant on the front left, wearing a blue cloak over red dress. In the background, his mother Elizabeth, Mary's cousin, is still in bed being attended by a nun, while his father Zechariah seated on the front right who has been speechless since he was told of the birth by the Archangel Gabriel, writes "His name is John."

Surviving in a heatwave

As we swelter and shelter from the current temperatures  here in the UK and across western Europe I came upon a video from Medieval Way which looks at how people managed to keep themselves and their food supplies cool in past centuries. 

It is normally thought the earlier middle ages were warmer and followed from about 1300 by the beginnings of the ‘Little Ice Age’ which deepened into the seventeenth century before working itself out in the early nineteenth century. That does not mean that exceptionally hot summers, such as that of 1540, or hot spells, did not occur.

I am no scientist but even I can understand and recall these pre air-conditioning features of daily life. I can still recall, after seventy years, the coolness of the cellar, and indeed the hall,  in my grandmother’s mid-Victorian house, the sun-blinds over traditional large shop windows, photographs of Edwardian country houses bedecked in similar blinds - their casings still survive at the Oxford Union’s building, the curious earth ware device to keep the extra pint of milk in cold water before refrigerators became normal, the slightly sinister looking meat safe with its fine mesh….

Most of those are much more recent than the medieval centuries but the sense of a cool interior even in really hot weather when entering a centuries old building with thick walls, be it a cottage or a church, is both palpable and so refreshing.  

 

The video can be watched at Medieval Peasant Knew Something About Cooling We Forgot

Queen Elizabeth I in amber

Artnet has a report about the forthcoming auction of an amber heart-shaped pendant enclosing a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. 

The pendant with its portrait of Queen Elizabeth I

Image: Artnet News

The item is little known and its creation has only now been studies. Dated to after 1592 because of the datable portrait, it appears to have been made in Königsberg, the centre of the amber-working craft. There seems no indication of who commissioned it or how and when it travelled to this country.

It does, however, suggest the importance of trading and cultural links between England and the relatively new Duchy of Prussia in these years. Trade with the Baltic was important until the events of the twentieth century from the east coast and ports as far west as Devon.

The illustrated article can accessed at Rediscovered Amber Portrait of Elizabeth I Heads to Auction

I also learned from it that magnifying glasses were invented in Königsberg - if anyone had asked me I would have thought renaissance Italy. One lives and learns.

The Major Oak

 

The recent announcement that the great survivor the Major Oak has died is sad news. Located near the village of Edwinstowe in north-western Nottinghamshire this venerable tree was very much a symbol of what remains of the ancient woodland that made up much of Sherwood Forest in the medieval centuries. 

 

The Major Oak

Image: Wikimedia

The Major Oak also had a place in the relatively modern legendary history of Robin Hood. That there probably was an outlaw of skill and cunning - or maybe a series - called or known as Robin Hood seems very likely. It was Sir Walter Scott in “Ivanhoe” who located him in the 1190s. The most recent research places him in the early thirteenth century, and more significantly, not in Sherwood in Nottinghamshire but north of Doncaster in Barnsdale along the Great North Road towards Ferrybridge. Barnsdale was not a royal forest in the legal sense but simply a wooded area along the magnesian limestone ridge which runs northward from the river Don. 

By the fourteenth century Robin Hood was leading protagonist in popular ballads, where avenged individual wrongs, not those of society. It was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries he became more generally the robber of the rich to give to the poor, and so could become the demotic hero of cinema.

How the Sheriff of Nottingham was drawn into the narrative ms is not clear, but one can reasonably imagine that a lawless group based in Barnsdale would not lose much sleep over heading south and crossing the county boundary into Nottinghamshire for variety or to through the forces of law and order off their trail.

  

Robin Hood has attracted a considerable amount of scholarship from academics in the past half-century or so. The book I always recommend is “Robin Hood” by J.C.Holt, which is careful and scholarly, very readable and well illustrated.

I regret on my various visits to Nottinghamshire over many years that I never bot to see the Major Oak. However its d ace dents will live on. Like the famous Cowthorpe Oak in Yorkshire time has, sadly, finally caught up with this landmark.

Wikipedia has a history of the tree at Major_Oak

and of its wider setting at Sherwood_Forest

 

The BBC News website has an article about its history and its place in the cultural life of Nottinghamshire which can be read at The 'Robin Hood' tree: The history and enduring appeal of the Major Oak

The Daily Telegraph has two articles about the way well-intentioned, if misguided, attempts to sustain it may well have hastened or contributed to its ultimate demise, They can be seen at Robin Hood’s 1,200-year-old oak tree in Sherwood Forest ‘killed by sightseers’ and at A century of noble (and misguided) measures that killed the Robin Hood oak