Last month I wrote on this blog that Harvard wasn't very much like the University of Pennsylvania. Because, I oh-so-brilliantly said, Harvard has an endowment sufficiently successful to allow them to wait out political tides "with ... a shrug." I have one more thing to say about the subject. Oops. [The fellow above is he for whom the institution is named -- John Harvard -- the son of a butcher in Surrey.] Harvard did not shrug at the attacks on Claudine Gay . I still suspect they were in a financial position in which they could have. Harvard, alas, is not William James' Harvard. In that era they were amassing the cultural capital that they have been expending for much of the time since. Actually, I have the following to say about the subject too. The president of MIT, Sally Kornbluth, needs to make the point, publicly and often, that for some of those who are making the “two down and one to go” noises, this whole thing ...
Posts
Until her death last week, Queen Elizabeth II had been the only Queen of England in my lifetime, and I'm getting on in years. She died at 96, so one can hardly curse the fates about her demise. She was entitled to Rest. Near the end, she was unable to leave Scotland and go to London to play her part in the transition from one Prime Minister to the next. the two PMs, outgoing and incoming, had to come to her. This was a big clue to the extent of her frailty. Still, the end came as a shock when it came. I am an anarchist, but I salute her. She carried herself with grace through difficult times, in impossible situations, and as the Mum of an impossible family, a characterization by which I mean emphatically to include the new King. The new King did not HAVE to call himself Charles III. Tradition allows for the adoption of a different "regnal" name. But Prince Charles went with remaining Charles even as he becomes King, and now the third King of that name....
Last week I offered a post that was a simple timeline of some of the events associated with the Renaissance, that "rebirth" of classical culture beginning in northern Italy that soon spread both west and north. I will expand a bit on the subject here. As a matter of periodization: the term "Renaissance" is conventionally associated with the second half of the fifteenth and the whole of the sixteenth century. I think it's fair to stretch into the seventeenth just a bit to take in Cervantes' great novel, as I did in the timeline. The term first appears in the middle of the 16th century, in the Italian form "renascita" (rebirth) in a book by Giogio Vasari, LIVES OF THE ARTISTS. "Renaissance" is a Francophone reworking of Vasari's term, coming much later. The period known as the Enlightenment, which saw itself as a successor to the Renaissance, may be said to have begun about 30 years after the publication of DON QUIXOTE, with the publi...
Moments worth keeping in mind in coming to grips with the Renaissance: 1453: Fall of Constantinople 1455: The War of the Roses breaks out in England 1485: War concludes as the Tudors take over, under King Henry VII 1492. The first of Columbus' voyages. 1494: Savonarola takes over in Florence 1498: Savonarola executed. 1504. Michelangelo completes work on his DAVID. 1510. Hieronymous Bosch paints THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS 1513. Niccolo Machiavelli puts out THE PRINCE, a study of the means that one must use to control a city-state, expressing a devout hope for the unity of Italy against its foreign oppressors. 1530. The earliest known pictures of instruments recognizable as violins date to this time, in northern Italy. 1598. The earliest known work that could be modern standards be considered an opera is performed in this year, DAFNE, in Florence. 1605. The publication of Cervantes' masterpiece, Don Quixote.
In the US, politically conscious folk have been so absorbed of late in our own national soap operas --about the Putin-Trump relationship, about an open Supreme Court seat, about real or alleged discussions of the 25th amendment, about the political implications of the latest version of A Star is Born , about the midterm Congressional elections -- so much on our plates that we may have lost track of what is going on in the Mother Country. Some fascinating and dramatic developments are underway there, as the effectuation of the Brexit vote of 2016 comes to a head. I'll simply offer you some pertinent links today. If all goes according the schedule, Great Britain will cease to be part of the European Union in March 2019. What if you want to move some products across the Channel in April? How will this matter to you then? That remains surprisingly unsettled. The underlying idea in the minds of many of those who supported a "Leave" vote was that Britain could adopt ...
Thanks to friend Henry for forwarding me a review of Cheryl Misak's recent book on pragmatism in England. I may never obtain the book, but I'll summarize here what the review says it says, and end with a quotation (from the book via review). The book recounts how, in 1908-09, Bertrand Russell, at Cambridge, developing his own logical atomistic views, took pragmatism to be an American re-working of a familiar foe, the coherence theory of truth distinctive to the Anglo-Hegelians. Russell was quite hostile to the coherence theory, and his view of this new variant of it from across the Atlantic was no more sunny. But, beginning with 1914, Russell was adopting pragmatic theses himself. By 1921 he had come around to the quite American understanding of belief itself as a "disposition to act." It was Ramsey, though, not Russell, who made the Cambridge warming to pragmatic winds more official or explicit. For Ramsey, Peirce was THE pragmatist, and a central influence...
Mystery solved! As some of you may remember, I've long been intrigued by a passage in Dorothy Sayers' introduction to her translation of Dante's Inferno. The passage, written in 1949, includes allusions to roughly 60 different people who played a part in English social history in the century or so before that date. Some she refers to by full name, most by part of a name, some by an allusive phrase. Her point is that an intelligent reader five centuries later will need help understanding a poem that makes such allusions, and she tries to provide analogous help in her notes on Dante. Roughly two thirds of a century has passed, and even for Anglophilic Americans, her prediction had been amply verified. Some of the references are obvious, some take some digging, some left me confused for a long time. But I believe I have cleared up the most confusing example. She refers to "Brown and Kennedy." Those are quite common names, so googling didn't help The arc...
One more quotation from the Ackroyd book, TUDORS, which is the second volume in his ongoing history of England . I quoted him last week on Mary and Reginald Pole, and the week before on Henry VIII and the dispossession of the monasteries. This week's lesson involves Pope Pius V and Mary's youngest Protestant sister Elizabeth. In early 1570, Pope Pius V issued a bull in which he excommunicated Elizabeth as a paramount heretic and tyrant. It stated that 'the pretended queen of England' could no longer command allegiance, and that she was the 'servant of iniquity'. Its denunciation covered any person who obeyed her laws and commands. The Queen herself was now a legitimate object of attack by any assassin of the old faith; her death would speed his way to heaven. It was the last stand of medieval religion, the final occasion when a pope would try to depose a reigning monarch.... I'm certainly glad Popes don't do that any more. In honor of that mil...
Meyer, the author of this book, now lives in England and seems to have no academic post, though he used to teach in the US -- apparently at three different colleges -- and has his MA from the University of Minnesota. The Borgias is aimed at a broad audience and is not particularly academic in form. It has a thin set of endnotes and (given the subject) a very thin bibliography. I say that as a matter of transparency, not that I would hold that against him. My last book had neither of those. One enthusiastic reviewer has called Meyer's book "an incredibly interesting and quite frankly brilliant read, and one I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone interested in learning about the history of this fascinating family." I won't review the book, I'll just quote the following passage, which concerns the relation between the Borgia family (especially Cesare) and the philosopher Machiavelli. "Like everyone associated with Florence's post-Medici repu...
Headnote: I have just learned that the great scholar Jacques Barzun has died. It is hardly a life cut short -- he was born on November 30, 1907, so he was about a month short of turning 105. Still, for those of us to whom his life and work mattered, he had come to seem immortal. And in any sense that scholarship can secure: he is. For now, I will proceed with the material prepared for this and the following two entries in this blog. But I will have more to say about Barzun here soon enough.] Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist who did a good deal to educate the non-scientists of the world about the biology of evolution, passed away back in 2002. He might be surprised to learn that his name has now become a bone of contention [a fossilized bone of contention?] among economists. Of course it isn't all that surprising that there should be cross-fertilization between biology and economics. Ask Malthus about this. Ask Herbert Spencer. Still, my understanding is that this wasn...