Jumat, 07 April 2017

Favorite obscure countries: Laos

I have always loved maps and history.  Growing up in the USA in the early 60s, the Southeast Asian war gave me the opportunity to learn geography that the vast majority of Americans knew nothing about.  Laos was one of the obscure countries that was promoted to the first section of the newspaper (I doubt that it ever made page 1)

Sometime in 1961 or 1962, a map roughly like this appeared in my local paper, showing not only the exotic international boundaries of Laos but also indicating who controlled what on the ground (or so it claimed).

Despite the considerable strategic importance attributed to Laos at that time, not much news of Laos everappeared in the papers. I have to admit I never systematically explored Laotian history.  But today when I was leaving our local public library, I spotted a book by Joshua Kurlantzick.  A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA.  

Interesting that Kurlantzick has also written a book on "the world-wide decline of representative government."



Image: The mysterious "Plain of Jars." Named and designed by Jack Vance?



Minggu, 02 April 2017

Richard Watson Gordon parades an amazing ignorance

Gordon is talking up an art exhibit on the subject of 19th century prostitution in Paris:
 It was a subject that interested them. Why? The obvious answer is that they were men, but another reason was that prostitution was linked to the idea of modernity. People had moved to the city, which was in itself a new concept, where the moral strictures of the village had disappeared. 
Gordon is a professor of fine arts.

Jumat, 31 Maret 2017

Another oddball medieval name from the Chronicle of the Good Duke

During my years with the Good Duke I have run across a number of surprising and amusing personal names: Bliomberis Loup and his brother, for instance (follow the "names" label to find him).

I don't recall this classic name of an English knight involved in the Duke of Lancaster's chevauche in 1373:

Sir Jean Bulle.

Minggu, 26 Maret 2017

If walls could talk: A BBC history of the home

My friend Nick Russon alerted me to the existence of a BBC 4 History of the Home now showing on Youtube. I have just watched the first of four episodes and I really like it. Part of it of course is the entertaining Lucy Worsley, who was made to be a TV presenter, but there's also the fact that the production quality is very high and we get to see a wide variety of (in this case) living rooms from many different angles. I don't doubt that other experts than Worsley and those who actually appear might disagree with some of the interpretations offered here, but at least you get a good detailed look at what they are talking about.

Fun!

Sabtu, 25 Maret 2017

Some people you just don't want to fight...

...because some people are just scum.

During the first half of the Hundred Years War, when France was in chaos, disbanded soldiers often struck out on their own to fill their purses and their stomachs by capturing both warriors and civilians and ransoming them back to their lords or families.  These were not nice people, as this story of the Good Duke makes clear. Duke Louis, who had himself been captive in England for seven years, was determined to rout out these outlaws.  Duke Louis' men had if anything a lower opinion of these "English" (who may not have been English in fact).

Duke Louis told them:

They have made a pit at Beauvoir , and when they have taken someone who they do not wish to or cannot ransom, they say " put them in hell" and they are thrown into this pit full of fire, of which everyone was so terrified, so that when anyone became a prisoner, he gave out that he was rich for fear of being thrown in hell. Therefore Duke Louis required, that all of his company should take part in the attack.

They all replied "Most redoubtable Lord, we are ready to go where it pleases you and we desire nothing else. But we pray you humbly, that it please you that you personally should not go there; for it would be too much of an honor to such people as they are, that such a Prince as you are ought to go there. For they are excommunicated by the sentence of the Pope, and are men of the companies, and without absolution; but if you please order us to go there." Therefore the Duke agreed with them and with great pain, as to him who always wished to be with them.
They won...
all those at Beauvoir were killed except the captain, Le Bourg Camus, who was taken to Molins, and the others were thrown into their hell.
Image: This might be a later version of Beauvoir castle.

Back to the Good Duke


After some months of writing other material, I am back to translating The Chronicle of the Good Duke, Louis II of Bourbon.  (I am astonished to see, by the way, that I started this translation in 2010.)  It's a fascinating view of one of the great warrior-princes (no, not Xena) of the first half of the Hundred Years War.  The best part of the chronicle is, however, what it says about the knights and squires who fought in Louis' service.  I've written an article about the Chronicle in the Journal of Medieval History, if you are fortunate enough to be near a library that carries it.

The Chronicle has its challenges.  It was written by an obscure hanger-on of the Bourbon family, one Cabaret d'Orville, who doesn't seem to be the master of the French language that he might be.  He is excessively fond of sentences that begin with "and."  I once told a friend that if I simply eliminated every "And" that began a sentence -- just the "and" not the sentence -- the Chronicle would be a third shorter.

Well, I tested that theory yesterday when I set up MS Word to search for an initial And.  And it told me that in 240-some pages there were 707 Ands I could get rid of.

Done and dusted.  Simplest bit of editing I've ever done.

Image:  Yes, that's him, as the 15th century remembered him.

Jumat, 24 Maret 2017

A flash of truth cuts through the overheated rhetoric

A Guardian column on "alt-right" celebrity Katie Hopkins' carpetbagging critiques of London stumbles into an important truth. Marina Hyde:
For now, it falls to her [Hopkins] to explain London to the Americans. “Londoners can’t even be honest about these attacks,” she told Fox News. “Because it would mean everything they believed in was false.” >Ah, the false idols of the decadent metropolis! Had Katie spent more than 10 minutes in the World History aisle of Wikipedia, she would know there have always been people who hated cities for what they stood for. The metropolis has at many times served as shorthand for a kind of moral decay and wicked permissiveness that requires (usually forcible) regression.

“This place where monsters lurk and steal lives away in an instant,” thunders Katie of the capital’s wickedness. “For nothing.” Dear, dear – it does all seem rather terminal. I wonder what Katie would do with the failed, corruptive experiment that is London? The Khmer Rouge decided that the only solution was to empty the cities, and send their suspiciously educated denizens to the countryside. Come Katie’s revolution, perhaps Londoners will be forcibly migrated too.
Quite right, Marina. Don't forget that anyone wearing glasses will be labeled as a dangerous intellectual and eliminated.