More on politics in the 21st century --gaming with Mossadegh's cat

Mossadegh was prime minister of Iran in the early 1950s, and his effort to gain control of Iran's oil led to a crucial crisis of modern Iranian history and of US-Iranian relations.

Two people at the University of Southern California thought Americans should know this crisis better -- and so they designed a game in which the player plays Mossadegh's cat.

You read it right.

This is a serious educational project, motivated in part by the desire to game conflict without focussing entirely on violence. You can find a link to the game and more on the project here.

Thought for the 4th

From TomDispatch.com, on the non-withdrawal from Afghanistan:

"It’s increasingly apparent that our disastrous wars are, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry recently admitted, “unsustainable.”  After all, just the cost of providing air conditioning to U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan -- $20 billion a year -- is more than NASA’s total budget."

Update: The more I think about this the more I realize that what I said once is literally true: the USA could have built a new world on Mars but settled instead for blowing up Iraq.

Latest news from Syria Comment

Joshua Landis pulls together a substantial collection of recent news reports and analysis. Upshot: No one knows how this complex situation will resolve; not yet.

Vikings invade Ottawa on Canada Day!

http://warehamforgeblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/viking-age-in-ottawa-for-canada-day.html

Click on the link and see what I am talking about!

Full Metal Jousting casting call

Are you a jouster? At least, an American jouster? A "reality" show is being promoted and a casting call is out.

Http://pilgrimfilms.tv/casting/jousting/

Tell this historian where he's gone wrong

He asked.

The new Nipissing University library

 

Neither the above photo, nor these, does it justice.  It's a box of light.

Foreign Policy cover story: explaining the fall of the Soviet Union

Some of my readers will surely want to read Leon Aron's article in Foreign Policy,
Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong*And why it matters today in a new age of revolution.

A sample:

LIKE VIRTUALLY ALL modern revolutions, the latest Russian one was started by a hesitant liberalization "from above" -- and its rationale extended well beyond the necessity to correct the economy or make the international environment more benign. The core of Gorbachev's enterprise was undeniably idealistic: He wanted to build a more moral Soviet Union.

For though economic betterment was their banner, there is little doubt that Gorbachev and his supporters first set out to right moral, rather than economic, wrongs. Most of what they said publicly in the early days of perestroika now seems no more than an expression of their anguish over the spiritual decline and corrosive effects of the Stalinist past. It was the beginning of a desperate search for answers to the big questions with which every great revolution starts: What is a good, dignified life? What constitutes a just social and economic order? What is a decent and legitimate state? What should such a state's relationship with civil society be?

"A new moral atmosphere is taking shape in the country," Gorbachev told the Central Committee at the January 1987 meeting where he declared glasnost -- openness -- and democratization to be the foundation of his perestroika, or restructuring, of Soviet society. "A reappraisal of values and their creative rethinking is under way." Later, recalling his feeling that "we couldn't go on like that any longer, and we had to change life radically, break away from the past malpractices," he called it his "moral position."
In a 1989 interview, the "godfather of glasnost," Aleksandr Yakovlev, recalled that, returning to the Soviet Union in 1983 after 10 years as the ambassador to Canada, he felt the moment was at hand when people would declare, "Enough! We cannot live like this any longer. Everything must be done in a new way. We must reconsider our concepts, our approaches, our views of the past and our future.… There has come an understanding that it is simply impossible to live as we lived before -- intolerably, humiliatingly."

Does this sound like some of the stuff coming out of the Arab Spring?  You betcha:

The fruit-seller Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation set off the Tunisian uprising that began the Arab Spring of 2011, did so "not because he was jobless," a demonstrator in Tunis told an American reporter, but "because he … went to talk to the [local authorities] responsible for his problem and he was beaten -- it was about the government." In Benghazi, the Libyan revolt started with the crowd chanting, "The people want an end to corruption!" In Egypt, the crowds were "all about the self-empowerment of a long-repressed people no longer willing to be afraid, no longer willing to be deprived of their freedom, and no longer willing to be humiliated by their own leaders," New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman reported from Cairo this February. He could have been reporting from Moscow in 1991.

"Dignity Before Bread!" was the slogan of the Tunisian revolution.

I can't help thinking of something else I read today, from a satire on American politics by Jim Wright:

Hell, Huntsman [a newly-announced GOP candidate for President] is even an Eagle Scout.
But, he’s far too liberal for conservatives.
And he’s far too conservative for liberals.
Maybe he could overcome that. 
But this morning, in front of the Statue of Liberty, he committed an unforgivable sin.  Beneath the shining symbol of America Jon Huntsman called for polite political discourse and promised to run a civil campaign.
Huntsman didn’t vilify his former boss, instead he claimed that both he and President Obama love their country, but have different visions for its future. 
As outrageous as that was, Huntsman went even further.  He crossed the line and said 2012 is about “who will be the better president, not who’s the better American.”
That’s when the crack appeared in the earth and an ominous rumbling began as the flying monkeys stirred in the fiery deep.
Huntsman said, "Our political debates today are corrosive and not reflective of the belief that Abe Lincoln espoused back in his day, that we are a great country because we are a good country."

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine a civil campaign.  Can you imagine how boring it would be? Without the vitriol and exaggerations? Without the lies and hyperbole? Who would we hate? Who would we cheer? 
Act like civilized adults?  That’s no democracy!
Americans don’t want civil discourse.
And they sure as hell don’t want to see candidates who refuse to engage in mudslinging, brawling, and fear mongering. Fight you bastards, don’t just stand there! Fight! Fight!
Americans don’t want moderates! We want extremists!
We demand to know who is the better American!
There can be only one.

Oh, and we want flying monkeys.

More on China -- "Too early to say"

Phil Paine forwards me this post from Delanceyplace.com:

In today's excerpt - the Chinese have often been invoked as having a longer-term perspective on history compared to the West, and to buttress this view, the story is often repeated of Premier Zhou Enlai's response when asked to discuss the impact of the French Revolution. His answer? "Too early to say":

"The impact of the French Revolution? 'Too early to say.'

"Thus did Zhou Enlai - in responding to questions in the early 1970s about the popular revolt in France almost two centuries earlier - buttress China's reputation as a far-thinking, patient civilisation.

"The former premier's answer has become a frequently deployed cliché, used as evidence of the sage Chinese ability to think long-term - in contrast to impatient westerners.

"The trouble is that Zhou was not referring to the 1789 storming of the Bastille in a discussion with Richard Nixon during the late US president's pioneering China visit. Zhou's answer related to events only three years earlier - the 1968 students' riots in Paris, according to Nixon's interpreter at the time.

Phil says:

I'm often amazed at the way even serious journalists and historians abandon all critical faculties when talking about China, and think in cliches, vague images, and old sayings and quotations.  Imagine the same guys analysing the Netherlands in terms of wooden shoes and windmills and taking sayings like "dutch treat" or "Dutch courage" as if they were profound. Or concluding that they can predict American foreign policy by watching old episodes of The Lucy Show.

Image:  1968

Voyager at Jupiter

From a Talking Points Memo retrospective as Voyager leaves the solar system.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen!

In the midst of what looks like an investment scandal involving a Canadian forestry company active in China, various business writers and commenters are arguing about whether China is now a good place to invest.  There are plenty of China-boosters saying that its economy will go up, up, up, presumably forever; and then there is this writer, who thinks there are good reasons to steer clear, for instance:

Lack of transparency: China is a dictatorship where analysts find it difficult to perform due diligence on prospective investments – just ask any analyst who has tried to research a Chinese company. What’s more, official Chinese statistics are notoriously unreliable, leading some observers, such as Stratfor, a private intelligence consultant, to label the country’s economy an unsustainable Ponzi scheme.

Few China fans address this charge, which should have a lot of force.  Think of all the countries that are not dictatorships and which do have traditions of transparency that had crashes in 2008-9 because large parts of the economy were, despite the advantages of past good governance, Ponzi schemes.

Do you really think that the most powerful people in China, many of whom were raised under Maoism, play fairer than the Icelanders?

Really?

Image:  The great teacher.

Two observers debate the Syrian uprising

Skeptical scholar Landis and activist Monajed:



Thanks to Bloggingheads.tv and Issander el Amrani at the Arabist.

Why many Syrians are reluctant to get rid of the regime

Once again Jonathan Landis at Syria Comment explains the basics as he sees them.

This time, it's why members of the Alawite sect -- the heretodox group that President Assad and his most important collaborators belong to -- haven't turned against the Assad regime.  To explain this, he uses a piece written by a Syrian Alawite back in 2006.

I think this analysis applies not only to Alawites and Syrians, but to many people in corrupt regimes who would like change but also fear it.

Some extensive excerpts follow,  but there is lots more in the full post.

So why then don’t Alawis do anything about the situation? Why are we silent? Why doesn’t an Alawi Army General carry out a coup?
Reasons general to all Syrian citizens:
1. The culture of fear has been deeply planted in every Syrian person regardless of their sect or race.
2. We have been deeply conditioned to mistrust and be suspicious of everyone, making it extremely hard for any two Syrians to work together, not to mention organize in a group. To see how deep this problem has become, look at how much the Syrians in the Diaspora are fragmented even when they are away from the regime and its influence. No two Syrian expatriates are able to organize a cultural gathering, not to mention a political party. No sooner does a new party emerge than its members, who are from the same sect and race and background, start to split apart into uncountable factions.
3. The external animosity of the United States paralyzes internal movements, organized to act against the regime, no matter how well intentioned they are. No one wants to risk a serious move against the regime while there is an enemy at the door. The United States has not shown any signs that it is interested in improving Syria’s internal situation or helping Syria. What the U.S. is asking for clearly and loudly are changes in external policies, period. Most of those policies are not attractive to the Syrian opposition. The regime is popular on most of these issues, such as the occupation of Palestine, the Golan, or Iraq.
A coup-d’etat at this moment risks being labeled “made in America” even if it does not have the slightest connection to America.
The present sentiment in the Syrian street is anti-American. This means that any opposition that seeks support from the Syrian street will be anti-American and will be spurned by the West, as happened with Hamas. Any opposition that seeks external support will lose the street, as is the case with Khaddam. We are in a tricky situation; the regime understands this well and has exploited with skill.
4. The organization of the Army and security forces was masterminded by the late president Hafiz Assad to prevent coups similar to those that rocked Syria during the three decades after Syrian independence. The Syrian forces capable of carry out a coup-d’etat – the Army, Special Forces, Police Force, and Security Apparatuses – are all burdened with a complex command structure, purposefully designed to frustrate plotters.
...
5. Most Syrians, as unhappy as they are with the present regime, see no point in changing the regime without a solid alternative. The opposition has yet to present a clear vision for the future that would inspire people to risk the few joys of Syrian life that they have, security being at the top of the list. Vague and generalized talk about democracy and a better life are the only promises made by present regime-change advocates. They aren’t reassuring.
6. We have to admit that corruption has insinuated itself deep into the souls of almost every Syrian. It is highly questionable that any form of regime-change is going to achieve real economic or social change, without being preceded by a long process of grass roots reform and cultural revival.
We do have a corrupt leadership, but even an honest leadership would find it impossible to overcome the pervasive culture of bribery, disrespect for hard work, and indifference to public interest that is shared by state, and indeed, private sector employees. Most Syrians’ sense of virtue has become so crooked that fooling a customer is defined as cleverness, “shatara.”
Can change really be enforced from the top down? The regime changers avoid this thorny question, but it must be aired and debated. Are we willing to act, think, and work differently when the regime is changed?
Reasons specific to Alawi Syrian citizens:
The main reason that prevents Alawis from being active in supporting any regime change plans is their fear of the “other.” Those who propose regime change without explaining to us what the end of Alawi rule will mean for thousands of ordinary Alawis will get no where.
There are two sorts of “others” in Syria:
a. First are the Sunni religious and Kurdish opposition leaders who say bluntly and clearly: “We want to end the Alawi rule”.
b. Second is everyone else, who says shyly and elliptically: “The monopoly over top army and security posts by one sect should end.”
Not a single Syrian intellectual, political leader, or plain good-will writer, has ever dealt with the following fundamental question:
What exactly are your plans for the Alawis after we give up power?
Why do answers to this question have to be vague and general? What are your plans for the tens of thousands of Alawis who work in the army and other security apparatuses? What are your plans for the republican guard and the special forces that are staffed primarily by Alawis? Are you going to pay them pensions if you decide to disband their forces? Or will they be fired and dumped on the streets, humiliated, and ostracized as were the Sunnis and Baathists of Iraq were following the American invasion? Do you have any idea of the impact on security such dismissals would engender? Will you be satisfied with a scenario by which these forces remain in their positions in exchange for their giving up political power?
What are your plans for the tens of thousands of Alawis who work as government employees in many non-functional establishments? Are you going to close these establishments? Do you have any idea of the social impact of such closures? Are you going to stop improvement projects in the coastal area as all past Sunni governments have done since independence?
Are you going to reverse confiscation laws to return land taken from Sunni landlords and distributed among tens of thousands of farmers?
Are you going to demand that security officials stand trial for their actions during the last 35 years? What is the highest rank that you are going to hold responsible? Are you going to ask for trials for past deeds? How about the present leading elite? Who exactly are the people you want to hold responsible? And If you do bring them to trial, are you going to hold the Sunni elite to the same standard? Will Sunni families who have benefited from the regime through monopolies and sweet-heart deals, such as the Nahhas family in Damascus and the Jood family in Latakia, be treated as Alawis are?
These questions should be answered not only by opposition intellectuals, but also by every non-Alawi Syrian. What do you want to do with us if we give you back political power? Are you really willing to live side by side with us, to cherish Syria’s diversity, and consider the past 40 years merely another failed episode in our long history of failed revolutions.

JLiedl brings us -- Carnivalesque!

Some choice blog posts from Carnivalesque 75 -- this issue being the ancient and medieval one.

Jousting posts

A couple of days ago, it just so happened that two posts on jousting -- in an extended use of the term -- rolled into my blog reader.  (I hang out with a bad crowd.) One was a rather serious look at "pushing" or "jousting on foot" as Froissart (or was it just his  translator?) said about certain foot-combat challenges, and the other was a look at a revered figure of the Renaissance being a bit ridiculous for monetary gain, and advertising jousting with (military) tanks.

Neither type of jousting was the real thing on horseback, but both incidents were from the period when people did joust. A bit more evidence about the hold that jousting had on the late medieval imagination.

Image:  name that artist!

"Canadians, freebooters and soldiers"

Thus Rene Chartrand , author of The Forts of New France, lumps together three groups who were housed together at the French Fort Biloxi in the years after 1699.  If you know what low regard soldiers were held in during the Early Modern period, you see the inadvertant insult.

This is an indirect way of saying, without excusing anything, that I'm not flabbergasted that some Canadians might riot at the end of a Stanley Cup series.  Canadians haven't always been seen as such nice guys -- remember how the Germans hated to face them on the Western Front.

Two literary episodes brought this home to me long ago.  The first was the concluding chapter of The Scotch, John Kenneth Galbraith's memoir of growing up in Southwestern Ontario near St. Thomas before the First World War.  The "Scotch" were a grim, hardworking lot who were not very Scottish, though they did know how to fight.  One of Galbraith's most vivid memories was of The Glorious Twelfth one year when an argument over religion or politics was amplified into a full-scale riot when someone started playing the pipes.  Galbraith's father saw how things were going to go before it really got going, and threw his family into the back of their wagon and headed home.  Galbraith long remembered how this hugely noisy fight grew so quickly that the noise it produced never seemed to drop off as the wagon went quickly on its way.

Now that was a riot; probably we can put it down to King Billy, like a large number of unhappy events in Scotland, Ireland, and Canada.

The other story comes from the first of the Lew Archer detective novels by Ross Macdonald (was he Scotch?).  Macdonald was a quintessentially post-World War II Californian writer, but he had been raised in part in Canada, and in one book (the first?) he had a Canadian character who got the plot moving.  This Canadian was a clerk from Toronto whose wife had run off to Los Angeles with a gangster; he followed, determined to find her and bring her home.  The curious thing about the guy was that, despite the fact he was an ordinary clerk who was coming up against some tough, ruthless gangsters, he was belligerent and tetchy and picked a fight against anyone he even thought was looking sideways at him.  Every fight he picked he lost, but that didn't stop him.

I would have to say that despite decades of immigration and vast cultural changes, that old strain may not be gone.  After all, even in recent times when Canadians have been mostly behaving themselves, you could always have a fight on a hockey rink, and important public figures would cheer you on.  And still do.  (Canadians know who I mean.)

Note:   the labeling feature lets me know that after  years of writing this blog, that this is the first labeled "hockey."  What does that say?

Image:  Biloxi oyster fishermen of the 1930s.  Why not?  You'd prefer a riot or a hockey game?

Kate Bush steampunk!

Japan recovers

Remember how whole districts were smashed to flinders, and those flinders just covered the ground?   As the Big Picture shows, the Japanese have piled up or even removed much of the junk.

Here's a place where they have done a particularly good job, showing before and after:

How the other half lives

While J-Lo dances in Ibiza, Tunisian migrants cross the Mediterranean the hard way.

As usual, click to see a larger version.

From the Big Picture.

More news from Syria Comment

News Round Up (9 June 2011)

Information overload

 Ken Stange said this video was superlative and he was right.

"If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it's not a problem; maybe it's a fact."

Paul Butterfield Blues Band, 1966

...sounding a lot like Quicksilver Messenger Service.  Thanks to John Emerson.

Note: slow start, abrupt end.

Walking in Catalonia with Jonathan Jarrett

A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe is a valuable blog in many ways, but it really shines when Jonathan goes to visit the landscape that gave rise to his charters.  He's doing it now!  Don't miss it!

That Chilean volcano

Two pics -- click to expand and get a better effect -- from the Big Picture.  Yes, the white stuff is ash.  What do you do about an ashfall when it's over?

Talking about that other place

Peter Van Buren was a Provincial Reconstruction Team leader for the U.S. Department of State in Iraq, and he speaks with some authority when he says that the "diplomatic" presence in Iraq after the military withdrawal at the end of the year -- if that indeed happens -- will be in effect a continuing, and expensive, occupation.  An excerpt from TomDispatch:

... the [State] Department has requested $6.3 billion for Iraq. Congress has yet to decide what to do. To put these figures in perspective, the State Department total operating budget for this year is only about $14 billion (the cost of running the place, absent the foreign aid money), so $6.3 billion for one more year in Iraq is a genuine chunk of change.
How Does It End?
Which only leaves the question of why.
Pick your forum -- TomDispatch readers at a kegger, Fox news pundits following the Palin bus, high school students preparing to take SATs, unemployed factory workers in a food-stamp line -- and ask if any group of Americans (not living in official Washington) would conclude that Iraq was our most important foreign policy priority, and so deserving of our largest embassy with the largest staff and largest budget on the planet.
Does Iraq threaten U.S. security? Does it control a resource we demand? (Yes, it’s got lots of oil underground, but produces remarkably little of the stuff.)  Is Iraq enmeshed in some international coalition we need to butter up? Any evil dictators or WMDs around? Does Iraq hold trillions in U.S. debt? Anything? Anyone? Bueller?
Eight disastrous years after we invaded, it is sad but altogether true that Iraq does not matter much in the end. It is a terrible thing that we poured 4,459 American lives and trillions of dollars into the war, and without irony oversaw the deaths of at least a hundred thousand, and probably hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis in the name of freedom. Yet we are left with only one argument for transferring our occupation duties from the Department of Defense to the Department of State: something vague about our “investment in blood and treasure.”
Think of this as the Vegas model of foreign policy: keep the suckers at the table throwing good money after bad. Leaving aside the idea that “blood and treasure” sounds like a line from Pirates of the Caribbean, one must ask: What accomplishment are we protecting?
The war’s initial aim was to stop those weapons of mass destruction from being used against us. There were none, so check that off the list. Then it was to get rid of Saddam. He was hanged in 2006, so cross off that one. A little late in the game we became preoccupied with ensuring an Iraq that was “free.” And we’ve had a bunch of elections and there is a government of sorts in place to prove it, so that one’s gotta go, too.
What follows won’t be “investment,” just more waste. The occupation of Iraq, centered around that engorged embassy, is now the equivalent of a self-licking ice cream cone, useful only to itself.
Changing the occupying force from an exhausted U.S. Army that labored away for years at a low-grade version of diplomacy (drinking endless cups of Iraqi tea) to a newly militarized Department of State will not free us from the cul-de-sac we find ourselves in. While nothing will erase the stain of the invasion, were we to really leave when we promised to leave, the U.S. might have a passing shot at launching a new narrative in a Middle East already on edge over the Arab Spring.

Makes you think about the sheer role of inertia in human affairs...

Image:  The Baghdad embassy under construction.  It is strikingly like an Abbasid palace.

Rethinking the Crusade environment in the light of the Arab Spring

Anyone who has been paying close attention to recent Arab uprisings against corrupt governments has been getting a crash course in what is unrevealingly called "sectarianism." What this term describes, or obscures, is the fact that the Middle East, which many of us visualize as Muslim, full stop, is actually made up of various religiously-defined communities, some non-Muslim, some generally accepted as Muslim, others claiming to be Muslim but regarded with a great deal of suspicion by other Muslims.   See this article on the Syrian situation.  Without re-reading the post, I can tell you what stuck with me:  Although Syria presents itself as something of a secular state, all Syrians together, and all Arabs too, there is a great fear of other "sects" resulting in a willingness to believe the worst of them.  Many Syrians fervently want to believe that they are and can be all Syrians together, but do they dare lower their defenses?  The well-documented fear of instability is easily justified by reference to what happened in Lebanon and Iraq when a long-standing modus operandi or religious truce broke down, and various parties grabbed for power out of greed or self-righteousness or perhaps mostly insecurity.  And of course that fear of instability comes close to being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 (And the other thing that stuck with me from recent reading about Syria is the fear and loathing that so many have for the idea of an Islamic Republic; as logically follows.)

Well, I knew about many of these internal religious divisions, but hearing people discussing it NOW, and urgently, has made a big impact on my effective understanding of the "Muslim Middle East," to wit, I now think a lot, in the front of my mind about the fact that however important Islam has been in the Middle East since the 7th century, and however sweeping the claims various Muslims have made, and whatever wishes for an Islamic society have been wished, it's always been at least this divided.  The divisions haven't always been active, but like so many fault lines in an earthquake-prone region,  they've been there.

Think about the religious history of the United States, as another instance.  So many people think it can or should be summed up in a phrase.  How wrong they are.

So what does this have to do with the Crusade era, which I will again be teaching in the fall?  I will have to think about something that Christopher Tyerman has said in a couple of places -- that the rulers and political and military actors "on both sides" were immigrants or recent descendants of such.  And if religious justifications for their actions and regimes were important (if not always appealed to), it is just wrong, wrong, wrong to attempt to explain the developments of the era merely by casting it as two religiously homogenous societies battling it out.  Even if that was the way some contemporaries, and influential ones at that, visualized reality.

It will be a challenge to strike the right balance.



Image:  The Assad family, late 20th century -- Syria's most famous Alawis, a term you should look up.

Name that country

From the Big Picture's monthly photo review of war in Whatchamacallit.

War in heaven

A Turkish Facebook friend linked to this.  I have a strong suspicion that this is how the beautiful billionaires and their beautiful acolytes actually live -- and compete.



Update: I know what this reminds me of -- the movie Blood of Heroes...not the fighting, but the Podunk aristocrats who hung around the competitors.

More from Coates

He's been reading George Fitzhugh, a pro-slavery writer of the pre-Civil War era who thought most white people (but presumably not himself) would be better off as slaves than as "free workers."  In discussing this Coates makes this striking point:
 

The value in Fitzhugh writing is, for me, first and for most its sheer beauty. The metaphor of free market capitalism as cannibalism is provocative and interesting, if not particularly convincing. His enstranged usage of voice--"we" instead of "I"--and his sampling of other primary sources make for a messy work of a literature, and one I thoroughly enjoyed.

But more than that, Fitzhugh unwittingly explains the difference between a society that tolerates slavery (New York in the 1820s, for instance) and a society where slavery is the dominant system of labor (South Carolina circa 1850. for instance.) As a country, we've yet to come to grips with the fact that Mississippi was not merely a place where black people were in slaves, but a police state where the majority of its population was enslaved. By understanding that difference we start to get how a War could be fought over slavery.

My Morning Jacket

I have seen this band twice -- they are great.  Thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates for bringing them up.

Radegund's brother

As I prepare course materials for my course on Gregory of Tours, I am blessed with a blog post that relates to him and 6th century Gaul (an earlier name for France).

Medieval History Geek asks -- did the famous 6th century queen and nun Radegund, wife of the Frankish king Clothar, actually have a brother?

Here's an excerpt:

As I've read accounts of Radegund, one item has begun to trouble me. Radegund left Clothar because he murdered her brother. 1 I’ve read a theory that he was a threat because he was last of a royal Thuringian line and that he may have been active in a revolt against Clothar.

Here’s my problem with the brother. He has no name. Gregory and Fortunatus both mention him, but he’s an anonymous figure. A substantial poem, "The Thuringian War," was written either by Radegund or by Fortunatus with Radegund's input. A large portion of this poem, written from Radegund's point of view, laments her dead brother, yet he remains nameless. 2 As I've read more books on the Merovingians, Radegund is consistently mentioned and each time I've read, "left Chlothar after he murdered her brother," I asked myself, "And who was this brother, exactly?" For some time I've been wondering; Did he really exist?

I have two reasons for questioning this. First and what really stands out for me is the simple fact of his namelessness. Gregory and Fortunatus wrote after Radegund’s death, roughly 40 years after she left Clothar. They were both well acquainted with Radegund. Gregory was bishop of Tours, just down the road from The Convent of the Holy Cross and conducted her funeral, even though he wasn't her bishop. Fortunatus corresponded with her regularly and wrote poems for her. In the decades the two of them knew her, with this being the trigger; the single key, life-altering incident by which she entered into a religious life, she never mentioned him by name to either of them? If her brother's murder bothered her enough to drive her from her husband, you'd think he would be important enough to be named.

...

It puzzles me that I’ve not run across this argument before. If someone knows of anyone discussing this, please let me know. 9 The historicity of Radegund's brother seems to be unquestioned by modern historians.

Image:  Radegund entering her convent, despite the pleas of many.

Another $100 book

To be honest, I doubt I will be buying this book, but I think some readers of this blog will be interested in this review from The Medieval Review:

Bryant, Nigel, trans.  Perceforest: The Prehistory of King Arthur's
Britain.  Series: Arthurian Studies, 77.  Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,
2011.  Pp. xxiii, 791.  $99.00.   ISBN: 9781843842620.

 Reviewed by Dorsey Armstrong
      Purdue University
      darmstrong@purdue.edu


Although it has started to receive greater critical notice of late,
the 14th-century text known as the Perceforest has received an
amount of scholarly attention that seems inversely related to its
significance.  In other words, for a text that is so important on so
many different levels--narrative progression, social commentary,
synthesis and adaption of sources, expressions of social and courtly
ideals, religion, depiction of the magical and fantastic--the text has
not been examined with nearly the critical scrutiny it deserves, nor
has it become a part of the pedagogical "canon" of medieval romance
texts in the way its contents would suggest is appropriate.  The
reason for this is clear: it is a massive work, filled with a series
of narrative adventures that are both thrilling (here, we have for
instance, the first known written account of the "Sleeping Beauty"
fairy tale) and overwhelming in their sheer number and repetition of
key themes and ideas.  A critical edition in the original French is
currently being completed by Gilles Roussineau; this work began in
1987 and, so far, only four of the six sections have been completed--a
fact that speaks to the astonishing length and difficulty of this text.
The manuscript has rightly been referred to by at least one scholar as
"a veritable encyclopaedia of 14th-century chivalry" [1] and it is
truly encyclopedic in both its content and its sheer bulk.  While its
comprehensive nature is one of the most fascinating things about the
Perceforest, it is also precisely this fact that has kept the
text out of the mainstream of academic investigation or from being a
subject for study in courses on medieval literature.

Thus, scholars and students owe Nigel Bryant a debt of gratitude, for
his new English translation (part of the Arthurian Studies series from
D.S. Brewer, of which Norris Lacy serves as general editor) makes the
Perceforest truly accessible for the first time to those
wishing to engage with its marvelous episodes.  To be sure, the size
and weight of this edition is still a matter of some difficulty when
it comes to portability (the tome is a sturdy hardback, clocking in at
just over 800 pages) but Bryant has managed to squeeze into those many
pages all that is significant and important about the
Perceforest, its narrative threads, and its characters.  To do
this, however, he has had to compress and abridge in some places; as
he himself says in the introduction to the volume: "In an ideal world,
this would be a complete translation, line by line, of the
extraordinary prehistory of Arthurian Britain that is
Perceforest...

Realistically, a complete translation is not a
publishable proposition, or at least not a purchasable one" (1).
Bryant notes that he considered but then discarded the idea of simply
translating and publishing those episodes that have been deemed "key"
by those scholars working on the text, but points out (rightly) that
to do so would obscure and flatten much of what makes this text so
engaging: the narrative threads that cross and re-cross, the
appearance of fascinating characters who may only appear briefly, the
development of themes and ideas over a very long narrative progression.
So Bryant has opted for a more satisfactory if still less-than-ideal
solution: he gives us the whole text without omitting a single
character or episode, but some of these are compressed or summarized.
In order to distinguish between moments that are abbreviated from the
source text, Bryant explains that he has opted to use single quotation
marks "to indicate phrases and passages which are translated verbatim"
(31 n.1).  This strategy is a clever way to make sure that the reader
is always clear as to which portions are summaries and which attempt
to render faithfully the source text.

The translation itself is accurate and lively, making it easy to
become absorbed in the narrative whether or not one has a background
in Old French or even medieval romance.  Indeed, it is a work that
invites both casual perusal--an episode here, an adventure there--and
a careful sequential reading in order to yield all its treasures.  As
Jane H.M. Taylor has observed of the Perceforest: "It is a
measure of the writer's remarkable success that the reader's
sympathies engage with the heroes and heroines, and that we arrive at
the end of the sixth book breathless perhaps, but neither lost nor
bored." [2]

The text is made easy to navigate by a comprehensive table of contents
that breaks the work down by books and chapters with detailed
descriptive titles conveying the main action of the narrative episodes.
Even more useful is Bryant's Introduction, the general style of which
is chatty and draws parallels between the events depicted in the
Perceforest and the kind of story-telling that seems appealing
to a 21st-century audience.  Besides its very accessible tone, the
Introduction also demonstrates the translator's deep understanding of
the text: Bryant discusses such thematic elements of the text as
"Action and Entertainment"; "Chivalry"; "Women"; "Fragility, Fortune
and the Creator"; "Love"; "The 'New Law,' Morality, Secularism and
Magic"; and "Blood and Conflict."  Each of these sections of the
Introduction functions as a kind of "mini-essay"-- complete with
footnotes and analysis of key passages--thus providing a vue
d'ensemble of the text as a whole from a variety of positions or
interests.  The result is that before even beginning to tackle the
text proper, the reader has a clear sense of what the major themes and
ideals are, where in time the text begins and how it moves forward.
One even has a sense of the style and interests of the medieval author,
as much as that can be conveyed in a translation and short discussion.
What the Introduction does best is to provide the reader with a series
of "orientation points" as (s)he begins the journey through the
narrative--Bryant does an admirable job helping to keep us from
getting lost in the Perceforest's "forests of adventure" by
offering a series of "hooks" that can help one focus and avoid
becoming overwhelmed by the sheer number of narrative threads,
characters, and themes.  Bryant offers us a place to start, and
readers then have a helpful foundation from which to begin their own
investigations of the Perceforest.  The critical apparatus is
rounded out with a short list of important scholarly works on the text
and it identifies the medieval manuscripts in which it is to be found.

Nigel Bryant's translation of the Perceforest is engaging for
the student, helpful for the scholar, and promises to make this very
important work accessible to a much larger population than has
heretofore been the case.  This can only be to the good, as with more
interest in and appreciation of this very important text, our
understanding of the fourteenth century and matters of class, culture,
literary genre, and social ideals is greatly enhanced and deepened.
One can also imagine the possibility of using this text--or large
sections of it--in the classroom, something previously difficult or
impossible.  Nigel Bryant deserves our thanks, appreciation, and
admiration.
--------
Notes:
1. Jacques Barchilon, "L’histoire de la Belle au bois dormant
dans le Perceforest," Fabula 31.1-2 (1990): 17-23.
2. Jane H.M. Taylor, "Perceforest," in The New Arthurian
Encyclopedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York and London: Garland
Publishing, 1996), 355-356.