Quebec college teacher saves civility with non-confrontational protest model

What's the key here?  Unhappy energy being redirected into hitting your own noisemaker instead of a human opponent?

From the Globe and Mail:

Twelve days have passed since Montreal’s last riot and fire, eight days since the city’s last mass arrest, and about that long since the last person bled from a serious clash between police and protesters.

In little more time than it takes to launch a teargas canister, an explosive situation was defused in Montreal two weeks ago by an unassuming teacher from a college outside the city. Using social media and the now-famous pots-and-pans protest, teacher François-Olivier Chené pulled Montreal back from the edge.

Those clanging pots, known as les casseroles, were initially seen as just another tactic, but a remarkable thing happened: Ordinary citizens armed only with kitchenware took back their streets from rock-throwers and riot police. They also pushed student and government leaders back to the negotiating table with fresh hope the conflict might end. (Whether the relative peace will last is anyone’s guess.)

“The release of tension is one of the best things that happened with this,” said Mr. Chené, who teaches politics at a college in Saint-Hyacinthe, just southeast of Montreal. “The students were exhausted. The police were, too. Not all students are communists and anarchists, not all police abuse their power. The tension was high, and this gave everybody a way out.”

Unimpressed by both radicals and authorities, Kevin Audet-Vallée, a graduate student in history at the Université de Montréal, was among the early adopters of the new form of protest. “Things have happened so fast, we have a tendency to forget two weeks ago there was a riot with fires in the streets and people were talking about calling in the army. The casseroles changed the game,” he said.

On May 18, as the provincial legislature prepared to pass Bill 78, a law to postpone classes for students on strike and give police new power to crack down on protests, Mr. Chené went on Facebook to launch his appeal for the pot-and-pan demonstrations, inviting people to take to their balconies with their pots. A few hundred people accepted in the early days.

By last weekend, the protests peaked with tens of thousands of Quebeckers in dozens of cities and towns taking to the street.

Mr. Chené’s original plan was that protesters would stick to balconies and sidewalks for only a few minutes and avoid confronting the law. Thousands of protesters gathering in scattered Montreal neighbourhoods overwhelmed such constraints. “That part was very spontaneous,” he said.

The din of wooden-spoon-on-wok overtook the soundscape Montrealers had grown to fear: rocks thrown against glass, fusillades of plastic bullets and police helicopters flying overhead.

More importantly, students now make up a minority of people in the streets, overtaken by legions of grandparents, young professionals and children. People who shrugged at a tuition hike, the point of student protest, were drawn out by the new law and poor handling of the crisis by the province.

“It was suddenly a lot harder to paint the students as violent radicals. Students aren’t even the dominant force any more. There are as many grey heads as students. It’s completely peaceful, and it’s filled with average Joes,” said Mr. Audet-Vallée.

The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance, by Christopher MacEvitt. Another good one

Christopher MacEvitt's book has a certain resemblance to Giancarlo Casale's book on Ottoman exploration. It's about an important, difficult subject; it goes against the prevailing wisdom; and it is based on difficult research in fragmentary sources.

MacEvitt presents  the prevailing wisdom  about relations between Western Christians settling in the holy land and the Eastern Christians who already lived there, thus:  as a case of colonial segregation. There are not a lot of sources that discuss the legal situation, how legal doctrines actually worked, or how Eastern and Western Christians interacted in daily life. The sources we do have come from the 13th century, after the restoration of the kingdom of Jerusalem following its destruction in the 1180s. MacEvitt has returned to the 12th century, and done his best to find the real story of daily life in charters and, in the north where Armenian documents exist in some numbers, chronicles, to see whether different Christian groups actually lived strictly segregated.

Well of course, he concludes that 13th century evidence gives a false picture of the earlier era. In contrast to the effort by churchmen and legislators to classify people by ecclesiastical and even Christological criteria, the early crusader states were characterized by an effort to obscure the dividing lines. Although there was a strong argument for giving priority to the person's ecclesiastical allegiance in legal and status matters, MacEvitt portrays a society where most people did not want to live in religiously-defined silos. They wanted to have a certain degree of freedom of association, and there was a consistent effort by documented individuals to make sure that they were not pinned down against their will. That does not mean that everybody loved everyone else or that some groups were not more important than others. That's the rough in "rough tolerance."

 Over the last year the situation in Syria has made me realize how very diverse the country is even now. Sometimes the divisions– religious divisions – between Syrians don't matter very much, and other times you are forced to pick a side, generally one chosen for you by unsympathetic neighbors.  And then you fight till everybody's tired of fighting, or one group establishes a short or long-term supremacy. It looks to me like during the crusading times, things were not that different.  Except in the 12th and 13th century, there was always some Frank or Turk or Egyptian or Byzantine showing up to claim the land and the holy places. But if you look back a century or so and realize that Syria not so long ago included Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel, then maybe that difference disappears, too.

Update:  can sectarianism be discussed in today's Syria?  Should it?  From Ehsani at Syria Comment:

This is what a Syrian commentator wrote on one of the social media outlets this morning:

“Anyone that mentions the name of sect or religion in Syria, in any context, and all those who incite sect or religion in Syria, in any context and all those who try to show a range as a victim and a look executioner in any context is a traitor to Syria and Syria is innocent of it. All intolerance for other than Syria is betrayal. Martyrs have one religion and one sect and that is Syria. Blood flowing on the soil of Syria have a single identity and that is the identity of Syria.”

كل من يذكر اسم طائفة أو دين في سوريا بأي سياق و كل من يحرض على طائفة أو دين في سوريا بأي سياق وكل من يحاول أن يظهر طائفة بمظهر الضحية و طائفة بمظهر الجلاد بأي سياق هو خائن لسوريا و سوريا بريئة منه فكل تعصب لغير سوريا قدس الأقداس خيانة.
للشهداء دين واحد و طائفة واحدة هي سوريا فالدماء التي تسيل على تراب سوريا لها هوية واحدة هي الهوية السورية

While it is hard to argue with pleas to ignore religious and sectarian tendencies that may incite more killings and hatred, ignoring the obvious demons we face does not strike me as a credible solution.

It should be obvious to all of us by now that fake stability is an unsustainable model that is unlikely to last for long. Societies cannot advance and prosper unless they openly face their demons and discuss their long held taboos.

I, for one, want every Syrian to openly discuss everything that ails our society. This covers the role of religion and sectarianism.

Image:  Not St. George; St. Sergios.

Everybody has their favourite pirates: Giancarlo Casale’s The Ottoman Age of Exploration

Near the beginning of Giancarlo Casale's  book, he remarks that the famous explorer-hero Prince Henry the Navigator was basically a pirate.  What follows is an entire book about Ottoman pirates of the 16^thcentury, whose role in expanding the trade in the Indian Ocean basin Casale obviously admires.  He knows they are pirates, or the next best thing, but then everybody has their favourite pirates.Casale has done his subjects proud.  His Ottoman admirals/merchants/corsairs are now part of the English language scholarly narrative of the age  of exploration, in a form that is accessible to any one who is really interested.

Casale argues that just as the Portugal and Spain created entirely new empires based on trading opportunities in seas unfamiliar to them, so did the Ottoman Empire, which before the 16^th century had been entirely oriented to the Mediterranean.  The story of 16^th century exploration in the eastern hemisphere should not be seen as merely  one of Christian Europe expanding into Muslim seas.  Although the Ottomans were Muslims, they had to work just as hard to find and exploit the new opportunities of the time.  Casale argues convincingly that the Ottomans were just as crucial as the Portuguese in creating a new global field of geopolitical competition.  And maybe they did better.

Here is where a certain amount of sentimentality comes in.  The book is a tribute to Ottomans whose role in politics, trade, exploration and cartography has long been underappreciated, in good part because theso few people have the necessary languages.  But at the end of the book of we are in a position to see that even if the trade in that region had increased dramatically, the Ottomans working to monopolize it, like their Portuguese counterparts, failed to create a viable Indian Ocean empire.  Nevertheless, Casale succeeds: he brings to life an interesting part of world history and made me care about it. 

Laying down my arms

Some of you know that I have long been a member of the SCA -- for about as long as I have been studying the real Middle Ages, 40 years and more. One of the main activities I took part it was fighting in the lists and on the  mock battlefield. I loved fighting, and once upon a time I was pretty good, back in the pioneering days of the sport.  I have been doing it a lot less recently because of health problems and the reduced energy of older age, which combined to make me less enthusiastic about being hit with sticks by large, unsympathetic men.  I just lacked  the faith that I would bounce back from an injury.

This week I found I have another health problem -- blood clots in both lungs. I was actually admitted to hospital where I was started on a course of anticoagulants, some of which I may be on for the rest of my life. So that is it for being hit, at least on purpose, by large unsympathetic men (not to mention the women).

Things could be worse. I was the least ill person in the crucial care unit of my hospital, where I was stuck because there were no beds in ordinary wards. At those times that I wasn't tied down too much by wires and IV tubes I could get around perfectly well, which is more than can be said about everybody else.

Sharia and Egypt: what it means, or may mean

The Carnegie Endowment has a meaty Q&A.

Among other things it explains why sharia is not going away any time soon:

What is the Islamic sharia?

The term “Islamic sharia” has subtly different denotations and sharply different connotations in Egypt than it often does in the United States or Europe. There is a reason many scholars insist that defining it as “Islamic law” (as it is often described in non-Muslim countries) is sometimes overly narrow. Sharia includes large areas of personal conduct not generally covered by legal rules in many societies (such as the regulation of prayer or ritual purity). Not only does it blend private practice, ethics, and public law, but it also includes categories such as detestable (but not prohibited) or preferred (but not required) that make ethical but little legal sense. A vaguer but more accurate translation might be “the Islamic way of doing things.”

And that is the definition accepted by many who follow sharia. Such a translation makes clear why the Islamic sharia is hard to oppose. It is one thing to questionhudud punishments (for serious crimes) by claiming to wish to follow the spirit but not the letter of traditional understandings. It is something quite different to proclaim that one prefers to do things in a non-Islamic manner or that Islamic teachings have no relevance in public life. It would be as unexpected as U.S. politicians claiming they prefer the “un-American way.” Public opinion polls on the subject provoke the same response among the broader society.

Of course, the Islamic sharia is not merely the equivalent of a flag pin for a politician’s lapel; it has enormous practical and not simply symbolic content. But observers should not expect many calls to abandon the Islamic sharia in Egyptian political debates.

There is another terminological oddity that can shed some light on the connotations of the Islamic sharia: following Egyptian usage, I have been referring to “Islamic sharia,” a phrase that seems almost comically redundant in English, like referring to a “Jewish rabbi.” A non-Islamic sharia might seem to be something like a “Protestant pope.” But Egyptians will sometimes refer to other religious communities as sharias.

A review of Constance Heiatt's most recent book on medieval cookery: Cocatrice and Lampray Hay

Reproduced from the excellent review source, The Medieval Review 

Hieatt, Constance B. ed. and trans. Cocatrice and Lampray Hay: LateFifteenth-Century Recipes from Corpus Christi College Oxford.
Totnes: Prospect Books, 2012. Pp. 176. GBP30.00/$60.00. ISBN: 978-1-903018-84-2.
 Reviewed by Melitta Weiss Adamson     The University of Western Ontario     melitta@uwo.ca

For nearly four decades the study of food in medieval England has beeninextricably linked with the name Constance B. Hieatt.  Her 1976 bookPleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks, which she co-authored with the late Sharon Butler, became a best-seller.  Apaperback edition in 1979 was followed by a completely revised secondedition in 1996 with Brenda Hosington as her collaborator.  In 1985,Hieatt and Butler published Curye on Inglysch, and in 1988appeared Hieatt's edition of An Ordinance of Pottage.  TheLibellus de Arte Coquinaria, published in 2001, was the resultof her collaboration with the late Rudolf Grewe.  To the books fromthis period must be added many shorter pieces which appeared inSpeculum, Medium Aevum, and elsewhere.  In addition tomaking more of the medieval manuscripts available in scholarlyeditions and translations, and offering modern adaptations for many ofthe recipes, Hieatt soon recognized the need for a comprehensive listof extant culinary manuscripts from medieval Europe and collaboratedwith Carole Lambert, Bruno Laurioux and Alix Prentki on the 1992Répertoire des manuscrits médiévaux contenant des recettesculinaires, which is included in the book Du manuscrit à la
table edited by Carole Lambert.  The Répertoire remains to
this day one of the most important reference works for medievalEuropean cookbook manuscripts.  With a good number of the extantculinary manuscripts from England accessible in print by the beginningof the new millennium, Hieatt set out to collate the various versionsof individual recipes and in collaboration with the late Terry Nutterand Johnna H. Holloway published the Concordance of EnglishRecipes: Thirteenth Through Fifteenth Centuries in 2006, which she
followed two years later with her book A Gathering of MedievalEnglish Recipes containing editions of various shorter culinary
manuscripts and a supplement to the 2006 Concordance.
With Cocatrice and Lampray Hay Constance Hieatt returns to amanuscript she and the late Sharon Butler had first begun totranscribe around 1980, but put aside on account of its manydifficulties (22).  Corpus Christi College Oxford MS F 291 is amanuscript from the end of the fifteenth century, written in MiddleEnglish and possibly originating from Norfolk (10).  Its recipes,unlike most in the earlier cookbook manuscripts from England and thecontinent, are very detailed and provide quantities for manyingredients.  The dishes usually serve between sixteen and eightydiners (20).  The recipe titles in the table of contents on fols. 1v-2v correspond largely but not completely with the recipes that followon fols. 3r-68r.  The main differences are due to some recipe titlesomitted in the table of contents, and two sheets now missing from thecodex.  All in all, Hieatt calculates that the cookbook likely oncecomprised 101 recipes of which 99 are extant today, most of themwritten in one hand (10-11, 19).  For each recipe, the editor providesthe transcription of the original text, a modern English translation,and a commentary which in most cases also contains notes for moderncooks who would like to interpret the dishes.  Since she does notoffer modern adaptations of the recipes complete with exact quantitiesand cooking instructions, the notes are geared more towards theexperienced cook than the novice.  Although many recipes havecounterparts in other manuscripts, the Corpus Christi College cookbookis not directly related to any of those recipe-collections, as Hieattpoints out (11).  What becomes clear from reading her comments to therecipes is that vocabulary, some of which not found anywhere else,confused instructions, and scribal errors pose the biggest problems toour understanding of the manuscript today.  We are fortunate thatConstance Hieatt decided to publish the recipe collection late in hercareer when she had the extant cookbook tradition of medieval Englandat her fingertips and was able to solve more of the problems than anyof her peers or she herself at an earlier time would have been ableto.  The book concludes with a supplement to the Concordance of2006 which combines the new material from the Corpus Christi Collegemanuscript with that contained in the 2008 supplement of AGathering of Medieval English Recipes (145-172).  Future users
will therefore only need to consult one supplement to theConcordance rather than two.  As in the 2006Concordance, Hieatt also provides a helpful "Glossary of RecipeTitles Used as Lemmas and Cross-Index of Variant Titles" at the end(173-176).
The cuisine reflected in the ingredients and recipes of the CorpusChristi College manuscript is that of a wealthy household.  Pepper,cinnamon, saffron and salt are the standard seasonings; honey in morethan half of the recipes, together with the ubiquitous figs and datespoint to a preference for sweetness.  Other prominent ingredients arealmond milk and grated bread used as a thickener.  The cookbook startson a flamboyant note with a recipe for "cocatrice," or basilisk, afabulous creature half piglet and half chicken (Recipe 1), and endswith a recipe for apple sauce (Recipe 99).  Hieatt describes the orderof the recipes in the collection as "quite eccentric" and detects "nodiscernable overall rationale" (11).  And yet, the collection doesfall into various sections which may point to different medievalsources from which it was compiled and/or various attempts to sort therecipes.  Many of the first thirteen recipes would have been suitablefor a banquet as a sotelty or surprise dish such as the aforementioned"cocatrice" or the skillfuly stuffed chicken (Recipe 4) or stuffedmackerel (Recipe 5).  Following the group of pastries under thesubheading "Baken Mete" (Recipes 14-19), we find two recipes forkeeping foodstuffs for extended periods of time, namely pea pods(Recipe 20), and venison (Recipe 21).  The recipe for "Lampray Hay"opens a long list of fast-day recipes (Recipes 22-55) featuring a vastarray of fish and seafood interspersed with some fruit and vegetabledishes, and a group of four pastry dishes (Recipes 48-51) under thesubheading "Baken Mete for Lentyn."  That "Lampray Hay" containsneither lampray nor hay causes Hieatt to surmise that we may bedealing with a "deliberate joke" (58).  The seventeen recipesfollowing the Lenten dishes are for meat dishes and various pottages(Recipes 56-72).  While most of these are standard recipes also foundin other collections, the five subsequent dishes and dish names notfound anywhere else leave even an expert such as Constance Hieattmystified (Recipe 73-77).  Quite the opposite is the case with thenext set of eight recipes starting with the popular "Morterews"(Recipe 78), "Mawmone" (Recipe 79) and "Blawmanger" (Recipe 80) andending with the simplest of cabbage recipes (Recipe 85).  The editoris unable to place the next recipe with the rather distasteful name"Capoun in Urinele" (Recipe 85) in the medieval English cookbooktradition but vaguely remembers having seen such a recipe before.  Infact, chicken cooked in a glass is a standard recipe in Italiancookbooks of the Liber de coquina tradition where it issometimes referred to as "de gallina implenda" or "gallina cocta incarafia."  The subsequent recipe for "Two Cunnyngs of One" (Recipe 87)in the Corpus Christi College collection also points to an Italianconnection.  The idea of skinning an animal, albeit not a rabbit but adove, roasting the carcass, stuffing the skin with other meat andserving both side by side, is found in the fifteenth-century CuocoNapolitano as Recipe 67, and interestingly followed there by a
recipe for chicken in a carafe (Recipe 68 in the 2000 edition andtranslation by Terence Scully).  In her comments to Recipe 87, Hieattmakes reference to a recipe for two capons from one that is containedin another manuscript from England but does not mention the Neapolitanparallel.  The final set of twelve recipes in the Corpus ChristiCollege cookbook brings an assortment of dishes ranging from pottages,fish and seafood dishes, to gruel, a pudding, pie, tart, and applesauce, all of which may well have been later additions (Recipes 88-99).
Cocatrice and Lampray Hay is Constance Hieatt's latest book onmedieval food but it will not be her last.  Prior to her passing inDecember 2011, she worked on the draft of another book entitled TheCulinary Recipes of Medieval England, which will be published
posthumously.  With her editions, translations, adaptations,concordances, and in-depth studies of medieval and early moderncookery, this prolific scholar has given us tremendous tools withwhich to study early European culinary history.  Now it is up to thenext generation to continue the work and bring the picture that hasemerged thanks to her tireless efforts into an ever sharper focus.Constance Hieatt will be missed by many.

Pseudo-epigraphy in the Ancient Near East

David Meadows forwards this note from Yale:

The letters she [Mary Frazer] studies offer three related challenges, she says. “They present multiple parallels with other genres, such as chronicles, so are generally difficult to classify. Second, the historicity of the events referred to in the letters is often problematic. For some of the letters, there are limited grounds to doubt their authenticity, however others contain such clear anachronisms that they must be seen as pseudonymous compositions, perhaps written retrospectively to justify certain actions of contemporary rulers. My third challenge is to explore the choice of the epistolary form as a medium for historiography.”

 Image: Letter from King Shulgi of Ur to the grand vizier Aradnu, (Yale Babylonian Collection).