Reviews and News:
“The shaky writing of the 13th-century annotator known as the Tremulous Hand, who is believed to have made as many as 50,000 notes on Old English manuscripts in an attempt to make them comprehensible to later readers, is revealed in all its wobbly glory by a new project from the British Library.”
Like me, you may have people in your Twitter feed who have lashed out at pictures of books turned spine inward on bookshelves. Are the people who do this “monsters”? Perhaps. Or maybe they’re just nostalgic for the early 16th century when life was shorter and simpler and when people always placed books on bookcases with spines towards the wall: “[T]he practice of adding the title and author’s name to the spine of a book did not begin in earnest until the mid-16th century and was not common until the 17th century. If a book’s spine held no information, there was no reason for it to be seen. Moreover, the spine of the book was viewed as its ‘back’: a means of holding the leaves together that was functional, not presentable.”
Roger Kimball recommends In Medias Res, “a new online journal devoted to the Classics.”
A bold if not entirely convincing defense of John C. Calhoun: “Once hailed as a political genius, John C. Calhoun is today either forgotten or condemned as a slavery apologist. Scholars dismiss his ideas as incoherent or misguided. In John C. Calhoun’s Theory of Republicanism, John Grove attempts to turn this consensus on its head. He believes Calhoun deserves mention alongside our greatest philosophic statesman and most serious political thinkers.”
The ancient and modern worlds are not so far apart, after all, as Picasso’s interest in the Minotaur shows.
Randall Smith explains why senior faculty should teach first-year students.
Essay of the Day:
In The Spectator, Tom Carter writes about why he went on a pilgrimage and why it appeals to young people today:
“In the Middle Ages, the Way of Saint James – as it is known in English – was one of the Christian world’s three great pilgrimage routes, matched only by those to Jerusalem and Rome. What is rumoured to have begun with the discovery of St James’ remains at the turn of the ninth century peaked in the 14th and 15th, when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims would set out from across Europe to this new Rome of the West.
“The route was on the frontline of the cultural battle against Moorish Spain, with the monasteries dotted along the route putting up pilgrims and hardening local Christian identity in equal measure. But a triple-whammy of religious war, plague and Reformation saw visitor numbers decline; by the mid-20th century, only a trickle of pilgrims made it to Santiago’s cathedral each year.
“Recent decades have seen a remarkable resurgence: numbers have increased hundredfold in just 30 years, and I was one of more than 270,000 people who completed the pilgrimage in 2016.
“The numbers may be back at their pre-Reformation levels, but the pilgrims have changed: for many, Christianity is incidental. The popular image of this new breed of pilgrim is of someone coming to terms with a life already largely lived. The divorced, the bereaved and the slightly New Age, looking for a modern kind of penance – and to lose a few pounds while they’re at it.
“There is some truth in this image: the Radiohead-loving septuagenarian was not entirely atypical of the kind of people I met along the Way. But they weren’t the only punters. When I embarked on the walk, I was 21 and had just finished my degree. I was too young to marry let alone divorce, and I didn’t yet have a job from which to quit.
“Nor was I alone. There is a small but growing contingent of fresh-faced pilgrims, straight out of school or university: In 2016, 75,000 people under the age of 30 walked the Camino, more than double the 30,000 young people who walked it in 2005.”
Photos: SpaceX Falcon Heavy
Poem: Gregory Fraser, “Nothing But a Few Bare Trees”
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