In the 1530s, as Henry Tudor attempted to gather evidence in his campaign for the annulment of his marriage - and later, his contest with the Pope - a tame intellectual called Leland was sent round the monastic libraries of England to pick up, in the years before the imminent dissolution, texts which might help the royal cause. He also did what he could to secure, for the royal collections, some of the choicest books harboured by the religious orders. He was not very successful in the former enterprise; when he got to the Oxford Greyfriars, where he confidently expected to secure a great haul of the works of Grosseteste, he found ... zilch ... I wonder why ... But in the latter business, he did rather better; there is in Bodley a preconquest book put together by S Dunstan, looted from Glastonbury, with a picture of a prostrate monk which might conceivably have been drawn by the Saint himself.
I hope you made your way through my recent post on the Middle Cornish plays written (probably) at Glasney College in Cornwall, and the iniquities of Bad King Tudor. Leland ... drole, yes? ... found it prudent to 'discover' in Cornwall evidence that Tudor was not so bad, after all; surprise surprise, he was a good religious king and a benefactor of the Church! 1984 and all that! Intellectuals, intellectuals!!
Incidentally, nowadays racial ideologues within the soi-disant 'Celtic' nations (unaware still that research in DNA has disproved any possibility of a common genetic inheritance) are elaborately enthusiastic about a warm pan-Celtic solidarity. However, there is little evidence for this sensitive racial fellow-feeling in the Middle Cornish texts or in sixteenth century history. The sorceress Owbra, while collecting the magical substances whereby to get the amorous Tudor stuck in her bath (memories of/allusions to Anne Bullen 'bewitching' Henry VIII?), includes in her pharmacology the 'noises' ('trosow': 'farts'?) which the Devil 'throws' over Wales.
And, after the Prayer Book Rising of 1549, while the regime's Welsh troops didn't quite manage the long journey to the battlefields until the Italian mercenaries had done most of the slaughtering, they certainly arrived in time to share effectively in the looting. A Exonian (and Protestant) chronicler recorded the contemporary witticism that the prices they charged for selling stuff back to the locals from whom they had stolen it were quite reasonable!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
The Devil may indeed be behind Owbra's pharmacological methods, and not only over Wales. In Philip Massinger's 1632 play, "Maid of Honour", there is a line that reads:
"Tho' the devil fart fire, have at him!"(IV.iv.)
While I expect that your attention will already have been directed to this, I noticed this morning that Dr Edward Feser yesterday took (approving!) notice of your version of the blessed John Henry Newman's'suspense of the teaching munus' explanation of... pontifical nonsense.
[https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2023/07/15/cardinal-newman-archbishop-fernandez-and-the-suspended-magisterium-thesis/]
Pax et bonum!
Am I not right in thinking that S. Dunstan's class book contains the text of Ars Amatoria I ? I trust the saint enjoyed it.
Re: Celtic DNA, it is based on only 2000 people, which is a pretty small data set. So it is less "proven" than "suggestive evidence collected before the real study."
The interest lies in a fair amount of evidence suggesting that tribal DNA is still hanging around in small local areas, and that various Celtic and Saxon tribes are not terribly close in DNA to each other, although everybody seems to have a mix of English/Norman in them. (Except maybe that Cheddar Man descendant.)
I would expect Britons and Bretons to be more alike, and the same with Gauls, Gaels, and Galatians, than Bretons with Gauls. But I would also expect everybody to be mutts, because Celts went everywhere and intermarried with everyone. (Except maybe that enemy tribe right next door.)
Text books on linguistics usually remind us that language, race and culture are three distinct categories, and that one can do a great deal of mischief by confounding them. One category can spread over an area without involving the other two categories to the same degree, although often there is a lot of overlap. Africans brought to the New World as slaves left behind most elements of their former language and culture. The Gauls, following the Roman conquest, exchanged Gaulish for Latin. Japan in the 7th century came under massive cultural influence from China, but did not exchange Japanese for Chinese, although Japanese was profoundly influenced by Chinese, as English has been by Latin. Swedes and Finns are culturally akin, as are Hindi speakers and Tamil speakers. Yet the related languages are Indo-European Swedish and Hindi. Finnish is Uralic, Tamil Dravidian.
There is certainly a Celtic branch of the Indo-European family. But is there a Celtic race with which one can express solidarity, if, like me, one is a Kiwi descended from Scottish Highlanders, Welsh and Irish? Apparently the DNA says no. When Wales met Ireland in the 2011 Rugby World Cup, it was billed as the "Celtic Clash." But this is rhetoric, not science.
There is also a Germanic branch of Indo-European. But there seems to be little enthusiasm for expressing one's racial solidarity with the Germanic peoples. Expressing one's solidarity with the Celtic race is cool. Expressing one's soldarity with the Germanic Volk - somewhat less so.
80 years ago, there was not much sign of racial solidarity among the Germanic-speaking peoples. The English speakers, save the neutral Irish, were in conflict with the German speakers, save the neutral Swiss. The Dutch and Scandanavian speakers, save the neutral Swedes, were unwilling vassals of the German speakers. And the German speakers disavowed any racial solidarity with the Yiddish speakers.
Post a Comment