Some works of Jean Bodin

 Jean Bodin, who is this these days perhaps best known for his musings on Historiography, engaged in problems of religion and tolerance as well. His only posthumously published Conference of the Seven Wise Men on the Hidden Secrets of Sublime Things (Colloquium heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis) clearly belongs into this category. It's seven speakers represent the views that Bodin was familiar with (summary by ChatGPT 3.5):

Coronaeus - Represents traditional Catholicism.

Fridericus - A Lutheran who defends Protestantism.

Curtius - A Calvinist, representing the Reformed tradition.

Torres - A Jew, offering a Jewish perspective.

Senamus - A skeptic, embodying the voice of doubt and questioning.

Salomon Barcassius - A Muslim, representing Islamic thought.

Octavius Fagnola - A Deist, who argues for a natural religion devoid of specific dogma.

Van Houts on Early Norman Poetry

 Elisabeth Van Houts, as so often, offers an exciting interpretation of Jezebel and Semiramis, two 10th century Norman poems that may be related as critiques of Emma of Normandy.

The Rise of Arthurian Legends and the Plantagenet Empire

This is almost a guest-post, since it contains so much information provided by my frequent collaborator, Beparo.

When reading up on Wace's Roman de Rou, or A History of the Norman People, as some translate it, I was struck by the role that Wace had played in bringing the Round Table of King Arthur into existence, so to speak, by inserting it into his adaptive translation Roman de Brut, completed in 1155, of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Kings of Britain (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxvi).

So in the middle of this negotiation of how to bridge these two land groups together (an attempt that does extend back to Saxon migrations and the Viking raiding of the 9th century, make no mistake), we have this influx of mythology. Perhaps the claims to the Roman mantle of power are again at disposition? The papacy is definitely involved in this shuffle, as the troubles that Wace go into for backing Becket against Henry II remind us (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxxvii).

The Round Table may have Welsh roots, perhaps. The Winchester Round Table is perhaps the most interesting aspect in that question. As Beparo put it,

It was almost certainly Edward I who commissioned it, ca. 1260?;  so, maybe a century after Wace had been making the rounds.  But Henry VIII had it renovated, and the current paint job (with the Tudor Rose conspicuously in the middle of the table) dates to his era.  I seem to recall somewhere coming across speculation this was done in advance of Charles V's state visit in May of 1522;  the monarchs visited Winchester, where Charles would have seen it.  Given the Habsburg claim to Roman imperial succession, the implicit message probably wasn't lost. 

Those speculators however may have gotten

... Charles V confused with Francis I.  The state visit of 1522 was preceded by another in 1520, which was part of the run-up to the Field of the Cloth of Gold---yet another of these complicated trans-channel exercises where everybody was trying to trump everyone else's claim to be the sole inheritor of the Roman imperial purple.

As Beparo reminds us, the notion of inheriting the Roman imperial purple, and the imperial control implied, had found its traces in the Welsh sources in the figure of the late-Roman general Magnus Maximus, whose traces as Macsen Wledig are found in the Mabinogion. (Not all traces in Mabinogion are this historically grounded; the backdrop of The Dream of Rhonabwy for example is more complicated to discern.)

This is interesting because the compilation process of the Mabinogion belongs into the 12th and 13th century, when the French tradition of romance (the literary genre, not the vernacular translation of Wace's) was in full swing and flowing back onto the English Isles. For example, Wace's Roman de Brut was translated into English between 1200-1220 by Layamon, a Parish priest from Worchester (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxvi). 

Of course, these back-and-forth connections between England and the modern day French shoreline reach back before the Conquest even. Wace himself is in some way linked to Duke Robert of Normandy, the father of William the Conqueror, who had attempted his own invasion of England and ended up with his fleet on Jersey instead, which connected Wace biologically to Turstin, the duke's chamberlain (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxxv). 

William brought Breton soldiers with him to Hastings (Ralph de Gael from Rennes; Apdx 40 and Saint Saveur le Victome, Apdx 89 in: Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, pp.xlvii-lxii)), who settled in the Welsh border marches, controlling Monmouth castle after 1080. This aristocracy has been suggested by Frank Stanton and others as the nobility from which men like Geoffrey of Monmouth hailed (discussed in: Brynley F Roberts, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cardiff, 1991). Perhaps even the name Arthur was more Breton than Welsh, after all.

Treating Beggers around Dijon over two centuries

When introducing the term "horizontal mobility", Braudel defers to a book on the environs of 17th century Dijon.

In the sixteenth century, a beggar would be fed and cared for before he was expelled [from the town]. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, he would have his head shaven. Later he was more likely to be whipped and by the end of the century the full weight of a repressive society set him to forced labour. -- Gaston Roupnel, La ville de la campagne au XVIIeme siecle. Etudes sur les populations du pays dijonnais, 2nd ed, 1955.

Quoted in: Braudel, The Mediterranean,  Book 2, p.704.

L'art de fabriquer le salin et la potasse

I am still trying to figure out the relationship between

L'art de fabriquer le salin et la potasse ; suivi des Expériences sur les moyens de multiplier la fabrication de la potasse ([Reprod.]) / par le citoyen Pertuis, & par le citoyen B. G. Sage... (Bavarian library copy) and the Lavoisier article from 1779 with the same title (catalog entry). Earlier I confused the Lavoisier book with this article on just Salpeter production, which Lavoisier also wrote when a regisseur at the poudre commission.

At first I thought that Pertuis and Sage were regisseurs with Lavoisier, but that seems unlikely based on this essay. At the same time, the name and the structure look so similar, that one suspects it might be a reprint, cleansed for the Republic (as the labels citoyen make one suspect).

One thing is certain: Lavoisier was executed in 1794.

Prof Marco Beretta of the University of Bologna, in a private communication, pointed out [typos rectified, RCK], that L'art de fabriquer le salin et la potasse was

... originally published anonymously upon a report made by Tillet, Cadet, Sage and Lavoisier. The report was probably written and conducted by Lavoisier. In the second ed. the experiments by Pertuis were added and for [from?] the index it seems that a few experiments by Sage were also added to the original ones. Thus, although Sage and Pertuis claim to be the author of the whole work[, this] was misleading to say the least, [but] their additions, apparently not particularly significant, justified the appearance of their names on the frontispiece.

However, an analytical comparison of the two editions remains a desideratum.

some French uses of the notion of an intellectual matrix

In its French form, la matrice intellectuelle, the concept is used to reconstruct the world stance of an intellectual movement. (Care has to be taken when reading these French texts, esp feminist authors, as matrice on its own also can mean the uterus. Cf. Emilie Malefant below, where about 70% of the references are anatomical.)

The French historian Yvan Lamond, in his essay L’émergence de l’intellectuel vue des Amériques, (pp.114f), in the reader of Michel Trebitsch, Marie-Christine Granjon (ed), Pour une histoire comparée des intellectuels: textes, 1998, Lamond speaks both of the cultural matrix and the intellectual matrix of the time of the Dreyfus Affaire, which that affair highlighted and revealed (p.114), to the point of bringing about the intellectual as a cultural force (p.115). Lamond provides no other clues about this construct.

The French historian Etienne Fouilloux, in his book Une Eglise en quête de liberté : La pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II (1914-1962) [i.e. A Church in Search of Liberty: French Catholic Thought during Modernism and the 2nd Vatican, 1914-1962], Paris (1998), p.10, can write:

The modernist crisis constitutes the intellectual matrix of contemporary Catholicism precisely insofar as it is defined as a re-reading of the founding message in light of the scientific forms of knowledge of the last century. (p.10)

In her master thesis from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, Emilie Malenfant reconstructs the genealogy of the intellectual matrix of misogyny of the Third Reich, without ever defining what that might be or offering clues to the secondary literature. Malenfant wants to have an "ideological matrix" that is not restricted to the intellectual, but widened to encompass medicine, philosophy, sociology and politics (p.21). Clearly she assumes that the philosophical discourse contributes to the matrix construction (p.25), bringing also the cultural into the game when writing about the "intellectual and cultural matrix" (p.25), though without distinguishing it properly from either of the constituent matrices of the conjunction.

French Wikipedia does not define the term, but use it. For example, in its article on the French Militia, they write:

L'organisation est fondée sur 21 points qui donnent la matrice idéologique du mouvement : « contre le capitalisme international, pour le corporatisme français », « contre la condition prolétarienne, pour la justice sociale », « contre la lèpre juive, pour la pureté française », « contre la franc-maçonnerie païenne, pour la civilisation chrétienne ».

PS: The Argentinian Sephardic theologian Mario Javier Saban wrote a Spanish book that placed the matrix straight into the title: La Matriz Intelectual del Judaismo y La Genesis de Europa, 2005.

Derrida and Olson discuss Composition

These quotes are from an interview between Jacques Derrida and Gary A. Olson on rhetoric and composition:

You have to adjust your teaching according to the situation. I call my students in France back to the most traditional ways of reading before trying to deconstruct texts; you have to understand according to the most traditional norms what an author meant to say, and so on. So I don’t start with disorder; I start with the tradition. If you’re not trained in the tradition, then deconstruction means nothing. It’s simply nothing.

That’s why there is not one deconstruction, and deconstruction is not a single theory or a single method. I often repeat this: deconstruction is not a method or a theory; it’s something that happens—it happens. And it happens not only in the academy; it happens everywhere in the world. It happens in society, in history, in the army, in the economy, and so on. What is called deconstruction in the academy is only a small part of a more general and, I would say, older process. There are a number of decon­structions occurring everywhere.

Now, if we refer to deconstruction as an organized discourse which appeared under that name some twenty-five years ago, of course, this phenomenon, as such, appeared in France. Nevertheless, it was not originally French; it appeared in France as already the heritage of a number of old things—German things, for instance. It was a new hybrid or graft, the French graft, of something older which implies Marxism, Heideggere­anism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and so on.

So contrary to what some people think I think—for instance, Habermas—I would be on the side of philosophy, logic, truth, reference, etc. When I question philosophy and the philosophical project as such, it’s not in the name of sophistics of rhetoric as just a playful technique. I’m interested in the rhetoric hidden in philosophy itself because within, let’s say, the typical Platonic discourse there is a rhetoric—a rhetoric against rhetoric, against sophists. I’ve been interested in the way concepts or arguments depend intrinsically on metaphors, tropes, and are in themselves to some extent metaphors or tropes. I’m not saying that all concepts are essentially metaphors and therefore everything is rhetoric. No, I try to deconstruct the opposition between concept and metaphor and to rebuild, to restructure this field. I m not at ease with metaphor either. I’m not saying, “Well, we should just substitute metaphor for concept or simply be content with metaphors”.

Polyptiques and Polyptycha

For a while, I was all about monastic administrative documents of the early Carolingian era, and during this time I had acquired a cool book

• Dieter Hägermann, Das Polyptychon von Saint-Germain-des-Prés: Studienausgabe, Köln-Weimar-Wien (Böhlau) 1993.

and located the cool website of the University of Leicester, which provides an overview of the existing polyptiques, Latin texts and English translations; cf the example of Weissenburg.

A similar intention lies behind the cartularies, and here the book I acquired was

• Constance Brittain Bouchard, The Cartulary of Montier-en-Der, 666-1129, Toronto (University of Toronto Press), 2004.