The Heart of a Bull

Peruvian cuisine tonight. The waitress carefully explained to me, after I ordered it, that it would be the actual heart of an animal. It was delicious. 

The Great Eggnog Riot at West Point

Come for the riot-worthy recipe, stay for the story of Cadet Jefferson Davis's eggnog rebellion.

The lightbulb comes back on

A crazy thought from disappointed Democrats: maybe the Constitution has some answers for how to rein in government when we find ourselves in a minority. It turns out there's federalism, separation of powers, and all kinds of stuff we might want to look into.

Syria

A friend writes:

Events are moving quickly in Syria after Hezbollah was crushed. The Turkish terrorists have taken Hama, the Iraqi parliament has authorized troops to enter Syria, and Russia has pulled its fleet from Tartus. Because Turkey has closed the Bosporus to them, the Russians will have to sail to northwest Russia to reach a friendly port. What a mess. I blame Israel ;-).

Tilghman Island

Travels Before Yule

I’m making a final swing for business before settling down to winter on the mountain. I’ll be on the road until the 13th. Posting may be light. 

What I been sayin'

Several reports of the surprising-but-not-surprising Hunter Biden pardon have mentioned that Hunter will no longer be able to plead the Fifth if called to testify in future probes of corruption on the part of his family, especially his father Joe and his uncle Jim. What that observation immediately suggested to me was that Hunter will be exposed to contempt charges if he does not testify and perjury charges if he does--assuming he won't simply tell the truth, a possibility I discount for the present. Jonathan Turley makes the same point in today's Hill article.

Strangely enough, Still-Sort-of-President Biden could have avoided this trap by commuting Hunter's sentence instead of pardoning him. That was the approach followed by President Bush in the conviction of Scooter Libby. President Bush reportedly felt it was wrong to pardon a crime he actually believed had been committed, but it was reasonable to commute the sentence in light of the unfair and persecutory nature of the prosecution. That ostensibly is also Biden's explanation for the pardon.

Like many, I look forward to pardons for the J6 participants, or commutation to time served at the very least, for any as to whom there may be credible evidence of violence. They've all already experienced more punishment than any rioters I can think of for the 2020-2022 period. Ditto for anyone convicted of standing around outside an abortion clinic praying.

Experimental Archeology and Notre Dame Cathedral

In 1997 an experimental archeology project was begun near Treigny, France. The project was to build a new castle, Guédelon Castle, using only the materials and methods available in the 13th century, in order to learn more about how castles were built. It took 25 years and involved hundreds of craftsmen, bringing about whole new generations of masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, etc., who had years of experience in medieval building methods. In 2019 Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burned down and many of these craftsmen went to work on the rebuilding project.

Wikipedia article explaining the castle project -- lots of pics

Guardian article on the Guédelon Castle craftsmen going to work on Notre Dame

For anyone who is interested in 13th century castle building, I can't recommend the five episodes of the BBC series Secrets of the Castle highly enough. It seems to be available for free on YouTube. (That said, if you already know a great deal about the topic, the series was made for a popular audience and may not be all that exciting.)

Here is the Guédelon Castle website, especially useful if you plan to visit.

Women in Power

As a student of Medieval history I have read a vast number of papers by other students of such history. As the academy has grown more and more heavily female, the proportion of papers about Medieval history that are feminist has waxed larger and larger. Young women who go to college and then grad school are very likely to be feminists, and they want to study women and power-struggle issues because that's what they're interested in anyway. As a consequence, I have read variations of the following paper probably thousands of times:

As a feminist historian, I study the ways in which women were able to pursue and achieve their goals in spite of the restrictive patriarchy of the Middle Ages. In my study of X, I examined the way that she/they were able to achieve a remarkable degree of success in pursuing her/their goals. Even more surprisingly, given the strident patriarchy of the era, I found that her/their chief allies were often the men in her/their lives rather than other women.

I have read this paper many, many times -- about individual women or groups, across social classes whether nobility in Ireland or criminals in France, laity or nuns or abbesses, bakers and brewers and housewives. The conclusion of their research always comes as a surprise, an exception to the reality they assume held sway.

Except it's not an exception; all these papers find the same things, everywhere they look. Just because I have read it so often, I have long been waiting for the breakout female historian who will similarly read such papers and come to question the assumptions they brought to their initial work. Maybe we've been sold a bill of goods about how men and women related in the Middle Ages, as we were about the idea that medieval people thought the world was flat. At one time everyone 'knew' that was true, but it just wasn't the case.

The woman who makes this breakthrough -- and it will have to be a woman, because a man making that argument would never get anywhere, especially not in academia -- will one day be recognized as a historian of the first water. She will overturn the whole field of Medieval studies by showing that some of its basic assumptions are false. She will also improve her contemporary world, both by speaking the truth, but also by improving the relationship between educated men and women who are now taught to view each other as oppositional classes of beings.

While we aren't all the way there yet, historian Erika Graham-Goering has taken us a major step further. She studies especially the area of France around the early period of the Hundred Years War, sort of the height of High Medieval feudalism. What she found ought to be astonishing: she found that women held exactly as large a proportion of positions of power in Medieval France as they do today -- and more than they did after the modern revolution in France.

When historian Erika Graham-Goering checked the number of women who were in power worldwide five years ago, she was surprised. The proportion was the same as it was in France in the 14th century: one in five.

Graham-Goering’s area of expertise is power, who held it, and how it was exercised in the late Middle Ages....  

Graham-Goering focuses on how society was organised. An important finding is that the exercise of power was much less authoritarian and more productive than the impression created in later times. It was about finding practical solutions to situations that arose in the moment.... 

“Women were somewhat more vulnerable to coups, but nonetheless, one in five of those in power were women. When Jeanne married, she remained the legitimate owner of the land.”

Noblemen and women performed many of the same leadership tasks, although few women went to war. An important exception here is Joan of Arc (1412–1431), now a saint in the Catholic Church. For a period during the Hundred Years’ War, she led the French army in the war against England.

“It’s a thought-provoking fact that women lost power after the French Revolution and the introduction of democracy. They could neither be elected nor vote themselves. Whereas when positions were inherited, they actually had a reasonably good chance of being at the top of the hierarchy and in power,” Graham-Goering concludes.

The rise of science in the early modern period has a similar feature: people like to think that history is the story of progress, so that the rise of science should align with a greater acceptance of women and an end to superstitions like witch-burning. In fact, we invented science when we started burning witches. The rise of science and superstition went hand in hand, accompanied with a rise in cultural misogyny. 

By the way, in the US Congress it's a about one-in-four: 25 Senators plus the Vice President as a tiebreaker, 127 of 435 in the House. The fact that I didn't know that without looking it up suggests that we don't really view it as that big a deal; I know how many Republicans and Democrats there are in the Senate without having to look, for example. Among governors, it'll be 13 of 50. It's interesting that these very different times and places have settled on about the same ratio, in spite of having completely different methods of selection. That might also be worth studying, but it is not properly a question for historians.