Category: History

A 1988 essay by Jeffrey Hart (professor of English, Dartmouth) about the rise of empiricism and the demotion of philosophical knowledge addresses a myth about the Middle Ages:

This great success story has some humorous and little known features. As customarily recounted, the story features enlightenment and progress winning the day against medieval superstition. In fact, the medieval period was relatively rational. Its folklore and fairy tales, its giants and dragons, were known to be fictions. It was the Renaissance that was riddled with superstition. Bacon and the empirical thrust indeed made their way against Aristotle and the medieval Schoolmen, but also against a world in which the French royalty was guided by Nostradamus, there was likely to be an alchemist or an astrologer in the next apartment, and audiences flocked to plays about Faust or Prospero, or plays in which the opening featured witches or commands from a ghost. The Renaissance did recover Homer and Virgil, but also the underground occult wrirtings of the ancient world as well.
The appeal of magic both black and white during the Renaissance clearly reflects a will-to-control analogous to that of the new empiricism. Faust flew through the air long before the Wright brothers did, and Nostradamus claimed to be predicting the major events of the next 7000 years — and he was taken seriously.

Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was a Catholic convert, author, and priest who, among other things, helped G.K. Chesterton make his conversion to the Faith. Knox’s extensive literary output ranged from apologetics and poetry to scholarship and detective fiction. As one observer suggested, his epitaph could have been “R.I.P. Ronald Knox, translator of the Holy Bible and author of
‘The Viaduct Murder.'”
On January 16, 1926, he unintentionally stirred up panic across Britain with his own tongue-in-cheek BBC broadcast. He sent up the conventions of radio news by announcing that a mob in London had stormed the National Gallery, attacked the Houses of Parliament, blown up the Clock Tower, and lynched a minor government minister, all at the instigation of “Mr. Poppleberry, secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues”.

One moment, please. The British Broadcasting Company regrets that one item in the news has been inaccurately given. The correction now follows. It was stated in our news bulletin that the Minister of Traffic had been hanged from a lamp-post in the Vauxhall Bridge Road. Subsequent and more accurate reports show that it was not a lamp-post, but a tramway post, which was used for this purpose.

A look back at the spoof and its aftermath is available at the Radio 4 website, along with an audio reconstruction of the brief program based on an original transcript.

Armed with spears and shields, an army of Frankish foot-soldiers led by Charles “the Hammer” defeated a superior force of invading Muslim cavalry in the Battle of Tours, this day in 732.
Steuben’s painting depicts a gentle Mother and a sleeping Child as the very vanguard of the defenders.

When I’m not here, I’m often translating articles for Wikipedia, and the latest one was painful to do: the biography of a 20th-century German bishop whose servile relationship toward the Nazis was and remains a scandal: Archbishop Conrad Gröber earned himself the nickname “Conrad the Brown” in the early years of the Reich until he turned against the authorities and became one of the “greatest enemies” of the regime.

On this day in 1535, besieging forces conquered the city of Münster, at the time run by a violent Anabaptist cult.
The returning civic authorities put on an impressive display afterward.
(Janet Reno, call your office.)