According to the Ancients, the greatest of the Lost Books was called “Troy VI: This Time It’s Personal”.

A rented one.

And…

My parents were among the undergraduates who along with Peter Yarrow and others built the Cornell Folk Song Society, which brought in acts like The Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger, and this man, their favorite countertenor (and mine):

Answer to “In the first week”, etc.: Assuming the rate remained steady until today and will through tomorrow, I get 24.5 murders for the month. I’m still working out whether the .5 is an unborn victim, a bisected one, a cat, or something else.

However, I suspect that the second sentence in the quotation is an ancient trick which the writer must think is still clever: It doesn’t read “how many more will there be IN JACKSON before the end of the month”. The “out-of-envelope” figure they’re looking for adds in the rest of the world — so let’s answer “at least in the thousands.”

Or…

I believe you are entirely right.

Hear the supernatural instrument of il Cavaliere Alessandro Moreschi, the “last castrato”, recorded in the Sistine Chapel in 1904, and weep:

Buridan and Of Okham, and even Chaucer, are sometimes referred to as figures in “the Renaissance of the 14th century”.

The Renaissance of the 14th century? Usually the 14th century is regarded as something of a disappointment in intellectual output compared to the preceding century, mainly because of the impact of the Black Death. Ockham is no joke, but the previous century boasts Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Henry of Ghent. The 14th century cannot really compare.

But classifying people on the basis of rather arbitrary time periods is often an exercise that undergraduates do instead of thinking.

Sure, but there’s a reason that the Renaissance is associated with the time period it is rather than otherwise: an emphasis on humanism and on ancient original texts, especially Greek ones, emphasis on rhetorical style and rejection of Scholastic style are all characteristic to it to a degree that is not present earlier. Insisting on a specific date for its start or end is a fool’s errand, granted, but we can still have a rough idea of a period that is characterized by the features mentioned.

At any rate, the reason I claimed that Dante was not a Renaissance figure is not because of when he lived, but because of the sort of themes his writing focuses on, which strike me as much more characteristic of the medieval period than the Renaissance period. I get the sense that people want to claim Dante for the Renaissance because of the relative paucity of great literature during the time period typically associated with the Renaissance.

I’m happy to grant that ‘Middle Ages’ is a poor term though. I prefer ‘Christendom’.

A very interesting observation on something I’ve been wondering about for years. For instance in England you have Chaucer early on, but I’d argue that you don’t find a truly world-class, transformational English painter until Turner after, say, 1800, around 400 years later. In composing, Frederick Delius and Ralph Vaughan Williams were at their peak in, very roughly, 1925. Would you have any ideas as to why this is so often the case? So far I haven’t seen any books or academic journal articles talking about this, although I may not be looking hard enough. Would you have any suggestions? It’s something I’d like to pursue further.

Thanks so much — WK

Dude, people have said much much stupider and much much nastier, myself included. Forget misdemeanors, this is an infraction of an infraction. Let it go.

I think the artist is going for a meso-American snake-god vibe there.

HOW many Romans?

Byzantium was the root of the Renaissance.

Does it work?

I think the rotunda in the National Gallery is one of the most spectacular spaces in north America. The massive columns are this gorgeous green polished stone, with a pantheon style dome above. Just touching the stone columns is exquisite. They appear to be solid stone.

Have not been to Williamsburg yet. The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village is one of Ford’s great contributions. There is a full collection of various types of stationary steam power from the beginning of the industrial revolution in the museum. One of my favorite engines has the body of the engine cast in a gothic revival style. True industrial art.

Well…

Buridan and Of Okham, and even Chaucer, are sometimes referred to as figures in “the Renaissance of the 14th century”. But classifying people on the basis of rather arbitrary time periods is often an exercise that undergraduates do instead of thinking. Taking a term from another field, they’re TSCs — Thought-Stopping Clichés.

And like the Middle East, the Middle Ages aren’t in the “middle” of anything.

There’s a famous quotation from no one knows where that goes something like this:

“With one foot planted firmly in the Middle Ages, Dante saluted the rising dawn of the Renaissance with the other.”

Yes, in general the order of change in artistic transformation is literary, visual, musical. So with Romanticism in all three; so with Symbolism/Impressionism. Of course the categorizations are conveniences to some large extent: Beethoven romantically dedicated his heroic/romantic 3rd to Napoleon (though later changed his mind) and composed for a further quarter-century but is nevertheless considered, more-or-less accurately, to predate the Romantic in music.

Yet even Napoleon came after, of course, the event the most inspired Romanticism. Illustrating that the actual order is reality, literature, visual arts, music.

translated and promoted Classic[al] texts.

Hence the Re- in Renaissance.

Oh God — thanks — this is the most embarrassing thing I’ve done since I was trying to ask Desiré, Koskishinkiletskiwitzeluski to the Fifth Grade graduation dance and threw up on her Mary Janes. Oh gentle Jesus. I’m still picking up the pieces… do you know of any way to do surgery on a published post? O God, O God…

Damn. And thanks. And I take such pride in my proofreading. Evidently the subject got me so fired up that I lost concentration while I was crawling around on the ceiling like Gregor Samsa. Do you know of any way to do surgery on an item that’s already posted? I’m so mortified… this is the worst thing since I scored an own goal in a third-grade soccer game. Or maybe it was when I was trying to ask Desiré Koskiaskashinkeltismastkkoskosonvitch to the fifth-grade graduation dance and threw up her Mary Janes. O God, O gentle Jesus, I’m still picking up the pieces. Oh sweet Mary ‘s blessed immaculate sacred mother’s holy presumputuous assumption…

I and many others would say the Italian Renaissance began in the 1300s with literary works written by humanists like Dante, Coluccio Salutati, and Petrarch, who translated and promoted Classic texts.

And oh, yes, judging by remains in burials, Tenochtitlan and the much earlier giant city, Teotihuacan, do seem to have been population sinks. They had their own “diseases of civilization”, parasitic and otherwise.

Make a note: Don’t date Wendy.

Yes, but even after the epidemic, they had many, many times more people. And their arrows were quite effective. It would be like the Little Bighorn.

Peter Frost suggested something similar with respect to the Iroquois in North America:

https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2011/07/rapid-cultural-evolution-case-of.html

This cultural evolution was actually accelerating when the Europeans arrived. What if their arrival had been postponed? The Iroquois would have certainly surpassed the mound builders of the Mississippi valley and probably reached a level of civilization like that of the Aztecs.

Such a scenario almost did happen. Indeed, conditions were far from ideal when the English and the French began to settle North America. Western Europe was just returning to the population levels that had existed before the Black Death. The North Atlantic was entering a cold period, called “The Little Ice Age,” that made trans-oceanic crossings difficult. Finally, the Turks were pushing deep into Central Europe, laying siege to Vienna in 1529 and 1683 and vowing to drive on to Cologne.

Had this fragile context taken a turn for the worse, there might have been insufficient will or ability to colonize the Americas. European settlers would have perhaps arrived on the Eastern Seaboard only in the late 1700s.

And beyond the Appalachians, they would have found millions of sedentary Amerindians living in fortified cities and recently united under the aegis of the Iroquois Confederacy …

True, but they could mobilize many times the number of warriors. If they could put together a united front, Cortes and his 615 men would be eaten long before they could get to Tenochtitlan/Mexico City. And Europeans wouldn’t be able to get many more soldiers to the new world in the small caravels they had at that time.

They were indeed a rough lot. But they didn’t often burn people as the Inquisition did. And it seems that they treated their slaves better than slaves were treated in Europe. Also, their battles were all hand-to-hand, so they killed a smaller proportion of their enemies in combat than were killed in European wars.

True. But the Mexica alone, not even counting the other states in Mesoamerica, had many times more people than the Eurotrash could have sent over in the small caravels they had at that time. Cortes and his 615 men would have been eaten long before they’d gotten to Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) if they hadn’t had an escort of thousands of warriors who hated the Mexica.

Jack D. and Kagaganovitch are correct. They didn’t have proper batteries and hadn’t sent electricity through wires. Instead the bath plus the piece of jewelry or whatever acted as its own battery. Here’s the bit from Wikipedia:

The Moche independently developed electroplating technology without any Old World influences. The Moche used electricity derived from chemicals to gild copper with a thin layer of gold. In order to start the electroplating process, the Moche first concocted a very corrosive and a highly acidic liquid solution in which they dissolved small traces of gold. Copper inserted into the resulting acidic solution acted both as a cathode and an anode, generating the electric current needed to start the electroplating process. The gold ions in the solution were attracted to the copper anode and cathode and formed a thin layer over the copper, giving the latter the appearance of a solid gold object, even though gold only coated the outermost layer of the copper object. The Moche then allowed the acidic solution to boil slowly, causing a very thin layer/coating of gold to permanently coat the copper anode and cathode. This battery-less electroplating technique was developed around 500 CE by the Moche, a thousand years before Europeans invented the same process.

Oddly enough, on the other side of the world the situation was in many ways the opposite. In 1492 two new, energetic empires, the Inca and the Mexica (or “Aztecs”), had recently, and for the first time, united and pacified huge regions of Central and South America, and by most indicators they were just getting started. Andean metalsmiths had used annealing and electroplating for more than a thousand years, and the Mexica’s main northern rivals, the Tarascans, were closing in on the magic 88/12 alloy ratio of copper to tin. If the citizens of the New World had been left alone for another century while they moved into the Bronze Age, and if they’d kept their act together, they could, possibly, have successfully resisted the Conquistadors.

Re. pit bulls — when I bite, I too do not let go.

Do they mean “sprang”?

That guy’s no Charles Bronson.