“O Fortuna!”

Grief is real.

We are living through a massive transformation.

Before the French Revolution, “revolution” meant a turning of the Wheel of Fortune.

The Wheel has turned.

The world has changed; we do not know yet what it will become.

It is time to pray, grieve, and hope.


Image: Wheel of Fortune from the Benediktbeuern manuscript (Munich, Bayerische Staastbibliothek, Clm 4660, fol. 1.

 For the story of this manuscript, see Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World (London: Allen Lane, 2016), chapter 8.

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my blog post. I look forward to hearing what you think!

F.B.

Popular posts from this blog

Imperial America

Image
Once upon a time, there was a colony that revolted against its ancestral kings and established itself as a republic.  The people of the former colony constituted a government in which the men of the republic voted for their administrative officials by tribe, each of which was determined geographically, not ethnically or by kinship groups. Having established a government, the new state began extending its authority by conquest and trade, until eventually it controlled a vast region previously occupied by multiple peoples, including several older empires.  Although citizenship was initially limited to the members of the founding tribes, over the centuries, as more and more nations were absorbed (or coerced) into the empire, the franchise was extended even to those whose ancestors had no association whatsoever with the founding of the state. These new citizens saw themselves as fully “native,” regardless of where they came from, within or without the empire. They adopted the language and
Keep reading

Make the Middle Ages Dark Again

Image
I miss the good old days. You remember. Back when the only thing people knew about the Middle Ages is that they were Dark and filled with evil barons wresting a living off the back of their serfs, not to mention lecherous clergy imprisoning young maidens so as to rape them and then accuse them of witchcraft. You remember, right? What it was like when the Middle Ages were Dark? The Roman Catholic Church made slaves of everyone, stripped them of their sense of dignity and independence and made social status a matter not of achievement, but birth. The Church hated science and industry and did everything in its power to keep people in chains. It guarded its authority with the sword and the stake, stifled all innovation, and fed the common people lies. And why were these Ages so Dark? There were no universities, no towns, only castles with dungeons. Monks huddled in their cells thinking dark thoughts about sin, while Vikings stormed across the countryside, raping and pillaging and ca
Keep reading

#Yeetler

Image
  About that livestream... The Most Accurate Image Ever Posted on the Internet I really cannot believe that I have people reading my Telegram channel who don’t get what Ye just did [in his interview on Thursday ], so let me pretend it is possible to break a rhetorical effect down dialectically so that you can feel smart again. I doubt it will work—I tried for years on my blog to describe why Milo did the performances he did, and I STILL have colleagues in academia convinced that a) Milo is nuts, and b) I am nuts for defending him—but, as my mother always loved saying, I am Missouri-born and therefore stubborn as a mule, so take this as DONKEY WISDOM about Ye.  What is the greatest taboo in our culture? Is it saying, “I love Satan”? Is it saying, “I love Judas, I would have kept the 30 pieces of silver”? Is it saying, “The Trinity is a nonsense doctrine invented by Rome/Saul-the-Fake-Apostle/paganism”? Is it saying, “Jesus was a fraud who is now in hell burning in excrement and I would
Keep reading

Talking Points: Three Cheers for White Men

Image
1. When white women (see Marie de France and Eleanor of Aquitaine) invented chivalry and courtly love , white men agreed that it was better for knights to spend their time protecting women rather than raping them, and even agreed to write songs for them rather than expecting them to want to have sex with them without being forced. 2. When white men who were celibate (see the canon lawyers and theologians of the twelfth century and thereafter) argued that marriage was a sacrament valid only if both the man and the woman consented , white men exerted themselves to become good husbands rather than expecting women to live as their slaves. 3. When white women (see Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the suffragettes) invented feminism , white men supported them (see John Stuart Mill) and even went so far as to vote (because only men could vote at the time) to let them vote, not to mention hiring them as workers and supporting their education. And before you start telling me a
Keep reading

A Connecticut Wizard in King George’s Court

Image
It’s been haunting me. I knew I had read this story before, I just couldn’t put my finger on it... There was another thing that troubled me a little.   Those multitudes presently began to agitate for another miracle.   That was natural. To be able to carry back to their far homes the boast that they had seen the man who could command the sun, riding in the heavens, and be obeyed, would make them great in the eyes of their neighbors, and envied by them all; but to be able to also say they had seen him work a miracle themselves—why, people would come a distance to see them. The pressure got to be pretty strong... Next, Clarence found that old Merlin was making himself busy on the sly among those people.  He was spreading a report that I was a humbug, and that the reason I didn’t accommodate the people with a miracle was because I couldn’t . I saw that I must do something. I presently thought out a plan. By my authority as executive I threw Merlin into prison—the same cell I had occupied
Keep reading