Hear Vincent Price Star in a Classic Radio Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984

in Books, Literature, Politics | August 10th, 2021

Here are some things you may not know about Vin­cent Price:

He was once a young man.

Before becom­ing a hor­ror icon in the 1950s, he was a suc­cess­ful char­ac­ter actor. “Only a third of his movies that he made were actu­al­ly hor­ror films,” says his daugh­ter, Vic­to­ria Price. “He made 105 films. Peo­ple don’t real­ize he had an exten­sive career in the­ater and radio.”

He came from a wealthy St. Louis fam­i­ly and har­bored ear­ly anti-semit­ic views and a mis­guid­ed admi­ra­tion for Hitler in the 1930s.

He com­plete­ly changed his views after mov­ing to New York and was placed on Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s “Pre­ma­ture Anti-Nazi Sym­pa­thiz­er list” in the 1950s, along with Eleanor Roo­sevelt, notes Susan King at the L.A. Times, a list that “raised ques­tions about those who had been against the Nazis before the U.S. went to war with Ger­many.”

He was a gourmet cook, had a degree in art his­to­ry, and worked for nine years in the six­ties as an art con­sul­tant for Sears….

He was black­list­ed for being anti-Nazi too ear­ly….

After being denied work for almost a year, as Price’s daugh­ter writes in her 1999 mem­oir, Vin­cent Price: A Daughter’s Biog­ra­phy, he chose to sign a “secret oath” offered by the FBI to sal­vage his career. Per­haps not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, he took a radio part soon after­ward in Aus­tralia, as a split narrator/Winston Smith in a 1955 Lux Radio The­ater adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984, per­haps fear­ful of a future in which secret oaths became the norm.

Orwell him­self had made it per­fect­ly clear what he feared. “Rad­i­cal in his pol­i­tics and in his artis­tic tastes,” Lionel Trilling wrote in a New York­er review the year the book came out, “Orwell is whol­ly free of the cant of rad­i­cal­ism”; his tal­ent as a writer of fic­tion is to make “com­mon sense” polit­i­cal obser­va­tions serve plot and char­ac­ter. Per­haps the most chill­ing of these arrives in the first few para­graphs of 1984:

In the far dis­tance a heli­copter skimmed down between the roofs, hov­ered for an instant like a blue­bot­tle, and dart­ed away again with a curv­ing flight. It was the police patrol, snoop­ing into peo­ple’s win­dows. The patrols did not mat­ter, how­ev­er. Only the Thought Police mat­tered. 

We may be remind­ed of the dis­tinc­tions between what “Orwellian” means and what it does not, as Noah Tavlin describes in a recent explain­er: if someone’s “talk­ing about mass sur­veil­lance and intru­sive gov­ern­ment, they’re describ­ing some­thing author­i­tar­i­an, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly Orwellian.” Author­i­tar­i­an­ism is pure brute force. The Orwellian requires a con­stant mis­use of lan­guage, a vio­lent twist­ing of con­science, a per­pet­u­al shout­ing of lies as truth until the two are indis­tin­guish­able. No one is served by this but nihilis­tic oli­garchs, Trilling writes:

The rulers of Orwell’s State know that pow­er in its pure form has for its true end noth­ing but itself, and they know that the nature of pow­er is defined by the pain it can inflict on oth­ers. They know, too, that just as wealth exists only in rela­tion to the pover­ty of oth­ers, so pow­er in its pure aspect exists only in rela­tion to the weak­ness of oth­ers, and that any pow­er of the ruled, even the pow­er to expe­ri­ence hap­pi­ness, is by that much a diminu­tion of the pow­er of the rulers.

Orwellian soci­eties exist sole­ly to spread hatred and mis­ery, even to their detri­ment, a point Price made at the end of anoth­er radio broad­cast, a 1950 episode of NBC’s The Saint, in which the actor denounced racism and reli­gious prej­u­dice. Not long after­ward, his name appeared on McCarthy’s list.

Price learned that the gov­ern­ment could deprive him of his hap­pi­ness unless he swore feal­ty to an insane­ly non­sen­si­cal polit­i­cal moral­i­ty. His daugh­ter offers the expe­ri­ence as one rea­son for his love of play­ing vil­lains. “Most of the vil­lains that he played had been wronged in some way. There was a rea­son for their vil­lainy.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What “Orwellian” Real­ly Means: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son About the Use & Abuse of the Term

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings Collects the Painter’s Entire Body of Work in a 600-Page, Large-Format Book

in Art, Books, History | July 27th, 2021

Most of us who know Fri­da Kahlo’s work know her self-por­traits. But, in her brief 47 years, she cre­at­ed a more var­i­ous body of work: por­traits of oth­ers, still lifes, and dif­fi­cult-to-cat­e­go­rize visions that still, 67 years after her death, feel drawn straight from the wild cur­rents of her imag­i­na­tion. (Not to men­tion her elab­o­rate­ly illus­trat­ed diary, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.) Some­how, Kahlo’s work has nev­er all been gath­ered in one place. That, along with her endur­ing appeal as both an artist and a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure, sure­ly made her an appeal­ing propo­si­tion for art-book pub­lish­er Taschen, an oper­a­tion as invest­ed in visu­al rich­ness as it is in com­plete­ness.

There’s also the mat­ter of size. Though not con­ceived at the same scale as the murals of Diego Rivera, with whom Kahlo lived in not one but two less-than-con­ven­tion­al mar­riages, Kahlo’s paint­ings look best when seen at their biggest. Hence Taschen’s “large-for­mat XXL” pro­duc­tion of Fri­da Kahlo: The Com­plete Paint­ings, which “allows read­ers to admire Fri­da Kahlo’s paint­ings like nev­er before, includ­ing unprece­dent­ed detail shots and famous pho­tographs.” Pre­sent­ed along with a bio­graph­i­cal essay, those pho­tos cap­ture, among oth­er sub­jects, “Fri­da, Diego, and the Casa Azul, Frida’s home and the cen­ter of her uni­verse.”

In cre­at­ing his vol­ume, edi­tor-author Luis-Martín Lozano and con­trib­u­tors Andrea Ket­ten­mann and Mari­na Vázquez Ramos focused not on the artist’s life, but her work. “Most peo­ple at exhi­bi­tions, they’re inter­est­ed in her per­son­al­i­ty — who she is, how she dressed, who does she go to bed with, her lovers, her sto­ry,” says Lozano in an inter­view with BBC Cul­ture. Putting togeth­er a run-of-the-mill Kahlo book, “you repeat the same things, and it will sell – because every­thing about Kahlo sells. It’s unfor­tu­nate to say, but she’s become a mer­chan­dise.” Fri­da Kahlo: The Com­plete Paint­ings is also, of course, a prod­uct, and one painstak­ing­ly designed to com­pel the Fri­da Kahlo enthu­si­ast. Its ide­al read­er, how­ev­er, desires to live in not Kahlo’s world, but the world she cre­at­ed.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fri­da Kahlo: The Life of an Artist

The Inti­ma­cy of Fri­da Kahlo’s Self-Por­traits: A Video Essay

Vis­it the Largest Col­lec­tion of Fri­da Kahlo’s Work Ever Assem­bled: 800 Arti­facts from 33 Muse­ums, All Free Online

Dis­cov­er Fri­da Kahlo’s Wild­ly-Illus­trat­ed Diary: It Chron­i­cled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Fri­da Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life and Work of Fri­da Kahlo

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Discover The Grammar of Ornament, One of the Great Color Books & Design Masterpieces of the 19th Century

in Art, Books, Design | July 22nd, 2021

In the mid-17th cen­tu­ry, young Eng­lish­men of means began to mark their com­ing of age with a “Grand Tour” across the Con­ti­nent and even beyond. This allowed them to take in the ele­ments of their civ­i­liza­tion­al her­itage first-hand, espe­cial­ly the arti­facts of clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty and the Renais­sance. After com­plet­ing his archi­tec­tur­al stud­ies, a Lon­don­er named Owen Jones embarked upon his own Grand Tour in 1832, rather late in the his­to­ry of the tra­di­tion, but ide­al tim­ing for the research that inspired the project that would become his lega­cy.

Accord­ing to the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, Jones vis­it­ed “Italy, Greece, Egypt and Turkey before arriv­ing in Grana­da, in Spain to car­ry out stud­ies of the Alham­bra Palace that were to cement his rep­u­ta­tion.”

He and French archi­tect Jules Goury, “the first to study the Alham­bra as a mas­ter­piece of Islam­ic design,” pro­duced “hun­dreds of draw­ings and plas­ter casts” of the his­tor­i­cal, cul­tur­al, and aes­thet­ic palimpsest of a build­ing com­plex. The fruit of their labors was the book Plans, Ele­va­tions, Sec­tions and Details of the Alham­bra, “one of the most influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tions on Islam­ic archi­tec­ture of all time.”

Pub­lished in the 1840s, the book pushed the print­ing tech­nolo­gies of the day to their lim­its. In search of a way to do jus­tice to “the intri­cate and bright­ly col­ored dec­o­ra­tion of the Alham­bra Palace,” Jones had to put in more work research­ing “the then new tech­nique of chro­molith­o­g­ra­phy — a method of pro­duc­ing mul­ti-col­or prints using chem­i­cals.” In the fol­low­ing decade, he would make even more ambi­tious use of chro­molith­o­g­ra­phy — and draw from a much wider swath of world cul­ture — to cre­ate his print­ed mag­num opus, The Gram­mar of Orna­ment.

With this book, Jones “set out to reac­quaint his col­leagues with the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples that made art beau­ti­ful,” write Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art cura­tor Femke Speel­berg and librar­i­an Robyn Flem­ing. “Instead of writ­ing an aca­d­e­m­ic trea­tise on the sub­ject, he chose to assem­ble a book of one hun­dred plates illus­trat­ing objects and pat­terns from around the world and across time, from which these prin­ci­ples could be dis­tilled.” To accom­plish this he drew on his own trav­el expe­ri­ences as well as resources clos­er at hand, includ­ing “the muse­o­log­i­cal and pri­vate col­lec­tions that were avail­able to him in Eng­land, and the objects that had been on dis­play dur­ing the Uni­ver­sal Exhi­bi­tions held in Lon­don in 1851 and 1855.”

The Gram­mar of Orna­ment was pub­lished in 1856, emerg­ing into a Britain “dom­i­nat­ed by his­tor­i­cal revivals such as Neo­clas­si­cism and the Goth­ic Revival,” says the V&A. “These design move­ments were rid­dled with reli­gious and social con­no­ta­tions. Instead, Owen Jones sought a mod­ern style with none of this cul­tur­al bag­gage. Set­ting out to iden­ti­fy the com­mon prin­ci­ples behind the best exam­ples of his­tor­i­cal orna­ment, he for­mu­lat­ed a design lan­guage that was suit­able for the mod­ern world, one which could be applied equal­ly to wall­pa­pers, tex­tiles, fur­ni­ture, met­al­work and inte­ri­ors.”

Indeed, the pat­terns so lav­ish­ly repro­duced in the book soon became trends in real-world design. They weren’t always employed with the intel­lec­tu­al under­stand­ing Jones sought to instill, but since The Gram­mar of Orna­ment has nev­er gone out of print (and can even be down­loaded free from the Inter­net Archive), his prin­ci­ples remain avail­able for all to learn — and his painstak­ing­ly artis­tic print­ing work remains avail­able for all to admire — even in the cor­ners of the world that lay beyond his imag­i­na­tion.

You can pur­chase a com­plete and unabridged col­or edi­tion of The Gram­mar of Orna­ment online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Explore the Beau­ti­ful Pages of the 1902 Japan­ese Design Mag­a­zine Shin-Bijut­sukai: Euro­pean Mod­ernism Meets Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Design

A Beau­ti­ful 1897 Illus­trat­ed Book Shows How Flow­ers Become Art Nou­veau Designs

The Bauhaus Book­shelf: Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books, Jour­nals, Man­i­festos & Ads That Still Inspire Design­ers World­wide

Every Page of Depero Futur­ista, the 1927 Futur­ist Mas­ter­piece of Graph­ic Design & Book­mak­ing, Is Now Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji: A Deluxe New Art Book Presents Hokusai’s Masterpiece, Including “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”

in Art, Books, History | July 16th, 2021

Like most Japan­ese mas­ters of ukiyo‑e wood­block art, Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai is best known monony­mous­ly. But he’s even bet­ter known by his work — and by one piece of work in par­tic­u­lar, The Great Wave off Kana­gawa. Even those who’ve nev­er heard the name Hoku­sai have seen that print, arrest­ing in its some­how calm tur­bu­lence, or at least they’ve seen one of its count­less mod­ern par­o­dies and trib­utes (most recent­ly, a large-scale homage in the medi­um of LEGO). But when he died in 1849, the pro­lif­ic and long-lived artist left behind a body of work amount­ing to more than 30,000 paint­ings, sketch­es, prints, and illus­tra­tions (as well as a how-to-draw book).

None of those 30,000 works are quite as famous as his Great Wave off Kana­gawa, but very few indeed are as ambi­tions as the series to which it belongs, Thir­ty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. It is that two-year project, the artis­tic fruit of an obses­sion with Fuji and its envi­rons, that Taschen has tak­en as the mate­r­i­al for their new book Hoku­sai: Thir­ty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

Pro­duced in a 224-page “XXL edi­tion,” it gath­ers “the finest impres­sions from insti­tu­tions and col­lec­tions world­wide in the com­plete set of 46 plates along­side 114 col­or vari­a­tions” — all sewn togeth­er, appro­pri­ate­ly, with “Japan­ese bind­ing.”

Not only does the book repro­duce Thir­ty-six Views of Mount Fuji with Taschen’s sig­na­ture atten­tion to image qual­i­ty, it presents The Great Wave off Kana­gawa in a way few actu­al­ly see it: in con­text. For that most wide­ly pub­lished of all Hoku­sai prints launched the series, which con­tin­ued on to Fine Wind, Clear Morn­ing, Thun­der­storm Beneath the Sum­mit, and Kajikaza­wa in Kai Province, that last being an image held in espe­cial­ly high esteem by ukiyo‑e enthu­si­asts. One such enthu­si­ast, east Asian art his­to­ri­an Andreas Marks, has per­formed this book’s edit­ing and writ­ing, as he did with Taschen’s pre­vi­ous Japan­ese Wood­block Prints (1680–1938). Expe­ri­enc­ing the whole of Thir­ty-six Views of Mount Fuji, more than one read­er will no doubt become as trans­fixed by Hoku­sai as Hoku­sai was by his home­land’s most beloved moun­tain. You can pick up a copy of Hoku­sai: Thir­ty-six Views of Mount Fuji here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Great Wave off Kana­gawa by Hoku­sai: An Intro­duc­tion to the Icon­ic Japan­ese Wood­block Print in 17 Min­utes

The Evo­lu­tion of The Great Wave off Kanaza­wa: See Four Ver­sions That Hoku­sai Paint­ed Over Near­ly 40 Years

The Met Puts 650+ Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Online: Mar­vel at Hokusai’s One Hun­dred Views of Mount Fuji and More

Get Free Draw­ing Lessons from Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai, Who Famous­ly Paint­ed The Great Wave off Kana­gawa: Read His How-To Book, Quick Lessons in Sim­pli­fied Draw­ings

A Beau­ti­ful New Book of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints: A Visu­al His­to­ry of 200 Japan­ese Mas­ter­pieces Cre­at­ed Between 1680 and 1938

See Clas­sic Japan­ese Wood­blocks Brought Sur­re­al­ly to Life as Ani­mat­ed GIFs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Discover Japan’s Oldest Surviving Cookbook Ryori Monogatari (1643)

in Books, Food & Drink, History | July 15th, 2021

Maybe your inter­est in Japan was first stoked by the sto­ry of the sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry shō­gun Toku­gawa Ieya­su and his cam­paign to uni­fy the coun­try. Or maybe it was Japan­ese food. Either way, culi­nary and his­tor­i­cal sub­jects have a way of inter­twin­ing in every land — not to men­tion mak­ing count­less pos­si­ble lit­er­ary and cul­tur­al con­nec­tions along the way. For the curi­ous mind, enjoy­ing a Japan­ese meal may well lead, soon­er or lat­er, to read­ing Japan’s old­est cook­book. Pub­lished in 1643, the sur­viv­ing edi­tion of Ryori Mono­gatari (var­i­ous­ly trans­lat­ed as “Nar­ra­tive of Actu­al Food Prepa­ra­tion” or, more sim­ply, “A Tale of Food”) resides at the Tokyo Nation­al Muse­um, but you can read a fac­sim­i­le at the Tokyo Met­ro­pol­i­tan Library.

Trans­la­tor Joshua L. Bad­g­ley did just that in order to pro­duce an online Eng­lish ver­sion of the ven­er­a­ble recipe col­lec­tion. In an intro­duc­to­ry essay, he describes his trans­la­tion process and offers some his­tor­i­cal con­text as well. Ryori Mono­gatari was writ­ten ear­ly in the era of the Toku­gawa shogu­nate, which had been found­ed by the afore­men­tioned Ieya­su.

“For the pre­vi­ous 120 years, the coun­try had been engulfed in civ­il wars,” but this “Age of War­ring States” also “saw the first major con­tact with Euro­peans through the Por­tuguese, who land­ed in 1542, and lat­er saw the inva­sion of Korea.” The for­eign­ers “brought with them new ideas, and access to a new world of food, which con­tin­ues to this day in the form of things like tem­pu­ra and kasutera (castel­la).”

Con­sol­i­dat­ed by Ieya­su, Japan’s sub­se­quent 250-year-long peace “saw an increased empha­sis on schol­ar­ship, and many books on the his­to­ry of Japan were writ­ten in this time. In addi­tion, trav­el jour­nals were becom­ing pop­u­lar, indi­cat­ing var­i­ous spe­cial­ties and del­i­ca­cies in each vil­lage.” The now-unknown author of Ryori Mono­gatari seems to have gone around col­lect­ing recipes that had been passed down oral­ly for gen­er­a­tions — hence the some­times vague and approx­i­mate instruc­tions. But unusu­al­ly, note pub­lish­ers Red Cir­cle, the book also “includes recipes for game at a time when eat­ing meat was viewed by most as a taboo.” In it one finds instruc­tions for prepar­ing veni­son, hare, boar, and even rac­coon dog.

Your fas­ci­na­tion with Japan might not have begun with a meal of rac­coon dog. But Ryori Mono­gatari also includes recipes for sashi­mi, sushi, udon and yak­i­tori, all eat­en so wide­ly around the world today that their names no longer mer­it ital­ics. Tak­en togeth­er, the book’s expla­na­tions of its dish­es open a win­dow on how the Japan­ese ate dur­ing the Edo peri­od, named for the cap­i­tal city we now know as Tokyo, which last­ed from 1603 to 1863. (In the video just above, Tast­ing His­to­ry vlog­ger Max Miller makes a typ­i­cal bowl of Edo noo­dles, based on a recipe from the 1643 cook­book.) “From the mid-Edo peri­od,” says the Tokyo Nation­al Muse­um, “restau­rants began to emerge across Japan, reflect­ing a new trend toward enjoy­ing food as recre­ation.” By the late Edo peri­od, an era cap­tured by ukiyo‑e mas­ter Hiroshige, eat­ing out had become a nation­al pas­time. And not so long there­after, going for Japan­ese food would become a culi­nary, his­tor­i­cal, and cul­tur­al treat savored the world over.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

Cook­pad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launch­es New Site in Eng­lish

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Behold the Astronomicum Caesareum, “Perhaps the Most Beautiful Scientific Book Ever Printed” (1540)

in Art, Books, Science | May 27th, 2021

Art, sci­ence, and mag­ic seem to have been rarely far apart dur­ing the Renais­sance, as evi­denced by the elab­o­rate 1540 Astro­nom­icum Cae­sareum — or “Emperor’s Astron­o­my” — seen here. “The most sump­tu­ous of all Renais­sance instruc­tive man­u­als, ” the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art notes, the book was cre­at­ed over a peri­od of 8 years by Petrus Api­anus, also known as Api­an, an astron­o­my pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ingol­stadt. Mod­ern-day astronomer Owen Gin­gerich, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, calls it “the most spec­tac­u­lar con­tri­bu­tion of the book-maker’s art to six­teenth-cen­tu­ry sci­ence.”

Apian’s book was main­ly designed for what is now con­sid­ered pseu­do­science. “The main con­tem­po­rary use of the book would have been to cast horo­scopes,” Robert Bat­teridge writes at the Nation­al Library of Scot­land. Api­an used as exam­ples the birth­days of his patrons: Holy Roman Emper­or Charles V and his broth­er Fer­di­nand I. But the Astro­nom­icum Cae­sareum did more than cal­cu­late the future.

Despite the fact that the geo­cen­tric mod­el on which Api­an based his sys­tem “would begin to be over­tak­en just 3 years after the book’s pub­li­ca­tion,” he accu­rate­ly described five comets, includ­ing what would come to be called Halley’s Comet.

Api­an also “observed that a comet’s tail always points away from the sun,” Fine Books and Col­lec­tions writes, “a dis­cov­ery for which he is cred­it­ed.” He used his book “to cal­cu­late eclipses,” notes Gin­gerich in an intro­duc­tion, includ­ing a par­tial lunar eclipse in the year of Charles’ birth. And, “in a pio­neer­ing use of astro­nom­i­cal chronol­o­gy, he takes up the cir­cum­stances of sev­er­al his­tor­i­cal eclipses.” These dis­cus­sions are accom­pa­nied by “sev­er­al mov­able devices” called volvelles, designed “for an assort­ment of chrono­log­i­cal and astro­log­i­cal inquiries.”

Medieval volvelles were first intro­duced by artist and writer Ramón Llull in 1274. A “cousin of the astro­labe,” Get­ty writes, the devices con­sist of “lay­ered cir­cles of parch­ment… held togeth­er at the cen­ter by a tie.” They were con­sid­ered “a form of ‘arti­fi­cial mem­o­ry,’” called by Lund University’s Lars Gis­lén “a kind of paper com­put­er.” Api­an was a spe­cial­ist of the form, pub­lish­ing sev­er­al books con­tain­ing volvelles from his own Ingol­stadt print­ing press. The Astro­nom­icum Cae­sareum became the pin­na­cle of such sci­en­tif­ic art, using its hand-col­ored paper devices to sim­u­late the move­ments of the astro­labe. “The great vol­ume grew and changed in the course of the print­ing,” Gin­gerich writes, “even­tu­al­ly com­pris­ing fifty-five leaves, of which twen­ty-one con­tain mov­ing parts.”

Api­an was reward­ed hand­some­ly for his work. “Emper­or Charles V grant­ed the pro­fes­sor a new coat of arms,” and “the right to appoint poets lau­re­ate and to pro­nounce as legit­i­mate chil­dren born out of wed­lock.” He was also appoint­ed court math­e­mati­cian, and copies of his extra­or­di­nary book lived on in the col­lec­tions of Euro­pean aris­to­crats for cen­turies, “a tri­umph of the printer’s art,” writes Gin­gerich, and an astron­o­my, and astrol­o­gy, “fit for an emper­or.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

16th Cen­tu­ry Book­wheels, the E‑Readers of the Renais­sance, Get Brought to Life by 21st Cen­tu­ry Design­ers

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

160,000+ Medieval Man­u­scripts Online: Where to Find Them

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Who Decides What Words Get Into the Dictionary?

in Books, English Language, Language | May 26th, 2021

DICTIONARY, n. A malev­o­lent lit­er­ary device for cramp­ing the growth of a lan­guage and mak­ing it hard and inelas­tic. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dic­tio­nary

Once upon a time, we were made to believe that words could nev­er acquire sticks and stones’ capac­i­ty to wound.

Talk about a max­im no longer worth the paper it was print­ed on!

Lan­guage is organ­ic. Def­i­n­i­tions, usage, and our response to par­tic­u­lar words evolve over time.

Lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er Ilan Sta­vans’ TED-Ed les­son, Who Decides What’s in the Dic­tio­nary?, rolls the clock back to 1604, when school­mas­ter Robert Caw­drey assem­bled the first Eng­lish lan­guage dic­tio­nary “for the ben­e­fit of Ladies, Gen­tle­women, and oth­er unskilled folk.”

Oth­er Eng­lish dic­tio­nar­ies soon fol­lowed, expand­ing on the 2,543 words Caw­drey had seen fit to include. His fel­low authors shared Caw­drey’s pre­scrip­tive goal of edu­cat­ing the rab­ble, to keep them from butcher­ing the high-mind­ed tongue the self-appoint­ed guardian con­sid­ered it his duty to pro­tect.

Word­smith Samuel John­son, the pri­ma­ry author of 1775’s mas­sive A Dic­tio­nary of the Eng­lish Lan­guage, described his mis­sion as one in which “the pro­nun­ci­a­tion of our lan­guage may be fixed, and its attain­ment facil­i­tat­ed; by which its puri­ty may be pre­served, its use ascer­tained, and its dura­tion length­ened.”

Lest we think John­son over­ly impressed with the impor­tance of his lofty mis­sion, he sub­mit­ted the fol­low­ing gen­tly self-mock­ing def­i­n­i­tion of Lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er:

A writer of dic­tio­nar­ies; a harm­less drudge that busies him­self in trac­ing the orig­i­nal, and detail­ing the sig­ni­fi­ca­tion of words.

150 years lat­er, Ambrose Bierce offered an oppos­ing view in his delight­ful­ly wicked dic­tio­nary:

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pesti­lent fel­low who, under the pre­tense of record­ing some par­tic­u­lar stage in the devel­op­ment of a lan­guage, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiff­en its flex­i­bil­i­ty and mech­a­nize its meth­ods.

Sta­vans points to broth­ers George and Charles Merriam’s acqui­si­tion of the rights to Noah Webster’s An Amer­i­can Dic­tio­nary of the Eng­lish Lan­guage (1828) as a moment when our con­cept of what a dic­tio­nary should be began to shift.

Web­ster, work­ing by him­self, set out to col­lect and doc­u­ment Eng­lish as it was used on these shores.

The Mer­ri­ams engaged a group of lan­guage experts to curate sub­se­quent edi­tions, strik­ing a blow for the idiom by includ­ing slang and region­al vari­ants.

A good start, though they exclud­ed any­thing they found unfit for the gen­er­al con­sump­tion at the time, includ­ing expres­sions born in the Black com­mu­ni­ty.

Their edi­to­ri­al­iz­ing was of a piece with pre­vail­ing views — see “wife.”

But humans, like lan­guage, evolve.

These days, lex­i­cog­ra­phers mon­i­tor the Inter­net for new words to be con­sid­ered for upcom­ing edi­tions, includ­ing pro­fan­i­ty and racial slurs.

If a word’s use is judged to be wide­spread, sus­tained and mean­ing­ful, in it goes… even though some might find it objec­tion­able, or even, yes, hurt­ful.

Sta­vans wraps his les­son up by draw­ing our atten­tion to Merriam-Webster’s tra­di­tion of anoint­ing one entry to Word of the Year, drawn from sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of the words peo­ple look up in extreme­ly high num­bers.

“They” got the nod in 2019, a tes­ta­ment to how deeply non-bina­ry gen­der expres­sion has per­me­at­ed the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness and nation­al con­ver­sa­tion.

The run­ner up?

Impeach.

Care to guess which word 2020 placed in the dictionary’s path?

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How a Word Enters the Dic­tio­nary: A Quick Primer

A Dic­tio­nary of Words Invent­ed to Name Emo­tions We All Feel, But Don’t Yet Have a Name For: Vemö­dalen, Son­der, Chrysal­ism & Much More

The Largest His­tor­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of Eng­lish Slang Now Free Online: Cov­ers 500 Years of the “Vul­gar Tongue”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Accurate Recreations of Medieval Italian Longsword Fighting Techniques, All Based on a Manuscript from 1404

in Books, History | May 17th, 2021

Giv­en recent events, the prospect of hun­dreds of young men meet­ing on Face­book, then trav­el­ing from around the coun­try to a cen­tral U.S. loca­tion might sound like rea­son­able cause for alarm. Yet a recent con­ven­tion fit­ting that descrip­tion had noth­ing to do with polit­i­cal vio­lence but, rather, a cel­e­bra­tion and appre­ci­a­tion of the name “Josh” (full dis­clo­sure: this writer did not attend). The gath­er­ing of the Josh­es this past April in Nebras­ka could not have been more peace­ful, includ­ing its fin­ish­ing bat­tle royale, con­duct­ed with pool noo­dles. (Win­ner: adorable 4‑year-old Josh Vin­son, Jr., or “Lit­tle Josh,” from Lin­coln, NE).

The Josh­es had no con­cern for prop­er pool-noo­dle-wield­ing tech­nique, if there is such a thing. But groups of peo­ple who gath­er around the coun­try to stage medieval-style bat­tles in live-action role play­ing (LARP) games with weapons both real and fake might ben­e­fit from point­ers.

So, too, might those who chore­o­graph sword fights on stage and screen. Where can seri­ous his­tor­i­cal re-cre­ators learn how to wield a real blade in his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate com­bat? One resource can be found at Wik­te­nauer, a wiki devot­ed to col­lect­ing “all of the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary source lit­er­a­ture that makes up the text of his­tor­i­cal Euro­pean Mar­tial arts (HEMA) research.”

The Fior di Battaglia (“Flower of Bat­tle”) — an Ital­ian fenc­ing man­u­al by Fiore de’i Liberi dat­ing from cir­ca 1404 — offers rich­ly- and copi­ous­ly-illus­trat­ed demon­stra­tions of medieval Ital­ian longsword fight­ing tech­niques. In the orig­i­nal man­u­script, seen here and at The Get­ty, “the illus­tra­tions are inked sketch­es with gold leaf­ing on the crowns and garters,” notes the Wik­te­nauer entry. They dom­i­nate the text, which “takes the form of descrip­tive para­graphs set in poor Ital­ian verse, which are nev­er­the­less fair­ly clear and infor­ma­tive.” So clear, indeed, the brood­ing young men of Akademia Szer­mierzy — a Pol­ish group that recre­ates medieval sword-fight­ing tech­niques — can more than con­vinc­ing­ly mim­ic the moves in the video at the top.

Once they get going, after some req­ui­site pre-fight riga­ma­role, it’s impres­sive stuff, maybe already famil­iar to mod­ern fencers and cer­tain mem­bers of the Soci­ety for Cre­ative Anachro­nism, the LARP-ing orga­ni­za­tion of ama­teurs recre­at­ing every­thing from the Mid­dle Ages and the Renais­sance. But for those who think all live-action role-play­ing is the equiv­a­lent of the Bat­tle of the Josh­es (or off-brand Nazis run­ning through the streets in home­made armor), the sheer bal­let of his­tor­i­cal sword-fight­ing may come as a sur­prise — and maybe inspire a few more peo­ple to pull on the dou­blet and hose. See more medieval sword-fight­ing recre­ations from Akademia Szer­mierzy here, and the full text of the Fior di Battaglia here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Renais­sance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades; Now Hear the Songs Per­formed by Mod­ern Singers

A Hyp­not­ic Look at How Japan­ese Samu­rai Swords Are Made

The Last Duel Took Place in France in 1967, and It’s Caught on Film

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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