Emma Bovary was a slut

"Sir," they say flatly, "she's a slut." (The women tend to be harder on Emma than the men are.) Subsequent class periods get even uglier. Many of the men admit that they're fearful of marrying and then having their stay-at-home wives cheat on them. For that reason, they say, "you've got to get her pregnant before you deploy." Emma is their worst nightmare. Emma should have been faithful to Charles! He loved her! He was a good provider! What more does she want?

—Bruce Fleming at The Chronicle Review: Leaving Literature Behind.

That is a pretty cogent analysis of Madame Bovary, except for one thing: Emma's pregnancy didn't do much to curtail her infidelities.

The hanging legs of the disappearing Christ

In the promotional leaflet of a certain publisher, I spotted the following:

I think it comes from Isabella of Castile's Book of Hours.

It seemed a little odd, this image of Christ during the Ascension, his upper body covered with a cloud, only his legs visible. More often, he is depicted with his full body in sight.

Then I remembered that I had read about this kind of iconography before. Apparently, it originated in eleventh-century England, and its motivation lies in biblical exegesis. They wanted to emphasize the idea that Christ ascended to heaven by his own means. Were he to be represented standing in the cloud, or enthroned in a mandorla carried away by angels, the misleading impression could be given that he needed some external help. Hence the hanging legs!

Here's an earlier example. The classic study of this iconography is Meyer Schapiro's "The Image of the Disappearing Christ: The Ascension in English Art around the Year 1000".

the drumming up of tradition

The traditional transmission of beliefs and knowledge is not one that is sought [...] The “search for a usable past” is something quite different [...] The drumming up of tradition [...] or the recommending of the observance of traditions which were no longer being generally received, represents an ideological transformation of tradition. It is certainly quite remote from the process of traditional transmission.

—Tradition and Liberty: Antinomy and Interdependence, by Edward Shils

For mummers and mumming Eustacia had the greatest contempt. The mummers themselves were not afflicted with any such feeling for their art, though at the same time they were not enthusiastic. A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction.

—Thomas Hardy: The return of the native.

Gotta read Hobsbawm's The Invention of Tradition one of these days.

a universal conspiracy for hiding sadness

Cheerful thoughts to be found in Amiel's Journal:

I gazed into the great implacable abyss in which are swallowed up all those phantoms which call themselves living beings. I saw that the living are but apparitions hovering for a moment over the earth, made out of the ashes of the dead, and swiftly re-absorbed by eternal night, as the will-o'-the-wisp sinks into the marsh. The nothingness of our joys, the emptiness of our existence, and the futility of our ambitions, filled me with a quiet disgust. From regret to disenchantment I floated on to Buddhism, to universal weariness. Ah, the hope of a blessed immortality would be better worth having !

With what different eyes one looks at life at ten, at twenty, at thirty, at sixty ! Those who live alone are specially conscious of this psychological metamorphosis. Another thing, too, astonishes them ; it is the universal conspiracy which exists for hiding the sadness of the world, for making men forget suffering, sickness, and death, for smothering the wails and sobs which issue from every house, for painting and beautifying the hideous face of reality.

Is it out of tenderness for childhood and youth, or is it simply from fear, that we are thus careful to veil the sinister truth ? Or is it from a sense of equity ? and does life contain as much good as evil -perhaps more ? However it may be, men feed themselves rather upon illusion than upon truth. Each one unwinds his own special reel of hope, and as soon as he has come to the end of it he sits him down to die, and lets his sons and his grandsons begin the same experience over again. We all pursue happiness, and happiness escapes the pursuit of all.

no jam (or miracles) today

The Toynbee convector has posted a delightful extract from the diaries of a nineteenth-century noblewoman, recounting her presence at the miracle of the liquefaction of St. Januarius' blood.

Having read a number of Protestant writers from that time, their skeptical and derisive attitude towards popish superstition seems redolent of the White Queen's policy regarding jam. There will be miracles tomorrow, when the Lord comes. There were miracles yesterday. But no miracles today!

Internet Archive find of the day

Vol II of Pascual de Gayangos' translation of Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari's History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain.

P.S. Also this online book: Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain.

P.P.S. More in this earlier post.