hiatus or ciao bella

We at PfRC have only had the chance to take one grand vacation this year—which we’re forever grateful for knowing that most do with a lot less and thankful too that this is an anomaly and not a worrisome trend, but happily we will have the chance to return to the Italian Lake District in a few days and returned from further adventures we will be refreshed and ready for more. In the meantime, you can visit our friends over at the Smörgåsblog or consult our extensive archives. Arrivederci!

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you know that’s Cyndi Lauper singing: a look into the making of the opening of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse

of all things the measure is man: an open letter to the Internet of Things

your hit parade: Kottke looks at the reemergence of the cover song and the throwback economy of imitation

bus stop sally: wonderfully bizarre public transport shelters of the USSR

tipple: specially designed snifter for enjoying a fine beverage in a micro-gravity environment

hermes trismegistos or copernican revolution

I was familiar enough, I thought, with legendary the Prague (Praha) of the late Renaissance and dormitories and laboratories constructed on the castle grounds for research into alchemy and the esoteric arts, but failed to appreciate that this commission and many of the scattered artefacts, both tangible and in the realm of ideas that challenge received knowledge, have a singular provenance thanks to the curiosity of one practitioner and patron, Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II.

Weary of the overtly hostile political ambitions of the his traditional capital of Vienna (Wien) and having no truck with neither the Protestants nearer to home nor the Counter-Reformation of his Spanish cousins, Rudolf chose to move his court to the ancient city—considered rather isolated from the rest of the Empire due to the recent and relatively successful Hussite rebellion against papal authority. There, collecting wonders and academics, Rudolf was able to carry on as a mad scientist in peace with the aims of ending factionalism in faith through miraculous demonstrations.

Not only did the discipline of chemistry develop out of the magicians’ trial and error—the aim was not to transmute base metal into gold but because gold did not rust, it was considered incorruptible and thus immortal—but also many mystic writings, including the undeciphered oddity known as the Voynich manuscript, were gathered together, studied in view of endless galleries of curio-cabinets.
These Wunderkammern were of course a treat to show-off to visiting dignitaries and an unparallelled collection of liminal objects which blurred the divide between Nature and artifice that also made a statement of the might of the Emperor—especially during a time of messy war with the Turks and the Finns—but primarily, there in the study-hall, were catchments of the art of memory and imagination. Polymath Pierre Hérgony himself was also a compatriot. University education or the time involved little research or experimentation and certainly did not invite unorthodox thought. There is quite a bit to unpack here and sadly the catalogue was broken up, lost, destroyed or hidden away—the perpetual motion machines, grimoires, unicorn horns and other unverified relics, so it is hard to declare Rudolf’s greatest legacy, but among the top contenders would certainly be the Emperor’s engagement with astronomers Tycho Brahe and Nicholas Copernicus, who during their tenure at court moved the centre of the Universe from Earth to the Sun and finally to a point in the void, a focus, around which the worlds revolved.

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corso zundert: Dutch annual tournament of tulips parade

bromance: Donald Trump praises Silvio Berlusconi as a “nice man”

a pig in a poke: thoughtful, well-organized essay explores how the history of technology parallels the history of pockets

limestone: looking at the chemistry and biology of coral colonies, material science is developing cleaner cement

superhenge: hidden landscape project hint at the true extent of the ritual monument 

peculium and pittance

Prior to the early decades of the fourteenth century, the civil and spiritual landscape of Britain and the whole of Europe looked very different than it does today, and it is inexorably difficult for modern minds, I think, to grasp how very alien that proximity was. No one was more than an hour’s walk separated from a monastery or covenant—comparable to the fact that settlements were more or less paced out, before sprawl took hold, a day’s distance on foot from one another, and if one was not directly under the employee of the institution as a farmer, physician or teacher, one still benefited from the round the clock prayers that the members engaged in for the whole of humanity.

These traditions, unimaginable to the grand majority as the pre-Dissolution state of affairs is to us, untraveled, who only knew their individual sheltered realities that had been constant companions as far as living memory ran. For varied motives which included annulling yet another marriage that failed to produce an acceptable heir and to raise state funds to engage the French in battle (another constant and as a relic of the Norman Invasion, many reported to French mother churches), however, King Henry VIII split with papal authority and went on to found the Church of England, and appointed head minister Thomas Cromwell (ancestor of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell who abolished the monarchy for a time) vice-regent in Spirituals and charged him with the the task of dismantling those anchor institutions of community and appropriating their holdings—mainly through extortion and defamation, which was undoubtedly valid in a few cases but not in the main. The roles that monastic houses had served as schools—especially giving girls an alternative to the expected medieval drudgery—hospitals, hostels, welfare for the poor, sanctuary for the accused, brewery and kitchen garden went unfilled for centuries afterwards, if ever fully replaced by government and private organisations.

Overnight, monks, nuns and friars (embedded monks that went out into the community) found themselves evicted and their treasuries raided with anything of apparent value taken for the Crown and much of their libraries lost to history, and their relics—another major economic component as it attracted pilgrims—dissected and subjected to the burgeoning scientific method, and when there was no divine intervention forthcoming to stop this destruction and desecration, peoples’ doubts were reinforced. Seeing what was happening in England in terms of tempering religious authority, where one third of all property belonged to the Church, other European powers began to follow suit, buffeted by the emergent discontent of Martin Luther, albeit that the threat against vulnerable, smaller monasteries encouraged the sale of indulgences to raise the requisite hush-money against being shut-down, and adopted their own national confessions. For Henry, the resulting security-theatre saw few gains—although one positive legacy was the endowment to great universities that still represent the heights of learning, and although the change must have been great, the actions prosecuted in Prussian, Bohemian and Low-Lands was a measure less disruptive and immediately replaced by foundations meant to care for those less fortunate and co-opting an essential service once performed by a suppressed Church, seamlessly and solidifying later commitments and general characterisations of secular assistance. The past is not so simple.