[ristastic]

“We’re starving. Can you help us?”

The woman scratched her chin, looking them over.

“Will you work for it?”

“God, yes.”

“What can you do?”

“He kills people. I read Latin. The little girl asks questions. And also reads Latin.”

-Christopher Buehlman, Between Two Fires

[ristastic]

“No star burns forever. You can say ‘It’s the end of the world’ and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not ‘civilization,’ whatever that is, but the actual planet.

Which is not to say that those smaller endings aren’t annihilating.”

-Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

[ristastic]

"Art history is arguably a discipline held together by its objects of study (however diversely and fluidly they are defined) rather than by committments to theories, methodologies, or historiographical geneaologies. The discipline is, in general, ideologically committed to a certain pragmatism; it seeks 'merely' to advance our knowledge of certain aspects of the world's visual culture. In this respect, many of the experts in the field can be labeled as anti-theoretical. Still, if we adopt Levi Bryant's position, then we are all theorists of some sort. We all work to make things visible. We do not simply recover the past lives of images and objects, we narrate and frame them in all sorts of ways that presuppose Bryant's notion of an 'apparatus of appearance.'"

--Gerald B. Guest, "Embodiment and Devotion in the Très Riches Heures (or, the Possibilities of a Post-Theoretical Art History)" Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art 6 (2020).

[ristastic]

“Nobody is more nostalgic than diarists, who believe that no moment has been fully lived until it’s been recorded and made available for later reawakening.”

-Thomas Mallon, “Now and Then: What if the thing we’re nostalgic for is nostalgia itself?” The New Yorker, November 27, 2023

[ristastic]

″Parisinus 8321 is worth mentioning at this point. It is damaged by damp and worms, and written in an ugly cursive of the fifteenth century.”

-P.T. Eden, “Theobaldi ‘Physiologus’” (1972)

[ristastic]

“Curiously enough, however, the presence in France of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance or of their works seems to have exercised almost no effect on French art, and it was not till the arrival of Rosso and Primaticcio that Italian influence began to take root in French painting. But then it swept everything aside and founded a totally new school without links with any local tradition.”

-Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France 1500-1700 (1980)

[ristastic]

“One of the fondest illusions of western civilization from the Renaissance to the present is that it has escaped the Middle Ages unscathed.”

-Jennifer Goodman, “European Chivalry in the 1490s” (1992)

[ristastic]

16th-century diplomacy:

“The French king by an heraulde wrote to the king of England, that he marueled greatly why he made him so sor war, and brent and toke his townes, slew and robbed his people with oute any cause genen on his parte, wherfore he required the king to graunt saufeconduyte to his ambassadours, which should entreate the cause: whereupon in June the French king sent a commission with the president of Roan and the generall boyer and certayne other nobles of France to entreate peace and allyaunce betwene both the prynces: and farther by cause that they knewe the mariage was broken betwene the prince of castell and the lady Mary (as you haue hard) they desyred the sayde lady to be espoused to the French king, affirming a great dower and suertes for the same, w great treasures: so much was offered that the king moued by he cousayl, and specially by the Bishop of Lyncolne Wolsey, consented, upon condicion that yf thesayde French king Loys died, then she should if it pleased her retorne into England again with all her dowar and riches: after such entretie, the indentures were sealed and the peace proclamed the vii daye of August and the king in presence of the French ambassadours sworn to kepe the same, & likewise ther was sent an Ambassade out of England to see the French kyng swere thesame.

The Dutchmen heryng these newes were sory, and repeted them that they receyued not the lady, and spake shamefully of this mariage, thut a feble old & pocky man should mary so fayre a lady, but the voys of people let not princes purposes.”

-Edward Hall, “The Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York,” 1548

[ristastic]

“One thought that preoccupied Louis XII at his accession: to rid himself of his barren and deformed wife, Jeanne of France, and remarry Charles VIII’s widow, Anne of Brittany. He had been forced to marry Jeanne by her father Louis XI as a sinister ploy to ensure the early termination of the Orléans branch of the royal family and the absorption of its lands into the royal domain. For a long time Louis had refused to live with Jeanne, preferring a life of unrestrained debauchery, but eventually he had accepted the marriage to the extent of seeing his wife from time to time. He even slept with her, despite the physical revulsion which she inspired in him. He made no attempt to repudiate her during her father’s lifetime or that of her brother, Charles VIII, but only his conscience could stop him now that he was king if the pope would declare his marriage null and void.”

-Robert Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France (1996)

[ristastic]

lol Wikipedia:

“Louis XI was very superstitious and surrounded himself with astrologers. Interested in science, he once pardoned a man sentenced to death on condition that he serve as a guinea pig for a gallstone operation.

Through war, cunning, and sheer guile, Louis XI overcame France's feudal lords, and at the time of his death in the Château of Plessis-lez-Tours, he had united France and laid the foundations of a strong monarchy. He was, however, a secretive, reclusive man, and few mourned his death.”

[ristastic]

Death emerges from a Sarcophagus, Book of Hours (Provence/Avignon, France), c. 1480-1495; attributed to illuminator Georges Trubert 

Morgan Library, ms. M. 348, fol. 155r

[ristastic]

“A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.”

-from Philip Larkin, Church Going

[ristastic]

“In some ways, however, the Middle Ages is an ideal period for us in the West to approach dialectically. It provides us a basic matrix for our culture. While we do not want all humanistic scholars to be medievalists (where for one thing could they find jobs?), a little does of it would give an important and deeper perspective on all later literature, history, and culture--as much for its alterity as for its sameness, for its differences as for its similarities. Medieval men are in some important ways ourselves and in other important ways very different from us. A sense of their dilemmas, their solutions, their art, their institutions, their life will help us over our own deep chasms and yet reinforce our sense of the marvelous and strange.”

-Morton Bloomfield, “Continuities and Discontinuities,” New Literary History 10/2 (1979)

[ristastic]

Memento Mori engraving (ca. 1500).

[ristastic]

Enguerrand Quarton, The Coronation of the Virgin, Musée Pierre-de-Luxembourg, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, 1452-1453

aka “wtf is happening in French painting in the mid-15th century????”

[ristastic]

“While we have no reason to suppose that Bourdichon went to Italy, his work is strongly influenced by Italian models, showing once again how difficult it was for the French school to free itself of its links with both Italy and the Flemish school. Although Bourdichon brought a certain technical perfection to the art of Fouquet, from the point of view of the development of a specifically French style emerging from a balance between the humanist dramatization of Flemish art and the decorative sumptuousness of Italian art, he marks a clear step backwards, by turning to a revival of Italian influence.”

-Benezit Dictionary of Artists entry for Jean Bourdichon

lol. 

[ristastic]

“[King] Charles VII [of France] has had a generally bad press from historians. Always frail, he was a poor specimen of humanity with short legs, knobbly knees and an ungainly walk. He had a big head, a long nose, thick, sensual lips, a strong jaw and small furtive eyes. According to Chastellain, he was a ‘loner,’ ever prone to worry, distrust, and envy. Paranoid about assassination, he became distrustful of floors and bridges. Towards the end of his life he was plagued by ulcers, yet we was not devoid of qualities. Chastellain tells us that ‘what he lacked in courage...he gained in judgment.’ He had charm, was well-read and a good latinist. Above all, he was devout. He heard two or three masses each day and state business was never allowed to interrupt his devotions. He trusted God, but also astrologers.”

-Robert J. Knecht, The Valois: Kings of France 1328-1589 (2004)