The Oxford conference 11 Jun 2010 … audio podcasts are here. This is the Religion, tolerance and intolerance conference I recently attended. I particularly was wowed and provoked into thinking – a rare occurrence these days – by Ben Kaplan’s talk ‘A tale of two churches’, in which he noted that religions in Europe tolerated each other but still tended to hate each other; tolerance was not a virtue. Despite this, they found all kinds of mutual accommodations, like Catholics and Lutherans sharing village churches. History Religion History
General Science Lucretius and the papal secretary 25 Feb 201927 Feb 2019 In 1417, during the Council of Constance that reunited the Catholic Church in the west, a papal secretary took advantage of the location in Germany to visit some libraries, while the papacy was vacant. He was hunting manuscripts, but not the newly written ones. Instead Gian Francesco Poggio was seeking… Read More
History The Times purveys some science myths 4 Jun 2009 This is just bad reporting and scholarship. Probably done to fill some space in a hurry or something. Hannah Devlin is claiming that there are several cases of scientific plagiarism including, you guessed, Darwin from Wallace. They claim Copernicus stole from a Persian astronomer, al-Tusi, becuase the same diagrams were… Read More
Administrative A paperback of Species: A History 12 Jan 2011 My not-inconsiderable ego has expanded several sizes upon the news from University of California Press that my book Species: A History of the Idea (see at right or on the My Books page) is to become a paperback. I hope to make a couple of corrections, and maybe add a… Read More
This “fire and sword” belief not just with regard to religion but with culture and ethnicity in particular is so written in to popular notions of history and for so long was used by historians with regard to what are viewed as the ‘dark age’ ethnic origins of many modern European societies. Warfare and violence was always viewed as the cause of major shifts in culture and language. Its a view that held from the 8th cen. until nearly the end of the 20th cen with regard to British history. It’s just not that simple. As society was on a much smaller scale at this time you can find for example in the U.K. in the 6th century Celts and Saxons not just sharing the same village but living and sleeping in the same one room hut. But a Briton remained a Briton even if he wore a gold hilted sword, as a legal code put it. Not a popular period to study these days but a crucial one as it puts some rather old beliefs to bed.