Sylvain Gouguenheim’s ‘“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs,…
Apparently it’s quite well-known, but I only found it this morning in HG Bohn’s A hand-book of proverbs (1855), in the household reading room: To build castles in the air. Far castelli in aria.–Ital. The French say, Faire des chateaux en Espagne. It is tempting although perhaps erroneous to believe that this derives from Frankish…
Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei. What was news to…
They’re photoshopping Jane Austen, so where will it stop? One writer who could do with some help is Al-Jahiz (776-868). Now known as something of a medieval Gollum, he killed and sold fish along the canal in Basra as a small boy, progressed into being a “notably ugle writer with ‘goggle eyes'” (hence جاØظ العينين)…
‘Sídí Abú Yahya, who had been governor of Cordova, said of its people, “They are like the camel, which fails not to complain whether thou diminishest or increasest its load, so that there is no knowing what they like.”‘ (Gyangos, History of the Mohammedan Dynasties of Spain, quoted in Adolphus, Letters from Spain in 1856…
The otherwise excellent Margaret Marks has ruined a peaceful Saturday afternoon by pointing out that St Columba was, apart from the first person to meet the Loch Ness monster, also on the wrong side of the first copyright case–or so says the Catholic Herald. Columcille copied a Jeromian psalter belonging to Finnian, King Diarmit made…
Amando de Miguel says that Zapatero is Spain’s worst ever ruler, with the possible exception of Fernando VII, Witiza and someone else. Wittiza was very naughty and nasty indeed–he “taught all Spain to sin“–and, to crown it all, he invited the Moors into Spain to help him fight Wodewic. Maybe there’s a Visigoth somewhere who’d…
