Two Poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Posted in History, Poetry with tags , , , , , , , on April 3, 2024 by telescoper

Another character who appears in Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall is Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) who was a diplomat and member of the Court of Henry VIII, as well as being a fine poet. I thought I would post two of his famous poems.

The first is a sonnet, written some time in the 1530s, is ostensibly a (loose) translation of Petrarch’s Una Candida Cerva and thus one of the first examples of a Petrarchan Sonnet written in English. That makes it interesting in its own right, but many people think that it is actually about Anne Boleyn. The use of hunting as a metaphor for courtly love was widespread and, despite being married, Wyatt seems to have had his eye on Anne Boleyn. As far as is known, however, they didn’t have a sexual relationship. Wyatt wisely backed off when he realized he was competing with Henry VIII (thinly disguised as “Caesar”) in the penultimate line; Noli me tangere means “do not touch me” in Latin.

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

Wyatt was in fact confined to the Tower of London in 1536 on suspicion of having committed adultery with Anne Boleyn; adultery with the King’s wife was considered treason, a capital offence. While in the Tower, where he witnessed executions, possibly including that of Anne Boleyn herself and others accused of treason with her, he wrote this other famous poem

Who list his wealth and ease retain,
Himself let him unknown contain.
Press not too fast in at that gate
Where the return stands by disdain,
For sure, circa Regna tonat.

The high mountains are blasted oft
When the low valley is mild and soft.
Fortune with Health stands at debate.
The fall is grievous from aloft.
And sure, circa Regna tonat.

These bloody days have broken my heart.
My lust, my youth did them depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.
Of truth, circa Regna tonat.

The bell tower showed me such sight
That in my head sticks day and night.
There did I learn out of a grate,
For all favour, glory, or might,
That yet circa Regna tonat.

By proof, I say, there did I learn:
Wit helpeth not defence too yerne,
Of innocency to plead or prate.
Bear low, therefore, give God the stern,
For sure, circa Regna tonat.

The repeated Latin phrase circa Regna tonat is usually translated “Thunder rolls around the Throne”, a reference to the dangerous temperament of the King.

Wyatt was not executed in 1536, but released after the intervention of none other than Thomas Cromwell. It seems he had a habit of sailing rather close to the wind, and was in and out of trouble with the King, being charged again with treason in 1541 and again released. He died, apparently of natural causes, in 1541, at the age of 39.

Leave a comment »

John Henry – Big Bill Broonzy

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , on April 2, 2024 by telescoper

I’ve been meaning to post this track for some time but for some reason haven’t got around to it until now. It was recorded in Germany in 1951 and is a solo performance by legendary guitarist, blues singer and guitarist Big Bill Broonzy. The song, often called the Ballad of John Henry, tells the story of the folk hero John Henry, a man whose job was to use a 12lb hammer drive a steel drill into a rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock in constructing a railroad tunnel. In the legend, John Henry is pitted against a steam-powered drill. He beats the machine, but is exhausted by his efforts and dies with his hammer in his hand.

By the way, you will hear reference in the song to a “shaker”. This was a man whose job it was to hold the drill – an object like a chisel – against the rock while it was struck by the hammer, and move it about to loosen the rock around it. I dread to think what happened if the hammerman missed the drill.

The historical facts around the location of the story of John Henry and indeed the identity of the hero are open to debate, but it’s a wonderful song and this is a brilliant and very characteristic performance of the song by Big Bill Broonzy whose singing, playing, and announcement to the song, will bring it all back to anyone lucky enough to hear him in the flesh. Bill Broonzy was on a European tour at the time this record was made, and I have back at home a very old LP of him singing and playing at the Dancing Slipper in West Bridgford, in Nottingham. I also have a copy of the album from which this performance is taken, the other side of which is by Graham Bell and his Australian Jazz Band. The full introduction to John Henry begins with Bill Broonzy saying rather sardonically “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’m glad to be here too, don’t think I ain’t” before the rest of it that you hear.

Leave a comment »

Changes at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in Maynooth, Open Access with tags , , , , , , , on April 1, 2024 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog – both of them – will have noticed that I haven’t posted any new publications from the Open Journal of Astrophysics for a couple of weeks. The reason for this is that we are switching to a new system of publishing that automatically integrates the Scholastica platform with Crossref, the system that (among many other things) keeps track of citations to published articles.

Up to now, I have had to prepare manually an XML file containing the metadata for each paper for upload, then send it to a colleague to register with Crossref. There are two problems with this. One is that transcribing the information from each overlay is prone to errors (made by me), especially if there is a long author list. The other problem is that it is rather slow and inefficient, which wasn’t such a problem when we were only publishing a few papers, but now that we are handling much more it is taking up too much time.

The obvious solution is to cut out the middle man (i.e. me) and register everything with Crossref directly from our platform. That will ensure that what goes to Crossref will be exactly the same as on our website and it will go there much faster. Another advantage is that if there is an error on the platform, such as a spelling mistake in an author name, correcting it there will automatically update the metadata on Crossref. You have no idea how much time and frustration this will save. Up to now we have to raise a ticket with Crossref for their staff to make the change, which can take a while to complete.

Scholastica offers a way to do this integration, but it doesn’t work with our existing Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), which have the format 10.21105/astro.1234.56789, because it doesn’t allow us to include the “astro” which we need it to do because we share the prefix (10.21105) with another journal, the Journal of Open Source Software and we need to keep the two separate; they use 10.21105/joss at the start of their DOIs. After much to-ing and fro-ing we were unable to persuade Scholastica to change their policy, so to use their integration we have been forced to change prefix. Fortunately, Maynooth University (which runs Maynooth Academic Publishing, the official publisher of OJAp) is registered to mint its own DOIs so we can switch to a new prefix (10.33232) and avoid potential problems with the old one.

This change seems straightforward but it requires Crossref to switch the “ownership” of the journal and give us permission to add new papers with the same journal title “The Open Journal of Astrophysics” from what is effect a new publisher. This is a straightforward process, but has been a bit slower than expected because of the Easter break. I expect it to be completed in a week or so, at the latest.

It is important to stress that this change only affects the DOIs and registration of new papers. Existing papers are not affected at all: they continue with the old DOIs. The DOI is meant to be a persistent identifier so this is as it should be. The name of our website domain (astro.theoj.org) remains unchanged too. In other words, nothing visible to authors will change except for the format of the DOIs and the fact we go from acceptance to publication even faster.

If al this seems rather boring, that’s because it is. But please bear with us while we complete this change. It’s definitely going to be worth it in the long run, for me if nobody else!

Leave a comment »

Thomas Cromwell and his Prayer-Book

Posted in Art, History with tags , , , , , , on April 1, 2024 by telescoper
(1532-1533, Oil on Panel, 78.1 cm × 64.1 cm) by Hans Holbein the Younger – The Frick Collection, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=207764

The famous portrait of Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein the Younger shown above is in fact a copy; the original is lost. There is another copy in the National Portrait Gallery in London, but it’s not as good. The original was painted around 1533, during the period covered by the novel Wolf Hall (which I reviewed yesterday) and is mentioned in the book. Holbein is known for having sometimes painted excessively flattering portraits – most notably of Anne of Cleves – but he doesn’t seem to have done that here. Cromwell is portrayed as dour, stern-faced and more than a little scary. He probably wanted people to fear him, so wouldn’t have minded this.

As well as the nature of the likeness, the composition is interesting. The subject seems to be squashed into the frame, and hemmed in by the table that juts out towards the viewer. He is also looking out towards the viewer’s left, though not simply staring into space; his eyes are definitely focussed on something. I’m not sure what all this is intended to convey, except that the table carries an ornate prayer-book (the Book of Hours) as if to say “look, here’s a symbol of how devout this man is”.

Interesting, just last year scholars published research that argues that the copy of the Hardouyn Hours which can be found in the Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, is precisely the book depicted on the table. If so, it’s a rare and perhaps unique example of an artefact seen in a Tudor painting that survives to this day.

1 Comment »

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Posted in History, Literature, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , on March 31, 2024 by telescoper

Still trying to use the spare time during my sabbatical to catch up on long-neglected reading, this Easter weekend – helped by the rainy weather – I finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, the first of her novels that I’ve read. This “historical novel” won the Booker Prize in 2009 and I understand was made into a play and a TV series, neither of which I have seen.

The novel is set in Tudor England in the reign of Henry VIII and revolves around Thomas Cromwell, who rose from lowly beginnings in Putney to be one of the powerful men in the country. Cromwell gets a surprisingly sympathetic treatment, at odds with most of the historical record which treats him largely as a cruel and unscrupulous character, undoubtedly clever but given to threats and torture if appeals to reason failed. From a 21st century perspective, it’s hard to find redeeming features in Cromwell. Or anyone else in this story, to be honest.

The historical events of the period covered by the book are dominated by Henry’s attempts to have his marriage of 24 years to Catherine of Aragon annulled so he could marry Anne Boleyn, along the way having himself declared the Supreme Governor of the Church in England, causing a split with Rome. Henry does marry Anne, and she bears him a daughter, destined to become Elizabeth I, though her second pregnancy ends in a miscarriage. The book ends in 1535 just after the execution of Thomas More, beheaded for refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy.

(More was portrayed sympathetically in the play and film A Man For All Seasons though he was much disposed to persecution of alleged heretics, many of whom he caused to be burned at the stake for such terrible crimes as distributing copies of the Bible printed in English. Significant chunks of the penultimate chapter are lifted from the script of A Man For All Seasons but given a very different spin.)

Henry VIII is also portrayed in a somewhat flattering light; Anne Boleyn rather less so. Mary Tudor, Henry’s eldest daughter by Catherine of Aragon, cuts an unsurprisingly forlorn and intransigent. There are also significant appearances from other figures familiar from schoolboy history: Hugh Latimer, Cardinal Wolsey, and Thomas Cranmer; as well as those whose story is not often told, such as Mary Boleyn (Anne’s older sister). I have a feeling that Hilary Mantel was being deliberately courting controversy with her heterodox approach to characterization. She probably succeeded, as many professional historians are on record as hating Wolf Hall as much of it is of questionable accuracy and some is outright fiction.

Incidentally, one of the most negative reactions to this book that I’ve seen is from Eamon Duffy who is on record as detesting the historical figure of Thomas Cromwell and was “mystified by his makeover in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall from a thuggish ruthless commoner to a thoughtful sensitive figure”. I mention this particularly because Eamon Duffy, an ecclesiastical historian, was my tutor when I was an undergraduate at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

On the other hand, Wolf Hall not meant to be a work of scholarly history: it is a novel and I think you have to judge it by the standards of whether it succeeds as a work of fiction. I would say that it does. Although rather long-winded in places – it’s about 640 pages long – it is vividly written and does bring this period to life with colour and energy, and a great deal of humour, while not shying away from the brutality of the time; the execution scenes are unflinchingly gruesome. The book may not be accurate in terms of actual history, but it certainly creates a credible alternative vision of the time.

It’s interesting that the title of this book is Wolf Hall when that particular place – the seat of the Seymour family – hardly figures in the book. However, one character does make a few appearances, Jane Seymour, who just a year after the ending of this book would become the third wife of Henry VIII. It also happened that Thomas Cromwell’s son, Gregory, married Jane’s sister, Elizabeth. I suppose I will have to read the next book in the trilogy, Bring Up The Bodies, to hear Mantel’s version of those events…

12 Comments »

A week is a long time…

Posted in Politics with tags , , , , , , on March 30, 2024 by telescoper

“A week is a long time in politics” is a quotation usually ascribed to Harold Wilson, although there’s no record of him ever having said it; it has nevertheless turned out to be true for the island of Ireland.

I have been thinking about writing about the sudden resignation of Leo Varadkar from the office of Taoiseach just ten days ago, and his impending replacement by Simon Harris (the current Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science), but I’ve been too busy and thought I’d wait until the holiday weekend to write something.

(To be honest I didn’t have any great insights to offer, so it’s perhaps just as well that I didn’t attempt any kind of in-depth analysis, not that lack of insight prevents media pundits from having a go. I’ll just say that Harris is an energetic tinkerer who is good at doing superficial – and sometimes positive – things to attract headlines, and is clearly enormously ambitious, but I don’t think he’ll offer any significant change of direction. The biggest issue in Ireland right now is the housing shortage, and in his address to Fine Gael members (given here in full) he didn’t mention the housing crisis or rising homelessness once. We can assume that more inaction is in store as the governing coalition limps on towards the next General Election, that must take place within the next year.)

I also found it amusing how many columnists wrote, after the fact, that they had Varadkar’s resignation coming although they were all far too brave to say so ahead of the event.

Anyway, the events of yesterday turned out to be even more surprising – not to say shocking – than Varadkar’s departure. Jeffrey Donaldson MP, Leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) resigned yesterday. Nobody knows for sure why Leo Varadkar resigned (except the man himself; my best guess is that he just got bored with the job) but the reason for Donaldson’s resignation is well known: he has been charged with sexual offences, including rape. Since his case is now in the hands of the criminal justice system, further comment or speculation about the charges would be highly inappropriate. Whatever you think of Jeffrey Donaldson’s character or politics – and I don’t think very much – he is, like everyone else, entitled to a fair trial. Just as importantly, if he has committed crimes it is important not to say or do anything that may be construed as prefudicial and might prevent a conviction.

This matter is alarming however because the Northern Ireland Assembly has just returned to Stormont after a two-year hiatus. Although Donaldson was largely responsible for its suspension, he was also largely responsible for its return. A sizeable fraction of the DUP were, and presumably still are, opposed to the agreement that led to reinstatement of power sharing and there is a real danger that the Assembly will collapse again. Fortunately, both sides seem to realize what a disaster that would be for the people of Northern Ireland, but that doesn’t guarantee that another crisis can be averted.

“May you live in interesting times” is another frequently misattributed quotation, but it seems we’re in them anyway.

Leave a comment »

Good Friday – Edwin Morgan

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on March 29, 2024 by telescoper

by Edwin Morgan (1920-2010)

Leave a comment »

Jueves Santo

Posted in Barcelona with tags , , , on March 28, 2024 by telescoper

Today, Jueves Santo (Holy Thursday, aka Maundy Thursday), is a public holiday in many parts of Spain but not here in Catalonia, where all the shops have been open. I mentioned that Barcelona is not the most religious city in Spain and this is another demonstration of that. I am glad the shops were open because I used the occasion to stock up for the approaching long weekend.

Nice weather having resumed, the tourist areas of Barcelona were extremely busy today. I’m not sure what the Spanish or Catalan words are for Chuggers but they were out in force. One guy stepped right in front of me and I couldn’t avoid bumping into him. As someone who is often very nervous in large crowds I find this sort of thing very irritating. I gave him an earful (in English) and walked on. I still don’t know what he was plugging.

Like everywhere I’ve stayed during this sabbatical, the apartment I’m on is equipped with a Nespresso machine. This one, however, is different from the usual type and takes larger capsules like those shown above. While you can get standard Nespresso pods in supermarkets and other stores, these funny hemispherical pods have to be purchased in a Nespresso shop. There are plenty of these shops around – there’s one just over the street from my apartment – but it’s quite hard work just buying the capsules at them. You can’t just pick up a box of capsules and take it to a till: you have to queue to see one of the assistants who will try to sell you some sort of subscription. On the other hand, they also offer you a coffee to taste if you don’t know which of the myriad types you want. You can also recycle used capsules there. Anyway, despite my broken Spanish, I did succeed in buying what I wanted and will be sufficiently caffinated for the next few weeks.

P.S. As well as the ceremonial purchase of coffee, one of the other rites performed on Jueves Santo is the Lavatorio de Pies which means “the washing of the feet” and has nothing to do with lavatories or pies.

Leave a comment »

That Exciting New Black Hole Picture!

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , on March 27, 2024 by telescoper

At a press conference earlier today, scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope revealed an exciting new picture of the environs of Sgr A* the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way that shows structures associated with a powerful magnetic field:

New
Old

You can see immediately the enormous advantage of using a paintbrush (left) rather than a crayon (right) to make such images. For more details, see the press release here or the two papers about this work, here and here.

3 Comments »

R.I.P. Peter Clegg

Posted in R.I.P. with tags , , on March 27, 2024 by telescoper

It is my sad duty to pass on the news that Professor Peter Clegg, formerly of Queen Mary University of London, passed away last Friday, 22nd March 2024.

Peter Clegg was an expert in observational and instrumental aspects of infrared astronomy. He was in the School of Physics at Queen Mary when I was in the School of Mathematical Sciences and I got to know him through the MSc in Astronomy that the two Schools delivered jointly, and latterly through the RAS Club. He was well known to colleagues in the Astronomy Instrumentation Group at Cardiff, many of whom worked for some time at Queen Mary.

I understand that Peter had been ill for some months, and that he passed away peacefully in his sleep. The funeral is to be on 12th April. Please contact me privately for details if you knew Peter and would like to attend.

1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »