18 March 2024

Visiting women in their houses

In the Iliad, the epic account of the Wrath of Achilles during the Trojan War, there is a thought-provoking vignette juxtaposing Hector and Andromache, and Paris and Helen. The latter pair are corrupt adulterers whose passion has precipitated the War. We must remember that, in Classical Literature, sexual passion is regarded as a wound or madness which leads to disaster; the Romantic superstition that sexual incontinence is "love" and that it justifies any and every wrong deed, had not yet been invented.

Hector his brother, on the other hand, is a brave man who fights for his country; and Andromache is a faithful and devoted wife and mother.

Paris was defeated in a single duel with Helen's lawful husband, Menelaus, but rescued from death by - needless to say - his divine patroness Aphrodite, louche goddess of sexual passion. She miraculously transfers him to his fragrant bedchamber and then scoops up Helen to join him in bed. Meanwhile, the slaughter continues.

In Book 6, we find Hector deciding to urge Paris back to the battlefield. He approaches Paris's house, which consists of thalamos, doma, and aule, defined respectively by the Scholiast [ancient commentator] as bridal chamber, men's quarters,and 'outside'. Still fully equipped in his armour, Hector enters (eiselthe) ... but how far does he go inside?

He finds Paris in the thalamos with Helen and the handmaids, to whom she is assigning their tasks. Paris is sitting there stroking his superb display armour (I was tempted to translate: fiddling with his tackle). To his brother's remonstrances, Paris replies that he had been feeling rather depressed, but that Helen had been wheedling him malakois epeesin to return to the battle. The Scholiast helpfully reminds us here that Paris is gunaimanes, 'womancrazed'.

Helen now adresses her brother-in-law Hector. She apologises for being an abominable bitch who would have been better not to have been born, and adds some derogatory remarks about her husband ... and starts trying to persuade Hector to 'come in' and sit beside her on this nice little chair.

But is Hector not already 'in'? I think not; and the Scholiast agrees with me. He explains that Hector had so far only entered 'in' as far as the aule. In other words, he had been standing on the threshold of the thalamos. Now she desires him to go in and sit down.

What we need to know here is that in pre-modern societies there were rigid and prescriptive assumptions about where each sex did go and did not go. Except when retitring at night, you would not normally expect a man to spend daylight hours in the thalamos with his wife and the womenfolk. 

That Paris was doing so reflects enormous discredit upon him. And now Helen is inviting Hector to join in this discreditable behaviour.

Tomorrow, I plan to move on to Joseph and Potiphar's wife. And to the proprieties of their situation.

  ...

17 March 2024

Imbolc; S Patrik; and S Bridgit (2)

 But ... one moment ... did I inform you that all the old chapels in Killarney Cathedral had been obliterated? That's not quite right: the Kenmare chapel still survives. And in it is anothe brass which the erudite and affable Fr Bertram, indefatigable antiquarian, might have wished to record. 

It shows a gentleman in the robes and wearing the coronet of an earl.

When the military situation in Brtitain still hung in the balance in 1689, our late Sovereign liege Lord, King James II, was still in Ireland, and holding a Parliament in Dublin. On 20 May, by Letters over the Great Seal of Ireland he created the Head of the Browne Family to be Viscount Kenmare and Baron Castlerosse. After the disaster of Williamite success in Ireland, nobody quite knew what to do about this. The unuttered compromise was ... just to ignore it. At the end of the century, the same titles were granted in the name of the Georgite regime to the de iure Jacobite Viscount; and they were granted again shortly afterwards with an earldom tacked on when, because of the 'Union', peerages of the 'Yewkay' became more politically useful than mere Irish peerages. 

These particular Georgite de facto creations, I think, became 'extinct' in the 1950s. (Conceivably, the old de iure creations of 1689 might not have suffered the same fate. Does anybody know?) There are in existence some very 'Thirties' paintings by dear Sir John Lavery of Lady Castlerosse by the bathing pool at the head of the Lake. 

And, in the 'former' Kenmare chapel of the Cathedral, is this very fime Brass of the then Earl ... perhaps looking rather pleased with himself for having got his rather unique and special de jure peerage Hannoverified; Georgificated. There are also some good tiles with the motto of the Family: LOYAL EN TOUT. I wonder how far back this motto goes ... and to which 'royal' family it proclaims its rather absolute loyalty.

In the Killarney Brass, two scrolls emerge from his Lordship's mouth, One reads: Sancte Patrici ora pro me. The other: Sancta Bridgida ora pro me.

Going back to the Moriarty brass ... in the canopy-work above Bishop Moriarty are representations of these same two Irish Saints.

May they pray for us all.  

And may we always be mindful of that great Christian craftsman and architect A W Pugin, of whom Bishop Moriarty, at the Consecration of the Cathedral, said "I was delighted that the great architect who designed the work was present on that occasion in the person of his own child--Mr Edward Pugin--who was not only the son of his affections but the child of his genius. Where is the Catholic mind that does not remember the mighty spirit of the departed, who has left the impress of his vast mind on the length and breadth of Great Britain and Ireland--who performed the work of centuries, in restoring the taste for ancient architecture, surrounding the temples of God with those forms of beauty which are so instinct with holy suggestions and thoughts." 

Young Edward Pugin himself remarked that ,"even when a child, he remembered hearing his father say that of all the churches which he had designed the Killarney Cathedral was the nearest to his heart, for he had endeavoured to make it a splendid temple to Almighty God". With a characteristic nod to the realities of the the Tourist Trade, he referred to "the vast numbers who flock to gaze on its unrivalled scenery, which, as it were, called, with a voice, half-divine, for the erection of a temple of worship suited to the beauty and majesty with which the God of Heaven had clothed every hill and valley of that earthly paradise."

The inhabitants of the Iveragh like that sort of thing: the Tralee Chronicle records "loud cheers"! In August 1861, Queen Victoria, her family and their entourage, were to pay a spectacular State Visit to Killarney, Lord Castlerosse being their host, but it is not not recorded that the Visit included Mr Pugin's masterpiece. I doubt it!

 

However, 2024 is, I think, the second year in which the name ... even, the identity, of S Brigid ... has been disrespectfully glossed over. The Irish State ... whatever would Mr Devalera have said, or General Michael Collins, each of them devout men ... has appointed the First Monday of February as a Bank Holiday in honour of ... is it S Brigid or Imbolc or a conflation of both?

My unhappy fear is that this is yet another lamentable expression of the Secularisation, the deChristianistion, of the Irish National State When I first began our visits to that Island, I rejoiced to be setting foot on a part of the British Archipelago where Divorce, Abortion, and all the other horrrs, had no place. 

16 March 2024

Saint Patrick and ... um ... Imbolc ... (1)

 Dunno ... does the Sacred Congregation of whatever still allow the Irish to celebrate S Patrick in preference to a Sunday in Lent/Passiontide?

Might you wish to put up a prayer to S Patrick in the most wonderful church ever built in his honour ... Pugin's masterpiece, the Catholic Cathedral at Killarney? That is a laudable desire, but ... well ... permit me to go off on a momentary tangent.

In Pagan/Protestant England, visiting one of the ancient Cathedrals in the custody of the body once known as the Church of England is comparatively straightforward. You enter; they do their best to extract some money from you; then you decide whether to buy a guide book. The advantage of doing this is that it will almost certainly contain a plan of the building, showing where each chapel is. S Cross and S Michael; S George and S Faith; S Peter and S Paul ... they will all be on the plan because, a century and more ago, learned old gentlemen worked out the plan from the archives; men such as the Canon J N Dalton, Canon of Windsor, the savant  who was such a spectacular failure as Tutor of Edward VIII ... M.A.; F.S.A. ... So, off you go ...

Killarney Catholic Cathedral will be rather shy about informing you which chapel was here and which one was there. Pugin's plans left it well-equipped with chapels, and his intentions were carried out  as it was completed by followers including his son Edward, and J J MacCarthy. 

But where now is the plethora of such chapels? 

The guide book I purchased, years ago, goes strongly on the adjective "former". "the former Blessed Sacrament Altar". "formerly St Brendan's Chapel ..."

The interior of this once superb church has been a wasteland since Bishop Casey, the first Swallow of the moral and institutional collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland, had it gutted. I remember the looks on the faces of the little old ladies with the long memories, describing to me the time when the builders' skips were being loaded with smashed masonry. 

But ... one moment . Here, attached to the wall, is a rather splendid brass monument (I wonder if Fr Jerome Bertram of the Oxford Oratory ever rubbed it) to Bishop David Moriarty, a close friend of S John Henry Newman and another of the 'inopportunists' of Vatican I.

Those were the days when the Bismarcks pretended to believe that the Vatican I decrees exaggerated papal authority. It was to take the grim violence of the unhappy Bergoglio years to demonstrate that those decrees in fact constituted limitations upon the use of the Petrine Ministry.

And ... mark these words: "Hanc Tabulam muralem necnon et Altare Sancto Patritio dedicatum Clerus populusque moerens erexit ..." and Bishop Moriarty  "vindicavitque sibi recordationem perennem."

So the S Patrick Altar (and Chapel?) was somewhere round here. It took the adulterous episcopal vandals of a later age to reinterpret words like recordatio and perennis and to level it with the ground. 

Moriarty, by the way, actually performed the Consecration, on the Octave of the Assumpton in 1855 as coadjutor to old Bishop Cornelius Egan, Diocesan since 1824. The Homilist, a Corkman, concluded his remarks with the following allusion to the old gentleman whose ministry, after all, did stretch back into the Penal Period: 

"It is no wonder that he should rejoice and be happy, when he sees that by the the zealous co-operation of his worthy clergy and his devoted people, that glorious structure at length almost completed. And now that his most earnest desire has been accomplished, that his earthly career is drawing to a close, his spirit may well look forward to that 'rest which remains' for those who have served God so fervently and faithfully as he has done. And oh! may the zeal of that great and good prelate serve as a bright exemplar to others to follow in his footsteps. Yes! when his venerable grey hairs, now silvered, as it were, with the light of the eternal world, shall have been exchanged for the halo of glory which diadems the brow of the beatified spirit -- when he shall have resigned the crozier for the crown -- this magistic [sic] temple, and the various churches and religious institutions with which he has studded this beautiful and interesting county shall be -- his MONUMENT."

My own view is that all bishops should die in ofice.

The second part of this should get me to Imbolc and even to S Patrick..

15 March 2024

Loss and Gain

"Soon he came in sight of a tall wooden Cross, which in better days, had been a religious emblem, but had served in latter times to mark the boundary between two contiguous parishes. The moon was behind him, and the sacred symbol rose awfully in the pale sky, overhanging a pool, which was still venerated in the neighbourhood for it its reported miraculous virtue. Charles, to his surprise, saw distinctly a man kneeling on a little mound out of which the Cross grew; nay, heard him, for his shoulders were bare and he was using the discipline upon them, while he repeated what appeared to be some form of devotion ..."

Goodness! You don't expect to see such weird goings-on in England's mild countryside! Has S John Henry Newman forgotten that his character is in the English Midlands? Has he strayed into the Gothick domains of Mrs Ratcliff? Is it the Castle of Otranto that we descry looming through the sulphurous mists?

No. 

Another page takes Charles Reding on to his lodgings, where an anonymous letter reveals that there is an anonymous Other in the neighbourhood. But not before Charles has been moved to draw near to the Cross, take off his hat, kneel and kiss the wood; to drink some of the cold water and to resist the temptation to pray to S Thomas the Martyr, patron of that pool. The next chapter brings us to luncheon, with the fatuous high-churchman Bateman ... in company with Willis. He is already a Catholic; and Newman enjoys setting us a scene in which Bateman is rigidly maintaining the Prayer Book rules on Fasting, by that time ignored in the Church of England, while the converted Willis modestly confirms that once desuetude overshadows a rule, it no longer binds.

Willis soon disappears from S John Henry's narrative, praying as he does so that Reding may receive the gift of Faith.

What is going on here? The former friends, Willis and White, go their separate ways, Willis to a Passionist House, while the rather more high church White has married the elder of the two 'pretty' Miss Boltons and they are planning their parsonage. Reding accidentally overhears their love-talk. "Charles breathed freely as they went out; a severe text of Scripture rose in his mind, but he repressed the censorious or uncharitable feeling ..."

What do you think that text of Scripture was? Possibly, "Verily I say unto you, they hath their reward"?

Newman retained a prejudice against the comfortable, wealthy domesticity of the married Anglican clergy. For the Passionists, he retained a great respect and was, eventually, received by a Passionist priest into the One Fold of the Redeemer. In 1848, in Loss and Gain, the Passionists reappear in what must be some of S John Henry's most emotional passages, in the Chapter X near the end of the novel: two centuries after S Philip and S Ignatius, Newman recalled their 'bodily austerities ... mortification' ... (in the Second Spring he was to speak of S Philip as "a calm old man, who had never seen blood, except in penance"). 

And Father Domenico de Matre Dei enters the narrativeof the novel. And the fictional Willis ... now 'Father Aloysius' ... is in the novel's very last sentence.

I gather that 'our' nuns, God bless them, are happily to be residing in Aston Hall in Stone, Staffordshire (architect, Edward Welby Pugin). This is an old recusant property where once the relics of S Chad were hidden. 

And in this property, Blessed Dominic Barberi once founded (1842) a Passionist noviciate.

I think it is appropriate, in the Ordinariate, for us to regard the Passionist Blessed Dominic as One Of Ours.

14 March 2024

Farewell to Lady Raglan (3)

 It is hardly surprising that Lady Raglan has been deemed the Inventrix of the Green Man, since she herself wrote that, as she looked at the carving in Llangwm church in Monmouthshire, the suggestion was made to her that the Green Man was intended to symbolise the spirit of inspriration. "But it seemed to me certain that it was a man and not a spirit, and moreover that it was a 'Green Man' ... and so I named it"

Silly old woman, she convinced herself that "by the 15th century it formed an important part of the religious life of the people."

"It is still", she wrote, "the custom to hang bells or flowers over the bride and bridegroom at the wedding ceremony ... now I see it to be none other than the Garland of the Sacrificial Green Man and his sacred bride."

Well, at Dorchester those who buy Sue Dixon's guide to the former Abbey church will continue to be informed that the Green Man is a "pre-Christian symbol of rebirth and renewal". And, reputedly, there are enthusiasts who, in pursuit of 'Wicca' are informed that it "predates Christianity by thousands of years".

Enough about that!!

13 March 2024

The Green Man (2)

 Julia Hamilton-Udny, daughter of Robert 11th Lord Belhaven, married Fitzroy Richard Somerset, 4th Baron Raglan. He was an atheist and a humanist and an anthropologist; he was a member of the All-Party Humanist Group at Westminster, and a prominent member of the British Humanist Association.

It is commonly said that Lady Raglan invented the term 'Green Man' and the mythology surrounding this figure; and that she did so in 1939. None of this is precisely accurate: the term Green Man had for centuries been applied to figures in English Folklore. But the rigmarole associated with this figure since the 1930s can certainly attributed to her. "It seems to me that not very deeply buried in this rite we have the bones, the framework, of the magical rite of the Spring Sacrifice ... a man was chosen to represent the god, and he, after conferring by the proper magical ceremonies his strength and fertility upon his people was sacrificed (perhaps by hanging), and his head placed in a sacred tree ..."

Perhaps it is as well that illustrated coffee-table books with titles like the Wit and Wisdom of Lady Raglan are not available ...

I think she may have had to repress some scepticism even within her own mind: "the idea of such sacrifice was not foreign to the minds of the common people even as late as the 16th century ..." But, like others in that fascinating decade, she clung to her own interior certainties: "the unofficial paganism subsisted side by side with the official religion". Conspiracy-theory mania writ large ... some people will believe anything ... and was this not the period when people tried to advance themselves at the courts of Hitler and Himmler with strange and complex constructions of the Occult?

Raglan had convinced herself that her green man belonged to a "world which was beginning to need him, a world in which people were gradually realising that industrialisation was steadily degrading our planet ... [the green man] came to represent all that the modern world undervalues, excludes, and lacks."

It all seems to me like a flight from reality; it is, surely, in the glorious and august Holy Sacrifice of the Mass that we discern, and appropriate, true divine reality?

12 March 2024

Th Green Man (1)

In church buildings all over the Three Kingdoms, one can find carvings, in stone or wood, of the Green Man. He is a grotesque figure, usually showing just a rather unhappy (or hostile) head and face, with foliage emerging from its orifices. 

This is a relic of the pre-Christian fertility cults which, after a long battle with the increasingly dominant and intolerant Christian Religion, finally lost the battle.

Except that this is not true. You will find it, or parts of it, in the 'popular' guide books which, at the back of church after church,  you are invited to buy. I recently found it in the little book currently on offer in Dorchester Abbey near Oxford. But it will be convenient to begin with a factual account of the present academic status quo ... and that means Stations of the Sun (1996) by Ronald Hutton. (Curiously, the Green Man is missing from the index: so I will give you the page numbers ... 241-2 and 424-5.) Hutton explains that we have here, according to 1930s writers, "representations of pre-Christian deities or spirits of nature and fertility. This supposition was not based upon any research into the history of either: it was, rather, an extension of Sir James Frazer's preoccupation with tree spirits encouraged by the proposal of another member of the [Folklore] Society and follower of Sir James, Margaret Muurray, that some of the more enigmatic images in medieval churches were representations of pagan deities in which much of the population still believed. This notion was itself equally devoid of any research into medieval sources, but it so perfectly reflected what mid-twentieth-century folklorists wished to believe that it became an orthodoxy."

In 1979, Roy Judge had published his account of the evidence, based on a systematic investigation of historical evidence; but after the publication of Hutton's Stations, Eamon Duffy gave Stations a highly positive review, speaking of : "a great deal of pseudo-science and sheer gobbledegook, for which the great Victorian anthropologist Sir James Frazer must bear much of the blame ... Like many other late nineteenth century neo-pagan intellectuals, Frazer was convinced that under the Christian veneer of modern society, older and deeper beliefs persisted, enshrined in 'folk' customs and recoverable from a srtructural anthropological scrutiny of those customs. This was a theory taken up with enthusiasm by students of folklore ..." In 2014, Tom Shippey wrote about how "over the last hundred years and more, it has been popular to think that past ages worshipped what is variously called the Great Mother, Earth Mother or Mother Goddess. DIstinguished scholars pioneered the idea, including Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, and the Cambridge classiciist Jane Harrison ... D H Lawrence , Robert Graves, and Rudyard Kipling ... so that by the early 20th century, Mircea Eliade commented : 'A search for the Mother' had become a major component of the 'unconscious nostalgia of the Western intellectual'".

In 2010, Richard Hayman wrote a small but stylish volume (The Green Man) in which he demonstrated that "The term 'green man' does not have any currency earlier than the 1930s ... That the term has become firmly established is due initially to Lady Raglan, who was inspired to enquire into the green man in the church at Llangwn Uchaf near her home ... In 1939 she published an article in the journal of the Folklore Society in which she argued that the green man in church architecture was a relic of pagan nature worship that had somehow weathered several centuries of Christian culture ... these were 'pagan' images on the margin of a later culture, the work of anonymous craftsmen stubbornly resisting orthodox Christian teaching and carving green men as a silent affirmation of an older faith ... pagan survival ... Upon this foundation the green man was reinterpeted in the latter part of the twentieth century to suit the needs of the post-modern world, as representing some sort of spiritual union with nature ... the assumptions made about the green man in the 1950s are no longer convincing."

!939?? Lady Raglan?? Who on earth was ... 

I hope to complete this piece later.

11 March 2024

QUATENUS

 I have noticed a grammatical construction which I can thus describe: you have an ut-clause; and dependant upon that clause you have another subordinate clause which might reasonably begin with another ut. In these circumstances, the second potential ut may be replaced by quatenus.

Here is a liturgical example: "Deprecantes, ut beatus confessor Birinus ... nobis obtineat, quatenus ipsius societate perfruamur ..."

And here is a curial example: " ... rogamus, ut ita in dei opere perseverare studeas, quatinus regi regum deo placere valeas ..."

My first example is from a 12th century liturgical book probable connected with Abendon; my second from a letter sent by or associated with Pope S Leo IX, to King Edward the Confessor.

Now here are my queries.

 Is this particular construction widespread? Should we consider it "Christian"?

According to Lewis and Short (sub voce E and F), we should think of Lactantius (d. 326), Cassiodorus (d. 575), and the Digest, which would be heavy enough hints even if we were not advised "(eccl. Lat.)" and "(post-class)."

But what about the other end of things? I am referring to Renaissance Latin. Is this a usage stylists such as Cardinal Pole, or Bembo or Gigli, would have been happy with? Or would they have deemed it a relic of the Dark Ages?

10 March 2024

Mothering mothering mothering mothering ... but never a word about ...

 Endless, endless stuff on the wireless this morning about Mothering Sunday or "Mothers' Day". But I didn't hear a word about the biblical basis of today's observance.

Every three years, during what the Informed so wisely call YEAR C, Novus Ordo worshippers are graciously allowed to hear selected, safe extracts from S Paul's Epistle to the Galatians. But, poor vulnerable poppets, they are preserved from the whole of Chapter 4.

Gotta protect them, you see ... from ... er ...

In this brilliant chapter, Christendom's ablest mind in two thousand years explains that our Patriarch Abraham had two sons; that these two represent allegorically the two Covenants. The first, son of Hagar, symbolises "the present Jerusalem" (tei nun Ierousalem), who is in slavery with her children. But the second, "the Jerusalem above" (he de ano Ierousalem), is free, and she is our Mother.

We, brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. 

But Hush. This is information reserved to obscurantist old Bible Students who heard Galatians 4 this morning. 

We are the tekna tes eleutheras.


9 March 2024

Now what about this ...

 ... the early records of the See of Exeter tell us that the episcopium was moved from the villula of Crediton to the civitas  of Exeter because the former had so very often (saepius) been devastated (devastari ... notice the intensitive de-) by the Infestation of Pirates.

I wonder what pirates  meant in the middle of the eleventh century. Did it refer to the raiders from the North; that is, the Vikings, the sophistication of whose advanced culture we are often invited, through Exhibitions and Seminars, to admire?

Or do we have here, coming on stream, our old friends the Barbary Pirates, Messengers of the Third Great Abrahamic Civilisation?

Where did all that loot from the great Anglo-Saxon monastic settlements end up?

Surely those who have excavated sites in Scandinavia and North Africa must know what Anglo-Saxon artefacts have come to light?

8 March 2024

Don't skip the opening pages

 I learned quite a time ago the importance of looking through the stuff at the beginning of liturgical books.

I was fortunate enough to have come into possession of the (the Henry Bradshaw edition of) the Ordinale Exoniense, all four volumes by Bishop John Grandisson ('grauns'n'); gracious me, what a workoholic micromanager the dear old fellow was. By chance, my eye fell upon mid-August. After the Assumption on August 15, August 18 offers Sol in Virgine.

Hmmmmmmm

It got me wondering whether this astronomical datum might explain why the Heavenly Birthday of the Mother of God should have been fixed in the middle of August.

But stay. Years later, Nicholas Orchard published his superb edition of the Stowe Missal. And the Exeter Diocesan Clergy Book Fund provided me with a copy. That book also has oodles of introductory material. And here also, perhaps three centuries before the Ordinale, we find ... well, this time it's Sol in Virginem. what a terrible schoolboy error ... an accusative rather than the ablative ... but ... perhaps the formula is an abbreviation and we are to 'understand' intrat.

The agreement of these two books offers another problem: as the centuries moved onwards, the divergence between the Julian Calendar and what we now call the Gregorian ... i.e. where the Heavenly Bodies actually were ... grew greater ... yes? So presumably the coincidence of these two sources of information indicates that the information was passed down orally or in writing; and was nor secured from or based upon observation.

 Incidentally, the Grandisson Calendar gives lots of information ... for example, that, today. February 21 is the "End of Winter. Beginning of Spring. Last possible Date for Septuagesima".

And hang on. Here's another thing. The disjunction Julian/Gregorian must surely have a spin-off with regard to how late Easter can be. I happen to have a Sarum Missal ... thank you, Father; it has been and is endlessly useful ... I have equipped it with tabs and ribbons ... in my view, that is why Providence has endowed us with such a rich supply of tabs and ribbons in all those old Novus Ordo liturgical books so that we can cannibalise them for loftier uses ... and Sarum says: April 25 is ULTIMUM PASCHA ... the last day Easter can possibly occur.

Now I shall turn to Cheney/Jones (I bought that myself). And ... apparently the latest date of Easter is ... April 25!! 1943 was the last such year; 2038 will repeat it.

I am now totally confused ...


7 March 2024

Homosexualism

 A little while ago, the Book Review section of The Times carried a review of a new book on homosexuality. The Reviewer was Diarmaid MacCulloch.

I don't know much about this "AI" business, but it seems to me that a Machine properly programmed would give you, if you typed in 'MacCulloch', exactly what this review says. All our dear old friends, now elderly chestnuts, are here ... "testy passing remarks of Paul of Tarsus": S Paul has had his "Saint" removed, just as if he had mismanaged a Post Office. We are told that it is "not 'homosexuality'" that "is denounced in the Christian Bible". 

For MacCulloch, "the same-sex relationships so pronounced in  the life of James VI and I of Scotland and England had no physical elements; that seems implausible." It reminds of the analysis, common in our time among the ideologically motivated, which argues that any opposition to a homosexualist agenda arises from the speaker's own covert or repressed homosexuality ... a neat thesis, which means that you can't argue against homosexualism without providing your interlocutor with additional evidence for the thesis you are opposing. 

And he refers to "a bizarre quarter-millenniun of paranoia about masturbation (not something that had much worried previous cuktures)." Anybody who has performed even a cursory survey of forms of devotion for "Compline" will know that going-off-to-bed was regarded as a dangerous moment for devout males (Dom Anselmo Lentini modified the text of the hymn Te lucis ante terminum) because it "excultis nostris moribus non opportuna est, unde expunctam velimus".

But what puzzles me ... what makes me seek enlightenment from readers ... is a sentence near the beginning of MacCulloch's review. "Embarrassed historians long neglected the topic; proper research had to await the 1980s and the efforts of three gay scholars: Michel Foucault, John Boswell and Alan Bray."

Really? Is MacCulloch unaware of the figure of Sir Kenneth Dover, 1920-2010, President of Corpus Christi College in this University, who published his Greek Homosexuality in 1978? It caused a great deal of comment when it was published. It is true that the volume currently under review is about "Early Modern Europe" and not the 'ancient Greeks' , but MacCulloch himself chooses to expand the subject under discussion to "three millennia".

Is there some ancient Odium Philologicum among dear old gentlemen going on here? Did Dover write or do something which MacCulloch still resents? 

Does anybody know?