May 15

Amber pages


Mike Oldfield, composer of "Tubular Bells", born today in 1953, providing an excuse for a piece on "whatever happened to?"... maybe, one day....





But there are people who I definitely intend to follow up:


Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, or Théroigne de Méricourt if you insist, attacked by a gang of Jacobins in the Jardin des Tuilleries, today in 1793; find her in the Napoleonic Age of "Woman-Blindness"


Anthony Shaffer, screenplay writer, and Peter Shaffer, playwright, b
orn within seconds of each other, and completely identical, today in 1926, providing an excuse for a piece on famous twins:

Jacob and Esau (heels and birthrights)
Perets and Zerach (less well-known, but that scarlet thread!)
Romulus and Remus
Castor and Pollux (click here)
Apollo and Artemis (click here)


And speaking of pairs, this one is listed on the "Mediaeval" page of "Woman-Blindness", the female half of that most famously tragic love story, Abélard and Héloïse...

Héloïse du Paraclet in full, born in either 1100 or 1101, died today in 1163, or it may have been 1164, the Juliet to Pierre Abélard's Romeo, and it turns out that they weren't somebody's made-up love-story, but two real people, he one of the leading theologians and philosophers of their day (more on him among the reverend writers), and she one of his students, or tutees might be more accurate because he was hired by her parents in a world without non-convent schools, and brought to their château, where what he initially fell in love with was her diligence, her intellectual curiosity, the speed of her intellectual development, and the gradual realisation that she was at least as clever as he was, and probably more so. To put that in context, he would later be a primary influence on both Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; as to her, when he first came to tutor her in 1115, she was already fluent in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and would need all three, as well as her native Franchoise, when she became abbess at d'Argenteuil, a convent being, in the end, the only place where a woman with a brain had any chance of using it, back in those mediaeval times. He, by the way, spent his latter years as a monk at St Denis Paris, where he published his "Historia Calamitatum" (click here) and received some of the most deprecating correspondence ever received by a man who thoroughly deserved it, from a woman he had badly wronged.



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