Watch a Musician Improvise on a 500-Year-Old Music Instrument, The Carillon

in Music | September 14th, 2017

Last year we fea­tured the Win­ter­gatan Music Machine, a lov­ing­ly hand­craft­ed in wood auto­mat­ed instru­ment cre­at­ed by artist/musician Mar­tin Mollin. Over 2,000 mar­bles trav­el through a com­plex series of gears, cranks, and tubes, even­tu­al­ly strik­ing notes on a xylo­phone and cre­at­ing beats on two close­ly mic’d pads to make bass and snare drum sounds. There’s more lay­ers to fol­low in the video, and it’s all been pro­gramed by Mollin.

His video earned over 55 mil­lion views on Youtube. What inspired the Win­ter­gatan Music Machine?The col­lec­tion of old automa­ta at the Speelk­lok Muse­um, where Mollin’s machine now resides. In an inter­view, he told Wired:

Even before dig­i­tal they made fan­tas­tic, pro­gram­ma­ble music instru­ments. In bell tow­ers and church tow­ers that play a melody they always have a pro­gram­ming wheel exact­ly like the one that is on the mar­ble machine.

Which leads to today’s video, where Mollin gets to impro­vise on the machine that inspired him to make his own: a 500-year-old car­il­lon. This car­il­lon uses a pro­gram­ma­ble wheel (or “repinnable musi­cal drum” as it is offi­cial­ly called), which allowed melodies to be played on church bells.

Those pat­terns are set on the drum by a series of mov­able stops, but this car­il­lon also has a sec­ond set of keys that are arranged like a piano, and must be played with a fist. Mollin has a go, and impro­vis­es a melody near the end.

Mollin also hosts “Music Machine Mon­days” on his YouTube chan­nel, where he explores more of the museum’s col­lec­tion of automa­ta, like this insane Self-Play­ing Orches­tra with 17 Instru­ments (above). If you are into some pre-tran­sis­tor cool­ness, before steam or punk was even a thing, do check it out.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Old­est Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

Behold the Sea Organ: The Mas­sive Exper­i­men­tal Musi­cal Instru­ment That Makes Music with the Sea

Watch Leonar­do da Vinci’s Musi­cal Inven­tion, the Vio­la Organ­ista, Being Played for the Very First Time

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Behold the Beautiful Designs of Brazil’s 1920s Art Deco Magazine, Para Todos

in Art, Magazines | September 14th, 2017

Art Nou­veau, Art Deco… these are terms we asso­ciate not only with a par­tic­u­lar peri­od in history—the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry and the ensu­ing jazz-age of the 20s—but also with par­tic­u­lar locales: Paris, New York, L.A., Lon­don, Vien­na, or the Jugend­stil of Weimar Munich. We prob­a­bly do not think of Rio de Janeiro. This may be due to bias­es about the priv­i­leged loca­tion of cul­ture, such that most peo­ple in Europe and North Amer­i­ca, even those with an arts edu­ca­tion, know very lit­tle about art from “the colonies.”

But it is also the case that Brazil had its own mod­ern art move­ment, one that strove for a dis­tinct­ly Brazil­ian sen­si­bil­i­ty even as it remained in dia­logue with Europe and the U.S. The move­ment announced itself in 1922, the cen­ten­ni­al of the South Amer­i­can nation’s inde­pen­dence from Por­tu­gal.

In cel­e­bra­tion, artists from São Paulo held the Sem­ana de Arte Mod­er­na, sev­en days in which, the BBC writes, they “con­struct­ed, decon­struct­ed, per­formed, sculpt­ed, gave lec­tures, read poet­ry and cre­at­ed some of the most avant-garde works ever seen in Brazil.”

1922 also hap­pened to be the year that a Rio de Janeiro-born artist, illus­tra­tor, and graph­ic design­er who went by the name J. Car­los (José Car­los de Brito e Cun­ha) took over the direc­tion of the mag­a­zine Para Todos. Found­ed in 1918, the mag­a­zine began as a film rag, and its cov­ers faith­ful­ly fea­tured pho­to spreads of movie stars. But in 1926, Car­los, who had already proven him­self a “major tal­ent in Brazil­ian Art Deco graph­ic design,” writes Messy Nessy, began draw­ing his own cov­er illus­tra­tions, and he con­tin­ued to do so for the next four years, as well as draw­ing thou­sands of car­toons and writ­ing vaude­ville plays and sam­ba lyrics.

His work clear­ly draws from Euro-Amer­i­can sources, includ­ing sev­er­al unfor­tu­nate racial car­i­ca­tures. But it also intro­duces some unique­ly Brazil­ian ele­ments, or unique­ly Car­los-ian ele­ments, that seem almost pro­to-psy­che­del­ic (we might imag­ine a jazz-age Os Mutantes accom­pa­ny­ing these trip­py designs).  J. Car­los was a pro­lif­ic artist who “col­lab­o­rat­ed in design and illus­tra­tion in all the major pub­li­ca­tions of Brazil from the 1920s until the 1950s.” In all, it’s esti­mat­ed that he left behind over 100,000 illus­tra­tions. So devot­ed was Car­los to the art and cul­ture of his native city that he appar­ent­ly turned down an invi­ta­tion by Walt Dis­ney to work in Hol­ly­wood.

Print mag­a­zine describes Car­los’ work as “a cross between Aubrey Beard­s­ley and John Held Jr.,” and while there is no short­age of the wil­lowy, doll-like flap­pers, elon­gat­ed, elfin fig­ures, and intri­cate, spi­dery pat­terns we would expect from this deriva­tion, Car­los is also doing some­thing very dif­fer­ent from either of those artists—or real­ly from any­one work­ing in the North­ern Hemi­sphere. He has since become a hero­ic fig­ure for Brazil­ian artists and schol­ars, inspir­ing an exten­sive web project, a visu­al the­sis on Issuu, and two recent doc­u­men­tary films (all in Por­tuguese), which you can find here.

In 2009, Car­los received a posthu­mous hon­or that prob­a­bly would have thrilled him in life, a trib­ute song by the Académi­cos da Rocin­ha sam­ba club. Lis­ten to it here and find sev­er­al more of Car­los’ Para Todos cov­ers at Messy Nessy, Print, and the Brazil­ian blog Os cam­in­hos do Jour­nal­is­mo.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Hun­dreds of Issues of Jugend, Germany’s Pio­neer­ing Art Nou­veau Mag­a­zine (1896–1940)

Down­load Influ­en­tial Avant-Garde Mag­a­zines from the Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry: Dadaism, Sur­re­al­ism, Futur­ism & More

Oscar Wilde’s Play Salome Illus­trat­ed by Aubrey Beard­s­ley in a Strik­ing Mod­ern Aes­thet­ic (1894)

Har­ry Clarke’s 1926 Illus­tra­tions of Goethe’s Faust: Art That Inspired the Psy­che­del­ic 60s

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear What Happens When Avant-Garde Composer Pierre Boulez Conducts Three Frank Zappa Songs

in Music | September 13th, 2017

Was Frank Zap­pa a musi­cal genius? A mod­ernist, avant-garde com­pos­er who just hap­pened to work in an idiomat­ic pas­tiche of jazz, clas­si­cal, pro­gres­sive rock and juve­nile shock tac­tics? The ques­tion can be a deeply divi­sive one. Zap­pa tends to inspire either intense devo­tion or intense dis­like. But what­ev­er one’s opin­ion of the man or his music, it’s safe to say that when he wasn’t work­ing alone, Zap­pa worked in the com­pa­ny of some incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed musi­cians. And he attract­ed, as John Rock­well wrote in 1984 at The New York Times, “a tiny fol­low­ing among clas­si­cal avant-gardists.”

That year, one of his more gen­teel fans, Pierre Boulez—for­mer music direc­tor of the New York Phil­har­mon­ic and “wide­ly regard­ed,” notes Rock­well, “as one of the great com­posers of the [20th] century”—decided to con­duct a suite of Zap­pa songs. Zap­pa hoped the result­ing album, The Per­fect Stranger, would help him real­ize his ambi­tion of hav­ing his music tak­en seri­ous­ly in clas­si­cal cir­cles. (“A brief col­lab­o­ra­tion in 1970 with Zubin Mehta,” writes April Peavey at PRI, “went nowhere.”)

Boulez con­ducts his own ensem­ble for three tracks on the album, “The Per­fect Stranger,” “Naval Avi­a­tion in Art?” and “Dupree’s Par­adise.” The remain­ing four songs are per­formed by “The Bark­ing Pump­kin Dig­i­tal Grat­i­fi­ca­tion Con­sort,” a Zap­paism for the Syn­clavier, Zap­pa’s favorite elec­tron­ic instru­ment. For all the high seri­ous­ness the col­lab­o­ra­tion implies, Zap­pa couldn’t help insert­ing his sur­re­al­ly sar­don­ic sense of humor; always “a com­pul­sive musi­cal come­di­an,” wrote Rock­well, he wears here “the defen­sive mask of irony, again.”

Each of the songs has an accom­pa­ny­ing sce­nario. “The Per­fect Stranger” imag­ines that “a door-to-door sales­man, accom­pa­nied by his faith­ful gyp­sy-mutant indus­tri­al vac­u­um clean­er, cavorts licen­tious­ly with a sloven­ly house­wife.” In “Love Sto­ry,” Zap­pa wants us to pic­ture “an elder­ly Repub­li­can cou­ple attempt­ing sex while break­danc­ing.” Many peo­ple have had trou­ble get­ting past the sopho­moric pos­tur­ing and see­ing Zappa’s music as seri­ous art. He often seemed intent on alien­at­ing exact­ly such peo­ple.

But per­haps Zap­pa did not need the pedi­gree Boulez lent to his work. When lis­ten­ing, for exam­ple, to the Moth­ers of Inven­tion play Zappa’s orig­i­nal arrange­ment of “Dupree’s Par­adise” (top), one has to admit, he cre­at­ed bril­liant­ly com­plex, rhyth­mi­cal­ly excit­ing music and, in the final analy­sis, rep­re­sent­ed “a par­tic­u­lar­ly appeal­ing type of quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Amer­i­can composer—genuinely defi­ant of estab­lished cat­e­gories and divi­sions that oth­ers rou­tine­ly accept.” Lis­ten to the Boulez/Zappa col­lab­o­ra­tion The Per­fect Stranger in the Spo­ti­fy playlist above, or access it direct­ly on Spo­ti­fy here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Musi­cal Evo­lu­tion of Frank Zap­pa in 401 Songs

Frank Zap­pa Gets Sur­prised & Ser­e­nad­ed by the U.S. Navy Band at the San Fran­cis­co Air­port (1980)

Frank Zappa’s Amaz­ing Final Con­certs: Prague and Budapest, 1991

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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When Roald Dahl Hosted His Own Creepy TV Show Way Out, a Companion to Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone (1961)

in Television | September 13th, 2017

In an odd twist of his­to­ry, two of the wis­est and weird­est children’s writ­ers of their gen­er­a­tion also hap­pened to have both been fight­er pilots dur­ing World War II. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Lit­tle Prince, flew recon­nais­sance mis­sions for the French Air Force before the 1940 armistice with Nazi Ger­many. Roald Dahl, author of—among many oth­ers—Char­lie and the Choco­late Fac­to­ry, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG, flew with the Roy­al Air Force. Both wrote about their fly­ing exploits and both writ­ers, it so hap­pened, were once shot down over Libya, which also hap­pens to be the title of Dahl’s first pub­lished sto­ry, writ­ten for grown-ups and pub­lished in the Sat­ur­day Evening Post in 1946.

There are maybe oth­er uncan­ny sim­i­lar­i­ties, but one thing Saint-Exupéry nev­er turned his hand to is tele­vi­sion. Dahl, on the oth­er hand, had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to host two TV shows dur­ing his life­time: Way Out in 1961 and Tales of the Unex­pect­ed, which aired from 1979 to 1988 and fea­tured sev­er­al episodes based on Dahl’s own sto­ries. Although he has become renowned for his high-con­cept kid’s books, at the time of Dahl’s entrée onto the tube, he had main­ly achieved fame as a writer of macabre tales pub­lished in the New York­er as well as a script writ­ten for Alfred Hitch­cock Presents called “Lamb to the Slaugh­ter.”

Dahl seems a nat­ur­al fit for the medi­um, not only as a writer but as a pre­sen­ter, with his dry wit and suave per­son­al­i­ty. But his first show, Way Out—eight episodes of which you can now watch on YouTube—came about entire­ly by acci­dent, or rather, as the serendip­i­tous result of anoth­er program’s spec­tac­u­lar fail­ure. This is no exag­ger­a­tion. Jack­ie Glea­son, per­haps the most famous come­di­an of his day, had decid­ed in 1961 to attempt a celebri­ty game show on CBS called You’re in the Pic­ture. The show was such a bomb that it only aired once, and the fol­low­ing week, Glea­son appeared on a bare stage for half an hour, the authors of a Film­fax Mag­a­zine arti­cle write, and “apol­o­gized to the Amer­i­can pub­lic for the insult to their intel­li­gence that had been per­pe­trat­ed the week before.”

This went on for sev­er­al more weeks, then Glea­son invit­ed celebri­ty friends on for impromp­tu inter­views and “when things start­ed get­ting des­per­ate,” had a chimp on as a guest star. One CBS net­work head at the time remem­bered the show lat­er as the great­est dis­as­ter of his decades-long career in tele­vi­sion. Enter pro­duc­er David Susskind, “a man who could deliv­er a pro­gram quick­ly and under pres­sure,” and a great fan of Roald Dahl. Cook­ing up the idea of “an eerie, chill­ing creepy dra­ma,” Susskind says, with “a nether world sense to it,” he approached Dahl with an offer to replace Gleason’s trav­es­ty with adap­ta­tions of his sto­ries and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to host.

Only one of Dahl’s sto­ries made it into the show, the first episode “William & Mary” (above), about a man plan­ning to become a brain in a jar. But the show was an instant hit with crit­ics, espe­cial­ly Dahl’s brief, dark­ly humor­ous open­ing and clos­ing mono­logues. One crit­ic described him as “a thin Alfred Hitch­cock, an East Coast Rod Ser­ling.” And like Serling’s show, Way Out—which was spelled in a title card after the first episode with an inex­plic­a­ble sin­gle apos­tro­phe as ’Way Out—traf­ficked in sci-fi and psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror. But the two shows were not in com­pe­ti­tion. Twi­light Zone and Way Out both aired on the same net­work, CBS, and the time slot of Gleason’s failed show hap­pened to direct­ly pre­cede The Twi­light Zone, just then end­ing its sec­ond sea­son. Dahl’s show was billed as a “com­pan­ion pro­gram” to Serling’s.

Sad­ly for all the praise show­ered upon ’Way Out, it did not attract a large enough audi­ence to get renewed for a sec­ond sea­son, and it would be anoth­er 18 years before Dahl returned to tele­vi­sion. But even had he nev­er returned, or nev­er even made his first pro­gram, Dahl’s sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to TV his­to­ry would be secure. His first chil­dren’s book, The Grem­lins, orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in 1943 for a failed Dis­ney project, inspired what is per­haps the most well-known Twi­light Zone episode of them all, the William Shat­ner-star­ring “Night­mare at 20,000 Feet,” which involves a cer­tain ter­ri­fy­ing shock on an air­plane and was so effec­tive, it was remade for Twi­light Zone, the film. The episode adapt­ed a sto­ry by Richard Math­e­son, but it was Dahl who first came up with the idea.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read a Nev­er Pub­lished, “Sub­ver­sive” Chap­ter from Roald Dahl’s Char­lie and the Choco­late Fac­to­ry

Roald Dahl, Who Lost His Daugh­ter to Measles, Writes a Heart­break­ing Let­ter about Vac­ci­na­tions

Alfred Hitch­cock Presents Ghost Sto­ries for Kids (1962)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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What Is Fair Use?: A Short Introduction from the Maker of Everything is a Remix

in Law, Media | September 13th, 2017

Back in 2010, we began fea­tur­ing a series of videos from film­mak­er Kir­by Fer­gu­son. Called Every­thing is a Remix, the four-part video series explored the idea that (to quote from one of my ear­li­er posts) “great art doesn’t come out of nowhere. Artists inevitably bor­row from one anoth­er, draw­ing on past ideas and con­ven­tions, and then turn these mate­ri­als into some­thing beau­ti­ful and new.” That applies to musi­cians, film­mak­ers, tech­nol­o­gists, and real­ly any­one in a cre­ative space.

If you would like to watch the orig­i­nal series in its total­i­ty, I would refer you to the video below. Above, you can now watch a new Kir­by Fer­gu­son video that delves into the con­cept of Fair Use–a con­cept defined by the Stan­ford Copy­right and Fair Use web­site essen­tial­ly as “any copy­ing of copy­right­ed mate­r­i­al done for a lim­it­ed and ‘trans­for­ma­tive’ pur­pose, such as to com­ment upon, crit­i­cize, or par­o­dy a copy­right­ed work.” They go on to say:  “Such uses can be done with­out per­mis­sion from the copy­right own­er. In oth­er words, fair use is a defense against a claim of copy­right infringe­ment. If your use qual­i­fies as a fair use, then it would not be con­sid­ered an infringe­ment.”

Need­less to say, fair use is an impor­tant con­cept if you’re mak­ing your own videos on Youtube, or if you’re a teacher using media in the class­room.

By the end of his short video, if you’re still not clear what Fer­gu­son means by Fair Use, you’re in luck. He’s giv­ing you the oppor­tu­ni­ty to sub­mit ques­tions to be answered by “a real live lawyer in a fol­low up video.” He also includes extra resources at the end of the seg­ment.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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A First Glimpse of Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury, Compared with the Real Freddie Mercury Performing at Live Aid in 1985

in Film, Music | September 13th, 2017


Few film­mak­ers have ever fig­ured out how to make a motion pic­ture about an already larg­er-than-life per­son­al­i­ty, and per­son­al­i­ties haven’t come much larg­er in recent his­to­ry than Fred­die Mer­cury’s. Talk of a movie about the Queen front­man, who died in 1991, has gone on for years: Dex­ter Fletch­er came up as a poten­tial direc­tor, and for the role of Mer­cury both Ben Wishaw and Sacha Baron Cohen have at dif­fer­ent times been attached. But now the film has entered pro­duc­tion, hav­ing found a direc­tor in Bryan Singer, he of the X‑Men fran­chise, and a star in Rami Malek, best known as the lead in the tele­vi­sion series Mr. Robot.

But can Malek — or indeed any­one cur­rent­ly liv­ing — con­vince as Mer­cury? The first piece of evi­dence has sur­faced in the form of the clip at the top of the post, shot on set as the cast recre­ates Queen’s 1985 come­back per­for­mance at Live Aid. The band “seemed to intu­it right from the start the impor­tance of the day, though they were very ner­vous back­stage.

But once onstage they com­plete­ly own it, even more so Fred­die Mer­cury who ris­es to the occa­sion as a front man and as a singer, giv­ing one of his best per­for­mances,” writes Ted Mills of the real con­cert video, which we fea­tured just this past May here on Open Cul­ture. The show opens by going straight into“Bohemian Rhap­sody,” Queen’s sig­na­ture eight-minute rock opera, which gives the new movie its work­ing title.

Even going by just a minute and a half of footage, shot shak­i­ly, in low res­o­lu­tion, and at a dis­tance, it must be said that Malek does look to make an uncan­ny Mer­cury, right down to that dis­tinc­tive jog onto the stage at Wem­b­ley Sta­di­um. In the Late Show with Stephen Col­bert clip just above, Malek talks about his expe­ri­ence watch­ing the sur­viv­ing mem­bers of Queen watch his per­for­mance as Mer­cury for the first time — and at the icon­ic Abbey Road Stu­dios, no less. “How did they take you?” Col­bert asks. “They took me,” Malek responds, leav­ing us to wait until Decem­ber of next year to judge for our­selves how he brings their beloved lead singer back to life — and whether, by what­ev­er com­bi­na­tion of train­ing and tech­no­log­i­cal wiz­ardry, the film gets it right down to that one-of-a-kind voice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Queen’s Stun­ning Live Aid Per­for­mance: 20 Min­utes Guar­an­teed to Give You Goose Bumps (July 15, 1985)

Sci­en­tif­ic Study Reveals What Made Fred­die Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cap­pel­la Splen­dor

Queen Doc­u­men­tary Pays Trib­ute to the Rock Band That Con­quered the World

Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Fred­die Mercury’s Final Video Per­for­mance

The Mak­ing of Queen and David Bowie’s 1981 Hit “Under Pres­sure”: Demos, Stu­dio Ses­sions & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Animated Introduction to Rene Descartes & His Philosophy of Radical Doubt

in Philosophy | September 12th, 2017

Ear­ly Enlight­en­ment French philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian René Descartes invent­ed a new genre of phi­los­o­phy, we might say, one that would dom­i­nate the cen­tu­ry to come. Before Locke, Leib­niz, or Kant, Descartes stood out as a “the­ist ratio­nal­ist.” Rather than trust­ing in rev­e­la­tion, he leaned sole­ly on log­ic and rea­son, cre­at­ing a set of “rules for the direc­tion of the mind,” the title of one of his books. He believed we might think our way—solely unaid­ed by unre­li­able exter­nal sources—to belief in God and “all the knowl­edge that we may need for the con­duct of life.”

Descartes’ proofs of God may not sound so con­vinc­ing to mod­ern ears, slip­ping as they do into the lan­guage of faith when con­ve­nient. But in oth­er respects, he seems dis­tinct­ly con­tem­po­rary, or at least like a con­tem­po­rary of Lud­wig Wittgen­stein. He believed that phi­los­o­phy suf­fered from improp­er def­i­n­i­tions and lacked clar­i­ty of thought. And like the ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry log­i­cal pos­i­tivists, he put tremen­dous store in log­ic and math­e­mat­ics as ana­lyt­ic tools for acquir­ing knowl­edge about the world. These, along with the sci­en­tif­ic method Descartes cham­pi­oned, were indeed the sole means of acquir­ing such knowl­edge.

Descartes, then, has become known for intro­duc­ing the rad­i­cal “method of doubt,” which sup­pos­ed­ly strips away all prej­u­dice and pre­con­cep­tion, every arti­cle of belief, to get at the most fun­da­men­tal­ly ascer­tain­able core of knowl­edge. Upon doing this in his 1637 Dis­course on Method, the French philoso­pher famous­ly found that the only thing he could say for cer­tain was that he must exist because he could see him­self doubt­ing his exis­tence—cog­i­to ergo sum, “I think there­fore I am.” The process involved cast­ing aside all author­i­ty and tra­di­tion, which made Descartes a hero to French Rev­o­lu­tion­ists. His free­think­ing also made him very much the ene­my of many in the Catholic church.

Describ­ing in Dis­course on Method how he had aban­doned all reliance on oth­er texts and resolved to derive the answers to his ques­tions from expe­ri­ence and rea­son, he seemed to dis­miss the author­i­ty not only of church hier­ar­chy and dog­ma but of scrip­ture itself. Rather than fix­ing God at the cen­ter of the uni­verse, Descartes used the “Archimedean point” of his own cer­tain exis­tence to anchor “an epis­te­mo­log­i­cal­ly unsteady world.” Nonethe­less, he was com­mit­ted to keep­ing faith intact, even as he seem­ing­ly demol­ished the foun­da­tions of its exis­tence, including—for Catholics—the cher­ished idea that priests could turn bread into flesh.

It might have been an attempt at self-preser­va­tion or appease­ment, but it seems more to reflect sin­cere belief: in the Med­i­ta­tions on First Phi­los­o­phy, Descartes sought to prove the exis­tence of God in much the same way as he had proved his own exis­tence, through cir­cu­lar rea­son­ing and argu­ments that split mind and mat­ter into two dis­tinct camps. Descartes cre­at­ed a dual­ist view of the world that became a major prob­lem in his phi­los­o­phy. At the time, many of his crit­ics were less con­cerned with this onto­log­i­cal puz­zle than they were with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of his hereti­cal thought inter­fer­ing in world affairs.

Descartes’ rad­i­cal doubt threat­ened not only church doc­trine but also church pol­i­tics. One schol­ar claims to have found evi­dence that a Catholic priest—fearing the French free­thinker would jeop­ar­dize the con­ver­sion of Sweden’s Queen Christi­na to Catholicism—murdered Descartes with an arsenic-laced com­mu­nion wafer. If so, it would have been a cru­el­ly iron­ic death, per­haps by design, for the man who dared to write in the Med­i­ta­tions that transubstantiation—one of the Church’s cen­tral super­nat­ur­al teachings—should be “reject­ed by the­olo­gians as irra­tional, incom­pre­hen­si­ble and haz­ardous for the faith,” and to hope for a time when “my the­o­ry will be accept­ed in its place as cer­tain and indu­bitable.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix: From Pla­to and Descartes, to East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

His­to­ry of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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1,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Online

in Books, History | September 12th, 2017

If you don’t much care for mod­ern med­i­cine, entire indus­tries have arisen to pro­vide you with more “alter­na­tive” or “nat­ur­al” vari­eties of reme­dies, most­ly involv­ing the con­sump­tion of plants. Pub­lish­ers have put out guides to their use by the dozens. In a way, those books have a place in a long tra­di­tion, stretch­ing back to a time well before mod­ern med­i­cine exist­ed as some­thing to be an alter­na­tive to. Just recent­ly, the British Library dig­i­tized the old­est such vol­ume, a thou­sand-year-old illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script known as the Cot­ton MS Vitel­lius C III. The book, writes the British Library’s Ali­son Hud­son, “is the only sur­viv­ing illus­trat­ed Old Eng­lish herbal, or book describ­ing plants and their uses.” (The sole con­di­tion note: “leaves dam­aged by fire in 1731.”)

The man­u­script’s Old Eng­lish is actu­al­ly the trans­la­tion of “a text which used to be attrib­uted to a 4th-cen­tu­ry writer known as Pseu­do-Apuleius, now rec­og­nized as sev­er­al dif­fer­ent Late Antique authors whose texts were sub­se­quent­ly com­bined.” It also includes “trans­la­tions of Late Antique texts on the med­i­c­i­nal prop­er­ties of bad­gers” and anoth­er text “on med­i­cines derived from parts of four-legged ani­mals.”

(Some­how one does­n’t imag­ine those lat­ter sec­tions play­ing quite as well with today’s alter­na­tive-med­i­cine mar­ket.) Each entry about a plant or ani­mal fea­tures “its name in var­i­ous lan­guages; descrip­tions of ail­ments it can be used to treat; and instruc­tions for find­ing and prepar­ing it.”

Quite a few of the species with which the guide deals would have been direct­ly known to few or no Anglo-Sax­ons in those days, and some of the entries, such as the one describ­ing drag­onswort as ide­al­ly “grown in dragon’s blood,” seem more fan­ci­ful than oth­ers. As with many a Medieval work, the book freely mix­es fact and lore: to pick the man­drake root (pic­tured at the top of the post), “said to shine at night and to flee from impure per­sons,” the guide rec­om­mends “an iron tool (to dig around it), an ivory staff (to dig the plant itself up), a dog (to help you pull it out), and quick reflex­es.” You can behold these and oth­er pages of the Cot­ton MS Vitel­lius C III in zoomable high res­o­lu­tion at the British Library’s online man­u­script view­er. While the reme­dies them­selves might nev­er have been par­tic­u­lar­ly effec­tive, their accom­pa­ny­ing illus­tra­tions do remain strange and amus­ing even a mil­len­ni­um lat­er — and isn’t laugh­ter sup­posed to be the best med­i­cine?

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of Beowulf Dig­i­tized and Now Online

2,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of the Ten Com­mand­ments Gets Dig­i­tized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Res­o­lu­tion

The Art of Swim­ming, 1587: A Man­u­al with Wood­cut Illus­tra­tions

The Turin Erot­ic Papyrus: The Old­est Known Depic­tion of Human Sex­u­al­i­ty (Cir­ca 1150 B.C.E.)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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