Utterly Immersed

It’s all good.  But regular life has been trumping internet lately.  Here’s a quick rundown, in the event that I manage to finish this post before something else presents itself:

Contagious Illness Unit Study at an end? I’m hopeful.  No one has developed an illness in over a week.   We even managed to go camping over the weekend – yay!  Pretty much been a record year as far as minor-but-disruptive afflictions go.  That’s been my number one reason for internet silence; not so much a case of too-ill-to-post, as that caring for whichever family member has the latest strain of plague sucks up just that extra bit of time and energy.  So we’ve held together the larger part of normal life, but some of the extras had to give way.  Gives me lots of fodder for the homeschooling book . . .

. . . On which I am making progress. Albeit more slowly than I imagined.  But it is a much richer work for all the real-life enrichment I’ve been handed.  And very fortunately I have amassed a small group of people I can’t bear to disappoint, so it will get written.  At this point I’ve got the bulk of an outline (quite detailed), one lousy opening chapter that needs to be scrapped, and one middle-area chapter that is getting full but still has a few more salient points to cover.  (Topic: Housekeeping.  And those who know me will assure you, when I say I am writing a book about realistic expectations while homeschooling, you can be entirely confident my housekeeping chapter will not set any unobtainable standards.)

Speaking of which, I am trying to clean out the house.  Just way too much stuff.  (All good – but more of it than we have house.)  I finally figured out that all the cool things my neat, clean, clutter-free friends give as hand-me-downs?  If I want a house like theirs, that stuff is the first to hit to the road.  Luckily, such friends understand the need.  The place does look better, but still needs a lot of work.

But I’m hopeful, because wow my yard is awesome. In addition to contagious illnesses, we’ve also been doing a gardening unit study this spring.  SuperHusband built us a privacy fence, effectively giving a real back yard to our corner lot that was previously 90% front yard.  I had been working on cleaning up that front yard anyway (mostly out of love for my neighbors, who have suffered long enough looking at our debris), and then after the fence went up we put in some blueberries and figs for landscaping in front of that, and meanwhile had been making headway on vegetable gardening and general civility in what is now the back yard.  It is all very cottage-y, in an I-like-tall-grass-and-trees-the-birds-plant kind of way, but we’re pretty happy with it.  And the front yard I’m trying to keep moderately civilized.  Don’t mind the woodpile.  (A real functioning woodpile — we will burn it next winter.)  So all that to say: if I can tame the yard, perhaps I can tame the house as well.

Latin Watch: Verb conjugation is killing us.  Same story in French.  Oh, we’ll get through.  But the pace has definitely slowed to a crawl.  Mr. Boy and I were checking his homework on Verbix today, and I clicked on the Kreyol  option just to have a look-see, and we observed that conjugating is much easier in that language. Mr. Boy immediately wanted to change his course of study.  I told him not ’till he has plane tickets to Haiti .  (Hint: We have no such plans.)  And plus he’d need to know French anyway, so no getting out of it.    But I will observe that the girls are absolutely loving learning ASL, which is, it should be noted, a non-conjugating language.  I begin to see a pattern.

Concerning my own education . . . I finished the Sex Book. (This one).  Good book, recommended for those who fit the target audience.  I will get a review up here shortly.  Summary: I’m glad I signed up for it, and it’s one I’ll be keeping on the shelf for my own reference.   An interesting counterpoint has been reading Love and Control by Cardinal Suenens (The Newman Press, 1961), a find from the parish library.   I’m about halfway through.  Timeless observations, if, again, a little more theoretical than a married lady might hope.  On the other hand, one doesn’t want one’s clerics getting too terribly practical concerning the details of the workings of someone else’s sacrament.

Also culled from the parish shelves:  The Rule of Saint Benedict. Wow, you should read it.  Surely it’s on the internet somewhere.  The translation I had was very readable, quick to digest, and makes a great combo-pack of spiritual and historical insights.  And as it happened, I also brought home St. Odo of Cluny (Sheed and Ward, 1958), which is a translation of the Life of St. Odo, written by his contemporary John of Salerno.  Total page-turner.  I kid not.  One fascinating vignette after another, constantly making you wonder what zany anecdote is coming next.   Lots of pillaging norsemen and monks who are fed up with eating fish.  Just finished the segment on the armed standoff between a house of slacker-monks and the party of civil and church authorities trying to force the foundation to accept Odo as their reforming leader.   Definitely need to read the rule of St. Benedict first in order to understand the action.

That’s enough news for now. I’ll check back with that book review. Happy June.

Book Review: Saint of the Day

Our pastor included  Saint of the Day (6th edition, Leonard Foley ed.) on his recommended reading list this past Advent.   I’ve never gone wrong in taking his advice, so when the book showed up on the Catholic Company’s review list, I saw my big chance.    The result was consistent with Father’s track record: Not something I would have chosen myself, but I’m glad to have given it a try.

Saint of the Day is a compilation of lives of saints spanning from the time of Jesus through our day.  Most entries are about one page front and back, and include a brief biography, a reflective commentary, and a quote which is either from that saint, or which is connected in some way with that saint’s life and teachings.   There are also entries for most (but not all) of the event-related feasts.  (Think: the Visitation or the Immaculate Conception.)

To answer the most common question I received while reading this book:  No, there is not an entry for every single day of the year.  So, for use as a daily devotional, it will meet many readers’ needs far more precisely than we would like to admit.

Because the entries are brief, the editors naturally had to be selective about what information to include.  The general pattern is this: If it is expected that the average reader already knows about the saint, the focus is on analysis and spiritual lessons to be learned.  If the saint is either relatively obscure or relatively new, the entry provides more concrete biographical details.  Certain major saints and events don’t make the book, either because they are too specialized (St. Genevieve – Patron Saint of Paris) or so well known they needn’t be discussed at all (Feast of the Incarnation).

I  found the book most helpful for learning about new saints — especially those newly canonized, but also some of the more obscure historic saints.   I found that if I already knew quite a lot about a saint, invariably the editors had chosen to leave out some crucial detail I thought terribly important.    I was also frustrated with some entries that omitted even bare biographical details such as where the saint lived, in favor of more reflective commentary.  For example, the entry for “Teresa of Jesus” never tells us that this Teresa of Avila — I was only sure they were one and the same because I happened to have The Way of Perfection sitting on the bathroom counter,  which work was mentioned in the “Teresa of Jesus” entry.

I was very happy to confirm the commentary is all 100% straight Catholicism — neither to the left nor the right.  Because the book was assembled from the work of many contributing authors, and because my mood is highly changeable, sometimes I found the quotes and reflections a little wanting, other times they seemed to be dead-on.  For many entries, the related quote comes from a papal encyclical or other modern church document. I found myself  frustrated at times by their ponderous style, but also glad the editors chose to introduce the reader to these momentous and undeniably relevant works.

I’m still looking for the perfect one-volume, general-interest saints book.   Saint of the Day takes an honest stab at that effort, and if it isn’t perfect, I wasn’t able to find another book on the shelves of my local catholic bookstore that did as well.   For the fairly informed catholic adult looking  for a combination devotional and historical brush-up, this is a sound choice.  It probably will not be the one book that meets all your needs, but it is reliably catholic, and certainly does what any good saints book will do:  it points you in the right direction.

Asimov / Belloc follow-up

Finished reading The Shaping of France.  Pretty happy with it.  All my reservations stated below continued, and of course it was just dreadful to read such an agnostic account of Joan of Arc — what a spoilsport!  But as a nice clear, readable telling of the kings and battles of medieval France-in-progress, it did the trick.  Great introduction to military history for people who don’t really do military history, but want to understand some of the big picture.  For all its faults, I think reading this one is a good starting point, or re-freshing point, before diving deeper into any particular topic covering medieval France or England.  (For example: 1215.)

I’m not sure whether it makes Hillaire Belloc squirm or chuckle, but I think his  Characters of the Reformation is a natural follow-on to The Shaping of France. Similar type of work, though the author’s historical lense now switches from ardently-atheist-mode to ardently-catholic-mode.   Belloc’s character-by-character approach is a little more disjointed and difficult to follow, but in exchange you get a slightly more intense look at each individual.  Likewise, Asimov is the more goes-down-like-popcorn story-teller, but I think Belloc is selling meatier ideas.  (And it was very refreshing to read an account of the reformation from an unabashedly-catholic perspective.  Just because you never do.  No doubt a bit of bias in there, but bias worth discovering for change.)  As far as historical-documentation goes, they are twins.

My only regret on these two: I really wish I had read The Shaping of France before Characters of the Reformation, because the one really sets you up to understand the other.

***

Next on my to-do list: Getting my notes done on my medieval-france honkin’ big pile of library books before they have to go back at the end of the week.   In between taking girls to the Nutcracker, cooking for Thanksgiving, attending Thanksgiving, hosting Thanksgiving, and maybe doing other fun stuff.  And then cleaning of my desk, haha.

 

Reading French History to Understand the English

I’m about a third of the way through Isaac Asimov’s The Shaping of France (Houghton Mifflin, 1972).  Not exactly a proper history book, since there are absolutely no citations or bibliography or anything else to back up his various claims, but more like a highly readable report written by an astonishingly good undergrad.   For all the man can’t seem to document, he can tell a mighty good story.

I picked up the book from the library wanting shore up my knowledge medieval french history, and certainly it’s been helpful for that.  But the surprise was this:  Suddenly the history of medieval England makes so much more sense.   Asimov’s telling of the Capetian kings’ efforts to build a stable (French) kingdom works like the denoument of a good mystery, where Father Brown or Miss Marple explain the motives of that one character you never really noticed before, but whose actions were driving all the strange comings and goings of the rest.  You need, of course, to already have the outline of English history in the back of your head, or else the final explanation won’t do you any good.

–> I’m don’t know that Asimov’s book is the best out there.  You could never use it for academic purposes without making your advisor chuckle (or cringe, or both).  And I’m only up to Philip VI, so this a PBR.  But if you need an easily-digestible history of the kings from Charlemagne forward, in a way you can actually pretty much remember and make sense of, Asimov is mighty handy in a pinch.   And just the trick for making sense of England.

 

Booklet Report – Church & State . . .

The Relation of Church and the State in the Middle Ages

The Very Reverend Bede Jarret, OP, MA, STL

Requiem Press, 2005

ISBN 0-9758542-7-5

Whew.  So as you know, when it comes to philosophy, I really have just fallen off the turnip trunk.  Which  is a bit of a problem, because when I picked out this little booklet as part of my Req Press omnibus order in January, it looked like a perfectly nice essay on *history*.  Close: history of ideas.  Lent-a-claus sure was feeling lenty on me.

Luckily not a very long essay — the whole booklet is about 30 pages of comfortable middle-sized print – and entirely readable.  I couldn’t comment critically on it, but I could understand it.

Here’s what it is: A summary of how theologians have viewed the relationship of church and state from the founding of Christianity through the end of the middle ages, and how that relationship has worked in practice.  The goal is to puzzle out how the English Martyrs got into the position they did.  Seems obvious now, but apparently, as the publisher’s preface observes, even St. Thomas More didn’t initially believe that the papacy was a divine institution.

Now if your history-of-philosophy education was as sorry as mine, your knowledge on this topic might consist of two assumptions:

1) We enlightened people believe in the Separation of Church and State

2) People in the past believed in The Divine Right of Kings.

The Relation of Church and State walks you through a much more nuanced and detailed assessment of how Christian thought and practice has developed over the centuries.  It opens with this observation about why the question is a uniquely Christian one:

That the difficulty [of adjusting the relations of church and state] is wholly Christian can be seen if it be remembered (using the words in their present day sense) that to the pagan his State was his Church, and to the Jew his Church was his State.  In either view, they were not two powers, but one. . . . For the Christian, however, the problem was much more delicate, since he was brought up to look on both the Church and State as divinely authorized powers and to believe that the authority of both was from God.

Tricky, what with the king being Nero and all.

But it got even trickier after the Edict of Milan:

. . . when Christians were allowed freedom of worship, and when the Emperor himself became a catechumen.  The difficulty now was no longer the simple difficulty of heroic obedience to a persecuting government, but of adjusting obedience to two authorities which were both interested in the application of the moral law of Christ to life.

The essay details of how this tension was addressed through the centuries, and what legacy was available to the martyrs of the English Reformation.   I can’t tell you how completely or precisely the author covers the topic, because it is brand new to me.  But I will say that it is worth your attention, if you want a survey of ideas for an introduction.  (Or, if you are more knowledgeable, you want a nice argument.)

Curiously, the conclusion is that relationship of the papacy to the national monarchies remained incompletely resolved at the close of the middle ages.  Jarret concludes that the the right to invest the Bishops was won by the papacy.  The right to tax and judge the clergy was won by the national monarchies.  But one thorny issue remained open:

. . . the right to determine the character of the beliefs of the nation.  This was the wholly new problem which John Fisher, Thomas More and the rest had to settle for themselves.

Worth a look.  I won’t say it’s an essay for everybody; but if it is a topic that interests you, it’s a respectable start.  And manageable – ordinary mortals can read it, which cannot be said for all works of philosophy.

Oh and the most wonderful bit about Requiem Press’s edition:  *translations of all the Latin*. Ha.  Because you know back in 1928 when this paper was first presented, it was assumed you could just toss off bits of Latin and everyone would understand.  Turns out not only was my philosophy education deficient, but my Latin isn’t all that great either.  Go Req Press.  My heros.  Woohoo.

Figuring Out What’s What in Medieval French

I’ve been reading The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow on and off for a while now.  Picked it up from the library about a year or so ago and never got past the introduction; got it out again recently, and have been browsing through it in spurts.  Pleasantly surprised tonight to discover I have one more renewal left before it goes back, so I may yet make some headway.

I should say right now that if you pick up this book, go straight to a chapter that interests you.  I had to slog through the introduction (I’m not saying *you* shouldn’t read it, just saying, don’t judge a book by its intro), but was rewarded in chapter one with a great lesson on the basics of what-was-what in medieval french languages.

So far I’m up to p. 100 in the cover-to-cover reading of the book, but I’ve also skipped ahead and read some bits farther along, and it was all good.  Assuming you have at least a smidgen of background on the topic, you can pretty safely just pick up and read wherever you like, and come away entertained and educated.  You do not, by the way, need to know French — English translations provided for all the non-obvious French words tossed out as linguistic examples, and some of the obvious ones, too.  (Say you couldn’t figure out that the word zéro meant, er, zero?  Don’t worry, there’s a translation there for you on p. 30.)

***

What struck me in reading the chapter on medieval ‘french’ is just how busy a time it was, linguistically.  By the year 800 a language distinct from latin had emerged, to the point that the church had to require homilies be given in the vernacular.  But this new language was both very local — not so much a unified language as a collection of more or less mutally understandable regional dialects — and vigorously international.  In addition to the exportation of Norman French to England with William the Conquerer, there was the development of the lingua franca, an italian-french dialect used in the mediterranean.

(Why did French become the, er, lingua franca of this region?  It was the dominant foreign culture.  Not unlike how the Amish call the rest of America ‘the English’, or a non-hispanic American might be called an ‘Anglo’, the Arabs apparently call all the crusaders, regardless of country of origin, ‘French’.)

–> And still more going on in addition to all that, over the five or so centuries that are especially middle of the middle ages.  Borrow the book and read Chapter 1 to get the introductory course.

There’s something worth understanding here.  When we think about language and geography and politics and culture, we Americans come from a perspective of a single highly standardized common language that has been fairly stable since as long as we can remember.  It is important in looking at medieval history and culture to understand that it was not this way then.  By getting a grasp of what was going on linguistically, we can avoid some common blunders in our historical analysis, and even hope to understand why certain elements of medieval society worked as they did.  Good stuff.  Well worth your time.

History Book Round-Up : “Discovering” America

‘Tis the season for talking about explorers, colonizers, and the people who had to deal with them.  Here are my four off-the-top-of-my-head favorite books to date.  The ones that if I need to quick grab something from the shelf, here’s what I grab.

(I should note that I will be grabbing from other people’s shelves: three from my local public library, and the fourth from my dad’s house. 3 of the 4 come with a ‘buy’ recommendation, but since I don’t have to do so myself, I won’t.)

Read all four, and you should be well on your way to being able to discuss all the hot Thanksgiving-related history topics that will be no doubt swirling around the table next week.

***

Don’t Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned by Kenneth C. Davis

This one showed up on the New Books shelf of my local library either last winter or the year before, and I grabbed it despite myself.  From the title and cover it sounded like it was going to be one of those cute little wow-your-friends-with-trivia books written in large print with lots of bulleted lists of amazing factoids, destined to circle the internet in spamlets for years to come.  Not so.  Far from it.

Each chapter is devoted to a famous moment in American History, as usually taught in American public schools.  Columbus, Pilgrims, all that stuff.  (You can look at the table of contents on amazon).  The content is the setting-the-record-straight work that college professors do to incoming freshman, essentially filling in the details and nuances to stories that are too-often summarized in three sentences through most of k-12.

I think I must have found the book tedious at times — I had to make myself finish it for the purpose of being able to write a review.  For certain there are moments when Davis gets on roll and his politics start showing, especially when he steps beyond his area of expertise.  And of course if you read the book this week, you may find yourself an insufferable dinner companion at Thanksgiving next week when a well-meaning relative tries to tell the neices and nephews about ‘The story of Thanksgiving’ and you feel compelled to offer additions and corrections.

All that said, it is still a useful reference for anyone who is interested in US history but hasn’t been through a good college-level course lately.  Loaded with details and facts surrounding various controversial moments in US history.  If you have your brain intact and can therefore read critically and reserve the right to form your own opinion, this book is a good starting point for making the transition from a sound-bite ‘knowledge’ of history to a competent understanding of what actually happened, to whom, by whom, when and how.

–> I recommend it as a library find.  Not sure I’d pay for it (above and beyond my regularly scheduled tax dollars), but I’m glad I read it.

Mayflower 1620 published by the National Geographic Society is one we bring home every year from the library.  If I couldn’t get it there, I would buy it.  The topic is the historic voyage of the Mayflower, with photos from the travels of the living history group that re-enacted the trip. Lots of good, solid, detail-laden historic evidence.

Look for it in your children’s department, but the book would be of interest to anybody who wants a thorough primer on the topic. The text is for older-elementary years and up.  As a read-aloud to younger children, I find myself having to do way too much explaining.  Younger kids, however, will enjoy the photos, and you can tell a pared-down version of events as you browse.

(Nerd-person tip of the week: Because it is easily readable, illustrated with lots of captions, and interesting across age ranges, this would be a fun one to bring along to Thanksgiving, for the browsing pleasure of people who don’t do football, and are otherwise at a loss for post-dinner conversation.  If yours is the sort of family where perusing a history book could count as ‘fun’.  It probably is, if you read this blog.)

And here are two that longtime readers may remember:

I just re-posted my original review of Squanto’s Journey.   Excellent book, beautifully illustrated and told.  Best for middle-elementary age and up — a touch too detailed for little listeners.

And finally, moving off the whole Thanksgiving topic, but still very much concerned with the early encounters between europeans and native americans is the novel Cacique by Bishop Robert Baker.   Unless you’re from Florida (and even then) you may not have studied the history of the early spanish missions in that state.  This is a very fun way to learn a good bit about the topic, if you like breezy action-adventure tales.  (Who doesn’t?  And written by a real live catholic bishop, so you can feel virtuous for reading it.)  My original review is re-posted immediately below.

***

That does it for this week.  Have a great Thanksgiving, and try to be gentle with your fellow diners as you whip out all your newly-acquired historical knowledge.

(re-post) Book Review of _Cacique_

And here’s another one for the round-up, originally posted on the old site in February 2007.

***

Cacique: A Novel of Florida’s Heroic Mission HIstory

By Bishop Robert J. Baker with Tony Sands

St. Catherine of Sienna Press, 2006

ISBN-13:  978-0-9762284-4-8

ISBN-10:  0-9762284-4-0

www.bishopbaker.com

I sent this book to my dad for Christmas, thinking it was more his genre than mine.   The plan was for him to read it, and then if he thought I’d like it, I’d read it over vacation.   First part of the plan didn’t work out — Dad has been short on reading time lately — so we skipped directly to step 2.  I read it, it was good.

Bishop Baker’s novel (pronounced ca-SEE-kay) is a fictional account of a franciscan mission to the Potano tribe in northern Florida.  The genre is Hardy Boys meets Butler’s Lives. The writing is clear and concise, not artsy — the prose serves as a vehicle for the story, not the end in itself.

Unlike the Hardy brothers, the heroes in this story do actually grow old and even die, such that in order to cover the entire life of the mission, Bishop Baker uses a sucession of main characters.  We begin with Fr. Tomas, the young and determined priest who founded the mission which is the subject of the book.  We end with the perspective of Felipe-Toloca, the cacique of the Potano village at the time the mission is disbanded by the Spanish.    The transition from one principal character to the next flows smoothly, and helps build the overall study of the life of the mission, which lasted over 100 years.  In moving from generation to generation we gain a sense of the history of the community, as well as a meditation on the communion of saints.

Also unlike the Hardy boys, our heroes are concerned with more than just fighting crime in Bayport.  The overarching theme of the many adventures is nothing short of evangelization and the bringing about of the kingdom of God.  Here Bishop Baker does a great service for catholic characters everywhere, for once rendering a series of faithful catholic heroes — first and foremost a priest — whose interior life is solid and sound.   Their struggles are not with the holy faith, but with how to live out that faith in the particular time and place given to them.

The novel succeeds where history books sometimes fail, in keeping the people real.  Neither the Spanish nor the Indians are made out to be a homogeneous pool of Good Guys or Bad Guys; we get individuals of all stripes, none perfect, and none are beyond the hope of forgiveness, mercy and redemption.

One of the risks of historical fiction is that we learn more about the author than about history.  Those looking for clues into Bishop Baker’s secret thoughts will discover the same messages that he has proclaimed throughout the diocese in his public life.   None of this was heavy-handed in my opinion;  even if our heroes are extraordinary for their own time — or our time — they are nonetheless consistent in action and attitude with other missionary saints of the 1600’s.

If you like an action-packed adventure story, this one is fun.  There are martial arts, traps, disguises, battles, shipwrecks, the whole nine yards.  If you are looking for a peek inside the mind of a missionary priest, that’s there too.  And at the end of the book there is brief note about the history that inspired the novel, as well as a bibliography for those who want to do further research.

Good book, very readable, very enjoyable.

*********

And a bonus feature This book  deserves an award for making a major advance in the world of southern literature: It treats the landscape of northern Florida as if it were, well, a perfectly normal place to live.  No long odes to Spanish Moss or treatises on the humidity — mosquitoes are mentioned so infrequently you might temporarily forget where this story is set.  The land is simply there.  Alligators, springs, quicksand, palmettos — they are all present, but mentioned only when they are relevant to action at hand. There is a time and place, of course, for seeing a well-known landscape with the eyes of an outsider; but frankly it is a relief to see a novel that is not only set in the south, but told through southern eyes.

Book Review: The Fathers

The Fathers

Pope Benedict XVI

Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-59276-440-2

Summary: Wow. This is a good book. You should go buy it.

The details:

I was very daunted, as you may recall, at the prospect of having to actually read this book. Although I very much wanted to read it, or specifically, I wanted to have read it, I was afraid that it would be much too hard for myself, a junior intellectual. Fear not. The most difficult chapter is the first, and even in that one, there was only one sentence that I could not understand. And which, on a second reading, I do understand. So here it is, the very hardest sentence in the whole book, found at the bottom of page 8, emphasis in the original:

Clement’s letter touches on topics that were dear to St. Paul, who had written two important letters to the Corinthians, in particular the theological dialectic, perennially curent, between the indicative of salvation and the imperative of moral commitment.

If you can read that, you can read the whole book. And if you can’t read that, you can probably still read all the other sentences, which aren’t nearly so bad. I read the entire rest of the book not knowing what that sentence meant, and never really suffered for my want of knowledge.

What is in the book?

The Fathers is a series of twenty-six biographies of church fathers, starting with St. Clement of Rome and finishing with St. Augustine of Hippo, one person per chapter. The text is taken from the Holy Father’s weekly general audiences from March 7, 2007 to February 27, 2008; depending on the person, the chapter might have been covered in a single talk, divided into two separate talks (usually “life” first and “teachings” second), or in the case of St. Augustine, three talks. So, almost blog-like in format. If, say, you had a blog written by the pope.

As a result each biography can stand alone, although they form a continuous whole if you have the time and interest for reading the book cover to cover. I recommend doing that, by the way, if you can. But if you can’t, don’t panic. You could also put the book out in a convenient space and just pick it up periodically to read a chapter at random, and you will still benefit significantly.

Each entry gives a history of the life of the church Father (all but three are saints), including the context in which they lived. It will help if you have some knowledge of the history and geography of ancient Rome. If not, this is as good a place as any to get your introduction. I had only one place-name that left me completely stumped: Aquilea. Never heard of it before. Usually the text gives some clue – the modern name of a city, for example, but for this one all we were told was that it was in the Decima Regione. I, sadly, did not know my Regione – though I do now. At least that particular one. The rest of the biographies, though, gave me no geography trouble at all.

Following the history is a section on the father’s teachings. Here again, a junior scholar’s serving of theology is helpful. I would say that if you are comfortable with the Catechism of the Catholic Church – that is to say, you can pick it up and read it and make good sense of whatever it is you are reading – then you can probably work through this book with similar confidence.

Is it a boring book?

No!

Here are the three things I found most interesting:

1. You get a real sense of the depth of the catholicness of the early church. You cannot come away from this book persuaded that early church history is just a bunch of myths shrouded in the mists of time, nor that our (catholic) understanding of it is based on a few scraps of paper interpreted how we want to read them. You really get a sense for the weight and substance of our catholic heritage.

[One possible pitfall: After reading this, if someone pulls one of those anti-catholic ‘just a medieval invention lines’, you’ll probably just stare at them dumbly and wonder where they came up with that nonsense. You’ll be thinking some piece of apologetic brilliance along the lines of ‘Are you one of those people who has twenty cats and tin foil on your windows?’ So be warned. Knowledge of history really is knowledge of the catholic church. They aren’t making that up.]

2. The biographies find a beautiful balance between breadth and depth. Each entry is substantial enough to give you something to chew on, but not overwhelming. You will feel like you’ve ‘met’ the church father – if it is your first meeting, you come away with a good idea of who he is and what he thinks, and will want to get to know him better; if he is an old friend, you’ll enjoy the chance to say hello again, and be reminded of the reasons for your friendship. Even more, if you read the whole book front to back, you will get a sense of who the fathers are as a group – how they fit together, how they fit into church history, and how their theology fits into the history of catholic doctrine.

3. There is Pope Benedict XVI’s ever fresh and practical spirituality. There is just nothing dry in any of these biographies. Every one of these church fathers could be your parish priest, speaking to you, today, about the spiritual challenges you face. The holy father isn’t trying to ‘make’ the ancient fathers of church ‘relevant for today’ – he shows you that they what they teach, both by their lives and their writings, really is as inspiring and applicable to us in the 21^st century as it was so many centuries earlier.

Conclusion: This is a book to keep around the house. I definitely give it a ‘buy’ recommendation. If not for All Saints (really, you should), then put it on your Christmas wish list. Good for reading, and good as a reference for your all your quick-look-up-a-church-father needs. It isn’t an easy book, but it isn’t a hard one either. If you are a basic model catholic blog reader, it should be about your speed, challenging but not overwhelming. If you’re more advanced, it will be light and refreshing. If you are a junior junior catholic, you’ll have to work through it, but the format is such that you can bite off just a little at a time and still benefit, without having to feel like you have to read the whole thing right away.

Good book. Get yourself a copy.

**

And now a word from our sponsor . . .

This review was written as part of the Catholic book Reviewer program from The Catholic Company. Visit The Catholic Company to find more information on The Fathers.

. . . The opinions, of course, are entirely my own. When I say it’s a good book, it’s because it’s a good book. That said, it’s not like I’m going to sign up to review anything that looks like it’s a bad book, heh.

The Catholic Company is still accepting new reviewers, by the way. Here’s the link: http://www.catholiccompany.com/content/Catholic-Product-Reviewer-Program.cfm Free books, but of course you have to actually read them, and then tell people what you think. Not that you don’t do that with your books anyway.

Book Review – 1215: The Year of Magna Carta

1215: The Year of Magna Carta

by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham

Simon & Schuster 2004, originally published in Great Britian in 2003 by Hodder & Stoughton

ISBN 0-7432-5773-1

This is a fun book. The goal of the book, I think, is to help the reader understand what the Magna Carta really was, how it came to be, and what on earth it was talking about. [Quick! Why is it important that your recognizance of novel disseisin be held in your own county’s court?!  Yeah, I didn’t know either.  This is why we read *about* the Magna Carta in school, but almost never read the document itself.]

The books opens with very broad chapters setting the scene – what was life like in a medieval English castle, or town or farm – and gradually shifts towards the events leading to the Magna Carta itself. The details are fascinating, entertaining, and sometimes disturbing – the excerpt I posted last week is typical of the kinds of colorful anecdotes the authors use help build a vivid portrait of medieval life.

–> One of the most helpful  of the earlier chapters for me was on warfare (“Tournaments and Battles”), because I don’t think until this reading I had really understood quite how it all worked – most books on medieval warfare that I have read tend to dive into a single aspect – castles, or knights, or the winning of particular battles – this book finally gave me the broader picture.

The narrative is quick – the word ‘breezy’ comes to mind – flowing very quickly from one idea to the next, and dropping details and anecdotes wherever they can be fitted smoothly.   Examples of various practices jump around time and place, and often a character is introduced without any real context, so that it was hard at times to fully understand the meaning behind the anecdote. The complete absence of footnotes did not help. This complaint of mine applies primarily to the earlier chapters, though, and by the end of the book, as the authors unroll the month-by-month developments leading to the Magna Carta, it is much easier to follow the train of events and be sure of who is doing what and why they are doing it.

In all I found the book to be believably balanced in its view. History being what it is, you can of course always find an argument with the historian’s version of events, but I can’t remember any point where I thought the authors were overlooking an obvious explanation for some particular practice.   Generally I found the reading of people and events to be very real – very aware of the normal humanity of the people involved, not at all trying to make them into something other than what they were.  And of course, if you know very little about the Magna Carta, this book is just the remedy.

So my recommendation is: Check it out from your local public library. I wouldn’t urge you to buy it unless you are really at the point where what you need is a readable popular history of the topic – it is a good book, but the lack of footnotes is a real stumbling block for those who want to use it as a launching point for further study. (There is a bibliography, though, if you are the sort who uses those. Perhaps it will be enough for you.)

I do think it makes a good beginner (adult) book – someone who was jumping into medieval history for the very first time could probably read and enjoy, and come away the winner for it.  And that in itself is impressive — there are not many history books that are informative for intermediate readers and still approachable for beginners.  I should emphasize that although younger readers could understand and enjoy, you would not necessarily want them to do so.  Parental pre-reading strong advised.