Wood from Newton's apple tree back from space

by Kathryn Hadley,

The piece of wood engraved with Sir Isaac Newton’s initials from the tree which inspired him to formulate the theory of gravitation was returned, yesterday, to its home at the Royal Society.

The section of wood from the tree from which Newton famously saw the apple fall was taken into space, on May 14th, by the astronaut Piers Sellers on the NASA mission STS 132. Sellers also took with him an image of Sir Isaac Newton, a former president of the Royal Society, as part of the 350th anniversary celebrations of the Royal Society. The piece of wood and the picture spent 12 days in space with Sellers who videoed them floating in the space station.

They are now on display in the Royal Society’s exhibition 'The Royal Society: 350 Years of Science'.



Images:

- Piers Sellers presents wood back to Professor Lorna Casselton, Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society (Royal Society)
- Piers Sellers holding the tree fragment (Royal Society/ NASA)

The bright lights of Lyon

by Kathryn Hadley

Today, Tuesday December 8th, is the last day of the annual Festival of Lights, ‘Fete des Lumières’, in Lyon, where I spent the weekend. Over the past four days and nights, sound and light displays, processions and special church services were organised to mark the event. The ‘Fete des Lumières’ was originally a religious festival and was first celebrated 157 years ago, in 1852.

The festival is a tribute to the Virgin Mary, the origins of which date back to the 17th century. In 1643, there was an outbreak of plague in Europe and the magistrates of the town of Lyon appealed to the archbishop for the protection of the Virgin Mary. In return, they agreed, every year, on September 8th, to climb the colline de Fourvière, a small hill to the west of the town and the site of a 12th-century chapel devoted to Mary, to pay homage to the virgin.

In 1852, a bronze statue of the Virgin Mary was due to be inaugurated, on September 8th, at the top of the chapel’s bell tower. That year, however, the river Soane burst its banks and the foundry where the statue was being sculpted was flooded. The inauguration was postponed until December 8th, the day of the Festival of the Immaculate Conception. When the planned celebrations could not take place, once again, due to bad weather, the inhabitants nevertheless all lit lanterns in the windows of their homes to mark the event. Church leaders also lit up the Chapel of Fourvière. From that year on, the inhabitants lit candles and the town was illuminated, every year.

The Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière, which replaced the original medieval chapel, was built in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. In 1870, threatened by the advance of the Prussian troops in eastern France, the inhabitants of Lyon appealed to the archbishop, once more, and vowed to extend the existing church if Lyon was spared.

For further information on the festival, visit www.lumieres.lyon.fr/lumieres/sections/en

For further information on the Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière, visit http://www.fourviere.org/

Photos:

- the opera of Lyon

- view of the Lyon from the colline de Fourvière

First Impressions: Moliere or The League of Hypocrites

by Kathryn Hadley

Moliere or The League of Hypocrites opened at the Finborough Theatre last week. Written by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), in 1931, under the Stalinist regime, the play recalls Molière’s fight to keep his integrity during the reign of Louis XIV when his plays were viewed by the Church and court authorities as increasingly subversive. It provides fascinating insights into both the life of Jean-Baptiste Molière (1622-1673) in 17th-century France and the Stalinist regime, of which Bulgakov was a victim.

The play is framed by two scenes in which the ‘scribbler’ records the events of the days on which the play begins and ends. He marks both days ‘with a black cross’. On the first day marked with a black cross, in 1662, Molière marries Armande Béjart, who is significantly younger than him and whom he believes to be his lover Madeleine’s sister. However, Armande was rumoured to be Madeleine’s daughter and the marriage is in the end one of the causes of Molière’s downfall. The play ends, in 1673, on another day marked with a ‘black cross’: the day of Molière’s death during his performance of Le Malade Imaginaire.

Bulgakov’s play provides, first of all, an intriguing insight into the life of one of the most famous French playwrights and the court of Louis XIV. This particular period of French history is vividly brought to life by the excellent staging, costumes, choreography and performances. The hypocrisy and extensiveness of the court is subtly highlighted, for example, by the identical masks worn by the women at Louis XIV’s court. The staging of the last scene, during which Molière’s company perform Le Malade Imaginaire, is particularly powerful. The actors chant medical formulae in Latin and oppressively dance around the main character Argan, a hypochondriac who imagines himself sick and scrupulously follows all his doctor’s orders, highlighting the arrogance and pedantry of doctors in 17th-century France, a recurring theme in Molière’s plays.

Beyond 17th-century court life, however, the play acts as a mirror of the time during which Bulgakov wrote and provides a deeper insight into the repression of the Stalinist regime. The story of the attack mounted against Molière’s Tartuffe following its premiere in 1664 hints at similar censorship in Soviet Russia. The play, which mocks a hypocritical priest and his dupes, was viewed as an attack on the Church. The Archbishop of Paris issued a statement excommunicating anyone who performed, watched or even read the play. The play itself was banned.

In a particularly dark and terrifying scene set in the crypt of church, hooded monks from the ‘League of the Holy Writ’ interrogate Zacharie Moirron forcing him to confess that Molière is married to his lover’s daughter, Armande Béjart. In the words of Jean-Jacques Bouton, the theatre factotum, the members of the league ‘take no account of the law so we must be prepared for anything’. Numerous references are made to the dangers of losing the king’s favour and a later scene, during which Moirron is interrogated by the king himself, is a further allusion to the torture and interrogations of the Stalinist era. When Moirron asks what he should do now that he has been banished from Moliere’s theatre company, the king suggests that he might ‘enter the royal service and work for the secret police’.

Bulgakov wrote at the time of the Great Terror in Russia. His plays were gradually banned and he found himself unemployable. His situation at the end of his life closely resembles that of Molière, who is portrayed as a broken man. Molière is old, has a ‘weak heart’ (he was in reality suffering from tuberculosis), has been deprived of the king’s patronage, his wife has left him and his lover is dead.

Excellently staged and performed in this production directed by Blanche McIntyre, a powerful and thought provoking play, which has forced me to reconsider my choice of the best history play of the year for our advent calendar of the top history moments of 2009!

Moliere or the League of Hypocrites
Until December 19th
Finborough Theatre
118 Finborough Road
London SW10 9ED
Telephone: 020 7244 7439
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Photos (by Sheryl Tait):

- Justin Avoth as Molière

- court scene with Gyuri Sarossy as Louis XIV

Saving Sir John Narbrough’s Diary

by Kathryn Hadley

The English naval commander Sir John Narbrough’s diary was discovered alongside a series of illustrated maps and drawings earlier this year with the family papers of the Earls of Romney at the Centre for Kentish Studies. The hand-written journal, which had been lost for the past 300 years, is now the subject of a desperate battle between a private collector and the British Library in their respective attempts to it for their own collections.

The document is currently owned by a foreign private collector who bought the journal and maps for £310,000. However, English law stipulates that any original manuscript must be granted a special export licence before it can be sent abroad and a temporary export bar has been imposed by culture minister Barbara Follett until November 7th. In the meantime, the British Library is pursuing its efforts to collect the necessary funds to equal the buying price and purchase the diary. The British Library has so far raised £90,000 and has also secured a £200,000 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. It still, however, has a further £30,000 to collect.

Why is Narbrough’s diary such a prized document? Who was the naval commander? While the names Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and Captain James Cook are well-known, Sir John Narbrough remains relatively unheard of. But maybe the explorer has been unfairly forgotten precisely because his journal was never published and was lost for more than three centuries.

The diary records in great detail Narbrough’s two-year journey to Patagonia and the Caribbean in an attempt to establish trading links with South America and the Pacific. He was the first British sailor to navigate around the Straits of Magellan, opening the way for British trade in the Pacific.

John Narbrough was born in approximately 1640 into a large family in Norfolk. He began his career as a cabin boy serving in merchant ships in the 1650s and early 1660s. In October 1664, he was commissioned as lieutenant of Admiral Sir Christopher Myng's ship Portland. On May 15, 1669, he was commissioned captain of The Sweepstakes and embarked on his voyage to South America. He set sail from Deptford on November 26th, 1669, and entered the Straits of Magellan in October of the following year. Narbrough was thereafter second captain of the Lord High Admiral’s ship the Prince during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74) and was commended for his conduct during the Battle of Solebay off the Suffolk coast in May 1672. Shortly afterwards he was made Rear Admiral and knighted. He also participated in various expeditions against the Tripoline and Algerine piracies and, in 1680, he was appointed commissioner of the Navy. Narbrough died of a fever in the West Indies in April 1688.

Peter Barber, the head of map collections at the British Library, described the importance of Sir John Narbrough’s voyage to the Straits of Magellan in an article published today on MailOnline:

'His journey proved it was possible for Britain to get involved in the Pacific
trade, which set the direction of our foreign policy for the next 50 years […]
The repercussions are extraordinary - if Sir John hadn't made his trip,
Britain probably would not have gone into the War of the Spanish Succession and
there would never have been the South Sea Bubble of 1720-21 - the biggest
financial crisis of the 18th century.'

For further information on the history of the Falkland Islands, read our article Sovereignty and Heraldry: The Case of the Falklands
For further information on Sir Francis Drake, read 'That Golden Knight': Drake and His Reputation and The Mystery of Francis Drake's Californian Voyage

Visions of India past and present

by Kathryn Hadley

Colourful, chaotic and charming; India is also an enchanting and overawing country of extremes, with an immensely rich history and cultural diversity. Vasco de Gama landed on the Malabar coast in the south-western state of Kerala in 1498. The prospects of developing trade links with India sparked considerable European interest in India. Throughout the sixteenth century, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Danish and English traders increasingly set up coastal trading centres exporting commodities such as textiles, sugar, indigo, saltpetre, tea and opium.

The British East India Company was founded on December 31st 1600 following Queen Elizabeth I’s signature of a Royal Charter, which granted a group of London merchants a monopoly of all trade East of the Cape of Good Hope and West of the Straits of Magellan for an initial period of fifteen years. The Company first landed in Surat (Gujarat) on the East coast approximately two hundred kilometres North of Bombay in 1608 and gradually established trading posts in Madras (1639), Bombay (1660) and Calcutta (1690). Perceptions of India in Europe at the time were largely based on accounts and paintings by European travellers who published or exhibited their works upon their return.

How did the first Europeans arriving in India view and depict the new world which they discovered? An exhibition currently on show in Mumbai attempts to answer this question. The show at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya museum provides an important insight into European views of India from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. It is organised in collaboration with London’s Victoria and Albert Museum from which many of the paintings by British artists are on loan. The display includes works by both professional and amateur artists, by artists who travelled to India to paint first hand accounts, as well as by artists in Europe who based their depictions on Mogul works of art, written accounts by European travellers or who copied other artists’ works.

Artists painted scenes of some of the architectural and natural wonders of India which were entirely unknown to their European publics. However, in their depictions of such novel and previously unknown subjects they remained influenced by the changing artistic influences popular in Europe at the time. The chronological display of paintings, prints and sketches highlights the evolution of European artistic trends, from Romanticism from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards, to the Realism of the end of the nineteenth century.

European painters first began to travel to India to paint first hand accounts of the landscapes and monuments which they visited in the eighteenth century. William Hodges (1744-1797) was the first English professional landscape painter to travel to India. He had previously accompanied Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific from 1772 to 1775. Hodges was granted permission to travel to India by the East India Company and arrived in Madras in 1780. He travelled for three years around the North of India and upon his return to London in 1783, he published a collection of 44 prints under the title Select Views in India.

Six years later, two other British artists, Thomas Daniell (1749-1840) and his nephew William Daniell (1769-1837), followed in Hodges’ footsteps. They arrived in Calcutta in 1786 where they set up a printing studio and then embarked on a tour of northern India. Returning to Calcutta in 1791, they then toured southern India for a further eight months. Their unprecedented collection of 144 prints was published in England between 1795 and 1808 under the title Oriental Scenery and saw considerable commercial success.

From the 1860s onwards, with the arrival of photography, European representations of India gradually changed. Subjects shifted from landscapes and architectural wonders to depict everyday and ‘real’ life, including the Indians themselves and their customs. This evolution of European artistic influences is particularly prominent in the works of John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911) and John Griffiths (1837-1918). Both artists arrived in Bombay in 1864 where they were appointed to teach at the Bombay Jeejeebhoy School of Art. Griffiths became Principal of the school in 1865; Kipling was commissioned by the British government in 1870 to tour the North-West Provinces and to sketch the Indian craftsmen of the area. In 1875, he became Principal of the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore in British India (now the National College of Arts in Pakistan).

For more on British views of India, read our article
British Views of India

Here are the full details of the exhibition in Mumbai:

Indian Life and Landscape: paintings and drawings from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century
Until February 8th
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly Prince of Wales Museum of Western India)
159/161 Mahatma Gandhi Road
Fort, Mumbai 400 023

A fascinating insight into the initial perceptions of the unknown and alien country and culture which European travellers to India discovered, into the evolution of such perceptions and into how the visions of European artists in turn shaped views of India in Europe.

History in the News: 17th century whaling station unearthed in Iceland

by Derry Nairn

The bloggers at Archaeology Magazine alerted us to the unearthing of an old Basque whaling station in Iceland last week.

The English language online newspaper Iceland Review quotes head archaeologist Ragnar Edvardsson as saying the find is of international significance. Up until now there had been no record of such an old whaling site in Iceland.

Edvardsson goes on to say the find represents

"the only remnants of foreign residency in Iceland in the 17th century."

During the period, Iceland's Danish rulers had a monopoly on Icelandic trade and forbade any contact between the island's residents and foreigners.

This discovery comes in the wake of a Greenpeace report that alleges Iceland and Norway have resumed commerical whaling over the summer, in defiance of an International Whaling Committee ban.

Read more about the history of whaling in History Today's extensive archive.

Click here to read the post on the Archaeology Magazine Blog.

Click here to read the original report in the Iceland Review.

Click here for the Greenpeace report.