MEDIEVAL CASTLE REOPENS AFTER RESTORATION
4 April 2007
Press Association Regional Newswire
A medieval ruined Dorset castle which was a stronghold in the time of William the Conqueror is partially reopening following major repair work.
The £700,000 project to restore Corfe Castle, in Wareham, was announced in August last year to conserve the 1,000-year-old monument for future generations.
Phase one of the two-year conservation programme by The National Trust and English Heritage saw stone conservators replace the old lime mortar to consolidate the crumbling masonry in the castle's gloriette and inner ward.
Most of the top part of the castle, which was closed due to health and safety fears last year, has now reopened to more than 100,000 visitors each year.
Pippa Russell, visitor services manager at Corfe Castle, said: 'By 2005, the ravages of time had begun to catch up with the large pieces of stonework around the keep, many of which lie on their side or upside down where they fell when the castle was blown up by gunpowder in 1646.
'The first phase of the restoration project has gone very well and visitors are now able to explore the inner sanctum of the castle again and enjoy those wonderful views over Purbeck.
'About 90% of the castle is open, with only the keep area itself still closed.''
Phase two, to be completed by summer next year, will focus on repairs to the keep, south west gatehouse and fallen stonework around the ruin which has Scheduled Ancient Monument status.
The renovations are part of the castle's turbulent history.
Perched in a gap in the Purbeck ridge, it was thought to have been an important Roman defensive site.
Monarchs have come and gone, including 13th century King John who improved the accommodation and defences, and built a hall, chapel and domestic buildings.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Call for medieval remains to be buried in Preston
Call for medieval remains to be buried in Preston
4 April 2007
Lancashire Evening Post
A leading historian is calling for medieval remains unearthed at a building site to be re-buried in Preston Parish Church.
Thirty graves, 12 of them containing virtually complete skeletons, have been discovered at a development site behind the city centre's privately-owned Brunel Court halls of residence on Marsh Lane.
Experts from Oxford Archaeology North believe the graves are the likely remnants of a medieval friary located in Preston from 1260 to 1539.
And now an order of Franciscan monks, similar to the ones who used to reside in Preston, have expressed an interest in burying the skeletons in their own cemetery in London.
But historical experts today said the bones were part of Preston's heritage and should stay in the city.
Stephen Sartin, associate curator for Lancashire County Museum Service, said: "If you start moving bones around which have been there since medieval times, where does it stop?
"If we are going to move them at all I am sure that order of monks would have wanted to be interred at the site of the most historic church in Lancashire - Preston Parish Church."
David Ward, curator at South Ribble Museum, said: "There are rules and regulations about the handling of human remains. The accepted thing is they should be reinterred at their original site or at a suitable local graveyard."
4 April 2007
Lancashire Evening Post
A leading historian is calling for medieval remains unearthed at a building site to be re-buried in Preston Parish Church.
Thirty graves, 12 of them containing virtually complete skeletons, have been discovered at a development site behind the city centre's privately-owned Brunel Court halls of residence on Marsh Lane.
Experts from Oxford Archaeology North believe the graves are the likely remnants of a medieval friary located in Preston from 1260 to 1539.
And now an order of Franciscan monks, similar to the ones who used to reside in Preston, have expressed an interest in burying the skeletons in their own cemetery in London.
But historical experts today said the bones were part of Preston's heritage and should stay in the city.
Stephen Sartin, associate curator for Lancashire County Museum Service, said: "If you start moving bones around which have been there since medieval times, where does it stop?
"If we are going to move them at all I am sure that order of monks would have wanted to be interred at the site of the most historic church in Lancashire - Preston Parish Church."
David Ward, curator at South Ribble Museum, said: "There are rules and regulations about the handling of human remains. The accepted thing is they should be reinterred at their original site or at a suitable local graveyard."
Remains Are Not Those of Joan of Arc
Remains Are Not Those of Joan of Arc
By JOHN LEICESTER
4 April 2007
Associated Press Newswires
A rib bone supposedly found at the site where French heroine Joan of Arc was burned at the stake is actually that of an Egyptian mummy, according to researchers who used high-tech science to expose the fake.
The bone, a piece of cloth and a cat femur were said to have been recovered after the 19-year-old was burned in 1431 in the town of Rouen. In 1909 -- the year Joan of Arc was beatified -- scientists declared it "highly probable" that the relics were hers.
But starting last year, 20 researchers from France, Switzerland and Benin took another look. Even they were surprised to find the rib bone came from an Egyptian mummy. Their best guess is that the fake was cooked up in the 19th century, perhaps to boost the process of Joan of Arc's beatification. She was canonized as a saint in 1920 by the Roman Catholic Church.
In medieval times and later, powdered mummy remains were used as medicine "to treat stomach ailments, long or painful periods, all blood problems," Philippe Charlier, who headed the research team, told The Associated Press.
The team's assumption is that a 19th-century apothecary transformed "these remains of an Egyptian mummy into a fake relic, or fake historic remains, of Joan of Arc," he said.
Now the mystery is why?
"Probably not for money," said Charlier. "Perhaps it was for religious reasons. Perhaps it was created to increase the importance of the process of beatification in 1909."
Tests dated the rib bone to between the 7th and 3rd centuries B.C., he said. The cat bone dated from the same period and also was mummified. The researchers also found pine pollen, probably from resin used in Egyptian embalming, he said.
They were unable to extract DNA from the remains, meaning they could not identify the sex of the mummy or the cat.
"The embalming products appear to have prevented the conservation of the DNA, and they are too old, so it didn't work," Charlier said.
Even perfumers were called in as detectives. The researchers had them sniff the remains, using their exceptional olfactory senses "so they could identify the smells, the vegetable matter, in the embalming and guide our research," Charlier said.
The remains were supposedly recovered from Joan of Arc's pyre and conserved by an apothecary until 1867, before being turned over to the archdiocese of Tours.
Joan of Arc was tried for heresy and witchcraft and executed after leading the French to several victories over the English during the Hundred Years War, notably in Orleans, south of Paris.
The illiterate farm girl from Lorraine, in eastern France, disguised herself as a man in her war campaigns and said she heard voices from saints telling her to deliver France from the English.
The journal Nature was first to report that the team had concluded that the bone was from a mummy, not Joan of Arc.
Joan of Arc relics a fake, experts say
4 April 2007
Reuters News
Relics advertised as being remains of St. Joan of Arc are no such thing and may in fact be parts of an Egyptian mummy, Nature magazine reported on Wednesday.
The magazine quoted French researchers who analyzed the relics and found they did not appear to be the burnt remains of anyone from the 15th century, but in fact dated to more than 2,000 years ago.
A vanilla smell suggests natural decomposition, not burning, the magazine quotes Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at Raymond Poincare Hospital in Garches, as saying.
Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431 in Rouen. The so-called relics were discovered in 1867 in a jar in the attic of a Paris pharmacy. The Roman Catholic Church formally recognized them and they are kept in a museum in Chinon, France, that belongs to the Archdiocese of Tours.
They include a blackened human rib, a cat's leg bone, some black chunks and a fragment of linen. Cats were often embalmed in ancient Egypt, but were also sometimes burned at the stake with accused witches in medieval Europe.
Charlier was allowed to study the relics last year and said he was astonished by the results. "I'd never have thought that it could be from a mummy," Nature quoted him as saying.
His team used several spectrometry devices to analyze the pieces. They also used a uniquely Gallic technique -- the noses of two famed perfumiers.
Both smelled hints of burnt plaster and vanilla.
Charlier said the plaster smell supported reports Joan of Arc was burnt on a plaster stake, instead of wood, to make the process last longer. But vanilla smells do not.
"Vanillin is produced during decomposition of a body," Charlier said. "You would find it in a mummy, but not in someone who was burnt."
"I see burnt remains all the time in my job," Charlier said. "It was obviously not burnt tissue."
Other evidence also pointed to an Egyptian mummy -- including the presence of pine pollen. Pine trees did not grow in Normandy at the time Joan of Arc was killed, but pine resin was used widely in Egypt during embalming, according to the report.
Carbon-14 analysis dated the remains to between 300 and 600 BC. The spectrometry profiles of the rib, femur and black chunks matched those from Egyptian mummies from the period and not those of burnt bones, Charlier said.
By JOHN LEICESTER
4 April 2007
Associated Press Newswires
A rib bone supposedly found at the site where French heroine Joan of Arc was burned at the stake is actually that of an Egyptian mummy, according to researchers who used high-tech science to expose the fake.
The bone, a piece of cloth and a cat femur were said to have been recovered after the 19-year-old was burned in 1431 in the town of Rouen. In 1909 -- the year Joan of Arc was beatified -- scientists declared it "highly probable" that the relics were hers.
But starting last year, 20 researchers from France, Switzerland and Benin took another look. Even they were surprised to find the rib bone came from an Egyptian mummy. Their best guess is that the fake was cooked up in the 19th century, perhaps to boost the process of Joan of Arc's beatification. She was canonized as a saint in 1920 by the Roman Catholic Church.
In medieval times and later, powdered mummy remains were used as medicine "to treat stomach ailments, long or painful periods, all blood problems," Philippe Charlier, who headed the research team, told The Associated Press.
The team's assumption is that a 19th-century apothecary transformed "these remains of an Egyptian mummy into a fake relic, or fake historic remains, of Joan of Arc," he said.
Now the mystery is why?
"Probably not for money," said Charlier. "Perhaps it was for religious reasons. Perhaps it was created to increase the importance of the process of beatification in 1909."
Tests dated the rib bone to between the 7th and 3rd centuries B.C., he said. The cat bone dated from the same period and also was mummified. The researchers also found pine pollen, probably from resin used in Egyptian embalming, he said.
They were unable to extract DNA from the remains, meaning they could not identify the sex of the mummy or the cat.
"The embalming products appear to have prevented the conservation of the DNA, and they are too old, so it didn't work," Charlier said.
Even perfumers were called in as detectives. The researchers had them sniff the remains, using their exceptional olfactory senses "so they could identify the smells, the vegetable matter, in the embalming and guide our research," Charlier said.
The remains were supposedly recovered from Joan of Arc's pyre and conserved by an apothecary until 1867, before being turned over to the archdiocese of Tours.
Joan of Arc was tried for heresy and witchcraft and executed after leading the French to several victories over the English during the Hundred Years War, notably in Orleans, south of Paris.
The illiterate farm girl from Lorraine, in eastern France, disguised herself as a man in her war campaigns and said she heard voices from saints telling her to deliver France from the English.
The journal Nature was first to report that the team had concluded that the bone was from a mummy, not Joan of Arc.
Joan of Arc relics a fake, experts say
4 April 2007
Reuters News
Relics advertised as being remains of St. Joan of Arc are no such thing and may in fact be parts of an Egyptian mummy, Nature magazine reported on Wednesday.
The magazine quoted French researchers who analyzed the relics and found they did not appear to be the burnt remains of anyone from the 15th century, but in fact dated to more than 2,000 years ago.
A vanilla smell suggests natural decomposition, not burning, the magazine quotes Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at Raymond Poincare Hospital in Garches, as saying.
Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431 in Rouen. The so-called relics were discovered in 1867 in a jar in the attic of a Paris pharmacy. The Roman Catholic Church formally recognized them and they are kept in a museum in Chinon, France, that belongs to the Archdiocese of Tours.
They include a blackened human rib, a cat's leg bone, some black chunks and a fragment of linen. Cats were often embalmed in ancient Egypt, but were also sometimes burned at the stake with accused witches in medieval Europe.
Charlier was allowed to study the relics last year and said he was astonished by the results. "I'd never have thought that it could be from a mummy," Nature quoted him as saying.
His team used several spectrometry devices to analyze the pieces. They also used a uniquely Gallic technique -- the noses of two famed perfumiers.
Both smelled hints of burnt plaster and vanilla.
Charlier said the plaster smell supported reports Joan of Arc was burnt on a plaster stake, instead of wood, to make the process last longer. But vanilla smells do not.
"Vanillin is produced during decomposition of a body," Charlier said. "You would find it in a mummy, but not in someone who was burnt."
"I see burnt remains all the time in my job," Charlier said. "It was obviously not burnt tissue."
Other evidence also pointed to an Egyptian mummy -- including the presence of pine pollen. Pine trees did not grow in Normandy at the time Joan of Arc was killed, but pine resin was used widely in Egypt during embalming, according to the report.
Carbon-14 analysis dated the remains to between 300 and 600 BC. The spectrometry profiles of the rib, femur and black chunks matched those from Egyptian mummies from the period and not those of burnt bones, Charlier said.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Review of The Mosiac Crimes, by Giulio Leoni
Medieval poet an unlikely crime sleuth
By Frank Wilson
1 April 2007
The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT)
The Mosaic Crimes By Giulio Leoni
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
Harcourt. 321 pp. $25
The great medieval poet Dante Alighieri would seem an unlikely gumshoe. He certainly proves to be an unusual one in Giulio Leoni's novel The Mosaic Crimes, which itself is as odd a thriller as you are likely to come upon.
The crimes Dante finds himself investigating take place in June 1300, shortly after the poet is elected one of the six Priors of Florence (the city was a republic, governed by a College of Priors). But the novel opens with a brief prologue set nine years earlier. The city of Acre in the Holy Land is falling to the Saracens, and a pair of monks manage to give the captain of one of the ships escaping the disaster a document intended for -- you guessed it -- the Knights Templar.
That, however -- thank God -- is the only point of resemblance between The Mosaic Crimes and The Da Vinci Code. Leoni's novel is beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and genuinely suspenseful on several levels.
The first of the two murders that figure in the tale takes place in a church not far outside the city. Ambrogio, a master mosaicist working to restore the church, has been found with his head encased in lime. After scoping out the scene, Dante stops on his way back to the priory at the shop of Teofilo Sprovieri, apothecary and physician -- born, interestingly enough, in Acre -- in the hope of getting something to ease the pain of the migraine that is tormenting him.
He gets his anodyne, a little something called chandu. Teofilo cautions the poet about the dosage: "Ten drops induce stupor and allay the most intense pain. . . . Twenty drops, and the mind rushes headlong into a delirium peopled with violent images. . . . More than twenty drops, and the gates of Paradise may open, but no one has ever visited Paradise alive." Dante takes 15 drops and finds himself on a pain-free ride through La-La Land.
A follow-up visit to the apothecary gets Dante an invitation to join Teofilo and some friends at a tavern run by a one-armed former Crusader named Baldo. In addition to the apothecary, the group consists of a theologian, an architect, an alchemist, an astrologer, a lawyer -- and a sea captain. A former member, it turns out, is now deceased: the master mosaicist Ambrogio. The group calls itself the Third Heaven and plans on being the core faculty of a proposed Florentine university.
The gathering of scholars may pique Dante's curiosity, but it is the dancer Antilia -- with her pantherlike movements and "the graceful beauty of an exotic bird" -- who catches his eye and fires his lust (though he steadfastly insists to himself that his interest in her has to do only with his investigation).
Unlike most modern fictional sleuths, with their proletarian bona fides, Dante hasn't a democratic bone in his body. He's a snob, both intellectually and socially. In fact, he's a misanthropic crank sorely in need of anger management. A great poet, no doubt -- and no one is more aware of this than he -- but only a so-so human being.
Dante isn't the only reason The Mosaic Crimes isn't your usual mystery novel. That actually has more to do with Leoni's grasp of the central role ideas played in the period he writes of.
Cecco D'Ascoli, the astrologer, argues with Dante that human affairs are completely determined:
It has been established that the celestial bodies that orbit the heavens beyond the lunar sphere are perfect and incorruptible. If their motion were avoidable, it would be defective, and we would have an uncertain consequent from a certain antecedent, a perfect cause that gives rise to imperfect effects. And this is a contradiction from which our mind recoils. Ergo, our destiny is written in the stars to an exact degree.
Dante, however, is not about to abandon his belief in free will and human responsibility:
If we were to admit that the influence of the heavens on our natures is inevitable, the ethical framework that supports all of our laws and customs, even our moral sense itself, would crumble. . . . Master Ambrogio's death could thus be ascribed to the timeless revolutions of the planet, and the hand that brought it about would become merely an instrument, in no way responsible.
This debate is still with us, and it is in passages such as these that Leoni's book reminds us that we have more in common with the Middle Ages than simple murder and mayhem.
By Frank Wilson
1 April 2007
The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT)
The Mosaic Crimes By Giulio Leoni
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
Harcourt. 321 pp. $25
The great medieval poet Dante Alighieri would seem an unlikely gumshoe. He certainly proves to be an unusual one in Giulio Leoni's novel The Mosaic Crimes, which itself is as odd a thriller as you are likely to come upon.
The crimes Dante finds himself investigating take place in June 1300, shortly after the poet is elected one of the six Priors of Florence (the city was a republic, governed by a College of Priors). But the novel opens with a brief prologue set nine years earlier. The city of Acre in the Holy Land is falling to the Saracens, and a pair of monks manage to give the captain of one of the ships escaping the disaster a document intended for -- you guessed it -- the Knights Templar.
That, however -- thank God -- is the only point of resemblance between The Mosaic Crimes and The Da Vinci Code. Leoni's novel is beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and genuinely suspenseful on several levels.
The first of the two murders that figure in the tale takes place in a church not far outside the city. Ambrogio, a master mosaicist working to restore the church, has been found with his head encased in lime. After scoping out the scene, Dante stops on his way back to the priory at the shop of Teofilo Sprovieri, apothecary and physician -- born, interestingly enough, in Acre -- in the hope of getting something to ease the pain of the migraine that is tormenting him.
He gets his anodyne, a little something called chandu. Teofilo cautions the poet about the dosage: "Ten drops induce stupor and allay the most intense pain. . . . Twenty drops, and the mind rushes headlong into a delirium peopled with violent images. . . . More than twenty drops, and the gates of Paradise may open, but no one has ever visited Paradise alive." Dante takes 15 drops and finds himself on a pain-free ride through La-La Land.
A follow-up visit to the apothecary gets Dante an invitation to join Teofilo and some friends at a tavern run by a one-armed former Crusader named Baldo. In addition to the apothecary, the group consists of a theologian, an architect, an alchemist, an astrologer, a lawyer -- and a sea captain. A former member, it turns out, is now deceased: the master mosaicist Ambrogio. The group calls itself the Third Heaven and plans on being the core faculty of a proposed Florentine university.
The gathering of scholars may pique Dante's curiosity, but it is the dancer Antilia -- with her pantherlike movements and "the graceful beauty of an exotic bird" -- who catches his eye and fires his lust (though he steadfastly insists to himself that his interest in her has to do only with his investigation).
Unlike most modern fictional sleuths, with their proletarian bona fides, Dante hasn't a democratic bone in his body. He's a snob, both intellectually and socially. In fact, he's a misanthropic crank sorely in need of anger management. A great poet, no doubt -- and no one is more aware of this than he -- but only a so-so human being.
Dante isn't the only reason The Mosaic Crimes isn't your usual mystery novel. That actually has more to do with Leoni's grasp of the central role ideas played in the period he writes of.
Cecco D'Ascoli, the astrologer, argues with Dante that human affairs are completely determined:
It has been established that the celestial bodies that orbit the heavens beyond the lunar sphere are perfect and incorruptible. If their motion were avoidable, it would be defective, and we would have an uncertain consequent from a certain antecedent, a perfect cause that gives rise to imperfect effects. And this is a contradiction from which our mind recoils. Ergo, our destiny is written in the stars to an exact degree.
Dante, however, is not about to abandon his belief in free will and human responsibility:
If we were to admit that the influence of the heavens on our natures is inevitable, the ethical framework that supports all of our laws and customs, even our moral sense itself, would crumble. . . . Master Ambrogio's death could thus be ascribed to the timeless revolutions of the planet, and the hand that brought it about would become merely an instrument, in no way responsible.
This debate is still with us, and it is in passages such as these that Leoni's book reminds us that we have more in common with the Middle Ages than simple murder and mayhem.
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