Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In these days, prelates and preachers are chained to the earth by the love of earthly things. The care of souls is no longer their concern. They are content with the receipt of revenue. The preachers preach to please princes and to be praised by them. They have done worse. They have not only destroyed the Church of God. They have built up a new Church after their own pattern. Go to Rome and see! In the mansions of the great prelates there is no concern save for poetry and the oratorical art. Go thither and see! Thou shalt find them all with the books of the humanities in their hands and telling one another that they can guide mens’ souls by means of Virgil, Horace and Cicero ... The prelates of former days had fewer gold mitres and chalices and what few they possessed were broken up and given to relieve the needs of the poor. But our prelates, for the sake of obtaining chalices, will rob the poor of their sole means of support. Dost thou not know what I would tell thee! What doest thou, O Lord! Arise, and come to deliver thy Church from the hands of devils, from the hands of tyrants, from the hands of iniquitous prelates.1177 Dizzy flights of fancy abounded in Savonarola’s discourses and took the place of calm and logical exposition. On the evening before he preached his last sermon in Advent, 1492, Savonarola beheld in the middle of the sky a hand holding a sword with the inscription, Behold the sword of the Lord will descend suddenly and quickly upon the earth—Ecce gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter. Suddenly the sword was turned toward the earth, the sky was darkened, swords, arrows and flames rained down. The heavens quaked with thunder and the world became a prey to famine and death. The vision was ended by a command to the preacher to make these things known. Again and again, in after years did he refer to this prophetic vision.1178 Its memory was also preserved by a medal, representing on one side Savonarola and on the other a sword in the heavens held by a hand and pointing to a city beneath.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  I quickly got off the phone for fear of saying what was on the tip of my tongue: How would you know a superficial phony, Anaïs? You live your life as a lie. You’re just repeating what Jamie said about me because you’re still mad that your fans adored me in place of you at your tribute and that I didn’t jump at the chance to write your phony bio. All you care about is your image, not about me, and despite how many times you say you aren’t a narcissist because you gave your typewriter to Henry Miller, you are a narcissist! Just like my father. Just like your father who you slept with! And Renate says you did it to prove you were the most daring surrealist. Talk about a mad intellect! My ego lacerated, I crawled into a sea cave of isolation to moan. Once there, I used my diary, as I always had, to exaggerate, overdramatize my feelings and sublimate them into intellectual abstractions. Only after what Anaïs had said, I couldn’t help seeing what I was doing. So I tried Anaïs’s advice to dive more deeply, just to see what would happen, writing on the page, What do I really feel? It was humiliating to find the tantrums of an angry, resentful child—my “Ugly Trissy.” I also found a punishing, exacting male voice that I named my “Internal Critic.” I wanted to expel them both, but instead I began to converse with these previously unrecognized parts of my personality. During this period of wounded introspection, I had nightmares that jolted me from sleep and sliced back in when I dozed off again. Tidal waves crashed over my house. A violent man pounded on my front door, his fist smashing through splintered wood into my face. A repulsive, furry, one-eyed creature stared up at me imploringly from its pool of afterbirth. The more I recorded dreams in my diary, the more I received, in clusters and cycles now, a hurricane of dreams. I was underwater with them; it took half the day just to write them down. In reward for paying attention, though, I began to have transcendent dreams. In one, I tossed in turbulent waves clinging to a raft below my house. From an open Dutch window, a serene “guru woman” watched me floundering below. In the morning I recognized that I was both figures and this began a series of dreams in which the same serene woman appeared as a priestess wearing a Grecian gown like Anaïs’s favorite white muumuu, although she didn’t look like Anaïs and didn’t have her French accent. She wasn’t Anaïs. She was a part of me, out of my unconscious. She was mine: the wise, essential self that Anaïs had characterized as Djuna and promised I would one day discover.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In Florence, at the time of which I am speaking, there was a man called Biondello, who was a dapper little fellow, elegant to a fault and neater than a fly, with a coif surmounting a head of long, fair hair, exquisitely arranged so that not a single strand was out of place, and this man practised the same profession as Ciacco. One morning, during Lent, Biondello was at the fishmarket buying a pair of huge lampreys for Messer Vieri de’ Cerchi,2 when he was observed by Ciacco, who went up to him and said: ‘Oho! What have we here?’ To which Biondello replied: ‘The other three that were sent to Messer Corso Donati’s3 yesterday evening, along with a sturgeon, were much finer specimens than these. He’s invited one or two gentlemen to breakfast, and because he thought there might not be enough to go round, he got me to purchase these other two. Won’t you be coming?’ ‘What a question to ask!’ Ciacco replied. ‘Of course I shall be coming.’ At what seemed to him an appropriate hour, Ciacco made his way to the house of Messer Corso, whom he found with several of his neighbours waiting to go to breakfast. When Messer Corso asked him the nature of his business, Ciacco replied: ‘I have come, sir, in order to breakfast with you and your friends.’ ‘You are most welcome,’ said Messer Corso. ‘And since the meal is now ready, let us go and eat.’ So they all sat down at table, and after a first course of tunny and chick-peas they had some fried fish from the Arno, after which the meal came abruptly to an end. On discovering that Biondello had deceived him, Ciacco was boiling with indignation, and resolved to pay him back in his own coin. A few days later he came across Biondello, who had meanwhile amused a number of people with the tale of his little hoax. No sooner did Biondello catch sight of Ciacco than he greeted him and asked, with a broad grin, what he had thought of Messer Corso’s lampreys. ‘That is a question,’ replied Ciacco, ‘which you will be far better able to answer yourself, before another week has passed.’ After leaving Biondello, Ciacco went to work without further ado, and having agreed upon terms with a crafty intermediary, he handed him an enormous wine-bottle, led him to a spot near the Loggia de’ Cavicciuli,4 and pointing out to him a gentleman there called Messer Filippo Argenti5 – a huge, powerful, muscular-looking fellow, who was as haughty, hot-tempered, and quarrelsome a man as ever drew breath – he said:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The Corbaccio, written, according to Giorgio Padoan, in or around 1365, but attributed more convincingly by Natalino Sapegno and others to a much earlier date (1355), is at once the most enigmatic and least attractive of Boccaccio’s works. The very title is mysterious, being almost an anagram of the author’s name and signifying a bird traditionally associated with omens of misfortune. The ‘ugly crow’ of the title can hardly refer to Boccaccio himself, and it is possible that all he intended it to suggest was the unceasing mockery (il corbacchiare) characterizing the work as a whole, which is a bitter invective against women. It therefore forms part of a tradition of misogynistic writing stretching back to Juvenal and to St Jerome. But although he had made one or two earlier excursions into this equivocal poetic terrain, for instance in an episode in the Filocolo and more especially in the story of the scholar and the widow (Decameron, VIII, 7), the sheer intensity and ferocity of the Corbaccio’s anti-feminism will astonish those who are accustomed to accept Boccaccio’s own self-portrait in the Decameron as the champion of the gentle sex (see the Prologue and the Introduction to the Fourth Day). The Corbaccio is in fact the work which documents in most convincing fashion Boccaccio’s conversion to the kind of literary asceticism to which he became increasingly committed after his encounter with Petrarch. As Sapegno has shrewdly observed, whereas the Muses in the Decameron had been compared to women (IV, Intro.), in the Corbaccio the ‘Ninfe Castalidi’ (‘Castalian nymphs’, a circumlocution for the Muses) are contrasted with wicked women (‘malvagie femmine’). The Epistola consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi, written in the winter of 1361–2 following the banishment from Florence of the addressee, is not only an attempt to offer encouragement to a close friend at a time of profound personal misfortune, but also an elegant and eloquent exercise in a literary genre with strong classical antecedents, a document that bears witness to the author’s continuing and ever more intensive commitment to humanistic culture. The exile of Rossi had coincided with the execution of that same Niccolò di Bartolo del Buono to whom Boccaccio had dedicated his Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine, and in fact several of the author’s close acquaintances fell victim to the purge carried out by the Florentine Signory after the abortive coup d’état of 1361, with the aims of which he had not, presumably, been entirely out of sympathy. It is perhaps significant that very soon afterwards, in that same year in fact, he handed over the family house in the San Felicita quarter to his stepbrother Iacopo, who was now of age, and retired to Certaldo, the town of his paternal forebears.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  “But you haven’t addressed the question left unanswered in your Diaries.” Clara brought Anaïs’s attention back. “How did you make a living? Certainly it wasn’t from your writing. All you published in those years was a booklet of nonprofessional literary criticism on D. H. Lawrence. Not exactly a moneymaker.” There were a few titters from Clara’s supporters. She pressed, “Since it was your marriage to an international banker that made your free, privileged life possible, don’t you think you’re obliged to tell us that? It’s not fair to let women think that they can have a life like yours without a rich, permissive husband like yours.” There was a hush in the room, stunned fear for Anaïs as the naked emperor exposed by an insurgent. I could not believe what I was witnessing. Clara and Anaïs were playing out a battle that had been raging inside me: Clara on the left, whom I so admired, brave and honest, who challenged unfairness and hypocrisy wherever she found it. Anaïs on the other side, brave and dishonest, my mentor, whom I loved. Anaïs remained unflappable in the face of Clara’s accusation of deception. “I have given you so much of myself in the Diary,” she intoned sorrowfully. “No woman has revealed so much. I have given voice to the secrets that most women hide. Why do you demand more of me?” You could feel the audience, like an armada, slowly turn, guns swiveling towards Clara. She shrugged, as if to say, What can I do if you Americans, unlike the French, cannot appreciate a good intellectual row? She shot back at Anaïs, “The question is why you did not ask more of yourself. You intentionally misled your readers into thinking you were self-supporting. All that time you were being supported by Hugo Guiler, a banker!” Anaïs answered calmly, “Yes, that is why I added at the end of Diary II that the bank recalled my husband to America and we had to leave Paris. That much had appeared in the newspaper; it was public record. That is all I could include about my husband because I did not have his permission to portray him.” I knew this wasn’t exactly true. It sounded convincing, but not to Clara. She glared at Anaïs accusingly. “You mean that you, the renowned seductress, couldn’t get permission from your own husband, the one you still live with in New York?” How did Clara know about Hugo in New York? I’d certainly never said anything about him to her. But Anaïs would believe I had! I could tell Anaïs was furious because her voice became soft and controlled. She demanded of Clara, “Who are you?” “I’m a member of Tristine’s consciousness group.” God, Clara was making it sound like I was in on this! Don looked over at me, an eyebrow raised. Anaïs stood tall and her gemstone eyes bored into Clara. “Where did you get the false impression that I am still married to Hugo?”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In France, according to the testimony of the famous printer Robert Stephens, who was born in 1503, the doctors of the Sorbonne, in the period when he was a young man, knew about the New Testament only from quotations from Jerome and the Decretals. He declared that he was more than 50 years old before he knew anything about the New Testament. Luther was a man before he saw a copy of the Latin Bible. In 1533, Geneva forbade its citizens to read the Bible in German or French and ordered all translations burnt.1246 The strict inquisition of books would have passed to all countries, if the hierarchy had had its way. In 1535, Francis I. closed the printing-presses and made it a capital offence in France to publish a religious book without authorization from the Sorbonne. The attitude of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, since the Reformation as well as during the Reformation, has been against the free circulation of the Bible. In the 19th century, one pope after another anathematized Bible societies. In Spain, Italy and South America, the punishments visited upon Bible colporteurs and the frequent burning of the Bible itself have been quite in the line of the decrees of Arundel and Bertholdt and the treatment of Bishop Tonstall. Nor will it be forgotten that, at the time Rome was made the capital of Italy in 1870, a papal law required that copies of the Bible found in the possession of visitors to the papal city be confiscated. On the other hand, through the agency of the Reformers, the book was made known and offered freely to all classes. What use the Reformers hoped to make of printing for the dissemination of religion and intelligence is tersely and quaintly expressed by the martyrologist, Foxe, in these words:1247 — Either the pope must abolish printing or he must seek a new world to reign over, for else, as the world stands, printing will abolish him. The pope and all the cardinals must understand this, that through the light of printing the world begins now to have eyes to see and heads to judge .... God hath opened the press to preach, whose voice the pope is never able to stop with all the puissance of the triple crown. By printing as by the gift of tongues and as by the singular organ of the Holy Ghost, the doctrine of the Gospel sounds to all nations and countries under heaven and what God reveals to one man, is dispersed to many and what is known to one nation is opened to all.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But I’ll see if I can persuade him to go away now, and then I’ll come back to let you in.’ ‘Go quickly then,’ said the scholar. ‘And I beg you to make sure there’s a nice big fire, so that I can warm myself up when I come in. I’m so cold that I scarcely have any feeling left in my body.’ ‘I don’t see how that can be possible,’ said die lady. ‘You always claim in your letters that you are burning all over because of your love for me. But it’s clear to me now that you must have been joking. However, I must go now. Wait here, and keep your fingers crossed.’ The lady’s lover, having heard every syllable, was mightily pleased, and returned with his mistress to bed, where they slept very little, but spent virtually the entire night disporting themselves and making fun of the unfortunate scholar. Perceiving that he had been duped, the scholar, whose teeth were chattering so vigorously that he seemed to have been turned into a stork, 3 tried the door several times to see whether it would open, and searched all round the courtyard for some other way out. But finding none, he paced to and fro like a lion in a cage, cursing the severity of the weather, the perfidy of the lady, the inordinate length of the night, and his own stupidity. So indignant did he feel about the way he had been treated by the lady that his fervent and longstanding love was transformed into savage and bitter hatred, and his mind dwelt on various elaborate schemes for securing his revenge, which he now desired far more ardently than he had formerly yearned to hold her in his arms. It seemed to him that the night would never end, but eventually the dawn began to appear, and the maidservant, following the instructions of her mistress, came down to open the courtyard gate. Pretending to be very sorry for him, she said: ‘A curse on that brother of hers for coming here yesterday evening. He’s kept us in suspense the entire night, and frozen you to the marrow. But you know how it is! Don’t be disheartened, try again some other night, and perhaps you’ll have better luck. My mistress is heartbroken that this should have happened, she really is.’ Though seething with indignation, the scholar was wise enough to know that menaces simply forearm the person who is threatened, and so, swallowing all the resentment that was striving within him for an outlet, he said to her in a quiet voice, without betraying the slightest hint of his anger: ‘To be honest, it was the worst night I have ever spent, but I could see that the lady was in no way to blame, for she was so concerned about me that she came down in person to apologize and offer me her sympathy.

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  These responses exist as parts of a united defence system. When fight and fight responses are thwarted, the organism instinctively constricts as it moves toward its last option, the freezing response. As it constricts, the energy that would have been discharged by executing the fight or flight strategies is amplified and bound up in the nervous system. In this emotional and anxious state, the now-frustrated fight response erupts into rage; the frustrated fight response gives way to helplessness. The individual who has moved into the stage characterized by rage or helplessness still has the potential to move abruptly back into a frantic flight response or a raging counter-attack. If the organism is able to discharge the energy by fleeing or defending itself and thus resolve the threat, trauma will not occur. Another possible scenario is that constriction will continue until the rage, terror, and helplessness have built up to a level of activation that overwhelms the nervous system. At this point, immobility will take over and the individual will either freeze or collapse. What happens then is that the intense, frozen energy, instead of discharging, gets bound up with the overwhelming, highly activated, emotional states of terror, rage, and helplessness. Blame It on the Neo-cortex Why don’t humans just move into and out of these different responses as naturally as animals do? One reason is that our highly evolved neo-cortex (rational brain) is so complex and powerful that through fear and over-control it can interfere with the subtle restorative instinctual impulses and responses generated by the reptilian core. In particular, the neo-cortex easily overrides some of our gentler instinctual response s — such as those that guide the healing of trauma through the discharge of energy. If the discharge process is to serve its purpose, it must be initiated and driven by impulses from the reptilian brain. The neo-cortex must elaborate on instinctual information, not control it. The neo-cortex is not powerful enough to override the instinctual defense response to threat and dange r — the fight, flee, or freeze responses. In this respect, we humans are still inextricably bound to our animal heritage. Animals, however, do not have a highly evolved neo-cortex to interfere with the natural return to normal functioning through some form of discharge. In humans, trauma occurs as a result of the initiation of an instinctual cycle that is not allowed to finish. When the neo-cortex overrides the instinctual responses that would initiate the completion of this cycle, we will be traumatized. Fear and Immobility The duration of the immobility response in animals is normally time-limited; they go in and they come out.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She held up her hand, commanding silence; commanding that slow, quiet voice to cease speaking, and she said: ‘As my father loved you, I loved. As a man loves a woman, that was how I loved—protectively, like my father. I wanted to give all I had in me to give. It made me feel terribly strong . . . and gentle. It was good, good, good—I’d have laid down my life a thousand times over for Angela Crossby. If I could have, I’d have married her and brought her home—I wanted to bring her home here to Morton. If I loved her the way a man loves a woman, it’s because I can’t feel that I am a woman. All my life I’ve never felt like a woman, and you know it—you say you’ve always disliked me, that you’ve always felt a strange physical repulsion. . . . I don’t know what I am; no one’s ever told me that I’m different and yet I know that I’m different—that’s why, I suppose, you’ve felt as you have done. And for that I forgive you, though whatever it is, it was you and my father who made this body—but what I will never forgive is your daring to try and make me ashamed of my love. I’m not ashamed of it, there’s no shame in me.’ And now she was stammering a little wildly, ‘Good and—and fine it was,’ she stammered, ‘the best part of myself—I gave all and I asked nothing in return—I just went on hopelessly loving—’ she broke off, she was shaking from head to foot, and Anna’s cold voice fell like icy water on that angry and sorely tormented spirit. ‘You have spoken, Stephen. I don’t think there’s much more that needs to be said between us except this, we two cannot live together at Morton—not now, because I might grow to hate you. Yes, although you’re my child, I might grow to hate you. The same roof mustn’t shelter us both any more; one of us must go—which of us shall it be?’ And she looked at Stephen and waited. Morton! They could not both live at Morton. Something seemed to catch hold of the girl’s heart and twist it. She stared at her mother, aghast for a moment, while Anna stared back—she was waiting for her answer. But quite suddenly Stephen found her manhood and she said: ‘I understand. I’ll leave Morton.’

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  At a time when in Germany, the richest country of Europe, church buildings were multiplying with great rapidity, many churches in England, on account of the low economic conditions, were actually left to go to ruin or turned into sheepcotes and stables, a transmutation to which Sir Thomas More as well as others refers. The rapacity of the nobles and abbots in turning large areas into sheep-runs deprived laborers of employment and brought social distress upon large numbers. On the other hand, parliament passed frequent statutes of apparel, as in 1463 and 1482, restricting the farmer and laborer in his expenditure on dress. The different statutes of laborers, enacted during the 15th century, had the effect of depressing and impoverishing the classes dependent upon the daily toil of their hands.1303 In spite of the strict synodal rules, repeated again and again, usury was practised by Christians as well as by Jews. All the greater Schoolmen of the 13th century had discussed the subject of usury and pronounced it sin, on the ground of Luke 6:34, and other texts. They held that charges of interest offended against the law of love to our neighbor and the law of natural fairness, for money does not increase with use but rather is reduced in weight and value. It is a species of greed which is mortal sin.1304 It was so treated by mediaeval councils when practised by Christians and the contrary opinion was pronounced heretical by the oecumenical council of Vienne. Geiler of Strassburg expounded the official church view when he pronounced usury always wicked. It was wrong for a Christian to take back more than the original principal. And the substitution of a pig or some other gift in place of a money payment he also denounced. The rates of the Jews were exorbitant. In Florence, they were 20% in 1430 and, in 1488, 32½%.1305 In Northern Europe they were much higher, from 431/3 to 80 or even 100%. Municipalities borrowed. Clerics, convents and churches mortgaged their sacred vessels. City after city in Germany and Switzerland expelled the Jews,—from Spires and Zürich,1435, to Geneva,1490, and Nürnberg, Ulm and Nördlingen,1498–1500. The careers of the great banking-houses in the second half of the fifteenth century show the extensive demand for loans by popes and prelates, as well as secular princes.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  "Dost thou hear this, O Pope! not the most holy, but the most sinful? Would that God would hurl thy chair headlong from heaven, and cast it down into the abyss of hell! Who gave you the power to exalt yourself above God? to break and to loose what he has commanded? to teach Christians, more especially Germans, who are of noble nature, and are famed in all histories for uprightness and truth, to be false, unfaithful, perjured, treacherous, and wicked? God has commanded to keep faith and observe oaths even with enemies: you dare to cancel his command, laying it down in your heretical, antichristian decretals, that you have power to do so; and through your mouth and your pen Satan lies as he never lied before, teaching you to twist and pervert the Scriptures according to your own arbitrary will. O Lord Christ! look down upon this, let thy day of judgment come and destroy the Devil’s lair at Rome. Behold him of whom St. Paul spoke (2 Thess. 2:3, 4), that he should exalt himself above thee, and sit in thy Church, showing himself as God—the man of sin and the child of damnation .... The Pope treads God’s commandments under foot, and exalts his own: if this is not Antichrist, I do not know what it is."

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘A bad one, and may God deal harshly with the whole lot of them. And my reason for telling you so is that, unless I formed the wrong impression, nobody there who was connected with the Church seemed to me to display the slightest sign of holiness, piety, charity, moral rectitude or any other virtue. On the contrary, it seemed to me that they were all so steeped in lust, greed, avarice, fraud, envy, pride, and other like sins and worse (if indeed that is possible), that I regard the place as a hotbed for diabolical rather than devotional activities. As far as I can judge, it seems to me that your pontiff, and all of the others too, are doing their level best to reduce the Christian religion to nought and drive it from the face of the earth, whereas they are the very people who should be its foundation and support. ‘But since it is evident to me that their attempts are unavailing, and that your religion continues to grow in popularity, and become more splendid and illustrious, I can only conclude that, being a more holy and genuine religion than any of the others, it deservedly has the Holy Ghost as its foundation and support. So whereas earlier I stood firm and unyielding against your entreaties and refused to turn Christian, I now tell you quite plainly that nothing in the world could prevent me from becoming a Christian.2 Let us therefore go to the church where, in accordance with the traditional rite of your holy faith, you shall have me baptized.’ When Jehannot, who was expecting precisely the opposite conclusion, heard him saying this, he was the happiest man that ever lived. And he went with him to Nôtre Dame de Paris,3 and asked the clergy there to baptize Abraham. This they did, as soon as they heard that he himself desired it: Jehannot stood as his sponsor, and gave him the name of John. And afterwards he engaged the most learned teachers to instruct him thoroughly in our religion, which he quickly mastered, thereafter becoming a good and worthy man, holy in all his ways. THIRD STORYMelchizedek1 the Jew, with a story about three rings, avoids a most dangerous trap laid for him by Saladin.2 Neifile’s story was well received by all the company, and when she fell silent, Filomena began at the queen’s behest to address them as follows:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  As already seen earlier, his father, originally a smallholder in the Florentine contado, had moved at an early age to Florence itself, where he gradually achieved a position of importance in the city’s banking fraternity. The practical, common-sense, hard-headed values of the prosperous bourgeois society in which Boccaccio was raised are everywhere apparent in the Decameron, which in turn exerted its greatest appeal upon those who shared and practised those values, hence the classifying of the Decameron as ‘the epic of the bourgeoisie’. The account of Messer Lizio’s sensible resolution of the problem created within his household by his wayward daughter’s premature consummation of her love for Ricciardo may be construed as typifying the scale of values by which the fourteenth-century Italian bourgeoisie regulated their lives, and to which Boccaccio himself wholeheartedly subscribed. But underlying the bourgeois values that the Decameron so clearly represents, there is also a noticeable regard for the code of conduct associated with the old feudal aristocracy, for whom the concept of honour was not so much a question of keeping up appearances as of strict adherence to a generally recognized series of rules governing polite behaviour, which set the nobility apart from their social inferiors. The tragic outcome of Ghismonda’s love for Guiscardo is as much due to the collision between these two diverse ethical codes as to any incestuous overtones of Tancredi’s affection for his daughter. In the brief but stupendous description of Tancredi’s reaction to his witnessing of the passionate sexual encounter between Ghismonda and Guiscardo, the reader suddenly becomes aware of the full implications of the preamble to the novella, where Tancredi had been described as ‘a most benevolent ruler, and kindly of disposition, except that in his old age he sullied his hands with the blood of passion’, and where it had been pointed out that he had ‘but a single child, a daughter’, of whom he was ‘as passionately fond... as any father who has ever lived’. His sense of outrage on waking to discover the two lovers locked together in amorous embrace is thus fully understandable as the natural reaction of one who has been deceived in the object of his deep affection. And likewise his over-reaction to the discovery – the brutal murder of Guiscardo and his sending of the young man’s heart to his daughter in a golden chalice – is explicable in purely psychological terms. But in the lengthy central episode of the novella, reporting the heated exchanges between Tancredi and Ghismonda concerning the propriety of her love for Guiscardo, it is the clash between the old feudal values and the new bourgeois ethic that holds centre stage, and there is little doubt that Ghismonda, representing the latter, has the better of the argument. Tancredi reproaches his daughter on two grounds: firstly, that she has given herself to a man who was not her husband, and secondly, that she has chosen to bestow her favours upon one whose rank was inferior to her own.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The edict was kept back till the Elector Frederick and the Elector of the Palatinate with a large number of other members of the Diet had gone home. It was not regularly submitted to, nor discussed and voted on, by the Diet, nor signed by the Chancellor, but secured by a sort of surprise.395 On Trinity Sunday, May 26, Aleander went with the Latin and German copy to church, and induced the Emperor to sign both after high mass, "with his pious hand." The Emperor said in French, "Now you will be satisfied."—"Yes," replied the legate in the same language, "but much more satisfied will be the Holy See and all Christendom, and will thank God for such a good, holy, and religious Emperor."396 The edict is not so long, but as turgid, bombastic, intolerant, fierce, and Cruel, as the Pope’s bull of excommunication.397 It gave legal force to the bull within the German Empire. It denounces Luther as a devil in the dress of a monk, who had gathered a mass of old and new heresies into one pool, and pronounces upon him the ban and re-ban.398 It commands the burning, and forbids the printing, publication, and sale, of his books, the sheltering and feeding of his person, and that of his followers, and directs the magistrates to seize him wherever he may be found, and to hand him over to the Emperor, to be dealt with according to the penal laws against heretics. At the same time the whole press of the empire was put under strict surveillance.399 This was the last occasion on which the mediaeval union of the secular empire with the papacy was expressed in official form so as to make the German emperor the executor of the decrees of the bishop of Rome. The gravamina of the nation were unheeded. Hutten wrote: "I am ashamed of my fatherland."400 Thus Luther was outlawed by Church and State, condemned by the Pope, the Emperor, the universities, cast out of human society, and left exposed to a violent death. But he had Providence and the future on his side. The verdict of the Diet was not the verdict of the nation.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The emperors nominated or confirmed the most influential metropolitans and patriarchs. They took part in all theological disputes, and thereby inflamed the passion of parties. They protected orthodoxy and punished heresy with the arm of power. Often, however, they took the heretical side, and banished orthodox bishops from their sees. Thus Arianism, Nestorianism, Eutychianism, and Monophysitism successively found favor and protection at court. Even empresses meddled in the internal and external concerns of the church. Justina endeavored with all her might to introduce Arianism in Milan, but met a successful opponent in bishop Ambrose. Eudoxia procured the deposition and banishment of the noble Chrysostom. Theodora, raised from the stage to the throne, ruled the emperor Justinian, and sought by every kind of intrigue to promote the victory of the Monophysite heresy. It is true, the doctrinal decisions proceeded properly from the councils, and could not have maintained themselves long without that sanction. But Basiliscus, Zeno, Justinian I., Heraclius, Constans II., and other emperors issued many purely ecclesiastical edicts and rescripts without consulting the councils, or through the councils by their own influence upon them. Justinian opens his celebrated codex with the imperial creed on the trinity and the imperial anathema against Nestorius, Eutyches, Apollinaris, on the basis certainly of the apostolic church and of the four ecumenical councils, but in the consciousness of absolute legislative and executive authority even over the faith and conscience of all his subjects. The voice of the catholic church in this period conceded to the Christian emperors in general, with the duty of protecting and supporting the church, the right of supervision over its external affairs, but claimed for the clergy, particularly for the bishops, the right to govern her within, to fix her doctrine, to direct her worship. The new state of things was regarded as a restoration of the Mosaic and Davidic theocracy on Christian soil, and judged accordingly. But in respect to the extent and application of the emperor’s power in the church, opinion was generally determined, consciously or unconsciously, by some special religious interest. Hence we find that catholics and heretics, Athanasians and Arians, justified or condemned the interference of the emperor in the development of doctrine, the appointment and deposition of bishops, and the patronage and persecution of parties, according as they themselves were affected by them. The same Donatists who first appealed to the imperial protection, when the decision went against them denounced all intermeddling of the state with the church. There were bishops who justified even the most arbitrary excesses of the Byzantine despotism in religion by reference to Melchizedek and the pious kings of Israel, and yielded them selves willing tools of the court. But there were never wanting also fearless defenders of the rights of the church against the civil power. Maximus the Confessor declared before his judges in Constantinople, that Melchizedek was a type of Christ alone, not of the emperor.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  tribunal.548 To these laws the pope paid only so much heed as expediency required. This claim, made by one of his predecessors in the bull Cupientes, to the right to fill all the benefices of Christendom, he had no idea of abandoning, and, whenever it was possible, he provided for his hungry family of cardinals and other ecclesiastics out of the proverbially fat appointments of England. Indeed, the cases of such appointments given by Merimuth, and especially in the papal books as printed by Bliss, are so recurrent that one might easily get the impression that the pontiff’s only concern for the English Church was to see that its livings were put into the hands of foreigners. I have counted the numbers in several places as given by Bliss. On one page, 4 out of 9 entries were papal appointments. A section of 2½ pages announces "provisions of a canonry, with expectation of a prebend" in the following churches: 7 in Lincoln, 5 in Salisbury, 2 in Chichester, and 1 each in Wells, York, Exeter, St. Patrick’s, Dublin, Moray, Southwell, Howden, Ross, Aberdeen, Wilton.549 From 1342– 1385 the deanery of York was held successively by three Roman cardinals. In 1374, the incomes of the treasurer, dean and two archdeaneries of Salisbury went the same way. At the close of Edward III.’s reign, foreign cardinals held the deaneries of York, Salisbury and Lichfield, the archdeanery of Canterbury, reputed to be the richest of English preferments, and innumerable prebends. Bishops and abbots-elect had to travel to Avignon and often spend months and much money in securing confirmation to their appointments, and, in cases, the prelate-elect was set aside on the ground that provision had already been made for his office. As for sees reserved by the pope, Stubbs gives the following list, extending over a brief term of years: Worcester, Hereford, Durham and Rochester, 1317; Lincoln and Winchester, 1320; Lichfield, 1322; Winchester, 1328; Carlisle and Norwich, 1825; Worcester, Exeter and Hereford, 1827; Bath, 1829; Durham, Canterbury, Winchester and Worcester, 1334. Provisions were made in full recognition of the plural system. Thus, Walter of London, the king’s confessor, was appointed by the pope to the deanery of Wells, though, as stated in the papal brief, he already held a considerable list of "canonries and prebends," Lincoln, Salisbury, St. Paul, St. Martin Le Grand, London, Bridgenorth, Hastings and Hareswell in the diocese of Salisbury.550 By the practice of promoting bishops from one see to another, the pope accomplished for his favorites what he could not have done in any other way. Thus, by the promotion of Sudbury in 1874 to Canterbury, the pope was able to translate Courtenay from Hereford to London, and Gilbert from Bangor to Hereford, and thus by a single stroke he was enriched by the first-fruits of four sees. In spite of legislation, the papal collectors continued to ply their trade in England, but less publicly and confidently than in the two preceding centuries. In 1879, Urban VI.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In this communication and in a special letter to the cardinals653 Huss spoke of the punishment for heresy and insubordination. He, however, wrote to John that he was bound to speak the truth, and that he was ready to suffer a dreadful death rather than to declare what would be contrary to the will of Christ and his Church. He had been defamed, and it was false that he had expressed himself in favor of the remanence of the material substance of the bread after the words of institution, and that a priest in mortal sin might not celebrate the eucharist. Sbinko died Sept. 28, 1411. At this juncture the excitement was increased by the arrival in Prag of John Stokes, a Cambridge man, and well known in England as an uncompromising foe of Wycliffism. He had come with a delegation, sent by the English king, to arrange an alliance with Sigismund. Stokes’ presence aroused the expectation of a notable clash, but the Englishman, although he ventilated his views privately, declined Huss’ challenge to a public disputation on the ground that he was a political representative of a friendly nation.654 The same year, 1411, John XXIII. called Europe to a crusade against Ladislaus of Naples, the defender of Gregory XII., and promised indulgence to all participating in it, whether by personal enlistment or by gifts. Tiem, dean of Passau, appointed preacher of the holy war, made his way to Prag and opened the sale of indulgences. Chests were placed in the great churches, and the traffic was soon in full sway. As Wyclif, thirty years before, in his Cruciata, had lifted up his voice against the crusade in Flanders, so now Huss denounced the religious war and denied the pope’s right to couple indulgences with it. He filled the Bethlehem chapel with denunciations of the sale and, in a public disputation, took the ground that remission of sins comes through repentance alone and that the pope has no authority to seize the secular sword. Many of his paragraphs were taken bodily from Wyclif’s works on the Church and on the Absolution from guilt and punishment.655 Huss was supported by Jerome of Prag. Popular opinion was on the side of these leaders, but from this time Huss’ old friends, Stanislaus of Znaim and Stephen Paletz, walked no more with him. Under the direction of Wok of Waldstein, John’s two bulls, bearing on the crusade and offering indulgence, were publicly burnt, after being hung at the necks of two students, dressed as harlots, and drawn through the streets in a cart.656 Huss was still writing that he abhorred the errors ascribed to him, but the king could not countenance the flagrant indignity shown to the papal bulls, and had three men of humble position executed, Martin, John and Stanislaus. They had cried out in open church that the bulls were lies, as Huss had proved.

• From The World of Biblical Israel (2013)

  165 verses 9–10: “Esau will be cut off by slaughter for the violence done to your brother Jacob.” o Then, in verses 11–14, we get a list of Edom’s crimes that occurred on the day of Jerusalem’s conquest by Babylonia, including standing aloof as strangers carried off Jerusalem’s wealth, “gloating” and “rejoicing” over the ruin of Judah, and conspiring with the Babylonians to deliver up any Judeans who fled Jerusalem toward Edom. • In verse 15, we shift from reading out the crimes to announcing the punishment. o First, Mount Zion—Jerusalem—will be restored. It shall once again be holy. The house of Jacob will repossess what it lost to Babylonia and to Edom. o And then we read, “The house of Jacob will be a fire and the house of Joseph a flame, and the house of Esau stubble.” Given that Jerusalem had been destroyed by fire, Obadiah imagines poetic justice. o Finally, Obadiah imagines the gathering of all the exiles from both Israel and Judah back to their homeland, where they will occupy an expanded territory that includes “the cities of the Negev,” namely, the territory southwest of the Dead Sea that Edom occupied after the conquest. • The short prophetic book of Obadiah narrates the troubled history between Judah and Edom. But throughout this historical reconstruction, Obadiah acknowledges Edom as “a brother” of Jacob. In some sense, it is this status as a twin that makes Edom’s crime, according to Obadiah, all the more inexcusable. Malachi • Malachi is another short prophetic book by an author we know little about. His central message calls on the restored “Israel” to remain faithful to the covenant and its teachings. He likely wrote in the

• From The World of Biblical Israel (2013)

  122 Lecture 17: Life in Exile, Life in Judah o In contrast, the exile to Egypt was, for the most part, voluntary. It occurred over generations as a gradual migration that began before the Babylonian period and continued after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem. Those who ended up in Egypt were mostly soldiers and traders—people of a lower class than those who went to Babylonia. o The remaining Judean contingent was most likely the majority. These were people who were not deemed important enough for deportation to Babylonia and had no reason to migrate to Egypt. They were farmers who knew how to eke out a living from the land. Exilic Life in Babylonia • During the first years of the Babylonian Exile, there were surely many Judeans who thought of nothing but returning home. Their anger toward their host country is expressed in the last lines of Psalm 137: “O Daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” • With this mood of revenge in the air, a letter sent to the exiles by the prophet Jeremiah was probably not greeted with enthusiasm. o Jeremiah addressed his letter to a group he labeled “the elders” within the exilic community. The letter was sent early, after the first deportation of elites that included King Jehoiachin and the prophet Ezekiel. o Jeremiah’s letter provides instructions from the god of Israel for the exiles to settle and continue raising families in the land and to pray for the welfare of their new home and those who inhabit it. o Jeremiah then predicts that the Judeans’ time in exile will be 70 years. At the end of that time, the Israelite god will visit them once again and bring them back to Judah.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  I quickly got off the phone for fear of saying what was on the tip of my tongue: How would you know a superficial phony, Anaïs? You live your life as a lie. You’re just repeating what Jamie said about me because you’re still mad that your fans adored me in place of you at your tribute and that I didn’t jump at the chance to write your phony bio. All you care about is your image, not about me, and despite how many times you say you aren’t a narcissist because you gave your typewriter to Henry Miller, you are a narcissist! Just like my father. Just like your father who you slept with! And Renate says you did it to prove you were the most daring surrealist. Talk about a mad intellect! My ego lacerated, I crawled into a sea cave of isolation to moan. Once there, I used my diary, as I always had, to exaggerate, overdramatize my feelings and sublimate them into intellectual abstractions. Only after what Anaïs had said, I couldn’t help seeing what I was doing. So I tried Anaïs’s advice to dive more deeply, just to see what would happen, writing on the page, What do I really feel? It was humiliating to find the tantrums of an angry, resentful child—my “Ugly Trissy.” I also found a punishing, exacting male voice that I named my “Internal Critic.” I wanted to expel them both, but instead I began to converse with these previously unrecognized parts of my personality. During this period of wounded introspection, I had nightmares that jolted me from sleep and sliced back in when I dozed off again. Tidal waves crashed over my house. A violent man pounded on my front door, his fist smashing through splintered wood into my face. A repulsive, furry, one-eyed creature stared up at me imploringly from its pool of afterbirth. The more I recorded dreams in my diary, the more I received, in clusters and cycles now, a hurricane of dreams. I was underwater with them; it took half the day just to write them down. In reward for paying attention, though, I began to have transcendent dreams. In one, I tossed in turbulent waves clinging to a raft below my house. From an open Dutch window, a serene “guru woman” watched me floundering below. In the morning I recognized that I was both figures and this began a series of dreams in which the same serene woman appeared as a priestess wearing a Grecian gown like Anaïs’s favorite white muumuu, although she didn’t look like Anaïs and didn’t have her French accent. She wasn’t Anaïs. She was a part of me, out of my unconscious. She was mine: the wise, essential self that Anaïs had characterized as Djuna and promised I would one day discover.