Pride

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 Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  central Europe and France. Since the laity had tolerated so much sidestepping of celibacy in medieval Europe, it would be important to co-opt them in enforcing the system. It was a slow process, not always helped by foot-dragging from local bishops who might themselves keep a concubine, and by local admiration for what the lay faithful could observe in Protestant clergy marriages, but, by the end of the sixteenth century, not only were leading laypeople in Catholic villages much more inclined to denounce clergy who kept concubines, but in France lay judges were prepared to see adulterous clerics and their female lovers hanged. As late as 1676, in an extreme case, a priest was burned alive by order of the Parlement of Burgundy, convicted of having had sex with a nun. [62] Renewal of celibate community life was equally important. It proceeded from individual initiatives rather than any plan in Rome – quite the opposite. Leaders in the changes were the Society of Jesus and a cluster of female congregations collectively known as the Ursulines; both predated the Counter- Reformation, and both provoked suspicion in the Catholic Church by their unconventionality. The Society of Jesus emerged in the 1530s under the leadership of a charismatic student from the Basque Country in the far north-east of the Iberian Peninsula, Íñigo López de Loyola. He had been an aspiring courtier in royal Spanish service until a serious wound sustained in the course of war with France in 1521 led to a prolonged convalescence and a radical redirection. Íñigo’s conversion and/or personal trauma led him in the opposite direction to Luther’s: he broke through his conventional family piety to a deeper passion for encountering God through the tradition and authority of the Catholic Church. Through a series of intense personal experiences, apparent setbacks among them, he noted down what was happening to him, and turned the results into a systematically organized practical guide to prayer, self- examination and surrender to divine power which others might follow. In its eventual shape as the Spiritual Exercises , it became one of the most influential spiritual guides in Western Christianity. [63] Enrolling at the University of Paris in 1528, Íñigo signalled a change of direction by the new Christian name that he took: Ignatius, resonant of the ancient martyr of Antioch. Around him gathered a group of friends with a collective though as yet undefined religious enthusiasm. Their efforts to find out what to do with their fervour in the service of the Church led to some initial fiascos: an abandoned joint pilgrimage to Jerusalem to convert Muslims, and a mission of salvation to the prostitutes of Italian cities, which provoked unsympathetic questions. It was easy to see them as brilliant mavericks, and powerful clerics in both Spain and Rome were further inclined to see them as potential heretics; Ignatius’s circle certainly did have more contacts with some of the more independent-minded leaders of Mediterranean heterodoxy than later accounts admitted.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  The people in our dining rooms are different from us. We are the other thing—and we like it like that. We may be glorified servants, catering to the whims of those usually wealthier than us (I mean, who among us could afford to eat in our own restaurants regularly?), but we are tougher, meaner, stronger, more reliable, and well aware of the fact that we can do something with our hands, our senses, the accumulated wisdom of thousands of meals served, that they can't. When you're tired after a hard day in the kitchen, and some manicured stockbroker is taking up too much room on the subway, you have no problem telling the stupid prick to shove over. You deserve it! He doesn't. Does this sound macho? It isn't. Men, women, anyone who works in a professional kitchen should feel the same way. They work harder, under more difficult conditions, in an often fly-by-night industry with uncertain futures, catering to a fickle and capricious clientele in an environment in which you can do everything right and still fail. This environment tends to breed a clannishness, a tribal subculture, a tunnel-vision view of the world where "there's us—and there's those like us" and screw everybody else. We have to cook as best we can for them, but that doesn't mean we have to be them. So all those hours scraping carrots, scrubbing oysters, pulling the bones out of pig trotters, tourneeing turnips, in the end, pay off. In addition to becoming expert, presumably, at those valuable tasks, you are asserting your reliability, your toughness, and your worth as someone whom an overworked chef de partie or sous-chef or chef might want to take under their wing, invest a little time and attention actually teaching, helping you to climb out of the cellar and up to the next level. You are also coming to an understanding—a real understanding—of what the hell it is that we really do in this business, meaning, we transform the raw, the ugly, the tough, and the unlovely into the cooked, the beautiful, the tender, and the tasty. Any cretin can grill a steak after a few tries. It takes a cook to transform a humble pig's foot into something people clamor for. This is the real story of haute cuisine, of course: generations of hungry, servile, and increasingly capable French and Italian and Chinese and others, transforming what was readily at hand, or leftover from their cruel masters, into something people actually wanted to eat. And as the story of all great cooking is often the story of poverty, hardship, servitude, and cruelty, so is our history. Like the shank of beef that over time becomes a falling-off-the-bone thing of wonder when slowly braised in red wine and seasonings, so too is the prep cook transformed—into a craftsman, an artisan, a professional, responsible to himself, his chef, his owners, his coworkers, his customers.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  A stressed, badly rested, overworked three-star chef is not going to take time out of his or her very busy day training some young commis to clarify stock properly if there's any doubt whether that commis will still be around, still focused, and still motivated in three months. The very real need for dreary, repetitive functions like squid cleaning serves a secondary purpose in weeding out the goofballs, the people who thought they wanted to be in The Life—but don't really understand or want that level of commitment. If some of these budding culinarians feel that they are not, for instance, comfortable with being spoken to harshly, or dismissed with an expletive in a moment of extremis, then they usually lack the basic character traits needed for a long, successful run in this greatest of all businesses. Much is made of the emotional volatility, even the apparent cruelty, of some of our better-known culinary warriors. And to the casual observer, the torrent of profanity likely to come the way of an inadequately prepared poissonier can seem terrifying and offensive. And there is a line not to be crossed. Bullying for its own sake, for the sheer pleasure of exerting power over other, weaker cooks or employees, is shameful. If I verbally disembowel a waiter during a busy shift for some transgression, real or imagined, I sincerely hope and expect that at the shift's end, we will be friendly and laughing about it at the bar. If a cook goes home feeling like an idiot for trusting me, working hard for me, and investing time and toil in pleasing me, then I have failed in my job. Good kitchens, however hard the work, and good chefs, should breed intense loyalty, camaraderie, and relationships that last lifetimes. Most reasonably coordinated people with hearts, souls, and any kind of emotional connection to food can be taught to cook, at some level or another. It takes a special breed to love the business. When you pursue excellence for yourself—not for dreams of TV stardom or endorsement deals, not for the customer, not for your chef, but for yourself—then you are well on your way to becoming the kind of lifetime adrenaline junkie professional culinarian recognizable in any country or culture. I can't tell you how many times I've talked about this with chefs and cooks around the world. Whether it's Singapore, Sydney, Saint Louis, Paris, Barcelona, or Duluth, you are not alone. When you finally arrive, when you take your place behind a professional range, start slinging serious food, know what the hell you're doing, you are joining an international subculture in "this thing of ours." You will recognize and be recognized by others of your kind. You will be proud and happy to be part of something old and honorable and difficult to do. You will be different, a thing apart—and you will cherish your apartness. FOOD AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS "Maybe you should drive," I said.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  And to make me laugh. In our business, you'd better have a sense of humor. We flirt with disaster every day—particularly during busy dinner rushes, when one screw-up, one mistake, one broken piece of equipment or ill-prepared cook can send the whole night's service careening into nightmare. We chefs take pride in our work, both in whatever degree of artistry or craft we bring to our product and also in the grim business of cranking out table after table of hot, properly prepared food. We know the sheer terror of running out of food, of being short-handed, and if we can't laugh about it when it happens—afterward— we eat ourselves alive. The torment of seeing a witless customer destroy a cherished fish special with bizarre dietary requirements, or with a misguided urge to design their own meal, can cut like a knife. A waiter who describes that lovely pheasant as tasting "kinda like chicken" can cause a chef's brain to boil, pushing his pulse rate into that red zone where all humanity seems aligned against him—every customer, every owner, every coworker an emissary of pure evil. A good laugh, a little context, they go a long way to bringing one back from the urge to shave one's head, climb a tower, and start shooting at pedestrians. We should know. As citizens of the world, we should know what came before. How we got here. Why we do things the way we do them. Where our food comes from. We should know what it was like for our humble predecessors, sweating and struggling in unrefrigerated larders, unventilated kitchens, the septic madhouse and twisting, low-ceilinged subcellars of restaurants past. We should remember the way it felt, scraping potatoes onto a garbage-strewn floor, scrubbing grease-caked pots with cold water, bending to the will of crazed and increasingly parsimonious masters. And we should understand not just how much has changed, but how much has stayed the same: the character of the business we have chosen as a lifestyle—the way people who do what we do have endured, have learned, have risen and learned to love this thing of ours. CHINA SYNDROME FINALLY. CHINA. I'd been nibbling around her edges for years, eating Chinese food in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei—and, of course, New York. But I'd never been to the mainland, to the Source. I'd been, to be honest, intimidated by the largeness and importance of the subject: the oldest, greatest, most influential and varied of the world's mother cuisines. Unlike other places I'd written about, China, with her eight distinct regional cuisines, seemed a subject for whom enthusiasm alone would not be enough. A certain . . . expertise, surely, would be required. I needn't have worried.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Devotion to icons wherever they may be found remains a form of sacred democracy in Orthodoxy, undergirding it against the powerful who would like to monopolize Christian allegiance. * The ninth century witnessed a momentous development for the Orthodox Church as the iconophiles emerged triumphant from a century of savage conflict. Photios, an especially energetic and creative Patriarch of Constantinople (reigned 858–67, 877–86), launched missions westward and northward beyond Byzantine frontiers, first into the territories of Khan Boris of the Bulgars (reigned 853–89). Boris was a shrewd and successful monarch who had been weighing up whether to entrust his proposed conversion to Christianity to the guidance of Latin Western or of Greek Eastern Christians. Pope Nicholas I (reigned 858–67) was exceptionally assertive in advancing the Roman Papacy’s historic claims, and he was furious that Boris eventually opted for Constantinople. A war of words escalated into full-blown schism between East and West and anticipated later unhappy divisions. One of the issues on which the Pope seized was that the Byzantine missionaries were insisting that their converts among Boris’s people should receive ecclesiastical blessing for their marriages to be valid: a reflection of the distinctive developments on marriage in Orthodoxy over the previous century. Interestingly, when in 867 Patriarch Photios penned a comprehensive counter-attack on Rome that spelled out many of the future contentious theological issues between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, he failed to make any riposte to this particular charge in Nicholas’s battery of complaints. Photios must have been aware that in this era before Emperor Leo VI’s Novella , his missionaries were on shaky legal ground. [42] The ninth-century initiatives in mission launched by Photios to Slavic peoples north and west beyond the Byzantine frontier were one symptom of the recovery in the Church and secular commonwealth. Partly that was because there was now an exceptionally capable ‘Macedonian’ dynasty of emperors, named from the origins of the first in the line, Basil I (reigned 867–86), and continuing thereafter for almost two centuries. Beyond immediate politics, in the wake of the Triumph of Orthodoxy during the later ninth century there was a new coherence in the theology of the Byzantine missions. A mark of Orthodox self-confidence was that the missionaries encouraged their Slavic converts to celebrate the Orthodox liturgy in their own language, not in Greek: a flexibility that stands in contrast to the Western Church’s insistence on the continued use of Latin, and piquant in view of modern Orthodoxy’s frequent insistence on its never-changing character. Photios’s missionaries even devised new alphabets to suit the sounds of these Slavic languages, and when a first effort, the Glagolitic alphabet created by the priest-brothers Constantine and Methodius, proved not to be a great success, a Bulgarian scholar created another system. It has entirely supplanted Glagolitic, though it has become tactfully known as ‘Cyrillic’ – Cyril was the monastic name adopted by the pioneer Constantine – and it has seen off later northern Orthodox efforts to supplant it.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Mary Astell was an English gentlewoman whose life spanned the Stuart and Georgian eras: a Church of England Tory of ‘High Church’ or sacramental outlook. Witty as well as devout, she was satirical about the liberal Whig politicians who had spearheaded the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that had brought William and Mary to the thrones of the Atlantic Isles; they talked loudly of freedom, but ignored women’s rights just as much as they ignored the rights of slaves. Choosing to remain unmarried (an unexpectedly common state in late seventeenth-century England, embracing around one in four of all adults), Astell published in 1694 A serious proposal to the Ladies , a programme for a Church of England community of celibate women – a convent, no less. Mansplaining gentlemen, Whig and Tory alike, were scathing: the journalist Daniel Defoe sneered that ‘nothing but the height of bigotry can keep up a nunnery: women are extravagantly desirous of going to heaven, and will punish their pretty bodies to get thither.’ Others, including some thoughtful men, sympathized with Astell’s perception that the celibate life of a convent was not confining, but liberating. [127] A welter of different circumstances was converging on a single phenomenon, that of female religiosity. It is worth noting one contemporary explanation of the high proportion of women in Massachusetts churches provided by the leading late seventeenth-century Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather: he felt

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  In a word, she woke up in Paris one morning to find herself, for the moment, quite famous. Valérie, Brockett, indeed all her friends were whole-hearted in their congratulations; and David’s tail kept up a great wagging. He knew well that something pleasant had happened: the whole atmosphere of the house was enough to inform a sagacious person like David. Even Mary’s little bright-coloured birds seemed to take a firmer hold on existence; while out in the garden there was much ado on the part of the proudly parental pigeons—fledglings with huge heads and bleary eyes had arrived to contribute to the general celebration. Adèle went singing about her work, for Jean had recently been promised promotion, which meant that his savings, perhaps in a year, might have grown large enough for them to marry. Pierre bragged to his friend, the neighbouring baker, anent Stephen’s great eminence as a writer, and even Pauline cheered up a little. When Mary impressively ordered the meals, ordered this or that delicacy for Stephen, Pauline would actually say with a smile: ‘Mais oui, un grand génie doit nourrir le cerveau! ’ Mademoiselle Duphot gained a passing importance in the eyes of her pupils through having taught Stephen. She would nod her head and remark very wisely: ‘I always declare she become a great author.’ Then because she was truthful she would hastily add: ‘I mean that I knowed she was someone unusual.’ Buisson admitted that perhaps, after all, it was well that Stephen had stuck to her writing. The book had been bought for translation into French, a fact which had deeply impressed Monsieur Buisson. From Puddle came a long and triumphant letter: ‘What did I tell you? I knew you’d do it! . . .’ Anna also wrote at some length to her daughter. And wonder of wonders, from Violet Peacock there arrived an embarrassingly gushing epistle. She would look Stephen up when next she was in Paris; she was longing, so she said, to renew their old friendship—after all, they two had been children together. Gazing at Mary with very bright eyes, Stephen’s thoughts must rush forward into the future. Puddle had been right, it was work that counted—clever, hard-headed, understanding old Puddle! Then putting an arm round Mary’s shoulder: ‘Nothing shall ever hurt you,’ she would promise, feeling wonderfully self-sufficient and strong, wonderfully capable of protecting. 2 That summer they drove into Italy with David sitting up proudly beside Burton. David barked at the peasants and challenged the dogs and generally assumed a grand air of importance. They decided to spend two months on Lake Como, and went to the Hotel Florence at Bellagio. The hotel gardens ran down to the lake—it was all very sunny and soothing and peaceful. Their days were passed in making excursions, their evenings in drifting about on the water in a little boat with a gaily striped awning, which latter seemed a strange form of pleasure to David.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The crucial figure in enriching the options within asceticism was Jerome, who in terms of Eastern Christian asceticism can be described as a failed monk: after a couple of solitary years in the mid-370s, he fled his effort at eremitical life in a rural area south of Antioch (not quite so much of a wilderness as he later liked to make out) and returned to Rome and to what proved a much more congenial role as secretary to Pope Damasus and chaplain to the ultra-rich. [72] As we have seen, his career in Rome also came to an abrupt, unplanned end, at which point he relocated to Jerusalem, alongside a number of Roman self-exiles in Palestine led by such exalted figures as his friend the Lady Paula (mother of the late Blesilla), who now presided over a distinctly aristocratic Latin-speaking monastery in Bethlehem. Jerome joined Paula’s community (despite his rudeness towards her); it was a perfect setting for continuing the biblical research that had already begun to fascinate him during his unhappy Syrian venture. Jerome was a pioneer in suggesting that the demands that scholarship made on him and like-minded monks – those congenial hours spent in his chamber sifting words to craft his great new version of the Bible – were just as much a sacrifice of self as the spiritual athleticism of a pillar-saint. This self-serving thought was the spark and justification for subsequent centuries of monastic scholarship that had not previously been a significant part of ascetic life. Henceforth the monastery was a vital conduit for conveying the imperial knowledge and culture of the Mediterranean forward to transformed societies. The sheer variety of ascetic experience that so proliferated between the fourth and sixth centuries has continued to give it vitality and appeal amid the choices

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

  Gregory VII. actualized this politico-ecclesiastical system more fully than any previous pope, and as far as human energy and prudence would admit. The glory of the Church was the all-controlling passion of his life. He held fast to it in the darkest hours, and he was greatest in adversity. Of earlier popes, Nicolas I. and Leo I. came nearest to him in lofty pretensions. But in him papal absolutism assumed flesh and blood. He was every inch a pope. He anticipated the Vatican system of 1870; in one point he fell short of it, in another point he went beyond it. He did not claim infallibility in theory, though he assumed it in fact; but he did claim and exercise, as far as he could, an absolute authority over the temporal powers of Christendom, which the popes have long since lost, and can never regain. Hildebrand was convinced that, however unworthy personally, he was, in his official character, the successor of Peter, and as such the vicar of Christ in the militant Church.30 He entirely identified himself with Peter as the head of the apostolic college, and the keeper of the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; but he forgot that in temporal affairs Peter was an humble subject under a hostile government, and exhorted the Christians to honor the king (1 Pet. 2:17) at a time when a Nero sat on the throne. He constantly appealed to the famous words of Christ, Matt. 16:18, 19, as if they were said to himself. The pope inherits the lofty position of Peter. He is the Rock of the Church. He is the universal bishop, a title against which the first Gregory protested as an anti-Christian presumption. He is intrusted with the care of all Christendom (including the Greek Church, which never acknowledged him). He has absolute and final jurisdiction, and is responsible only to God, and to no earthly tribunal. He alone can depose and reinstate bishops, and his legates take precedence of all bishops. He is the supreme arbiter in questions of right and wrong in the whole Christian world. He is above all earthly sovereigns. He can wear the imperial insignia. He can depose kings and emperors, and absolve subjects from their oath of allegiance to unworthy sovereigns. These and similar claims are formulated in a document of twenty-seven brief propositions preserved among Gregory’s letters, which are of doubtful genuineness, but correctly express his views,31 and in a famous letter to Hermann, bishop of Metz.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Since he had a shrewd head on his shoulders, Canigiano quickly saw what was to be done, and explained his plan to Salabaetto, who, thinking it an excellent idea, set about putting it into effect. He still had a little money of his own, and supplementing this with a loan from Canigiano, he ordered a number of bales of merchandise to be packed and tightly corded up, and having purchased and filled about a score of oil-casks, he loaded the entire consignment aboard a ship and returned to Palermo. There he presented the invoice for the bales to the officers of the dogana, to whom he also declared the value of the casks, and having made sure that they had registered everything under his own name, he placed the goods in store, saying that he wished to leave them there until the arrival of a further consignment of merchandise he was expecting. On learning of his return and hearing that the goods he had brought were worth two thousand gold florins at the very least, without counting the goods still to come, which were valued at more than three thousand, Madonna Jancofiore, thinking she had set her sights too low, decided to repay him the five hundred florins so that she could get her claws on the greater portion of the five thousand, and sent word that she would like to see him. When Salabaetto called upon her, she pretended to know nothing of the merchandise he had brought and gave him the warmest of welcomes, saying: ‘Listen, my love; in case you were angry with me for not paying you back that money of yours punctually–’ But Salabaetto, having profited from his earlier mistakes, laughed and said: ‘To tell the truth, my lady, I was very little displeased, for I would pluck the very heart from my body and give it to you, if I thought it would make you happy. But I should like you to judge for yourself how angry I am with you. So great and so particular is the love I bear you, that I have sold the greater part of my possessions, and now I have brought with me to Palermo a consignment of goods worth over two thousand florins. Moreover, I am expecting a further consignment from the West worth more than three thousand, and I intend to start a business in Palermo and settle here for good, for I consider myself more fortunate in loving you than any other lover in the world.’

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  It was a Friday night and there was a line of people outside waiting to get in. The bouncers were very picky about who they let in on weekends, and would send your ass home if they thought you weren’t dressed the right way. I gave a bouncer named Freddy dap and proceeded through the glass door. Though I was technically properly dressed, the normal rules didn’t apply to me. I was a regular at Mochas. Everyone knew Chocolate. It was just after one in the morning so the spot was in full swing. There were beautiful women, single and in groups, scattered around the lounge, and thirsty men trying to pump them full of alcohol. I paused by the bar and scanned the crowd for my partners. It didn’t take long for me to spot them; sitting on a love seat near the DJ booth, trying to charm a group of young ladies out of their panties. These niggaz thought they had game, but they knew who the real Don was. As I made my way across the room all eyes were on me. I nodded to a few of the guys I knew and flashed smiles at some of the bitches I had fucked. A time or two I caught sight of some nameless female that I’d probably slept with but hardly remembered, trying to get my attention, but I acted like I didn’t see them. I didn’t feel like the headache. All I wanted to do was have some drinks with my boys and chill. I had almost made it over to where my friends were sitting when my path was suddenly blocked. The brazen young thing had yellow skin, and wore her hair in a straight weave. I knew her angelic face, but for the life of me couldn’t remember her name. Her ass was plump, but not large. Just enough to where it looked good. She stared at me with her bright green eyes and waited for me to say something. Since I knew that’s what she wanted, I remained silent. “You can’t speak, Chocolate?” Ms. Green Eyes asked. The sound of her sweet voice reminded me of a string quartet. “What’s happening, baby?” I grinned, but was careful not to give her a full smile. Though I would’ve liked nothing more than to take her in the bathroom and slam her pussy, I couldn’t seem too thirsty. I was Chocolate, and like the rest, this bitch would recognize. “Oh, you on it like that? You can fuck me in a park, and then act like you don’t know a bitch?” My groin tingled as my mental Rolodex finally placed her.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Both were created through the eighth and ninth centuries against a wider background of steadily more bitter tensions between Western and Eastern Christianity (see Chapter 10); that gulf remained when the issues moved on. [51] The Emperor was fascinated by the Roman imperial heritage he had annexed. He filched columns from imperial Ravenna to decorate his stately new Palace chapel at Aachen (from which its French name, Aix-la-Chapelle, is derived); he bathed nude in the hot springs of Aachen as a good Roman gentleman would have done, and in his last years he issued a most remarkable coinage, meticulously imitating Roman coins from more than half a millennium earlier, bearing a portrait bust of himself depicted in a thoroughly un-Frankish manner, laurel-wreathed and clean-shaven. [52] Yet this was a Christian Roman Empire; among Charlemagne’s favourite books (read aloud to him for relaxation) were Augustine’s great meditation on the divine shaping of world history, The City of God , and the writings of Bede on history, angels and much more. The Emperor’s energetic programme of codifying law for his empire compared him with God’s ancient ministers Moses and King Josiah of Judah. This enterprise of rediscovering the Graeco-Roman world and interpreting it for a new age is just as worthy of being termed a ‘Renaissance’ as later convulsions of cultural excitement in the twelfth century and in fourteenth-century Italy; it was the recovery of a culture and a language that were in severe decay through most of Europe. [53] Annexing the Classical and Christian past like this demanded that the Empire should conserve what remained of its literature, and then expand on it with new explorations. A vital part of the multiform programme that Charlemagne launched was the copying of manuscripts, so alarmingly neglected since the mid-sixth century. He even sponsored a new Latin script to produce easily readable texts reproduced with relative speed; it is now known as ‘Carolingian minuscule’, a direct ancestor of the typeface employed in modern printed books such as this. [54] This mammoth task, which saved the collective memory of the Latin West from further loss, would absorb the time of countless professional scribes, and the most readily available source of such specialist labour was the monastery, or indeed the nunnery. Anglo-Saxon monastic life as created by 700 was at the height of its self-confidence and creativity and provided a model for the new monastic culture in mainland Europe. It is remarkable that such a latecomer to Latinity as the Anglo-Saxon Church should become one of the chief energies behind the recovery of idiomatic high-level Latin for speaking and writing, and one of the most honoured scholars of the Carolingian court was a late product of that energy, Alcuin of York ( c .735–804), who is likely to have been the source of the Emperor’s interest in Bede.

• From The Girls (2016)

  It had happened, after all, and I kept up a vivid catalog of happy data: the fact that I was sitting beside Suzanne, our friendly silence. My perverse pride that I’d been with Russell. I took pleasure in replaying the facts of the act, even the messy and boring parts. The odd lulls while Russell made himself hard. There was some power in the bluntness of human functions. Like Russell had explained to me: your body could hurtle you past your hang-ups, if you let it. Suzanne smoked steadily as she drove, occasionally offering her cigarette to me with serene ritual. The quiet between us wasn’t slack or uncomfortable. Outside the car, olive trees flashed by, the scorched summer earth. Far-off waterways, sloughing to the sea. Suzanne kept changing the radio station until she abruptly snapped it off. “We need gas,” she announced. We, I echoed silently, we need gas. Suzanne pulled into the Texaco, empty except for a teal-and-white pickup towing a boat trailer. “Hand me a card,” Suzanne said. Nodding at the glove box. I scrambled to open it, loosing a jumble of credit cards. All with different names. “The blue one,” she said. She seemed impatient. When I handed her the card, she saw my confusion. “People give them to us,” she said. “Or we take them.” She fingered the blue card. “Like this one is Donna’s. She lifted it from her mom.” “Her mom’s gas card?” “Saved our ass—we would’ve starved,” Suzanne said. She gave me a look. “Like you hustling that toilet paper, right?” I flushed at the mention. Maybe she’d known I had lied, but I couldn’t tell from her shuttered face—maybe not. “Besides,” she continued, “it’s better than what they’d do with it—more crap, more stuff, more me, me, me. Russell’s trying to help people. He’s not judgmental, that’s not his trip. He doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor.” It made a kind of sense, what Suzanne was saying. They were just trying to equalize the forces in the world. “It’s ego,” she went on, leaning against the car but keeping a sharp eye on the gas gauge: none of them ever filled up a tank more than a quarter full. “Money is ego, and people won’t give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold on to it like a blanket. They don’t realize it keeps them slaves. It’s sick.” She laughed. “What’s funny is that as soon as you give everything away, as soon as you say, Here, take it—that’s when you really have everything.” One of the group had been detained for dumpster diving on a garbage run, and Suzanne was incensed, recounting the story as she pulled the car back onto the road. “More and more stores get wise to it. Bullshit,” she said. “They throw something away and they still want it. That’s America.” “That is bullshit.” The tone of the word was strange in my mouth. “We’ll figure something out. Soon.” She glanced in the rearview.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The Maccabean rebels suffered terribly in fighting him, but they succeeded in returning Judaea to a native dynasty descended from heroes in the liberation struggle; known from an earlier ancestor as the Hasmoneans, they ruled as high priests for the Jerusalem Temple. Though the Hasmonean monarchy proved to be the last Judaean experience of prolonged independence in the ancient world, it was an extraordinary achievement against a great power: a victory to cherish, reinforcing the sense of a unique Judaic destiny and distinctiveness in God’s purpose. The Hasmoneans remained a significant regional force in the eastern Mediterranean for a century until conquered by a new imperial power arriving from far to the west of Judaea’s previous overlords. When the Hasmoneans first encountered the Roman Republic in the second century BCE , Rome was still a far-away city, a potential ally against their threatening neighbours. By 63 BCE , the Roman army’s invasion of Judaea was part of its mopping-up operations around Rome’s real prizes, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires. Roman conquest led to a further Jewish Diaspora into the western Mediterranean: the Jewish community in Rome was one of the first to be affected by Christian activism in the first century CE . In 37 BCE , looking for a compliant local ruler for Judaea but finding no convincing Hasmonean candidate, the Romans displaced the last Hasmonean and replaced him with a relative by marriage, who reigned for more than three decades. Their choice, an outsider from the land of Edom (which the Romans called Idumea) south of Judaea, was Herod I, ‘the Great’. Herod rebuilt the Second Temple as one of the largest sacred complexes in the ancient world; its remnants still impress by their monumentality. Yet his subjects gave him little thanks, and self-conscious Judaean upholders of purity in God’s Covenant were angered by Herod’s Greek-style innovations such as public sporting contests (male nudity always a possibility), gladiatorial combats or horse-racing in newly built arenas. [4] After Herod’s death in 4 BCE , his sons divided the extensive territories that the first Roman emperor Augustus had allowed the puppet king to build up. For more than a century thereafter, and during the life of Jesus, Rome experimented with a mixture of indirect rule through various members of the Herodian family and, for parts of Judaea, direct imperial control through a Roman official.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Intervening in a long-standing debate in the Church about how often laypeople should receive the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine when attending Mass, he recommended as frequent reception as possible. In 1907 he further decreed that the minimum age for a first communion should be lowered from twelve or fourteen years to seven. Now this ‘First Communion’ became a new piece of charming theatre for young children dressed in appropriately innocent finery, with their putatively adoring parents looking on. This innovation in Catholic folk-culture liturgically affirmed family life in the local parish church: it is a fixture now, though so comparatively recent in origin. [37] The Roman Catholic Church as it had evolved by the beginning of the twentieth century might be considered the unwanted but spectacularly successful child of the French Revolution. For all its rhetoric of tradition and its campaign against Modernism, it was a new creation, rebuilt out of the trauma and lack of leadership of 1800. It followed newly constricted doctrinal paths backed by the restored prestige and authority of its celibate clergy, against the backdrop of vigorous numerical growth across the world aided by all the possibilities of communication that technological advance offered. Memories of both the Enlightenment and Revolution combined with the Papacy’s new self-confidence in its teaching role to determine how it would face a host of fresh challenges to Christian life and belief. Not all have concerned sex, but many do. During the same period the rival heirs of medieval Western Christianity, Protestants of all varieties, produced their own solutions to these same questions, equally played out on a global stage.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  184 eripmE namoR yloH ot eripmE namoR morF :52 erutceL • “Popes and Franks” may sound like ballpark food, but the phrase sums up precisely the two power sources that worked to create the catholic world of the Middle Ages. Political Context: 9th to 15th Centuries • The second stage in the medieval political context begins with Charles the Great (Charlemagne, 742–814), the son of Pepin III, who is one of the most significant figures in the political and religious history of the West. • Charles was anointed as king of the Franks by Pope Stephen III in 754 and became sole heir of the kingdom in 771. He immediately engaged in a path of conquest and consolidation under his authority. o Between 771 and 799, he Charlemagne’s military triumphs conquered Lombardy, the established his authority firmly over the West; he was crowned Saxons, Bavaria, the Avars, emperor in the year 800 by Pope Pannonia, and Italy. Leo III in Rome. In 778, he crossed the Pyrenees to conquer Spain, which was o in the hands of the Muslims, and was defeated at the Battle of Roncevalles. Thirteen years later, in 801, he conquered Barcelona and made it the center of the Spanish March (a buffer zone separating the Muslim and Frankish kingdoms). • In view of these triumphs, Pope Leo III, on Christmas Day, 800, in the city of Rome, crowned Charlemagne as emperor. It was an extraordinary act, and its implication (that the Franks were the approved continuation of the Roman heritage) was not appreciated by the Byzantines. Eventually, the emperor of the West would claim the formal title of Holy Roman Emperor. .kcotsknihT/aremeH ©

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Up onstage, Monique ignored the noise from the crowd as she did her nasty thang like she’d been born with a golden pole wedged between her legs. She slipped her hips and popped her spine the way she had practiced a thousand times before in the mirror, and it was that kind of dedication to her grind that had made her the Spot’s top moneymaker for the last two years. Monique didn’t mind the fact that all kinds of niggahs wanted to fuck her. She was proud to be the kind of freak that men just couldn’t resist. And yeah, her body was simply fuckin’ stunning. Damn right they was feenin’ for her, because what good was having the best shit on the shelf if you couldn’t make a niggah cry for it? Tonight Monique was doing one of her new ill na-na routines. She had about thirty dance acts she worked, switching the moves up every other night, and every last one of her routines kept niggahs digging deep in their pocket stash, producing guaranteed cash results each time. Some long-legged hustler sitting right up front screeched like a bitch as Monique squeezed her firm cantaloupe-sized breasts in her hands and let her red-polished fingernails flick her inch-long nipples seductively. He screamed again as she lowered her head and licked that stiff little nipple that sat smack in the middle of her upper chest, the one protruding from her tiny third breast that was round and perfect, but sat up closer to her neck than her normal breasts did, and was much, much smaller, like a twelve-year-old’s. Yeah, she thought as niggahs started whistling and wildin’ at the sight of her tongue swirling around that little tiny titty. Everybody loved a freak. And of all the things Monique could claim to be, she was a true freak-a-leek above all else. She turned her back on the crowd and popped her hips, letting her chips dip and her backbone slip. Ya’ll niggahs take a good fuckin’ look at all this chocolate birthday cake, Monique thought, clapping her thick booty cheeks and showing them flashing bits of her pink pussy and her sweet asshole. ’Cause a bitch is gonna be off this stage and paid in a minute. Straight fuckin’ paid. Niggahs moaned out loud and nutted in their drawers, but Monique couldn’t care less about their sexual satisfaction. She had thoughts of retirement on her mind, and if shit went down the way she and Pluto planned, she was about to give up the poles and become the number-one bitch at her very own strip club down in B-More.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Mr. Patterson’s thick fingers strummed against his desk. Pretty picked up the pattern and bobbed his head every time he heard the thud. He wasn’t going to answer automatically. He felt the transition of power. He had something Mr. Patterson wanted. The knowledge of Mr. Patterson’s self. Mr. Patterson thought everyone loved him. He thought no one ever said anything bad about him. Sure he ran this ship like a slave one, but he gave out great Christmas gifts. He gave rewards like Scooby snacks when people met quotas. He pampered on his own time. Pretty held on to the information like an informant did to get a better deal. What was it worth to Mr. Patterson? He watched Mr. Patterson glance at him through his bluest eye. Mr. Patterson’s voice was huge. “Well?” “Tell me your proposition first.” Pretty wasn’t going to let Mr. Patterson string this proposition out for hours. He wanted to know what was going on. He needed to know the particulars. “Enough of the bullshit, Jarvis. This proposition benefits you more than it would me.” He spoke slowly, and with conviction. “What do they call me?” Pretty laughed. “Mr. Fatterson!” He fell back into his seat and awaited his response. He figured Mr. Patterson would want to know who it was. He thought Mr. Patterson would be angry and disturbed that someone would actually call him such names. Instead, Mr. Patterson chuckled loudly. “They’ve always called me that. They couldn’t think of anything new? I’ve heard that all of my life.” He patted his stomach. “Well, since I’ve grown this. A stomach doesn’t make a man, Jarvis.” Pretty laughed with him. This was the first thing they’d ever shared. And it happened to come at Mr. Patterson’s expense. “Come back to my office at exactly one-thirty if you want to hear the proposition,” he said plainly. He offered Pretty the door. He knew that he’d put enough in Pretty’s head to stimulate it. He never said what it was, and he knew that would get Pretty interested. He couldn’t run a ship so tight without being smart. • • • At one-thirty Pretty knocked twice. “Come in, Jarvis.” Pretty walked in and found Mr. Patterson standing by a makeshift bar, with a drink in hand. The shabby silver cart housed two big bottles of liquor, a long slender bottle of red wine, and three glasses: one shot glass, a wineglass, and a wide glass people used when they swirled around expensive scotch. Mr. Patterson held his glass in the air. “Scotch, Jarvis?” Pretty stopped in his tracks. He looked up toward the ceiling and searched for hidden cameras. “No, thank you. I’m good.” Mr. Patterson noticed the apprehension and walked near. “Who runs this establishment, Jarvis?” He took great pleasure in saying the name “Jarvis.” He knew he wanted to be called Pretty, but it wouldn’t be by him. Every chance he got, he would let Pretty’s government name put him in his place.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  246 Lecture 34: The Great Plague bishops, although they still relied on secular authorities to carry out their decisions. o Even more extreme, Innocent IV’s Ad extirpanda in 1252 authorized the use of torture by the inquisition, although there is no evidence of its use in the 13 th century. Those found to be heretics who repented received the same sorts of penances (fasting, pilgrimages) that other sinners would receive after confession. Serious offenders could be confined in the inquisition’s prisons and burned at the stake by secular authority; perhaps three people a year, on average, were thus executed. o The inquisition was turned against the Knights Templar by Philip IV of France in 1307 and was even used by Pope John XXII against Franciscan “spirituals” in 1318. o In the late 15 th century, Spanish rulers received permission from Sixtus IV to organize the inquisition against “Christianized Jews.” After an auto-de-fé (“act of faith”) confessing their crime, those convicted were executed. • The hostility toward, and persecution of, Jewish communities that began with the First Crusade and was expressed in the controlling laws of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215)— and the burning of the Talmud in Paris (1242)—exploded in unparalleled violence in response to the great plague: Jews became a handy scapegoat for the sudden and unexplained deaths. o Fear and hysteria were fomented by rumors of Jews’ poisoning wells or causing the plague by sacrificing Christian children. o In 1349, the Jewish communities of Mainz and Cologne were wiped out; in the same year, 2,000 Jews were murdered in Strasbourg. In all, some 60 major Jewish centers and 150 smaller settlements were destroyed during these irrational and violent outbursts. 247 The Rise of Mysticism • Perhaps not surprising in an age of such external turmoil, the 14 th

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  58 Lecture 8: Forms of Witness—martyrdom and apologetic circa 165; his trial before the Roman prefect was recorded and is extant. When the prefect orders him a final time to offer sacrifice to the gods, Justin refuses, saying, “Through prayer we can be saved on account of our Lord Jesus Christ.” • Evidence also exists for the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of relatively unknown Christians. o A letter from the churches of Vienne and Lyons attests—shortly after the event—to the suffering and death of a considerable number of Christians in Gaul under Marcus Aurelius in 178. o Later in the 2 nd century, the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs likewise provides evidence of North African martyrs. o The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity is an account, close to the events, of the imprisonment and death of Christians in North Africa in 203. • The most passionate statement concerning the ideal of martyrdom is found in Origen of Alexandria’s Exhortation to Martyrdom in 235: The death of the martyr is the closest possible conformity to the witness of Christ. Origen speaks of the inducements to turn away from the pain of suffering and says, “if turning from all of these we give ourselves entirely to God ... with a view to sharing union with his only begotten son and those who have a share in him, then we can say that we have filled up the measure of bearing witness” (3.11). Apologetic Literature • A second response to persecution is the composition of apologetic literature. Such literature also had its roots in Judaism and in the New Testament. • Apologetic literature arose among Diaspora Jews, such as Philo and Josephus, who responded to anti-Semitic charges of misanthropy with histories and philosophical treatises that demonstrated that the Jewish Law and manner of life were actually philanthropic. 59 • Although supposedly directed to outsiders, such apologetic literature played an important role in shaping Jewish identity, by portraying the tradition in terms understandable to the wider world. • In the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles has many of the elements of apologetic literature: “The way” is portrayed as benevolent and nonthreatening to the social order. Luke tries to show that the Christian movement is continuous with Israel and is philanthropic in character. • The Christian literature termed “apologetic” in the 2 nd and 3 rd