Jacob L. Wright - Why The Bible Began (Cambridge University Press, 2024) ****

Among the best books on the Bible that I've read, together with "The Bible Unearthed" by Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman, "And Man Created God" by Selina O'Grady, "God - An Anatomy" by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, and many of the books by Bart D. Ehrman. 

Jacob L. Wright is an American biblical scholar currently serving as professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University. Prior to this, Wright taught at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). His areas of expertise include Biblical Archaeology.

In "Why The Bible Began", he explains the need for the weak tribes living between the superpowers of Mesopotamia and Egypt to build strength by uniting what was not united, a mixture of tribes fighting each other on the small land bridge between Asia and Africa. Judah in the south and Israel in the north needed a narrative that would give them a single story, as if they all descended from the same family genealogy, and as a result even today still family. Both states saw benefits in this, and consecutively they wrote what is now the Bible, adding other myths and legends, poetry and moral stories about how to live. By claiming this historical fiction, they invented a new nation, while at the same time writing a text that for the first time ever, integrated myths into a historical context. In this way they created a narrative that created unity and could mobilise the people behind a common agenda. 

"The answer is simple: even if the biblical authors had some of way of knowing about what happened centuries earlter, an account of those events would have had hardly been relevant to their purposes. They lived during, and especially after, the demise of the territorial states that emerged during the Iron Age, and what they needed was a new way of thinking about themselves. By affirming a direct relationship between a singular deity and the nation's diverse members, and by removing the institution of the monarchy from the nation's formative past, their work provided a blueprint for a new form of peoplehood, one that had the potential to unite rival populations after the downfall of their kingdoms. 

Many of the historical factors that shaped Israel's and Judah's forma­tion find no mention in the Bible, while much of what the Bible portrays in considerable detail is far removed from history. Thus, the book of Exodus depicts how the Hebrew slaves became a nation during their liberation, and especially after entering a covenant at Sinai - long before the reign of their kings. That account runs counter to what we know today about the origins of the ''Israelites,'' and many scholars today are convinced that the Bible has little, if any, historical value. Yet rather than summarily dismissing the biblical narrative as a witness to the past, we will be focusing on the divergence of history and story. Only then will we be able to appreciate the creativity, and groundbreaking contributions, of the generations of scribes who shaped the biblical corpus." (p. 49)

"The Bible's project of peoplehood grew out of the will to admit defeat, yet also the refusal to allow it to be the final word. In Lamentations and the important works that preceded it, we witness how generations of anonymous scribes denied that military might was all-determinative in world affairs, and how their denial laid the founda­tion for a new kind of political community". (p. 152)

"Thanks to this revolutionary new concept of covenant, Yhwh could now survive the destruction of his people, and that destruction could now be understood to be a consequence of the nation's collective behavior. What emerges in this new conception of covenant is a legal-rational cosmic order, with a written, public document determining the nation's fate and a transcendent deity governing history." (p. 347)

"In the end, these final generations of biblical writers made a surprising move: they incorporated books and texts that encourage their readers to challenge the teachings that they and their predecessors had developed over centuries.These circles, who shaped the final form of the canon, were convinced that pushback and testing make a system more flexible and resilient. Only when their communities questioned and evaluated their teachings would they fully appreciate both their value and their limitations. (p. 354)

"The pervasive presence of defeat is an important clue to the enigma of the Bible's existence. It suggests that the most formative time for biblical literature was the period following the destruction of the kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, the decades leading up to the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE, and especially the centuries thereafter, during which new communities re-emerged in both the North and the South.  

The flourishing of two kingdoms was, to be sure, a necessary precondi­tion for the development of biblical literature. By consolidating disparate groups with unified calendars, festivals, music, law, cult, and language, the palace created new occasions for writing. But if the kingdoms of Israel and Judah had continued to grow and expand, and their members had not suffered long and painful experiences of political weakness and subjuga­tion, scribes would have never produced a body of writings capable of creating and sustaining a new nation. 

By reminding their audience of the destruction and suffering that their ancestors witnessed - especially after things had started to take a turn for the better - Lamentations and other biblical writings issue a warning: place your hope not in ephemeral kingdoms but in something more enduring. That something is not heaven or a new earth but belonging to a people whose members are committed to each other and to the deity who dwells in their midst. In the coming chapters, we examine how this project of peoplehood took shape in the centuries after Judah's defeat. (p. 151)

This not only results in the story as collected and written by Judean scribes or as developed by Israeli scribes, two other narrative traditions also emerge: the people's story that focuses on the collective of the nation, and the palace story, which focuses on the genealogy of power and the rights to rule the nation. These four elements to a large extent explain the many contradictions in the Bible, because they were all assembled with different perspectives and agendas. 

The whole concept of superiority as a people keeps conflicting with their military losses against neighbouring tribes. From God's perspective, this could be the externalisation of their weakness, of worldly forces versus cosmic power. The moral weakness of the ancestors, including their lack of faith and loyalty to their God, is demonstrated by their real earthly weakness now. If this is their own fault, it means that they can also gain control over their own fate by being faithful to their god and its religion, turning away from their weakness as a people. In this way, weakness becomes a foundation for superiority, to be seen as the "chosen people" by God. 

Absolutely essential reading for anybody with an interest in the Bible. 

Steven Mithen - The Language Puzzle (Profile Books, 2024) ***

Maybe my expectations were too high, or maybe I missed some of the essence of this book, but it left me somewhat disappointed. Steven Mithen is a "British archaeologist. He is noted for his work on the evolution of language, music and intelligence, prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and the origins of farming. He is professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading" (Wikipedia). The title is an apt one, in which he brings all the current knowledge together as pieces of a huge puzzle: language among animals and especially apes, the evolution of the human brain, the evolution of culture and the need for communication, the nature of language, the physiology of speech and hearing, language to transcend the concrete world, etc. 

"As such, their lexicons had little impact on how they perceived the world. Modern humans used linguistic metaphors to explain and understand abstract concepts - ideas about other worlds and ancestral beings, notions of justice, identity and ownership. 

Such concepts could be assembled into new categories with no grounding in the world, which then eased the invention of learning, recall and explanation of further abstract concept that now had a category to sit within. Once the category of the supernatural was conceived, this provided a home for new concepts and their associated words, such as ghosts, spirits and spells. The lexicon continued to expand and stories took on new dimensions with complex plots, heroes and villains, magic, events and imaginary worlds. Storytelling became an art form for impressing, persuading, educating and entertaining by the skilful use of words. (p 388)

Many of these aspects are of course widely known, and it is of interest to see them all listed one after the other, yet there is no deeper insight than what was already known. The puzzle, once made, shows a picture that was already familiar, because not specific to language or its evolution. He misses a great deal of information on recent research in neuroscience on language. 

My son Tom did his PhD on the neurological origin of language, conducting brain scans to identify which types of words and even concepts were located in which part of the brain. Interestingly, it was not in the prefrontal cortex as many expected, but in the deeper part, the amygdala or the 'animal' part of the brain. 

Charles Freeman - The Awakening (Head of Zeus, 2020) *****

This is one of those monumental works on the history of thought that anyone with an interest in the subject should read. Freeman is a well-known author of works on history, such as "The Closing of the Western Mind" (2005). In "The Awakening", he describes how the Western Mind opened to extract itself from religious thought, dogma and superstition, to be replaced by doubt, questioning, evidence and facts, and the development of the scientific method in parallel with the rise of democratic thought and structures. 

Yet he starts by describing the darkness from which we started, including the bizarre religious concept that god has a full insight of every feeling and every thought of every individual at any moment: a terrifying concept that already convinced me as a child that I would never ever be allowed to heaven. 

"If human beings are inherently sinful, as Augustine taught, there had to be definition of what was sinful and what was not. St John Cassian, who is credited with bringing the ideals and practices of eastern monasticism to the West, outlined eight vices in his influential Institutes, among them any expression of sexuality. It is interesting that in addition to fornication, self-glorification and avarice, Cassian includes what he considers unhealthy moods such as sadness and apathy (acedia). In the Irish Church, the clergy used Penitentials, handbooks that listed sins and the correct penance for each one. Crucially, as Augustine had already argued, the inner mind became accessible to God. 'Let us consider how severe a judge is coming; who will judge not only our evil deeds but our every thought,' preached Pope Gregory the Great. This was a psychological transformation of enormous importance. Nothing was invisible to God. Furthermore, the church itself defined what was sinful or not. The opportunities to manipu­late its control over its congregations were magnified. No ancient religion had enjoyed this power and its appearance marks a revo­lutionary development in the history of European thought. The Christian was required to live in a permanent state of alert, some­thing unknown in the classical world". (p. 70)

This was further reinforced with the obligation to confess. 

"Prominent was the council's requirement that the faithful had to take communion once a year and also make a confession. This was, as one medievalist has described it, 'perhaps the most impor­tant legislative act in the history of the Church'. The dialogue between confessor and sinner forced the individual to search his or her own conscience, discuss the nature of their intentions and so the extent to which they should take personal responsibility for their guilt. The distinguished German historian Johannes Fried argues that 'the history of the psyche and human attitudes, and hence the entire history of the West, was profoundly affected by this change.' This may be too sweeping an assessment and assumes that the medieval mind was ready to he so subservient. Even so, taking personal responsibility for one's guilt was only part of the impact of the church's teaching on the probability of damnation at the Last Judgement. (p. 97)

Luckily, the religious dogma and often bizarre practices and behaviour (see first paragraph below) gradually started to crack by the insights and courage of individuals, even from within the Church. 

"As far back as the second century the earliest 'Latin' theologian, Tertullian, from Carthage in North Africa, had asked the question 'What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Church with the Academy, the Christian with the heretic? ... Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic; and dialectic compo­sition. We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel.' Instead, one should simply be receptive to God's word, a view that was often repeated by the Church Fathers. Gregory the Great's saying that 'Faith has no merit for which human reason offers proof' sug­gested that praise should be given to those who do not question, a view that has persisted in the Catholic Church throughout its his­tory. lntrusion into faith was, in Bernard's (of Clerveaux) graphic phrase, simply 'tearing out the guts of God's secrets' and in a specific condemna­tion of Abelard, he protested, 'Let him who scanned the Heavens go down into the depths of Hell'. Offering his mind directly to the heavens, Bernard valued the Virgin Macy as an intercessor with Christ and even reported that once when he was ill a statue of the Virgin came alive and offered her breasts for him to suck healing milk" (p. 112)

"In Sic et Non Abelard hit on the original - if provocative idea of quoting the Church Fathers on specific theological issues, some 158 of them, so that one could see that they often contradicted each other. Although Abelard stated that much could be resolved by a careful analysis of the language of different texts, it was inevitable that readers would be unsettled by this presentat·ion of opposing views. Abelard did not seem to care. Doubting was healthy in itself, as he put it in the Prologue to Sic et Non: 'For it is from doubt that we arrive at questioning and in a state of questioning we arrive at the truth.' He went on to sug­gest that anyone, not just experienced theologians, could grapple with the issues of logic in Christian doctrine. This was bound to offend conservatives who argued that doctrine was coherent and beyond challenge, esp·ecially by the ordinary faithful. Even if the importance of this approach was not grasped at the time, Abelard's championing of doubt was an important moment in the awakening of the western mind. Progress in knowledge is impos­sible if conventional thinking is never doubted."(p. 107)

Gradually, reason and democracy join hands and become part of the system. The Magna Carta is a prime example of this. 

"In Plantagenet England a constitutional conflict between the barons and King John resulted in the remarkable Magna Carta of 1215, which is still recognized today in English law as a fundamental statement of liberty from arbitrary rule. Its original Larin title, Magna Carta Libertatum ('The Great Charter of Liberties') pro­claims its purpose. The personal and political freedoms it listed applied not only to the barons but to all freeborn men and to cities, notably London. There were now to be limits on royal authority, extraordinary taxes were only to be raised with the approval of 'the general council of the kingdom' (the word par­liamentum appears for the first time only in 1237), and the barons would be able to supervise the actions of the king. One of its most famous articles, Clause 39, stated that 'no free man shall be seized, or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or exiled or injured in any way ... except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land'. Rights of the individual to inheritance and chattels were also protected." (p. 140)

In short, this book is highly recommended to understand the incredible struggle that Western civilisation has fought to emancipate itself from theocracy and dictatorship. Today, the most prosperous countries in the World, happen also to be the ones with the best democratic systems, the best education and the least percentage of believers. To me the recipe is clear, yet the dark forces of zealots, oligarchs and theocrats are still very much alive, including in the West.

"The issue that weighs on anyone who sees the importance of fostering tolerance, accepting that science has achieved more for the welfare of humanity than institutional religion, and being open to more profound thinking about the human condition' is that these values are still under threat 300 years later. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama was seriously mistaken in assuming that liberal democracy had triumphed after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and that a high point of civilization had been reached. Every passing year seems to throw further doubt on this assessment. It is all the more vital to learn how painful was the birth of such values and how vulnerable their survival. But it is also right to applaud the cultural riches that they have provided. I do think I am justified in describing the long centuries from the fall of the Roman empire to 1700 as a process, often fitful and haphazard, of an 'awakening of the Western mind'.

Here are some more worthwhile excerpts, yet I recommend to buy and read the whole book. 

"Between 750 and 900 they translated most of the known works of Aristotle into Arabic. Aristotle was particu­larly valuable because he looked at a question from all angles and emphasized that issues were up for discussion that could only be resolved through reason. This led to sophisticated debates on the relationships between philosophy and theology and an awareness of the key issues in ethics and the sciences. Ibn Sina, known in the west as Avicenna (980-1037) was an intellectual superstar. (...) His Metaphysics, which arrived in the west at much the same time, was a massive commentary on the works of Aristotle that reinterpreted them to present a coherent system of Avicenna's own making. In the words of the contemporary scholar Peter Adamson: Avicenna went out of his way to be innovative, deliberately overthrowing centuries of tradition to forge a new and distinctive philosophy. This was an essential step forward if the scattered and hetero­geneous works of the great Greek philosopher were to be at all comprehensible, but Avicenna went beyond Aristotle in provid­ing original arguments for the nature of the existence of God. This made his works relevant for some western theologians but infuriated others who felt that Aristotle's texts were too authoritative to be tampered with. Aristotle's authority was further enhanced by Ibn Rushd, known in the west as Averroes (1126-98), from Cordoba, in Muslim Spain, where he practised as a judge. He was also the court physician to the Almohad caliphate, but his real passion was philosophy. Like Abelard, he came under pressure from conservative theologians for his insistence that theology and philosophy could be used equally as alternative and perhaps divergent approaches to finding the truth (what Averroes termed the 'double truth'). There was always the fear, and it would return in the Paris schools of theology; that philosophy, based on pagan Greek sources, would overthrow theological orthodoxy (whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian), but Averroes, like Abelard, did not believe that it should do so. He admired Avicenna but felt that he had been too radical in diverting from Aristotle's original works. These were the gold standard, 'the highest truth, since his spirit was the highest point of the human spirit - it is justly said that he was created and delivered to us by the providence of God, so that we may come to know everything that can be known'.(p. 145)

In 268 Aquinas returned to Paris to find that a number of the arts teachers had gone further than he had, in preferring Aristotle's views on the soul and the eternity of the world over orthodox Christianity. The two most prominent were masters of arts, Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia. They relied so heavily on the Islamic Averroes' adulation of Aristotle that they are known as the Latin Averroists. While they accepted Christian teaching, their support for Aristotelian philosophy as a means of finding the truth was so enthusiastic that it was as if they were ignoring theology. So they argued that God could not do something that Aristotle had shown to be physically impossible. One example was that God could not move the cosmos in a straight line as this would leave a vacuum, and Aristotle had taught (erro­neously, as would later be discovered) that a vacuum could not exist. This contrasted with the orthodox Christian view that God could do anything short of a logical contradiction.

"Marsilius, however, rejects 'natural' hier­archies, in particular the concept that good birth is related to the ability to govern. Within the next few years many of Marsilius's ideas were supported by the lawyer Bartolus da Sassoferrato,(...). Bartolus was as concerned as Marsilius was with the internecine disputes between and within the Italian cities. The two agreed that the sovereignty of the people can never be alienated and that religion should be kept separate from politics. This approach was to prove especially fruitful. In their own time it provided a riposte to those who wished to retain the authority of the Church over secular rulers. Not since the era of the Roman empire had anyone reflected as probingly and effectively as this on the ways in which the citizenry (though only males) as a whole could he involved in government. The influence of Aristotle, with his emphasis on the harmonious order of the city through the collective, and natural, will of the citizens to achieve civil happiness, is clear."

"Petrarch never overcame his detestation of the scholastic obsession with Aristotle. He was responsible for coining the term 'Dark Ages' to describe the medieval period he believed he was still living in following the extinction of the 'light' of classical antiquity. Several of his works dwell on how the moral corruption of his age allowed a lust for wealth to transcend spiritual values. He believed he was restoring the light and continuously harked baek in his writings ro the superiority of Rome. (...) Petrarch championed tolerance, echoing ancient beliefs when he noted that 'many can be forced to confess, but not to believe. No liberty is gre-ater than the liberty to think. As I claim it for myself, so I do not deny it for others ... I am unwilling to be the judge of the human conscience which is something hidden and deep.' This acceptance of intellectual diversity was an important moment in Renaissance thought. It ensured that humanism was never a homogenous movement : rather, it opened up intense debates on 'the condition of man'.

"(Gentili) recognized that there had to be some basis for evolving the rules governing their relationships, but in a falous saying - silete theologi in munere alieno - ' Silence theologian, in matters that do not concern you' - he insisted that theology must be kept out of it. Where Gentili and his followers differed from the theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, was in assuming that natural law was not necessarily to be interpreted as having been founded by God. (...) For Gentili, a legal system needed to be based, pragmatically, on the actual practice of civi­lized nations. Religion was a private matter between individuals and their God. What was important for Gentili was to find a way in which traditional natural law, 'the set of principles that are true for all peoples at all times' and which regulate the desire to live in a peaceful and rational social order, could be incorporated into the law of nations."

"Philosophically, Grotius made an impo·rtant contribution to the concept of natural law. While he was prepared to accept that natural law might show the will of God, he claimed (controver­sially for many of his contemporaries) that its precepts would hold true even if God did not exist. Natural law is so intrinsic to human existence that even God cannot change it. 'Just as even God cannot cause that two times two should not equal four, so he cannot cause that which is intrinsically evil be n.t evil.' As a result Grotius has been seen by some as marking a new beginning in moral philosophy, 'th.e secularization of virtue'. He narrowed the precepts of natural law down to two: the right of self-pres­ervation and the right to live socially with others."

"In the Novum Organon, Bacon elaborates on what he calls the 'idols', the hindrances that come between the mind and reality. The senses, he says, are always unreliable: we can be led astray by information that conforms with what we already believe and we can easily be swayed by the opinions of the marketplace. It is important to separate scientific knowledge from theological belief, which is based on textual authority rather than material evidence. Ultimately, however, there was a place for God in Bacon's system: certain knowledge could be found in 'the true signatures and marks set upon the works of [divine] creation as they are found in nature... all knowledge appeareth to be a plant of God's own planting'. The trick was to mend 'the cracked mirror; of the mind so as to distinguish what God had actually created from what were vain imaginings. (...) Once sufficient material has been gathered to form the basis of a reasonable hypothesis, the hypothesis itself has to be tested. For Bacon, it was as important to find evidence to refute it as it was to find evidence to confirm it. This was one of Bacon's most important contributions to scientific method."

Janna Coomans - Dievenland (De Bezige Bij, 2025) ****

Net als Marta van der Laak met "Heksenjacht" is onderzoekster Janna Coomans in rechterlijke archieven gaan zoeken naar teksten die te maken hadden met kleine rechtszaken van gewone mensen in onze Lage Landen, maar vooral gefocust op die van Kampen en Deventer. Haar focus is niet om de misdaad in kaart te brengen, wel om aan de hand van teksten te achterhalen hoe de mensen toen leefden, waarom ze deze misdaden begingen en hoe de gemeenschap hierop reageerde. 

Er was veel bittere armoede onder de bevolking in die tijd, met mensen die volledig afhingen van landheren om voldoende werk en inkomsten te hebben, maar van zodra er tegenslag was, waar een groot deel van de bevolking mee geconfronteerd werd, hingen ze af van werk als dagloner, hun diensten aanbiedend op boerderijen, dorpen en steden. Als er geen werk was, was diefstal bijna de enige manier om  in leven te blijven. 

Coomans toont aan dat voor diefstal uit lijfsbehoud een vaak mildere straf werd gegeven dan bij de bijna professionele dieven die heel het grondgebied en ook in Duitsland aan de slag waren, en die zowal goederen als dieren stalen en die veel verder doorverkochten aan de hen gekende helers. 

Maar voor de meesten ging het echt om overleven, zoals de ondertitel suggereert. 

Een aanrader voor wie belangstelling heeft over de rand van onze samenleving in de Middeleeuwen.

Paul Christiaan Smis - Historische Verhalen (Historische Verhalen, 2018) **

Ik was eerlijk gezegd wat ontgoocheld in dit boek. Ik had gehoopt en verwacht om echte verhalen uit de Middeleeuwen geserveerd te krijgen, maar het is eigenlijk fictie tegen een historische achtergrond. Die is wel correct en goed weergegeven, wat de verhalen plausibel maakt maar niet realistischer. 

De diepmenselijke noden of de spanning die nodig is om tot een krachtig verhaal te komen, ontbreken nu eenmaal. Smis is onvoldoende stilist of fictie-auteur om de personages echt tot leven te brengen. 

Interessant, maar niet echt een aanrader. 

 

Ugo Janssens - De Heidenen (Lannoo, 2009) ***

Het is een gigantisch werk om exact te weten hoe onze voorouders leefden in de eerste eeuwen van onze jaartelling, maar toch heeft Ugo Janssens dit kunnen realiseren, ondanks het gebrekkig en fragmentarisch bronnenmateriaal en archeologische vondsten. Het is ook niet altijd eenvoudig omdat de volkeren in onze contreien zelf verschilden: kelten, galliërs en franken waren allen Germanen, maar dat wil niet zeggen dat ze dezelfde goden en rituelen hadden. 

Het boek beschrijft in de mate van het mogelijke deze verschillen, maar ook de kerstening ten tijde vanaf de vierde eeuw, en dan finaal onder de Franken. 

Een mooie inleiding voor wie belangstelling heeft voor de geschiedenis van onze contreien: helder, overzichtelijk, en leerrijk. 

André De Vries - Brussels (Interlink, 2003) ***

In mijn reeks van Brussel-boeken, was dit het eerste, maar misschien het minst goede. Het is duidelijk geschreven voor buitenlandse toeristen, maar bevat toch interessante weetjes over de stad. 

Wat mij vooral stoort is de stereotypering van de Brusselaar, gebaseerd op historische perspectieven en oordelen van buitenaf, maar die in geen velden of wegen klopt met de realiteit van vandaag. 

Een goede inleiding voor wie Brussel niet kent. 

Maartje van der Laak - Heksenjacht (Borgerhoff & Lamberigts, 2025) ****

Nederlands-Belgisch onderzoeker Maartje van de Laak heeft diep in de archieven van de Lage Landen gegraven om deze vreselijke periode uit onze geschiedenis op te diepen en weer tot leven te brengen. Dat is dan bijna letterlijk, door alle vrouwen - en ook mannen - die vals werden beschuldigd van omgang met de duivel opnieuw bij naam te noemen, hun context uit te leggen en ook de oordelen van de rechters weer te geven. Dit waren tijden van collectieve waanzin, bijgeloof, onverdraagzaamheid, armoede, tegenspoed en absolute wreedheid, met foltering tot er bekentenissen volgden en andere heksen werden verklikt. Door dit laatste vermenigvuldigde het aantal vrouwen dat ondervraagd en gefolterd en uiteindelijk werd verbrand. 

Eind 15e Eeuw werde de Heksenhamer gepubliceerd, de Maleus Maleficarum, die een handleiding bood om heksenpraktijken te herkennen, en die wereldse rechtbanken de argumentatie gaf om onschuldige vrouwen te bestraffen, vaak tot de dood. 

Van der Laak heeft hier duidelijk met hart en ziek aan gewerkt, en het resultaat mag er zeker zijn. Op het eind van het boek geeft ze een lange lijst, acht bladzijden lang, van alle vrouwen van wie ze informatie heeft kunnen opzoeken en die slachtoffer waren van de heksenjacht. Ze betreurt dat de beeldvorming nog altijd tot de stereotypering behoort in onze tijd, en dat in sommige steden en dorpen nog altijd folkoristische herdenkingen zijn van heksenverbrandingen. 

Gelukkig heeft ze het ook over de enkelingen die tegen de stroom durfden inzwemmen en de heksenjacht aan de kaak stelden, en die feiten en onderzoek belangrijker vonden dan valse beschuldigingen en bekentenissen onder foltering. 

Een praktijk om te testen of vrouwen heksen waren, was ze in het water te gooien om na te gaan of ze bleven drijven. Als ze zonken en verdronken, waren het geen heksen. Als ze boven water konden blijven, waren het wel heksen en werden ze verbrand. Ik had dit al gezien in Monty Python en dacht dat dit een grap was, maar blijkbaar was dit bittere realiteit in de late Middeleeuwen. Onze samenleving is er in onze contreien toch wat geëvolueerd, maar op vele plekken in de wereld is dit nog schering en inslag. 

De Geschiedenis van Brussel in Oude Kaarten (Lannoo, 2025) ****

Een prachtige uitgave van Lannoo met de evolutie van Brussel doorheen de tijd. Veel weten we niet van Brussel van voor de 10e eeuw, en de eerste kaarten dateren slechts uit de zestiende eeuw, maar uiteraard hebben geschiedkundigen de groei van de stad retrospectief in kaart kunnen brengen, figuurlijk dan vooral.

Naast de vele kaarten, is er ook een heel heldere en interessante uitleg van Brusselse geschiedkundigen. Het is opvallend hoe groen en landelijk onze hoofdstad nog was in de 19e eeuw, en hoe de expansie en verstedelijking is toegenomen in de laatste honderd jaar. 

Het is haast niet voor te stellen dat bvb Anderlecht en Molenbeek buiten de stad lagen of dat op de oevers van de Zenne de lakens te drogen lagen op gemeenschappelijke weiden. 

Een koffietafelboek om in een keer uit te lezen of om vaak in te bladeren. 

Jason Roberts - Every Living Thing (Riverrun, 2024) *****

It's no surprise that this excellent book received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and the 2025 PEN America Literary Science Award.

The author juxtaposes the lives of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus and French naturalist George-Louis de Buffon, two men who happened to be born in 1707 and competed to write the catalogue of all living things. The Bible mentions 120 animal species, so both authors tried to list animals, plants and other living things. Linnaeus sets his taxonomy in rigorous categories, static or never-chaning in his opinion, whereas Buffon has a more evolutionary perspective, and in this sense a precursor to scientists of the 19th Century like Wallace and Darwin.

Next to the rivalry itself, Roberts also goes into the right level of detail to give the public and especially the official reaction of the church against the work of both men. 

"Acclaim, however, was far from universal. The same Journal of Trévoux that praised the Histoire as a masterstroke against Linnaeus later published a critique angrily taking issue with Buffon's assertion "that it is possible to descend by almost imperceptible gradations from the most perfect of creatures to the most formless matter." The theological implications, it argued, were disturbing: If life was a continuum, there could be no clear leap between ensouled beings and those without souls. so happily placed as to serve as the imperceptible passage from one to the other" (p. 144-145)

Linnaeus also classified human beings according to race with caucasians at the top of the hierarchy and black people at the bottom, a justification for institutionalised racism for many years to come, whereas Buffon also had different opinions. 

"Buffon had his working definition. The essence of species lay in reproduction, the ability of one generation to propagate another. He logically applied this measure to humanity: Since all ethnic groups seemed clearly capable of interbreeding with one another, they comprised a single species. "The dissimilarities are merely external, the alterations of nature but superficial," he concluded. "The Asian, European, and Negro all reproduce with equal ease with the American. There can be no greater proof that they are the issue of a single and identical stock than the facility with which they consolidate to the common stock". In sum, reproduction was proof that 

'there was originally but one species, which, after being multiplied and diffused over the whole surface of the earth, underwent diverse changes from the influence of the climate, food, mode of living, epidemical distempers, and the intermixture of individuals ... that at first these alterations were less conspicuous, and confined to individuals; that afterwards, from continued action, they formed specific varieties; that these varieties have been perpetuated from generation to generation" (p.183-184)

It is fascinating to see how reason, logic and science manage to revolutionise ancient thinking and stereotypes, how observation and deductive reasoning could overcome ignorance, and even anticipate scientific insights that we only achieved two centuries later. Buffon's 'moule intérieur' or internal matrix is nothing else than our genetic code. 

"Just as species passed from existence, he concluded that they must come into existence as well, throughout the expanse of time. In 1753, the fourth volume of Histoire Naturelle had contained Buffon's observation that while humans and horses were greatly dissimilar from each other in outward appearances, the horse's hoof contained the same inventory of bones as the human hand. This was a "hidden resemblance" that evaded Linnaeus's systematics entirely, and which to Buffon "seems to indicate that in creating these animals the supreme Being wished to employ one idea, and to vary it at the same time in all possible ways."

Buffon thought that these resemblances were more than coincidences. If his postulated shaping internal matrix (moule intérieur) could account for individual variations within species, might it not also be responsible for even larger, inheritable changes? Such changes might accumulate, to the degree that they added up to an entirely new species.(p. 198)

He was also visionary enough to see that humanity was able to create much and advance technologically, but also that our own destruction and environmental damage was a possible consequence: 

"In The Epochs of Nature, the 1774 essay both included in Histoire Naturelle and published as a stand-alone volume, Buffon had argued that human-driven environmental change had proceeded to the point that it represented the "seventh and last epoch, when the power of man has assisted that of Nature." This power, he concluded, was not universally positive. "The most despicable condition of the human species is not that of the savage," he wrote,

but that of those nations that are a quarter policed, which have always been the real curse of human nature, and which civilized peoples still have trouble to contain today. They have, as we have said, ravaged the first happy land, they tore out the seeds of contentment ... Cast your eyes on the annals of all the peoples, you will count there twenty centuries of desolation for a few years of peace and repose". (p.353)

Jason Roberts has not only written a wonderful overview of the biological classification of nature in line with the great encyclopedists of the 18th century, but he has positioned it by showing two entirely different approaches to the subject by two fascinating characters, adding tremendous amounts of facts and events that make this a very readible and entertaining read. 

It's not only about two men with differing views, it's about the approach to science in general, and how evidence, facts, methodology and logic are the way forward. 

Brilliant! 

Philipp Blom - Nature's Mutiny (Picador, 2019) ****

From the end of the 16th to the mid-18th Century, the world was impacted by a Little Ice Age, for reasons still unknown. The consequences for people, nature and society were heavy: harvests did not yield any food, floods were frozen, hampering supplies, people were starving. We know this period from the many paintings of snow-covered landscapes and people ice-skating on frozen rivers. 

In this excellent historical review, German historian Philipp Blom analyses the deep impact of this moment of climate change on society, on its economy and as a consequence also on philosophy and science. 

Because of the lack of resources, the rich and powerful could no longer just grab land and levy taxes on the poor, because there was nothing to grab anymore. People in power had to think differently, on how to use the scarce resources in a much more efficient way than before: 

"For the first time in Western history, scholars and administrators began to think methodically about the structures and possibilities of  their  society and its economy without relying on biblical injunctions, their logical arguments by the doctors of the Church, or even the comparatively liberating philosophy of classical antiquity. Instead, they began to form their theories out of perceived current earthly needs such as money for the soldiers, for instance and on the immedi­ate material givens: geographical, demographic, and economic real­ities. They were leaving the Middle Ages behind and preparing the ground for what would eventually be called the Enlightenment." (p. 131)

That does not mean that wealth distribution was already on the agenda. Some thinkers were

"The wealthy merchant Mun clearly saw wealth as a danger to weak characters, and his therapy was equally unambiguous: 'As plenty and power doe make a nation vicious and improvident, so penury and want doe make a people wise and industrious." Wealth, it seemed, was good only in the hands of a small number of people who were born into it, or whose exceptional personal qualities enabled them to use it well." (p. 134)

Blom gives insights in the many influential thinkers of that time, most of which are known (Hobbes, Descartes, Giordano Bruno, ...), although some new and interesting figures come up, such as the Italian materialist Luciano Vanini, or the French priest and eccentric Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) who strongly believed in observation through the senses instead of dogma and abstract thinking. 

"But if all knowledge comes from the senses, what about know­ing things that do not reveal themselves to our senses? Impossible, judged the priest, taking sides in this debate. Nothing can be known without sensory experience, not even God. Especially not God. Descartes' attempt to prove, through logic, the existence of a being beyond sensory perception, crumbled under the beam of Gassen­di's analysis. You can believe whatever you like, the priest implied, but you can only know something if you can or could experience it through your physical perception." (p. 168)

 Leading some pages later to the observation that "Nothing is certain, we have no access to a transcendental truth. We are alone" (p. 173).

The book is extremely well written, and as you might have understood, more about philosophy and the way learned people started looking at nature, than about the science of the Little Ice Age as a natural phenomenon. 

The book is relevant for today's political context as well. Democracy and science are always the first victims of autocracy, religious zealotry and power-hungry tycoons; 

"Liberal democracy is not, as many of Hegel's latter-day disciples would have us believe, a necessary consequence of historical prog­ress. Instead, it is a largely accidental, contingent, and vulnerable historical experiment with an open outcome, revealed by recent developments to be in present danger of being subverted, ignored, left to atrophy, or eliminated completely. Democracy was born out ideas first broadly debated during the Little Ice Age. It could eas­ily die or be hollowed out to a mere façade during our own era of climate change, as living conditions for ordinary people become harsher and the very rich take more power for themselves." (p. 283)

I am only afraid that this message will only be read and understood by people who are already convinced, while the ones who actually need to hear it, rarely read anything longer than a post on social media. 

Snezana Lawrence - A Little History of Mathematics (Yale, 2025) ****

In one of the first chapters of this book, the story is told about Greeks in the 5th Century BC who consulted the oracle of Delphi to appease the god Apollo after the plague rampaged across the country. The oracle said that "in order to assuage the god, they should double the size of Apollo's altar, an ornate then-foot-high cube. That didn't sound very difficult to do. Double the cube? How hard could it be? (...). This problem, known as the Delian problem, 'rested on how to find the cube root of 2, and was eventually proven - not until the 19th Century - to be an impossible task using only Euclydian tools of geometry available in the fifth century". (p. 31). 

This little example illustrates the book well. It's a historical overview of new challenges and solutions in mathematics from the earliest ages to today. Math was definitely not my thing in school, and I only realised that integrals could be used to calculate volumes when on the exam we had to calculate the volume of a flat tyre. I never knew what it was actually used for. In retrospect, a lot of math could have been made more attractive by using some of the challenges in this book. It requires some basic knowledge of math, but not exceptionally so. 

The example also demonstrates the weird thing that is relatively unique to mathematics: on a very abstract form, there are many riddles that have no other apparent function or relationship with reality other than keep very smart minds busy for centuries, yet other times, the link with reality becomes obviously clear, and most of our current technology would not be possible without it. 

Lawrence takes us step by step through the creative processes of mathematical geniuses who solved ancient and new problems with sometimes completely creative approaches, opening new vistas for other scientists to go even a step further. This includes the amazingly long time it took to have a symbol for zero or for the equation, things which are so obvious today. 

Maybe in stark contrast to other sciences, discoveries in math have usually been the result of the stubborn passion of individuals to find solutions for mind-boggling problems. I have used the approach of Kepler in some of my presentations: to make people understand that the earth is revolving around the moon, he forced his audiences to imagine they were looking at the earth from the moon, which gave a totally different perspective on how the planets rotated. This sudden change in perspective clarified everything. 

From the early use of numbers to calculating in 24 dimensions, her story is accessible as it is fascinating. Her explanations and examples are sufficiently well explained for non-mathematicians to also enjoy the book, even if many will have trouble understanding how you can work in 4 or 5 dimensions, let alone in 24, but yes, today's math is capable of that. 

Peter Frankopan - Earth Transformed - An Untold Story (Bloomsbury, 2024) *****

The words that come to mind when reading this book are colossal, gargantuan, massive, monumental, gigantic, not only because the physical characteristic of its 660 pages, but also because of its incredible and erudite picture of the history of our world that is described here, viewed from the perspective of the interaction of our environment with historical events. 

Peter Frankopan is a British historian and writer. He is a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford, and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is also author of the best-selling "The Silk Roads". 

I identified over fifty passages in the book that I intended to refer to in my review, but this is simply too much. 

The book starts at the real beginning, around 4.5 billion years ago, takes us over the origin of our species, prehistory, and then through history to our currrent times with a view to the future. The geography is our entire world, with impact and interaction between environment and people in every geography: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, plagues, and other calamities that shaped nations, beliefs and cultures. 

"as societies become larger in size and more specialised in their work, rulers and priests become the interpreters of everything from natural disaster to environmental challenges, from_ resource surpluses to shortfalls, from military defeats to premature deaths, helping explain punishments or bounties that were being administered by unseen gods. Environmental and natural calamities in particular were closely linked to 'moralising gods' who, out of anger or simply from boredom, handed out punishments for transgressions and apparent lack of respect. It is striking, though perhaps not surprising, that regions that were vulnerable to changes in weather conditions - above all droughts, but also floods and storms - developed cosmological systems based on 'moralising gods' who used such events to punish, show their displeasure and teach lessons" (p. 87)

Next to influencing the development of religions of course, the destruction of nature by man has also been something of all times, even if the recent developments are possibly more devastating. Frankopan gives many examples, but I'll just list some from Ancient Europe. 

"deforestation had seriously depleted wood supplies in many regions. The forests in what is now Tuscany had been cut down and exhausted, wrote Strabo around 2,000 years ago, to provide wood both for ships and for houses in and around Rome, including over-the-top villas that were of'Persian magnificence' - a nod to opulence, excess and bad taste. Pliny the Elder, writing not long afterwards, noted sadly that too many people undermine nature with the sole purpose of self-enrichment; it should hardly come as a surprise, therefore, that the earth should occasionally show its displeasure, through disasters such as earthquakes. Rather than content themselves with the bounteous food and natural wealth that the world provides, humans were too busy being overwhelmed by avarice to stop overexploiting its resources" (p. 192)

Despite the endless list of destruction and calamities, the author remains optimistic about man's capabilities of behavioural change and good stewardship, but then with a number of conditions that need to be fulfilled. 

"Some climate sceptics point out - rightly - that forecasts that look into the future can be highly speculative, and they also seek to dampen alarm by noting, again quite correctly, that economic growth, new technologies and adaptation may alleviate the problems that lie ahead and, in some cases, may even s.olve them. 8 That too, however, requires faith and confidence; moreover, what history in general and this book in particular show is that there have been a great many times in the past when societies, peoples and cultures have proved unable to adapt. Indeed, in some respects, the human story of progress is about batons being repeatedly dropped and picked up by others. 

The question, then, is not so much whether to adapt, but how, where and when to do so. And in that sense it is certainly true that there is plenty of good news, much to celebrate and reasons to be optimistic." (p. 643). 

As you can expect, this is a really important book, not only because of its perspectives on our history, but also as great background knowledge that should help us to become more environmentally conscious and especially for politicians to finally act in a meaningful way. This book was of course written before the current Trump administration, which decided to step out of the Paris Agreement, and claiming that global warming is a hoax, promoting "beautiful, clean coal" instead of renewable energy. I hope this short-sightedness will stop soon, yet with the probability that Donald Trump reads this book are zero, prospects become worse. 

Often when reading, I deplored the fact that the sources of all the references are missing in the book. At the end, he explains that there is a dedicated website that contains the 200 pages with his source material. The QR code below leads the reader to the source material. 

Vincenzo De Meulenaere - Coudenberg (Borgerhoff & Lamberigts, 2025) ****

In "Coudenberg" brengt geschiedkundige Vincenzo De Meulenaere het kasteel van Coudenberg weer tot leven. Op de "mons frigidus" zoals de heuvel in het oude Brussel ooit heette, werd in de tiende eeuw een versterking (castrum) gebouwd, die gaandeweg uitgroeide tot het koninklijk paleis voor vele koningen uit onze geschiedenis, om dan te worden vernietigd door een grote brand in de nacht van 3 op 4 februari 1731. De oorzaak hiervan is onbekend, maar het betekende het einde van het paleis, dat nog lang als een ruïne bleef bestaan tot het uiteindelijk in 1774 met de grond gelijk werd gemaakt. 

Vandaag zijn enkele ruïnes van dat paleis nog te bezichtigen onder het Koningsplein in Brussel. Het Koninklijk Paleis staat eigenlijk op dezelfde plek vandaag. Het Coudenbergpaleis heeft een gigantische geschiedenis gekend, en ongeveer al wie ooit macht had in Europa, van de vroege middeleeuwen tot de 18e Eeuw heeft er zijn intrek genomen of is er te gast geweest. Het is de verdienste van De Meulenaere om dit op een heel overzichtelijke en frisse manier weer tot leven te roepen, met veel aandacht voor anecdotes en zin voor detail. Het zijn vaak dezelfde hoofdfiguren als in "De Boergondiërs" van Bart Van Loo, maar hier geconcentreerd op een enkele plek. 

Als Brusselaar vind ik het fantastisch dat hier zoveel aandacht aan wordt geschonken, maar ik denk dat elke Belg verrast zal zijn dat een dergelijk paleis volledig verdwenen is. Ik heb ook in Tervuren gewoond, waar ook een gigantisch kasteel stond aan de vijvers, maar dat ook totaal is verdwenen, en ongeveer in dezelfde periode ook uitgroeide van een kasteel tot een paleis. 

De Meulenaere schrijft met veel liefde en belangstelling voor zijn onderwerp, wat het lezen ook de moeite waard maakt. Op het eind van het boek worden nog enkele kleurplaten weergegeven van schilderijen over het paleis en zijn protagonisten op verschillende tijdstippen. Van mij hadden dat er gerust veel meer mogen zijn, omdat het visuele natuurlijk ook zijn aantrekkingskracht heeft, maar ik weet dat het niet altijd eenvoudig is om reproductierechten te krijgen voor publicaties. 

Wie van onze vaderlandse geschiedenis houdt en van onze hoofdstad moet dit boek zeker lezen. Een aanrader. 

Michael Taylor - Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion (Bodley Head, 2024) ****½

What a wonderful treat of a book. It describes the discovery of "impossible monsters", the skeletons of dinosaurs and other reptiles in the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset, Southwest England, first by the 12-year old Mary Anning. The ongoing discoveries of other skeletons created a completely different view on ancient animals and on the age of the earth, questioning biblical stories in which these strange animals never even featured. But the book is not about the animals themselves, but how they became the subject of intense debates with the Church and scientists who claimed that the earth was only 6,000 years old. 

Not much later Darwin developed his theory of evolution of the species which added even more fuel to the heated discussions. 

The book gives a wonderful overview of the debates that ensued between religion and science, the opposing views, the discrediting of scientific evidence by religious dogma, but also the whole public debate, including the reports of the actual meetings of the Royal Society of Science in which the topics were debated. 

Michael Taylor was born in 1988 and graduated with a double first in history from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD. He is also the author of "The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery". The discoveries of Mary Anning have been made into a worthwhile movie, called "Ammonite" with Kate Winslet in the leading role. 

The discoveries of ancient animals and Darwin's theory of evolution found fertile ground in the now formal questioning of the actual reality of the Bible stories: 

"In 'The Essence of Christianity' (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach developed an anthropological approach to religion, which he described as merely 'the dream of the human mind'. Here, the God of justice represented human ideals of justice, and the God of love was the perfection of human ideals of love; it followed that Christ the miracle-worker was 'nothing else than a product and reflex of the supernatural human mind'. In 'The Life of Jesus' (1835) David Strauss had meanwhile looked at the gospels, striving to separate historical evi­dence from mythology. Though he did not deny that Christ had lived, Strauss decried the New Testament's 'false facts and impossible conse­quences which no eye-witness could have related'. Fatally, in his view, 'there was [for a long time] no written account of the life of Jesus', so that 'oral narratives alone were transmitted'; such tales had become 'tinged with the marvellous', growing into 'historical myth[s]'. For Strauss, these stories 'like all other legends were fashioned by degree', only in time acquiring 'a fixed form in our written Gospels' (p. 133)

The discoveries shoock the very foundations of religious belief, of the concept of right and wrong: 

"And what of the Lord Himself? (conservative priest) Richard Froude despaired at the 'goodness' of a god who had chosen to bless 'arbitrarily, for no merit of their own, as an eastern despot chooses his favourites, one small section of mankind, leaving all the world besides to devil-worship and lies'. Just why were the chosen people chosen? And how could Sutherland believe the Lord to be 'all-merciful, all-good' when He was 'jealous, passionate, capricious, [ and] revengeful, punishing children for their fathers' sin', tempting men 'into blindness and folly' when He knew they would fall, and punishing them eternally in a 'hell prison-house'? This god was not divine. He was 'a fiend' (p. 135)

The broadening of the number of scientists and other amateur scientists to deal with the information and the data, led to even further destruction of the foundations of religious belief: 

"Here, he (William Parker Foulke, an American lawyer) compared 'the modified bird Archaeopteryx' with 'the ordinary Dinosauria' in which class, in con­tradiction of Wagner, he placed the Compsognathus. There were differences to be sure, but Cope remarked upon 'the union of the tibia and fibula [of the Compsognathus] with the first series of tarsal bones, a feature formerly supposed to belong to the class Aves [ that is, birds] alone'. He also looked at 'the transverse direction of the pubes', the hip-bones, and again observed 'an approach to the birds'. After describing other 'bird-like features' such as the number and nature of its vertebrae, Cope suggested that the Compsognathus stood 'inter­mediate between the position in most reptiles and in birds' (p. 249)

"All this was proof, he concluded, that 'the facts of palaeontology . . . are not opposed to the doctrine of evolution, but, on the contrary ... enable us to form a conception of the manner in which birds may have been evolved from reptiles'. The 'fowl that may fly above the earth', sup­posedly created by the Lord on the fifth day of the first week, had in fact evolved from the sixth day's creatures 'that creepeth upon the earth'. The book of Genesis lay in ruins, the dinosaurs had tri­umphed, and even Richard Owen recognised the quality and force of the bulldog's performance. (p. 251)

"John William Draper (American chemist, professor at New York University) moved from the library at Alexandria to the 'pillared halls of Persepolis', from the Arabian schools of mathematics to the courts of the Inquisition, and from Renaissance universities to the learned societies of London. There was no question of his favour: 'The history of Science', he declared, 'is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expan­sive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other'. Of that 'traditionary faith' he was unsparing, describing the development of Catholicism as an 'intellectual night' which settled on Europe, .during which spiritual affairs passed from the control of classical philoso­phers 'into the hands of ignorant and infuriated ecclesiastics, parasites, eunuchs, and slaves'. At last, however, that night was lifting, and civi­lised society had recognised the truth: 'that Roman Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being abso­lutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice - it cannot have both'. (p. 286). 

Taylor's erudition is a pleasure to read, as is the fluency of his writing style. Highly recommended reading. 

Irene Vallejo - Papyrus (Hodder, 2023) ****½

I love books that give a broad, sweeping overview of everything there is to know about a subject, an encyclopaedic vision through history and the boundaries of our knowledge. This is such a book, and even more interesting, it's a book about books, about writing, about the importance of the physical aspects of human writing: clay tablets, parchment, paper, but even more so about what they achieved in terms of sharing stories, ideas and values. Irene Vallejo is a Spanish classical philologist with degrees from the universities of Zaragoza in Spain and Florence in Italy. 

Her passion is clear from the very start. She writes with incredible erudition, but with equal personal joy and personal experience of her relationship with texts and writing. 

 "After all the agonies of doubt, after exhausting every possible delay and excuse, one hot July afternoon, I face the void of the blank page. I've decided to open with the image of some enigmatic hunters stalking their prey. I identify with them. I appreciate their patience, their stoicism, the time they have taken, their steadiness, the adrena­line of the search. For years I have worked as an academic, consulting sources, keeping records, trying to get to know the historical mate­rial. But when it comes down to it, I'm so amazed by the true and recorded history I discover that it seeps into my dreams and acquires, without my volition, the shape of a story. I'm tempted to step into the skin of those who traveled the roads of an ancient, violent, tumultu­ous Europe in pursuit of books. What if I start by telling the story of their journey? It might work, but how can I keep the skeleton of facts distinct beneath the muscle and blood of imagination?  

The initial idea seems to me as fantastical as the journey in search of King Solomon's mines or the Lost Ark, but historical documents show that in the megalomaniacal minds of the kings of Egypt, it was truly possible. It might have been the last and only time - there, in the third century BC - that the dream of gathering all the books in the world, without exception, in a universal library, could become a reality. Today it seems like the plot of a fascinating, abstract story by Borges - or perhaps his great erotic fantasy." (p. XV)

She starts in ancient times, with the endeavour of Alexander The Great to conquer the known world, to create his own city of Alexandria in Egypt, with the largest collection of written material from all the places in his realm. He opened up the world to create a kind of proto-globalism where all cultures could meet and mingle, if not in person, then at least in their written forms. She draws a fantastic picture of how scrolls were written, how they were traded and collected, how they were catalogued and copied. It's a fascinating journey, one that we are of course by and large aware of, but she adds so many snippets of concrete examples and information that it make for fascinating reading. As in this example of the last Egyptian scribes, "who witnessed the shipwreck of their civilization". In 380 CE, Christianity became the compulsory state religion, and pagan cults were prohibited in the Roman Empire. 

"(In the) Temple of Isis on the island of Philae, to the south of the first cataract of the Nile, (...) a group of priests took refuge, men who were repositories of the secrets of their sophisticated writing system and who had been forbidden from sharing their knowledge. One of them, Esmet-Akhom, engraved on the walls of the temple the last hieroglyphic inscription ever written, which ends with the words "for all time and eternity." Some years later, the emperor Justinian I resorted to military force to close the temple where the priests of Isis were holding out, taking the rebels as prisoners. Egypt buried its old gods, with whom it had lived for thousands of years. And, along with its gods, its objects of worship, and the language itself. In just one generation, everything disappeared. It has taken fourteen centu­ries to rediscover the key to that language. (p.53)

Or in this example on the origin of poetry, which makes sense and appears quite obvious once you think about it: 

"In their effort to endure, denizens of the oral world realized that rhythmic language was easiest to remember, and on the wings of this discovery, poetry was born. During recitation, the melody helps the speaker repeat each line without alteration, since it is when the music is broken that the sequence falters. All of us were made to learn poems in school. Years later, after forgetting so many other things, we find we can still remember these poems with extraordi­nary clarity" (p. 81)

I also liked this example to please and annoy my friends in medical practice: 

"What kind of education did those Greeks receive? They were steeped in culture in all its variety. Unlike us, they weren't remotely interested in specialization. They looked down their noses at knowl­edge of a technical nature. They weren't obsessed with employ­ment; after all, they had slaves to work for them. Those who could avoided anything as degrading as having a trade. Leisure was more refined - in other words, it involved cultivating the mind, fostering friendships, making conversation, and leading a contemplative life. Only medicine, an unquestionable social necessity, demanded its own particular kind of training. As a result, doctors suffered from an overt cultural inferiority complex. All of them, from Hippocrates to Galen, repeated the mantra in their texts that a doctor is also a philosopher. They wished to avoid being confined to their field and tried to show themselves to be cultured, slipping the occasional quote by a key poet into their writings." (p. 179) 

She also gives a reflection on her own academic research, and the book format gives her also the opportunity to write about herself, about her own experiences, sometimes funny, sometimes deeply personal. 

As a PhD student she went to the Oxford Library to do some research, but she is confronted with the obligation to "take the oath": 

"A bald man behind a desk interrogated me with­out making eye contact. I answered all his questions, justified my presence, and showed him the papers he asked for with somewhat intimidating politeness. There was a long silence while he entered my information into his vast database, and then, hands still on his keyboard, in a startling swerve in time, he suddenly stepped into the Middle Ages and informed me pompously that the time had come for me to take the oath. He handed me a small stack of laminated cards that showed, each in a different language, the words I would have to say. I did so. I swore to obey the rules. Not to steal, damage, or deface a single book. Not to set fire to the library or help cause a blaze and watch with diabolical pleasure as the roaring flames engulfed its treasures, reducing them to ash." (p. 44)

 Or this even more personal reflection, which again lifts the book out of the academic space into a more personal environment, the perspective that is obviously excluded from any scientific research and publications: 

"Violence among children and teenagers is protected by a barrier of murky silence. For years I took comfort in not having been the class snitch, the tattletale, the coward. Not to have stooped that low. Misplaced pride and shame made me fol­low the rule that certain stories aren't told. Wanting to be a writer was a belated rebellion against that law. The stories that go untold are exactly the ones you must tell. I decided to become the snitch I was so afraid to be. The roots of writing are often dark. This is my darkness, the darkness that nurtures this book, and perhaps nur­tures everything I write. (p.226)

But of course the main message is the power of literature, of writing, of books in all their forms, how they made ideas accessible to anyone around the world, to start sharing common values and a common culture, or at least to value that they're might be other perspectives to look at the same reality: 

"In a time when the vast majority of Greeks scarcely set foot outside their native village, Herodotus was a tireless traveler. He enlisted on merchant ships, moved in slow caravans, struck up con­versation with many people, and visited a great number of cities in the Persian Empire, to give an account of the war with knowledge of the terrain and a range of perspectives. When he met the enemy in his daily life, he offered a different and more precise vision than any other writer. In the words of Jacques Lacarriere, Herodotus strove to topple his Greek countrymen's prejudices, teaching them that "the line between civilization and barbarism is never a geographic bor­der between countries, but a moral border within every people, and beyond that, within each individual." It's curious to note, so many centuries after Herodotus wrote his work, that the earliest history book begins in a ferociously modern way. There are wars between East and West, kidnappings, mutual accusations, differing versions of the same events, and alternative facts".  (p.162)

It is an ode to knowledge, to intellectual curiosity and debate ...

"In its ambiguous state as a Greek city outside of Greece and the seed of Europe beyond the bounds of Europe, Alexandria came to see itself from the outside. During the Library's greatest era and following in Alexander's wake, the Stoic philosophers were bold enough to teach for the first time that all people belonged to a com­munity without borders and were obliged to accept humanity wher­ever and under whichever circumstances they encountered it. We should remember the Greek capital of the Nile delta as the place where this effervescence was born, where the languages and tradi­tions of others began to matter, and where the world and knowledge were understood to be a shared territory. In these aspirations we find a precursor to the great European dream of universal citizenship. Writing, books, and libraries were the technologies that made this utopia possible". (p.232)

... and of course the incredible value of the freedom of speech: 

"Days before The Satanic Verses appeared in bookstores, during the publicity campaign, an Indian journalist asked Rushdie, off the record, whether he was aware of the row that was coming. The writ­er's response was unequivocal: 'It is a funny view of the world to think that a book can cause riots." 

If we look back at the general history of book destruction, we'll see that in fact, the funny view of the world - the oasis, the strange paradise, the Shangri-La, the forest of Lothlorien - is freedom of expression. Over the centuries, the written word has been stubbornly persecuted, and the times when bookstores receive only peaceful visitors who do not wave flags or wag fingers, break windows or set things on fire, or give themselves over to the primitive zeal for prohibition, are in fact the unusual ones. " (p. 294)

The scientific study of writing and books becomes a personal story as well as a humanistic manifesto. At times it is not easy to follow the logic or the thread of her narrative, because so many pieces of information are provided. It is this wealth that makes the book so entertaining and a pleasure to read. 

Highly recommended!

Abbott Kahler - Eden Undone (Harper Collins, 2024) **½

When buying books on Amazon, they often give "recommendations based on your past choices", and this book popped up, with the amazing subtitle "A True Story of Sex, Murder and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II", which appealed to my boyish nature. 

I will refrain from doing semantic exercises on the description "A True Story" as initiated by the movie Fargo. What happened then is not a story. It is true. A German physician and his patient move to Floreana in 1930, one of the Galápagos Islands with the sole intent of creating their own paradise, their own eden, far from the madness and obligations of society. Dr. Friedrich Ritter also has the high aspirations to write his own philosophical treatise about how to live in this world. He describes their new paradise in a series of newspaper articles, which of course leads to other people sharing his idea. They are followed by another German couple who are looking for a place where their ill and almost blind son, still a boy, can hope to benefit from a good environment. Next comes an Austrian-French sex-obsessed Baroness with two 'male slaves' and an Ecuadorian translator. The baroness is a true narcissist, self-obsessed, manipulative, dictatorial, charming if need be, seductive and commanding. 

Because the media attention they create, they also generate the interest of the very rich Americans, who come to visit with their cruise ships to see for themselves how these Europeans have eked out a living in the harsh environment of the Galapagos. 

Needless to say that this Eden soon becomes a nightmare for all involved, with the truth becoming a commodity as rare as luxury goods. Human nature comes to the fore even among the most principled people, leading to theft, hypocrisy, gossip, shifting alliances, hate, death and murder. 

Kahler brings it like a documentary, extensively using excerpts from letters and articles, and literally including all events that took place, which gives possibly a very distorted view of the actual boring life these people must have had on the island, with the exception of the conflicts that were documented. The book has also no literary ambition to bring more than just a report. It's a missed opportunity with this kind of material to work from. 

It's a fascinating microcosm of humanity, isolated and reduced to a handful of people. It could have been staged for a play, to reduce the madness of our kind on one tiny location, with high hopes and lofty aspirations leading to a predictable catastrophy within a very short time span. It's a mirror to all of us, and if a fiction author had developed a plot such as this one, the reader would say it's possibly too programmatic, too artificial to be credible. 

In this sense it really is a story. But then a true one.