My favourite period? This exact moment when King Edward desperately wanted a male heir to succeed him on the English throne, was dying, and nature told them no. Every descendant, even from the lines they didn't want (bastards, Catholics), was female. So on his death bed, he placed a woman in line of the succession for the first time ever: Jane, a 16 year old girl and I think one of the brightest people ever. She did become queen that next day and stayed so for a few more days, deposed by another woman (Mary I) who raised an army.
This is Tudor times and I don't know whether that counts as medieval or modern.
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I've seen a documentary about this thing once and it's completely fascinating. It's a device (or was before it eroded on the seabed) that can calculate future astronomical events (planet positions, eclipses) and is small enough to be handheld or at least portable. It is two thousand years old, ancient Greek, a time of great accomplishments but this we didn't know they could do. Some call it the world's first computer.
The Antikythera MechanismImage Credit & License: Marsyas, Wikipedia
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230723.html #APOD
APOD: 2023 July 23 – The Antikythera Mechanism
A different astronomy and space science related image is featured each day, along with a brief explanation.apod.nasa.gov
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Thinking again of Jane Grey, a royal of Tudor times, and how the world was robbed of her brilliance when she was beheaded on orders of Queen Mary, when Jane was only seventeen. Most people focus on the history around her short time wearing the crown of England (the first woman, or girl, to do so in her own right), but to me her life before is much more fascinating.
The writings of her tutor and of philosophers in Europe, where you can feel how much in awe they were of her intellect while knowing she was a fifteen year old girl, are spine tingling. Her translating a book into ancient Greek from another ancient language and giving it to her father as his birthday present, at that same age, indicates she was indeed super smart but also a total show-off.
Gidi Kroon
Gidi Kroon
There's this story where this tutor came to visit Jane and her family (again around her age of 15), only to find the family had gone out for a hunt (bad thing, but that's what they did in those days). But only the father, mother and the two other daughters had gone out, Jane was still in the house, so the servants let him in to the main room. There he found her reading a book, sitting in the window to catch enough light. He asked why she was still inside and hadn't gone with her family and enjoy the pleasures of the hunt. She replied, with complete earnest surprise, that she didn't understand why they had gone outside while instead they could be sitting here in the window enjoying the pleasures of reading Plato in the original Greek.
If there's anything that defines a character...
Gidi Kroon
Gidi Kroon
Gidi Kroon
The last months of her life, when she was sixteen and seventeen years old, Jane Grey was locked up in The Tower, which is the normal prison for royalty (it's a castle and royal people were there under house arrest, or castle arrest, not in dungeons). But because she was a kid, she wasn't in the inner Black Castle part, but in the outer ring with the Head Yeoman and his family. They were under strict instructions from Queen Mary on pain of death, to not let any of her writing get out. There was a thing Mary feared most of all: Jane's words. Jane had already become a fierce fighter for the Protestant religion and Mary was fiercely Catholic.
When Jane was taken to be executed, 17, she carried with her her Book of Hours, which at the time was the most precious and most personal possession a religious person had. Especially for a royal person, this would have been made and illustrated especially for her. Nothing out of the ordinary with her grasping that in her hands. Along the way she asked someone to make sure this book was given to her father. The soldier or servant she gave i
... show moreThe last months of her life, when she was sixteen and seventeen years old, Jane Grey was locked up in The Tower, which is the normal prison for royalty (it's a castle and royal people were there under house arrest, or castle arrest, not in dungeons). But because she was a kid, she wasn't in the inner Black Castle part, but in the outer ring with the Head Yeoman and his family. They were under strict instructions from Queen Mary on pain of death, to not let any of her writing get out. There was a thing Mary feared most of all: Jane's words. Jane had already become a fierce fighter for the Protestant religion and Mary was fiercely Catholic.
When Jane was taken to be executed, 17, she carried with her her Book of Hours, which at the time was the most precious and most personal possession a religious person had. Especially for a royal person, this would have been made and illustrated especially for her. Nothing out of the ordinary with her grasping that in her hands. Along the way she asked someone to make sure this book was given to her father. The soldier or servant she gave it to thought it was nothing more than normal that a girl on her way to her execution would want her most prized possession to be given to her father, so he did and thought nothing more about it. Her father discovered she had hidden a whole lot of her writing in the book, which he smuggled to printers in Italy, since England was too dangerous. From there her printed manifests were distributed over England, kept the Protestant flame going during Mary's Catholic reign, so the next Queen could be a Protestant again, Elizabeth I.
In the end, she won after all. (And the trio succeeded)
Gidi Kroon
During her months in The Tower, Mary sent her own chaplain, the most learned Catholic in the country, to Jane every single day to try and convert her. Every day he reported back to Mary that he had not succeeded in converting Jane to Catholicism. His private writings in his journals have been preserved. In it he says that not only did he not succeed in converting her, but many days Jane almost succeeded in converting him.
She could argue like the best. And she would never give in.
(She was aware that the deal was that if she converted to Catholicism, she would be let out and not executed. It says quite something that she didn't take that deal.)
Gidi Kroon
In those days science wasn't some people together doing experiments, but it was a network all over Europe of individual people, usually old gray men, at home thinking about stuff and writing their thoughts down in letters to each other. What blows my mind is that 15 year old Jane Grey was part of that network. Not by trickery, writing under her father's name, or them only replying out of politeness. No, they fully knew who she was and they accepted her as an equal. It's a shame her letters have not been preserved.
What could she have achieved had she been able to live into adulthood. I believe she would have become an important scientist whose name we'd remember. Can you imagine that an earlier scientist even than Isaac Newton would have been a woman, rather than us having to wait centuries later for Marie Curie? I think our whole perception of gender in science would be different.