Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 December 3

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December 3

Medieval French poem

Working on the article for the 14th-century French composer F. Andrieu; he set to music two poems by Eustache Deschamps to music for the death of Guillaume de Machaut. There's a line ("The fount of Dirce, the fountain of Helie") where I'm not sure what "Dirce" or "Helie" is referring to? (I assume the former is Dirce but I'm not sure, and have no idea of about "Helie") I put the stanza that this line begins below if that helps, thanks – Aza24 (talk) 05:01, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Stanza containiing line in question

Le fons Dircé et la fontayne Helie Dont vous estes le ruissel et le dois, Ou poëtes mirent leur estudie, Conveint taire, dont je suy molt destrois. Las! C'est pour vous qui mort gisiés tous frois [Qu']ay un dolent depit, faillant replique, Plourés, arpes et cors saracynois, La mort Machaut, le noble retorique. (second strophe) Eustache Deschamps The fount of Dirce, the fountain of Helie, Of which you are the stream and the course In which poets have put their study Must now be muted, which me much distresses. Alas! It is for you, who lie cold and dead, That I have grievous pain, lacking reply, Weep, harps and Saracenhorns, for The death of Machaut, the noble rhetorician English translation by Howard B. Garey

Dircé as you say is almost certainly Dirce, devoted to Dionysus, who caused a fountain to flow where she died, tied to the Farnese Bull.

"la fontayne Helie" is probably Hippocrene, the fountain of poetic inspiration on Mt. Helicon - found through the line "Soubz le ruissel de la fontaine Helie?" in this Balade which is connected with Chaucer. Hope this is of some use. MinorProphet (talk) 06:31, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

The academic Laura Kendrick reads the first line as La fons Ciree et la fonteine Helie. She glosses Helie as "Helicon" and Ciree as "Cirrha". Ciree or Circé ("Circe") seems to be the usual reading of the first name: [1] [2]. --Antiquary (talk) 11:43, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

How (if I might enquire) is Circe connected with fountains and/or poetry? Surely Deschamps is simply comparing Machaut to the fons et origo of lyrical (etc.) poetry, which now runs dry. The harps bring to mind the willows and waters of Babylon, ("where we sat down, and wept") and Saracen horns to rival that of Roland. Or maybe that was later... How much physical evidence is there for Dircé-Cirée? I am ignorant of the paleography. MinorProphet (talk) 13:15, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

It seems that Circé is the manuscript reading and Cirrée a conjectural emendation. I agree that Circé would be hard to explain. I can't find anyone since 1875 giving the first name as Dircé, so I presume it's a textual busted flush. --Antiquary (talk) 13:46, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Although I count myself as one of the world's worst poker players (Hint: not interested in winning OR money), one of my oldest mates still hates playing against me, because every deal I pretend I've got 4 aces, even if it's a pair of twos. Or nothing at all. (Answer: I'd rather be right, which tends to involve further dimensions). MinorProphet (talk) 15:35, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Two Potters - Beatrice Webb & Shena Simon

Were Beatrice Webb (née Potter) and Shena Simon (née Potter) related, and if so how? Thank you, DuncanHill (talk) 19:23, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

It's difficult to prove a negative but I doubt if they were, since the ODNB says Shena Simon's father was "a shipowner of Scottish descent", while Beatrice Webb's ancestry is traced by thepeerage.com back to John Potter (1691–1751), Yorkshireman. What's more, Beatrice Webb didn't write Squirrel Nutkin. I'm still trying to get over that discovery. --Antiquary (talk) 21:44, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Antiquary, in Martin Rowson's Scenes from the Lives of the Great Socialists (1983), there's a cartoon, originally in The New Statesman, showing a lady saying "Do you know, dear sweet Mister Stalin, that you are just exactly like funny old Jemima Puddleduck?" Stalin angrily replies "Pozhaluista?" and a bewhiskered man between them looks as if he wants to disappear into the carpet. The caption says Sidney Webb has, it would appear, absent-mindedly married the wrong Miss Potter. --ColinFine (talk) 16:13, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Also, Potter is a very common occupational surname.  --Lambiam 22:40, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks both. DuncanHill (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 00:29, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Very old portraits

I've been told that some Greek and Roman paintings show men with darker skin and women lighter. Is this clearly "the way it was done" or extrapolation from a too-small number of examples? Was the same done in other cultures, for example Egypt? Temerarius (talk) 20:25, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Yes! This was done in Greece, Rome, and Egypt, at least - I first noticed it when I visited the preserved brothel in Pompeii, the Lupanar. Mary Ann Eaverly talks about it in her book "Tan Men, Pale Women", in which she contends that it's because men were expected to be active and outdoors while women were expected to be indoors. Luisa Koala (talk) 21:34, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

However, in reality women are usually a little lighter-skinned than men of the same population (our article Human skin color says "Females evolved to have lighter skin so their bodies absorb more calcium"), but this difference has been exaggerated in various artistic conventions. I remember reading about one ancient Egyptian artwork in which the women were shown a little more whitish and the men a little more reddish (as was conventional), and when it came time to depict a eunuch, the artist used an intermediate shade! AnonMoos (talk) 22:30, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

The contrast is sometimes striking in old movies. —Tamfang (talk) 06:18, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

References

The two Miss Wrinklers

In Oliver Goldsmith's novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), the vicar and his family have fallen on hard times. Discussing potential future marriages of their daughters Sophia and Olivia, the vicar's wife says:

She hoped again to see the day in which we might hold up our heads with the best of them; and concluded, she protested she could see no reason why the two Miss Wrinklers should marry great fortunes, and her children get none. As this last argument was directed to me, I protested I could see no reason for it neither, nor why Mr Simpkins got the ten thousand pound prize in the lottery, and we sate down with a blank.

Regarding, "the two Miss Wrinklers", what does this mean? There is no character in the novel called Wrinkler. Is it a reference to a now obscure item of popular culture? A novel or mythology? Thuresson (talk) 22:18, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

I assume that in the novel it's the name of two young women who married wealthy husbands, but are otherwise not relevant to the plot. Doubt whether the name "Wrinkler" has any great significance -- it's mildly humorous, and perhaps suggests that the two women weren't great beauties... AnonMoos (talk) 22:23, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

It would seem not: the quoted passage is the only instance of "Wrinklers" in the book (and "Wrinkler" does not occur at all), which seems over-enigmatic if it's meant be internal to the novel only. My conjecture is that it may be a reference to characters from some other book, play etc., or even real life, popular or well-known at the time but since forgotten. A web search did not yield anything promising. {The poster formely known as 87.81.230.195} 90.197.26.5 (talk) 16:14, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

I suspect that you're over-thinking it... AnonMoos (talk) 17:14, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Most ambitious settler colonialist plans in modern/recent history?

Which settler colonialist plans were the most ambitious in modern/recent history? So far, I could think of:

• Zionism: There were very few Jews in Palestine in 1850 but over six million Jews in Israel and Palestine right now as a result of millions of Jews making aliyah to Israel and Palestine since 1880 or so.
• The Recovered Territories: Other than in Masuria and Upper Silesia, there were very few Poles in the Recovered Territories before World War II but several million Poles there right now. (The Czechoslovak, Lithuanian, and Russian post-World War II efforts to repopulate the Sudetenland, Memelland, and Kaliningrad Oblast with either Slavs or Lithuanians also fall into this category, but they were on a significantly smaller scale than for the Poles.)
• Nazi Germany's desire to conquer Lebensraum in Eastern Europe and to settle huge numbers of ethnic German Wehrbauer (soldier-peasants) there--though in its case, the problem was from where exactly Nazi Germany was actually supposed to get these surplus Germans?
• Manifest Destiny: The United States of America's desire to expand from sea to shining sea and to settle its newly acquired territory (especially, but not only, by White Americans) during the 19th century. This is closely related to the concept of the American frontier.

There were also some other events, such as the massive population transfers in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, but AFAIK, these didn't really have a desire to alter the demographics of the recipient territory. So, for instance, when Stalin was deporting Soviet Germans to Siberia and Central Asia, he wasn't actually trying to Germanize these territories but rather to reduce the risk of German subversive activities. Ditto for Stalin deporting the Koryo-saram to Central Asia in 1937-1938, et cetera.

Anyway, which additional examples of this can you think of? Futurist110 (talk) 23:17, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Calling Manifest destiny a "plan" exaggerates its role; it was really a justification for what the U.S. was already doing. But you can look at the ambitions of the "Knights of the Golden Circle", and the British Cape-to-Cairo ambitions which Cecil Rhodes and a few others obessed over... AnonMoos (talk) 23:44, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Some aspects of Manifest Destiny could involve conscious planning, such as the Louisiana Purchase, Adams-Onis Treaty (purchasing Florida), the splitting of Oregon Country down the middle (with the United States of America getting the southern half of Oregon Country) with the 1846 Anglo-American Oregon Treaty, and the Mexican-American War and the resulting Mexican Cession. As for the Knights of the Golden Circle, Yes, that could work if this if these plans actually involved large-scale settler colonialism--presumably of White American slaveowners and their slaves, along with perhaps some yeoman farmers--similar to what previously happened in Mexican Texas in the early 19th century. The Cape-to-Cairo Railway doesn't really work for this since this didn't actually involve any plans for settler colonialism on a huge scale, though. Futurist110 (talk) 00:14, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

That's what I meant -- the Louisiana Purchase basically took place before manifest destiny was formulated as a self-conscious ideology (certainly at least four decades before the term "manifest destiny" itself was coined). AnonMoos (talk) 17:10, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

P.S. I bet that the Cape-to-Cairo enthusiasts had their eye on a few regions whose climate was suitable for European settlement, such as the "White Highlands"... AnonMoos (talk) 17:21, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

• The Population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923 was a MASSIVE undertaking, affecting 1.6 million people in a very short period of time. --Jayron32 14:18, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Partition of India mentions 14.5 million people resettled following that event. --Jayron32 14:56, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Yep. Futurist110 (talk) 03:33, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Han migration into Tibet and Xinjiang? DOR (HK) (talk) 01:35, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Xinjiang might have been pretty ambitious, but AFAIK Tibet is still over 90% Tibetan even nowadays. Futurist110 (talk) 03:33, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

If we're talking about modern state supported internal migrations, these often get complicated. For examples Indonesia's transmigration program has resulted in significant demographic changes in some areas, something which has undoubtedly been of benefit to the central government, but it's questionable if this was the primary reason for the program throughout most of its life. However I also find out unlikely that the demographical change benefits weren't considered by at least some people in government in the post independence period. Nil Einne (talk) 08:03, 7 December 2020 (UTC)