Ink May Have Poisoned Monks

This article spawned in me a very nerdy research binge.

Consider yourself warned.

From discovery.com: Biblical Text-Writing May Have Poisoned Monks.

June 27, 2008 — Medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries reveal that monks who wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials may have been exposed to toxic mercury, which was used to formulate just one of their ink colors: red.

The study, which will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, also describes a previously undocumented disease, called FOS, which was like leprosy and caused skull lesions. Additionally, the researchers found that mercury-containing medicine had been administered to 79 percent of the interred individuals with leprosy and 35 percent with syphilis.

Since the monks, who were buried in the cloister walk of the Cistercian Abbey at Øm, did not have these diseases but contained mercury in their bones, scientists believe the monks were either contaminated while preparing and administering medicines, or while writing the artistic letters of incunabula, or pre-1500 A.D. books.

Kaare Lund Rasmussen, a University of Southern Denmark scientist at the Institute of Physics and Chemistry, suspects that ink used in the abbey’s scriptorium was the culprit.

Continue reading at Discovery News

Also, be sure to take a look at the related links provided by the site.

Odysseus’ Bloody Homecoming Dated to 1178 B.C.

It has been quite a long time since I have found the time to post here, but when I found this article I felt a strong urge to brush the dust of the ol’ blog and continue sharing again.

This is pretty cool.  I love to see developments like this.  It always motivates me to pick up an old favorite and look at it in a new way.

“Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.

It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers say in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Experts have long debated whether the books of Homer reflect the actual history of the Trojan War and its aftermath.

Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina, acknowledge they had to make some assumptions to determine the date Odysseus returned to his kingdom of Ithaca.

But interpreting clues in Homer’s “Odyssey” as references to the positions of stars and a total eclipse of the sun allowed them to determine when a particular set of conditions would have occurred.

“What we’d like to achieve is to get the reader to pick up the ‘Odyssey’ and read it again, and ponder,” said Magnasco. “And to realize that our understanding of these texts is quite imperfect, and even when entire libraries have been written about Homeric studies, there is still room for further investigation.”

Their study potentially adds…”

Full article at: Odysseus’ Bloody Homecoming Dated to 1178 B.C..

Shakespeare was a political rebel who wrote in code, claims author

From The Guardian: Shakespeare was a political rebel who wrote in code, claims author.

A code-breaking book which aims to change the image of William Shakespeare and reveal him as a subversive who embedded dangerous political messages in his work is to be published in Britain.

Far from being an ambitious entertainer who played down his Catholic roots under a repressive Elizabethan regime, Shakespeare took deliberate risks each time he took up his quill, according to Clare Asquith’s new book Shadowplay. She argues that the plays and poems are a network of crossword puzzle-like clues to his strong Catholic beliefs and his fears for England’s future. Aside from being the first to spot this daring Shakespearean code, Asquith also claims to be the first to have cracked it.

‘It has not been picked up on before because people have not had the complete context,’ she explained this weekend. ‘I am braced for flak, but we now know we have had the history from that period wrong for a long time because we have seen it through the eyes of the Protestant, Whig ascendancy who, after all, have written the history.’ [continue]

Related links:
The Catholic Bard – Commonweal Magazine
The Shakespeare Plot – The Weekly Standard
Shakespeare, the secret rebel – Macleans
The brightest heaven of invention The Tablet
The religion of Shakespeare – Catholic Encyclopedia

The book:
Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare – amazon.ca