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Extremely rare medieval manuscript

In the end of the 14th century a new musical style emerged. Specialists call it ars subtilior. It is of extremely complex and experimental nature, hard to sing and produce and with super refined musical notation. Obviously, only a small circle of true composers and music lovers could enjoy this musical style. Overall, it was the avant-garde music of the late medieval period. However, as a specialist and web analyst I find some controversy in this issue. Even though the ars subtilior music is highly refined, it was not merely a dead-end artistic movement.  Even more, it seems that some of ars subtilior music was widely known and distributed because many of the devices first used by its composers became standard compositional techniques in the Renaissance.

The center of ars subtilior was Avignon when it was a residence of a Pope who was fighting the opposing fraction in Rome headed by another Pope. From Avignon this musical style spread to Southern France, Paris and Northern Spain.  In the beginning of the 15th century it reached England and established itself there too. Ars subtilior music was exclusively secular. Its songs were telling of courtly love, war, chivalry and even praise of public figures.

The majority of what we know about ars subtilior French composers comes from a single invaluable and extremely rare medieval manuscript the Chantilly Codex.  It is the most important source of information, because we don’t know anything else about many of these music creators, including their biographies, dates of life and death. Brief texts that accompany the music and some of its lyrics allowed us to discover great composers of that time like Solage, Borlet, Grimace, Trebor, Senleches and others. The Chantilly Codex contains 112 polyphonic pieces, mostly ballads, motets, and rondeaus, that represent the most popular courtly dance styles of its time.

First ancient manuscripts

Originally, all documents and books were written by hand.  This type of manuscripts lasted until the invention of printing in China in the 7th century and later in Europe in about 1450.  The material used for hand-written ancient manuscripts differed depending on the geographical location.  The ones that were preserved till our days included papyrus, various parchments, and even palm leaves and birch bark documents.

First ancient manuscripts were discovered in Egyptian tombs and mausoleums. They were either located inside the sarcophagi or even reused as  mummy wrappings.  Archeologists and adventurers were discovering scrolls of manuscripts in bizarre places like dry caves, desert burials, or within the secretly buried jars.

The world of antiquity was famous for its large libraries, the most famous and largest of which was the  Library of Alexandria.  There is a certain irony that most of the scrolls that were kept in these huge storage all over the ancient world were lost forever. They were either burnt in fire or destroyed during wars and turmoil.

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Ancient Bestseller

There were the product of collaboration of various scribes and artists whose work was pasted together and then produced in some kind of funerary workshops, that predate funeral homes. It seems that the book of the dead was extremely expensive and had to be prepaid before the persons' death.  It is interesting to note that the value of the book was so high not because of the spells pasted there but due to high value of the blank papyrus.  No wonder, that some of the discovered papyrus funeral resolutions were reused.

When specialists started finding in quantities the book of the dead, they mistakenly assumed that it had extreme religious importance to ancient Egyptians. Some even proclaimed that it was the "Bible" of ancient Egypt.  However, this was not the case.  Ancients did not consider it a divine source, which led to the changes of some texts as the time went by.  But it was popular reading for them because it remained an ancient bestseller until ancient Romans conquered Egypt.

Famous Book of the Dead

In the middle of 19th century European learned about very complex and sophisticated concept of afterlife that existed in ancient Egypt.  In 1842 when German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius published the selection of texts that included Egyptian collection of funeral hymns, spells, and instructions to allow the deceased to pass through obstacles in the afterlife. The book became an instant bestseller and part of its fame belongs to the title that Lepsius gave to the selected manuscripts. He simply called them - "The Book of the Dead", deriving the name from the one of the most important spells in the ancient texts.

The original texts that were included in the book of the dead were most commonly found in the coffin or burial chamber of the deceased ancient Egyptian. There were written on the papyrus scrolls. Archeologists learned that these "prequels" of funeral poems were created in advance with with spaces being left for the name of the deceased to be written in later.

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Fans of conspiracy theories

It seems that everything Google has instant first love attraction. Sometimes we even see things that don’t exist because of that kind of trust we have in the number 1 search engine company.  I am talking about the recent "discovery" of Atlantis.

It all started when some Big Foot believer from United Kingdom was spending too much time on Google Earth.  Mind you, the guy, whose name is Bernie Bamford, is an aeronautical engineer.  While browsing the wondrous software, that recently added above and below ocean views, he observed a grid of lines near the coast of West Africa.

What would you do next? Probably, nothing.  Well, Bernie called tabloid Sun paper and proclaimed that he just discovered lost Atlantis! Why, Atlantis? Because wise Plato mentioned its location somewhere nearby a couple of thousand years ago.

 A number of other newspapers kept printing articles left and right about the discovery. Even after Google stated that the lines Bernie had seen, represented sonar data collected from boats.  That lade to a new salvo of articles hinting that Google "hides" something from general public.

You just can’t please them all. Say no to Lemuria searchers, and you immediately have to deal with the fans of conspiracy theories.  Why would Google hide Atlantis? After all, thanks to Google Earth, experts already discovered pristine forest in Mozambique and an ancient Roman villa.

 

Manuscript of Mesoamerican rituals and life

The invasion of conquistadors to America resulted in almost total destroyal of documents and manuscripts of Mesoamerican rituals and life.  One of a little few that survived the ordeal is located in the Apostolic Library of Vatican.  Specialists call this famous manuscript  Codex Borgia  - it consists of 39 sheets of made of the animal skin.  All sheets except one are painted on both sides. Up to this day Codex Borgia remains an enigma: nobody knows its origin, although many believe that it came from someplace on the territory of the modern Mexican state Puebla.

The discovery of the manuscript is interesting story by itself. It seems that the document was brought from America to Italy during early  Spanish colonial period. The last owner of the manuscript was Italian cardinal Stefano Borgia (which explains the name of the codex).  Borgia was a well-known theologian, antiquarian, and historian of the 18th century.  When he died in 1804 he left the treasure of invaluable artifacts that he collected throughout his life.  Alexander von Humboldt, extraordinary German naturalist and explorer, due to his greatness was allowed by Vatican to organize the artifacts in 1805.  This is where Alexander  discovered the enigmatic document and realized its importance, as he traveled so many times to America with research expeditions.

Even now specialists can not claim that they decoded every piece of the codex correctly because  nobody can understand the ways of ancient Aztec priests.  Thus, the largest part of the great manuscript contains the whole story with rituals, ball games and historical events that are not decoded. And up to this day the longest sequence in the document remains a mystery.

 

Unusual and bizarre aristocrat

Lord Rokeby refused to have a fire in his house even in the coldest weather. He grew an immense and bizarre looking beard, that was not in fashion at any times Thick beard stuck out under his arms and could be seen from behind. A couple of years later he built a swimming pool under glass which was heated only by the sun. There he spent most of the time, preferably alone.

In the end his neighbors and other locals became scared of him because his increased isolation gave birth to all kind of rumors. One of them was that Lord Rokeby became a cannibal and ate only raw meat. But, in fact he rarely ate meat at all and refused to see any doctors. He did not go to church either because he complained that sermons were boring and that he preferred to worship God at natural altar of the earth, sea and the sky.

He never married. On the extremely rare occasions when Matthew had to accept visitors he tried to get rid of them fast by entertaining them with lengthy boring poems. All his aristocratic relatives were ashamed of him, especially during his occasional visits to court. His presence usually gathered big crowds of people on the streets who thought that Matthew was an ambassador of Turkey - because of his unusual appearance.

Midlife crisis

In the 18th English nobleman Matthew Robinson suddenly became a big supporter of baths. He was born in the aristocratic family and later inherited a title of Lord Rokeby. Matthew was acting normal for the first part of his life but later changed his ways and became quite an eccentric. We don’t know what happened, it might well be midlife crisis. We just know when his eccentricity originated. When Matthew inherited big estate new Canterbury. That is when he became an extreme enthusiast about baths.

This passion was definitely very bizarre even for our modern times, so you might imagine how it looked like in the eighteenth century. Lord Rokeby daily went to the seashore to swim in salt water regardless of the weather. He spent so much time there that sometimes he even fainted and had to be rescued. Most of the times his servants had to come to the seashore to convince Matthew to return back home. Along the route to the beach he built drinking fountains and in the end of the road, right on the seashore he built a hut. His servants would follow Lord Rokeby in the carriage with full livery while he walked all the way to the hut. And if he noticed a person drinking from his fountain, he would give him a tip.

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Opponent of the Spiritualist movement

For many years Conan Doyle was friends with the famous American escape artist and magician Harry Houdini. Unlike the famous writer, Houdini was an opponent of the Spiritualist movement. His contempt for Spiritualism even doubled in the 1920s when his mother died. He was touring America and Europe making public speeches against mediums.

Houdini made his goal to publicly expose Spiritualist mediums as frauds and presented many examples as proof that they employed trickery fooling gullible people. But for some reason Houdini’s efforts had an opposite effect on his friend Conan Doyle. The famous author became utterly convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers. Conan Doyle even wrote a book about it. No matter how hard Houdini tried, he could not dissuade Conan Doyle. Harry unsuccessfully tried his best convincing Conan Doyle that his feats were simply magic tricks. In the end two friends had a bitter quarrel in public. This even ended their friendship and they never spoke to each other again.

Conan Doyle fell the victim to the Spiritualism

Great British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most successful writers in the beginning of the twentieth century. His most famous work - stories about detective Sherlock Holmes brought him fame and fortune. As we know, Sherlock was a hard core realist and intellectual who relied on the method of “deductive reasoning”. This helped him to solve any case of crime no matter how weird, bizarre or fantastic it looked.

Unfortunately Sherlock’s creator himself in the second half of his life did not follow the steps of his hero. Conan Doyle fell the victim to the Spiritualism. The reason for this were very tragic events in his family that affected and traumatized Doyle on the deep personal level. His beloved wife Louisa died in 1906. Some years later other started happening one after the other. Doyle lost one by one his son Kingsley, his brother Innes, his two brothers-in-law, and his two nephews. After World War I, because of these unfortunate and sad deaths, Conan Doyle sank into deep depression. So it happened that the only solace he found was Spiritualism and its alleged scientific proof of existence beyond the grave.