Category: Modern(ish)

Princess vs. Countess: a topless duel over flowers

Modern(ish)

In August of 1892, a duel took place in Liechtenstein. The two adversaries took the field armed with rapiers to take satisfaction in blood over an unpardonable outrage: a dispute over a flower arrangement.

The precise nature of the disagreement has been lost in the mists of time. All we know is that Princess Pauline Metternich, granddaughter of Napoleonic-era Austrian statesman Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, and Countess Anastasia Kilmannsegg, wife of the Statthalter of Lower Austria, had conflicting visions of how the flowers should be arranged at the Viennese International Exhibition of Music and Theater of 1892. Both of the ladies were high society fixtures in Paris and Vienna of the late 19th century. Both of them volunteered for a number of charitable organizations and were active supporters of the arts.

The Internationale Musik und Theaterwesenausstellung was the artistic event of fin de siècle Vienna, and while little remembered today, its influence was enormous and has played a foundational role in the perception of musical culture extending to the present. Inspired by the madly popular trend for world fairs launched by the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, the Viennese International Exhibition was a showcase of the greatest music Europe’s most musical city could offer and the first large-scale marketing blitz to monetize and promote that artistic output. It was the first and only world’s fair ever to focus exclusively on music and theater, and the very idea of “classical music,” defined as European music from the mid-16th century through the end of the 19th, was birthed there on May 7th, 1892. By the time the exhibition ended on October 9th, the notion was firmly established, as was the image of Vienna as the capital of European music.

Princess Pauline and Countess Kilmannsegg held important volunteer positions at this once-in-a-lifetime event. The Princess served as Honorary President, the Countess as President of the Ladies Committee. It was the Princess’ idea, in fact, the expand the purview of the festival to cover theater as well as music, and to make it international (in the Eurocentric sense) instead of a the original idea which was a far more modest exhibition dedicated to the history of Austrian music. Because of her operas like Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana were staged to great acclaim at the Exhibition. (Not in a single bill together, though. The classic CavPag pairing debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York a year later.)

The Princess also founded the Flower Parade down the main street of the Prater, a tradition she began in 1886 that continues to this day, and she was described in one paper (before the duel) as “having inherited a courage which borders on insanity from her father, Count Sandor, who was famous for his hair-brained extravagances.” So maybe that explains why whatever the Countess had to say about the flower arrangements at the International Exhibition so deeply appalled the Princess and why she was willing to take it to the point of bloodshed.

Princess Pauline Metternich, then 56 years of age and so great a doyenne in Austrian society that she was held in far higher social regard than the Empress Elizabeth, challenged Countess Kilmannsegg to a duel. As dueling was illegal in Austria, they and their seconds Princess Schwarzenberg and Countess Kinsky respectively, went to Vaduz, capital of Liechtenstein, to let their rapiers do the talking.

Presiding over the encounter was Baroness Lubinska, a Polish noblewoman who had been sent for from Warsaw to oversee the violence. The Baroness was a medical doctor, a rarity for women at that time, and rarer than that, she practiced Listerite principles. This was an important asset for someone who might have to field-dress rapier wounds. The Baroness had seen first-hand how easily infection could set in with even superficial cuts in battle because dirty clothes would be stabbed into the wound and make it fester, so she told the male footmen and coachman to turn around and ordered the dueling parties to strip to the waist.

This was not to be a duel to the death. The aim was first blood only. Princess Metternich and Countess Kilmannsegg, both topless, picked up their rapiers and engaged. After a few exchanges, one received a small cut to the nose, the other one to the arm. Contemporary reports, sparse on detail, are inconsistent about which one of them took which blow. Either way, first blood had been drawn by Princess Metternich. She was declared the winner and fighting ceased. The doctor dressed their wounds and the seconds suggested the ladies embrace and kiss. They did so and thus ended the great Topless Flower Arrangement Duel of 1892.

The encounter caused a sensation. It became known as the Emancipated Duel and scenes of topless women swordfighting became very popular on stage, screen and in naughty postcards.

EDIT: Darnit, too many smart people read this blog. It seems there is no hard evidence for this duel ever having taken place. The contemporary accounts were basically gossip. I can’t help but hope that the Princess denied it happened to preserve her privacy. Yeah, that’s the ticket. PISTOLES AT DAWN for anyone who tries to persuade me otherwise.

Medieval Irish Avicenna fragment found in English book

Medieval, Modern(ish)

A fragment of a medieval manuscript used in the binding of a printed book has been identified as a unique Irish-language translation of a medical compendium by the great Islamic philosopher and physician Avicenna. Written on vellum in the 15th century, the fragment was part of a manuscript of Book 1 of The Canon of Medicine, a five-volume overview of medical knowledge in the Islamic world written in 1025 by Persian physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna in the Latinized version). The fragment is small, consisting of parts of descriptions of the physiology of the jaws, nose and back. It is an Irish translation of the Latin version of the text translated from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona in the 13th century. This fragment is the only known example of Avicenna’s Canon in Irish.

The ‘Canon of Medicine’ was a great medical encyclopedia which, through translation into Latin (from which the Irish text itself is translated), achieved great popularity in Europe, where state-of-the-art medical theory and practice in medieval times had their origins in the Muslim world. The Irish fragment contains parts of the opening chapters on the physiology of the jaws, the nose and the back. The existence of this text was not hitherto known in Ireland.

Medical scholarship in medieval Gaelic Ireland was on a par with that practised on the Continent and was the most outward-looking of all the native branches of learning. There is evidence of Irish scholars travelling to European medical schools, and bringing their learning back to the medical schools of Ireland.

A century later, a sheet of the manuscript was heavily trimmed along the top and sides, sheering off a significant portion of the text, and folded four times to be used as a bifolium cover of a printed book. The book, a Latin manual of local administration, was printed and bound in London between 1534 and 1536. Since that time, it has been in the possession of a single English family, amazingly enough.

Professor Pádraig Ó Macháin of the University College Cork found about the existence of this volume and as an Irish professor, was intrigued by the Irish language sheet.

“The use of parchment cut from old manuscripts as a binding for later books is not unusual in the European tradition,” says Ó Macháin, “but this is the first time that a case has come to light of such a clear example of the practice in a Gaelic context.” From photographs of the binding supplied by the owners, Prof. Ó Macháin established that the Irish text was a medical one. “A quarter of what survives of late-medieval manuscripts in the Irish language is medical in content,” says Ó Macháin, “an indication of the practical purpose of these books in Ireland of the time.”

Professor Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, who bears the indisputably awesome distinction of being “the only living expert on medieval Irish medicine,” identified it as Avicenna’s classic tome. Persuaded by its unique importance in the history of Irish philology, books and medicine, the owners of the book agreed to allow the vellum sheet to be removed and the book rebound sans its priceless structural captive.

John Gillis of Trinity College Dublin removed the manuscript fragment from the binding, flattened the folds and conserved it as a single sheet. The fragment has been digitized and uploaded to the Irish Script on Screen website.

American whaler rock art found in northwest Australia

Modern(ish)

Researchers have discovered rock engravings left by American whalers on two islands in northwestern Australia. Left by sailors on the whaling ships Connecticut and Delta in the mid-19th century, they are the earliest archaeological evidence of the presence of Americans in northwest Australia.

The inscriptions were found by a team from the Centre for Rock Art Research + Management documenting the Aboriginal Australian occupation of the Dampier Archipelago. There are archaeological remains on the islands of the archipelago indicating human occupation going back 50,000 years, and Aboriginal petroglyphs abound. When the American whalers followed migrating herds of humpbacks to the Dampier Archipelago, the sailors left their marks over earlier indigenous rock art.

We know from a few surviving ship logbooks that foreign whaling ships were plying their bloody trade in the area as early as 1801, six decades before the British established permanent colonies on the islands. The indigenous residents, the Yaburara people, were devastated by clashes with the colonists and their oral histories and knowledge of life before colonization were devastated along with them. Their rock art is an important and rare surviving cultural record. The mixture of earlier Yaburara petroglyphs with pre-colonization but post-contact inscriptions from whalers sheds light on little-known period of transition.

The inscriptions were found on Rosemary and West Lewis Islands. The one on Rosemary was left by sailors on the Connecticut in 1842, engraved on a basalt stone on a high ridgeline overlooking the coast. The site had a great view for whale watching, and the Aboriginal people who lived there for thousands of years left more than 265 rock art panels and more than 70 standing stones. Of more than 800 motifs recorded in the petroglyphs in this area, 81 of them are grids, vertical and horizontal lines intersecting like graph paper.

Over this grid, the whalers engraved the following:

Sailed August 12th
1841
And This Was Right? [written] August 18th 1842
JACOB ANDERSON
New London
IN THE SHP
CONNECTICUT of
New London
cpt D – CROKER
CAPT D CROCKER
12 mths out? 18[4]1

The logbook of the Connecticut has not survived, but other records note that it was a 398-ton bark that departed New London with a crew of 26. Daniel Crocker, 33 years of age, was the captain. Jacob Anderson was an 18-year-old New Londoner of “black complexion.” (Black men were common in whaling crews by the mid-19th century. Records show that by the end of the 1850s, one in six whalers were described as African-American.) It returned to New London on June 16th, 1843, carrying 1800 barrels of whale oil.

The engravings by the crew of the Delta are much less formal. They consist of the name of the ship (repeated in different hands), the date, initials and the name J. Leek. They were found on the headland of West Lewis Island, again superimposed over pre-existing rock art. The logbook of this voyage has survived, so we know that the Delta, commanded by Captain David Weeks, was working the area in spring and summer of 1849, and that crews would go ashore often to collect water and wood, to hunt or enjoy “liberty” time.

Although there is no specific mention in any of the ships’ logbooks of encounters with Aboriginal people in the Dampier Archipelago, the whalemen’s inscriptions are significant, as “they are an indication of cultural contact at a time when very little colonial development had occurred in that part of Australia,” says Jason Raup, a maritime archaeologist at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.

It’s “fantastic” to have found inscriptions from around the time of first contact with the islands’ Yaburara people, agrees Peter Jeffries, a local elder and CEO of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation. He says a number of Aboriginal petroglyphs across the region may depict first contact. These include possible depictions of ships with sails and a sailor with a hat that has “pointy ends,” which was typical for naval dress of that period.

Oldest tattoo tool in North America identified

Ancient, Modern(ish)


An artifact stored in the Washington State University (WSU) Museum of Anthropology for 40 years has been identified as the oldest tattooing device in North America. The tool, two prickly pear cactus spines inserted into the soft middle of a lemonade sumac stem and bound with yucca leaf strips, was excavated in 1972 from a midden at the Turkey Pen site in the Greater Bears Ears Landscape of southeastern Utah. One of the points of the spines was broken off, which is probably why it was discarded into the midden pile. Coprolites and corn cobbs in the midden layer that included the artifact were radiocarbon dated to a range of 79-130 A.D. during the Basketmaker II period (ca. 500 B.C. – 500 A.D.).

There are historical accounts of tattooing practices in Native American peoples of the southwest after the arrival of Europeans, but colonial authorities generally considered it a barbarous cultural expression and suppressed it actively. It was poorly documented and traditional tattooing was frequently prohibited. It largely died out in North America after European contact.

Evidence of indigenous tattooing before that is very slim. No tattoos have been found on pre-contact mummified human remains and there are no ancient written accounts of the practice. Rare surviving tattoo tools and depictions in ancient iconography are all scholars have had to go on when studying body modification and adornment in southwestern Native American cultures before they were disrupted by European colonization, and it’s unclear whether the artworks depict tattoos, body paint or scarification.

The device was discovered by WSU anthropology PhD candidate Andrew Gillreath-Brown during an inventory of the Turkey Pen material. Cactus spine tattoo tools have been found before at Native American sites in Arizona and New Mexico, but the oldest of them date to between 1100-1280 A.D. This device looked like ones found elsewhere in the southwest only it was used a thousand years before them.

The tool consists of a 3 ½ inch wooden skunkbush sumac handle bound at the end with split yucca leaves and holding two parallel cactus spines, stained black at their tips.

“The residue staining from tattoo pigments on the tip was what immediately piqued my interest as being possibly a tattoo tool,” Gillreath-Brown said.

Encouraged by Aaron Deter-Wolf, a friend and co-author of the study who has done studies on ancient tattooing and edited several books on the subject, Gillreath-Brown analyzed the tips with a scanning electron microscope, X-ray florescence and energy dispersive ray spectroscopy. For good measure, he did several test tattoos using a replica on pig skin.

He saw the crystalline structure of pigment and determined it likely contained carbon, a common element in body painting and tattooing.

The find, said Gillreath-Brown, “has a great significance for understanding how people managed relationships and how status may have been marked on people in the past during a time when population densities were increasing in the Southwest.”

The study has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports and can be read in its entirety for free online.

Restorative deboning at iconic Czech bone chapel

Medieval, Modern(ish)

The Sedlec Abbey ossuary in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic, is known worldwide for its extravagant towers, massive central chandelier and decorative flourishes constructed of human bone. The Sedlec Ossuary is one of the greatest tourist draws in the Czech Republic, attracting a half million visitors a year.

The church was originally built around 1400 after the monastery’s cemetery became a major regional draw due to its having been sprinkled with soil from Golgotha in the 13th century. Death’s rich harvest during the Bubonic Plague of the mid-14th century and the Hussite Wars 50 years later gave the cemetery more business than it could handle, and the church included an ossuary on the lower level so bones could be stored to make room for new graves.

For hundreds of years monks collected bones in stacks in the ossuary, but the artistic bone structures as they exist today were created by woodcarver Frantisek Rint in 1870. (He signed his work, yes, in bone.) It’s estimated that the skeletons of 40,000-70,000 individuals, 60,000 or so skulls and 450,000 long bones, were used to create four large pyramidal mounds in each corner of the chapel and the other decorations in the nave and on the walls.

Now those famous pyramids are being dismantled as part of a major restoration project to repair structural issues of the mounds and of the church building itself. Without dismantling the pyramids, it’s not possible to repair plaster walls, floors and windows and dehumidify the space.

Restorers began to dismantle the first of the four pyramids in November. The bones are being placed in paper boxes one at a time and removed to a conservation laboratory where each bone will be surface cleaned, soaked in a weak lime solution and dried. They won’t be scoured or even cleaned as thoroughly as restorers cleaned the hanging elements like the chandelier and the Schwarzenberg coat of arms

The biggest concern is that over time the pyramids have suffered damage at the base. The deformation of the lower layers poses a danger to the entire structure and the deconstruction will hopefully help identify the root cause of the problem. It could largely be a matter of weight, the towers being too massive for the bones on the bottom to bear. Endemic mold and moisture also play a part.

It’s already clear that some of the bones have been irreparably damaged by moisture and will have to be replaced. What material will be used is undetermined at this juncture. Bones from a neighboring church with a small ossuary could be borrowed, or copies could be made out of mineral materials.

In order to rebuild the pyramids so they look exactly the same as they used to, experts will have to replace and shore up damaged parts in ways that do not alter the original design. The firm Nase Historie has been engaged to scan the bone towers using photogrammetry, thousands of high-resolution images mapped and stitched together to create an extremely accurate 3D model.

Conservators estimate that it will take at least four months to dismantle each tower, but that’s speculative at this point. Nobody really knows what’s in these pyramids, the real number of bones, whether there is any debris or osseous material shoring up the intact bones. Being able to count precisely how many bones were used to create these towers is another unique opportunity afforded by the restoration project.

As restorers work on the towers, visitors continue to be allowed access to the chapel. A dust-proof barrier separates the pyramids and chapel, but there are windows in it to give people a chance to see the reconstruction.