(School of English Literature, University of Sheffield)
Joan of Arc is as much an artistic muse as she is an historical figure, a view widely reflected in critical discussion on her persistence in the cultural imagination. In her study, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, Marina Warner writes:
[Joan] is literally a cypher. Just as a feather in the cap, green doublet and hose and a merry gallantry signify the figure of Robin Hood, so Joan is instantly present in the mind’s eye: a boyish stance, cropped hair, medievalised clothes, armour an air of spiritual exaltation mixed with physical courage.
Warner’s reading neatly encapsulates the notion that there is an idea of Joan of Arc, one based upon consensually recognised aspects of her hagiography and iconography. Building upon the premise of a female acolyte of God sent to save medieval France in its hour of need, artists rework new versions of her character and narrative to fit their various political agendas. As Susan Hayward writes, ‘[…] each interpretation is designed to suit the ideological cloth of either the filmmaker or the nation producing the film.’
In 1916, America was on the brink of entering the First World War, a conflict that isolationists, opposed to military intervention, argued was Europe’s war and thus not a responsibility of the United States. This sentiment was captured in the rhetoric of the year’s Presidential election, where the re-elected incumbent Woodrow Wilson ran on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Cecil B. DeMille and his screenwriting collaborator Jeannie MacPherson thought differently. Strident internationalists, they made a film that adapted the tale of Joan of Arc to promote America’s entry to the war. This production, Joan the Woman, presages the use of the heroine’s icon and associated message on stamps issued by the U.S. treasury department in 1918. Here, the American government encouraged the nation’s women to do as Joan did and lead their men into battle, not through literal combat, but rather through the purchase of stamps (fig. 1). Joan of Arc’s revolutionary connotations make her a proxy representation of the mutual values of liberty shared by America and France, as cemented in The Statue of liberty [which France gifted to the U.S. in 1886]. Thus, an attack of these is an attack on the very virtues set out by the founding fathers in The Declaration of Independence. The poster’s appeal for women to invest in the war effort by providing additional sources of capital consigns them to the passive role of fundraisers rather than active combatants. It encapsulates the contradictory virtues espoused through the Joan icon in the cultural milieu of DeMille’s production. This paper considers how the eponymous Joan the Woman serves as a pacified mascot for limited female participation in the war effort, a representation of women in war consistent with a trend of heritage melodramas that DeMille and MacPherson replicated in their subsequent film collaborations.
Defining the Heritage Melodrama
The term ‘heritage melodrama’ is not widely used in film criticism. Instead, it is one that I have coined as an appropriate descriptor for DeMille and MacPherson’s allegorical approach to depicting American-European encounters. In essence, it is intended to encapsulate how the filmmakers use the conventions of melodrama to perpetuate themes of American heritage and its geopolitical role on the world stage, especially during and immediately following the First World War. First, one must define heritage melodrama’s constituent terms. So, what exactly is cinematic melodrama?
Established criticism overwhelmingly aligns the mode with representations of gender. Writing on Hollywood films released between 1910 and the onset of the Second World War, E. Ann Kaplan makes a distinction between what she calls early maternal melodrama and the woman’s film. She argues that the former is an outgrowth of the literary melodrama and the latter of the domestic novel (or women’s fiction). Both types of films, according to Kaplan, are subversive in different ways, and both address different audiences: melodrama (male and female) and woman’s film (female). Emphasising the distinction between them, she writes:
It is significant that in general the woman’s film, by virtue of being a resisting form, shows more sensitivity to social concerns than does the maternal melodrama, which situates itself more firmly in the terrain of unconscious Oedipal needs, fears and desires. The woman’s film on the other hand put more stress on the cognitive/conscious level, often foregrounding sociological issues and dealing more frequently with social institutions.
Kaplan’s diagnosis of cinematic aims and conventions is insightful in its suggestion of their subversive functions. Her idea that the woman’s film was distinct in style, subject matter, and target audience is an important and valid nuance that reflects how, on the whole, male audiences would not relate to the inbuilt injustices of American society during the Progressive Era (1890-1920). During this period, Hollywood cinema was dominated by films that foregrounded the sociological issues Kaplan speaks of, that of everyday struggles that were more immediately relatable to the female social experience than the male. As Mintz, Roberts, and Welky argue, so many films of the Progressive Era dealt with themes of prostitution, abortion, and women’s suffrage, in a way that ‘[…] transformed complex social issues into personal melodramas.’ In contrast to Kaplan, then, Mintz et. al view melodrama to be a broader style of pathos that foregrounds the film’s sociological context and the protagonist’s relation to it. Kaplan’s division of attributes between the labels of melodrama and the woman’s film is not especially useful in the context of DeMille and MacPherson’s productions. In their films, the characteristics Kaplan describes are interchangeable and extant within individual texts; and, most importantly, the nature of the sociological becomes fundamentally transformed by the context of war and its centrality to the problems faced by the characters.
In her reconsideration of melodrama, Linda Williams re-emphasises the term’s unconscious and sociological attributes by aligning it with cinematically constructed notions of national identity. She writes:
Melodrama is the fundamental mode of popular American moving pictures. It is not a specific genre like the western or horror film; it is not a “deviation” of the classical realist narrative; it cannot be located primarily in woman’s films, “weepies,” or family melodramas – though it includes them. Rather, melodrama is a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action. It is the foundation of the classical Hollywood movie.
Significantly, Williams aligns melodrama with the style of filmmaking that dominated Hollywood’s classical era. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson have defined classical Hollywood style as lasting between 1917 and the early 1960s. It deployed techniques of filmmaking that maintained realism and foregrounded the experience of the narrator as hero and the viewer as spectator with clear and direct access to the events being portrayed on screen. Nickolas Haydock captures critical sentiment on the style well, writing:
The classic Hollywood style produces a movie to be looked through, not at. Film editing, shot protocols, music, lighting, and dialogue propel viewers through the story without calling attention to its construction, thereby rendering the simple joys of escapist fantasy through a coherent and uninterrupted diegesis.
The conditions of the classical style help to explain a lot about the narrative logic of the melodrama. By emphasising a dialectic of pathos and action, Williams extends the observations of Mintz et. al to suggest an intriguing tension between sentimental appeal and spectacular action. This is especially useful when one considers the interplay between melodrama and national identity in collaborations between the director DeMille and the screenwriter MacPherson. A whole host of their films produced between 1916 and 1920 centre on female protagonists who react to the dispatch of troops to war, men who are their sons, husbands, and lovers. They combine action-orientated narratives that, as Steve Neale has identified, would become more typical of the battle sequences seen in male-dominated war films of classical Hollywood with the nuanced character dramas of the woman’s film that Kaplan refers to. In DeMille’s The Little American, for example, we encounter the heroine in a series of action sequences caused by the circumstances of the wartime conflict and, often, the resolution to these encounters can be found through sentimental or emotive appeal, either on behalf of the characters or the filmmakers. When faced with attack by German U-boats, the protagonist attempts to reason, appealing to the hostile party’s emotions, and subsequently she is saved. Here, complex and fast-changing geopolitical circumstances are personified and reduced into the microcosm of personal melodrama that Mintz et. al identify.
Williams also considers melodrama to be conducive to the fundamentally democratic premise of American society. This is a crucial point of access in unifying the constituent terms of heritage and melodrama thematically. When present, the heritage element at work in their melodramas is overwhelmingly concerned with the interplay between America and the nation’s progenitor Anglo-Saxon cultures in central and western Europe. Strikingly, few DeMille-MacPherson pictures delve into the Italian or Slavic cultures of America’s new wave of émigrés, who provided what Eileen Bowser calls ‘[…] an infusion of culture distinct from earlier German and Irish migrations.’ Instead the filmmakers’ heritage melodramas opt for depictions of white Anglo-Saxon cultures long assimilated into constructions of Americanness. They place their emphasis firmly on American characters’ interactions with England, France, Germany, and The Low Countries (Belgium and Holland). One democratic element to all of this comes in the form of America’s intervention in a Europe beholden to bickering monarchies and the carnage associated with their disintegrating empires.
The filmmaker’s use of melodramatic trope to exude the concerns of a geopolitical consciousness is not limited to films set in the historical past, as is the case in Joan the Woman. Both The Little American (1917) and Till I Come Back to You (1918) are set during the contemporaneous war and each film exhibits DeMille and MacPherson’s proclivity for internationalist rhetoric that allegorises American primacy and the emergent geopolitical power’s place in the world. Starring Mary Pickford, The Little American caricatures nationhood through its characters. The film opens during the birthday party of its heroine, Angela More, who – like America – was born on the 4th of July. Her lover Karl is defined by his ethnic hybridity: he is half-German, half-American. A competitor for her affections is a Frenchman named, Count Jules de Destin. With hubris and naivety, Angela leaves her comfortable life as a socialite to follow her suitors to Europe when they are called back to fight in the war, only to be caught up in the horrors of the impending conflict. Ignoring the warnings about German U-Boats, she sails across the Atlantic on the Veritania, a fictional version of the real-life Lusitania (a British-American cruise liner torpedoed by the Germans in 1915). In a moment of high sentimentality, Angela escapes the wreck on a floating table and pleads with the aggressors not to attack innocent passengers. This emphasis on sentimentality in the face of conflict continues throughout the remainder of the film and culminates in the climax, where Angela wanders the war-torn landscape of The Western Front in search of Karl. Upon finding him, approaching bombs force the weak and exhausted lovers to shelter in a church, which is hit in the barrage. The smoke clears from the ruined refuge to reveal a perfectly intact statue of Christ on the crucifix (fig. 2). With its clear message of divine protection, this scene reiterates the tendencies of melodrama identified by John Mercer and Martin Schingler, who view the tradition as dominated by dramatic twists and turns, disasters, suspense and last-minute rescues.
The film’s combination of patriotism and emotional appeal forms a crucial part of the ways in which it was marketed to audiences. One theatrical poster describes it as ‘a stirring photo-play of great patriotic appeal,’ alongside a picture of Pickford’s Angela waving from a car, an expensive consumer object indicative of the character’s socialite lifestyle, whilst another presents the image of a more sombre Angela with the caption: ‘the silent sufferers.’ The distinction between the two images is significant. The poster of Angela waving from the car infantilises the character, depicting her as blissfully unaware of the horrors of war. The other poster details sentimentality, showing a friend crying head down on the protagonist’s lap, whereas another poster presents a bedraggled Angela, dressed in torn and muddied clothing. Together, these posters capture the emotional transitions of Pickford’s character throughout the film: what begins as a combination of naivety and hubris becomes a traumatic realisation of the carnage and horrors of war. Thus, in the film and the corresponding narrative perpetuated by its marketing campaign, to recall Mintz et. al, we see the transformation complex social issues – to the American cultural psyche in 1917, the war had emerged as a major issue – into personal melodramas.
The gender politics of Joan the Woman
So, DeMille and MacPherson’s heritage melodramas are defined by their amplification of the personal melodrama through the personification of national identities and their reduction of complex geopolitical relations into microcosmic and sentimental character dramas. The relocation of American characters to the theatre of war emphasises the relative comfort and congeniality of the homeland, whilst drawing empathy for cultures most relatable to dominant white, Anglo-Saxon American culture in an attempt to make the case for U.S. intervention in European affairs. In Joan the Woman, the filmmaker’s take various artistic liberties with the historical Joan narrative to make it consistent with the representational sensibilities of their subsequent heritage melodramas.
The film begins with the story of Eric Trent, a British officer (played by Wallace Reid) in the trenches of the First World War. After being ordered to consider a suicide mission, he finds a sword in his trench that conjures up the spectre of Joan, played by famous opera singer Geraldine Farrar. She proclaims that it is time for Trent to rectify past wrongs, an allusion to the soldier’s betrayal of her in a previous life. Subsequently, the film’s action shifts ‘Into the Past’ of medieval France. Here, the main part of the plot deals with Joan’s parabolic tale: her rural youth, defiled by rampant Burgundian invaders; her subsequent role as mascot for French resistance; and finally, her demise at the stake thanks to the treachery of Trent’s previous incarnation. The film ends back in the trenches, where a newly inspired modern-day Trent accepts the suicide mission.
The American subtext of the medieval setting is best evinced through the establishment of Joan’s narrative in the film’s early scenes. In particular, Robin Blaetz observes that: ‘Joan’s rural childhood, allowed Cecil B. DeMille to extrapolate to such a degree that a contemporary reviewer of Joan the Woman described his Joan as a “girl you might meet in the smaller farming communities of our country.”’ Upon transporting the audience back into the past, a lingering longshot introduces Joan, who slowly herds sheep into the foreground of the frame before disappearing out to the right. The shot provides focus on her beaming face; its stillness and subject matter work in tandem to emphasise the tranquillity of the pastoral paradise in Domrémy, Joan’s home village. Subsequent scenes compound this tone through repeat use of the long-running static shots, one of which reasserts the rural idyll of small town values by detailing an affable exchange between farmworkers and a local pastor (fig. 3). Here, the filmmakers create a setting in which pious citizens work hard, routinely stop for thanksgiving prayer, and greet one another in the street. This bliss is soon broken. When the film revisits the same town, just two scenes later, the audience sees it subjected to a brutal attack by marauding invaders, a traumatic disruption that motivates Joan’s quest. Significantly, this is where the film introduces the fictionalised love story between Joan and Trent (the medieval incarnation). Trent enters the village as a commander of the invading English forces, who occupied large swathes of France in the early 15th century. He is knocked unconscious during the ensuing fray and Joan hides him in a hay-loft, where she nurses him back to health and brings him flowers in the meantime. The latter act provides an interesting subversion of gender roles typical to the cinema as, here, the girl woos the guy with gifts. Like the love triangle at work in The Little American, the casting of Joan and Trent as two lovers on opposing sides of the war is consistent with Mercer and Schingler’s reading of the melodrama as a tradition dominated by dramatic twists and turns, disasters, suspense and last-minute rescues. As an addition aimed at adding character depth to the narrative for popular appeal, the inclusion of the romance turns a broader
conflict into a personal melodrama.
Later in the film, Joan’s revolutionary spirit and fervour for liberty is juxtaposed with the stagnant and corrupt court of King Charles VII, an ignorant and inept European monarch of the order that the United States emancipated itself from. Under the influence of an enemy agent, a character known as “The Spider”, the king is caught in a web of deceit at the expense of the French state. It is the task of Joan the revolutionary to cast the cobwebs of conspiracy from the court and force the king from inertia to action through her rousing battle cries. We see her give a stirring speech to the troops, urging them to fight for France (fig. 4). The mise-en-scène of the shot is particularly symbolic: in the foreground, a beaming Joan with a stage light upon her face grabs the flag, whilst in the background, the precarious King Charles (played by Raymond Hatton) casts a nervous look. Joan quite literally steals the limelight from the king, threatening to obscure him from view with her rousing unfurling of the flag.
Joan’s status as inspirational figurehead forms part of the film’s saleable pitch to audiences. In this sense, the film’s promotional material places star and protagonist in an almost conflating close comparison. Its theatrical posters are emphatic in their credit of Geraldine Farrar as the leading lady (fig. 5), a bankable star with a large fan-following, dubbed ‘Gerry-flappers’ by The New York Times. In a spectacle that echoed Joan’s rabble-rousing scene from the film, Farrar appeared at Joan the Woman’s Boston premiere draped in the American flag. The location of the screening was not coincidental. The city was home to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, arguably the event that served as catalyst to The American War of Independence. Accordingly, the posters display the name of Farrar’s character with equal emphasis to that of the star, implying that she is the woman to follow: note the underline on both posters. The result is a message of a constrained aspiration, one that encourages servitude in one respect and freedom through proxy. After all, the film poster does not show Joan solely in her valiant armour; instead, it makes a point of drawing binaries between a drab reality and the translucent, heroic apparition of ambiguous gender. By retaining the depiction of passive and domesticated womanhood, the film’s marketed message conforms to cultural attitudes of the time, portending Joan’s usage in the poster for war bonds from the U.S. treasury department.
Although Joan the Woman was penned by a female screenwriter, with an emphatic script development credit for DeMille’s brother William, the way in which its coda glorifies Trent’s sacrifice reinforces the narrative’s male instincts. The film’s closing shots show Joan consigned to the sort of passive entity displayed in the theatrical posters. For all her rabblerousing in the past and despite the fact that the audience sees her donning armour and commanding armies, Joan does not serve an active role in the contemporary war. Ultimately, the performance of the heroic feat back in the trenches lies with a man: Wallace Reid’s Eric Trent.
In a cathartic act of sanctification for the soldier, Joan’s translucent apparition floats over the graves of the war dead. In Joan the Woman, the eponymous heroine may freely traverse the boundaries between medieval France and the present, yet the film’s static and binarised gender portrayals are at odds with such temporal fluidity. Joan’s limited agency in the present casts her among the ranks of her sisters in the heritage melodrama. In such films, female protagonists lead spectacular moments and provide sentimental resolution but, ultimately, the narrative relegates their primacy in favour of a valorisation of male sacrifice.
Joan the Woman. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille (Paramount Pictures, 1916)
The Little American. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille (Paramount/Artcraft Pictures, 1917)
Till I Come Back to You (Paramount/Artcraft Pictures, 1918)
Anon., ‘The Little American Poster’, Wayback Machine Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20170216180418/https://verdoux.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/the-little-american-1917-misspickford.jpg [accessed 01.05.2018]
Anon., ‘War Savings Stamps’, World Digital Library, https://www.wdl.org/en/item/4591/ [accessed 10.04.2018]
Anon., ‘Gerry-Flappers’ in The New York Times (April 23, 1922), p. 20
Blaetz, Robin, Visions of the maid: Joan of Arc in American film and culture, 1st edition (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001)
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, 1st edition (London: Routledge, 1985)
Bowser, Eileen, ‘1907 Movies and the Expansion of the Audience’, in American Cinema 1890-1909: Themes and Variations, ed. by André Gaudreault, 1st edition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), pp. 179-201
Casella, Donna R., ‘Feminism and the Female Author: The Not So Silent Career of the Woman Scenarist in Hollywood – 1896-1930’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 23 (2006), pp. 217-235
Dumenil, Lynn, The Second Line of Defence: American Women and World War I, illustrated edition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)
Haydock, Nickolas, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages, 1st edition (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008)
Hayward, Susan and Phil Powrie (eds.), The films of Luc Besson: Master of Spectacle, 1st edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006)
Kaplan, E. Ann, ‘The Maternal in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film 1910–1940’, Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. by Christine Gledhill, 1st edition (London: BFI Publishing, 1987)
Mercer, John and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style and Sensibility, 1st edition (London: Wallflower Press, 2004)
Mintz, Steven, Randy W. Roberts, and David Welky (eds.), Hollywood’s America: Understanding History Through Film, 5th edition (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016)
Neale, Steve, Genre and Hollywood, 1st edition (London: Routledge, 2000)
Warner, Marina, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, 2nd edition (London: Vintage, 1991)
Williams, Linda, ‘Melodrama Revised’ in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. by Nick Browne, 1st edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 42-88
 Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, 2nd edition (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 6.
 Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie (eds.), The films of Luc Besson: Master of Spectacle, 1st edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 163.
 Joan the Woman. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille (Paramount Pictures, 1916).
 E. Ann Kaplan, ‘The Maternal in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film 1910–1940’, Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. by Christine Gledhill, 1st edition (London: BFI Publishing, 1987).
 Donna R. Casella, ‘Feminism and the Female Author: The Not So Silent Career of the Woman Scenarist in Hollywood – 1896-1930’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 23 (2006), pp. 217-235 (p. 226).
 ibid., Kaplan, p. 126.
 Arguably, the Progressive Era began prior to the inception of cinema in the 1890s and ended in 1920 with the nationwide prohibition of alcohol and the dawn of the Jazz Age.
 Steven Mintz, Randy W. Roberts, and David Welky (eds.), Hollywood’s America: Understanding History Through Film, 5th edition (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), pp. 12-3.
 Linda Williams, ‘Melodrama Revised’ in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. by Nick Browne, 1st edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 42-88 (p. 42).
 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, 1st edition (London: Routledge, 1985).
 Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages, 1st edition (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008), p. 91.
 C.f. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 1st edition (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 181; Kaplan, p. 126.
 Eileen Bowser, ‘1907 Movies and the Expansion of the Audience’, in American Cinema 1890-1909: Themes and Variations, ed. by André Gaudreault, 1st edition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), pp. 179-201 (p. 179).
 The Little American. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille (Paramount/Artcraft Pictures, 1917); Till I Come Back to You (Paramount/Artcraft Pictures, 1918).
 John Mercer and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style and Sensibility, 1st edition (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), p. 7.
 The posters are in the public domain and available online at Wayback Machine internet archive: Anon., ‘The Little American Poster’, Wayback Machine Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20170216180418/https://verdoux.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/the-little-american-1917-misspickford.jpg [accessed 01.05.2018]. See, also, Dumenil’s display of ‘the silent sufferers’ poster in – Lynn Dumenil, The Second Line of Defence: American Women and World War I, illustrated edition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), p. 251.
 Mintz, Roberts, and Welky, Hollywood’s America, pp. 12-3.
 Robin Blaetz, Visions of the maid: Joan of Arc in American film and culture, 1st edition (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001), p. 50.
 See figure 3.
 Mercer and Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style and Sensibility, p. 7.
 Anon., ‘Gerry-Flappers’ in The New York Times (April 23, 1922), p. 20.
 Haydock, Movie Medievalism, p.18.
 Jeannie MacPherson is given a credit for story, concept, and screenplay as a whole, specifically the insertion of the contrived love story of Joan and the reincarnated Trent. Although, William is awarded a screenwriting credit, it is unclear how much and what parts of the story were subject to his penmanship.


This website concerns the life and works of the Irish playwright Brian Friel (1929-), in particular his play, 'Dancing at Lughnasa'. It is intended as information for students required to write a short essay on Friel covering major themes in his work, especially the position of Ireland. Quotations are provided from critical studies of Friel, and a bibliography of such studies concludes the web page. Hyperlinks take the user to explanatory pages and while the site does not seem to have been updated recently, most of the links are active. This site is most likely to be of use to undergraduates, both for early research on Brian Friel, and for the model it offers for a straightforward research methodology.


The Divine Comedy (Italian: Divina Commedia) is a poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preëminent work of Italian literature and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. On the surface, the poem describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise (or Heaven); but at a deeper level, it represents, allegorically, the soul's journey towards God.
Volume one holds The Inferno, volume two holds The Purgatory and The Paradise.
Taken from the original sources (and illustrated by Gustave Doré), scanned and cleaned up in Adobe Photoshop, these volumes are of stunning quality, laid out as Christian as well as artistic works.


Illustration of a humpback whale by Benedikt Gröndal (1827-1907) from his work The Animal Kingdom of Iceland. Benedikt Gröndal was a prominent figure in the Icelandic 19th century cultural life, a highly versatile man known as poet, linguist, illustrator and a naturalist.
Benedikt Gröndal (1826-1907) was a seminal figure in Icelandic culture life in the last decades of the 19th Century as collector, illustrator, poet and writer. Raised at the only grammar school in Iceland at the time, the School of Bessastaðir, he was from early age provided with outstanding education in languages by his father, a teacher at the school. He continued his studies at the University in Copenhagen and was the first Icelander to complete a master degree in Old Norse studies.
After pursuing his studies in natural sciences he later returned to Iceland and became active as a collector and illustrator of marine species, birds and plants. He founded the Icelandic Society of Natural History and organized the first permanent exhibition of the Icelandic Museum of Natural History at his home in Reykjavík. He collected his nature illustrations in two major volumes, The Animal Kingdom of Iceland and Birds of Iceland, both of which were not published until decades after his death.
– by Crymogea
Poster: 40×50 cm – delivered in a standard poster tube
EAN nr. : 5690755626492
Size: 40×50 cm
Format: Landscape / Portrait
Packing: Tube: 45 cm (height) x 5 cm (width)
Weight with packing: 130 g


Exploring everything strange, scary, paranormal, mythical, mysterious, otherworldly and unexplained.
The Voynich Manuscript is a handwritten book thought to have been written in the early 15th century and comprising about 240 vellum pages, most with illustrations. Although many possible authors have been proposed, the author, script and language remain unknown. It has been described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript”.
Some of the images are beautiful and some of them are haunting…
#The Voynich Manuscript


Hey there, fellow ice cream enthusiasts!
Grab a comfy chair and get ready for a delightful journey through the fascinating history of ice cream. It’s not just a frozen treat; it’s a centuries-old tale of innovation, indulgence, and the pure joy of satisfying our sweet cravings. In this leisurely read, we’ll explore the cool beginnings of ice cream, its journey to Europe, its colonial connection in America, and the delicious revolution that brought us the ice cream we adore today.
The Cool Beginnings: Ancient Ice Cream Tales
Imagine this: You’re in ancient Mesopotamia, and the sun is scorching. People back then had a clever idea – they mixed snow with honey and crushed fruit to create the world’s first ice-cold dessert. It was like the original snow cone, and it tasted like heaven on a hot day.
But the Mesopotamians weren’t the only ones with a sweet tooth. The Chinese were busy freezing mixtures of milk and rice, creating a precursor to our modern ice cream. These early versions were more like chilled puddings, but they were a delicious start.
The Creamy Renaissance: Ice Cream Comes to Europe
Now, fast forward to the 16th century, and ice cream had made its way to Europe. It became an instant hit among the European elite, who couldn’t resist this exotic delight. Think of kings and queens savoring their chilly treats – they were the true OG ice cream enthusiasts.
One of the early adopters was Catherine de’ Medici, an Italian noblewoman who married the future King Henry II of France. She introduced gelato to the French court, forever intertwining the destinies of France and ice cream. It was the start of something beautiful.
The Colonial Connection: Ice Cream in America
The 18th century saw the arrival of ice cream in the American colonies. European immigrants brought their recipes and techniques with them, and soon, ice cream was being enjoyed by colonists from New England to the Deep South.
But it wasn’t just a fancy treat for the rich. In fact, the first ice cream parlor in America was opened by a Quaker colonist named Philip Lenzi in 1777. He sold ice cream to anyone who could afford a dish, making it one of the earliest examples of ice cream as a popular street food.
From Hand-Cranked to Häagen-Dazs: The Ice Cream Revolution
As we move into the 19th century, ice cream started to churn up a storm. The invention of hand-cranked ice cream makers made it easier for households to whip up batches of their favorite flavors. And boy, did they get creative! Ever heard of oyster ice cream? How about garlic or lobster ice cream? Yep, those were a thing.
But it wasn’t until the 20th century that ice cream truly went mainstream. Pioneers like Ben & Jerry and the Häagen-Dazs crew burst onto the scene, introducing us to a world of flavors and combinations we’d never dreamed of. Suddenly, the freezer aisle became a playground of possibilities.
The Scoop Today: Ice Cream for All
Fast forward to today, and ice cream has evolved into an art form. We’ve got dairy-free options for the lactose-intolerant, organic and artisanal varieties for the foodies, and weird and wacky flavors that keep us on our toes. Ice cream is a unifying force, bringing us together at family gatherings, helping us mend broken hearts, and being our trusty companion on lazy Sunday afternoons.
So, the next time you dive into a double scoop of your favorite flavor, remember you’re not just indulging in dessert; you’re relishing a piece of history. Ice cream has been cooling us down, cheering us up, and bringing us together for centuries. It’s the sweet thread that connects us through time and space.
Whether you’re a classic vanilla aficionado, a quirky pistachio explorer, or a die-hard fan of cookies ‘n cream, there’s a scoop out there with your name on it. So, let’s raise our cones (or cups) and salute the frozen delight that has been making our lives a little bit sweeter, one scoop at a time.
Here’s to ice cream – the timeless treat that keeps our hearts as cool as our tongues!


Ocean Life From A to Z, Book & DVD from Reader’s Digest Children’s Publishing, lets young readers discover the wonders of underwater life through the pages of this 32-page full-color storybook, and a bilingual (English/Spanish) 47-minute underwater DVD – featuring photographs and exclusive footage captured by boat captain, dive instructor and educator, Annie Crawley. (ISBN: 10: 0-7944-1222-X; $17.99) Ocean Life From A to Z is a must have for every home, school, and library adding to your ocean life books collection. Get yours today and Annie will personalize for you!
The 32-page Ocean Life book is set against a collection of amazing images and provides fun facts and interesting tidbits about ocean-dwellers for each letter of the alphabet. Here is a free gift Ocean Life A to Z Activity Guide. The 47-minute Ocean Life DVD showcases spectacular up-close underwater footage, with marine life information suitable for young and old. It was created and narrated by Annie Crawley, and features 3 main sections: Meet Annie – an introduction by Annie as she puts on her gear, drives her boat, and gets ready to dive; A-to Z – filled with fun facts and cool video about ocean life from A to Z; and You and the Ocean – where kids can watch as Annie and other kids get in the water. By using an optional language setting, the DVD is translated for Spanish-speaking viewers. The DVD was sponsored by the Save Our Seas Foundation. If you are interested in distribution, contact us today.
The underwater scenes on the DVD are from Annie’s dive expeditions in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Belize, Galapagos and California, and are not available anywhere else. Kids will want to watch them over and over as they learn about the magical life underwater. Learning has never been so much fun – and so family friendly! “It’s my personal mission to make a difference by educating people about our ocean and our environment.” Annie Crawley
Annie Crawley, CEO of Dive Into Your Imagination, has spent the past 20 years living and working around the world, from Indonesia to Galapagos, Belize to Papua New Guinea. As a producer, photographer and motivational speaker, Annie photographs and produces films about life on our planet, specializing in our marine environment. Trained in journalism, with a corporate as well as a non-profit background, her recent work includes the Dive Into Your Imagination series of books, ebooks, and DVDs for children and adults. As the founder of Dive Into Your Imagination, a Les Brown Platinum Speaker, a licensed scuba diving instructor and USCG 100 ton boat captain, her mission is to promote understanding about ecological systems to create a sustainable human relationship for a healthy Ocean. Collect all of her ocean life books for your library today!


Kat Duff is the author of The Alchemy of Illness (Pantheon, 1993) and The Secret Life of Sleep (Beyond Words and Oneworld, 2014).
Born and raised in Minnesota, Duff left the Midwest to get her BA at Hampshire College, where she was able to pursue a multi-disciplinary course of study. She went on to work as a printer and publisher at Mother Jones Press in Northampton, Massachusetts and Red River Women’s Press in Austin Texas, before pursuing her MA in Counseling and Education at Southwestern College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In 1992, Duff won 1st place for Nonfiction in the Taos Review Literary Contest for her essay, “Towards an Ecology of Illness,” which she later expanded into her award-winning first book, The Alchemy of Illness. Since then, she has published essays in a variety of print and online publications, while making her living as a mental health counselor and child forensic interviewer in Taos, NM.
Duff writes at the intersection of the natural world and the imagination, as it occurs in the life of our bodies. Whether she is discussing illness, scars or sleep, Duff illuminates common, intimate experiences that are often overlooked.
Born and raised in Minnesota, land of long winter nights, I developed a love for perusing library shelves at an early age. The books stacked next to my bed were (and are) an eclectic mix of history, biology, psychology, religion and fiction. While I would like to say I love to learn, I have a poor memory for facts, and it would be more accurate to say I am driven by a desire to understand, to make sense of our world and our experiences as human beings. I write out of that desire.
During college, I made it a point to take classes in as many departments as I could. I studied literature, psychology, anthropology, history, ecology, sociology, economics, neuroscience, art and dance, and concluded that every discipline has a valuable perspective on human experience, but none has the answer. I have worked as a printer, a baker, a farm-worker, and much more, but never a candle-stick maker.
– Kat Duff


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[Racket announcement] Racket v6.11
Racket version 6.11 is now available from
* Typed Racket supports refinement types and dependent function types.
Previously an experimental feature, refinement types allow types to
describe more interesting properties of values, especially integers.
For example, this type shows that the `max` function always produces a
number at least as big as its inputs:
`(-> [x : Integer] [y : Integer]
(Refine [z : Integer] (and (>= z x) (>= z y))))`
* DrRacket's Program Contour is significantly more efficient; using it
no longer hurts DrRacket's interactivity.
* The `web-server/formlets` library produces formlets that are
serializable, facilitating dynamic uses of formlets in stateless #lang
web-server servlets. The new `web-server/formlets/stateless` and
`web-server/formlets/unsafe` libraries provide additional support with
the same API.
* The `db` library supports the Cassandra database.
The following people contributed to this release:
Alex Knauth, Andrew Gwozdziewycz, Andrew Kent, Asumu Takikawa, Ben
Greenman, Ben Noordhuis, Carlo Dapor, Daniel Feltey, David Christiansen,
David Van Horn, Eric Dobson, Gustavo Massaccesi, Harold Carr, Jack
Firth, Jay McCarthy, Jeannie Tran, Jens Axel Søgaard, jgreco, John
Clements, Jordan Johnson, Justin Slepak, Leandro Facchinetti, Leif
Andersen, Matthew Butterick, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, Michael
Ballantyne, Milo Turner, Nadeem Abdul Hamid, Philip McGrath, rain, Robby
Findler, Royall Spence, Ryan Culpepper, Ryan Davis, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt,
Shu-Hung You, Spencer Florence, Stephen Chang, Vincent St-Amour, WarGrey
Gyoudmon Ju, and Weng Shiwei.


Fantastic book for anyone who is aware of Mindfullness, Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 December 2016.
Depression has been my constant companion literally all of my life.
You can on reflection begin to see the value in previous sections and how almost without you really noting it you have begun to apply some of the techniques. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 September 2016.
--Paul Gilbert, PhD, Centre for Compassion Research and Training, University of Derby, United Kingdom. I completed the 8-week course 14 months ago, and continue with the practice daily. This i an excellent introduction into building a mindfulness practise into your life, Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 5, 2017. Only downside is a few too many exclamation marks, but I won't hold that against the authors as its just a pet peeve of mine. Please try your request again later. However, it's not the kind of program that you go through once and that's it. My heart goes out to all of you who struggle with depression and its disabling effects, and my hope is that this program will help you as much as it did me.
For me had trouble with self-help style; needed course instructions which are planned. Not so keen on the CD that comes with the book - the content is fine but the speed is a little too fast/ too much talking for my liking on the body scan - I used Jon Kabat Zinn's body scan instead. He actively advocates for the relevance of mindfulness-based clinical care in psychiatry and mental health. I can't recommend this book highly enough. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 5, 2017. Extremely clear and well written. Since retiring, Dr. Teasdale has taught mindfulness and insight meditation internationally.
Mark G. Williams …
Unlimited listening to select Audible Originals, audiobooks, and podcasts. The program has worked for both myself and the group I peer-facilitated.
My advice: 'Try this.'" Would highly recommend for anyone looking to begin mindfulness practices. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2019. By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible’s Conditions of Use. This was the book and CD used to support the 8 week mindfulness course I recently completed. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Fortunately, the authors who translated the treatment into a workbook are the very people who developed the treatment in the first place; all three are expert clinicians and scientists. Like anyone else, I still get sad and anxious sometimes, but it happens much less frequently and I'm better equipped to deal with it. That book gave me a deeper understanding of depression and why mindful meditation works. The expert authors introduce specific mindfulness practices to try each week, plus reflection questions, tools for keeping track of progress, and helpful comments from others going through the program.
This i an excellent introduction into building a mindfulness practise into your life. Imagine an eight-week program that can help you overcome depression, anxiety, and stress - by simply learning new ways to respond to your own thoughts and feelings.
Now retired, he continues to live near Oxford, to teach mindfulness to teachers-in-training across the world, and to explore, with colleagues, how mindfulness might be used in evidence-based public policy. After I read "Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression" I felt like I had a better grasp on the program. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. Because the workbook is set up as a workbook there is not as much explanation of how and why this method works. Nice plain English, useful exercises and a structured programme to work through. Please try again. Imagine an 8-week program that can help you overcome depression, anxiety, and stress--by simply learning new ways to respond to your own thoughts and feelings. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.
That program is mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), and it has been tested and proven effective in clinical trials throughout the world. The only reason I gave it four stars is that I feel that I benefited most from the program when I also read "Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression," (Second Edition.) I recommend getting both books. I would recommend that for any practitioner/therapist who wants to add further information and research to their competencies, knowledge, and skills, read and use this workbook, its gives more in depth research and outlines to the practice of Mindfulness. I was having a very difficult time several months ago and I credit this book with helping me then things around. I also much preferred the audio tapes to Kabet-Zen's.I found the book really enjoyable, though I was glad I had done the original course as it gave me the foundation and confidence to continue on my own. If you are troubled, follow the meditations and exercises and feel the difference. See also the authors' The Mindful Way through Depression, which demonstrates these proven strategies with in-depth stories and examples. --from the Foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, "What could be more fabulous than this? This was the book and CD used to support the 8 week mindfulness course I recently completed.
I recommend it highly." It outlines an easy-to-follow, step-by-step program for how to train our minds out of repetitive loops and find states of peace." To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I am trying it out to accompany a MBCT course. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 7, 2016.
Having already done a weekly course following the John Kabet-Zen method, I wasn't sure I'd like this, but in fact I preferred it. A really great, user friendly, helpful book. This seems at first to be a wee bit airy fairy. I purchased this workbook after thoroughly reading 'The Mindful Way Through Depression.' That said, the book is very clear and there is no need for prior knowledge of mindfulness. Plus, mental health professionals, see also the authors' best-selling therapy guide: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: Second Edition - winner (second place), American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award, consumer health category. Not so keen on the CD that comes with the book - the content is fine but the speed is a little too fast/ too much talking for my liking on the body scan - I used Jon Kabat Zinn's body scan instead. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Especially good if you suffer from depression. I am totally confident that my own improvement will be substantial by the time I am done. The Mindful Way Workbook: An 8-Week Program to Free Yourself from Depression and Emotional Distress Paperback – 31 January 2014 by John Teasdale (Author), J.
This is truly a workbook with lots of space to record your thoughts and impressions right in the book. Will change your mind!
The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook: A Proven Way to Accept Yourself, Build Inner Strength, and Thrive [Neff, Kristin, Germer, Christopher] on Amazon.com. Kommentar: The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. "The strategies in this book have truly changed my life. Like a trusted map, this audiobook guides you step by step along the path of change.
One credit a month to pick any title from our entire premium selection to keep (you’ll use your first credit now). There was a problem loading your book clubs. A really great, user friendly, helpful book. Please try again. We could ask for nothing more from three of the world's most gifted and caring clinicians, who provide us with a clear and practical guide to understanding and strengthening the mind. The spine remains undamaged. Please try again. Cancel online anytime.


Memorial Day-Municipal Offices Closed
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May 27, 2020, 4:30 PM
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Author Instructions for paper submissions
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Poet and writer Claudia Pavel is born and resides in the beautiful south-eastern European country Romania, well known for the forested Carpathian mountains, medieval towns with old churches and beautiful castles, notably among them being Bran Castle, with the famous Dracula legend.
As far as her education is concerned, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Law, a Bachelor’s degree in Economics, a Master’s degree in Law at esteemed universities in Romania and a certificate of Completion in Negotiation Mastery from the prestigious, Harvard Business School.
Although her studies and experience recommend her as a professional in the legal field and economic environment, where she activated as an economist and legal advisor, her heart belongs to poetry and writing.
She spent her formative years in school, participating to writing and literature contests, corresponding with high school magazines. Her real passion towards literature drove her to write her first poetry collection about love.
“The odyssey of my lost thoughts”, her debut collection of poetry is split in four chapters: Hope, Passion, Pain and Resilience.
For one of the poems in the book, “Paris” she was awarded “David Burland Poetry Prize 2017” – Special Mention, by Anna Burland Services, England, United Kingdom.
Besides literature, she loves art as a whole, opera, ballet, classical music and jazz, theater, old movies, paintings, sculptures and she derives great pleasure from spending hours in museums admiring and learning about art and history.
She enjoys traveling and discovering magical places around the world and she likes sharing her experiences with friends and readers.
Her motto is: “I want to spread beauty and joy into the world!”
"Never say NO to love, no matter what the universe has planned for you. The subjects of this book of poems range from memories to present time and turned to be an altruistic and empathetic look at different ways to experience love. Raw, sensitive and enlightened into lines of beauty – Claudia Pavel is a delightful encounter."
"The look and feel of this volume of poetry are absolutely gorgeous. The poems are a magical journey in and of themselves. You can feel the passion in each poem and it will stay with you for a while, to say the least. Exquisite beauty and moving poetry!"
"This enchanted odyssey captures the very gist of love and everything love entails. The author unveils her soul to the reader, who will be shrouded in hope, will immerse in sweet passion, taste the bitterness of grief and finally seek serenity in healing. Definitely, a book one must read with the heart."


for you were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth),
In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. There came a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for a witness, that he might bear witness of the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came that he might bear witness of the light. There was the true light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man.
giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. For He delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son,


Based on Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971); Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (Routledge, 1998); John Livingston, The Rise of Science in Islam and the West (Routledge, 2018).
Greek knowledge was all but lost in the centuries before Islam. In the west the Roman empire came under attack as early as the third century, and in response, the Romans more frequently chose military men as their emperors. These men spoke no Greek themselves, and favoured equally rough-hewn men as their subordinates. The Greek language lost its cachet and the Roman elite stopped studying it. Greek became so little known in the west that even scholars could not read books written in that language. From the fall of the western empire in 476, to the capture of Toledo in 1085, European Christians were barely aware of Greek philosophy.
In the east, Alexandria became the last bastion of Greek knowledge. The astronomer Claudius Ptolemy lived and worked in Alexandria in the second century, the mathematician Diophantus in the third, and the neoplatonist John Philoponus in the fifth, but the tradition of Greek scholarship eventually disappeared even there. Christianity had become the official religion of the whole Roman empire in 380, but it evolved differently in the east and in the west. Eastern (Byzantine) Christianity became more ascetic than its western counterpart, more prone to doctrinal disputes, and more suspicious of pagan thinking. The Byzantines valued Greek philosophy as part of their heritage but believed that it had been superseded by the revelations of Christianity. Unable to either embrace or abandon Greek philosophy, the Byzantines simply preserved it. Their empire lasted for a thousand years, but the Byzantines made no significant contributions to science.
The earliest Muslims shared the Byzantines’ disregard for pagan knowledge. Their mission was to expand Islam’s domain by conquering new lands and proselytizing their inhabitants. Like the Byzantine Christians, they were certain of the truth and completeness of their own religious revelation, and felt no need for Greek philosophy.
As Islam’s empire matured, the Muslim elite began to take an interest in certain kinds of knowledge, especially astrology and medicine. Foreign books on these subjects — mostly Greek, but also Persian and Hindu — began to be translated into Arabic. A feedback loop between book translations and Islamic scholarship soon developed: the translations led Islamic scholars to new questions that required further translations to answer. Islamic scholarship gradually widened to encompass most fields of study. The fields in which Islamic scholars made the most fundamental advances were optics, mathematics, and astronomy.
The Rise of Islam
Muhammad had reached middle age when he began to experience what he believed were revelations from God. These revelations took the form of verses. They were recorded by Muhammad’s companions and then compiled as the Qur’an. Taken together, the Qur’an and the hadiths (the sayings of Muhammad) constitute the sacred writings of Islam.
Muhammad quickly attracted followers. His first revelation occurred in 610, and by 630, his adherents controlled the prosperous towns of Mecca and Medina. Part of the appeal of his teachings was that settled Arabs, having grown prosperous through trade and agriculture, had outgrown the ethic of their nomadic predecessors. This ethic emphasized a man’s place in a tribal community. A web of social interactions and obligations governed his actions. He could hold the respect of the community through acts of generosity or wisdom, but also through acts of senseless bravado or swift vengeance. Men sometimes acted in ways that harmed outsiders in order to maintain their status within their own communities. Such actions were deemed acceptable, even admirable, when the Arabs were nomadic desert-dwellers, their tribes separated by vast stretches of sand. Once the Arabs were settled and urbanized, the same actions led to endless conflict.
Muhammad offered the Arabs an entirely new ethic. He expected them to see themselves, not as the sum of their community ties, but as individuals. They would be entirely alone at the Last Judgment — no community, not even family — and their conduct during their lives must prepare them for that single moment of judgment. Their only allegiance must be to God. The Arabs readily absorbed this new ethic.
Under Muhammad as a religious leader, peace came to towns whose magnificent style of life had plainly outstripped the rough ethics of the desert, with murderous results. As the inhabitants of Medina said: “Allah has sent us a prophet who will make peace between us.” It was as an arbitrator, backed by a core of devoted fighting-men, that Muhammad rose to power in Arabia.1
By the time of his death in 632, Muhammad had brought peace to the whole of the Arabian peninsula.
As revolutionary as this ethic was to the Arabs, it merely brought them into line with the rest of the Near East.
The Muslim guided his conduct by exactly the same considerations as did any Christian or Jew throughout the Fertile Crescent. He, too, was a “God-fearer.” He, too, faced…the Last Judgment, infallibly revealed to him in a Sacred Book. He, too, must think on it day and night. The Syrian [Christian] hermit…was venerated because he summed up an ideal of behaviour to which the populations of the Near East subscribed without question — even if the majority prudently avoided exposing themselves to acting on it. Muhammad imposed this ideal on all his Arab followers. In so doing, he brought the Arabs into civilization as it was known in the seventh-century Near East.2
The Muslim concept of “People of the Book” is an explicit recognition of these commonalities.
In the first few decades after Muhammad’s death, Islamic armies took control of Persia, much of the Byzantine empire, and part of the Mediterranean coast of Africa. Despite their military strength, Islam’s generals avoided warfare whenever they could.
The career of Muhammad, who had created a religious empire in Arabia almost exclusively through negotiation, provided the first caliphs with precedents for acute diplomacy. In the first decades of their conquests, the Arabs gained quite as much by treaty as by the sword: key cities, such as Damascus and Alexandria, fell because the Muslim High Command was instantly prepared to offer generous terms — protection and toleration in return for a fixed tribute.3
Islam’s empire expanded in a different way under the Umayyad dynasty (651-750).
The Umayyad empire was an undisguised Arab supremacy, based on the partially Islamized warrior-aristocracy of the Arab tribes. The Bedouin way of life of the Arab aristocracy, though castigated by Muhammad, saved Islam. It was the Chieftains of the Bedouin tribes who created the Arab war-machine with their rude followers, and it was the style of life of this warrior-aristocracy — and not the sheltered piety of the core of devout Muslims — that held the empire together.4
As before, the conquered territories paid tribute to their overlords but were not rigidly governed. Territories such as Syria, Egypt, and Persia grew more prosperous through increased trade and an agricultural revolution.
The lifting of barriers between India and the Eastern Mediterranean saw the systematic importation into Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean of numerous strains of plants, legumes, and fruits and the development of new ones, as well as agricultural techniques and a knowledge of intensive farming and full use of fallow lands. Thus, much more than trade,…it was the agricultural revolution of the first centuries after the Arab conquests that provided much of the wealth of the early empire.5
Muhammad had decreed that all of Islam’s adherents were equal, so Arab Muslims had to share control of the empire with non-Arab converts. Moreover, the Arabs had come from a highly decentralized political regime, so few of them had the skills needed to administer a large and complex empire. These skills were more common among the converts from old and well-established civilizations such as Syria and Persia. Converts from these areas would ultimately hold more power than their numbers warranted.
Syrians and Persians became the pillars of Islamic civilization: they came to be the administrators, the lawyers, the theologians, even, within only a century, the professors of Arab poetry. Medieval Islam was very largely the creation of Muslim non-Arabs.6
The Umayyads attempted to halt the slide of authority away from the Arabs, but non-Arab resistance to their policies grew into a full-blown revolution that overthrew their dynasty. Their successors, the Abbasids (750-1258), turned away from territorial expansion, instead seeking to consolidate the empire.
With the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate, the slow-moving ideals of an organized and expensive imperial administration replaced the fearful mobility of the Bedouin armies.7
The old dynasty’s capital had been Damascus, but the Abbasids built a new capital — Baghdad — in the heart of Persia. Baghdad would become the largest and wealthiest city in the world.
The Translation Movement
The Abbasids initiated the systematic translation of foreign scholarly books into the Arabic language.8 Some of the translated books were written in Sanskrit, some were written in Pahlavi or Syriac, but most were written in Greek. This translation movement continued for more than two centuries, and did not end until every significant Greek book of a mathematical, scientific, or philosophic nature had been translated. It was not an elitist movement, and it was not a purely Islamic movement.
The support for the translation movement cut across all lines of religious, sectarian, ethnic, tribal, and linguistic demarcation. Patrons were Arabs and non-Arabs, Muslims and non-Muslims, Sunnis and Shi’ites, generals and civilians, merchants and land-owners.9
The translation movement led to rapid scientific progress, but it was not begun for that purpose.
The primary concern of Al-Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph, was establishing the legitimacy of Abbasid rule. The Abbasids had come to power through what was essentially a Muslim civil war, so there was a need for reconciliation among Muslims. There was also a need to consolidate the support of the Persians, who had been instrumental in bringing the Abbasids to power. The majority of the Persians were still Zoroastrians, so al-Mansur had to devise an expanded ideology — expanded beyond Islam — that would lock the Persians into his political coalition.
This was done by promulgating the view that the Abbasid dynasty, in addition to being the descendants of the Prophet and hence satisfying the demands of both Sunni and Shi’i Muslims, was at the same time the successor of the ancient imperial dynasties in Iraq and Iran, from the Babylonians through the Sasanians, their immediate predecessors…They were able to incorporate Sasanian culture, which was still the dominant culture of large masses of the population east of Iraq, into mainstream Abbasid culture.10
The translation movement was one aspect of this policy. It was inspired by a long-established Zoroastrian tradition:
Zoroaster received from Ohrmazd the Good God the texts of the Avesta, which include all knowledge. The destruction wrought upon Persia by Alexander the Great, however, caused these texts to be dispersed throughout the world. The Greeks and the Egyptians derived their knowledge from these Zoroastrian texts which Alexander had translated into Greek and Coptic. Subsequently Sasanian emperors took it upon themselves to collect all these texts and the knowledge that was derived from them from the various places where they had been scattered: the sources named India and Byzantium.11
This tradition grossly misrepresents the chronology of human knowledge, and should be understood as a backstory written by the Zoroastrians to magnify their own importance.12
One of the emperors who acted upon this tradition was Sabur (r. 241-71). Surviving documents show that he
… collected the non-religious writings on medicine, astronomy, movement, time, space, substance, accident, becoming, decay, transformation, logic and other crafts and skills which were dispersed throughout India, the Byzantine Empire and other lands, and collated them with the [Zoroastrian sacred text] Avesta.13
The tradition was still influential during the first century of Abbasid rule. By initiating the translation movement, al-Mansur showed that he was following in the footsteps of previous Persian emperors, thereby solidifying his claim that he was their natural successor.
The earliest translations were overwhelmingly astrological. Astrology was part of Persian beliefs, and al-Mansur embraced the practice.14 The translation of astrological texts was a double demonstration of al-Mansur’s connection to the Sasanian emperors. Medical texts were also frequently translated. Galen’s anatomy texts were particularly valuable to Muslim scholars, because Islam prohibited dissection of the human body.
Translations often involved intermediate languages. Translations from Greek to Syriac were common during the ninth century. Many of the Syriac editions were then translated into Arabic. Important books were translated more than once, with the later and more accurate translations being direct from Greek to Arabic. Likewise, there were few direct translations from Sanskrit to Arabic; instead, “Indian scientific material in astronomy, astrology, mathematics, and medicine passed into Arabic mainly through Persian (Pahlavi) intermediaries.”15
Among the most important scientific translations during the reign of al-Mansur were the Hindu astronomical handbook known as Sindhind (translated directly from Sanskrit), Ptolemy’s Almagest, Euclid’s Elements, and Aristotle’s books on logic.16
Another Persian idea adopted by the Abbasids was the “House of Wisdom,” which originally meant a palace library, especially one that preserved the history of the people. The earliest surviving mention of the Abbasid’s House of Wisdom is in documents that date to the reign of Harun al-Rashid (r. 786-809). No surviving documents describe its founding. The Abbasid’s House of Wisdom is most strongly associated with al-Ma’mun (r. 813-833), who extended its activities to include mathematical studies and astronomical observation. Al-Ma-mun was an enthusiastic patron of the translation movement, but the popular depiction of the House of Wisdom as a sort of manufactory for book translations is unfounded.
Al-Ma’mun was as concerned with consolidating his rule as al-Mansur had been. He came to power after a civil war fought against his brother, who had become caliph upon the death of their father. The war ended with a year-long siege of Baghdad, during which much of the city was destroyed. The brother was captured and killed, allowing al-Ma’mun to claim the caliphate.
Al-Ma’mun’s mother was Persian, and he had been raised in an environment that emphasized the values of the Persian elite, including its commitment to scholarship. One of these values was the translation movement itself.
As a young man he read and studied zealously the books of the ancients, al-Ahbari tells us. By the time he became caliph, it is certain not only that he as an individual had internalized values that considered the translation movement and all that it stood for as a cultural good, but also that these values were the dominant ones among intellectuals…That he would actively promote the translation movement, therefore, as all his predecessors had done before him, never came…into question.17
There were two areas in which this tradition of scholarship served al-Ma’mun’s political interests: the centralization of Islamic religious authority, and war against the Byzantines.
Islam was not hierarchical. When a dispute over dogma arose, religious leaders would attempt to persuade their adherents of the rightness of their own opinions. Al-Ma’mun considered this system to be too haphazard and sought to make himself the final arbiter of religious disputes. He would make his decisions in conjunction with the most learned theologians, and these decisions would be based upon dialectic argumentation, as set out in Aristotle’s books on logic.18
Al-Ma’mun also sought to push back the borders of the Byzantine empire. In order to justify his attack, Muslims were portrayed as superior to Byzantines, and the translation movement was presented as evidence of this superiority.
The Byzantines were portrayed as deserving of Muslim attacks not only because they were infidels…but because they were also culturally benighted and inferior not only to Muslims but also to their own ancestors, the ancient Greeks. The Muslims, by contradistinction, in addition to being superior because of Islam, were also superior because they appreciated ancient Greek science and wisdom and had translated their books into Arabic. This superiority is even transferred to Islam itself as a religion; the Byzantines turned their back on ancient science because of Christianity, while the Muslims had welcomed it because of Islam.19
The translation movement arose out of social and political maneuvering, but in the end, an opportunistic policy paid enormous scientific dividends. The movement yielded a great deal of practical knowledge, and provided the foundations for a developing scientific and philosophical tradition. The demand for translations supported the continuation of the movement for more than two centuries.
The Muslims were (imperfectly) aware of what Greek and Hindu scholars had accomplished, and translated their books as needed. They believed that any scholarly study should begin with a review of what was already known or hypothesized — wherever that knowledge might be found. When al-Kindi (d. c. 870) began to apply philosophy to theology, for example, he ordered the translation of metaphysical works by Aristotle, Plotinus, and Proclus. A second example of this approach comes from mathematics, and a third from optics.
The famous book on algebra by al-Khwarizmi, which was to revolutionize mathematical studies forever, appeared…about half a century after the translation of Euclid’s Elements…Al-Khwarizmi’s demonstrations of different algebraic formulae for solutions are inspired by Euclid insofar as they rest on the idea of the equality of areas.20
The optical books by Diocles, Anthemius of Tralles, and Didymus were translated into Arabic as a result of the practical interest of scholars and rulers in burning mirrors. The legend of Archimedes setting fire to the flotilla of Marcellus during the siege of Syracuse…alerted mathematicians to the possibility of actually reproducing the feat. The available Greek works on the subject were thus tracked down, translated into Arabic, and al-Kindi wrote an independent treatise on the subject correcting and advancing in many ways the work of the Greek authors.21
Al-Kindi wrote candidly about the value of foreign scholarship:
We ought not to be ashamed of appreciating the truth and of acquiring it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. For the seeker of truth nothing takes precedence over the truth, and there is no disparagement of the truth, nor belittling either of him who speaks it or of him who conveys it. No one is diminished by the truth; rather does the truth ennoble all.22
The translation movement was self-catalyzing: new translations raised new issues, and the resolution of these issues required still more translations. This dynamic gradually broadened the scope of Islamic scholarship. The Muslims translated only what they needed, but in the end, they needed everything.
Islam and Philosophy
The ancient Greeks had no dogma and no holy books. Their religion was a performative one, requiring only their participation in rituals and festivals. It did not constrain their attempt to explain the world in natural terms. By contrast, the revelation of Muhammad was the central fact of Islamic life. Muslims absorbed only those parts of Greek philosophy that could be made compatible with this revelation. This limitation eventually narrowed their scientific outlook.
The Muslims were interested in selected scientific fields or in particular scientific problems, like optics. In each case, the subject was appealing because it had practical applications. Pure scientific theory, the lure of scientific knowledge for its own sake that had animated the ancient Greeks, was not [appealing]. Nor were Muslim scientists concerned with using science to develop a coherent world view based on reason or a universally applicable method of testing ideas…The ability to amplify Greek scientific knowledge along its own lines did not go hand in hand with the desire to forge connections among all the sciences or to contemplate the possibility of alternative scientific paradigms.23
Islamic philosophy was, from its beginning, a form of theology. The earliest Muslims were aware of incongruities in the Qur’an, and developed traditions that harmonized them. They held that the Qur’an was to be understood literally: references to the hands and face of God imply that God is a being of recognizable form. Their literalism led them to conclude that people do not have free will. “Man, like other creatures, has neither power, will, nor choice.”24 Every person’s actions are preordained, and so is his fate on Judgment Day.
This theology was challenged during the ninth century by the Mu’tazilites. Their arguments were based on Greek dialectics and incorporated elements of Greek philosophy. Their primary concerns were divine justice and God’s unity.
The Mu’tazilites sought to reconcile divine justice with the existence of evil. They argued that God’s decrees are not arbitrary.
Good and evil are not conventional or arbitrary concepts whose validity is rooted in the dictates of God…but are rational categories which can be established through unaided reason…[Furthermore,] God cannot enjoin what is contrary to reason or act with total disregard for the welfare of His creatures, in so far as this would compromise His justice and His wisdom.25
God would not decree that a person will commit evil acts, and yet evil acts are present in the world. These propositions are consistent only if people have some degree of free will. The puzzle, never satisfactorily resolved, was how to explain free will without impinging upon God’s absolute sovereignty.
The Mu’tazilites rejected the idea that God can be characterized by positive attributes, such as wisdom or bodily form. His only characteristic is his “oneness” — he is a single transcendent essence. This belief owed much to the Greeks: the Mu’tazilites were “influenced by the Aristotelian concept of God as the pure actuality of thought,…as well as by [Plotinus’s] view that God, who transcends thought and being altogether, can only be known negatively.”26 It was at odds with the Qur’an’s many references to God’s hand and face and footstool, so the Mu’tazilites argued that the Qur’an must sometimes be read metaphorically. They also rejected the traditional belief that the Qur’an is eternal and uncreated, arguing that it was inconsistent with God’s oneness.
The Mu’tazilites employed Greek philosophy only in a piecemeal fashion. Al-Kindi used it to construct a comprehensive theology. He was strongly influenced by Aristotle, and also by neoplatonists such as Plotinus and Proclus. Although he was not himself a Mu’tazilite, his conclusions — including “the creation of the world ex nihilo, the resurrection of the body, the possibility of miracles, the validity of prophetic revelation, and the origination and destruction of the world by God”27 — mirrored those of the Mu’tazilites. His insistence on God’s oneness led him to negative theology: “Anything that can be said of something else will be inapplicable to the absolutely one.”28
The Mu’tazilites were strongly supported by al-Ma’mun, but their arid and passionless theology did not appeal to the common people and was opposed by traditional scholars. A new school of philosophy, the Ash’arites, developed in reaction to them.29 The Ash’arites used the same methodology and addressed the same issues, but came to conclusions that were much closer to traditional theology:
The Quran was the eternal mind and speech of God. As such, the Quran had to be understood literally, anthropomorphisms and all…All human decision and action had been predetermined by God at the moment of creation. God’s greatness could not be constrained to a human concept of justice…Nature did not operate according to causal relationships but by the direct action of God ordering each event, a shadow being caused not by a tree blocking solar rays but by God creating the shadow independent of any object between the sun and the shadow.30
The Ash’arites, like the Mu’tazilites, found that there were elements of theology that defied reasoned analysis.
The anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Qur’an were to be accepted bi-la kayf – without asking how – and the paradoxes to God’s power and human free will ultimately made it impossible for man to comprehend the will and justice of God.31
The Ash’arites’ reformulation of traditional beliefs became the theology of the Sunnis, Islam’s dominant sect. There are two ways in which it diminished the influence of science in Islamic society. The first way was simply its intense conservatism.
Traditional ways and practices, called taqlid (molding, forming and casting in a mold) was opposed to innovation, bid’a, doing things in a way not prescribed by tradition of the Prophet. Bid’a was therefore to be avoided in case the particular innovation was religiously reprehensible.32
Greek philosophy was one of the innovations that a devout Muslim should avoid lest it lead him astray. The second way was its adoption of the doctrine known as occasionalism, which was essentially a denial of causality:
In every instant, in every atom of time, the universe was annihilated and recreated by God’s command…Time was atomistic; the intervals of non-time separating the atoms of time were states of nonexistence, instantaneous universal annihilations, which obviated the flow of nature and events by cause and effect relationships. God’s atomizing of time into imperceptible instants of annihilation and reintegration made Him the sole cause in all existence. 33
According to this doctrine, a ball thrown into the air falls back to earth only because at every moment of its flight, God has willed it to do so.
Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) was an ardent defender of Sunni theology. He studied with Ash’arite teachers and had a deep knowledge of Greek philosophy. He was also strongly attracted to Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism whose practitioners sought unmediated knowledge of God. According to al-Ghazali,
The mystical approach to God is the deepest and most meaningful, but it cannot be expressed in words without it sounding mad and heretical…The ineffable must remain ineffable.34
Al-Ghazali reinforced both of the Ash’arites’ “anti-science” ideas, namely, the dangers of Greek philosophy, especially its metaphysics, and the rejection of causality. Indeed, it is for the vehemence of his denial of causality that he is most widely known:
According to us the connection between what is usually believed to be a cause and what is believed to be an effect is not a necessary connection; each of the two things has its own individuality and is not the other, and neither the affirmation nor the negation, neither the existence nor the non-existence of the one is implied in the affirmation, negation, existence or non-existence of the other — for example, the satisfaction of thirst does not imply drinking, nor recovery the drinking of medicine, nor evacuation the taking of purgative, and so on for all the empirical connections existing in medicine, astronomy, the sciences, and the crafts.35
On the dangers of philosophy, al-Ghazali again emphasized that even seemingly neutral concepts are a danger to faithful Muslims.
Al-Ghazali…accepts that there are parts of astronomy (for example, the theory of solar and lunar eclipses) that are based on apodeictic demonstration and are thus “impossible to deny;” such things are, in and of themselves, unconnected with religious matters. However, these “neutral” and true aspects of mathematics may seduce the unwary student into believing that certainty also exists in the physical and metaphysical theories of the philosophers, some of which stand in contradiction to Islamic religious dogma. Thus the study of these sciences must be limited and constrained, for “few there are who devote themselves to this study without being stripped of religion and having the bridle of godly fear removed from their heads.”36
Nevertheless, al-Ghazali refrained from condemning mathematical studies, arguing that
…there is nothing here obliging us to deny the science of arithmetic which informs us in a specific manner of the paths of sun and moon, and of their conjunction and opposition.37
An astronomy that conformed to al-Ghazali’s ideology would be stripped of its physical attributes. Islamic astronomy seems to have developed in accordance with this dictum.
Even the more philosophically inclined of the Islamic astronomers seem, for the most part, to be intent not only on demarcating astronomy from natural philosophy but also on making it as independent as possible.38
Al-Ghazali is sometimes accused of blocking the progress of Islamic science, and given both his prominence and his beliefs, this claim is not without foundation. But did al-Ghazali change Islamic society, or did he simply embody the changes that were already in progress? His ideas were consistent with Ash’arite ideology, which was already being absorbed by Islamic society. And Islam’s shift away from science seems to have been due, at least in part, to the rise of Sufism, which looked inward to the human mind or soul rather than outward to the physical world. Here, too, al-Ghazali was a follower as much as he was a leader.
In any case, the “golden age” of Islamic science came to an end in the twelfth century. Ideas that did not mesh with Islam’s “founding ideas” were marginalized.
The ideas that shaped Islamic life had an inner logic that defined the options open to Muslim intellectuals and thus channeled Islamic intellectual life in particular directions. The issue was not a lack of freedom for individual creativity…but rather that those whose efforts cut across the grain of the formative ideas of Islamic society, like al-Farabi and the early philosophers, did not shape the central core of Islamic thought. Those who could make their intellectual creativity flow into channels that the founding ideas of Islam had opened won enduring influence. Such thinkers included al-Ghazalı, who saw that the place for logic was in the legal curriculum, and Suhrawardi, who saw that the natural role of philosophy was as the interpreter of mysticism.39
The sciences that continued to progress were those that had practical applications within Islamic society. Medicine was one of these sciences. Mathematics, despite its abstractions, was another. The mathematician al-Khwarizmi explained that his goal was to provide the solutions that “men constantly require in cases of inheritance, legacies, partition, lawsuits and trades, and in all their dealings with one another, or where the measuring of lands, the digging of canals…are concerned.”40 Astronomy also had great practical importance within Islam. The lunar calendar determined the dating of major festivals such as Ramadan, and there were prescribed times for daily prayers. The direction of Mecca was also important, both for participation in daily prayers and for the construction of mosques. All of these things were within the purview of the astronomers.
Islamic science, like the Greek science that came before it and the European science that came after it, was moulded by a variety of social forces. The next post (here) discusses some of its most important achievements.
- Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, p. 191. ↩
- Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, p. 191. ↩
- Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, p. 193. ↩
- Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, p. 194. ↩
- Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 12. ↩
- Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, p. 198. ↩
- Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, p. 202. ↩
- The overlap of language groups in the Near East meant that some translations were necessary for administrative purposes. The Umayyads engaged in this kind of translation, but there is no evidence that they translated scholarly books (Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 23). ↩
- Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 5. ↩
- Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 29. ↩
- Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, pp. 40-1. ↩
- The same kind of myth-making has occurred elsewhere. For example, there is no compelling archeological evidence of the Jewish exodus, or of the existence of a powerful King David. ↩
- Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 36. ↩
- It is not clear whether his belief was sincere or strategic. Astrology had not previously been part of Islamic culture. It had, however, been part of Greek culture, and both Aristotle and Ptolemy had written about it. ↩
- Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 24. ↩
- Testimony of al-Ahbari, an early ninth-century historian. Quoted by Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 30. ↩
- Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 83. ↩
- Here, “dialectic” means that in involves a dialogue between two (or more) proponents, in which propositions are tested and refined. Dialectic arguments were central to the philosophies of Socrates and Plato. ↩
- Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 84. ↩
- Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 117. ↩
- Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 117. ↩
- Quoted by Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, pp. 158-9. ↩
- Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (Yale, 1997), p. 136. ↩
- Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 48. ↩
- Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, p. 49. ↩
- Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, p. 59. ↩
- Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, p. 70. ↩
- Peter Adamson, “Al-Kindi and the Reception of Greek Philosophy”, in Peter Adamson and Richard Taylor, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (Cambridge, 2005), p. 35. ↩
- The Ash’arites were named for the philosopher Abu Hasan al-Ash’ari (c. 874–936). The Mu’tazalites took their name from an Arabic word that meant to withdraw or stand apart. ↩
- Livingston, The Rise of Science in Islam and the West, p. 95. ↩
- John Walbridge, God and Logic in Islam (Cambridge, 2010), p. 51. ↩
- Livingston, The Rise of Science in Islam and the West, p. 97. ↩
- Livingston, The Rise of Science in Islam and the West, pp. 96-7. ↩
- Al-Ghazali, quoted by Livingston, The Rise of Science in Islam and the West, p. 107. ↩
- Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers. ↩
- Jamil Ragep, “Freeing Astronomy from Philosophy: An Aspect of Islamic Influence on Science,” in Ragep, in Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus (Turkish Academy of Sciences, 2022), p. 25. ↩
- Al-Ghazali. Quoted by Jamil Ragep, “Freeing Astronomy from Philosophy: An Aspect of Islamic Influence on Science,” in Ragep, in Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus (Turkish Academy of Sciences, 2022), p. 26. ↩
- Jamil Ragep, “Freeing Astronomy from Philosophy: An Aspect of Islamic Influence on Science,” in Ragep, in Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus (Turkish Academy of Sciences, 2022), p. 31. ↩
- Walbridge, God and Logic in Islam, pp.13-4. ↩
- Al-Khwarizmi. From Frederic Rosen, editor and translator, The Algebra of Mohammed Ben Musa (1831), p. 3. ↩


Author — Rancher — Fighter Pilot — Test Pilot — Consultant
Mike Rhynard has been involved in cattle ranching since age seven; and from the time he could read, he’s been an ardent and enthusiastic student of American history. In addition, he’s a retired operational fighter pilot, combat veteran, developmental test pilot, and aerospace engineer and consultant.
Mike has enjoyed writing since grade school; and in the course of his professional careers, authored numerous technical publications. But as he wrote fighter aircraft evaluations and space transportation plans, an unrealized passion to write historical fiction simmered and grew just below the threshold of his consciousness. Finally, in the early 90’s, his daughter’s academic experiences convinced him that American schools no longer taught a comprehensive core of American History. So, in righteous retaliation, he wrote “Dangerous Dreams” as a Young Adult novel, with the belief that a series of fast-paced, adventurous historical fiction novels could insidiously teach the history the schools were not. However, when a reviewing agent kindly suggested that Mike re-write the story as an adult novel, the idea resonated with him; and after a 19 year hiatus to run the family cattle ranch and his aerospace consulting firm, he embarked on the journey in 2011.
He published the adult version of “Dangerous Dreams” in October 2015, and will begin plotting and researching his next historical fiction novel in 2016. Mike Rhynard lives on his family’s ranch in the breathtaking Rocky Mountains, with his long-suffering, but still loving, wife and hordes of hopelessly adoring animals.


SOFTWARE: Unreal Engine 4
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UE4 Beginner's Crash Course is a free PDF guide that will show you how to start learning and using Unreal Engine 4. The guide is 150 pages and features over 80 tips and how to techniques.
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Originally posted 22nd May 2008
After recent disappointments, I have just acquired a copy of the book 304 Squadron and it has proved a revelation. It has given me a fuller report of the last flight of Jan Stanislaw Waroczewski and also 2 photographs of R1268 (NZ - T). This is incredible because it was only 22 days old when it crashed and had only been in the hands of the squadron for 8 days,so it is really surprising that photographs even exist. I am only waiting for permission from the author and publishers before reproducing the photographs and the expanded story on this journal.