Laura Battiferra – a Poetess for the Great Siege

Giovanni Bonello wrote a series of three articles for the Times of Malta (2012) on the poetess Laura Battiferra in relation to the Great Siege of Malta (1565).

Laura Battiferra by Agnolo Bronzino c.1560

"Laura Battiferra – Laura who? She had sunk into almost total oblivion, even though she was the wife of one of the most distinguished artists of the High Renaissance: Bartolomeo Ammannati. If one wanted to be generous, she had become an inconspicuous footnote in the history of Italian literature. The cultural explosion of feminism in more recent years has reversed the trend of gender neglect and again pushed Battiferra to the forefront."

Bonnello notes that: " Women do not generally celebrate war in poetry – only silly men do that – but then they do sometimes sing the praises and the virtues of male warriors and champions, the handsome supermen of their unacknowledged dreams, objects of unabashed hero worship or more."

Of her final days, Bonnello writes: "Battiferra spent most of the last stretch of her life in a chapel specially built for her by her husband in a rented villa in Camerata, close to the gates of Florence. Ammannati could afford that and much else besides, after a long and highly successful career as a sculptor and an architect. She passed away in November (probably the 1st), 1589, and was buried in the Ammannati chapel in the Florentine church of San Giovannino whose façade had been designed by her gifted husband."

Times of Malta: 
Laura Battiferra – a poetess for the Great Siege (July 29, 2012)
Laura Battiferra’s four poems on the Great Siege of Malta (August 5, 2012)
Poetess sings praises of Great Siege heroes August 12, 2012

About Laura Battiferra:

• Wikipedia - Laura Battiferra
• Italian Women Writers - Laura Battiferra Ammannati
• Creative Partners: the Marriage of Laura Battiferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati 
• eScholaship: Laura Battiferra - An Open Book
• Project Continua - Laura Battiferra Ammannati

Books on / featuring Laura Battiferra:

• Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook edited by Rinaldina Russell
• Laura Battiferra and Her Literary Circle: An Anthology: A Bilingual Edition By Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati
• Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England edited by Diana Maury Robin, Anne R. Larsen, Carole Levin
• Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance: Courtly Ladies and Courtesans by Laura Anna Stortoni, Mary Prentice Lillie

Astronomers Recreate Ancient Skies to Date a Nearly 2,600-Year-Old Greek Poem

Astronomers Recreate Ancient Skies to Date a Nearly 2,600-Year-Old Greek Poem | Smart News | Smithsonian

The poet Sappho from the Greek island of Lesbos was revered almost as much as Homer in classical antiquity. Plato called her the Tenth Muse and she appeared on coins and statues for centuries. She reportedly created at least 9 books worth of verse containing 500 poems, but sadly all that remains are about 200 fragments recovered in the late 1800s from a garbage dump in Oxyrynchus, Egypt.

According to Michelle Starr at CNET, the researchers used software called Starry Night (version 7.3) and Digistar 5 from the International Planetarium Society to recreate the night sky as seen from the Greek island of Lesbos. They chose to start with the year 570 B.C., the year Sappho died and the only reliable date associated with her.

Sarah Losh: Forgotten Heroine

From The Economist:

In The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine—Antiquarian, Architect and Visionary, Jenny Uglow has brilliantly researched web of connections—of friends and family, ideas and influences. Losh left little of herself beyond the stone, wood and glass of her astonishing church and a few other local structures—a mausoleum, a cross, the schoolhouse, some cottages. Ms Uglow believes a diary will emerge one day.

From Amazon:

In the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical church in Victorian England. Jenny Uglow’s The Pinecone tells the story of its builder, Sarah Losh, strong-willed and passionate and unusual in every way. Born into an old Cumbrian family, heiress to an industrial fortune, Losh combined a zest for progress with a love of the past. In the church, her masterpiece, she let her imagination flower—there are carvings of ammonites, scarabs, and poppies; an arrow pierces the wall as if shot from a bow; a tortoise gargoyle launches itself into the air. And everywhere there are pinecones, her signature in stone. The church is a dramatic rendering of the power of myth and the great natural cycles of life, death, and rebirth.

Losh’s story is also that of her radical family—friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge; of the love between sisters, and the life of a village; of the struggle of weavers, the coming of railways, the findings of geology, and the fate of a young northern soldier in the Anglo-Afghan War. Above all, though, it is about the joy of making and the skill of unsung local craftsmen.

Poem Dedicated to Adelaide of Louvain

Saudi Poet Attacks Clerics

From Google News:

A Saudi housewife's bold poems which blast "evil" extremist fatwas by Muslim clerics have earned her death threats but could yet win her a 1.3-million-dollar poetry contest on Emirati television.

Ahead of Wednesday's finals of the "Million's Poet" aired weekly on Abu Dhabi state television, the poems have put Hissa Hilal, who wears a traditional head-to-toe black "abaya" cloak and veils her face, in the spotlight.

If on March 31 she is announced the winner, she will walk away with the grand prize from the competition, which draws masters of bedouin dialect poetry, known as Nabati, which is highly appreciated by Gulf Arabs.

But Hilal has drawn the wrath of Islamist conservatives in her country after criticising its strict segregation of the sexes and blasting fatwas that reject an easing to allow women to take on jobs that are currently for men only.

Shakespeare: to be or not to be

Shakespeare - or the myth surrounding him - has always fascinated me. His life, his death, his works, the myth of his "true" identity.

So here's a fascinating article from Jack Malvern at Times Online, which claims that the Bard had help with his writing.

The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism.

Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, believes that a comparison of phrases used in The Reign of King Edward III with Shakespeare’s early works proves conclusively that the Bard wrote the play in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, one of the most popular playwrights of his day.

The professor used software called Pl@giarism, developed by the University of Maastricht to detect cheating students, to compare language used in Edward III — published anonymously in 1596, when Shakespeare was 32 — with other plays of the period.

He discovered that playwrights often use the same patterns of speech, meaning that they have a linguistic fingerprint. The program identifies phrases of three words or more in an author’s known work and searches for them in unattributed plays. In tests where authors are known to be different, there are up to 20 matches because some phrases are in common usage. When Edward III was tested against Shakespeare’s works published before 1596 there were 200 matches.

There has been lots about the Bard in the tabloids over the past few years - here's a selection:

• Portrait of William Shakespeare
• Bard was a Catholic
• Hubble Bubble - Shakespeare's in trouble
• The Death of William Shakespeare

Taslima Nasrin

Article by MT Husain in the New Nation:

Taslima Nasrin, professionally a physician and a writer by fancy, a native of Bangladesh, lives abroad for years. As there was a report published in some media, she lamented that how come that she could not come to her motherland Bangladesh even when the Awami League and a lady like her, some years older in age, Sheikh Hasina is in power. She was certainly right. Her lamentation had genuine point.

None can take away anybody's birth right as living in one's own birth- place and country, and so leaving from or entering into. The government cannot deny much less restrict that right except recourse to due process of law.

I am not sure what legal restrictions she has against her. Even if there is any, she can come in and face the due process of law in the court just like any other citizen could be under. None should be outside the purview of law or without recourse to it.

She has however image problem in the society. In this case she has options. One, she could continue as she did in the past as a vulgar feminist writer not acceptable in the predominantly Bangladeshi Muslim society, but even so, being a pluralist state, the government may well provide her with the best possible security inside the country. Or else, she could well engage herself both in her original profession of physician to serve many in physical ailments. In case she wants still to do her writing as a feminist advocate she has to avoid vulgarism, particularly of sexuality, and instead do writing that would not offend the religious feelings and sentiments of the millions of her own countrymen living in Bangladesh.

Thus putting the ball in her court the government should welcome her back in the country.

Offical website of Taslima Nasrin
Wikipedia - Taslima Nasrin

Kamala Das

From the Times Online:

Kamala Das was one of India’s finest authors, the mother of modern English Indian poetry, and the first Hindu woman to write frankly about sexual desire. Admired by those seeking better living conditions and human rights for women, Das was a writer who could be tender and biting, sometimes in the same sentence.

Das died in Pune, in northwestern India, where she had lived since 2007 near the family of her youngest son, Jaisurya. Her body was flown to her home state of Kerala, where thousands of mourners of all ages paid homage, weeping and placing flowers on her hearse during her funeral procession. The proceedings were covered live on television, and the procession stopped at public halls in Trichur, Cochin, Alleppey, Kollam and Trivandrum.