486 results in Regional geography
Contents
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- Studies in Medievalism XVI
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An Eastern Medieval Revival: Byzantine Art and Nineteenth-Century French Painting
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Summary
As the nineteenth century progressed, interest in medieval romance, literature, and art intensified, especially in France. The reasons for this were varied, but certainly the revival spirit of French Catholicism at mid-century and the ubiquitous search for a deeper spirituality at the end of the century contributed significantly to this attraction to the medieval period. In addition, the growing nationalistic fervor in nineteenth-century France encouraged an increased fascination with the French Middle Ages. While the western Middle Ages were clearly of interest to the nineteenth-century French, the eastern medieval world, specifically Byzantium, was also becoming a topic of great attraction and curiosity. The interest in Byzantine art, architecture, and history resulted in a plethora of printed journals, books, and other publications that featured engravings of many Byzantine monuments, and motivated many to travel to Italy, Greece, and Turkey, where they encountered Byzantine monuments first-hand. Whether seen in person or through representations, such an acquaintance with Byzantine images encouraged and inspired a number of nineteenth-century artists. For example, mid-century mural painters and the late-century artists who called themselves “the Nabis” (“the Prophets”) each expressed a distinctly Byzantine influence through iconographic choices, formal compositions, and painting techniques.
At mid-century, French artists were creating apsidal and nave murals that reflected, if not copied, forms from Early Christian and Byzantine churches. The church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Paris provides an excellent example of the reappropriation of what was understood at the time as the Byzantine style. Jakob-Ignaz Hittorff inherited the patronage of the building of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul from his father-in-law, Jean-Baptiste Lepère. When Hittorff took over the construction of the church, he remodeled the structure to reflect the form of Early Christian basilicas and desired a decorative program that would match this architectural style.
In 1848, Hittorff chose François-Edouard Picot to decorate the apse of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. In a letter dated August 14, 1848, Hittorff urged Picot to study the images in L’Architecture moderne de la Sicile (1835), Hittorff 's own book, and to use the illustrations in that volume to inform the compositions for the church. In his apsidal painting, Picot displays Christ seated on a cushioned-throne. Cross-nimbed, clad in a blue tunic, and wrapped in a red cloak, Christ blesses with an outstretched right hand while he holds a book in his left. This composition is very similar to Byzantine representations of Christ the Pantocrator, which are very common in the art of Byzantium.
A Ritual Failure: The Eglinton Tournament, the Victorian Medieval Revival, and Victorian Ritual Culture
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Summary
In its own time the Eglinton Tournament was, and today it remains, one of the most famous failures of the Victorian period. The range of epithets applied to the event testifies to the unanimity of critical opinion on this point: christened an “absurdity” by one critic; a specimen of “medieval mania” by another; and “the most bizarre manifestation of medievalism in the early years of the Victorian period” by a third; the tournament has also been labeled “a splendid failure,” “a fiasco,” “the greatest folly of the century,” and – my personal favorite – “the most magnificent abortion that has been witnessed for two centuries.” Despite, or perhaps because of, this widespread agreement, explanations of the Eglinton Tournament's failure rarely get beyond memories of the weather on the opening day. However, such exclusively meteorological recollections risk ignoring the productive significance of the failure to which the rain undoubtedly contributed, and the ways in which that failure can serve as a productive point of entry into Victorian England's elite public ritual culture.
Three critics – none principally interested in the Eglinton Tournament – approach the event with sufficient theoretical sophistication to begin to account for its enduring reputation among critics as a failure. In his survey of the historical context for the 1844 Robert Burns Festival, Alex Tyrrell casts the Eglinton Tournament as “a symbolic statement” of Scottish aristocratic paternalism “protesting against […] the ideology of modernization and social divisiveness that Whig reformers had pursued in the 1830s.” Tyrrell's argument suggests that the tournament failed, at least in part, because it could not persuade its contemporaries to adopt a specific political program and class position. The Earl of Eglinton's decision to attempt persuasion- by-tournament is explained by Helene Roberts, who uses Thomas Carlyle's theory of clothes in Sartor Resartus (1833–34) to understand the Victorian medieval revival. The brief section of her article devoted to the Eglinton Tournament makes perspicuous the degree to which the event relied on contemporary theories of signification.
Contes du Style des Troubadours: The Memory of the Medieval in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales
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Summary
In 1690, a new literary genre was launched in France. The forty-page story L’Ile de la félicité (The Island of Happiness), incorporated into Marie- Catherine d’Aulnoy's historical novel L’Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas, is generally considered to be the first French fairy tale to be published. Although this first fairy tale was not explicitly designated as such, it was soon followed by others that were more ambitious in their attempt to create an autonomous literary genre. In 1697, Charles Perrault published his Histoires ou contes du temps passé, the collection of eight tales that quickly became the model for the genre and that included the first-known versions of classics such as Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots. The term conte des fées (“tales of the fairies”) was itself first used in the title of another collection published in the same year, d’Aulnoy's Les Contes des fées. It was followed shortly thereafter, in 1698, by the introduction of the term more commonly used in France today to designate “fairy tales” – conte de fées – in the title of a collection authored by the Countess of Murat.
Raymonde Robert, in her classic study of the literary fairy tale in seventeenth- and eighteeenth-century France, has established that during the first decade of fairy-tale production, that is to say, the years 1690–99, fully half of the fairy tales published drew on folkloric motifs. Although she does not state this explicitly, her study suggests that many of these motifs went back to older traditions, and in a number of cases, she traces them back to specific medieval texts. Thus, the first published French fairy tale, d’Aulnoy's L’Ile de la félicité, bears a similarity to the Breton lai Guingamor, which, according to Robert, suggests a common source, if not actual, direct influence. The famous opening scene in Perrault's Sleeping Beauty (La Belle au bois dormant), during which the fairies each bestow a gift on the newborn princess, appears to go back to the fourteenth-century chivalric romance Perceforest. In the preface to her tale L’Enchanteur (The Magician), included in her collection Les Fées, contes des contes (1697), Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force declared that she had drawn her inspiration from an episode in a twelfth-century anonymous chivalric romance, the Livre de Caradoc.
Promises of Monsters: The Rethinking of Gender in MMORPGs
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Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an “act” as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” itself carries a double meaning of “dramatic” and “nonreferential.”
Yes, it's just a game, the way that the real world is a game.
It is a commonplace to assert that one of medievalism's greatest virtues lies in its opportunities for the loosening of gender constrictions, and certainly a quick inventory of medievalist texts from the 1980s on seems to bear witness to this phenomenon, as it features females taking up traditionally male roles, alternative matriarchal societies, and the sharp questioning of traditional masculine values. Yet while these may be refreshing changes from the pale and overtressed maidens of Pre-Raphaelite painting or the vapor-prone women of Gothic novels, celebration of this phenomenon needs to be tempered with caution. Jane Tolmie's intelligent essay on heroines in the fantasy genre, for example, shrewdly points out that like their forerunners in medieval romance, fantasy heroines’ very exceptionalism depends, within the constraints of the genre, upon the flattening of representation and upon lack of power for the other female characters. Moreover, the heroine's access to power is frequently through the very cultural institutions that support constraining ideologies of gender in the first place. Other critics, such as James Noble and Lee Tolbin McClain, have focused attention on the problematic gender essentialism and homophobia in The Mists of Avalon, or found that overly narrow emphasis on behavioral gender roles in medievalist texts ignores the issue of determinative embodiment of these heroines: where, for example, is the place in medievalism for the “gap-tothed” Wife of Bath or Grendel's grieving mother? However, most studies of the relationship of gender and medievalism have focused on traditional texts: novels, short stories, films, and, occasionally, graphic novels. Massively multi-player online role-playing games (known as MMORPGs), of which the dominant games are largely medievalist, complicate the idea of a medievalist “text” on a number of grounds. First, they are capable of near-infinite expansion of both narrative geography and characters; in fact, their survival depends upon continual growth in both areas. Second, they are collaborative texts formed from the templates given by the programmers and from the adventures and contextual narratives provided by the participants.
Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Elements in Computer Role-Playing Games: Use and Interactivity
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Summary
Introduction
The Middle Ages have long served as an inspiration for film and literary works. However, since the late twentieth century, they have also fueled an ever-growing number of re-enactments and games, especially computer games. Some of the latter are grounded in thorough research on the historical circumstances of the Middle Ages, but many more depend on overt fiction from or about the period, and almost all incorporate at least some pseudo-medieval elements.
This article explores some of those medieval and pseudo-medieval elements, as well as the types of computer game in which they appear. As the number of these games is far greater than could reasonably be covered here, I will focus on those that revolve around role-playing. But to give some idea of the range of medievalism and pseudo-medievalism in computer games as a whole, I will address examples from three different subgenres of roleplaying games. After briefly outlining the genre as a whole – as well as some of the others into which computer games have traditionally been divided – I will summarize Starbreeze Studios’ Knights of the Temple: Infernal Crusade, which represents simple, action-based games set in comparatively historical circumstances, Piranha Bytes’ Gothic 2, which is a more complex, questbased game set in a fantasy locale with mere overtones of the Middle Ages, and Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot, which is a massively multiplayer on-line role-playing game (henceforth referred to as an “MMORPG”) set in a milieu largely derived from medieval fiction. I will then examine three key aspects in the development of these games – namely, the medieval themes that apparently served as their inspiration, the manner in which these conceptions were altered for the benefit of the games (and the motives behind these alterations), and the differences among anticipated levels of interaction in the games – before concluding with a summary of my main points.
The Types of Computer Game Containing Medieval Elements
As is suggested by the vast differences among the genres and subgenres to which specialty publications often assign the same computer games, categorizing the latter can be highly problematic. Games from one genre often contain features associated with other genres, and some features are found in almost all genres. For example, games that fundamentally revolve around role-playing almost always contain at least some form of action, strategy, and/or adventure, and at least some form of role-playing is almost always found in games that fundamentally revolve around action, strategy, and/or adventure.
Acknowledgments
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The Doughboy Comes to Chartres: Stars and Stripes and the Middle Ages
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Summary
Of course, all wars are relics of the ancient eras; and Armies, with which wars are waged, must, to run true to form, retain many aspects of the medieval.
The following explores references to the Middle Ages in the American Expeditionary Force's (AEF) newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Recently digitized for the Library of Congress's website “American Memory,” it is a fresh source for exploring the medievalism of the Great War. From poems praising Joan of Arc to didactic articles on the history of the cities the doughboys were fighting – and dying – to liberate, Stars and Stripes chronicles a distinctively American encounter with the medieval “Old World.”
Stars and Stripes merits close reading by students of medievalism. It differs markedly from the elite texts examined by Paul Fussell and others since the 1970s. While Fussell's thesis that the war marked a cultural divide has been criticized in recent years, notably by Jay Winter, scholars have still focused their attention largely on England, not America. Stars and Stripes was self-consciously American; its pages also transmitted a variety of views, from official military reports to soldier's letters and poems. Unlike the poems and novels of the literati, this soldiers’ newspaper covers both elite and popular cultures. Both enrich our understanding of how the AEF, from its commanders to the doughboys, remembered the Middle Ages.
The American Middle Ages on the Eve of War
In early twentieth-century America, the Middle Ages were susceptible to any number of interpretations. American optimists had long found both the “Dark” and “Middle” Ages useful foils for contrasting old, decadent Europe with young and vigorous America. Others had followed romantics who encouraged medievalizing fashions in architecture and literature. Many considered the Middle Ages in racial terms, for example the “germ theory” explaining the origins of modern English and American governments in the dark forests inhabited by virile, freedom-loving Germans. Pessimists were drawn to Madison Grant, who warned that this American racial heritage, with its roots in both the medieval and ancient worlds, was now threatened:
We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping our nation towards a racial abyss.
Editorial Note
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14 - North of Oporto
- Harold Livermore
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- Portugal: A Traveller's History
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Beyond the Foz, the Atlantic coast has a string of sandy beaches. Next to Leixões, the ocean port for Oporto, comes the fishing-town of Matosinhos, which has a baroque church and a Franciscan convent. The small river Leça gives its name to Leça da Palmeira and a few miles inland Leça do Balio. The coast continues to Vila do Conde, passing a prominent obelisk rising above the sands to commemorate the place at Mindelo where Dom Pedro and his liberal army landed in 1832 from the Azores to take Oporto where they were besieged. The dunes and pools are now a bird-sanctuary at which avian visitors are ringed. Leça do Balio was the former headquarters of the Knights of St John, the Hospitallers, who moved south to Crato in 1312. It may have been a church with a defensive tower against the Vikings. The present building dates from c. 1350 to 1374, the work of the balio Frei Vasques Pimentel. It consists of three naves in regular rectangular plan with a lower triple chancel with stone vaulting. Both church and tower are battlemented. It governed many places in the fourteenth century, and King Fernando's irregular marriage to Leonor Teles was celebrated here in 1372.
The whole area north of Oporto was the Terra dos Maias, the powerful family which liked to trace its origins to King Ramiro II in 917. It covered some sixteen parishes from the sea to the present airport of Pedras Rubras and beyond. It now has no centre, the Alto da Maia being overspread by later development. The church of Aguas Santas dates from the twelfth century, and passed to the Knights of St John and then to Malta. Its baroque trappings have been removed and its original appearance restored. The old roads to Braga by way of Famalicão, and Guimarães by Santo Tirso, have been interwoven with the excellent new system of toll-ways which whisks vehicles through the pine-clad rolling hillsides, avoiding long stretches of ribbon development, but, as everywhere, making errors difficult to rectify and remote places hard to find. Residents who have taken computerisation in their stride slip through the toll-ways and a gadget on the windscreen identifies them so that invisible wizardry sends them a monthly bill for their accumulated mileages.
Foreword
- Harold Livermore
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Summary
When I was invited to write this book some years ago, circumstances prevented me from accepting. I feared that arthritis would stop my travels. I first visited Portugal in May 1936 as a graduate working in Spain, but the outbreak of civil war obliged me to come home. Cambridge then kindly made an award, intended for study in Spain, available in Portugal. My wife and I went to Coimbra, and I was made headmaster of the English school near Lisbon. We returned to England in November 1942, and my earliest history of Portugal appeared in 1947; this will explain why my interest was originally historical. I see Portugal and the Portuguese as they emerge from their past. If I qualify as a tourist, it is because I have returned almost every year for one or more visits.
I am indebted to many friends – some of them not known to me by name. But they include the late Susan Lowndes, who with her husband Luiz Marques founded the Anglo-Portuguese News. She knew Portugal well and published her Selective Traveller in 1949. Dr Paul Lowndes Marques has given me valuable help with the illustrations, selected by him with the help of Dr George Winius, and I am glad to record my thanks for the kindness of the Portuguese tourist authorities. I must also mention Dr Carlos Estorninho of Lisbon and Figueira da Foz, as well as Dr A J Miranda of Santo Tirso and his family, who have afforded me hospitality and driven me round the Minho. On the one occasion, Dr Winius both drove and pushed me round the Alentejo and Algarve. I had not thought it feasible to visit Portugal in a wheel-chair until TAP, the Portuguese airline, and George and Grace made it possible. In London, Mr António de Figueiredo has helped on many occasions and lent me books I did not possess, and Mrs Andrea White has undertaken the formidable task of making sense of my script. None of these is to blame for such errors as I may have made.
I have inserted one or two poems, which strike a nostalgic note: Saudade, the yearning for people and places no longer present, is often thought to be characteristic of Portugal.
The author and publishers would like to record their gratitude to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for assistance with the publication costs of this book.
Portugal: A Traveller's History
- Harold Livermore
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Portugal, the 'ancient ally', is a country easily accessible, with an enviable climate, welcoming inhabitants and famous beaches. English and Spanish apart, Portuguese is more widely spoken than any other European tongue. This historical guide draws on personal experiences ranging from a residence of three years to regular visits since 1936. It combines introductory chapters on eight centuries of nationhood, and sections on the Roman and Islamic past, architecture, painting, music and birds, with visits to the great cities of Lisbon and Oporto, and to the country's varied regions. The author's aim is not merely to describe; rather to account for the emergence of what the visitor may expect to see. He avoids jargon, preferring clarity and moderation - although permitting himself an occasional expression of saudade (the nostalgia for Portugal which haunts all who have loved this land).
Harold Livermore studied in Portugal in 1937 and taught there, in Cambridge and in Canada. He was educational director of the Luso-Brazilian Council in London and is a member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences and of the Portuguese Academy of History. His first 'History of Portugal' was awarded the CamSes Prize and was followed by a 'New History' and a 'Shorter History'. He has also published a history of Spain and an account of the medieval origins of both countries. A selection of his articles, 'Essays on History and Literature', appeared in 2000.
List of Illustrations
- Harold Livermore
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15 - Interior Portugal
- Harold Livermore
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Summary
The high road to the east from Oporto strikes out for a very different Portugal which the writer Miguel Torga (1907–95), who was born there, called a ‘marvellous kingdom’. It is not a kingdom, and has no name but that bestowed on it from outside, Trás-os-Montes, ‘beyond the mountains’. The range in question is the Serra do Marão, rising to 4,250 feet. The pass at the Espinho commands a vast panorama. Those who dwell beyond are their own masters: ‘Para cá do Marão, mandam os que cá estão’. It is a large land-locked province whose capital Bragança is far away near the border with Spain. It is quite different from the teeming maritime Minho which wears its heart on its sleeve (at least the seamstresses of Viana do). The rivers of the Minho go directly to the sea, whilst those of Trás-os-Montes rise near the Spanish border in the north and first find their way to the Douro. The largest of these is the Tâmega, already a broad stream when it flows under the great Roman bridge at Chaves, which is certainly in Trás-os-Montes, but passes through Basto and Amarante in the Minho, and pours into the Douro some twenty-five miles east of Oporto. The historical border of the province seems not to have been fixed. It comprises the two districts of Bragança and Vila Real. More recently the city of Oporto has been made the centre of the Douro Litoral, which includes both sides of the river, and Vila Real has become the capital of the Alto Douro, and includes Lamego south of the river.
On leaving Oporto, the road, whether it knows it or not, traverses the Douro Litoral. The first river to cross is the Sousa, a small stream flowing through a wide valley. Its name has been carried all over the world. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the only family that could match the Maias were the Sousas who acquired many estates. The Paço de Sousa stands a little off the main road near Paredes, and was an ancient hermitage when the Sousas made it their Benedictine monastery under Egas Moniz, the tutor of Afonso Henriques: he is buried in the church, which exceeds the usual Romanesque building of the time. Egas’ successor as mordomo-mór was Gonçalo Mendes, ‘o Sousão’ (1157–67).
17 - Algarve
- Harold Livermore
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Algarve is Portugal's ‘other kingdom’ which is in many ways different from the rest of the country. Its name recalls that it was once the Far West, as seen from Egypt or Syria. In late Muslim times, its capital was Silves, but it was only a kingdom dependent on the Abbadid rulers of Seville. In 1471, Afonso V ‘the African’ assumed the title of ‘King of Portugal and of the two Algarves, on this side and on that’, thus stressing its ancient connection with Morocco, the Magrib. His son, the great John II, came to take the waters of Monchique, where he died in 1495. His chronicler noted that he died ‘at a small place outside of Portugal’. Under the Philips, its governor was referred to as a viceroy, but the designation has now no political implication. Since the tourist boom which began in about 1960, Faro has become the second busiest airport in Portugal, and it is possible to visit the Algarve without seeing the rest of the country, regrettable though this may be. It is marked off from the neighbouring Alentejo by a line of hills, which rise to nearly 3,000 feet in the Serra de Monchique and only half as high in the Malhão further east. They form a sort of amphitheatre, containing the undulating coastal plain which stretches for a hundred miles behind a succession of sandy beaches that catch the sun. It is in sharp contrast with the long levels of the adjoining Alentejo, which is bare grazing country with a relatively small population. The Algarve is only a fifth of the size of the Alentejo, but carries a higher population than either part of its neighbour.
The territory is too narrow to have any great river or estuary to attract a large population. As in the north, the coast is more populous than the interior, and has a string of small ports administered from Faro, which before the tourist boom had a population of only 13,000 and was chiefly engaged in the export of fish or fruit from its fertile hinterland. The Algarve is an orchard of almonds, which blossom in January, oranges, lemons and figs, as well as apples, pears, cherries and other fruit, and a market-garden for tomatoes, onions, cauliflowers, melons, aubergines, pimentos and so forth.
7 - Music
- Harold Livermore
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- Portugal: A Traveller's History
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In an age when recorded sounds are available everywhere, what is heard in Portugal may or may not be Portuguese music. Discounting international sound, which is easily industrialised, and in which Portugal doubtless has its place, we can only say briefly what is typically Portuguese. When Ann Livermore wrote her Short History of Spanish Music in 1972, she remarked that she could not do a similar volume for Portuguese because you can't write about music unless you hear it. Now much more Portuguese music is available, for which a debt is owed to the Gulbenkian Foundation, particularly in the field of early church music which had hitherto gone unpublished. Church music emanated from the monasteries, and the tradition was abruptly broken at the dissolution of 1834, being only gradually restored. Secular music was performed at royal banquets and other occasions in the middle ages, and much of it went unrecorded. Some later music comes from the eighteenth-century opera, which flourished in the golden days of King John V. A detailed account of Portuguese opera by Manuel Carlos de Brito is available in English (Cambridge 1989).
The Galaico-Portuguese lyric goes back to the twelfth century, when the songbooks or Cancioneiros were formed. Under the learned Alfonso X (1252–84), the religious Cantigas de Santa Maria were preserved in Castile, while the secular tradition passed to his grandson, King Diniz of Portugal (1279–1325). The forms adopted in the songbooks fell into three main groups: the first, addressed by men to women; the second, put into the mouths of women, is amatory and plaintive, though almost always composed by men; and the third is satirical, denunciatory or comic. This convention lasted until about 1400. A new troubadour convention then arrived from Castile or Aragon (previously from Provence or Italy). The Portuguese style was more contemplative and discursive than the Castilian, which was ecstatic and introspective.
In the greater churches, the organ had prepared the way for orchestration and polyphony. The theatre of Gil Vicente, which prevailed at court from 1502 until 1536, calls for a wide variety of songs and dances, some of them regional. Camões’ last play, Filodemo, performed by the poet and his friends in India in 1554, calls for half a dozen rustic instruments.
3 - Before Portugal
- Harold Livermore
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- Portugal: A Traveller's History
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Summary
There were innumerable generations of inhabitants of Portugal before they recognised themselves as Portuguese, or even Lusitanians, the name given by the Romans to the people of central Portugal. The first Stone Age or Palaeolithic takes us back a hundred millennia, when the present climate and landscape did not yet exist. The range of primitive artefacts, from stone bludgeons to the refined laurel-leaf blade, can be seen in the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography at Belém and in numerous local collections. Although Portuguese archaeology goes back to 1865, new sites are constantly being revealed. A project for a hydroelectric scheme in the valley of the river Coa, an affluent of the Douro, was halted because of the discovery of scrawled drawings on the flat rock. The preservation of this ancient art became a question of national concern, and the small town of Vila Nova de Fozcoa acquired a tourist attraction it previously lacked.
The existence in Portugal of cave-paintings of the Magdalenian age, like those of Altamira in Northern Spain and Lascaux in southern France, was unknown until 1963, when the caverns at Santiago do Escoural, near Montemór o Novo in the Alentejo, were explored. These underground galleries have fourteen sketches of animals and humans, supposedly done in about 15000 bc. Most of Portugal escaped the rigours of the last glaciation, and the drawings at Escoural do not reveal any sign of the despair at the disappearance of the reindeer and cold-weather fauna which it is possible to read into the art of Altamira. To the amateur eye they resemble the drawings at Fozcoa made in the light of day, when men had abandoned the life of the caves, and drew in the open on flat surfaces eroded by the small river. In the period between 8000 and 7000 bc, the valleys of the Tagus and Sado to its south were frequented by men who hunted and also gathered shellfish on the shore. The middens were noticed in 1865, and those at Flor da Beira in 1935, with others on the Sado. They are mounds of discarded shells, which also contain the bones of animals and human beings. Some three hundred skeletons have been found, pointing to continuous rather than dense occupation. The former owners of the bones dwelt in the open or behind wind-breaks or rock-shelters: they decorated themselves with perforated sea-shells.
16 - Alentejo
- Harold Livermore
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- Book:
- Portugal: A Traveller's History
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 11 November 2004, pp 159-175
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Summary
Lisbon is a famous seaport, but it is not on the open ocean. A channel half a mile wide and twenty miles long leads into an inland sea several miles across and broad enough to hold all the world's navies. It is the Straw Sea, Mar de Palha. The name has nothing to do with straw, but suggests a false ocean, rather as the False Creeks explorers used to find, a ‘man of straw’, a dummy. The rim of this expanded river or miniature sea is the Outra Banda, or Other Side.
At the narrows ferries take about twenty minutes to cross, and ply constantly between the Terreiro do Paço or Cais de Sodré and Cacilhas. They are crowded at the rush-hours but otherwise provide a simple and inexpensive way to see Lisbon from the water. Formerly, travellers coming from the east would arrive at Aldeia Galega, the most distant part of the Mar de Palha, and wait for transport to Lisbon. The ferry from Lisbon to Montijo took an hour and a half and sitting on the deck in the sunshine afforded a pleasant way of passing an idle afternoon. The bay at Moita was rendered more attractive by the blue magpie or jay, found only in China and here. Who introduced this beautiful bird is not known; fifty years ago it was confined to Montijo or thereabouts, but now it is not uncommon over a large area.
The south bank seen from the height of the castle in Lisbon looks attractive in a faint veil of blue mist. It is a series of inlets now in part industrialised. Barreiro is the railhead for the southern railway, and passengers obtain tickets from the office near the Lisbon Terreiro and cross by ferry to the trains on the other side. The naval shipyard was traditionally at the Arsenal adjoining the Paço, but was transferred to Alfeite, a former royal estate. Barreiro has docks and yards for the repair of large oil-tankers and other vessels. The streams flowing into the Mar de Palha had water-mills, and one of these at Seixal has been rehabilitated as a tourist attraction.
Contents
- Harold Livermore
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- Book:
- Portugal: A Traveller's History
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 11 November 2004, pp v-v
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Index
- Harold Livermore
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- Book:
- Portugal: A Traveller's History
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 11 November 2004, pp 187-192
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