This week: Plato, medieval dynasties, Thomas Jefferson, Joe Zucker & more.
Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100-1300, by Catherine Hanley (Yale University Press): The politics of twelfth- and thirteenth-century France and England were largely governed by the complex personal relationships between the Capetian and Angevin dynasties. From the moment William the Conqueror crossed the channel and took the English throne, the destinies of France and England became inseparable, bound by intermarriage, successional disputes, and war as the kingdoms vied for primacy in Western Europe. Catherine Hanley focuses her work on the rulers, their family members, and the nobility, contextualizing contemporary narrative sources on individuals like Eleanor of Aquitaine within big-picture histories of events such as the Crusades. Newcomers to dynastic politics of the Middle Ages should fear not: Hanley provides numerous dynastic charts, maps, and illustrations that bring these stories to life in a legible, vivid form. —JW
Notes on the State of Virginia, by Thomas Jefferson, edited by Robert Pierce Forbes (Yale University Press): Controversy follows Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), regardless of the century that receives it. The only full-length book by the Founding Father, it surveys late-eighteenth-century Virginian society and argues for secular government, freedom of speech and press, and emancipation. Jefferson landed in hot water then for “atheism,” weakening his presidential run in 1800. Now, the passage claiming differences between races garners content warnings on university websites. Robert Pierce Forbes tackles the various controversies and contradictions in a thorough new edition, the first to be based on both the first edition and the original manuscript. —SM
“Joe Zucker: Detritus 2020,” at the Madoo Conservancy (through September 17): During the pandemic closures of 2020, the artist Joe Zucker turned to the stories of Sholem Aleichem. What resulted is a revelatory body of work that looks to these often-illustrated tales with a bracing new austerity. Painted and drawn on the cast-off materials of his studio—cardboard, towels, rubber mats—the work of “Detritus 2020” is brought together for the first time in an exhibition at the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack, New York, on view through September 17. Nearly monochrome, dappled in a chilling white snow, the series traces out the shells of the shtetl, with recurring motifs such as the abstracted shape of a snowman recalling the graven image, a melting presence, and supremacist forms. What results is a haunting landscape that hints at the apocalypse to come to this corner of the Pale, not to mention the cataclysm of the present day. —JP
Plato: Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, edited and translated by Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy (Loeb Classical Library): It’s fitting that Plato’s famous theory of “forms,” in his Symposium, comes swaddled in layers of hearsay: an account by Diotima of Mantinea, related by Socrates at the titular drinking party, and overheard by a certain Aristodemus, by whom it was reported to one Apollodorus, who, in turn, relays it to an unnamed interlocutor (the outer frame of the whole dialogue). Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy continue the line of transmission with this new Loeb edition, handsome as usual, presented in bilingual format alongside Plato’s Lysis and Phaedrus. —RE
By the Editors:
“Studio: The English baroque architecture of New York.” A review of An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts architecture in New York City, by Phillip James Dodd with photography by Jonathan Wallen.
James Panero, The Critic.
Podcasts:
“Music for a While #64: Horne-o-rama.” Jay Nordlinger, The New Criterion’s music critic, talks music—but, more important, plays music.
From the Archives:
“The strange case of Charles Valentin Alkan,” by James F. Penrose (May 1993). A review of Charles Valentin Alkan, edited by Brigitte François-Sappey.
Dispatch:
“Modern orthodoxy in ‘Elizabeth Finch,’” by Anthony Daniels. On Elizabeth Finch, by Julian Barnes.