Stanford University Press Blog

Finding hidden imagery in an Illuminated Page

A guided tour of the Zeytun Gospel’s Canon Tables reveals the extraordinary life of a matchless Armenian artwork

HEGHNAR ZEITLIAN WATENPAUGH

A bifolium of two different sets of illustration from the Getty display of the Zeytun Gospels canon tables. Photograph: J. Paul Getty Museum. Ms, 59, fols 3v-6r. Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

Consider this page from the Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The illuminated page features an architectural frame supported by three columns. Between the columns are golden grids that contain letters written in the Armenian alphabet. The letters stand for numbers, and the grids are concordance lists of passages that relate the same events in two or more of the four Gospels. In the Middle Ages, canon tables almost always preceded the Gospels. They occupied several pages and were among the most elaborately decorated passages in a manuscript. The Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels were created in 1256, the first signed work of Toros Roslin, now recognized as the greatest medieval Armenian illuminator. On this page, you see areas of geometric ornament enhanced with gold ink and jewel-like colors. When you look closely at the ornamental field, you find pairs of partridges and blue birds hidden in the gold leaf, pecking at tendrils. There are two faces staring out from the upper section, their expressions enigmatic. The column capitals are actually ox heads rendered in blue. Plants and animals surround the architectural frame. At the top of the page, two roosters stride confidently towards a jeweled vase, their tail feathers outlined in gold. Flanking the frame are floral motifs and pomegranate trees where two species of birds frolic.

 

One of the matching pairs of Canon Tables by Toros Roslin. Ms. 59,  fol. 5v and 6r. Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

Roslin conceived of his canon tables as matching pairs. When you opened the book, they appeared on two facing pages that echoed each other’s decoration. You can see how the matching page features a similar arrangement, with the same roosters, ox-head column capitals, and pomegranate trees (see Ms. 59, fol. 5v and 6r). As your eye travels from one page to the other, you delight in discerning differences: the roosters nibble at the bottom of the vase rather than striding towards it, the birds are all different, and on the lower row they peck at the column capitals. The hidden faces in the architectural frames have vanished, leaving behind indigo arabesques emerging from horns of plenty.

Trump’s Metaphorical Drug Deal and Lynching Fallacy

Trump invokes outrage to terrorize and intimidate while justice is served.

ADAM HODGES

July 2019– President Donald J. Trump speaks to members of the press prior to departing for West Virginia. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The most important political metaphor during the first month of the impeachment inquiry surfaced again during testimony from the top US diplomat in the Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., on October 22. Only it was overshadowed by President Trump’s new—and predictably more outrageous—metaphor for the investigation that same morning: “a lynching.” The tiresome “witch hunt” trope seemed to have finally lost steam—itself merely a recycled sound bite left over from the Mueller investigation. It was time for Trump to crank up his rhetoric another notch to induce more outrage and drown out the serious talk of his own behavior in the Ukraine dealings—this time by incredulously equating imagined injustices against him with the very real injustices inflicted on an estimated 4,000 African Americans who were lynched by mobs of white supremacists in the decades after Reconstruction.

An outside observer need not follow all the details and nuances of the affair to grasp the gist of what was going on: something shady outside the rule of law.

Metaphors are central to everyday language use, including our political discourse—and for good reason. Metaphors help us make sense of the unfamiliar and complex by invoking the familiar and easier to understand. The complexity of the Ukraine shenanigans is a case in point. Taylor opened his testimony with a lengthy statement that laid out a detailed chronology of events spanning several months and involving multiple people engaged in both a “regular Ukraine policy decision-making channel” and an “irregular channel.” Taylor himself is one of several witnesses who have testified since the start of the official impeachment inquiry. As the depth and complexity of the evidence continues to accumulate against the president, the public needs a captioning device to make sense of this imbroglio.

Look no further than the metaphor attributed to John Bolton by Fiona Hill in her testimony on October 14 and reiterated a week later by Taylor. After learning of the irregular channel’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rivals, Hill testified “that Bolton told her to notify the chief lawyer for the National Security Council about a rogue effort by Mr. Sondland, Mr. Giuliani and Mick Mulvaney,” stating, “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up.”

Metaphors operate by drawing from a source domain—such as drug deals—to understand a target domain—in this case, the Ukraine dealings. The conceptual schema of the source domain maps onto the target domain, allowing us to use the schema of drug deals to reason about and make sense of the rogue diplomatic efforts in Ukraine. Criminality is central to the drug deal schema, implying that the rogue diplomatic efforts involved criminal—or at the very least highly unethical and thereby impeachable—behavior.

EURASIA’S NEW GEO-ECONOMICS

Why geography matters to the world now.

KENT E. CALDER

December 2013– President Xi Jinping meets with Prime Minister Rutte and Minister Ploumen of The Netherlands. By Minister-president Rutte, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons  

A century ago geography was an avidly followed and debated subject in international relations, but the discipline for many years fell into disrepute. Long associated with fascist expansionism, after World War II it was rendered politically irrelevant by the static bipolarity of the Cold War world. However, with increased global connectivity boundaries have become more fluid and permeable, leading to a quiet but sharp growth in geography’s global importance.

In Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration, I take an in-depth look at how geography, in interaction with economic growth and the structural changes of the early post-Cold War years, has quietly begun to re-shape the world’s largest continent, thereby transforming the face of world affairs. Eurasia, after all, has over one third of the earth’s land area, over 80 percent of its proven natural gas, and almost 60 percent of its proven oil reserves. It includes three of the four most heavily populated nations on earth. Yet as Zbigniew Brzezinski, US National Security Advisor under Jimmy Carter, noted in 1997: “Fortunately for America, Eurasia is too big to be politically one.”

Two decades and more after Brzezinski’s important judgment on Eurasian political geography, it remains true that Eurasia is by no means politically one. Regional rivalries, as between China and Japan, certainly continue. Yet political relations among the continent’s key nations are substantially better, economic interdependence is deeper, and social connectivity is much greater than when Brzezinski wrote. The cumulative effect of these post-Cold War social, economic, and political changes is to transform the geopolitical profile of Eurasia’s fragmented political geography itself, and to raise the specter of a more cohesive Eurasia that yields unprecedented influence in world affairs.

How This Book Came To Be Written

Robert O. Paxton reflects on the process behind the creation of Vichy France and the Jews.

ROBERT O. PAXTON  

The cover of the second edition of Vichy France and the Jews» by Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton from Stanford University Press (left) and the original cover of the Stanford University Press first edition (right).

 

I was invited to write Vichy France and the Jews by a French publisher. The late Roger Errera, a French magistrate who also worked for the Paris publishing house of Calmann-Lévy, asked me to write about this subject in a letter of July 2, 1971. “Good books about Vichy,” he wrote in that letter, “are nonexistent in France.” This statement might seem surprising for such a momentous period in French history, from June 1940 to August 1944, when Paris and two thirds of the country were occupied by German troops while a semi-autonomous French government administered the rest from the spa town of Vichy, in the central hills, and while resistance gathered in the shadows. In 1971, however, the German occupation and varying French responses to it still aroused bitter feelings that discouraged serious scholarship. Self-justifying memoirs abounded, but the one standard study of this period was the journalist Robert Aron’s Histoire de Vichy (1957),  a work that, in the absence of access to any relevant government documents, had drawn heavily upon how Vichy officials under trial after the war for collaboration had explained their actions.

At that time I was a relatively young scholar. I had published one book about the Vichy regime: Parades and Politics at Vichy: the French Officer Corps under Marshal Pétain (Princeton, 1966). But it had not been translated into French. Indeed it had hardly been noticed in France. I had had to donate a copy myself to the French National Library. I had not yet completed my second book about Vichy, which was to appear in 1972 as Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Alfred Knopf,). But Errera had heard about me from my professors at Harvard. He wanted someone who stood outside French clans and cliques, who knew the period well, and who could work with the German archives as well as French. He wanted someone who would dig deeply into the policies of both countries and apportion responsibility for what happened to Jews in France during 1940-1944. He wanted a book so firmly rooted in the official record that its findings could not be challenged.

Errera was well-connected, and as promised he secured access for me to important classified files in the French Archives Nationales. These included the correspondence of Marshal Pétain, the Vichy French head of state, and the files of the Commissariat-general for Jewish Questions

I had not expected my research on Vichy France to move in this direction.  But Errera’s invitation was tempting. The subject was certainly a dramatic one. Moreover Errera promised me some access to French archives, which were still officially closed. Above all he offered me a chance to be published in France and to address the French public directly, an opportunity which had eluded me up to that time. I accepted his invitation eagerly.

Ideological Polarization and the Belgian Experience

Writing the history of ethno-nationalism through 19^th-century tweets.

MAARTEN VAN GINDERACHTER

Maison du Peuple of the P.O.B. (Belgian Workers Party), CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication, via Wikimedia Commons  

 

As I am writing this, early October 2019, it’s been 5 months since the last general elections in Belgium. No new government is yet in sight. It feels like 2010-2011 all over again, when it took over a year and a half to form a national government. This time, however, Belgium does not feel as the odd cousin in the Atlantic family of well-behaved functioning democracies. In the age of Trump and Brexit ideological polarization has made governing by compromise near impossible in many western liberal democracies. Suddenly, the Belgian experience no longer seems to be the exception to the rule. The discord between Belgium’s Dutch-speakers and French-speakers now appears as just one manifestation of the many potential societal divides that need to be managed in a liberal democracy, rather than an idiosyncratic Belgian quirk. All over the globe the rise of populist ethno-nationalisms has opened up the cracks and fissures of the liberal-democratic status quo.

Given the current zeitgeist, taking stock of ethno-nationalism’s past manifestations has taken on a new urgency. And where better to start than in Belgium, the little kingdom by the North Sea fragmented by ethno-linguistic rivalries? Obviously, the current Mexican stand-off between Dutch- and French-speaking politicians plays into the cliché image of Belgium as an artificial invention of international diplomacy, a country only held together by the monarchy, the national football team, waffles, chocolate and beer. Belgium is a supposedly superficial and unnatural juxtaposition of Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, a view  that goes all the way back to the country’s foundation as an independent state in 1830. Even Leopold von Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld, the German prince who became the first king of the Belgians, was pessimistic: “Belgium does not have a nationality and given the character of its inhabitants it will never have one.” Many contemporaries casted doubt on the viability of the country. Rather than a reflection of the weakness of the young nation-state or the inevitability of ethno-linguistic discord, their naysaying was a response to the geopolitical uncertainties Belgian independence had created. Because of its central location in Western Europe – the “keystone of the European order” in the words of the French king Louis-Philippe – the Belgian territory was avidly looked upon by France, Britain, Prussia and the Netherlands. It was easier to deny the country’s viability than to annex it.

The image of Belgium as an accident waiting to happen or as a lost cause from the start has been refuted by academic research. Flanders and Wallonia are by no means more natural or more ancient than the so-called artificial Belgian nation-state. The ethno-linguistic divide only became a separatist wedge issue after the First World War. As the paragon of European modernity, nineteenth-century Belgium was even a frontrunner in nation-building. Densely populated and urbanized, covered by a network of busy railroads, canals and highways, it was the first industrialized country on the continent. Its liberal constitution protected the freedoms of religion, press and association, and supported a thriving civil society. In short, a framework to mass-produce citizens was in place.

All over the globe the rise of populist ethno-nationalisms has opened up the cracks and fissures of the liberal-democratic status quo.

The Prehistory of Queer Celebrity

How Sontag, Baldwin, and Vidal contributed to gay liberation.

GUY DAVIDSON

James Baldwin and Marlon Brando at the August 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C.            Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

 

Toward the end of 2018, Newnownext, like many other LGBT-focused websites, featured a listicle tallying celebrities who had come out that year. The celebrities listed had variously come out as gay, bisexual, pansexual, non-binary, and queer and included Janelle Monáe (pansexual), Broad City star and creator Abbi Jacobson (queer), pro soccer player Collin Martin (gay), and star of Scream and Arrow Bex Taylor-Klaus (non-binary).

The article is headlined #20GayTeen: 26 Celebs Who Came Out in 2018—an allusion to a hashtag tweeted out by American out lesbian pop star Hayley Kiyoko on the 1^st of January of the year. Kiyoko tweeted: “It’s our year, it’s our time. To thrive and let our souls feel alive. #20GAYTEEN #expectations2018.” The #20GAYTEEN hashtag quickly went viral, tweeted out by fans and other LGBTQ celebrities as a proclamation of queer pride.

In an article from December of the same year entitled How 2018 Became the Year ‘20GAYTEEN’, Vice writer Daisy Jones enthused that Kiyoko had been right in her optimistic prediction, given the number of overtly queer pop hits that the year had seen, as well as the number of out queer characters in films and other media. She concluded,

“it's really cool that teenagers today who might not identify as totally straight (which is a lot of them, apparently) have a pop culture landscape that increasingly speaks to the specifics of their own life. Because that's exactly what pop culture should be. It should be a vehicle for you to make sense of the world around you, of the relationships you'll get lost in, the structures you'll have to navigate, the loves you'll gain and lose and gain again, the years that will fly behind you. And if pop culture is a mirror, it makes sense that it would (and it should) hold more than one type of person's reflection.”

How to Stop Trump from Evading What’s Undeniably Impeachable

Why words alone do not convey all the meaning in Trump's phone call with Zelensky.

ADAM HODGES

July 2019– President Donald J. Trump at a meeting with the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

We’ve been through this routine many times before: Trump says something egregious. Critics cry foul. Trump and his supporters respond by invoking plausible deniability. They project the president’s own fault onto his opponents and reframe the conversation in a way that sows enough doubt and distrust across a divided electorate to avoid being held accountable.

This time could be different—if congressional Democrats follow Speaker Pelosi’s lead and effectively counter Trump’s disingenuous language games. But doing so will require understanding some key ideas from sociocultural linguistics on the way meaning unfolds through language use. Holding Trump accountable for his most recent impeachable offense requires communicating to the public why the memo of his call with President Zelensky of Ukraine is so damning. And it has less to do with what he reportedly said—or didn’t say—in so many words (a quid pro quo of US military aid for dirt on a political opponent) than what he did communicate within the context of the call and US foreign relations.

Politicians frequently play the plausible deniability language game by exploiting the gap between semantic and pragmatic meaning. In that other infamous memo of the Trump presidency—the one in which then-FBI director James Comey documented what he took to be the president’s attempt to obstruct justice in the investigation of Michael Flynn—Trump’s defense hinged on the semantics of the word hope (“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go”).

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Turns Towards Hollywood

Going beyond the label of propaganda in regime media.

NARGES BAJOGHLI

Parade of IRGC tank transporters. Photo by Mohammad Sadegh Heydari via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC Attribution 4.0 International

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A professionally produced video surfaced on Iranian social media the last week of August. A young soldier in the Revolutionary Guard stands on a train in the Tehran metro. Some young boys around him begin to beat-box and the soldier raps to the passengers:

 

Why are you sitting

Join me

We are all from one home

In happy times and hard times, sticking together is what endures

Our future is bright, as long as we stick together

We all have to be ready to heal each other’s wounds

 

Given the passengers reactions in the video it becomes obvious that the rapper and his beat-box boys have shown up unannounced on the metro train. The intention seems to be a depiction of the Revolutionary Guard as “of the people,” a soldier who at once is connected to the tired commuters as well as has the attention of the younger riders who are supposedly enjoying his rhymes. The camera focuses on ordinary passengers, who either look on amused or indifferent as the soldier raps about unity in the face of economic hardship from US sanctions. Not only do the lyrics communicate national unity in the face of domestic and international pressures, but the video forefronts passengers who are read as working and lower-middle class Iranians. The rapper is a young soldier in the Revolutionary Guard, immune from accusations of grift, corruption, and the accumulation of vast wealth that his older counterparts are widely critiqued for by Iranians today.

When the music video ends, the only credit reads: Director: Eighty Million Iranians.

How do we make sense of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – an organization now formally designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the US government – beatboxing and producing rap videos that claim to speak on behalf of a nation? There’s nothing new about national militaries using media to conjure unity. So, what’s the big deal here?