RODA: THE MEDIEVAL BIBLE OF SANT PERE DE RODES

The Grandma in Sant Pere de Rodes

Today, The Grandma has visited the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes in El Port de la Selva. This monastery was witness of the creation of one of the most important and amazing manuscripts of the 11th century: The Rodes Bible, a wonderful work which you can see in the National Library in Paris.

The Rodes Bible is a manuscript written in the 11th Century. It was originally a book with 566 pages but, in the 18th Century, it was divided into four books. It was written on vellum, a parchment made of unborn animal skin. The preparation of the pages for writing is easy to see, with the page divided into three columns with spaces for the miniatures.

More information: Ajuntament del Port de la Selva

Miniatures. The Rodes Bible.

The Bible is written in Latin in the Carolingian script of the early 11th Century, combining titles and certain other phrases in other types of script. The handwriting of six different scribes can be identified. Many of the pages are illuminated, with illustrations occupying either a small section or the entire page, particularly in the books of the Old Testament.

There are three groups of miniatures -the initial capital letters, depictions of scenes and characters from the Bible, and representations of animals. Depending on the text that they accompany, they occupy one or two columns or the entire page. Just as in the case of the scribes, the work of different miniaturists can be discerned.

More information: Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes

Normally, the writing was completed first and the scribe left a blank space for the monk who specialized in drawing the miniatures. However, this was not always the case throughout the entire book.

Miniatures. The Rodes Bible.

The miniatures of the Rodes Bible are a great source of knowledge about the medieval world of the Catalan earldoms. Although the clothes, gestures, furniture, soldiers' weapons and relationships between characters were supposed to depict the people and scenes from the ancient world, they are all taken from the everyday lives of 11th Century monks.

The Rodes Bible was written in the first quarter of the 11th Century in the Monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll when Oliba was the abbot. Abbot Oliba commissioned three large-scale Bibles to be written and illustrated with miniatures. One of these Bibles was given as a gift ini an unfinished state to the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes, possibly to mark the ceremony of the consecration of the Monastery's church in 1022. 

More information: Monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll

The Bible remained at the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes until it was stolen at the end of the 17th Century by the Duke of Noailles as part of the spoils of war. The Rodes bible was one of the manuscripts that formed part of the private collection of the Noailles family until it was purchased by Louis 15th along with 200 other manuscripts in 1749, to add to the french royal collections. Today, it is kept at the National Library in Paris.

Miniatures. The Rodes Bible.

Sant Pere de Rodes was a monastery of the Benedictine Order under which, among other duties, a compulsory daily period of reading was imposed. This required books which were obtained by copying them from other collections.

The term Scriptorium is used to refer to a room in monasteries set aside for writing. however, in medieval monasteries, scribes normally wrote at a small table in the cloisters or in their rooms. The word scriptoria refer to the written works produced in the monasteries rather than to a physucal place. A monastery's scriptorium is also associated with the existence of a library which, in many cases, was no more that a closer or trunk located in the cloister or in a passageway. In the case of Sant Pere de Rodes, it is known that an archive existed in which, among other books, there was a luxurious Bible which was stolen at the end of the 17th century.

The Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes is one of the most important medieval monasteries in terms of Catalan Romanesque art. The monument that we see today is a set of building constructed between the 4th and 18th Centuries.

The Monastery's golden age was from the 10th to the 12th Century, a period in which it received several donations and lands from nobles, primaily from the Counts of Empúries, which great benefited the Monastery. 

The monks abandoned Sant Pere de Rodes in 1798 after a long period marked bad financial management, attacks from pirates and continuous wars with France.

More information: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

The notion that human life is sacred 

just because it is human life is medieval. 

Peter Singer

J.V.FOIX: THE AVANT-GARDE IN EL PORT DE LA SELVA

J.V.Foix in his home in El Port de la Selva

Today, The Grandma is in El Port de la Selva, a small town in l'Alt Empordà, where the poet Josep Vicenç Foix found inspiration for the most part of his poems. 

The town has a special route dedicated to J.V.Foix where you can follow his life and understand his poetry.

Josep Vicenç Foix i Mas (28 January 1893-29 January 1987) was a Catalan poet, writer, and essayist in Catalan. Born in Sarrià, Barcelona, Foix was a son of one of the best-known bakers in the whole city. He started his studies of Law, but left them after the second course at university. 

More information: Fundació J.V.Foix

From then, he worked in the familiar business as well as he read classic masterpieces of literature by authors such as Lord Byron, Dante Alighieri or Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, Foix never forbade the place where he had been born, not even when the Spanish Civil War ended. 

Some old memories in El Port de la Selva

Nonetheless, Foix always had been a liberal writer who introduced some avantgarde ideology in Catalonia.  

He usually signed his work by using the abbreviation J.V. Foix.

In 1916 began to collaborate with La Revista and started to be interested in avantgarde art. He worked among other publications like Trossos, La Cònsola (1919–1920) or La Publicitat (1923–1936), where he worked as an art director.

At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Foix returned to the familiar business, and let forgotten for some time his artistic purpose. 

More information: Mapa Literari J.V.Foix-El Port de la Selva

The Grandma in El Port de la Selva nowadays

He also compiled his total poetic work, and continued helping young artist related to avantgarde, between which Joan Brossa must be named.

On 25 May 1962, he became a member of Institut d'Estudis Catalans. 

He received many different awards during his life: la Medalla d'Or de la Generalitat de Catalunya in 1981 or el Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes in 1984 are some of them. 

In 1984, the Parliament of Catalonia proposed him for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Download Readings of J.V.Foix

J. V. Foix helped in 1985 to found again the students association Federació Nacional d'Estudiants de Catalunya (FNEC). He was named President de Honour of it. He died in 1987, and buried in Sarrià.

    Alone, I am eternal. A thousand-year old terrain
    entices me, what was strange is no longer strange,
    I was born to this place; desert without oasis.

J.V.Foix

WALTER BENJAMIN: EXILE AND DEATH IN PORTBOU

Walter Benjamin

The Grandma is in Portbou where she has arrived to visit the Walter Benjamin's Memorial. Today, the weather is rainy with a grey sky and strong wind, a sad picture for a dramatic story.

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892–26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. 

He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was also related by law to German political theorist Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to his cousin, Günther Anders.

Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays The Task of the Translator (1923), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), and Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, and translation theory. 

More information: Walter Benjamin in Portbou

He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. 

Walter Benjamin

In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from invading Nazi forces. Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.

Perceiving the socio-political and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire, in February 27 1933, as the de facto Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews, he moved to Paris, but, before doing so, he sought shelter in Svendborg, at Bertolt Brecht's house, and at Sanremo, where his ex-wife Dora lived.

More information: The Charnel House

In 1937 Benjamin worked on Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, met Georges Bataille, to whom he later entrusted the Arcades Project manuscript, and joined the College of Sociology. In 1938 he paid a last visit to Bertolt Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. Meanwhile, the Nazi Régime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, Benjamin was arrested by the French government and incarcerated for three months in a prison camp near Nevers, in central Burgundy.

The Grandma in Portbou, Alt Empordà

Returning to Paris in January 1940, he wrote Über den Begriff der Geschichte. As the Wehrmacht defeated the French defence, on 13 June, Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to the town of Lourdes, a day before the Germans entered Paris on 14 June, with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the US that Max Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo, Benjamin planned to travel to the US from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach via Francoist Spain, then ostensibly a neutral country.

The historical record indicates that he safely crossed the French–Spanish border and arrived at the coastal town of Portbou, in Catalonia. The Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and ordered the Spanish police to return such persons to France, including the Jewish refugee group Benjamin had joined. 

It was told by the Spanish police that it would be deported back to France, which would have destroyed Benjamin's plans to travel to the United States. Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Walter Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets on the night of 25 September 1940 while staying in the Hotel de Francia; the official Portbou register records 26 September 1940 as the official date of death. Benjamin's colleague Arthur Koestler, also fleeing Europe, attempted suicide by taking some of the morphine tablets, but he survived. Benjamin's brother Georg was killed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942. 

Download Critique of Violence by Walter Benjamin

Despite his suicide, which is still a mystery, Benjamin was buried in the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic cemetery. 

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts 

far more than convictions. 

Walter Benjamin

VICENT ANDRÉS ESTELLÉS: BORN FOR STAYING AWAKE

Vicent Andrés Esteller

Today, The Grandma wants to talk about one of her favourite poets: Vicent Andrés Estellés.

Vicent Andrés Estellés (4 September 1924-27 March 1993) was a Valencian poet and journalist. 

He was born in Burjassot, València and is considered one of the main renovators of modern Catalan poetry, with a similar role to that of Ausiàs March or Joan Roís de Corella in earlier periods.

Vicent Andrés Estellés was twelve years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out. During its course, he trained to become both a baker and a goldsmith, and learned to write on a typewriter. The war had a profound impact on his work, in which death is a recurring theme.

More information: UOC

Estellés spent his teenage years in Valencia, where he developed an interest in literature. During that period, he was most influenced by Charles Baudelaire, Pablo Neruda, Paul Éluard, Cesare Pavese, and Walt Whitman, Catalan poets such as Màrius Torres, Jacint Verdaguer, Josep Carner, Carles Riba, Santiago Rusiñol and Joan Salvat-Papasseit, as well as the Valencian poet Ausiàs March and the Balearic poet Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel.

In 1942, at the age of 18, Estellés moved to Madrid to study for a degree in Journalism. Three years later, he left to do his military service in Navarre. At the age of 24, he moved back to Valencia and became a journalist for the newspaper Las Provincias. He befriended Joan Fuster, Xavier Casp and Manuel Sanchis i Guarner, all three of them well-known Valencian writers, and met Isabel, who would later influence his writings as well.

The Grandma meeting Estellés in Burjassot

In 1955 Estellés married Isabel. The couple had a daughter, who died when she was four months old. After the death, which Estellés recalled in Coral romput, death became a recurring theme in his works.

In 1958 he became editor-in-chief of Las Provincias, only to be dismissed for political reasons in 1978, thus being forced into early retirement at the age of 54. This allowed him to devote himself entirely to writing and engaging in a variety of cultural activities, such as art exhibitions. That same year, Estellés was awarded the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes. In 1984 he was awarded the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Valencianes.

Estellés spent a few years in Benimodo, a municipality in the comarca of Ribera Alta, in the Valencian Country. During this period, he combined poetry with prose in his works. He received several awards in the 1990s, including the Premis Octubre.

More information: Visat
 

The works of Vicent Andrés Estellés, one of the most important Catalan-language poets of the 20th century, are diverse and extensive. 

Vicent Andrés Estellés

Estellés also wrote novels, plays, screenplays, as well as his memoirs. It is difficult to categorize his entire work because some works were reworked from books or private notes such as Manuscrits de Burjassot, Cançoner or Mural del País Valencià, from which he only published extracts or the poems he considered most appropriate. 

The three levels of oppression that are evident in his works are the reason why Estellés's aesthetics have been described as irate.

-Personal oppression: He describes a vital situation in which persecution and humiliation are constant. This situation unavoidably requires being assertive and acting consequently. It shows love as a possibility of salvation and redemption.

-Collective oppression: He describes a collective life characterized by economic misery, fear of being socially criticized, and a situation of ignorance devastating the people which he feels he belongs to.

-National oppression: He describes a sense of despair, a particular sensitivity caused by cultural, linguistic, and national abduction. He is sensitive to the Valencian people's fight to dignify their own culture.

 More information: Ajuntament de Godella

Some of his most frequently recurring topics are death, love and eroticism, hunger and political oppression, as well as daily life. Put together, these themes provide a considerable formal and tonal variety.

You will assume the voice of a people
and it will be the voice of your people,
and you will be, forever, people,
and you will suffer, and you will wait,
and you will go through the dust,
and a dust cloud will follow you.

Vicent Andrés Estellés

MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE AND THE REIGN OF TERROR

Maximilien Robespierre

La Terreur or The Reign of Terror or The Terror is the label given by some historians to a period during the French Revolution.

Several historians consider the reign of terror to have begun in 1793, placing the starting date at either 5 September, June or March, birth of the Revolutionary Tribunal, while some consider it to have begun in September 1792, September Massacres, or even July 1789, when the first beheadings took place, but there is a general consensus that it ended with the fall of Robespierre in July 1794.

Between June 1793 and the end of July 1794, there were 16,594 official death sentences in France, of which 2,639 were in Paris. However, the total number of deaths in France was much higher, owing to death in imprisonment, suicide and casualties in foreign and civil war.

There was a sense of emergency among leading politicians in France in the summer of 1793 between the widespread civil war and counter-revolution. Mr. Barère exclaimed on 5 September 1793 in the Convention: Let's make terror the order of the day!

They were determined to avoid street violence such as the September Massacres of 1792 by taking violence into their own hands as an instrument of government.

More information: History Today

On 9 Thermidor Year II, 27 July 1794, the French politician Maximilien Robespierre was denounced by members of the National Convention as a tyrant, leading to Robespierre and twenty-one associates including Louis Antoine de Saint-Just being arrested that night and beheaded on the following day.

Execution of Maximilien Robespierre

The fall of Robespierre was brought about by a combination of those who wanted more power for the Committee of Public Safety, and a more radical policy than he was willing to allow, and the moderates who completely opposed the revolutionary government. They had, between them, made the Law of 22 Prairial one of the charges against him, so that, after his fall, to advocate terror would be seen as adopting the policy of a convicted enemy of the republic, putting the advocate's own head at risk. 

Between his arrest and his execution, Robespierre may have tried to commit suicide by shooting himself, although the bullet wound he sustained, whatever its origin, only shattered his jaw. Alternatively, he may have been shot by the gendarme Merda. The great confusion that arose during the storming of the municipal Hall of Paris, where Robespierre and his friends had found refuge, make it impossible to be sure of the wound's origin. In any case, Robespierre was guillotined the next day.

The reign of the standing Committee of Public Safety was ended. New members were appointed the day after Robespierre's execution, and limits on terms of office were fixed, a quarter of the committee retired every three months. The Committee's powers were gradually eroded.

More information: History Extra

Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally 

destined to emerge from the Revolution. 

Irving Babbitt

OUR LADY THE QUEEN OF THE ANGELS OF PORCIÚNCULA

Tina Picotes in the City of Los Angeles

Tina Picotes remembers her last visit to Los Angeles, California. She has great memories of her travel and wants to talk to us about the history of this amazing city which today is  suffering one of the worst fires of its history. 

Los Angeles, officially the City of Los Angeles and often known by its initials L.A., is the cultural, financial, and commercial center of Southern California. With a U.S. Census-estimated 2016 population of 3,976,322, it is the second most populous city in the United States, after New York City, and the most populous city in the state of California.

More information: Los Angeles City

The Los Angeles coastal area was first settled by the Tongva, Gabrieleños, and Chumash Native American tribes thousands of years ago. A Gabrielino settlement in the area was called iyáangẚ meaning "poison oak place."

Map of Los Angeles City, 1894

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese-born explorer, claimed the area of southern California for the Spanish Empire in 1542 while on an official military exploring expedition moving north along the Pacific coast from earlier colonizing bases of New Spain in Central and South America.  

Gaspar de Portolà, the Catalan military who became the Governor of California, and Franciscan Majorcan missionary Joan Crespí, reached the present site of Los Angeles on August 2, 1769.

In 1771, Franciscan Majorcan friar Juníper Serra directed the building of the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, the first mission in the area. On September 4, 1781, a group of forty-four settlers known as Los Pobladores founded the pueblo they called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula; in English, The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of Porciúncula.

The Queen of the Angels is an honorific of the Virgin Mary; indeed, the present-day city still retains an active Roman Catholic Archdiocese, and as noted below, this archdiocese of Roman Catholicism remains the largest such archdiocese in the United States. Two-thirds of the settlers were mestizo or mulatto with a mixture of African, indigenous and European ancestry. The settlement remained a small ranch town for decades, but by 1820, the population had increased to about 650 residents. 

More information: Discover Los Angeles

Today, the pueblo is commemorated in the historic district of Los Angeles Pueblo Plaza and Olvera Street, the oldest part of Los Angeles.

Tina Picotes in Venice Beach, Los Angeles

New Spain achieved its independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821, and the pueblo continued as a part of Mexico. During Mexican rule, Governor Pío Pico made Los Angeles Alta California's regional capital.

Mexican rule ended during the Mexican–American War: Americans took control from the Californios after a series of battles, culminating with the signing of the Treaty of Cahuenga on January 13, 1847.

In 1910, Hollywood merged into Los Angeles, with 10 movie companies already operating in the city at the time. By 1921, more than 80 percent of the world's film industry was concentrated in L.A. The money generated by the industry kept the city insulated from much of the economic loss suffered by the rest of the country during the Great Depression. By 1930, the population surpassed one million.

More information: Los Angeles City Historical Society

The city is divided into over 80 districts and neighborhoods, many of which were incorporated places or communities that merged into the city. These neighborhoods were developed piecemeal, and are well-defined enough that the city has signage marking nearly all of them.

Tina Picotes in Los Angeles Dodgers Stadium

The city is divided into the following areas: Downtown Los Angeles, East Los Angeles and Northeast Los Angeles, South Los Angeles, the Harbor Area, Greater Hollywood, Wilshire, the Westside, and the San Fernando and Crescenta Valleys.

The city of Los Angeles and its metropolitan area are the home of ten top level professional sports teams. These teams include the Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Angels of Major League Baseball (MLB), the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers of the National Football League (NFL), the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Los Angeles Kings and Anaheim Ducks of the National Hockey League (NHL), the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer (MLS), and the Los Angeles Sparks of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). 

I love Los Angeles, and I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. 

Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic. 

Andy Warhol

CLAIRE FONTAINE & THE GRANDMA VISIT THE CRARC

Claire Fontaine & The Grandma in Masquefa

Masquefa is a municipality in the comarca of Anoia in Catalonia. It is situated on the edge of the Penedès Depression on the road between Piera and Martorell. It is served by a station on the FGC railway line R6 from Barcelona via Martorell to Igualada.

Claire Fontaine and The Grandma have visited Masquefa this morning. They have gone to visit the CRARC, a wonderful place where some reptiles and amphibians live in a special atmosphere waiting their moment to be returned to its original habitat. You can see lots of different species in this place: crocodiles, frogs, snakes, iguanas and turtles. One of the most interesting species is the Hermann's tortoise, aka Testudo hermanni which is under danger of extinction and thanks to CRARC is returning to its original habitat in ranges like the Albera, the Garraf, the Montsec or the Montsant.

More information: CRARC (Catalan Version)

Hermann's tortoise or Testudo hermanni is one of five tortoise species traditionally placed in the genus Testudo, the others being the marginated tortoise, Greek tortoise, Russian tortoise, and Kleinmann's tortoise. Two subspecies are known: the western Hermann's tortoise and the eastern Hermann's tortoise. Sometimes mentioned as a subspecies, Testudo hermanni peleponnesica is not yet confirmed to be genetically different from Testudo hermanni boettgeri.

Claire, The Grandma & Testudo Hermanni

Testudo hermanni can be found throughout Southern Europe. The western population is found in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Tuscany. The eastern population, Testudo hermanni boettgeri inhabits Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Turkey and Greece, while Testudo hermanni hercegovinensis populates the coasts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Montenegro.

Hermann's tortoises are small to medium-sized tortoises from Southern Europe. Young animals, and some adults, have attractive black and yellow-patterned carapaces, although the brightness may fade with age to a less distinct gray, straw, or yellow coloration. They have slightly hooked upper jaws and, like other tortoises, possess no teeth, just strong, horny beaks. Their scaly limbs are greyish to brown, with some yellow markings, and their tails bear a spur, a horny spike, at the tip. Adult males have particularly long and thick tails, and well-developed spurs, distinguishing them from females.

More information: The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species

Claire, The Grandma, Peke and a crocodile

The real purpose of Claire Fontaine and The Grandma's visit has been to meet one old friend, Peke, a sulcata tortoise that was adopted by The Grandma, some years ago and nowadays lives comfortably in the CRARC.

The African spurred tortoise or Centrochelys sulcata, also called the sulcata tortoise, is a species of tortoise, which inhabits the southern edge of the Sahara desert, in Africa. It is the third-largest species of tortoise in the world, the largest species of mainland tortoise, and the only species in the genus Centrochelys.

Its specific name sulcata is from the Latin word sulcus meaning furrow and refers to the furrows on the tortoise's scales.

More information: The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species

The African spurred tortoise is native to the Sahara Desert and the Sahel, a transitional ecoregion of semiarid grasslands, savannas, and thorn shrublands found in the countries of Burkina Faso, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan. 

Claire & The Grandma in the CRARC, Masquefa

In these arid regions, the tortoise excavates burrows in the ground to get to areas with higher moisture levels, and spends the hottest part of the day in these burrows. This is known as aestivation. Burrows may average 30 inches in depth; some dig tunnel systems extending 10 feet or more underground.

Centrochelys sulcata is the third-largest species of tortoise in the world after the Galápagos tortoise, and Aldabra giant tortoise, and the largest of the mainland tortoises. Adults can reach 83 cm and can weigh 105 kg . They grow from hatchling size very quickly within the first few years of their lives. The lifespan of an African spurred tortoise is about 50–150 years, though they can live much longer. The oldest in captivity is 54 years, located in the Giza Zoological Gardens, Egypt.

More information: CITES

Sulcata tortoises are herbivores. Primarily, their diets consist of many types of grasses and plants, high in fibre and very low in protein. Flowers and other plants including cactus pads can be consumed. Feeding of fruit should be avoided.

Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest. 

James Lovelock