Did I jinx myself?
So, 30 minutes into World Civilizations 1, I was discussing the issues involved in comparing this:
Pyramids at Gizeh
with this
Monastery Church at Bourg-en-Bresse (Savoy, now France)
when this happened!
Gary Fuller (Richard Armitage) directs students to safety in Into the Storm.
Yup — the phones buzzed, the storm sirens went off, and we all dashed to safety. I don’t think the tornadoes made it to campus, but there was a heck of a storm, and flash floods afterwards.
Hmmm. Next year I’m not posting a picture of Gary on the first day of class.
Me + Richard Armitage 
Lol. Now if only Gary had come to lead you to safety! (Glad you are all safe though.)
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Hahaha Sue I was thinking the same thing!! It’s a sign I need to watch Into The Storm this week!!
Gary to the rescue 😛😍
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If you need any Daddy Armitage, this film will do it for you.
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Yeah daddy Armitage indeed..it was a toss up
between ITS and Sleepwalker and my gut and
some pics of Gary pointed toward ITS
I’ve only seen it once a few months ago during
Round one of Armitage mania for me so it’s
ripe to watch again…. I just can’t bring myself
to watch Daddy Cahalan again and not bec
of Richard or Carrie Anne Moss who I like now
thru Jessica Jones but CGM just is bad…
and the writing is baddd in my opinion.
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IKR? It was a young woman in a high-vis vest.
I was worried there would be a death because there was a report on the police scanner of a child sucked into a drainage ditch, but apparently he kept his head above water and has been found unharmed.
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Thank goodness he was found in time!
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It really was a minor miracle apparently. The rescuers thought they were going in to do a recovery, not a rescue.
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There was a nick-of-time incident when we were in Toronto, too. A huge downpour caused significant flooding downtown. Two men were trapped in an elevator in an underground parking lot. The water rose so fast and it was amazing that they were rescued. They had to stand on the side railings and bash open the locked hatch at the top with their heads to get a cell signal to call for help. They had only 12 inches of air at the top when the police came and dove down to rescue them. Quite dramatic.
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Sounds like a potential movie plot!
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When reality could inspire fiction.
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Exactly!!!
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Oh dear 😅 A lively start to semester. I wish you all the best with your new students.
And I’d be curious to know what you said about comparing the pyramids with the Bourg-en-Bresse church!
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I showed those two pictures plus a picture of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán and a picture of the Taj Mahal. The point was to query why all of these things would be in the same course — they are all in our textbook — is it fair to compare them? On what basis? What do we learn from the comparison? I was talking about the relationship between monuments built to commemorate the dear departed — is the tomb of a Christian monarch comparable to that of a Pharaoh 4000 years earlier? And so on. So I was mostly asking questions: is there a real relationship between the things covered in “World Civilizations I” and if so, what is it?
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Wow! I wish I had you as my prof in my poli sci
curriculum!! What a great set of queries do you get any sense they have a spidgeon of what you are really asking them? That would excite me as a student for sure!!
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my grad minor was political theory, but I’m unlikely to teach it at this campus because there’s still a separate political science major. I teach most of the subects that fall under the history department purview (arbitrarily).
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🙂 I like this subject. I studied sun diseases and at the beginning of my thesis I wrote about sun’s gods.
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There’s also an alleged syncretic connection between Jesus and Sol Invictus (the scheduling of Christmas), although this question has been debated for centuries.
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🙂 Sorry it was only some science researches subject for me. I wrote: “Nowadays modern man sacrifices himself to the Sun Gods for the tanning that it generates, sign of holidays, rest, health, social promotion … Formerly, these gods had a beneficial or harmful aspect too…” then I wrote about each of them including Amaterasu in Japanish history legends.
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Interesting. I certainly wouldn’t have expected that church to feature in a textbook and be compared to Taj Mahal & Co. It’s not very far from where I live and I like it, especially the polychrome tiled roof, but Bourg-en-Bresse is in the butt-crack of the country and the church isn’t that well-known.
I’d love to sit in the back of your class. And pester you with unclear questions.
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J’y vois des points communs:
– ce sont des monuments très bien conservés ou “retapés”,
– ce sont des monuments de très grande taille,
– ce sont des chef-d’œuvres à l’apogée de leur style architectural,
– ce sont des nécropoles où l’amour intervient et
– le public a montré son grand intérêt, son engouement pour chacun d’eux.
Vive France 2 et Stéphane Bern pour faire connaître notre patrimoine à l’étranger. http://www.bourgenbresse.fr/Toute-l-actualite/Le-monastere-royal-de-Brou-elu-monument-prefere-des-Francais (Personnellement, je préfère la sobriété des abbayes plus anciennes comme Cluny, Fontfroide, Fontevrault, Solesmes ou l’ épau pour celles qui me sont connues)
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and the famous Abbaye du Mont-Saint-Michel
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Bonjour 😁
C’est vrai qu’il y a eu l’émission de Stéphane Bern, mais je ne sais pas si ça l’a vraiment faite connaître auprès d’un grand nombre de gens, et s’il y a davantage de visiteurs. Je n’ai aucune idée de l’impact réel. L’église de Brou est magnifique et gagne à être connue, mais niveau renommée ça n’est pas le mont Saint-Michel ou Notre-Dame de Paris, donc au premier abord ça m’a bien surprise de la voir mentionnée, surtout à côté des Pyramides (je me suis dit mwahahaha c’est la gloire pour Bourg-en-Bresse).
Mais effectivement si l’on considère son histoire, on trouve des points communs, par exemple avec le Taj Mahal (monuments bâtis suite à un deuil par des personnes de pouvoir). J’aurais bien aimé assister au cours de Servetus 😄
Moi aussi j’aime bien l’atmosphère des abbayes plus sobres et simples.
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🙂 Mon cheminement émotionnel et intellectuel a été semblable au votre, excepté que j’aurais sorti comme onomatopée: MiaAouOU!
PCCB – Le duo des chats
A cause des sépultures qui s’y trouvent, je comparerais plus facilement le “Monastery Church at Bourg-en-Bresse” avec l’abbaye royale de Fontevrault. En plus il y avait un splendide jardin botanique médiéval avec des plantes médicinales et condimentaires.
http://www.architectureanecdotes.com/2015/09/17/la-necropole-des-rois-dangleterre-a-fontevraud/
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😉 Sympa de voir Servetus nous laisser entrevoir les coulisses de ses cours d’ enseignement supérieur. A quand un cours en ligne pour ses lectrices assidues?
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Ha ha, je m’inscrirais tout de suite
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An earlier generation would have gone to Brou for the chicken 🙂 (which we also tried out and liked. I also think we drank a kir there).
Another interesting comparison — both funerary monuments but Brou has physical effigies of the departed while the Taj Mahal does not (Shah Jahan was a Muslim). There’s an interesting discussion there about the relative level of embellishment in each case — Muslim vs Christian aesthetics and so on.
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🙂
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We did Cluniac sites one summer, too. Cluny, Vezelay, Paray le Monial, etc., but we did not go to Solesmes.
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🙂 One of the great pedestrian pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela in Spain could start in “Bourgogne-Franche-Comté”: Vezelay then Paray le Monial and Cluny, leading to “Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes” to reach Le Puy-en-Velay. Just kidding: why not next time, walking barefoot, as in Ireland at Croagh Patrick?
Solesmes Abbey (sheltering a true monastic life, no visits for the women) and Fontevraud Abbey (tourist and cultural place without monks just Henri II Plantagenêt, Aliénor d’Aquitaine, Richard Cœur de Lion and Isabelle d’Angoulême) are in the west region of “Pays de Loire”, not far from the famous castles. A next journey perhaps!
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Wow! Sign me up for either tour!!
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Why not? But at first, I could advise you to read in this blog, what last year, I former wrote and kindly Servetus corrected about my family Irish pilgrimage, in memory of Richard Armitage movie.
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Ok I will do that but both pilgrimage you mention sound wonderful!
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🙂
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My students were always stunned that people undertook long journeys barefoot. (I wouldn’t, myself. I’d have been one of those medieval people who never went more than 35 mi from home.)
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C’est malheureusement un exemple de ce qu’ où les rites religieux peuvent aboutir: des pratiques extrêmes. Ils ont peut-être beaucoup de choses à se faire pardonner. Leurs pieds doivent être calleux, comme ceux des ongulés (animaux à sabots).
Au Moyen- Age, j’aurais parcouru la campagne à la recherche de plantes médicinales et ensuite fabriqué des potions comme Radagast. Ainsi, j’aurais pu finir brûlée pour sorcellerie ou magie.
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or like the feet of hobbits.
My ancestors were (mostly) peasants in Prussia in 1648, so I assume that they would have been the same in the Middle Ages, too.
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🙂
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J’oubliais que ce sont des personnes de pouvoir qui ont initié ces constructions, avec l’idée de rester à la postérité et de montrer par la même leur pouvoir.
Les croyances, les religions et la politique étaient étroitement liés…
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I think the reason the church is in the textbook is that the author of that chapter is a former student of mine 🙂 but I saw it because I went on vacation in Burgundy once and for someone who studies the Reformation, the political history of Savoy is an absolute must, so after our ten days in Burgundy we swung through Bourg-en-Bresse on our way to Geneva. And because of that (at the time I had a really great photographer boyfriend) I had lots of great picture of the church, and it demonstrates a lot of important points about medieval piety, etc., so I discussed it in class one year, and that student went to visit it in when he was doing his research, and was similarly impressed by it and thus it ended up in that chapter. 🙂
The comparison to the Taj Mahal isn’t in the textbook, but it was one I made. They are both spectacular funerary monuments to beloved, departed spouses (inter alia).
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Did you travel to in south France to study religion through Avignon (Grand schisme d’Occident ) or Toulouse, Pyrénées Mountains (Hérésie Cathares Albigeois)?
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Sadly, I’ve never been to Avignon although I know a lot about it (and can sing the song about the bridge). Professionally, I had to do 3 months at the library in Wolfenbüttel or Gotha or Berlin every year, and then in early to mid-August we’d take a two week vacation. My boyfriend at the time got his first academic job in Emden, so for several years we did the Netherlands and Belgium and the German North Sea coast. Then he got a job in Mainz and we did Alsace, Lorraine, and then Burgundy over about five years — with heavy emphasis on looking at churches as we were both church historians (he still is). We picked mostly based on what was convenient to Mainz by car. I’ve been to Paris twice. But there’s unfortunately a lot of France I haven’t seen. I used to talk about the Cathars a lot and I’d love to see that part of Europe.
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🙂 In the future, I do hope so for you!
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Oh, you came to visit ☺️ and saw the place for real. Your boyfriend was a great photographer indeed. Well thanks for spreading the renown of my région’s monuments 😁
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I hate to think what would happen if you posted a picture of Proctor.
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I did use to teach a course on European witchcraft.
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Well then. 😜
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I would have freaked out if I’d seen Gary coming!
Oh, hell no! I’ve seen the tornado chasing you!
I’d have run the opposite direction.
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It might have been wise — in general in that film — for people to just have stayed still. Odds are the storm will pass you by. It was odd how often they ended up in the direct path of a twister. 🙂
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Haha! That’s what you get with a man driving😉
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LOL! That really is a coincidence! Would’ve been nice if you’d actually had the man run up to you to protect you from the rain…
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Would’ve impressed the heck out of the students, too!
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Yikes. Gary to the rescue indeed.
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I’m totally confident he’d have dived into a ditch for us 🙂
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Drôle de rentrée! J’espère que les Dieux du Soleil seront sous de bons auspices et qu’ils vous souriront le reste de l’année. Bon courage!
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I was wondering if Tlaloc was angry because I showed the pyramid at Teotihuacan instead of the monument on top of his mountain.
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🙂
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Impressive! They just wanted to give you the most spectacular welcome!! No Gary/Richie on duty around there???
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It felt like an omen. Like I shouldn’t be taking things so seriously 🙂
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🙂
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