Recrudescence

During a talk a few years ago, Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the book Olive Kitteridge, mentioned the word “recrudescence.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary this means, “The state or fact of breaking out afresh.” Sometimes it is applied to the state of something bad like an epidemic, but it can also mean the revival or rediscovery of something good. I had never heard the word before but liked the sound of it and wrote it down so I would remember.

Currently, deep into researching my next writing project as well as working on a masters degree in history, I was surprised to—rediscover—the word recrudescence when it popped up several times in a history book. I have never seen it anywhere else. Speaking of history, about the same day, an article in the Wall Street Journal pondered on the value of specific undergraduate degrees and stated that, “More than 20% of US undergraduates are business majors, nearly double the next most common major, social studies and history.” With all the disheartening news about how little students, or adults for that matter, appear to know about history these days, I was stunned yet gratified to see that history—my favorite subject—was so popular at that level. Could this be a recrudescence of interest in history? Or has the interest been there all along, sneakily making its mark behind the more industrial business degree?

The article explained that corporate recruiters are looking for people with a deeper, more well-rounded education than a business degree usually offers. Recruiters and top university faculty have been seriously discussing the disconnect between merely hacking out theory and having the skills to solve real world problems. The realization has begun to sink in that business majors lack the skill of critical thinking necessary for innovation and problem solving.

In writing both history and historical fiction, critical thinking and the ability to communicate it through clear writing are absolutely necessary skills. Without them, a historian cannot synthesize voluminous information, analyze it and interpret it in a comprehensive, cohesive manner that will benefit anyone with an eye to understanding the real world, not just today, but both as it was in the past and how it might evolve in the future. Perhaps students are put off by the term “critical thinking” as it sounds scary, complicated and difficult. True, to a degree, but rather than fear it, why not embrace the notion of putting events in a broader perspective? To understand the context of an event can open completely new avenues to knowledge, discoveries—or re-discoveries—of something previously missed. Recrudescence in action!

A simple example of this appeared on an episode of the PBS program “Finding Your Roots.” The preeminent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. visited a high school history class and asked the students if they knew whether, prior to the Civil War, slaves had been owned in northern states as well as those in the south. Most of the students, if not all, did not know this, and an astute, mature and well thought out discussion ensued between the students and Professor Gates that thoroughly explored the meaning and consequences surrounding this fact. Though a simple premise in this case that was expanded upon, it illustrated critical thinking at work. The class both enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to discover this insight. Frankly, I personally think critical thinking should—and certainly can—begin much earlier than college as this example clearly demonstrates. And schools, I wish, would learn to deliberately engage young students in learning how that skill can be easily applied well beyond the classroom to analyze problems and creatively seek solutions. They did not in my day, decades ago, and probably still do not.

As a counter-thought to the famous and endless iterations of, “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it,” countless essays have been written which claim that learning history can promote “good citizenship.” Right, but many rarely detail how this happens beyond vague or convoluted ideology. Why not simply describe how to think like a historian in order to get at the root of social and other problems? Thinking back to Elizabeth Strout’s author talk—she told her audience that she was waiting until she had a sentence with enough muscularity to support such a heavy word as recrudescence. The innovation and problem solving skills lacking in undergraduate business degree programs might need to include history not only for critical thinking, but for muscular creativity as well. What is more thrilling than discovery, or the recrudescence of a previous discovery, when new understanding breaks out afresh? 

====

PS: I have an undergraduate business administration degree from thirty years ago that did little more than qualify me for a better paying jobs at the time. A high school level bookkeeping class would have sufficed to do the work. The masters in history is a whole lot more interesting!

.

A Lovely New Review from Steamboat Magazine

.

Widely recognized for her multi-award winning “Macsen’s Treasure” series, Kathleen Cunningham Guler reintroduces readers to its beginnings.

Combining legend and actual history of fifth century Britain, Guler brings to life the pre-Arthurian time of 459 AD. With every chapter, an awakening sense of place, time and culture engages the reader, and the emotional wholeness of the story’s characters achieves a convincing reality.

Marcus ap Iorwerth spies for a clandestine alliance that will depose Vortigern, the man whose hired mercenaries have killed and displaced the old landholders. With the Romans long gone and lands divided among 29 warlords, Britain lies open to invasion, from Picts in the north, Irish from the west, and Germanic tribes from the continent. Marcus, while on a mission to identity those who would prevent the rightful King Ambrosius from ascending to the throne, meets the young woman Claerwen. Her clan has been victimized by Vortigern’s men.

Claerwen’s gift of visions, known as “fire in the head,” adds a mystical quality to the ongoing battle for power. When word comes of Marcus’s death, she refuses to accept what the world around her would have her believe and embarks alone to find the “other half of my soul.” As they journey into the path of gods, Marcus and Claerwen come to understand where destiny is leading them, and the name she has been hearing in visions.

Guler’s historical fiction gives the reader more than a well-told, captivating story of adventure and love. In a time when lawlessness and suspicion pervaded among the ruling power, an unquenchable desire for something better remained strong. This book leaves the reader with that hopefulness, a welcome feeling in today’s world of apparent disarray.

Harriet Freiberger, for Steamboat Magazine, Spring 2012

.

Nominated!

It's official! A letter arrived from Colorado Humanities (Colorado's affiliate of the NEH) confirming that my novel, Into the Path of Gods, has been nominated for the Colorado Book Award in the genre fiction category! Have to wait until April to see if it will be short-listed. Fingers crossed that spending the time and effort on reworking the book was worthwhile.

The Massilliote Periplus

Broighter Gold Boat, National Museum
of Ireland, Dublin

The what? you say. I know, I can’t pronounce it either. The Massilliote Periplus was a Phoenician sailing manual or sea merchant’s handbook thought to date from c.600 BC. The word periplus comes from the ancient Greek for “circumnavigation.” Massilliot(e) derives from the Greek colony of Massalia, founded around the same time from which the manual comes. Unfortunately, the original book has been lost, but the good news is: in the fourth century AD, a Roman writer called Rufus Festus Avienus wrote a poem called Ora Maritima that draws information from the periplus. The poem’s title translates as The Maritime Shores or The Sea Coasts. Avienus was a native of Volsinii in Etruria, and according to an inscription his full name includes another name, Postumius, that precedes all the rest. In a few modern references, Rufus appears as Lucius instead, but this could simply be error.

The periplus is important for its account of a sea voyage from the city of Massalia, which became the French city of Marseilles on the western Mediterranean. The manual describes the coast from Cadiz, Spain northward along the European Atlantic coast to Brittany, Ireland and Britain. The description is also the earliest known account of the sea trade route between southern Europe and the British Isles. Archaeology has corroborated these trade links.

The original book’s full contents, having been lost, are only known through Avienus’s poeticized and confused work based on the original. Only one manuscript of the poem survives. Scholars tell us that Avienus was simply copying information from the earlier material and had not actually traveled the seacoasts that are identified in the manual—he wrote as if some the cities were still in existence but had actually been abandoned by the time he wrote his poem. He also relied on Roman itineraries to give distances, sometimes incorrectly. That he did not update the material to reflect his own time turns out to be a good thing—it preserves the historical information from the manual that would have otherwise been distorted or destroyed.

For anyone involved in the history of the Celts, the periplus and the Ora Maritima are important because the periplus contained the first known recording of the Celts’ existence. In the poem, the Latin name “Celtarum” appears, meaning “Celts.” An English translation gives the following: “If anyone should dare to drive his ship into the waves from here at the Oestrymnic Island to where the air of Lycaon grows stiff, he enters the Ligurian land, empty of inhabitants. For because of a band of Celts and frequent battles, the fields have long been empty…”(1) Assuming this information was picked up directly from the manual, we are being told about a voyage from the extreme west of the Iberian peninsula (Spain) to the lands of the Ligurians who lived in northern Italy and southeastern France, and that the Celts had driven them out. There are also passages that name “Gallic soil,” a reference to Gaul, which is identified with Celtic lands before the Roman conquest.

Additionally, Ireland, called the Holy Isle in this case, is mentioned and said to be inhabited by the race of Hierni—the Irish. The island of Albiones is also named. This is Britain. The important issue to note is that although the British Isles, Brittany, and the Celts have all been identified, the poem does not place the Celts in the British Isles. That doesn’t mean the periplus itself did or did not—this will never be known—but it does establish that trade routes between the islands and Celtic lands on the European continent existed as early as c.600 BC., the same time the Greeks were colonizing all over the Mediterranean, the Near East and the Black Sea regions. We do know some form of the Celts eventually ended up in the British Isles—attested from their languages, art and other material evidence that spread and absorbed the earlier Neolithic people already there. The question is: did they migrate because of the trade routes? Did they do so sometime later? Or were they already there by the time the Phoenicians came?

(1) Avienus. Ora Maritima. Trans. by J.P. Murphy. Chicago: Ares Publishing, 1977.

.