Steve Bamlett
I am retired and really only register for these things to keep my brain active. Everyone says that is a lost cause. I get passionate about ideas though still.
Location County Durham
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Available online through Google search:
http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/airwatpl.mb.txtLocal knowledge is vital because it details aspects of environment vital to health - quality of air, water, dietary resources, although these need to compared to variations between people in terms of their balance of humours in the constitution of their physical...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
The situation with regard to 'norms' is still not so different although these tend to researched statistical norms, hence the magical importance of reading numbers in modern medicine.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Frank Tallis made a career of seeing love as set of symptoms of mental ill-health:
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Magical thinking in young children is treated by Piaget as an early form of the application of wish fulfilment and I'm sure that survived paganism globally. The power of desire can be reified or it can be part of a narrative of transformation. There is enough in the Bible to foster beliefs in some sects or to encourage them as allegories of truths. I think.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
"Medical texts appear to be written for other doctors, ..."
That may be so but people get information about their health (what's 'good' or 'bad' for it) from many various sources regardless of authority or evidence even up to today. Often it is replete with metaphor like 'imbalance' - like the ones used to justify anti-depressants. in that sense not unlike... -
Steve Bamlett made a comment
Excellent resource finding education to encourage research. Thanks
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Tweeted a section from this article on: https://twitter.com/StevenBamlett/status/1437786470274719745
Full article:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5778676/#__sec1title -
Steve Bamlett made a comment
So agree with the need to abandon reference to 'complete' health. it becomes a means of oppression against the chronically sick and otherwise abled in society otherwise, who need positive images too. And anyway, maybe admissions of vulnerability should be at the core of a genuine healthy attitude that does not masquerade under statistics or mere appearances...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Zenophon's Socrates is really Zenophon then while Pato's is really plato. Maybe. Never thought of that. Thanks.
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In fact think of the benefits system now under the present Government if you want a cold calculating look at how ill health disadvantages UNLESS a functional disablement, and not even always then.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Loved the dialogue. Socrates (via Plato) still surprises and floors me. But the factor that is important in that dialogue is not health as such but the outcome of a declared health status. This is very culture specific. Think of the legendary fate of sick children in Sparta in the continually recycled myths about Sparta - denied by...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I have a miniature copy bust of Hygeia over the fire mantel that came from the museum at Athens. i think the best comparison in words is thinking about the Goddess in relation to cult and practice (at Epidaurors for instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygieia) and the derivation through a path to the modern 'hygiene' which is about cleanliness but even if...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think we can oversimplify the view of the ancients about mental and physical health because the terminology for talking about either or both was different and usually had a physical element registering the sensation of good and bad health. Even the location of health less likely to be the heart but other organs as well or instead. The dimension of the...
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Steve Bamlett replied to Idalie Lagerholm
My experience exactly fits with Idalie's analysis. I couldn't be bothered to read pulse the BHF way, relying entirely on my mechanical 'shagnmometer' 9if the mechanical ones are still called that.
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Steve Bamlett replied to Steve Bamlett
Had no luck with BHF teaching advice. from my attempts I could well be dead! Lol
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Having looked at other responses, i've found my response to Covid pandemic might have been different but that's mainly because I'm over retirement age and have fully retired. i have always worked in fairly sedentary work - although teaching my way involved a lot of flinging me arms about - and i'd put on lots of weight and I'm diabetic. hence high risk for...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
My name is Steve. I am retired and going to the gym regularly for the first time in my life at 66. My work was in teaching literature, social work and then teaching social work & psychology, including health Psychology.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Health today is an issue of maintenance of body, mind and other functions (religious for some but not me) at peak functioning based on best advice on diet, exercise, occupation and reflection. For the Greeks it may have been related to function, particularly military function for men, although philosophers like Plato and Aristotle give it a mental and/or...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
That in teaching a subject you can attempt to do too much.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
i think her reign was the most consistent attempt of any monarch to fashion a rational and identity of monarch for a new age across the realm of administration, ideological control and maintenance of power without war and by centralising these issues. I see her as transforming the imperial idea so that it became ripe for its later use in terms of global empire.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think I will choose Elizabeth and the goddesses:
The portrait of Paris is a fine rebuke to the insubstantiality of some forms of male power and the decision-making it involves. it is a bullish portrait, defending the choice of single state very well but also allowing Mary to excel in all the realms commanded by the 3 goddesses, as well as be associate with... -
Steve Bamlett made a comment
Does putting mysticism and the occult at the centre of Elizabeth’s court change your perception of her reign?
I think the ways in which 'magic' was spoken about in the period covered many various purposes and can't really be dragooned into helping form an opinion. There were secular magics for instance like art which Prospero to some respect represents in...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
"stupid and inarticulate (think of Bottom ..."
Never! Lol.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Again the choice between binaries is unhelpful in trying to get to grips with the issues politically, ideologically or in terms of working within a prescribed sexual politics.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I don't think a binary choice like this really covers all the factors nor does it build a strong basis for understanding the idea of courtly love, its origins and links to Plato and Neo-Platonism (al;l essential for understanding the poetry of the period).
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think the poor awareness of Mary has a lot to do with a studied ignorance, and the marginalisation of, Scottish history in English schools. there was a better basis for independence than this fact.
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When I did my degree in literature I was really excited to find that poem Richard - then in a little anthology with the off-putting title of 'Silver poets of the sixteenth century'.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
The quotation seems a much more elaborate version of Spenser's notion of a 'dark conceite' wherein religious mystery and puzzlement (labyrinths) are called in to explain irreconcilable issues through myth, especially myths of androgyny. I do not think these solve the political issues except ideologically so when Elizabeth lost power, those ideological...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Crucial to the iconography. This is a response to some of the issues bedevilling women who seek power in patriarchal culture but she used the imagery against men. The problem is her models were immortal, she was not and the practical issue of succession was more complex for a woman, even if only because of the absoluteness of the proof of hereditary...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Ralegh, for instance, was an accomplished poet; he wrote a book, The Historie of the World, to occupy his time when he was imprisoned by King James I; he also served as a Member of Parliament.
Yes, but much of this is about being the courtier including being learned about the Platonic model of what love of a monarch might mean, as in the wonderful 'Ocean's...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think Elizabeth used the iconography of women in the Bible to bolster an image of secular renewal but this led her to find images of powerful chastity that were end-stopped because the models were immortal and enduring and she, and monarchs generally, were not.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think the binary of Protestant and Catholic terribly unhelpful anyway especially since much of the thinking returned to the history of the early Church in the Roman Empire, the break between East and West and the notion of a Christian Empire. If the issue is about liturgy then I think the aim was to conserve and look backwards but to insist on national...
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Steve Bamlett replied to Tessy R
Yes I do @TessyR I think the key skill is learning to use evidence in debate of differing opinions rather than treating evidence as close-ended facts. I think the relationship between fact and interpretation would be opened up by the 'afterlives' theme but it doesn't happen. there are history fact articles then rather disjointed pieces on film and theatre etc...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
The introduction to a 'princely' courtly education is really important, although I would be more interested in whether that learning spread to Renaissance interpretations of the classics as, from the literature, you would guess it would. Her grasp of how power is manipulated in fact and in fiction is my interest in her, particularly the ways in which she and...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Disappointed by the coverage of Mary 1 on the course but enjoyed the rest. There was too much asking us to opinionate and not enough substantial debate to engage with. Not so with the others.
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Steve Bamlett replied to Tessy R
With you on this Tessy R.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Should film-makers should be open and honest about how they have “stretched” the truth?
What a loaded question. The same could be said of any debate about historical interpretation. David Starkey never worried about interpreting the break from Rome as a kind of Brexit to legitimise his view of English recidivism and rejoice in it. I see no 'dishonesty' in...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
That issues of succession were a moveable feast when it came to principles which tend to be evoked after and not before the event to justify the plan carrying most political weight.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
A lot but not necessarily in the historical scenes apparently represented but rather in the processes involved in creating a selective vision of the past for the purposes of the present. It is DeLARoche's motivation that interest or those he intuited in his audiences.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Yes. By precedent and Tudor practice at least where legitimacy becomes somewhat divorced from heredity and primogeniture.
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Yes, I agree Tessy R
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Why do you think historians, until recently, under-estimated the scope of these rebellions?
Too much reliance on hindsight, perhaps. We need to see the potential in these events and the counterfactual possibilities.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
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Of course as a painting I prefer the Scrots one, which creates an autonomous persona for Edward.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
The final picture is the most persuasive since it creates an allegory of independent royal power based on a stable Succession and thus would be important to Elizabeth even if her religious policy followed a less extreme path. Her fidelity to a new Prayer Book is implicit here. And i thinki I agree with Emma Wise below.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Yes, of course, especially to the recommendation of conciliar rule as a means of enabling kingship that was not based an individual monarch's will. I think that is the interest of the man that he is seen and represented as wilful and eccentric but could imagine a rational kingship just as could Thomas Cromwell.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Henry VIII set the standard of a courtly culture that was much more like the secular European, and especially Italian States, model. Without this the nature of English education might have been different and was preserved too from the over-moralistic tone of the dutch reformed churches. Would Spenser and Shakespeare have been possible without Henry VIII...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Poetry is the mark of a gentleman of course and Surrey fulfiuls this perfectly but Wyatt almost seems to make the vulnerability of a poetic vocation his subject and uses language so beautifully. not least:
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
This summarises the issue. Useful reprint with article...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
The 'Mary Rose' for the reason cited in video & quoted below. Interesting because we know about the lives of real people through its survival and preservation of numerous objects.
'Most interestingly of all, the wreck of the Mary Rose serves as a kind of time capsule of ordinary people’s , lives because many of the objects on board were personal items... -
Could we have a “comedy” Henry VIII now?
I hope not if that is the standard of comedy.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
How important was Cromwell to the English Reformation?
Very but mainly because of the way he represented the reale politick of monarchy and the alliance of monarchical power to open belief in strategems based on the maintenance of political power in the Machiavellian sense:
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Nuance in these films would have made them exceptional not only to historical reproductions but other genres of the film.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
The people and the Church are mediated by State power in the figure of the king and the throne just over the top of the word 'Bible'
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By 1681 and the Civil War the case against the Monasteries has been thoroughly sexualised in Andrew Marvell's 'Upon Appleton house'.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
xxii
"Nor is our Order yet so nice,
Delight to banish as a Vice.
Here Pleasure Piety doth meet;
One perfecting the other Sweet.
So through the mortal fruit we boyl
The Sugars uncorrupting Oyl:
And that which perisht while we pull,
Is thus preserved clear and full.xxiii
"For such indeed are all our Arts;
Still handling Natures finest... -
Steve Bamlett made a comment
It feels as if it were the inspiration of Louis XIV's Versailles, which makes a feature of a court devoted to trivialising the great noble families who now vied for roles as courtiers. So I think this is a version of Tessy R's answer below: Legacy, investment, branding, heritage,... Althoiugh 'heritage' of a particular fabulous kind, rooted in myths of English...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I can't feel too much for Anne Boleyn who must have known the politics that surrounded European courts and the costs of power. that isn't because i feel hard-hearted towards her or blame her for her own fate but the vast number of people disadvantaged during her reign had little support from her and her class of rulers and beneficiaries of rulers. I also think...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Showing Elizabeth I legitimises the succession much as does the Banquo element of Macbeth.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
This picture by Hans Holbein would have been approved by Henry VIII himself. What do you think the key messages of the picture are?
I think the messages are more to do with policy than personality. Not virility as such but the capacity to sire a son for the Succession. The width of shoulders and span of legs are surely icons of immense power and are not...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Does the Pilgrimage of Grace show us that Henry’s reformation was fundamentally unpopular?
No, it doesn't. It does show that there were extraordinary interests allied together to preserve the status quo in the Church. Certainly i see no evidence of popular support in the preservation of Papal rights or unreformed Catholicism. -
Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think I see the possibility of interaction between the 2nd and 4th explanation since I feel it is unlikely that the whole affair was based on one single predetermined plan. Certainly some of the evidence can be interpreted this way.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
It isa important of course but the danger is to trace the enormous changes that followed to this one person only and personal accident. this ignores so many other historical timelines in operation for which the King's change of persona may have been just fortuitous.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Have you visited Hampton Court Palace? If so, what lasting memory do you have? If not, what would you most like to see?
Strangely enough it was not the Palace per se, nor the maze, but the Tudor tennis courts. But it was in the 1980s and not as impressive a sight as i believe it is now.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think what we believe we might answer and the real answer might differ. we are so capable of self-justifying dialectics. Not an answerable question except to express a belief about self lacking verifiable evidence. Lol.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
No artwork really attempts to recreate the period of its setting but selects from features of that period things that reflect the politics, attitudes and beliefs of the time of its own making. this is certainly true of Bolt and his interest in the meaning of political autonomy and integrity of the citizen.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
A man of his times. Not sure the splitting of the man in this way is appropriate to the conception of the person in the Renaissance which was not a naive one but was certainly not a reductive one and had ways of exploring contradictions between appearance and reality, policy and principle etc.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think it possibly refers to the reduction of the politics of the once powerful regional forces to a courtly game or masque where appearances take the edge over the political realities in their localities that the nobles once felt they had the right to protect. Power has become to be seen as a game in order to be the more effectively centralised.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think I have learned that there were were so many possible pathways by which the Tudors might have established their power but that these were to some extent influenced by contingent events - deaths, personal failings and lack of insight on the part of some courtiers and possible heirs etc. I find it difficult to even want to answer some of the more...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
It was a failure to see that monarchy had to present itself as able to trump the claims of any one of its subjects to have some autonomy from the King and Court. To play the latter game is necessarily dangerous because no 'subject' must aspire to be more 'mighty' in any way than the King in the kind of model of monarchy the tudors were building.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Today we might think of such extravagant spending as wasteful; in the sixteenth century, it was seen as necessary and virtuous. How difficult is it to adjust to a Tudor view of magnificence and expenditure?
I think the role of 'spectacle' in 'acting out' ideologies of power and their justification aren't difficult to imagine - any more than in the Roman...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
His successes seem to have been really a hang-on from Henry Vii's successful and realistic political and economic reforms - even the way Wolsey extended these policy initiatives. Otherwise the reputation of Henry seems to a model of the kind of ideologically focus princeship Castiglione was to tyrn into literature in The Book of the Courtier:...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Does John Blanke’s presence and status at the early Tudor court come as a surprise to you?
Not really, otherwise the issues at play in Shakespeare's 'Othello' couldn't be understood. There had at least to be a debate between representations of black people with a compromised form of power that could be used to see the 'other' as dangerous.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Do you think we too often reduce Katherine of Aragon’s life to mere biology or is such a focus justified by the consequences of her reproductive fate?
The answer must be yes because Katharine represents many pathways in the establishment of monarchy - in the form of Continental alliances, the role of established religion - that also matter a lot in terms of...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Again I find this not a useful question. Success meant establishing self and issue as stronger in resistance to threat to your power than it was and in this sense it worked (or seems so in retrospect). However the many tensions and loose ends he left behind him, especially in matters of religious affiliation could have ended the dynasty and nearly did.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
In later life, did Henry VII wish to be loved by his subjects?
I am certain this question is unanswerable and is probably irrelevant. The promotion of an ideology of the role of love is implicit in the notion that one is God's chosen steward in the secular sphere. It is one of the planks of retaining power probably and helps when you feel you have...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
It reminds me of Shakespeare's Henry IV: 'So shaken as we are, so wan with care'. The importance of succession that could be presented as a renewal must have been on his mind, that strategy itself having been nearly lost with Arthur.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think there is a kind of careful policy-led attention to the matter that fears the effect of over-reaction in raising the charisma of challengers to the throne. Of course it meant summary executions but it feels interesting that these executions were legitimised as means of maintaining order and justifying the need of a king to raise taxes to maintain 'law...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
What does this play seem to be saying about Tudor monarchy and its legacy?
It drives a wedge into the ideology of Tudor monarchy, in that it honours 'fame' and shows that it can be created by art and/or propaganda, whilst rather marginalising the importance of heredity and even established role. This must have raised all kinds of questions to writers who...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think the real threat must have seemed to Henry that, in a sense, all kings 'pretend' to a kind of legitimacy once lawful birth alone has become a less clear means to succession.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Like this documentary:
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Neither. Kings are illegitimate per se. Even historically and in the values of the time there were other options.
https://www.redalyc.org/journal/5766/576666994015/html/In part I think the Tudors exploited these models of an expansive 'republic' by changing the nature of what monarchy appeared to mean. But just a thought .....!
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I despair at the debate that followed between Leicester and York about who had main right to the heritage spoils deriving from 'the visitors to important people places' money pot. Not sure how much is history, how much propaganda (for the hateful concept of monarchy for instance) and how much is real discovery - and discovery of what kind. Surely not...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
What do you think happened to the Princes in the Tower and what reputation do you think Richard III should enjoy?
Almost certainly victims of power politics in one way or another I think, bit ... I don't know.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
What surprises you most about Henry Tudor’s background?
The theme of the 'Bastard' is continually played with in Shakespeare's histories (and thereafter in King Lear) as a means of discussing the notion of legitimacy or lawfulness of succession throughout the History plays - including 'King...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Absolutely important - not least for the meaning it accrued when represented for the purposes of later cultures / societies. In the nineteenth century most often seen as the acme of oppression by radical writers like Dickens and Forster. Glamorised by right wingers like David Starkie in the twentieth century for inverse...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
Never visit places for my history - in the sense of Country Houses for instance, although I would love to see a play at the Globe:
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
No. Always feels a bit like theme park history to me but that may be a prejudice that needs shaking.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
The Elizabethan section of the film Orlando was surely the finest recreation of a house setting. See it in trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MorOaD61KUIQuentin Crisp is a most delicious cross-gender Elizabeth; @Do not grow old, Orlando'.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
No I wouldn't but my favourite mock Tudor house has to be: Plas Newydd Historic House and Gardens, the home of the Ladies of Llangollen who were visited by many eminent men including Wordsworth and who were a devoted pair of women who escaped enforced marriage to love together....
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I don't think these are the kind of novels I like reading so I have no opinion but here's a list of 8, none of which i have read:
https://www.booktopia.com.au/blog/2020/01/28/love-tudor-history-read-these-8-books/ -
Steve Bamlett made a comment
For me McIvor says it ALL HERE:
"Gregory exposes the difference between historical facts and historical fiction by ignoring the historical context, and imagining the “emotions, motives, and unconscious desires” of the characters. One could argue that all historical novels are equally true, or, rather, equally untrue. So much that is essential to the fictional... -
Steve Bamlett made a comment
Clearly a master writer but i have to admit, though a reader of novels a-plenty, I don't get through the Mantel novels.
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
The timeline of the plays is interesting. in my opinion:
https://www.rsc.org.uk/shakespeares-plays/timelineI think the discussion of legitimacy, divine right and rebellion in the history plays is the most interesting thing about the plays in the Tudor period (probable dates of course). Any critique of the Elizabethan myth comes in the Jacobean period:...
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There is a useful list I found on:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000365909/
Out of these I would still choose the 1966 Robert Bolt play, 9wordy as it is):
A Man For All Seasons
For a trailer giving a taste:
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi488029209/?ref_=tt_vi_i_1
Love Robert Shaw as an unbelievably trivial henry VIII
and Orson Wells as Wolsey. Leo McKern... -
Raleigh's lines from the 'Ocean's Love to Cynthia' (Cynthia or the Moon as as an avatar of Elizabeth who is also the sun etc.) tell how ideas of chastity and sublimation of male sexual desire play into the myth:
The mind and virtue never have begotten
A firmer love, since love on earth had power;
A love obscured, but cannot be forgotten;
Too great and... -
Steve Bamlett made a comment
I think the representations of her as 'Virgin Queen' in the second half of her reign as important ideological icons of how and why the idea of an asexual queen became very important in representations in literature and visual art. The equation of Elizabeth with the Nation allowed her to be shown in various iconic guises - as Astraea (Virgil's Justice returned...
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Steve Bamlett made a comment
I reminded myself of this film which i first saw as a young child with the 'chicken-eating scene' available on You-Tube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4tOb9J7W2k
This is high comedy indeed but it also sets the 'humanity' (advertised by his huge sexual and other appetites) of Henry against the artificiality of 'statesmen' like Cromwell and Cranmer in... -
Steve Bamlett made a comment
Why do you think the Tudor dynasty was so important?
An unnecessary question since Lipscomb has just answered the question in the video. However I think the interactions between her 4 categories as what becomes important - the idea of Imperial and national unity in relation to measures to preserve the 'state' as a national institution claiming to represent... -
