Sicut Lucas

Something I have just noticed is that the art historian Marcia Growden translated into English in 1976 the fulcrum passage of both the Liber Genealogus and the Great Stemma:

Just as Luke the Evangelist has indicated that his line was traced through Nathan to Mary, so also the Evangelist Matthew showed that his line was traced through Solomon to Joseph. That is, out of the tribe of Judah. That the divine tribe appears to proceed to them and thus to Christ according to the flesh that it might be fulfilled which was written. Behold the lion from the tribe of Judah has conquered for the family tree of the Lord. He is the lion from Solomon and descendant of Nathan.

As far as I know this is the first stab at putting into English this mysterious key passage which explains the purpose of both works, yet leaves as many questions as it answers.

The translation, arguably the first ever into English, appears in the text of her Stanford doctoral thesis on the Gerona Beatus, The Narrative Sequence in the Preface to the Gerona Commentaries of Beatus on the Apocalypse. I am a bit baffled by her phrase "for the family tree of the Lord". My translation (in fact mainly the work of Seumas Macdonald) appears in my online collation of the text, and there is some discussion of it on my Liber Genealogus page:

Whereas the evangelist Luke traces the origin of Mary back to Nathan, the evangelist Mathew traces that of Joseph back to Solomon, demonstrating an ancestry from the tribe of Judah. Thus it is clear that these two are biologically descended from a single tribe, leading down to Christ, so that what was written might be fulfilled, "Behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has prevailed" (Rev. 5:5), whereby the lion is Solomon, the root is Nathan.

I have not seen Growden's dissertation, but the passage is quoted by Jessica Sponsler in her own 2009 thesis at the University of North Carolina on the same topic, Defining the Boundaries of Self and Other in the Girona Beatus of 975. Growden appears to have gone on to become an art history professor at the University of Nevada in Reno.

Ludicrous Cardboard Cut-Out

At the start of a justly celebrated 1996 article which theorized on why humans benefit by using diagrams, two British authors, the late Mike Scaife and Yvonne Rogers, quoted a bizarre scolding in Britain’s House of Commons by the Speaker, Betty Boothroyd.

According to The Guardian of 1994 December 7, she rebuked a legislator for using a cardboard diagram to explain overseas aid figures, saying, "I have always believed that all members of this house should be sufficiently articulate to express what they want to say without diagrams."

I was curious as to the circumstances of such a foolish statement and whether it was accurately reported, and located it in Hansard 1803–2005. The person who had held up the diagram was Tony Baldry, the under-secretary for foreign affairs, who was defending the Conservative government's allocation of aid to Africa on December 5.

It was immediately mocked by the late Derek Enright (Labour) as a "ludicrous cardboard cut-out".

Shortly after Dale Campbell-Savours (Labour) raised a point of order:

You will have noted during Question Time an incident at the Dispatch Box when the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs made what can only be described as an idiot of himself by holding up a handwritten sign showing misleading statistics on overseas development. Are you happy with such conduct at the Dispatch Box, Madam Speaker?

Boothroyd's  reply was not quite verbatim the same as the sentence in The Guardian, but the quote is close enough:

I am not happy with conduct whereby any Minister or any Member brings such diagrams or explanations into the Chamber. I believe that all Members of the House and particularly Ministers should be sufficiently articulate to express what they want to say without diagrams.

Politicians take note: Scaife and Rogers' article points out (very articulately) why diagrams (graphical representations) are enormously important and useful for clear thinking.

Scaife, Mike, and Yvonne Rogers. “External Cognition: How Do Graphical Representations Work?” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 45 (1996): 185–213.