My latest article for Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty, “The Peasants’ War and Martin Luther,” is now online. Marxist claims have largely dominated historical discussions of the Peasants’ War, but it was a revolt in defense of property rights, not against them. Its Twelve Articles contain ideas that appeared in the United States’ Declaration of Independence.
I’m the kind of person who always needs to have a project or two going. Things have been slow in that department lately, and FAWM is still about six weeks away. The two novels I wrote were enjoyable to do, but fiction isn’t my strongest point. The research I did for them has proven fruitful, though. I thought about writing a book on the Protestant Reformation and its effect on the emergence of personal freedom. I can’t claim to be a professional historian, though, and the readership would undoubtedly be small.
But I can write songs. The idea I’ve developed is a song cycle which combines music and history while connecting to my novels. Hans Lorenz is Thomas and Frieda’s son in The Magic Battery and Spells of War. He’s a small child and isn’t developed much as a character, but he has strong musical abilities. In this cycle, the adult Hans is the singer of songs which could get him into bad trouble for the ideas they expressed; but doing that runs in his family. (His father was on trial for his life, his mother’s book was burned, and his grandmother was killed in prison, accused of witchcraft.)
The first song, which I’ve put up on SoundCloud, is “Deva Prison.” It presents history which most listeners won’t know, so it’s followed by a short talk by “Hans” to his audience about the facts behind the song. This is a pattern which I plan to follow in other songs in the cycle.
A fact that might get a few people more interested: Dávid Ferenc, the subject of the song, was the founder of Unitarianism.
If I achieve my goal, this cycle will present some important history which isn’t familiar to most modern audiences in an entertaining way. Let me know what you think.
Some of you may not have found time yet to read my historical fantasy novels, The Magic Battery and Spells of War. If you haven’t, you can get them now for just $1.00 each from Smashwords with the coupon code SG36X. This offer is good for the rest of 2023.
My latest article for Liberty Fund is now out: “The Political Philosophy of Tolkien.”
J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings presents several societies with different approaches to government. The most prominent include the idyllic Shire, the grand realm of Gondor, the hardy kingdom of Rohan, and the absolute dictatorship of Mordor. Looking at them gives strong indications of his views of government. In addition, we have his own words on the kind of governance he favored.
The most detailed description of a governmental structure is that of the Shire, the home of the Hobbits. …
Two articles which I wrote for Liberty Fund are up in their Banned Books Week series, which runs all through October. My articles are on Caron de Beaumarchais’s two well-known “Figaro” plays, both of which got him in trouble with the censors.
Take a look at the rest of the articles if you have time; there’s a lot of interesting material.
Liberty Fund is running a month-long series of articles in honor of Banned Books Week. One of my contributions is now online, on “Beaumarchais and The Barber of Seville.”
My article on The Marriage of Figaro should show up later this month.
The second edition of Tomorrow’s Songs Today, my history of filk music, is now available as a free download. A new chapter covers events since 2015, and the appendices have been updated to list conventions and awards up to the present. The existing chapters have been lightly revised. Many links that broke over the past eight years are fixed.
In my Liberty Fund article on Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, I made an error. Relying on what others wrote, I said:
When he [Beaumarchais] wrote The Marriage of Figaro, Louis XVI banned it for three years. The King supposedly said, “For this play not to be a danger, the Bastille would have to be torn down first.” Eight years later, it was, and the French aristocracy came crashing down with it.
It’s a good thing I used the word “supposedly.” I suspected a problem today when I got Lever’s biography of Beaumarchais and found a different version of the remark: “This is detestable and will never be performed; the Bastille would have to be destroyed for the performance of this play not to be of dangerous inconsequence.” “Dangerous inconsequence” is a weird phrase, so I looked up the original French and found it on Wikipedia: “La représentation ne pourrait qu’être une inconséquence fâcheuse, sauf si la Bastille était détruite.”
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My latest history article for Liberty Fund is Beethoven and Napoleon: Clash of the Titans. I hope you enjoy it.