Acesta este ultimul episod din Cartea din vis. Ca doar nu suntem la telenovele aici :-)

Le commentaire entre tradition et innovation: actes du colloque international de l’Institut des traditions textuelles, Paris et Villejuif, 22-25 septembre 1999.

Le commentaire entre tradition et innovation.

This volume represents the first attempt to examine occult sciences as a distinct category of Byzantine intellectual culture. It is concerned with both the reality and the image of the occult sciences in Byzantium, and seeks, above all, to represent them in their social and cultural context as a historical phenomenon. The eleven essays demonstrate that Byzantium was not marginal to the scientific culture of the Middle Ages, and that the occult sciences were not marginal to the learned culture of the medieval Byzantine world.

Paul Magdalino, Maria V. Mavroudi - The Occult Sciences in Byzantium.

No ruler in modern times reigned in full sovereignty for as long as Francis Joseph emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia. Titular master of central Europe from 1848 until 1916, he was center stage in Europe throughout the dramatic era in which Italy and Germany emerged as united nation states. His personal decisions were vital both to the outcome of the Crimean War and to the onset of World War l, sixty years later. Although he was an autocrat who believed ill the Habsburg dynastic mission to provide eleven distinct nationalities with a cohesive unity, he was also a family man of simple tastes; and in his old age he was revered in his Austrian heartland, much as Queen Victoria was within her empire. Francis Joseph suffered a succession of personal disasters: his brother, Maximilian, was executed by Mexican republicans; his only son, Rudolf, shot himself and his mistress at Mayerling; his empress-queen Elizabeth, died from stab wounds in Geneva; his nephew and heir,,Francis Ferdinand, was assassinated at Sarajevo. These episodes are examined anew by Alan Palmer in a biography of revelation, reassessment, and restoration. Too often the emperor is represented as a lonely, humorless bureaucrat, lacking in human warmth, artistic sensitivity, or political perception. Alan Palmer believes that this is a false impression. From a reading of hundreds of the emperor’s letters, as well as his mother’s diaries and other papers in the Vienna archives, Alan Palmer presents a more rounded and sympathetic portrait of Francis Joseph as the head of an empire and the head of a family.

Alan Palmer, Alan Warwick Palmer - Twilight of the Habsburgs: The Life and Times of Emperor Francis Joseph.