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Guyot Marchant's 'Danse Macabre' : The 1486 edition woodcut illustrations

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  "The earliest known representation of the danse macabre dates from 1424, when a mural representing the Dance of Death was painted on the external walls of the Cemetery of Holy Innocents in Paris. Although the walls and the paintings have long since been destroyed, the images are preserved in the woodcuts of Guyot Marchant's edition of the Dance Macabre , published in 1485. The authorship of the poem accompanying the illustrations has never been conclusively established, although from an early date it was ascribed to Jean Gerson, chancellor of the Sorbonne, and indeed its didactic tone is strongly reminiscent of the sermons for which Gerson was so famous. If not Gerson himself, it is probable that the author was a member of the theologian's circle. Marchant's book quickly attained great popularity ... The original edition sold out almost immediately, and was followed in 1486 by an expanded edition. It is apparent ... that the author of the poem and the artist who crea...
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La Danse Macabre

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The Dance of Death  " With its grim ironic prediction of life as a merry dance towards the grave, the danse macabre  was a product of the later Middle Ages that had survived until the sixteenth century, when, as the medieval world view faded, it lost its moral force ... The tradition dates back to the Black Death, but the earliest surviving source for the dance is the sequence of illustrated verses inscribed in 1524 on the walls of the cemetery of Holy Innocents in Paris." Rosemary Hill, 2023, Times Witness : History in the Age of Romanticism , Penguin Books, p 243. "The Danse Macabre consists of the dead, or a personification of death, summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave ... The effect is both frivolous and terrifying ... The deathly horrors of the 14th century such as recurring famines, the Hundred Years War in France, and, most of all, the Black Death ... The omnipresent possibility of sudden and painful death ... increased th...
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Fracas AUKUS

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"... the challenges facing the AUKUS partners in delivering  'at least eight'  nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy ... just how much the undertaking will strain the armed forces and industrial capacity of all three countries ... will be the anvil on which a key set of relationships, capabilities and effects will be either forged or broken ..." (Nick Childs, 2023, 'The AUKUS Anvil: Promise and Peril', Survival , 65.5, 7-24)   AUKUS 15 September 2021 announcement: [US President Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison]  " If things go according to plan  Australia will join an elite fraternity of like-minded nations operating nuclear-powered submarines; the submarine-production capacity of the three partners  will significantly increase; and, by the middle of the century, about a dozen extra such submarines could be added to the combined inventories of the AUKUS navies ... From the outset, AUKUS al...
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Fiasco AUKUS

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  'All great powers behave like gangsters. And all small nations behave like prostitutes.' [Emery Reves, 1946, The Anatomy of Peace , London, quoted in  Keith Lowe, 2017, The Fear and The Freedom , New York, p 192 ] 1. Behaving like a prostitute:      ( Jamal Barnes & Samuel Makinda, 2022, 'Testing the limits of international society? Trust, AUKUS and Indo-Pacific security', International Affairs , 98.4, 1307-1325). "... US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a new trilateral military partnership called AUKUS on 15 September 2021, [claiming] their main goal was to protect a rules-based international order and 'preserve security and stability in the Indo-Pacific'; [sharing] military capabilities and critical technologies, such as cyber, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and undersea domains'. "... France ... has been the first casualty of the new partnership ......
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