The Duke of Wellington was an exemplar of an older England—an England bound by blood, not interest. He affirmed the very English equality of manhood, which comes with honorable service in the line, the rule that he who is with the king on St. Crispin’s Day shall be by him called “brother.” The Great Duke, [...]
One of the most heinous crimes against humanity that modernity has perpetrated is its war on the humanities. And let’s not forget that the humanities are thus called because they teach us about our own humanity. A failure to appreciate the humanities must inevitably lead to the dehumanizing of culture and a disastrous loss of [...]
To what extent Colonel Edward House’s novel "Philip Dru" contributed to the Wilsonian transformation of the Democratic party will likely never be known. But we do know that Woodrow Wilson read the book, brought House to the White House, and relied on House for advice and companionship. Philip Dru: Administrator - A Story of Tomorrow, [...]
What is true of architecture, art, and music is equally true of literature. Throughout the history of Christendom, great literature has paid homage to sacred liturgy and the sacraments. Author's Note: On the evening of Wednesday, September 25 I was honoured to give the keynote address at the opening of the annual conference of the [...]
Christopher Columbus is without a doubt responsible for the Columbian Exchange—which through human agency recreated the lost world of Pangea. But was Columbus the first to discover America? The memory—and especially the statues—of Christopher Columbus have taken quite the beating over the last half-century. The great Lakota activist, Russell Means, once called him worse than [...]
In his lifetime, Edgar Allan Poe’s renown lay primarily in his reputation as the foremost critic of the day. As a critic, he complained that four or five cliques controlled American literature by controlling the larger portion of the critical journals. Edgar Allan Poe secured a permanent place among world authors as father of the [...]
Jonathan Edwards helped to invent a new America, committed to a national covenant and an unprecedented spiritual egalitarianism. In 1930, the historian Henry Bamford Parkes critically assessed the legacy of America’s most famous Puritan intellectual, Jonathan Edwards. According to Parkes, “it is hardly a hyperbole to say that, if Edwards had never lived, there would [...]
Could the life of St Galgano be linked to the Arthurian legend of the Sword in the Stone? In an earlier essay for The Imaginative Conservative, I recounted my discovery of the famous “Sword of St Michael” while on a hitch-hiking pilgrimage from England to Jerusalem. For those who are unfamiliar, the Sword of St [...]
Harry Jaffa’s constitutional history of America’s late-eighteenth-century is not credible nor, in keeping with many of his own pronouncements, is it conservative. The writing of history, as we have learned from authors as diverse as Thucydides, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Butterfield, Collingwood, and Oakeshott can and has been done in strikingly different ways while serving radically different [...]
Bartolomé de Las Casas is an unsung hero who wanted to convert the pagan Native Americans to Christ as well as stop the sinful aspects of the European conquest of the New World. Ever since the advent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s myth of the “noble savage” in the eighteenth century, there has been a tendency to idealize [...]
Despite the multitude of Christian denominations that have sprung up over the last 500 years, there seem to have been few, if any, important divisions among Christians about the authenticity of the canon of the New Testament since the Catholic Church promulgated it at the Council of Rome more than 1,600 years ago. I. The [...]
Cristina Neagu Cristina Neagu specializes in the literature and arts of the Renaissance. She has a doctorate from the University of Oxford. The fields in which most of her work has been conducted include Neo-Latin literature, rhetoric, art history and history of the book. From 2003 until 2023 she was Keeper of Special [...]
Pelagius of Asturias was a warrior of Christendom who is revered by the Catholics of Spain but is largely unknown to the wider world. One of the most enchanting places in the whole of Christendom is Covadonga in the Asturias region of northern Spain. The visitor, on approaching it for the first time, could easily imagine [...]
For Clyde Wilson, the Jeffersonian conservative tradition was never a stale embrace of the past for its own sake. It conserves only to produce something better. In 1969 the late Mel Bradford recommended to Modern Age’s second editor, Eugene Davidson, that he should publish a groundbreaking article by a young historian named Clyde Wilson. The [...]