Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

Happy Birthday to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.  Recently a copy of the Gainsborough portrait was found and restored by two Syracuse University alumnae (my alma mater). Joyce Dallaportas and Ronald K. Theel found the painting at a Syracuse estate sale and confirmed that it was the lovely Duchess. You can read the article from Syracuse University magazine here Speaking of Duchesses, Sarah Ferguson The Duchess of York has been in the news lately since it was revealed that she involved in a cash-for-access scandal uncovered by the tabloid newspaper The NEWS OF THE WORLD.  The whole thing was a set-up on the part of the newspaper. The Duchess got caught on videotape offered to help a gentleman that she thought was a businessman gain access to her ex-husband Prince Andrew for the tidy sum of 500,000 pounds. Last week, she went on Oprah to explain her actions, saying that she has gotten into financial trouble again, and had hit rock bottom. You can read about it...

Hypatia as imagined by Raphael The most scandalous thing about the famous mathematician and philosopher Hypatia was her brutal murder at the hands of a mob in AD 415. Why would a mob of any kind, much less one led by Christian monks, haul a 60-year-old scholarly woman from her chariot, hack her body apart with pieces of pottery, and burn the bits outside the walls of Alexandria? Historians, writers and poets have tried to solve that mystery throughout the ages. What we actually know about Hypatia is sketchy, but well laid out in Hypatia of Alexandria by Maria Dzielska (1995 Harvard Press). Most of what we know comes from the surviving letters of one of her former students, Synesius (later Bishop of Ptolemais) who extravagantly admired his teacher and called her his "divine guide." Although known for her writing on mathematics and science, Hypatia's first love was a form of philosophy which required a strict moral code, extensive study, and meditation. She wasn't a...