Venus Verticordia

# Venus Verticordia

## Abstract

Venus Verticordia ("Changer of Hearts" or "Heart-Turner") was an aspect of the Roman goddess Venus conceived as having the power to convert either virgins or sexually active women from dissolute desire (libido) to sexual virtue (pudicitia). Under this title, Venus was especially cultivated by married women, and on 1 April she was celebrated at the Veneralia festival with public bathing.

The epithet Verticordia derives from the Latin words verto, "turn", and cor, the heart as "the seat of subjective experience and wisdom". The conversion, however, was thought of as occurring in the mind – the mens or "ethical core". Women were thus viewed as having the moral agency necessary for shaping society, albeit in roles differing from men.

Venus Verticordia was one of several goddesses whose new or reinterpreted theology or cult practice was meant to inform the conduct of women as a response to wartime upheaval and social crisis during the Roman Republic. Her purpose was not to suppress sexual desire but to encourage its positive expression towards a good outcome in marriage.

## In Roman state religion

The cult of Venus Verticordia was established with the installation of a statue (simulacrum) around the time of the Second Punic War, before 204 BC, possibly 220 BC or 214 BC, or as early as 237 or 224 BC. Its initial location is uncertain – generally, in the Vallis Murcia, between the northern slope of the Minor Aventine and the farther end of the Circus Maximus. The founding statue was possibly dedicated in the shrine of either Venus Obsequens or Venus Erycina, or it may have been placed in an open-air precinct (templum) where her temple was later erected.

The official process behind the dedication was similar to the establishing of other women-centered cults such as that of Fortuna Muliebris or the religious reparations owed to Juno Regina in 207 BC. A list was compiled of one hundred matronae – respectable married women – eligible to make the dedication, then their number was narrowed to ten by sortition (drawing lots). The ten women themselves nominated a Sulpicia, wife of a consul, as the most worthy of the honor among them. Pliny the Elder implies that it was the first time a woman was selected for a religious task on behalf of the state in this way, and says that this process was followed again for the importation of the cult of the Magna Mater by Claudia Quinta.

The Temple of Venus Verticordia (aedes) was one of several established by the Roman Republic in response to perceived outbreaks of female debauchery, in this instance incestum, the violation of religious chastity by three of the six women serving as "professionally chaste" Vestals. The women were tried and convicted, and the Sibylline Books were consulted. Verticordia's temple was the last of eight the Romans built in accordance with Sibylline authority, dedicated to ten different deities, seven of them goddesses. The earlier cult statue of Verticordia would have been moved there.

Work on the temple started in 114 BC. It was located in the Vallis Murcia, possibly near the shrine of Murcia at the Circus Maximus, but the proximity of functionally overlapping temples to Murcia, Obsequens, and Verticordia leaves uncertainties in interpreting the ancient texts. Coarelli assumed that the Temple of Venus Verticordia physically replaced that of the archaic Fortuna Virilis; the two deities shared a feast day. No traces of the buildings in this area have been detected in the archaeological record. Other than the annual feast day when the statue was bathed, nothing is known of the shrine's quotidian operations; since Verticordia was cultivated only by women, it seems likely that temple personnel included priestesses and female attendants.

## Founding narratives

The narratives that explain the founding of Venus Verticordia's cult blend history and myth, as is characteristic of Roman mythology and its focus on human actions within a divine order that supports the Roman state. Ancient sources indicate that both the dedication of the statue and the building of the temple were religious responses during a time of military and social crisis.

### Statue dedication

In consultation with the Sibylline Books in the latter 3rd century BC, the decemviri (a commission of ten men) had determined that a statue of Venus Verticordia was required in response to the impudicitia of Roman matrons. After a sort of " real virtue contest " among the ten finalists, the honor of making the dedication went to a Sulpicia, who is likely a historical figure. Valerius Maximus says that Sulpicia was the daughter of a Paterculus and the wife of a Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, presumably the consul of 237 BC. She is described in superlatives as sanctissima ("most holy"), elevated above all others in castitas ("purity"), and pudicissima, of utmost sexual integrity. The French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann imagined Sulpicia herself as the model for the statue, since she embodied the desired virtues.

### Prodigy of the temple

About a hundred years after the statue was dedicated, as tensions in North Africa were mounting for the Iugurthine War, the Temple of Venus Verticordia was built in response to a prodigy (prodigium). The protagonist in the story was a virgin, Greek parthenos in Plutarch and virgo in Latin sources, named as Elbia, Elvia, or Helvia. Plutarch (early 2nd century AD) says Elbia was out horseback riding when she was struck dead by a lightning bolt. She was found naked, with her dress (chiton) pulled up as if on purpose, and with her shoes, rings, and headdress torn off and scattered around. Her mouth was open, and the tongue was hanging out. Her horse was also found dead and stripped of its trappings. The haruspices (manteis) immediately connected the incident to a disgrace among the Vestals, probably issuing their response in September 114 BC, and an investigation was launched.

Julius Obsequens (late 4th/early 5th century AD), who compiled a collection of prodigies and drew on now-lost parts of the Augustan -era historian Livy 's work, dates the incident to the consulship of Manius Acilius Balbus and Gaius Porcius Cato in 114 BC. He identifies the virgin as the daughter of a Publius Elvius, a member of the equestrian order. While Plutarch has her out riding alone and her body later discovered, in Obsequens' account she is traveling in the company of her father from the Roman Games to Apulia when the incident occurs in the ager Stellas, the Stellate Plain. She is left dead by the lightning strike, with her garment pulled up to expose her genitals and her tongue hanging out, as if fire had flashed from the "lower places" (per inferiores locos) to her mouth. While the death of the horse is not explicitly reported, its trappings (ornamenta) are said to have been scattered about.

In the version of the Christian writer Orosius (died ca. 420 AD), the equestrian Lucius Helvius was returning to Apulia from Rome with his wife and daughter when a storm struck the traveling party. Seeing that his daughter was upset by the storm, he decided to leave the vehicles behind and to proceed more quickly on horseback to seek shelter. But when the girl rode into the middle of the caravan, she was struck dead by lightning, which caused her clothing to be pulled off without being torn – the bindings at her breast and feet were undone, and her necklaces and rings yanked off. She was left lying "in an obscene manner", naked but with no injury apparent, and her tongue hanging out "just a little". As with Plutarch, the horse is struck dead too, and its bridle and harnessing unfastened and scattered. The wife, unmentioned in the other versions, plays no role in the story.

Outside the taking of official auspices, an unsought sign that violated the predictable orderliness of the physical world occasioned alarm. The prodigium was a sign of divine displeasure, and the religious offense that provoked it had to be identified and expiated. The frequency of recorded prodigies seems to have been especially intense during the Second Punic War, and these were often accompanied by lightning, a speciality of Etruscan divination. The forensic techniques for interpreting lightning accounted for elements such as the direction from which the strike came and what kind of damage it left. For instance, Jullius Obsequens traced the path of the strike from "lower places" to the mouth – lightning from below being one of the standard signifying types. The scattering of the horse trappings, according to Obsequens, was a sign that pointed to the involvement of the equestrian order.

The Sibylline books were consulted, and an official pronouncement (responsum) formalized the accusation against members of the equestrian order along with three Vestals in the disgrace, which Obsequens labels infamia. The consultation with the Sibylline books may have been the source for the epithet Verticordia, modeled after the Greek cult of Aphrodite Apostrophia, who turned away (from apo -, "away," and stroph-, "turn") disordered acts of sexuality. Danielle Porte saw apotropaism in the powers of Venus Verticordia, as suggested by the prodigy's imagery of exposed genitals (like the anasyrma gesture) and the protruding tongue characteristic of gorgoneia.

#### Trial of the Vestals

The prodigy was linked to Vestals committing repeated acts of sexual misconduct with several members of the equestrian order. The Augustan poet Ovid more generally blames a decline in sexual morality (pudicitia) in Rome at the time, four generations before hm. The trial before the pontiffs started in December 114 BC; the proceedings have been described as "exceptional and no doubt politically motivated."

#### Human sacrifice

The founding of Verticordia's temple and the punishment of the Vestals for sacrilegious inchastity were deemed insufficient to avert the panic, and these expiations were supplemented by a rare human sacrifice in ancient Rome — of two couples, one Greek and the other Celtic. Livy calls the practice "hardly Roman", but it seems to have been the second time this particular rite was enacted, the first carried out during the Hannibalic War. According to Plutarch, it was the last human sacrifice carried out in Rome.

## The Veneralia and the calendar

The feast day of Venus took place on 1 April (the Kalends). Verticordia may have supplanted or been a refinement of an older form of Venus originally honored on the Kalends, and she shares the day with Fortuna Virilis, an older instantiation of the goddess Fortuna whose origins are unknown. The Kalends of April was one of the three days during the year when a woman expected to receive a gift from her male romantic partner, the other two being her birthday and the Sigillaria in December. No games (ludi) were held as they were for many other religious festivals.

The whole month of April, Latin Aprilis, was under the guardianship (tutela) of Venus, and Ovid and others took Aphrodite, the name of her Greek counterpart, as the origin of the word Aprilis. The more common view among the Romans was that Aprilis derived from the verb aperire, "to open", according to Verrius Flaccus because it was the month when "fruits and flowers and animals and seas and lands do open". April and June were the most propitious months for weddings, as they were presided over by Venus and then Juno as a goddess of marriage. The April religious calendar was dominated by female rites, with major festivals for Magna Mater ("Great Mother") and Ceres as well as days for Venus. The Kalends is not named as the Veneralia until the Calendar of Filocalus in AD 354, which illustrates the month of April with a scene from the theatrical ludi of Magna Mater.

The most detailed source on the Veneralia is the Kalends of April section in Book 4 of Ovid's poem about the Roman calendar, the Fasti, but the word Verticordia is metrically impossible in elegiac couplets and thus can't be used as an epithet for Venus in the poem. Ovid refers to Verticordia, however, in a line that plays on the etymology of the epithet: inde Venus verso nomina corde tenet, "and from her change of heart Venus holds her title."

According to Ovid, the cult image of Venus was bathed and redressed in the ritual act of lavatio. The goddess's rich adornments and gold necklaces were removed, and after she had been washed head to toe and polished dry, she was decked with not only her jewellery but also fresh roses and other flowers. Rose adornment was also part of the Vinalia, the wine festival on 23 April when Venus Erycina was celebrated. Ovid is the only source for Verticordia's lavatio, and the earliest for the bathing of the cult statue of the Magna Mater, which was carried to the river Almo during her festival 4–10 April, the Megalensia. Statue-bathing was not characteristic of early Roman religion; it may have served a practical purpose that was ritualized to preserve the sanctity of the image, or even been reconceptualized as an annual cleansing of offenses committed against the goddesses.

At the Veneralia, matrons and brides were to supplicate Verticordia, seeking physical beauty, socially approved behaviors, and a good reputation, while women of lesser standing (mulieres humiliores) celebrated Fortuna Virilis by burning incense. The celebrants of Verticordia bathed communally, crowned in wreaths of myrtle, a plant especially associated with Venus and eroticism but not used in bridal wreaths. Ovid explains the origin (aetion) of myrtle-wearing with a brief version of the myth of Venus Anadyomene rising naked from the sea, recognizable as such in the poem by the "hair-drying pose" he describes. As she is wringing out her dripping hair on the shore, she becomes aware of a rowdy band of satyrs watching her. Unlike the usual myth in which an enraged goddess punishes the man who has seen her, Ovid's Venus simply covers herself with myrtle and goes about her pleasurable business. "Nakedness, baths, and female sexuality" form a kind of "expressive module" for the holiday. "The nakedness that lies at the center of this celebration is no taboo," Alessandro Barchiesi observed of Ovid's reassembling of the religious materials, but "is a public gesture" emulating the ancestress of the Romans as Aeneadae, descendants of Aeneas, son of Venus.

Participants also emulated Venus in consuming cocetum, a slurry of poppy seed, milk, and honey that served a ceremonial purpose similar to the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The festival of Ceres – Greek Demeter for whom poppy was emblematic – began 12 April with games and performances in the Circus Maximus and concluded 19 April with the Cerialia. The poppy beverage may have helped relax or sedate anxious virgin brides, or had an aphrodisiac or more strongly narcotic or hallucinatory effect, depending on the opiate content of the poppy. Ovid offers another origin story for brides consuming the cocetum, saying that Venus herself drank it on her wedding night. But he undermines an image of Venus as a model wife with the sexuality of Venus as a woman, framing her feast day with reminders of Mars, her regular consort to whom she was not married; she drank the cocetum to endure her arranged marriage to the unattractive but eager bridegroom Vulcan, and her son Aeneas, father of the Roman people, was born from her adulterous desire for the mortal Anchises.

Ovid's artistic intermingling of Verticordia and Fortuna Virilis and his social commentary on the division of the celebrants is "notoriously controversial" and "puzzlingly paradigmatic" as a historical source. The name Fortuna Virilis means something closer to "Good Luck in Men" than "Manly Fortune", or "Lucky Guy" if the women's actions are meant as a "privileged exhibition" for the men – the women may be hesitant that taking off their clothes exposes physical imperfection, but that isn't what Fortuna Virilis lets men see. Her origins are no later than the 4th century BC, predating the dedication of Verticordia's statue, and Plutarch traces a temple of Fortuna Virilis back to the semilegendary king Servius Tullius, to whom many such foundings were attributed in myth. In the late 4th century BC, public bathing might have taken place at the public pool (piscina publica), but the appearance of the women at the men's public baths has to be a later development, since these were not in use until the 2nd century BC.

The 1 April feast day was celebrated widely, perhaps universally, by Roman women, but ancient sources seem to indicate social stratification in what aspects they might participate in. The bathing and adornment of Verticordia's statue could involve only a limited number of women, and selectivity of merit was inherent in the establishment of her cult. The women who attended on her wore the respectable attire of the matron. Women of lesser status attended to Fortuna Virilis, and then they – or perhaps all women – crowned themselves in myrtle like Venus and went to share a "fecundating" bath in public view of men, who watch as the satyrs did. Earlier in the Fasti, Ovid had used the word iuventus ("the youth" as a collective), which in this period often meant an elite troop of young men of the equestrian order, to refer to a band of satyrs subject to Venus, and T. P. Wiseman conjectured that in the 4th century BC, the rites on the Kalends of April may even have involved men dressing as satyrs.

The mutual desire of Mars and Venus being fundamental to the Roman state, the role of Verticordia was not to inhibit sexuality but to promote libido within marriage, which Cicero described as "the seedbed of the republic" (seminarium rei publicae). About nine months later, the Carmentalia that celebrated the goddess of childbirth was for all women giving birth, a festival unusually without social segregation.

### In the era of Christianization

By the early second century AD, the rituals of Fortuna Virilis had been absorbed into the cult of Venus Verticordia. By late antiquity the drinking of cocetum and practices associated with Fortuna Virilis seem to have fallen into disuse. The name Veneralia for the festival on the Kalends of April first appears in AD 354 in the Calendar of Filocalus, the work of a Christian illustrator and chronographer that integrates Christian elements into the traditional Roman calendar.

The Veneralia may have been the setting Augustine of Hippo had in mind in a sermon on Mary and Martha, dated around AD 393, when he writes that "we" should not get carnally distracted by "banquets of Venus" (epulae venerales) but practice moderate behavior (modestia). Augustine advised forbearance, not passion, as a way to approach the secular banquet of Venus, which he seems to regard as "rather a respectable affair in 'celebration of a life of harmony and fullness'". The 6th-century antiquarian Ioannes Lydus, writing in Greek, says that women of higher rank had worshipped Aphrodite on 1 April "to achieve concord (homonoia) and a modest life", with no mention of Fortuna Virilis.

## Relation to other goddesses

The first Roman shrine (aedes) to an instantiation of Venus had been built during the Third Samnite War in 295 BC, located near the racetrack of the Circus Maximus. Funded by fines imposed by the curule aedile Fabius Gurges on matronae for engaging in sexual misconduct (stuprum), it was dedicated to Venus Obsequens – "Compliant" Venus. During the wars of the Middle Republic that expanded Rome's presence throughout the Mediterranean world, and especially during the Punic Wars (264–146 BC), social and economic power among Roman women of the propertied classes increased, as they stepped in to manage domestic matters in the absence of men deployed at war. At the same time, anxieties about untethered women led to regulation of their behaviors in relation to men through both legislation and religious cultivation, counterbalancing their contributions to the Roman state and relative autonomy on the home front with expectations of loyalty and self-discipline expressed sexually. The "turning" or conversion of Venus Verticordia is not a suppression of sexual desire but a purposing of its power for social benefit in a display of personal excellence.

### Venus Erycina and the cults of Pudicitia

In the month of Venus, on 23 April, a day comparable to the Greek Aphrodisia festival was devoted to Venus Erycina extra portam Collinam, "Venus of Eryx outside the Colline Gate " and hence outside the sacred boundary of Rome (pomerium) as foreign rites traditionally were. Sex workers (meretrices) attended while socially respectable women celebrated the same goddess with "cleaned up" rites at the Vinalia festival on the Capitoline. The lower-class women (mulieres humiliores) who celebrated Fortuna Virilis on the Kalends of April would have included prostitutes as well. Sarah Pomeroy believed that the humiliores comprised only prostitutes, but this is not standard usage of the word, and Ovid undermines even the usual social distinction between the humiliores and women of the upper social orders in the inclusivity of the 1 April festivities.

Venus Erycina was a Punic cult imported from Sicily, and her temple was built as the result of a wartime vow, most likely in 212 BC at the close of the Siege of Syracuse which gave Rome control of the island. At her second temple on the Capitoline, Erycina was eventually assimilated to Venus Genetrix, Venus as the generative mother of the Roman people, a moral amelioration of Erycina that indicates "prostitution was not the only item in her portfolio." The development of Erycina's cult shows the counterbalancing of an ideation of sexual women as whores by advancing the more self-controlled form of sexuality (pudicitia) for women within marriage, which Verticordia also embodied.

The social separation between Fortuna Virilis and Venus Verticordia, and between the two temples of Venus Erycina, had played out earlier in similar dynamic tension as the Conflict of the Orders sought resolution. A patrician woman had married a plebeian and consequently was deemed ineligible to participate in the cult of Pudicitia Patricia, "Pudicitia for Patricians". In response, she established a shrine to Pudicitia Plebeia as an alternative for socially aspiring plebeians in 295 BC. Pudicitia was the public moral arena in which women competed as men did in virtus, "manly" excellence. Only univirae, married women who had been with only one man, could be admitted to either cult of Pudicitia, emphasizing a woman's success at the self-management of her own sexuality beyond social expectations or male desire. The shrines of both Pudicitia Plebeia and Venus Verticordia were established in response to prodigies at a time of crisis in the Roman state; it is a frequent pattern that repairing social disorder required the public demonstration of the sexual and moral integrity of Roman women.

### Murcia and the myrtle

The location of the Temple of Venus Verticordia in the Vallis Murcia also raises questions about her relation to the obscure goddess Murcia, the varied spelling of whose name led to her identification with Venus Murtea or Myrtea, "Venus of the Myrtle Grove". Servius says that Verticordia's temple precinct (fanum) was near the Circus Maximus in a former myrtle grove, which was also the site of the Rape of the Sabine Women. As a pretext for the founding act of bride abduction, Romulus had invited the Sabine families to a festival in honor of the god named by Plutarch as Poseidon Hippios ("Horse Poseidon"), Latinized as Neptunus Equester ("Equestrian Neptune ") and identified with the archaic god Consus. The underground altar of Consus was located at one of the two points of the Circus Maximus where the chariots turned, the meta Murciae, near the myrtle grove. In earliest times, the site was largely flooded by the Tiber river in April, a terrain supporting the conceptualization of Venus rising from the "sea" among the myrtles, but in the driest months, the area was devoted to horse races, especially in August, when Venus's second Vinalia of the year was held on the 19th, two days before the horse-racing festival of Consus.

### Demeter, Bona Dea, and Aphrodite Apostrophia

The Greek equivalent of Verticordia, Aphrodite Apostrophia ("Aphrodite of Turning Away") was complementary to Demeter Erinys. The April rites of Roman Ceres were not based on the primary Greek myth of Demeter – the abduction of her daughter Persephone to serve as the bride of Pluto – and yet Ovid chooses to narrate it at disproportionate length in his treatment of April in the Fasti. This choice may have been motivated by the complex nexus in Greek myth and cult between Demeter Erinys and Aphrodite Apostrophia. Demeter Erinys ("Furious Demeter") represents the rightful anger the goddess felt after she herself was raped during her search for her daughter, having turned herself into a mare to try to evade Poseidon only to have him transform into a stallion to mount her. Erinys is the drive for vengeance, rendered into lawfulness by Demeter Thesmophoros ("Bringer of Laws", thesmoi) who preserves family order and the state. Although Demeter's Thesmophoria is framed broadly as an all-female "fertility" festival, the second day became a "forum for crime detection and dispute resolution" pervaded by the complaint of the wronged goddess.

The animalizing potential of desire is "turned away" by Aphrodite Apostrophia (from apo -, "away" and strophein, "to turn") – so called because she diverted the human race from acting on desires that were contrary to nomos (ἐπιθυμίας τε ἀνόμου) and from unholy deeds (ἔργων ἀνοσίων), such as the incestuous union that produced Adonis, the beautiful youth unsatisfactorily loved by both Aphrodite and Persephone.

Incest plays a role in one version of how the Roman Bona Dea, whose rites seem most comparable to the Thesmophoria, became a goddess. In most tellings, she is deified after her husband, Faunus, beats her with a myrtle branch when he finds her drinking wine – in one account, to death – but Macrobius has her as his daughter, whom he beats with myrtle when she refuses sex even though he has plied her with wine. In the hands of Faunus, who in the later tradition is often depicted with satyr-like features, the myrtle of Venus becomes an instrument for "excessive erotic desire"; it was banned from Bona Dea's temple on the slope of the Aventine, above the "Valley of Myrtle".

In Verticordia's mythology, the threat of bestial sexuality is represented by the satyrs in Ovid's account of Venus's bath, and by the prodigy of the horse-riding virgin, whose body is found with signs that ordinarily might be interpreted as rape. The German philologist Carl Koch suggested that the Sibylline consultation calling for a temple to Venus Verticordia might have directly prescribed the model of Apostrophia, as was the case with some other transferrals of Greek or other deities to Rome.

### The nudity of Venus

The feast day of Venus Verticordia was one of two April holidays featuring the public nudity of women, the second being stage performances at the Floralia that started at the end of the month and continued into May. For the Floralia, however, the bodies of entertainers and prostitutes were on display; on the Kalends, even respectable matrons removed the garments that marked them as such, the long dress (stola) that covered them to their feet and the headbands (vittae) that bound their hair. Valerius Maximus attributed a kind of inviolability to the stola, stating that it was not to be subjected to the touch of an "alien" hand – meaning someone outside the family – even if the matron came under arrest. The unwilling removal of the protective garment would be a violation, but its willing removal and the reclaiming of the nude body held power: "Like the Gorgon's eye, it can paralyze or protect." Although female nudity among the Archaic and Classical Greeks had been taboo, "respectable female nudity" was imported into Italy via the Etruscans and took the form of Hellenistic Aphrodite.

The Venus Pudica statuary type displays the goddess naked, and the placement of her hands is not obviously defensive but rather instructs the viewer toward the erogenous zones of the female body. The sometime presence of a cloth or drapery is ambiguous as to whether Pudica has just removed her garment or is about to put it on, and in some versions, such as the Mazarin Venus (at the top of this article), suggests a striptease. The apparent erasure of social rank was renegotiated by the practice of wearing jewellery in the baths, as modeled by the bejewelling of nude Venus statues and documented by archaeological finds in drains.

Both the Venus Anadyomene and Pudica types are associated with rising from the water, sometimes indicated by a hydria (water vessel) or dolphin, with bathing a reenactment of the goddess's birth from the sea. Ovid's description of Venus with dripping hair for the Kalends of April may have been inspired by a painting in the anaydomene pose that Augustus had exhibited in the Temple of the Deified Julius. Pudica, however, is well coiffed. Roman matrons were not portrayed with the loose, wet locks of Anadyomene, which released an eroticism that might not be fully under control; elaborately bound-up hairstyles were not simply ornamental but "upright" in the moral sense. The polymath Varro said that the piled-up hairstyle of Roman matrons was called a tutulus from the word tutus, "safe", and was also nicknamed an arx, like the citadel of the city – just as functionally the cult of Verticordia was established to safeguard the city. And just as women reenacted the role of Venus in the rites of 1 April, they were portrayed quite literally as Venus in sculpture, with their own portrait head placed on a conventional body type of the goddess – a costly form of self-expression available only to those who could afford it, from the wives of emperors to successful freedwomen. Although nude, their portraits exhibit "flawless reserve and self-possession".


2024 Go Bowling at The Glen

# 2024 Go Bowling at The Glen

## Abstract

The 2024 Go Bowling at The Glen is an upcoming NASCAR Cup Series race that will be held on September 15, 2024, at Watkins Glen International in Watkins Glen, New York. Contested over 92 laps -- extended from 90 laps due to an overtime finish Contested over 90 laps on the 2.45-mile (3.94 km) road course, it will be the 28th race of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season, the second of the 2024 NASCAR playoffs, and the second race of the Round of 16. Chris Buescher won the race, his first win since the 2023 Coke Zero Sugar 400. Shane Van Gisbergen finished 2nd, and Carson Hocevar finished 3rd. Ross Chastain and Zane Smith rounded out the top five, and Chase Briscoe, Michael McDowell, Corey LaJoie, Ryan Preece, and Austin Cindric rounded out the top ten.

## Report

### Background

Watkins Glen International (nicknamed "The Glen") is an automobile race track located in Watkins Glen, New York at the southern tip of Seneca Lake. It was long known around the world as the home of the Formula One United States Grand Prix, which it hosted for twenty consecutive years (1961–1980), but the site has been home to road racing of nearly every class, including the World Sportscar Championship, Trans-Am, Can-Am, NASCAR Cup Series, the International Motor Sports Association and the IndyCar Series.

Initially, public roads in the village were used for the race course. In 1956 a permanent circuit for the race was built. In 1968 the race was extended to six hours, becoming the 6 Hours of Watkins Glen. The circuit's current layout has more or less been the same since 1971, although a chicane was installed at the uphill Esses in 1975 to slow cars through these corners, where there was a fatality during practice at the 1973 United States Grand Prix. The chicane was removed in 1985, but another chicane called the "Inner Loop" was installed in 1992 after J.D. McDuffie's fatal accident during the previous year's NASCAR Winston Cup event.

The circuit is known as the Mecca of North American road racing and is a very popular venue among fans and drivers. The facility is currently owned by NASCAR.

#### Entry list

- (R) denotes rookie driver.

- (P) denotes playoff driver.

- (i) denotes driver who is ineligible for series driver points.

## Practice

Tyler Reddick was the fastest in the practice session with a time of 1:12.018 seconds and a speed of 122.469 mph (197.095 km/h).

## Qualifying

Ross Chastain scored the pole for the race with a time of 1:12.130 and a speed of 122.279 mph (196.789 km/h).

## Race

### Race results

#### Stage results

Stage One Laps: 20

Stage Two Laps: 20

### Final Stage results

Stage Three Laps: 50

## Media

### Television

USA covered the race on the television side. as part of a Radio style Broadcast for the race. Leigh Diffey and Steve Letarte called the race from the broadcast booth. MRN broadcaster Mike Bagley called the race from the Esses, Dillon Welch had the call from Turn 5 to Turn 9, and Jeff Burton called the race from Turn 10 & 11. Kim Coon, Parker Kligerman and Marty Snider handled the pit road duties from pit lane.

### Radio

Motor Racing Network had the radio call for the race, which will also be simulcast on Sirius XM NASCAR Radio. Alex Hayden, Jeff Striegle, and former crew chief Todd Gordon covered the action when the field raced down the front straightaway. Dave Moody called the race when the field raced thru the esses. Kyle Rickey wcovered the action when the field raced thru the inner loop and turn 5 and Jason Toy covered the action in turn 6 & 7. Steve Post, Brienne Pedigo, Chris Wilner & Jacklyn Drake called the action from the pits for MRN.


Beatrice of Portugal

# Beatrice of Portugal

## Abstract

Beatrice (Portuguese: Beatriz, pronounced; 7–13 February 1373 – c. 1420) was the only surviving legitimate child of King Ferdinand I of Portugal and his wife, Leonor Teles. She became Queen consort of Castile by marriage to King John I of Castile. Following her father's death without a legitimate male heir, she claimed the Portuguese throne, but lost her claim to her uncle, who became King John I of Portugal, founder of the House of Aviz.

During her early years, Beatrice was a pawn in the changing politics of foreign alliances of her father, who negotiated successive marriages for her. She would eventually marry King John I of Castile, by whom Beatrice became Queen consort of Castile. At the death of her father, Beatrice was proclaimed Queen regnant of Portugal and her mother assumed the regency in her name. Opposition to the regency, fear of the Castilian domination and loss of Portuguese independence led to a popular rebellion and civil war between the late King Ferdinand I's illegitimate brother, John of Aviz, who wrested control of the regency from the dowager queen, and the supporters of Beatrice and her husband, John I of Castile, who claimed the throne of Portugal by right of his wife. In 1385, John of Aviz was proclaimed King of Portugal, and the King of Castile was definitively defeated in the Battle of Aljubarrota, effectively ending any prospects for Beatrice and her husband to assert their rights to the Portuguese crown.

From that time, Queen Beatrice took a special interest in the welfare of the Portuguese exiles in Castile who had been faithful to her dynastic claim to the Portuguese throne. After the death of her husband she was relegated to a secondary level in the Castilian court. However, the dynastic strife continued to represent a challenge to the normalization of relations between Castile and Portugal. From the second decade of the 15th century onwards, her documentary trail became scarce until she completely disappears about 1420.

## Life

### Early years and betrothals

Beatrice was born in Coimbra, during the brief siege of the city by Castilian troops during the second Fernandine War (1372–73). The siege was lifted and King Henry II of Castile continued to Santarém and then Lisbon. During the siege of Lisbon, Cardinal legate Guido of Bologna obtained an agreement between the Kings of Castile and Portugal, the Peace of Santarém. According to that treaty, King Ferdinand I of Portugal would abandon the Petrist cause, his claim to dynastic legitimacy that originated after the assassination of King Peter I of Castile in 1369. Two marriages were celebrated between the two royal families to reinforce the peace: between Sancho Alfonso, 1st Count of Alburquerque, brother of Henry, and Beatrice, half-sister of Ferdinand, and between Alfonso Enríquez, Henry's natural son, and Ferdinand's illegitimate daughter Isabel. In addition, a betrothal was arranged between Beatrice, Ferdinand I of Portugal's newborn daughter, and Fadrique, created Duke of Benavente, another natural son of King Henry II of Castile.

The Cortes de Leiria of 1376 pledged to support Beatrice as heiress of the throne, accepting her betrothal with the Duke of Benavente. The betrothal was solemnized in Leiria on 24 November 1376, and on 3 January 1377 was accepted by King Henry II.

Fernando I's will of 1378 ratified all agreements concerning Beatrice, adding that in the absence of Beatrice or any descendants, the Portuguese king's half-brothers, the children of Inês de Castro (John, Diniz and Beatrice) were disinherited, and the throne of Portugal would pass to any hypothetical sisters of Beatrice, and after them, to Duke Fadrique of Benavente. To ensure the succession of the throne in her daughter, Queen Leonor Teles devised a plot against John of Portugal, in which the Queen's own sister María Teles, John's wife, was accused of adultery and killed by her husband in June 1379. Although John later obtained the royal pardon, he opted to flee to Castile, fearful of the Teles family.

In May 1379 King Henry II of Castile died and his son John I succeeded him. Once these events were known in the Portuguese court, negotiations began for the betrothal of Beatrice with the first-born son of the new King, the future Henry III of Castile, in order to counter any aspiration of John of Portugal to the throne with the political and military support of the Castilians. The 21 May 1380 agreement stipulated that the wedding would be celebrated when the 1-year-old prince reached the age of 14. It also established the succession. If Beatrice died before the marriage and her father had no more legitimate offspring, the throne would pass to John I of Castile, but if she died after her marriage and without any descendants, it would go to her widower. If Henry died first, without issue by Beatrice, she would remain Queen regnant, but were she then to die without children by a subsequent marriage, the Portuguese throne would pass to the Kings of Castile. In this way the children of Inês de Castro were again denied succession. The marriage agreement was approved in the Cortes de Soria in August 1380.

By July 1380, Ferdinand I had changed his politics by secretly allying himself in the Treaty of Estremoz with King Richard II of England and the Duke of Lancaster, defenders of the Petrist cause. The King of Portugal abandoned Antipope Clement VII and swore obedience to Pope Urban VI, while his daughter Beatrice was betrothed to Edward of Norwich, son of the Earl of Cambridge and grandson of King Peter I of Castile. The negotiations for this alliance brought to Portugal a Petrist exile, Juan Fernández de Andeiro, Count of Ourém, who would later have prominent influence at the Portuguese court. When the Castilian King heard of the agreement thanks to the exiled John of Portugal, he sealed an alliance with France through the Treaty of Vincennes, accepting obedience of his kingdom to the Antipope Clement VII, and he undertook the third Fernandine War. While King Ferdinand I and his counselors were at Elvas to discuss the war, on 19 July 1382 Queen Leonor Teles gave birth a son who lived only four days. One month later, on 10 August, the war was concluded with the Peace of Elvas, under which a betrothal was celebrated between Beatrice and the second son of John I of Castile, the future Ferdinand I of Aragon. In addition, the Kingdom of Portugal, religiously divided by the Western Schism, returned to the obedience of Antipope Clement.

John I of Castile was widowed in 1382, and the Count of Ourém, favorite of Queen Leonor Teles, negotiated a new betrothal for Beatrice, this time with the Castilian King himself. Ferdinand agonized over the proposed marriage. It would seem to secure the succession of Beatrice, because she would have a powerful neighboring monarch as an ally who could counteract the aspirations of John of Portugal and his siblings instead of supporting them, yet on the other hand the Castilian King, having to reside in Castile, would have to leave the affairs of Portugal in the hands of Queen Leonor as regent. The marriage contract was signed on 2 April 1383 in Salvaterra de Magos. The contract stipulated that at the death of Ferdinand I without sons, the crown would pass to Beatrice, and her husband would be titled King of Portugal. However, both sides agreed that the Kingdoms of Castile and Portugal would not unite, and to guarantee this Queen Leonor Teles would remain as regent and in charge of the government of Portugal until Beatrice had a son who reached 14 years of age, who would then assume the government and title of King of Portugal in place of his parents. If Beatrice died without surviving children, the crown would pass to other hypothetical sisters, and if there were none it would pass to John I of Castile, and through him to his son Prince Henry, again disinheriting the children of Inês de Castro. The succession of Castile also was stipulated: in case the succession of John and of his two sons failed, the crown would pass to his sister Eleanor, and if she also died without offspring, the Castilian throne would pass to King Ferdinand I Portugal and his descendants. During the preparation of the marriage contract, the King of Castile objected to the dowry assigned to Beatrice and also disagreed that his sons by her had to be raised in Portugal, that Queen Leonor Teles could hold the regency in Portugal, and that the border fortresses had to be in Portuguese hands, but in view that it offered him the Kingdom of Portugal, these objections were viewed as secondary and he accepted the agreement.

Pedro de Luna, a pontifical legate for the Kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Navarre, solemnized the betrothal at Elvas on 14 May 1383, and the official wedding ceremony took place on 17 May in Badajoz Cathedral. To ensure compliance with the Treaty, on 21 May a group of Castilian knights and prelates swore to denaturalize from the Kingdom and fight against their monarch if the Castilian King broke the agreements made in the marriage contract, and in the same way a group of Portuguese knights and prelates (among them the Master of Aviz) made the same oath if the Portuguese King broke the treaty with Castile. Later, Beatrice approved in her own name what was agreed at Salvaterra de Magos. Once the wedding took place, she went to live in Castile with her husband. The marriage contract was taken to the Cortes de Santarém of August and September to swear to accept Beatrice and John I of Castile as heirs of Portugal, although these acts were not conserved. For her part, Queen Leonor Teles gave birth on 27 September to a daughter who lived only a few days, so Beatrice remained the only legitimate child of King Ferdinand I.

### Crisis of 1383–1385

King Ferdinand I of Portugal died on 22 October 1383. Leonor Teles, his widow, in accordance with the Treaty of Salvaterra and the testament of the deceased monarch, assumed the regency and government of the Kingdom in the name of her daughter. The regent maintained her clique of Castilian Petrists, which strengthened an opposition faction that demanded that the Council of the regent only included councilors of Portuguese origin.

News of the death of the Portuguese King came to John I of Castile and Beatrice in Torrijos, and they immediately closed the Cortes in Segovia. The Master of Aviz wrote to the Castilian monarch urging him to take the Portuguese crown that belonged to him through his wife, and that the Master himself be made regent on their behalf. To avoid dynastic conflicts with John of Portugal (first-born son of Inês de Castro) the Castilian King imprisoned him in the Alcázar of Toledo, and there adopted the title and the arms of King of Portugal, which was recognized by Antipope Clement VII. Later, he convened the Royal Council in Montalbán and sent Alfonso López de Tejeda to Portugal with instructions to the regent to proclaim him and his wife King and Queen of Portugal.

The proclamation was made, but in Lisbon and other places like Elvas and Santarém, a popular rejection was expressed in favor of John of Portugal. John I of Castile decided to lead troops into Portugal to take possession of the Kingdom, against the advice of some members of his Council since it represented a clear contravention of the agreements made in the Treaty of Salvaterra. He had the support of Beatrice's chancellor, Afonso Correia, Bishop of Guarda, who promised him the surrender of the land. John I thus entered in Portugal with Beatrice to ensure the obedience of Portugal and the rights of his wife.

For John I of Castile, his marriage allowed him to maintain a protectorate over the Portuguese kingdom and the ability to prevent the English from becoming established in the Iberian Peninsula. In addition, the union of Castile and Portugal would benefit the Portuguese nobility, who would have greater expectation of receiving land, titles and positions. Faced with this, the peasants, who had improved their standing as a result of the depopulation of the countryside, feared a reinforcement of the privileges of the nobility while the merchants, artisans, public officials and large sections of the lesser nobility feared their political, social and economic annulment in the face of an increase in the power of the Portuguese high nobility and the threat of a Castilian domination that favored agriculture over trade. Combining opposition to the regent and her Petrist clique, the expectation of a commercial monopoly, and fears of Castilian dominion and loss of Portuguese independence, uprisings began in Lisbon in late November and early December. The Master of Aviz killed the Count of Ourém, favorite of the regent, and after that there was the uprising of the peasants against the government instigated by Alvaro Pais, in which Martinho Anes, Bishop of Lisbon, was murdered. The uprising spread to the provinces, claiming the lives of the Abbess of the Benedictine cloister in Évora, the Prior of the collegiate church of Guimarães and Lançarote Pessanha, Admiral of Portugal, in Beja, among others. The uprising had the support of the bourgeoisie but not of the nobility, who maintained their support of the regent.

Queen Leonor Teles fled from Lisbon with the court and took refuge in Alenquer. In Lisbon, Alvaro Pais proposed the marriage of the Master of Aviz with the Queen regent so they could jointly assume the regency, but she refused, and with the news of the imminent arrival of the Castilian King, the Master of Aviz was chosen Defender and Regent of the Kingdom on 16 December 1383, invoking the rights of John of Portugal, first-born son of Inês de Castro. The Master of Aviz constituted his own Council in which João das Regras appeared as Chancellor, and requested the aid of England; he also tried to besiege Alenquer, but Leonor fled to Santarém, so he immediately returned to prepare the defense of Lisbon. In Santarém, Leonor Teles proceeded to recruit an army and sought the help of her son-in-law the King of Castile to defeat the insurgents who didn't accept her regency or recognize her daughter Beatrice as Queen.

John I of Castile acted to control the situation in Portugal, leaving a Council of Regency in Castile consisting of Alfonso of Aragon, Marquis of Villena, Pedro Tenorio (Archbishop of Toledo) and Pedro González de Mendoza (First Mayordomo of the King). In early January 1384 John I, together with Beatrice, invaded Portugal via the road to Santarém, following Queen Leonor Teles' call, and a few days later, on 13 January, he obtained from his mother-in-law her resignation of the regency and government. Thus the Castilian King assumed control of the government, and he organized a chancellery, a court, and an army composed essentially of Castilians. After this, many knights and castle governors came to pay homage to him and his wife Beatrice, such as those of Santarém, Ourém, Leiria, Montemor-o-Velho, Feira, Penella, Óbidos, Torres Vedras, Torres Novas, Alenquer, Sintra, Arronches, Alegrete, Amieira, Campo Maior, Olivenza, Portel, Moura, Mértola, Braga, Lanhoso, Valença do Minho, Melgaço, Vila Nova de Cerveira, Viana do Castelo, Ponte de Lima, Guimarães, Caminha, Bragança, Vinhais, Chaves, Monforte, Miranda do Douro, Montalegre, Mirandela, Castelo Rodrigo, Almeida, Penamacor, Guarda, Covilhã and Celorico da Beira, among others. However, Queen Leonor began to conspire against her son-in-law, and for this she was sent to the Monastery of Tordesillas. This provided the Master of Aviz with further justification for the revolt because the terms of the Treaty of Salvaterra had been violated, and in addition it split the nobility that had mostly supported Leonor, with several of them, such as the Chancellor of the regent, Lourenço Eanes Fogaça, allying with the Master of Aviz.

Although he counted on the support of the majority of the Portuguese aristocracy, King John I couldn't repeat the Castilian triumphs of the Fernandine Wars and failed before Coimbra and Lisbon. On 3 September 1384 he left garrisons in the cities of his supporters, returned to Castile and asked for help to the King of France. Beatrice also left Portugal for what turned out to be the last time. Meanwhile, the Master of Aviz attempted to seize loyal cities from his adversaries, and although he took Almada and Alenquer, he failed in Sintra, Torres-Novas and Torres Vedras. He then went to Coimbra, where he had summoned Cortes for March 1385. There, Beatrice was declared illegitimate because the marriage of her parents was considered invalid, and on 6 April they proclaimed the Master of Aviz as King John I of Portugal. After the Cortes, the new sovereign undertook a campaign to control the north of the Kingdom, and thus obtained Viana do Castelo, Braga and Guimarães. John I of Castile again entered Portugal, this time via Ciudad Rodrigo and Celorico, but his army's defeats at Trancoso and Aljubarrota in May and August 1385 represented the end of any chance to impose himself as King of Portugal.

At Aljubarrota the Castilian disaster was absolute: the King fled to Santarém and from there he descended through the Tagus river until he met his fleet around Lisbon, and in September, the Castilian fleet returned to Castile. John I of Portugal then gained control of the cities that were still opposed to him. He took over the region north of the Duero where Portuguese knights still maintained fidelity to Beatrice and John I of Castile: Villareal de Pavões, Chaves and Bragança capitulated in late March 1386, and Almeida in early June.

### Legitimism and truces with Portugal

The Castilian disaster at Aljubarrota produced an exodus towards Castile of Portuguese clerics who had remained faithful to Antipope Clement VII (their maintenance being undertaken by Queen Beatrice, who also requested benefits for them from the Antipopes at Avignon) and nobles, who initially didn't receive substantial compensation since they were expected to return to Portugal.

Aljubarrota also renewed the aspirations of the descendants of King Peter of Castile: his daughter Constance and her husband John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. On 9 May 1386, Portugal and England signed the Treaty of Windsor, and John of Gaunt, his wife and their daughter, Catherine of Lancaster, arrived in Galicia in July. John I of Castile immediately called the Cortes in Segovia to assure the defense of the Kingdom, and in addition rehabilitated John of Portugal, first-born son of Inês de Castro, entrusting him the regency of Portugal in his and his wife's names, with the goal of undermining the position of his half-brother King John I of Portugal. Given the scant results of the Anglo-Portuguese campaign and the loss of support in Galicia, John of Gaunt and John I of Castile signed the Treaty of Bayonne on 8 July 1388, under the terms of which John of Gaunt and his wife renounced to all their rights over the Castilian throne in favor of the marriage of their daughter Catherine with the first-born son and heir of John I of Castile, the future Henry III. The interruption of the Hundred Years' War with the Truce of Leulinghem motivated the Truce of Monção on 23 November 1389 between Castile and Portugal, under which cities both sides had occupied were restored, but the dynastic claims of Beatrice remained pending.

The recovery of Portugal was still on the mind of the Castilian monarch; in 1390, celebrating Cortes in Guadalajara, he proposed to his Council his abdication to dedicate himself completely to Portugal. His death on 9 October 1390, generated a power struggle to constitute the regency, so the Portugal issue was postponed with the renewal of the truce in 1393. Throughout these struggles, they preserved the dispositions King John I had made in his testament, written at Celorico da Beira in 1385, that provided for the economic maintenance of the household of the now-Dowager Queen Beatrice, on which depended the Portuguese exiles who had followed her to Castile. The testament also made reference to the doctrinal part of the inheritance rights, but there is disagreement over their intent. Olivera Serrano indicates that John I recognized his wife Beatrice as the legitimate queen of Portugal, and as she died without legitimate descendants, the rights would be passed to Henry III, according to the terms of the Treaty of Salvaterra de Magos in 1383, while the mention of Papal arbitration was merely to dictate and ratify that the rights of succession over Portugal would indeed belong to Henry III after Beatrice's death. Oliveira Martins indicates that the Pope had to decide who should be the ruler of Portugal after the death of the Castilian King, whether it should pass to Beatrice or to her stepson Henry III. The dynastic rights of Beatrice would for decades constitute an insurmountable obstacle to the normalization of relations between the Kingdoms of Castile and Portugal, a situation that could only be completely resolved in 1431 after the signing of the Treaty of Medina del Campo. Beatrice's presence in the Kingdom of Castile was beneficial to the aspirations of the House of Trastámara over Portugal, because the Dowager Queen represented the dynastic legitimacy against the illegitimacy of the House of Aviz.

During the reign of Henry III there was a greater Portuguese exodus to Castile, the common factor of which was the rejection of the House of Aviz, and the Castilian King granted the exiles some compensation for their losses in Portugal. These exiles would reject good relations between the Kingdom of Castile and the House of Aviz, and also tended to maintain networks of kinship consistent with their allegiances, and thus the exiled adherents of Beatrice settled in cities where the Dowager Queen had influence, like Toro or Valladolid.

John I of Portugal reinitiated warfare between 1396 and 1399 to force favorable clauses in a peace treaty, but his results weren't what he expected. In the negotiations that culminated in the truce of 1402, the Castilians persisted in maintaining the rights of Beatrice and proposed a marriage between her and Afonso, first-born son of John I of Portugal, but this union was rejected by the Portuguese king. Henry III also raised his own inheritance rights in Portugal on the basis that Kings Ferdinand I of Portugal and John I of Castile had been maternal first cousins.

The death of Henry III in 1406 marked a new direction in the relations with Portugal. While the life of Beatrice in Castile didn't change since the testament of the King indicated that the provisions made by his father for her should be respected, the government of the Castilian kingdom was now in the hands of a co-regency in the name of the infant King John II between his mother, Catherine of Lancaster and his paternal uncle, Infante Ferdinand; however, their political differences forced the division of the Kingdom of Castile between them for his administration. As to peace with Portugal, Catherine favored her brother-in-law, the Portuguese King, while Ferdinand favored the position of legitimacy, which maintained the cordiality between Beatrice and Ferdinand, her youngest stepson. The disagreement between the regents prevented peace with Portugal and the truces were renewed only in 1407.

The death of King Martin of Aragon in 1410 and Ferdinand's aspirations to the Aragonese throne made him more conciliatory toward Portugal. Ferdinand still maintained the superiority and legitimacy of his family's dynastic rights, but in the negotiations that developed into the provisional treaty of 1411, the dynastic question and the Western Schism remained separate from the settlement in other points of friction: the Castilians promised not to wage war with Portugal for Beatrice's rights or the Western Schism, and agreed to suppress any claims by the exiles faithful to Beatrice over their confiscated property or indemnifications prior to the year 1402.

The problem concerning the Western Schism was solved at the Council of Constance (1414–1418). The new elected Pope, Martin V, recognized the King of Portugal, and thus in the bull Sane Charissumus of April 1418 he asked the Christian sovereigns to help the Portuguese monarch in his fight against the Saracens. The death of King Ferdinand I of Aragon in 1416 and the deposition of Antipope Benedict XIII in 1417, eliminated the only remaining support that Beatrice retained.

The power struggle in Castile between Álvaro de Luna and the Infantes of Aragon, brothers of King Alfonso V of Aragon, made Portugal a factor in support of the Infantes of Aragon, so Álvaro de Luna tried to eliminate this with a lasting peace. The Treaty of Medina del Campo of 30 October 1431 established that the rights of Beatrice died with her, and King John II renounced any rights that may have fallen to him through the kinship between Ferdinand I of Portugal and John I of Castile. In addition, the Castilian king accepted the House of Aviz as part of his family by virtue of the kinship between Catherine of Lancaster, mother of the Castilian King, and her half-sister, Philippa of Lancaster, wife of the Portuguese King. The Portuguese exiles in Castile were denied any rights or compensation in Portugal.

### Life in Castile

In 1376, when Beatrice was sworn heiress to Portugal in the Cortes de Leiria, she received a patrimony for the maintenance of her own household, though it was controlled by her mother. The Queen's favorite, Juan Fernández de Andeiro, was Beatrice's First Mayordomo. Following her marriage, rather than including territorial incomes, the dowry of the princess consisted of money that King John I of Castile had to accept with the prospect of obtaining the Kingdom of Portugal. As a minor, her husband retained her custody, but since 1385, when she attained her legal majority, Beatrice was able to sign and seal her own documents.

As Queen consort of Castile, she maintained her household, in which Juan Rodríguez Portocarrero served as First Mayordomo, and her Chancellor was the Bishop of Guarda, Afonso Correia, who would be succeeded by the lawyer Vicente Arias de Balboa. Beatrice's patrimony in Castile varied over the years, since the Castilian monarchs had to reward other relatives according to the political interests of the moment. Some provisions concerning the patrimony of Beatrice in the testament of John I of Castile, dated 1385, couldn't be fulfilled in 1392 when the regency of Henry III revised the testament. Although as wife of the Castilian King she had jurisdiction over Tordesillas, San Esteban de Gormaz, Cuéllar, Peñafiel, Medina del Campo and Olmedo, when she became a widow she only retained Béjar and Valladolid. In 1396, Henry III exchanged Béjar for Ciudad Real and the merindad of Valladolid.

Her marriage with John I of Castile was childless, although a son called Miguel is mentioned in several genealogies of the 17th and 18th centuries and even in some modern history books, probably representing confusion with Miguel da Paz, the grandson of the Catholic Monarchs. From 1390 Beatrice, now an 17-year-old widow, remained in the shadows, distanced from the intrigues of the court. Nevertheless, she still had a visible presence in the Castilian court, maintaining a relationship in a wider social circle than the group of Portuguese exiles. During the regency of John II of Castile, she settled in Ciudad Real, and as appears from her letters, she seems to have retired to Toro after the treaty of 1411. In 1409 she received the marriage proposal of a Duke of Austria, member of the House of Habsburg. She rejected it since it would have led to the loss of her Castilian patrimony, which would have harmed her Portuguese exile partisans, and she needed to retain the ability to make the type of political marriage that would have been necessary for a hypothetical return to Portugal. Beatrice maintained a close relationship with her stepson Ferdinand (later King of Aragon), supporting his family, and especially Infante Henry, intervening to support his election as Grand Master of the Order of Santiago in 1410.

In 1419 Beatrice sent Juan González de Sevilla, professor of the University of Salamanca and later Bishop of Cádiz, to appeal to Pope Martin V asking for the type of permissions usually granted to a person preparing to die. No documentary evidence of her death has survived, but her properties were dispersed, granted to the constable Álvaro de Luna from 1420, and in June 1420 Toro appears to have reverted to the Crown. Juan González de Sevilla, who was in charge of representing Beatrice as her ambassador before the pope, stopped referring to himself in this manner from April 1420. In April 1423 a new truce with Portugal was agreed upon that discussed the inheritance and succession of Beatrice, which suggests she had already died.

### Status as monarch

There has been some actual debate as to whether Beatrice should be counted as a monarch or not. In recent decades, a historiographical current of Spanish and Portuguese authors defend that she was titular Queen of Portugal between 22 October and the middle of December 1383. Some historians counted Beatrice as the queen of Portugal during 1383–1385. However, the majority of the Portuguese historians have argued that during the 1383–1385 period Portugal had no monarch, and in Portugal Beatrice is not counted as a queen regnant.

The Portuguese rebellion was not the only challenge to her accession, she also faced competing claims of her own husband. Many Portuguese nobles of the pro-Castillian faction also recognized her husband, King John I of Castile, as their jure uxoris monarch, rendering him vassalage and obedience, as, for example, did Lopo Gomes de Lira in Minho. As can be read in his 21 July 1385 testament written at Celorico da Beira, John identified himself as the king of Portugal and possible effective owner of the kingdom, saying that if he predeceased his wife, the Pope should decide whether Beatrice or his son (her stepson) Henry should be the sovereign of Portugal.

## Ancestry

## Sources


November 2022 Great Lakes winter storm

# November 2022 Great Lakes winter storm

## Abstract

In November 2022, a severe lake-effect winter storm impacted parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, causing high accumulations of snow across the Great Lakes region, including snowfall accumulations upwards of 50 in (130 cm) in several locations. In Hamburg, New York, 81.2 in (206 cm) fell, while Orchard Park, New York recorded 80 in (200 cm) of snow. At least four fatalities occurred, with three in New York and one in Indiana, and several highways closed after heavy snowfall. A travel ban was also issued for New York by governor Kathy Hochul, and thundersnow occurred across areas impacted by the winter storm.

## Meteorological history

The storm started on November 16, 2022, at around 18:00 UTC with snowfall being recorded just south of Buffalo, New York. Hamburg recorded 34 inches (86 cm) of snow by 8AM EST on November 18. By 2:30pm, that amount increased to 37 inches (94 cm), with 42.3 inches (107 cm) in Orchard Park. In Buffalo, from 8 – 9 PM, 3.1 inches (7.9 cm) fell. Over 6,000 customers lost power. The same lake effect storm also hammered parts of Ohio with up to 17.2 inches (44 cm) of snow in 12 hours. Snow was amplified partially due to very warm Lake Erie temperatures of 52 °F (11 °C).

## Preparations

Winter weather advisories were in place for six states: Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin. New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency for 11 counties. The Buffalo Bills – Cleveland Browns game was moved to Detroit. Numerous flights were cancelled at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport. The Buffalo Skyway was closed temporarily, and the New York Thruway was closed west of Exit 46 on the afternoon of November 17. Multiple Amtrak stations such as Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Depew, and Erie County suspended all bus service.

## Impact

Natural Bridge, New York received 70.9 inches (180 cm) of snow. A 132 mi (212 km) stretch of the New York Thruway was closed from Rochester, New York to the Pennsylvania border. Interstate 90 in Pennsylvania was also closed east of the interchange with Interstate 86. The full length of Interstate 290 and Interstate 990 was closed as well. Further east, Interstate 81 was closed from the exit of NY-69 north to the Canada–United States border. A full commercial travel ban was issued for multiple highways in New York. Thundersnow was also recorded when the snowstorm hit, with several cars and trucks stuck in the snow. At 66 inches (170 cm) in a single day, Orchard Park set a record for most snow in a single day, with the total snowfall being 77 in (200 cm). In Gile, Wisconsin, ending on November 18, recorded 24.5 inches (62 cm) of snow. In addition, 23.3 inches (59 cm) fell in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 65 hours, including daily snowfall records on November 17 and 19. It has been made November at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport as the third-snowiest November, which later become second-snowiest. At least two deaths occurred, due to cardiac arrest after shoveling the snow. A third person died in Hamlet, Indiana after his snowplow rolled over. An estimated 8,000 customers were without power. The 36.9 inches (94 cm) of snow that fell in Buffalo, New York in a period of three days made November 2022 the second-highest accumulation of snow in November there.


# List of Major League Baseball career runs batted in leaders

## Abstract

This is a list of Major League Baseball players who have compiled 1,000 runs batted in (RBIs). RBIs are usually accumulated when a batter in baseball enables a runner on base (including himself, in the case of a home run) to score as a result of making contact at-bat (except in certain situations, such as when an error is made on the play or during a double play). A batter is also credited with an RBI if he reaches first base with the bases loaded via a base on balls (walk), being hit by a pitch, or interference.

As of September 2, 2024, Freddie Freeman is the active leader in career RBIs and is 146th overall with 1,226.

MLB's official list does not include RBIs accumulated before 1920 when runs batted in became an official statistic. The list on this page is compiled from Baseball-Reference, which credits RBIs from 1907 to 1919 as recorded by baseball writer and historian Ernest Lanigan. One difference between the lists is that Babe Ruth is ranked third by Baseball Reference, but seventh by MLB, which does not count Ruth's 224 RBI compiled before 1920.

## List

- Stats updated as of September 15, 2024.

Through September 15, 2024, these active players have at least 850 RBIs.

- Bryce Harper (971) 82 in 2024

- Anthony Rizzo (961) 31 in 2024

- José Abreu (960) 7 in 2024

- Mike Trout (954) 14 in 2024

- Salvador Perez (914) 102 in 2024

- Marcell Ozuna (874) 98 in 2024

- José Ramirez (853) 107 in 2024


# List of contraltos in non-classical music

## Abstract

The contralto singing voice has a vocal range that lies between the F below " middle C " (F) to two Fs above middle C (F) and is the lowest type of female voice. In the lower and upper extremes, some contralto voices can sing from two Bs below middle C (B) to two B ♭ s above middle C (B ♭).

The term contralto was developed in relation to classical and operatic voices, where the classification is based not merely on the singer's vocal range but also on the tessitura and timbre of the voice. For classical and operatic singers, their voice type determines the roles they will sing and is a primary method of categorization. In classical music, a "pure" contralto is considered the rarest type of female voice. In non-classical music, singers are primarily defined by their genre and their gender, not their vocal range. When the terms soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, tenor, baritone, and bass are used as descriptors of non-classical voices, they are applied more loosely than they would be to those of classical singers and generally refer only to the singer's perceived vocal range. Contemporarily, the informal term alto is sometimes used interchangeably with contralto.

The following is a list of singers in country, popular music, jazz, and musical theatre who have been described as contraltos.

## Works cited


Joris-Karl Huysmans

# Joris-Karl Huysmans

## Abstract

Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (US: / w iː s ˈ m ɒ̃ s /, French:; 5 February 1848 – 12 May 1907) was a French novelist and art critic who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans (French:, variably abbreviated as J. K. or J.-K.). He is most famous for the novel À rebours (1884, published in English as Against the Grain and as Against Nature). He supported himself by way of a 30-year career in the French civil service.

Huysmans's work is considered remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French language, large vocabulary, descriptions, satirical wit and far-ranging erudition. First considered part of Naturalism, he became associated with the Decadent movement with his publication of À rebours. His work expressed his deep pessimism, which had led him to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. In later years, his novels reflected his study of Catholicism, religious conversion, and becoming an oblate. He discussed the iconography of Christian architecture at length in La cathédrale (1898), set at Chartres and with its cathedral as the focus of the book.

Là-bas (1891), En route (1895) and La cathédrale (1898) are a trilogy that feature Durtal, a character on a spiritual journey who eventually converts to Catholicism. In the novel that follows, L'Oblat (1903), Durtal becomes an oblate in a monastery, as Huysmans himself was in the Benedictine Abbey at Ligugé, near Poitiers, in 1901. La cathédrale was his most commercially successful work. Its profits enabled Huysmans to retire from his civil service job and live on his royalties.

## Biography

### Early life

Huysmans was born in Paris, France, in 1848. His father Godfried Huysmans was Dutch, and a lithographer by trade. His mother Malvina Badin Huysmans had been a schoolmistress. Huysmans's father died when he was eight years old. After his mother quickly remarried, Huysmans resented his stepfather, Jules Og, a Protestant who was part-owner of a Parisian book-bindery.

During childhood, Huysmans turned away from the Roman Catholic Church. He was unhappy at school but completed his coursework and earned a baccalauréat.

### Civil service career

For 32 years, Huysmans worked as a civil servant for the French Ministry of the Interior, a job he found tedious. The young Huysmans was called up to fight in the Franco-Prussian War, but was invalided out with dysentery. He used this experience in an early story, " Sac au dos " (Backpack) (later included in his collection, Les Soirées de Médan).

After his retirement from the Ministry in 1898, made possible by the commercial success of his novel, La cathédrale, Huysmans planned to leave Paris and move to Ligugé. He intended to set up a community of Catholic artists, including Charles-Marie Dulac (1862-1898). He had praised the young painter in La cathédrale. Dulac died a few months before Huysmans completed his arrangements for the move to Ligugé, and he decided to stay in Paris.

In 1905 Huysmans was diagnosed with cancer of the mouth. He died in 1907 and was interred in the cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

### Writing career

He used the name Joris-Karl Huysmans when he published his writing, as a way of honoring his father's ancestry. His first major publication was a collection of prose poems, Le drageoir aux épices (1874), which were strongly influenced by Baudelaire. They attracted little attention but revealed flashes of the author's distinctive style.

Huysmans followed it with the novel, Marthe, Histoire d'une fille (1876). The story of a young prostitute, it was closer to Naturalism and brought him to the attention of Émile Zola. His next works were similar: sombre, realistic and filled with detailed evocations of Paris, a city Huysmans knew intimately. Les Sœurs Vatard (1879), dedicated to Zola, deals with the lives of women in a bookbindery. En ménage (1881) is an account of a writer's failed marriage. The climax of his early work is the novella À vau-l'eau (1882) (Downstream or With the Flow), the story of a downtrodden clerk, Monsieur Folantin, and his quest for a decent meal.

Huysmans's novel À rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature or Wrong Way; 1884) became his most famous, or notorious. It featured the character of an aesthete, des Esseintes, and decisively broke from Naturalism. It was seen as an example of " decadent " literature. The description of des Esseintes' " alluring liaison " with a "cherry-lipped youth" was believed to have influenced other writers of the decadent movement, including Oscar Wilde.

Huysmans began to drift away from the Naturalists and found new friends among the Symbolist and Catholic writers whose work he had praised in À rebours. They included Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam and Léon Bloy. Stéphane Mallarmé was so pleased with the publicity his verse had received from the novel that he dedicated one of his most famous poems, "Prose pour des Esseintes", to its hero. Barbey d'Aurevilly told Huysmans that after writing À rebours, he would have to choose between "the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the Cross." Huysmans, who had received a secular education and abandoned his Catholic religion in childhood, returned to the Catholic Church eight years later.

Huysmans's next novel, En rade, an unromantic account of a summer spent in the country, did not sell as well as its predecessor.

His Là-bas (1891) attracted considerable attention for its portrayal of Satanism in France in the late 1880s. He introduced the character Durtal, a thinly disguised self-portrait. The later Durtal novels, En route (1895), La cathédrale (1898) and L'oblat (1903), explore Durtal/Huysmans's conversion to Roman Catholicism. En route depicts Durtal's spiritual struggle during his stay at a Trappist monastery. In La cathédrale (1898), the protagonist is at Chartres, intensely studying the cathedral and its symbolism. The commercial success of this book enabled Huysmans to retire from the civil service and live on his royalties. In L'Oblat, Durtal becomes a Benedictine oblate. He finally learns to accept the world's suffering.

In addition to his novels, Huysmans was known for his art criticism in his books L'Art Moderne (1883) and Certains (1889). An early advocate of Impressionism, he admired such artists as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. But after Huysmans sent a copy of L'Art Moderne to Camille Pissarro, Pissarro wrote to him, "How is it that you don't say one word about Cézanne, whom not one of us has failed to acknowledge as one of the most singular temperaments of our time, and one who has had a very great influence on modern art? I was extremely surprised by your articles on Monet. How can such astonishing vision, such phenomenal execution and such rare and extensive decorative feeling not have struck you back in 1870...?"

Huysmans was a founding member of the Académie Goncourt.

Huysmans's work was known for his idiosyncratic use of the French language, extensive vocabulary, detailed and sensuous descriptions, and biting, satirical wit. It also displays an encyclopaedic erudition, ranging from the catalogue of decadent Latin authors in À rebours to the discussion of the iconography of Christian architecture in La cathédrale. Huysmans expresses a disgust with modern life and a deep pessimism. This had led him first to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Later he returned to the Catholic Church, as he noted in his Durtal novels.

## Style and influence

"It takes me two years to 'document' myself for a novel – two years of hard work. That is the trouble with the naturalistic novel – it requires so much documentary care. I never make, like Zola, a plan for a book. I know how it will begin and how it will end – that's all. When I finally get to writing it, it goes along rather fast – assez vite. "

"Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor, it is – especially in regard to things seen – extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of a painter's palette. Elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very perversity that Huysmans's work - so fascinating, so repellent, so instinctively artificial - comes to represent, as the work of no other writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the Decadent movement in literature." (Arthur Symons, The Decadent Movement in Literature)

"...Continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax." (Léon Bloy, quoted in Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans). Critical reviews by Léon Bloy of À rebours, En rade, and Là-bas published contemporaneously, in various journals or reviews, as Huysmans's novels came out over the years, in 1884, 1887, 1891, can be found, collected together and published 6 years after Huysmans's death, in book form, in On Huysmans' Tomb.

"It is difficult to find a writer whose vocabulary is so extensive, so constantly surprising, so sharp and yet so exquisitely gamey in flavour, so constantly lucky in its chance finds and in its very inventiveness." (Julien Gracq)

"In short, he kicks the oedipal to the curb" (M. Quaine, Heirs and Graces, 1932, Jowett / Arcana)

Huysmans's novel, Against the Grain, has more discussions of sound, smell and taste than any other work of literature we know of. For example, one chapter consists entirely of smell hallucinations so vivid that they exhaust the book's central character, Des Esseintes, a bizarre, depraved aristocrat. A student of the perfumer's art, Esseintes has developed several devices for titillating his jaded senses. Besides special instruments for re-creating any conceivable odour, he has constructed a special "mouth organ", designed to stimulate his palate rather than his ears. The organ's regular pipes have been replaced by rows of little barrels, each containing a different liqueur. In Esseintes's mind, the taste of each liqueur corresponded with the sound of a particular instrument.

"Dry curaçao, for instance, was like the clarinet with its shrill, velvety note: kümmel like the oboe, whose timbre is sonorous and nasal; crème de menthe and anisette like the flute, at one and the same time sweet and poignant, whining and soft. Then to complete the orchestra, comes kirsch, blowing a wild trumpet blast; gin and whisky, deafening the palate with their harsh outbursts of cornets and trombones:liqueur brandy, blaring with the overwhelming crash of the tubas."

By careful and persistent experimentation, Esseintes learned to "execute on his tongue a succession of voiceless melodies; noiseless funeral marches, solemn and stately; could hear in his mouth solos of crème de menthe, duets of vespertro and rum."

The protagonist of Submission (2015), a novel by Michel Houellebecq, is a literary scholar specializing in Huysmans and his work; Huysmans's relation to Catholicism serves as a foil for the book's treatment of Islam in France.

## Personal life

Huysmans never married or had children. He had a long-term, on-and-off relationship with Anna Meunier, a seamstress.

Huysmans was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1892, for his work with the civil service. In 1905, his admirers persuaded the French government to promote him to Officier de la Légion d'honneur for his literary achievements.

## Works

- Le drageoir aux épices (1874)

- Marthe (1876)

- Les Soeurs Vatard (1879)

- Sac au dos (1880)

- Croquis Parisiens (1880, 2nd ed. 1886)

- En ménage (1881)

- Pierrot sceptique (1881, written in collaboration with Léon Hennique)

- À vau-l'eau (1882)

- L'art moderne (1883)

- À rebours (1884)

- En rade (1887)

- Un Dilemme (1887)

- Certains (1889)

- La bièvre (1890)

- Là-bas (1891)

- En route (1895)

- La cathédrale (1898)

- La Bièvre et Saint-Séverin (1898)

- La magie en Poitou. Gilles de Rais. (1899) (see Gilles de Rais)

- La Bièvre; Les Gobelins; Saint-Séverin (1901)

- Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (1901, France) (on Saint Lydwine de Schiedam) (Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur) Saint Lydwine of Schiedam, translated from the French by Agnes Hastings (London, 1923, Kegan Paul)

- Saint Lydwine of Schiedam, translated from the French by Agnes Hastings (London, 1923, Kegan Paul)

- De Tout (1902)

- Esquisse biographique sur Don Bosco (1902)

- L'Oblat (1903)

- Trois Primitifs (1905)

- Le Quartier Notre-Dame (1905)

- Les foules de Lourdes (1906)

- Trois Églises et trois Primitifs (1908)

Current editions:

- Écrits sur l’art (1867-1905) Archived 2008-11-14 at the Wayback Machine, edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Éditions Bartillat, 2006.

- À Paris, edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Éditions Bartillat, 2005.

- Les Églises de Paris Archived 2006-12-06 at the Wayback Machine, edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Éditions de Paris, 2005.

- Le Drageoir aux épices Archived 2006-12-05 at the Wayback Machine, edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2003.

- The Durtal Trilogy, edited by Joseph Saint-George with notes by Smithbridge Sharpe, Ex Fontibus, 2016 (Alternative site) Archived 2016-10-11 at the Wayback Machine.