Word: 17th
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...drafty naves rubbing the images onto paper.* Now, for would-be brass rubbers, the transatlantic trip is no longer necessary. A unique shop in downtown Boston, the London Brass Rubbing Centre, makes available to plate rubbers meticulous plastic copies of top brasses ranging from a rare depiction of a 17th century child to an armored, gauntleted, 6-ft. knight who served Kings Edward III and Richard...
Named after François-Pierre de la Varenne, a 17th century French chef who wrote four treatises on food that are recognized as the first modern cookbooks, the Franglais school occupies an old restaurant building on the Left Bank's fashionable Rue St. Dominique. Unlike the Cordon Bleu, which shuns up-to-date kitchen machinery and has, in the polite words of Gourmet Writer Craig Claiborne, "an aura of the last century," La Varenne has two bright, buzzing, modern kitchens. One is at street level, used as the working classroom; the other, on the second floor...
...earliest is a battered 5th century silver votive lamp, dedicated to St. Sylvester and found, half eaten away by corrosion, in a church garden in the 17th century. From such crude, fragile souvenirs of primitive Christianity, the range expands: 10th century enamels, 11th century ivories, medieval reliquaries of silver and gold containing various fragments of sanctified bodies, and so on, to the ecclesiastic baroque and rococo confections produced from the metals of the New World...
...church practice, including art, has changed across the centuries. What were once objects of universal veneration are now, to most people, oddities. The less intrinsically dignified the relic, the truer this seems to be. One cannot re-experience the feelings with which a devout Roman borghese of the 17th century might have knelt before the reliquary of Mary Magdalene's foot in the church of Sts. Celsus and Julian. To him it would have been an object dense in its reality and hallowed in association: one of the actual feet that propelled the repentant whore of Judea...
...reliquary has no such value. We do not know whether the wizened and musty tissue that presumably lies inside the silver casing was ever attached to a historical personage named Mary Magdalene. The odds are against it, since the relic has no written history older than the 17th century. Instead, the quasi-magical object has become a fine piece of mannerist silverware, culturally almost as distant from us as an African nail fetish...