A Brill Calendar: April 2

"Father of Europe"

Few epithets are more gnomic than ‘Father of Europe’.

The difficulty stems from Greek myth, featuring a daughter of Agenor, Phoenician King, namely the fair Princess Europa. The story goes that she was carried off to Crete by an enamoured Zeus, (in the guise of a white bull). However, before we can proceed with the story, we must state that the poor child’s pedigree is contested; she may also be child of Phoenix, son of Amyntor, - a Prince to be distinguished from a magical bird reborn out of its own ashes much earlier in ancient Egypt.

So, on this calendar day, a day that we can confidently state that a ‘Father of Europe’, Charlemagne was born (though the year is a guess - around 742 AD), it is tempting to ask why it is that there is hardly a candidate for the title ‘Mother of Europe’. Queen Victoria reigned too close to the present day to be a universally acclaimed by such an ‘epitheton ornans’.

Difference in gender involves dissimilarities as well as conjunctions. A maternal, albeit impersonal counterpart of the paternal Christian warrior, ruler and slayer of heathen braves is a new, singular literacy and mode of scholarship, interlaced with an emerging post-classical Europe. However, the parental metaphor – father or mother – derives its expressive strength from association with a historical figure; and following the decline & fall of the Roman Empire – at least in the West – well documented feminine counterparts of Charlemagne are like white ravens.

A peculiar absence could fill this position of honour: to wit, the empty space between two consecutive words in a hand-written, typographically printed or electronically displayed text. A few generations before Charlemagne, Irish monks broke with the time-honoured classical scholarly tradition of ‘scriptio continua’, in which each single letter of the alphabet is equally distant from the one preceding and the one following.

The written word as we know it, born by two spaces, is a ‘Mother of Europe’ if there ever was one.