Behind the Scenes Minis: Maria and Bruno

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This week we talked about Maria Gratrudis Brusselo, who was also known as Dounia Tulis, who I found out about in a puzzle. If you are really I'm not going to tell the solution to this puzzle, but if you are planning to go crawl through old years of the m I T Mystery Hunt to look at puzzles and work on them, I'm gonna talk about that puzzle for about a minute. This was a puzzle that was delivered to us as an envelope containing a bunch of paper dolls. Fun and uh and so I just I cut out all the paper dolls and their clothes. Happy as a clam, I addressed all the paper dolls. I figured out who all the paper dolls represented. It's been some years ago when this happened. It's I may have had some help with the figure or not who was who, but then became totally and irrevocably stuck on what to do next. And if somebody had presented me with the same puzzle. Now, three years later and I have more experience working on these kinds of puzzles, I think I would have I think I would have been able to figure it out. But I could not figure it out at that time. And all I did do was just write the name of this person on my short list for ideas for the episodes for an episode to just linger on there for three years until I realized there was a book that had come back into print, which was very exciting. I mean, look, I don't know what this puzzle is, but the next thing to do is play with the paper dolls. Yeah, there was a lot of playing with paper dolls. I had a good time with it. Scan the paper dolls in and make it into a fabric. That's the next thing I would do. And um, so the m my Team Mystery Hunt puzzles are are uh you can find them online still and so if people are really curious. I feel like I found it by maybe googling and my Team Mystery Hunt puzzle paper dolls. But it's possible that I had to go back to our our old team records to find that. Now I've forgotten how I did that step and refreshing my memory about this puzzle. Uh. One of the reasons that I wanted to talk about her just besides the fact that I found the idea of doing an episode on a woman gambler to be interesting. We have had just running theme of episodes on women in the past who needed a way to make some money, and a lot of those have been writers. There are just like writing has been one of the few professions um that has uh have have been open to women in a lot of the past, and when at times when they're just were not as many ways for women to make money. And so the idea that she made her money as a gambler and a successful businesswoman just really delighted me. I was very excited to tell that story. While I love the women writers love working on those episodes, this was a nice, uh refreshing way to take a different look at a different way to become independent and successful financially. She's such a fun story to me, And granted, we're getting kind of like the sketch version of her life since there is a lot of missing documentation. For all I know, she was a horrible person who was just mean as a snake, but she seems delightful well and this her whole life story played out on this backdrop of living in New Spain and then independent Mexico and then the United States, UH and all of that was happening alongside westward expansion of the United States, horrible conflicts and genocide against indigenous people UH slavery. Like she she died before the Civil War started, which that there's just a whole separate story involving that. But like one of the reasons that people had uh moved into neighboring Texas was to bring their enslaved people with them. We talked about that some in the Lucy Parsons episode. So it's like there was a whole lot of social context that was happening along with her life and we know nothing about her attitudes or uh an involvement in any of it at all. I almost feel like it would also be fun to just do an episode of like women Gamblers in History. That would be fun, because did you run up against any info on Latti Dino while you were looking at her? I don't think so. Because she was also a gambler um in Texas and New Mexico in the early nineteen hundreds, it seems like she might be an interesting dovetail. But I don't think there's a ton of info on her either. But I bet if we looked across history we could find a lot of lady gamblers. It would be pretty fun. So yeah, Well, and every time I would circle around until suddenly a couple of months ago when I was like, wait, there's a book. How did I not know there was this book? Every time I would circle around, I would find like the same one page description about her being such an important figure in uh, Santa Fe and in New Mexico more generally during this period, UH and like fighting the same basic information over and over. And so it wasn't until number one the book came out in paperback and that uh you know, got it back into the search results. UM. And also finding a lot more of the people who had written first person accounts of her and going to read those accounts like that became a big part of the research also. So it took some circling around to be able to get the episode together, and I'm glad finally did me too. I also love those accounts, which are often I'm trying to think of a word that I can say on a family friendly podcast because the first one that comes to mind is not kind um that are just they They're so condescending and blicky, and I always have to wonder, like, are you just mad that someone who is different than you is successful, isn't. Yeah, A lot of the stuff that I read that was by historians and scholars from this area, like described the attitudes of the newcomers from the Eastern US as with words like puritanical, uh there, Like there was clearly a culture clash going on. And one of the things that also sort of revealed itself as I was working was presumptions by people who had own up in what had been British colonies, assuming that the way it worked in British colonies was also the way that it worked in Spanish colonies regarding things like gender, and it wasn't necessarily the same. So anyway, I'm glad I didn't just delete her off of my short list when it seemed like I wasn't going to be able to find enough information. Me too, and I still hope we one day figure out what her actual style was. Yeah, yeah, same same. Now I kind of want to take a field trip to New Mexico and just go through archives of old photos right, maybe this is her, Maybe this is her problem. How would we know, oh, gior Dono Bruno. Yeah, yeah, I don't mean to laugh about someone who is executed, but he does seem again like a pill. Yeah, and it's uh, it's hard to separate the sound of the soundtrack from and canto. And we will talk a lot, we will, we will. Somebody is gonna tell me that should have been called the cast recording probably whatever. Um. Yeah, So we talked about this in a moment sort of like in a in one of the ad break moments. I think where it's not just that I've known I've known people like this. I think I was people like this, So I mean until I grew out of it to at least an extent to some point. Right. I think it's a pretty natural phase for a lot of bright folks to go through when you are younger, to hit your know at all moment where you want to criticize everybody because clearly they're all far stupid or than you are. And like you said, most of us grow out. And I hope Suordano Bruno did not grow out of it. Yeah, I I I think it would be foolish to say I've entirely grown out of it, but it's less less than before. I'm better than before about being a know it all pill to everyone. Right. Oh, I still have my moments. It's like a little hardwired. Uh. It's something I work on with my therapist all the time. How can I not be a jerk? Even if I only have it in my head? I hate that that's my first response to somebody. As a teen, I owned a shirt that said I'm not opinionated, I'm just always right. Oh yeah, no, I'd run away from that person. I have seen grown adults wearing that shirt, and I make a point to just duck away because I can't know. And that is sort of the thing. Right He was always a hundred percent convinced of his rightness, which is funny because he also was like, Hey, everybody be cool with each other, but he was not cool with anybody. Yeah. Well, and it's like his rightness and also his right to say whatever without consequences, um, which especially depending on who you're saying the thing too. If you're writing it in your diary, you know whatever, But if you're literally going up to somebody in the church and saying, hey, Jesus was a magician who was tricking people like that's gonna be upsetting. You can't just say that and expect no consequences, right, which he claimed when that came up after he was turned in My motion ego, he claimed that that was like a theoretical he had interned. Like he was like, oh no, no, no, I never said that. He was that there was the thought exercise. I right, that's exactly what he did. And that's where I was like, I've known this person. I'm sure I encountered this person in college classes who wanted to say really incendiary things that they knew were incendiary, and they'd be like what me, No, I'm just exploring ideas. You guys, we've all known that person. Yeah, well, and now that person lives in Internet comments. Not necessary. We mentioned some of his charges of heresy, but there were things that he wrote about that like we didn't get into because there's a I mean, he wrote a lot, but one that like stuck out to me and I was like, yo, yeah, the Churchill would hate that. He made the case at one point that religion is a means to govern the ignorant, and that philosophy is for the men who are wise enough to govern, which is some of the most snoots pitutes ideology for sure. So when I thought, when you you see that quote, religion is the opiate of the masses, which is the twentieth century thing, I'm like Bruno was saying that in the sixteenth century catch up. I also love that the Italian dialogues were prompted after he got in that fight at Oxford, because it was like this case of I'll show you who's smart, I will explain all of my stuff, and he just kept explaining forever, and probably most people didn't want to read it. Um. I also mentioned that we would talk about how he knew he couldn't publish that in Italy, but because Italy was recognized as a place where intellectuals were doing interesting things as well, he wanted to maintain the mystique of it being an Italian set of books. So allegedly, and I wasn't able to verify this in any way, which is why I didn't put it in the episode. Allegedly, he did things when it was finally published, like have the word Venice put in the early pages as though it was published in Venice, which again wasn't part of Italy at the time, but was considered part of that like Italian intellectual circle. And he also would ask the publisher to leave their name off so that they couldn't be traced back to non Italian publishing house, sneaky, So he'd be like, yes, I'm Georgian o' bruno the nolan Um, which is very very fascinating, and he referred to himself as the nolan which also suggested that it was an Italian publication, very sneaky. One of the sources that I used for this was the Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy, and there was an interesting thing written in it about how he had structured some of his writing, particularly in his book on the Cause the Principle and the one where he basically wrote it like as an apology. That was the second of those books to come out, and he wrote it as an apology where say, no, no, no, I didn't say that, but I could justify all those things you didn't want me to say, and that I say I'm apologizing for and like again doing that, like it's a thought experiment, and that this was actually kind of what he was doing during his trial when he was like no, no, no, it's all theoretical, which just was interesting. I it's such a weasily way to be a scholar. Um dono Bruno. He was clearly very smart and had insights into things that other people were not even considering yet. But man, the package it came in was yeah, yeah, when you told me this is what you were working on, I it was like that, I'm pretty sure I started an episode about that at some point, and I did, and it was way back and something like and I think what had happened was I had seen a tumbler post of something or something like a Twitter thread, you know, one of those incredibly overly reductive, exaggerated threads about listen to how amazing this person was, groundbreaking on all of these different ways. And as I got into it, it turned out that um number one, that none of that had actually been accurate in terms of this particular thing, and then number two a lot of heresy execution to talk about. And I was like, no, I'm gonna move this. All this stuff is going to go in a folder I have that is called probably Not, which is episodes I have started working on and then abandoned and will probably never return to. See. Mine is called maybe one day hear that too. Probably not is like the thing I'll return to occasionally in desperation of like is there anything in here that I can pull? You know? Uh, but there's other stuff that's the like the potential topics are ones that are more likely to come around, right, Um, if any of our listeners are interested in reading more, particularly about this kind of later examination of how much his cosmological views were important in his his heresy trial. Alberto Martinez, who we mentioned, uh, the article in the Annals of Science that can be a little tricky to get a hold of, and it sometimes behind a paywall there. He did also write a book that came out several years I think two years after it called Burned Alive Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition. So it's obviously not only about Bruno, but it does talk more at length about how he researched and came up with some of those numbers that we talked about about, um, all of the witnesses and the number of charges, and how often the cosmological views and the innumerable world's idea came up in his trial documents. Um. And it's a fun read question mark. But if I am always very fascinated by this idea of of people with new and controversial ideas being vilified and how that works societally, especially now in retrospect, and we're like, actually right, um uh, those are always very interesting to me. So if you're interested. Again, that's Alberto Martinez and his book is Burned Alive, Bruno Galileo and the Inquisition Um, which came out in ten So it's it's pretty I found it pretty readily available and there's a kindle version of it for sure. So um, that is your Dono. Bruno a pill, pretty smart, pretty foolish in his ways he dealt with people. Um, anyway, please don't be foolish in the ways you deal with people. And if people are foolish in the ways they deal with you this weekend, I apologize for them on their behalf, because they may not have sense to apologize themselves. Uh. We hope that your your end of the week goes well, whether you have time off or whether you have obligations to fulfill, and I hope that it all goes delightfully and that no one accuses you of anything that you have not done. If you would like to hang out with us, some more. We'll be right back here tomorrow with a classic, and then on Monday there will of course be brand new episodes. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.