Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 March 19

= March 19 =

Black Sea drainage basin
Greetings,

I am considering topic of Black Sea drainage basin as more of geography than that of geology so using this forum to seek some suggestions and assistance.

With ref to Talk:Black Sea. As of now primarily I am looking for suggestions and assistance in combining two related sections Black Sea and Black Sea withing Black Sea article preferably in tabular form to make them neat tidy and compact for easier read and saving article space. IMHO a Table would be helpful but some one who can spare time and technical effort would do better job than me.

Thanks and regards

Bookku (talk) 07:37, 19 March 2021 (UTC)


 * This isn't really the scope of the reference desk. It's more for answering questions about the things Wikipedia is written about, rather than actually using Wikipedia. There's a handful of places that would probably be better suited to help you, I'd encourage you to check out the Limnology and Oceanography WikiProject. There's a good chance someone over there will be well suited to help you with this. In my opinion, however, these sections are good as they are. TheMrP (talk) 07:37, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Lomond Hills Regional Park
Can anyone point me to a map showing the boundary of the Lomond Hills regional park in Fife, Scotland? Various websites give information about it, but I've not found one showing a map. --rossb (talk) 07:37, 19 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Google maps. The darker green shaded area. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lomond+Hills+Regional+Park/@56.206578,-3.2417827,12z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x488635958203febd:0x37d90921cb7f0b1f!8m2!3d56.238997!4d-3.256331 41.165.67.114 (talk) 09:48, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Trolled. Well done. 41.13.224.63 (talk) 19:34, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the information. rossb (talk) 08:33, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Francis Dereham - He was the reason the Queen died?
How was Francis Dereham's involvement with Henry VIII's fifth Queen, Catherine Howard, in her youth, a principal cause of her execution? 5.80.15.109 (talk) 22:49, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Earlier related questions: Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 June 8; Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 October 20. --Lambiam 23:41, 19 March 2021 (UTC)


 * It was arguably the principal cause because (according to the relevant articles):
 * (a) there was strong and reasonable suspicion that it had included a pre-contract of marriage between Dereham and Catherine which, together with their proven and admitted sexual relationship, would have constituted a legal marriage and made Catherine's subsequent marriage to King Henry VIII legally invalid;
 * (b) there was less provable suspicion that they had continued their sexual relations subsequent to her marriage to Henry, which would have constituted not merely adultery, but (he being King) treason; and
 * (c) its investigation highlighted her subsequent, possibly adulterous and certainly inappropriate, relationship with Thomas Culpeper (also treason if true), which was the actual legal ground for her execution.
 * I agree with the OP that the Dereham article, particularly the rather brief lede which their question paraphrases, could (given appropriate citations) spell all this out more explicitly.
 * (NB: The above reflects the attitudes and laws of the historical context only, not my own, and of course there were political manoeuvres (particularly by Thomas Cranmer) in play which exploited the situation.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.221.80.5 (talk) 07:08, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not blaming 2.221, because he's only repeating what the articles say, nor Claire Ridgway, whose blog is cited, because she's only repeating what David Loades says in his book The six wives of Henry VIII, but a cursory examination will show the information is false.  Claire says:

a promise of marriage, whether written or verbal, was binding if consummated, so Catherine was a bigamist if Dereham was telling the truth.

"Binding" as regards a precontract means that the parties are required to marry in church, not that they can dispense with the ceremony if they then have sex. That's fairly obvious, because they might have had sex before entering into the contract, and anyway the Church forbade sex before the church ceremony. This attitude continued until things changed in the swinging sixties.

Loades says There were, for example, several ways of creating a binding contract but he can only come up with one, "the betrothal per verba de praesenti." He claims:

Such a betrothal, followed by consummation, was held to be a full and lawful marriage, even if no wedding ceremony had taken place.

To have made such a rule the Church would be cutting off its nose to spite its face, because it would encourage pre-marital sex and disincline couples to marry in church. The articles are going to have to be rewritten - the facts are at Draft:Bigamy (canon law). 89.240.118.119 (talk) 12:55, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
 * But surely what matters is not what the law actually was – and your argument appears to contain assumptions, including that it was exactly what "the Church" would have liked it to be – but what people at the time thought it was, and what they were prepared to assert that it was in order to achieve political and personal objectives: what we would now call the PR angle must have been a factor.
 * As for the exact state of Church law in 1641; Henry had, some 17 years before, created a new Church of England with himself as its "Supreme Head on Earth", so he was in a position to define it for himself, or have those working on his behalf do so. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.219.35.136 (talk) 16:37, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
 * (Another posting by banned user removed. –– Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:08, 21 March 2021 (UTC))
 * "1641" was a simple typo for 1541.
 * My blue link of "assumptions" was not to the article of that title, but to WP:Synthesis.
 * By "people" I meant the Royals, nobles, clergy and lawyers actively involved in the case and their peers who had a realistic interest in its outcome, not commoners who had no influence in any national affairs.
 * I really have no agenda in this discussion: I was only trying to address the OP's initial query and suggest a possible deficiency in the Dereham article that may have prompted it. If you have relevent reliable sources and want to improve the article, go ahead. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.219.35.136 (talk) 17:34, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Marriage at this point absolutely did not in any way require the direct involvement of the Church. If two people of the opposite sex (who had no other reason why they could not marry) said "I do marry you", they were married. If they said "I will marry you" and then had sex, they were married. If they represented each other as husband and wife and had sex, they were married. The laws about marriage did not change automatically at the Reformation, in part because (unlike Cranmer, etc.) Henry's intent was to create a Church IN (not of) England that was wholly Catholic in nature, except where it suited him to be otherwise. It took decades for nonsense like this to be addressed within the Church.

And no, Ridgway didn’t get it from Loades; she got it from Loades, Ives, Warnicke, Rex, Starkey, and literally every single other Tudor scholar out there. It's basic knowledge. To be blunt, if marriage had required a church ceremony at the time, Richard III's argument re. the illegitimacy of his nephews would not have been accepted. One of the major reasons the Council of Trent happened was to rein in these legal quagmires that in part contributed to the success of the Reformation. 24.76.103.169 (talk) 18:37, 23 March 2021 (UTC)