Good morning everyone,

It's Good Friday! How are you all doing? I have a "classic" (i.e., saints 'n' scientists) Fem Fri for you today, with an added thematic twist, which is that all these women are called Mary.

Let's start with Mary Anning, our scientist. She had no formal education but she was a pioneering palaeontologist and… you know, I knew this story, but I didn't know how young she was when she discovered the ichthyosaur:

Around 1811, when Mary was 12, Joseph found a strange-looking fossilised skull. Mary then searched for and painstakingly dug the outline of its 5.2-metre-long skeleton. By the time she was done, several months later, everyone in town knew she had discovered what must have been a monster. Scientists thought this was a crocodile. At the time most people assumed that unearthed, unrecognisable creatures had simply migrated to far-off lands. By this time, Georges Cuvier, known as the father of palaeontology, had only recently introduced the theory of extinction. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species would not be published for another 48 years.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/mary-anning-unsung-hero.html

Now, here is a saint - it's Mary of Egypt, who was a very popular saint in the middle ages. She was the subject of this blog writer's Master's thesis, and clicking on the "Mary of Egypt" tag on his blog gives you the pleasant impression of someone who trots around Western Europe looking for pictures of his favourite saint:

There is plenty of evidence attesting to Mary of Egypt’s cult in England from the early middle ages. Her feast-day was commemorated there as early perhaps as the late seventh century, in Northumbria. She figures in just under half the surviving liturgical calendars of the Anglo-Saxon period, with indications of a centre of devotion in the southwest. Her name is frequently found (but not by any means universally) in calendars, litanies and other texts from the later medieval period in England, including a St Paul’s, London calendar with which Chaucer was familiar.

https://tredynasdays.co.uk/2016/03/mary-of-egypt-again/

Finally, a musician! Mary Lattimore is a harpist and you could do much worse than to put this on the stereo and go to a Latvian seaside town with her:

’Baltic Birch’ didn’t entirely start out as a song about Latvian seaside towns. It came out of a broken heart and need for liberation from it, but I took that feeling to Latvia so it was infused with that feeling of being a stranger exploring a new gorgeous mysterious place, being hungry for new-ness. Things that might feel like landscape odes are, but you’re also bringing your personality to these places so descriptions of trees will always be the story of you describing trees, if that makes sense. In general, though the song-ideas come out the way they start, but since they’re instrumental, the listener can take them to another place.

http://savedbyoldtimes.com/features/2018/6/5/a-conversation-with-mary-lattimore

Here's the song she is talking about!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ersRF9cGYg

Love,

Alex.