Severian's Family. What the text shows...

Lee Berman · 22 Dec 2010, 17:56 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 12:56:20 -0500
Subject: (urth) Severian's Family. What the text shows...
Message-ID: <SNT123-W190EF47AA1AD1FE34E16D3CF1B0 at phx.gbl>

>James Wynn: I think Severian knows the answer by the time he meets Ouen. But he's 
>not telling. Yeah, we should know more about Ouen. But we should definitely know more 
>about Catherine. I really expected Severian to meet her in tUotNS.

I agree that Severian is not telling us a lot of embarassing stuff that he knows.

I think Severian does meet her in tUotNS; sees her anyway, as the woman on the 
Path Of Air. As such, I think this ties her to the Contessa in the play and to the 
woman in the coffin that Vodalus/Hildegrin dig up. So perhaps all we need to know
about her can be gleaned from these connections.

>Jeff Wilson: My reading is monials --> run off --> slept with Ouen --> arrested, 
>presumably for something done *before* she ran, but not positively.

Same here. I am willing to go a bit further and suggest the livid face of the dark-
haired woman in the coffin suggests death by Allowin's Neckace, the only torture device 
which is described in great detail for no apparent reason. 

For me, dark hair, middle age, armiger height, oval face, failed Pelerine, sentenced to
strangulation is enough of a connection for me to associate Catherine with Cyriaca. Thus
Catherine's crime was adultery (implying a powerful husband cuckolded). 

I can provide some further speculation in this vein if any are interested.

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