Pedro de Luna: The Pope from the Sea
Jan Read describes how, in 1394 a Spanish Cardinal became Antipope at Avignon, pledging to end the Schism in the Church.
The elegant Long Gallery of the University Library at St Andrews contains a number of curious historic relics, not least a clock belonging to James Gregory, the seventeenth century astronomer, and the bracket on which he mounted his telescope for the precise establishment of the meridian - now marked by an inlaid line in the floor.
When in 1707 the university porter hanged himself from the balustrade, the Senatus decreed that his remains should hang for perpetuity and ‘be for ever without a name’; and it was only in 1940 that his skeleton was removed from a case suspended above the staircase and given decent burial. Equally strange are a plaster cast of the skull of Pedro de Luna, most tempestuous of the anti-popes, and a single hair from his head mounted in a microscope slide.
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