… and even the Jacobeans were at least pretending to be shocked, when Anne of Denmark, the Queen of James I, appeared as Pallas (Wisdom and Defence) in the first masque she arranged, Vision of Twelve Goddess, played at Hampton Court on January 8, 1604.
As was appropriate for a warrior, she was in a short skirt. That frequently prissy bachelor Dudley Carleton complained:

“Her clothes were not so much below the knee but that we might see a woman had both feet and legs, which I never knew before.”

He could have worked for the Daily Mail!

From: Writing Women in Jacobean England, B.K. Lewalski, Harvard Uni Press, 1993, p. 30.

Today started with the mail: another rejection for my book proposal. Shortly afterwards some bastard stole the front wheel of my bicycle, forcing a long, wearying and eventually expensive trudge to the bike shop.

I did get an hour in the British Library, without results of note, so today I’m cribbing my quote from a regular email that I’d recommend,  Today in Literature, which has a free version and a $20 a year one:    http://www.todayinliterature.com/

“The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.”Don Marquis, who was born on this day in 1878. He also said: “I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it’s a paragraph in my column.”

Personally, I tend to go the other way … might be a message in there somewhere!

… but he did have some sense.

At  a mini-exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery on 17th-century science, I met Theodore de Mayerne (1573-1655), the Hugenot physician who emigrated to England after initially visiting to treat Anne of Denmark in 1606.

He wrote in his diary that the King “asserts the art of medicine to be supported by mere conjecture, and useless because uncertain”. 

 
To prove that the way people think has not changed so much as we might think …

John Woolman, an American abolitionist, arrived in London in June 1772 wearing a white hat, undyed clothes and shoes of undyed leather. He was rejected by those who might have been expected to welcome him (at least on most accounts), although the London Quakers were later ashamed of their action.

He did not believe in dyeing clothing because of the pollution and damage to the health of workers that the process caused: “Dirtiness under foot and the scent arising from that filth … more or less infects the air of all thickly settled towns.”

From: M. Pointon, “Quakerism and Visual Culture 1650-1800” in Art History, Vol 20, No 3, Sept 1997, p. 415. 

More wisdom from Richard de Bury …

“The educated man seeks such degree of certainty as he perceives the subject-matter will bear”.