Books History

From Ritual to God in the Ancient Near East: Tracing the Origins of Religion

p. 4 “It is from physics, and especially quantum theory, that the need to mobilize all possible means for understanding how things and individuals are entangled has emerged. In so doing, the concept of ‘intra-action’ introduced by Karen Barad, is definitely a more dynamic way of defining forms of relationality (and causality) in the process of creating the phenomena of materialization… three main lines of thought that have considered relationaity as pivotal for supporting the reconstruction of ancient phenomena based on archaeological data …the focus on rationality became an ‘ontological turn’ that theorizes on ‘what it means to be, and how we come to be, human in relation to other things, organisms, materials, substances and phenomena.”,,,

Social Network Analysis (SNA) social networks in which the modes are individuals, and the links represent their forms of relationship

Action-Network Theory (ANT) analytical syummetries between human and nonhuman actants

Entanglement: forms of relationship (dependence) existing between humans and things (and vice a versa) Engtanlement – HT +TT+TH+HH

p. 5 It is through a relational approach that the Cartesian dichotomy between the mental and the material can be overcome, because religious beliefs are a by-product of the relationship between ideal and practical domains of human cognition and are physically engraved on the material culture.. we have to ensilage a theoretical framework that is based on forms of nonverbal communication systems in which all involved elements can serve as nodes, through the use of connecting ties; the nodes form a network that establishes the meaning of the maerial culture concerned with religious practices. The elements involved in the materialisation of the network are diverse and combine a patchwork of sensory experiences (ie viaul, tactual, sound, smell, taste) that are interconnected by complex forms of ritual [practices (ie ritualzation) shared by the participants. For the involved cues to be both functional and meaningful, the context, the participants prior knowledge and the social practice involving human and nonhuman elements, appear as central for a coherent and powerful communication of the meaning of materiality… it is important to emphasize that ritual acts must be interprested as part of a broader semantic framework within which the significance of the action is dependent upon the place in which the ritual act is enacted and through its relationship with the context in which the action is performed.”

p. 6 This, the ideological power of ritual acts is produced by the creation of networks of elements (eg votive objects, icons, ceremonial architecture, sacred food and animals) that gain their meaning only when they are part of a performance context and through their entanglement with human beings.

Arts Books Environmental politics History

Notes from The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe

p. 28 Rufinus’s translations of Origen’s works (from Green to Latin) “also changing the voice of Origen to the voice of Rufinus-as-Origen and at the same time to the voice of Origen-as-Rufinus, in order to transform their readers. In the preface, Rufinus writes ‘The interpretation of the 36th, 27th and 28th Psalm contains everything that is the moral life. They provide us with teachings for the correction of our lives, showing us both the path to conversion and repentance and the path to cleansing and perfection… The book, Rufinus promises his friends, this bundle of plant bodies platted and painted by human hands, can help you change… In manifold ways, the words and languages and hands and bodies touch and change each other.”

p. 29 “The force that Origen, in Rufinus’s Latin, calls ‘the power of words” illuminates and sanctifies the speaker’s soul. This is a bodily change, not just persuasion. In his late treatise Against Celsus, Origen says of majical spells that ‘it is not the significance of the things which the word describe that has a certain power to do this or that, but it is the qualities and characteristics of the sounds.”

p. 36 “Papyrus can wait a long time in the dark. Pliny writes that ‘Cassus Hemina, a historian of many years ago states, in his Annals IV, that Gnaeus Terentius, a clerk, when digging his land on the Janiculum, unearthed a chest that held the body of Numa, king of Rome, and some books of his. This happened 535 years after Numa’s reign. Hemina further writes that the books were made of paper (papyrus) which is all the more remarkable because they remained intact. The books, in this story, are later destroyed, some deliberately and some by accident. Pliny’s story is about how old papyrus can be, but it ius also a story about trust, about the mutual confidence of plants and humans resting together in bodies, and about remembering… papyrus is the caretaker of the human body and it becomes the body; undone and woven back together in plant form. The plant cares for the human that touched it, although its care is inhumane. It cares for the human in this way because it is inhumane, for no human could provide the same long afterlife for another.”

p. 51 Unlike plants and humans, stones and earthy matter exist at the obscure limits of aliveness. Sometimes they are alive and sometimes they are records of past aliveness or signs of aliveness in the future. Sometimes they exist on the barest possibility of aliveness. They are a logical problem. In his translation of Origen’s On First Principles, Rufinus, in Origen’s voice, simultaneously denies that stones will be reunited with God at the end of the world, and concedes that one might think that scripture implies they could be… In Origen’s Homily 4 on Ezekiel, Origen, this time in the words of Jerome, admits: 2If I look over the whole broad ‘forest’ of Scripture, I am constrained to suppose that this visible earth is a living creature…. The whole creation groans and suffers pangs.” ] Rom 8:22] If the whole creation groans and suffers pangs, but the earth and heaven and aether are a part of the creation … then who knows whether the earth also is subject to some sort of sin according to its own nature, and held liable?”

p. 72 “The limestone, brick and marble of Aquileia also changed over the course of the 5th century. The city fell to Attila the Hun in 452, and afterwards the forum, the walls and other public spaces were reconfigured or abandoned… But humans are not the only rebuilders of limestone: wind, weather, salt deposits, changes in water flow, or seismic action are equally involved in the movement and reshaping of stone matter. The tendencies and reactions of stone to its chemical or atmospheric surroundings are some of what Origen might call the characteristics of the stone’s parts.”

“Plotinus believed that the earth, in its nonhuman, seeing, sensing form, was good. Origen believed that the earth, graning in labour pains, desired to become good… Theophrastus says that the most wonderful of all are the stones that give birth to young.”

p. 76 “Rufinus was an intellectual, but he was also a traveller. In the world in which he lived, thinking and moving were the same. Thinking and knowing and hoping and trusting and believing happened in inbetween space…. Learning was often pictured as a path or journey, and the stories of migrations – the wanderings of Odysseus, the wanderings of Abraham or Moses – were stories of intellectual motion. Knowledge was not an accumulation of facts but a navigation, a directional skill that one could practice well or badly… In a universe made up of divine thinking, to go out from the land of Egypt, to cross the sea, to move in our tiny human way through the landscape, is to exist inside knowledge. To find, and be found by, the nonhuman things that lie between  us and the horizon is to live inside the mind and body of the world.”

p. 80 Vitruvius, from whom we learn much of what we know about Roman architectural theory, insists that the Roman builder of houses ‘should have learned the art of medicine, because of the influences of the different zones of the world… and of different types of air and location – some of them healthy and others conducive to illness – and because of the importance of different waters. Without all these considerations, no place to live can be healthy. In siting a farm, according to the agricultural writer Palladius, “a wholesome air is indicated by a location well away from valley bottoms and night mists, and by appraisal of the inhabitants’ physique. The forms our bodies take are manifestations of the air and water around us; we are products of their tendencies and constraints.”

p. 134 “The movement and touch of hands is ephemeral, but it is also a way of creating knowledge that is different from the knowledge that we find elsewhere. Knowledge from hands is from and with a body, so it is hard to put into words, though words too can be part of a hand’s work… Zeno of Citium, we are told, said that knowing something is like grasping it firmly in your hands.”

p. 135 “This physical conversation between maker and matter is a way of knowing, as Tim Ingold puts it, from the inside; it is a responsive practice of inquiry…” the conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the material with which we work. Knowlewdge construction, when it is literal construction, is both experiential and multidirectional, in the sense that knowledge is neither simply imposed on a material object of knowing nor purely extracted from it. The nonhuman interlocutor and its human partner are together greating and inhabiting a period of time in which knowledge occurs as the coming together of their bodily actions and tendencies. In this way, making is a process of creating events and times that are full of knowledge… is a turn away from a model of knowledge that locates knowing exclusively or primarily in the mind, and that defaults to the propositional as the primary form of knowledge.”

p. 150 “Intimacy is not an individual experience but happens between beings. Theorists of intimacy focus primarily on the intimate relationships between beings who are alive at the same time, at the same time scale. What does it mean to have or to make, an intimate relationship with the past? In such a relationship, to the degree that we can reach out and touch the past, that is, to a very small degree, the strangeness and decentering is mutual. We are destabilized when we touch the past, but the past is also destabilized by us and by our touch.

Books Early modern history History Science

Notes from Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat by Joe Shute

p. 41 “(Between 2.9 million and 0.9 million years ago), the brown rat diverged from from the other Eurasian Ratus species (of which there are more than 60 distinct rodents in the genus today). Nowadays the two most common species around the world are the brown rat Rattus norvegicus (the one you will see scuttling around the streets at night), and the black rat (Rattus rattus, once common in Britain but now driven to the edge of localised expinction and displaced by their larger and more aggressive cousins, who are better suited to colder northern European climates).

At some undetermined point in their history, both species firmly yoked themsleves to human activity and spread across the world from their native homes of the Indian subcontinent, in the case of the black rat, and China, in the case of the brown.

Over millennia rats have followed the rise and fall of empires … In 2022, the first acnient genetic study of the black rat …. concluded that the black rat colonised Europe at least twive. The rats arrived with the Romans and perhaps even disappeared with the collapse of their empire… only to return when long-range international trade resumed during the medieval period. ,,, various studies in Germany … have discovered the remains of what are thought to be contemporary brown rats in former medieval settlements, including the village of Klein Freden, near Salzglitter, which was occupied between the 9th and 13th centuries”. (But hard to date rats, because they borrow down through archaeological layers!!)

p. 45 “In their native far-east, rats are viewed with far more appreciation than the lands they have invade. The rat is the first sign of the Chinese Zodiac, indicating charm, intelligence and gregariousness. In Japan, rats appeared widely in historical artworks as symbols of familial prosperity and social scuccess. In one surviving early 17th-century Japanese manual of mathematics, children were even taught geometry using symbols of rats. And in India, the elephant god Ganesha travels the world on a rat to help remove any obstacle in his path.”

p. 46 “Rats … are nature’s anarchists, subverting and challenggin our own carefully constructed hierarchies”…. “Banksy… who during the first lockdown in 2020 sneaked onto a Circle Line tube train to spray images of rats sneezing and parachuting face masks, celebrates the urban rat because ‘they exist without permission’.”

p. 49 Gunther Grass The Rat, … “narrator receiving a caged female rat for Christmas, a gift which sparks a long and rambling history of the world from a rat’s perspective. The ‘She-rat’,,, talks to him in his dreams and outlines a dystopian future in which humans have destroyed themselves with nuclear weapons and the rats are in charge. Around the time Grass was writing… it was known that rats living on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean had survived nuclear tests conducted there… in 1998, a team of Russian researchers… discovered that rats did have significantly higher survival rates than any other species. This haridness is in part fown to rats’ natural – and remarkable – tolerance to hypoxia”.

p. 58 “When it rains in Delhi and their burrows are flooded… there is a kind of rat amnesty declared for the rodents, scurrying to find new homes. People will not kill them when they are clearly desperate and in need.”

“Maan Barua, a lecturer in human geography at Cambridge University who focuses on urban ecologies and novel ways of understanding the flow of the city… his work on how non-human life utilises infrastructure to its own ends….. Barua arges that “infrastructures have became a vital thread in understanding the intensity and scale of other-than-human movement”.

p. 63 “Researchers found the dry rats would regularly aid those trapped in the water by opening the door. However, when they shared the box with no water in, they were far less likely to operate the button to lift the divide. This, the team of scientists concluded, demonstrated the rats were not merely rescuing each other out of companionship but through a genuine sense of empathy with those who were struggling. The researchers introduced one final curveball into the experiment, placing the temptation of chocolate cereal for the dry rat on the platform, with the option that it could either eat that,, or rescue the rat in the pool. The rodents chose to help their companions above doing for the chocolate between 50 and 80 epr cent of the time…. studying brain networks at University of California Berkeley, “using a range of diagnostic tools to monitor the neural pathways in rats as they responded to trapped companions, they concluded that they react in much the same way as people, registering an emotional reaction to any rat in distress, but being far more likely to leap into action when it is a companion they recognise.”

p. 66 “Follwing an 80% reduction in rodents in a location, the population will subsequently increase between 3 and 20% per week as new rats fill the vacuum. Within as little as four weeks following any control measures, rat populations can rebound to more or less what they were before.”p. 67 “Canadian public health researcher Chelse Himsworth recently argued that rat-related issue should be treated as a result of policy failure. Rather than wasting time attempting to eradicate rats, city leaders should focus attention on the deprived inner-city neighbourhoods that are disproportionately impacted. Better waste collection, tougher rules on littering, greater community cohesion and reducing antisocial behaviour can all help reduce rat activity without the need to bait a single trap.”

“Researchers proposed Amsterdam’s rodents be considered as denizens of the city rather than invaders. Their burrowing, gnawing, rat runs and encounters with humans can all be understood as “acts of denizenship”… staking their own claims on the built environment.”

“If left alone, and with access to food, urban rat populations will remain entrenched in the same locations for many generations, if not centuries. A recent archaeological study of the ruins of Sheffield Castle (demolished during the English Civil War in 1646 as a royalist stronghold) found … the remains of several black rats. These wer ein all likelihood residents of the slaughterhouses and market stalls that for 700 years filled the streets surrounding the castle. In 1296 Edward I granted a charter to the Lord of the Manor of Sheffield Thomas de Furnival, permitting a weekly Tuesday market and a three-day fair once a year. From then until the closure of Sheffield’s cattle market in 2013, the location was the centre of urban food trade – and a rat bazaar.

p. 69 “Outside of trading hours, the [Victorian] streets around the area were some of the city’s most prominent nightspots, roading with drunks, music halls, prize fights and betting rings. Several nearby pubs housed their own rat pits in which a dog was released and people would place bets on how many rodents it could kill. One larg rat pit at the Blue Bell Inn on Silver Street was operated by a local character called Fagey Joe, who boasted that his pitbull, Bullet, once killed 200 rats in 13 minutes. The landlord of another pub, the Clown and Monkey on Paradise Square, ended up in court accused by his neighbour of deliberately encouraging rats to breed in his basement to ensure a steady supply, leading to the nearby cellars being overrun. Sometimes the bets would take place in the open air in the marketplace itself, with bystanders cheering on the dogs as they mauled whichever rats they could hunt between the stalls.”

p. 85 “The ability of rats to both gnaw with their front teeth and chew with the back molars has given them the upper hands against other rodent species. While guinea pigs have evolved to chew and squirrels evolved to gnaw, the study found the rat can do both more effectively than the so-called ‘specialist’ species… shockingly powerful bit … more powerful (relative to bodyweight) than a hyena, grizzly bear, buill shark or hippopatamus, and foughtly 20 times the bite of a human… front incisors are open-rooted, meaning they never stop growing. Without continuously biying them down, these teeth will curl up like a ram’s horn inside a rat’s skull and ultimately cause it to die.”

p. 111 – mine-detecting rats

p. 141 Talking to rat catcher – thinks glue traps should be totally banned. “He is also highly critical of the use of aluminium phosphide…. ‘What are we doing stull using that?” he asks… “Are we in the dark ages?”

p. 152 “formation of the Vermin Repression Society in 1919. Based at 44 Bedford Row in London, the society represented a host of wealthy landowners and had access to the highest corridors of power, where they lobbied the government. Another member. Lord Lambourne, called in 1920 for a “crusade against rats to be carried out along national lines”… the government passed the Rat and Mice (Destruction) Act on 23 December 1919. The act placed a legal obligation on every private indivdual to destroy rodents and deal with any infestation on land or property they owned, or face a fine of £5. The act also called for the enforcement to be carried out by every local authority in the country. This marked a major escalation in rodent control…. The Vermin Repression Society discussed deploying the Boy Scouts nationwide and even considered a proposal emnating from a ‘professor of hygiene’ in Germany to deliberately circulate a cirus among rat populations, which he assured was not harmful to people. Even given the febrile atmosphere… this was ultimately deemed a step too far.”

o, 168 post-war, DDT etc “During this new chemical age, specialist poisons were concocted to dounter the rise of rodents, which, unlike other less adaptable animals, could rapidly flourish acorss the monoculutres created by industrial farming. Indeed, with no other predators around to speak of, they could thrive… anticoagulant warfarin … “A recent study conducted by the Campaign for Responsible Rodenticide Use UK claimed genes demonstrating resistance to anticoagulent rodenticide had been detected in 79 per cent of rats…. other natural predators higher up the food chain started increasingly falling victim, either through consuming the bait tjemselves or by eating stricken rats. … a second generation of even more powerful anticoagulent rodenticides soon came to market, around 100 to 1,000 times more toxic than warfarin. Five of these poisoned are currently authorised for use in Britain: disenacoum, bromadioline, brodifacoum, floucoumafen and difethialone.”

p. 169 “the likes of the Banr Owl Trust argue that rodenticides are almost certainly a significant cause of barn owl decline and remain an issue of serious concern for a host of other species”… including hedghogs, even though they don’t eat rats.

p. 214 “A 2013 study demonstrated that rodents can inherit fear from their forebears. … researchers taught male mice to associate the smell of cherry blossoms with mild shocks to their feet. Their pups were then raised with no exposure to the smell, but became immediately fearful if it was introduced… they were born with both enhanced olfactory sense to detect cherry blossom and be afraid of it. The study found that these inherited painful memories were passed on by the pups to the following generation as well.”

Books History Women's history

Notes from Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words

p. 56 Thomas Raynalde 1545 Womans Booke – had no truck with outdate’how-to’ genre of recipes and do-it-yourself tips) advises that if you wanted to clear your garden of “lise [liced ideas about women’s bodies. In his section on the womb, he says it’s utterly wrong to think that periods are the purding or cleansing of some waste matter a female body can’t process. He challenged the logic found it Elyot’s dictionary definition, resisting the idea that periods are “evacuations” or “purgations” of waste matter, however natural. This is blood, says Raynalde, as “pure and holsum” as any other blood. How could it not be, he argues, because in pregnancy it nurtures that most precious of things, a human life. Menstrual blood replenishes itself every cycle like a “natural source, spryng, fountayne, or wel.”… ever fresh and ready in case a baby is conceived. … won’t even countenance the ‘dreames and playne dotage’, the fantasies and stupidity, of those who claim that period blood is dangerous… he means the widely circulating superstitions that menstruating women could render mirrors cloudy or spotted, or wither flowers or blight fruit in an orchard… One Tudor ‘book of secrets” (a popular ‘how-to’ genre of recipes and do-it-yourself tips) advises that if you wanted to clear your garden of “lise [lilce] and other small beastes” you could simply get a menstruating woman to walk around it and “all the vermine will fall doune deade”.

p. 248-9 “William Gouge’s 1622 conduct book, Of Domesticall Duties, is famous for its neatly nested and very quotable summary of patriarchal order: “A familie is a little Church, and a little common-wealth,” eacg governed by paternal authority which guides, protects and disciplines. Yet in his third edition, Gouge had to row back quite some distance. He said he needed to make a “just apology” to those he’d offended by the first two editions. He didn’t want them to write him off as “an hater of women”, he said…. He had set out the ‘utter-most’… of a husband’s supreme authority and a wide’s duty to obey. Some readers had interpreted these theoretical extremes as representing how things sgould work in everyday life and thought him completely unreasonable and impractical. In the preface to his third edition, Gouge thus tried to introduce some nuance… A husband, though he had total dominance in theory, ought in practice to make his wide ‘a joint governor of the family with himself’.

Books History Women's history

Notes from Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages

p. 18 The beginning of vernacular literacy is not necessarily the same as the beginning of a vernacular literary language. Can we be confident that what we consider the earliest written texts in Occitan or Croatian actually are those languages, or are they in a demotic register of what should still be considered Latin or Church Slavonic? That conundrum leads on to the problem familiar to social scientists as the tension between ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ categories: between the categories of the observers, on the one hand, and those of the people under observation on the other… can prompt us to consider other alliances and trajectories than the single-track one of nationally conceived literary history, which takes the existence of a language for granted.”

p. 19 printing “a transformation of the system of literature from one in which the basic unit is the material book to one in which literature is organised around the ideal concept of the authorial work. In a manuscript culture, where a new text of the ‘same’ work is created with each recopying, authors and scribes are co-producers of literature such that it is not obvious why the category of authorship should be restricted to the person who wrote it first.”

“Scandinavia,” Roberta Frank, pp. 12-22

p. 24 “Iceland was settled at some time in the late ninth century by colonists from Norway and the Viking diaspora of the Hebrides, Northern Isles and Ireland, some of whom had already been exposed to Christianity and letters. Throughout the medieval period, the island remained rural and thinly populated, with never more than 50,000 inhabitants. Iceland had no army, king, or town, and remained a more-or-less independent commonwealth until 1262-4. Yet by the end of the 12th century, members of its clerical aristocracy were studying abroad, reading the same textbooks, law collections, and grammars as the rest of Europe. … There were two episcopal sees (with cathedral schools) and perhaps nine or ten monasteries (Benedictine and Augustinian, along with educational centres run by chieftain families. Latin works were soon translated into the vernacular, replicating a European-style textual culture in Norse and granting the mother tongue the official status that Latin held abroad. Forms of literary analysis began to be applied to vernacular compositions. When around 1220 Snorri Sturlison in his Hattatl (‘list of verse forms’) distinguished between the exuberant fornskald (early poet), and the later, metrically regular hofudskald (‘chief (or main) poet), his sensitivity to historical change suggests exposure to the interpretive frameworks of contemporary Latin grammatical and rhetorical treatises. By 1250, a volcanic island on the far edge of the inhabited world had a spacious stall to itself within the larger European literary theatre.”

p. 25 “Codices, like people, have a tendency to burn, drown and wander off. The anonymous late 12th-century Historia Morwegiae, possibly the first Latin historical text written in Norway, survives in a 16th-century Scottish paper manuscript, discovered near Dundee and first published in 1850; a brief excerpt appears in two (late 14th– and early 15th-century) Swedish codices.”

p. 27 In 1263, the Norwegian king Hakon Hakonarson, on his way home from battle, took ill in Orkney. According to his saga, composed ca 1265 by Sturla Portarson, Hakon on his sick bed … asked to be read to from Latin books, but soon found them tiring; he then asked for books in the Norse language to be read to him night and day, first saints’ sagas; and when those ran out, tales of kings from Halfan swarti, and afterwards about all the Norwegian kings, one after another, ending with the saga of Sverrir, his grandfather, raised in the Faroes, a former priest and guerrilla fighter, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a former ruler. Near midnight, after the reading of Sverris saga had finished, Hakon died. His death may have been unexpected, but the presence of continuous prose texts in Latin and in Norse in a 13th-century cathedral library in Orkney was taken for granted by the writer.”

Irish and Welsh, Barry Lewis,

p. 52 “The task of building a cohort of Latinists forced teachers to consider the facts of the indigenous language, as issues arose such as how to map its case system onto the Latin one or how to convey categories, like the infinitive, which Lirish lacks. If interpretations of Latin text were one gateway, others were religious instructions (eg the Cambrai homily) and the concern of the church for its property rights under the native legal system(cf. the Armagh records… Irish was doubtless for a time a language of the margin. The Armagh pieces conclude with an awkward justification for writing in Irish ‘not because I could not have penned them in the Roman language, but … because of the great number of Irish names. This suggests that the domain of written Irish was not yet clear in the late seventh century, even though quite ambitious texts in the vernacular were already circulating.”

p. 62 2The beginnings of Welsh vernacular language may lie in praise poetry sustained by revised British kingships after the end of Roman rule. But ait it is not conceded that we have textual witnesses to such early material, then our investigation refocuses on a handful of poems from the 9th century onwards, all isolated and hard to contextualise. Either way, a continuous narrative is impossible – or perhaps we should say inadvisable – before ca 1100.”

English, Laura Ashe

p. 69 origins “The first of these, and precociously early, was ‘Englisc’, now known as ‘Old English’, the language brought to the island by Germanic invaders in the 5th century and used (alongside Latin) in writings of various kinds as early as the 7th century. The second, after the hiatus brought about by the Norman Conquest, occurred in the 12th-century re-emergence of what we now call ‘Early Middle English’, a non-standardised rendering of a fast-changing vernacular, dialectally highly variant, in constant textual contact with Latin and French. … in the French poetry of royal and aristocratic courts and patrons; that francophone literature was the majority of England’s literature – of English literature – for at least two centuries to come. But English was everyone’s first language, from within a generation or two of the Conquest, and all those trained to read and write in Latin and French in England also spent much of their daily lives in English. Inevitability, the majority vernacular would come to play a part in the literary scene, and would have done so even had it not possessed the astonishing literaty precedents set by Old English.”

p. 71 “In the two earliest extant manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical History, perhaps copied from the autograph, the lines of what we now know as ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ have been added to Bede’s text. So it is that ‘English literature’ as opposed to irretrievable oral poetry, begins, with a documented poem in English which is explicitly understood in context to be one example of a thiriving genre.”

p. 83 “Extensive religious prose works appeared in Early Middle English from the first decades of the 13th century. The Ancrene Wisse: a Guide for Ancorites, was written at the request of three ‘sisters’ (whether blood relatives or spiritual siblings) who lived in the extreme self-imposed ascetism of the anchorhold. The author gives them a prescription for not only the ‘outer rule’ of their daily life but the ‘inner rule’ of the pure heart, in a work of complex and entirely current theology which shows its immersion in contemporary Latin and French works (including the romance), while expressing itself in fluent, lively and memorably English prose.”

Spain, Marina S Browlee

p. 90 “The exclusionary model (that the Middle Ages are different) and the mentality that subtends it is at least as old as the Renaissance – which promoted itself as the new age of classical rebirth. The effect … had long-term distorting effects on medieval studies and their perception in the academy – a situation which is finally being rectified”

p. 91 Enrest Robert Curtius with his “infamous characterization of Spain’s ‘cultural belatedness’. “Curtius assumes a uniform ‘Spanish’ vernacular, but this is an unfounded assumption since Arabic entered the peninsula from 711 CE and Hebrew had existed there since Roman times. Iberia was a linguistic crucible that included Latin, Occitan, Catalan, Aragonese, Galician-Portuguese, Arabic and Hebrew – as well as Castilian.”

French, David F Hult

P.112 “French “earliest surviving written text” “That honour (and a literary one at that) goes to the Sequence of Saint Eulalia… of slight length (29 verses) it is also distinctive in its being apparently complete in its narrative of the saint’s martyrdom, ending with a brief prayer to God.”

Greek Panagotis A Agapitos

p. 259 “The hundred years covering the reign of the Komnenian dynasty (1081-1185) represents an important period in Byzantine textual production, with a quantitative rise in public oratory and poetry, the reappearance of fictional texts; the rise in the study of Ancient Greek literature and philosophy, with the production of very different forms of historiographical writings, and experimentation with new and complex performative genres. At a rough guess, about twio-thirds of this textual production is related to the imperial family or to the high officials of state and church.”

Afterword

p. 309 “The Igor Tales features the only personalised female lyric voice of early Rus literature, as Igor’s wife, Iaronslavna, ‘sings her lament on the battlements, addressing the wind, the river Dieper, and the sun”. The poem evokes a semi-sacralised, animistic landscale, alive to the touch and dense with ancient allusiveness; it also maps on to the territory of Kursk, site in 1943 of the greatest and bloodiest tank battle in the history of warfare.”

Books History Women's history

Notes from Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France


p. 8 The resistance to certain feminine nouns (a resistance that was only officially overcome in 2019 when the Academie francaise gave approval to the use of feminine terms for most metiers and functions) is to be placed in the linguistic context of the 17th-century – a period credited not only with being a transitional moment because of the standardisation and codification of the French language, but also with ushering in the masculinisation of French, evident from the shift towards the preferred use of the universal masculine pronoun and agreement. As Eliane Viennot and others remind us, grammar is never a neutral or objective phenomenon, and there were exclusionary strategies at play in its development… the term ‘autrice’. This is a term Marie de Gournay used liberally in her oeuvre, both as a scholar of Latin (it has its roots in the Latin feminine noun auctrix, meaning a female creator or originator)… and as a (proto-)feminist intellectual, trying to find a name, and thus a place, for herself.”

p. 10 author’s approach “resists the tug of collectivity that can sometimes shape scholarship on ‘women’s writing’, including the work of historians in the 1990s. Instead, I … wary of the category of ‘woman writer’, either because this appears, if left unpacked, to have essentialising connotations, and/or because it assumes a common orientation towards feminised genres or women’s causes… sees gender as one category alongside others, such as class, education and faith; and allows s to avoid essentialising notions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’.”

p. 14 “significant work by Jane Stevenson and Laurie Churchill has focused on women Latinist; and the important and chronologically wide-ranging Women Classical Scholars, which examines women’s classical reception from the Renaissance to the 20th century, defines a female classicist as a ‘philologist’, foregrounding linguistic knowledge. This would (and does) include Anne Dacier, but exclude Madeleine de Scudery. … early modern genres have been a site of implicit or explicit judgement according to their degree of learning, with traditional forms of reception (translation, imitation, commentary) in the hands of ‘savantes’, valued more highly than new genres that took the ancient world as their subjects (historical novels or romances, imagined lives, incidental verse, epistolary novels) and were products of a female-orientated salon culture, by so-called salonnieres.

p. 15 “Particularly important is the tension between the professionalisation of the writer, and the related necessity to earn a living by one’s pen, and what Viala calls “le tropisme nobilitaire”, that is the aristocratic vaunting of amateurism over money-making. Most of the authors in my corpus shared the need to navigate this tension because of financial difficulties… Scudery, as[piring to aristocracy, and dependent on favours and patronage, played down the professionalism of her literary activity and the labour of her learning (and thus her Latinity) even though she did also (and did need to) profit from it financially. Cournay, on the other hand, needed to prove her worth, though her knowledge of classical culture, in order to court her own patrons, whereas Villedieu, with her publisher, Claude Barbin, developed her own lucrative and influential conception of ancient historical fiction that was geared to public and commercial success.”
p. 16 “Underlying some of these different positions was the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, and its debates about ideologies of learning, classical reception, especially vulgarisation and adaptation and literary value. … Classical languages and culture, particularly Latin, were (still) the epitome of what constituted learning within the literary field in 17th-century France, and whereas men had the cultural privilege to deny the importance of Latinity and Greco-Roman culture (the Modernist position), the path to legitimacy for women was more complicated.”
p. 244 “We witness across this corpus some clear examples of solidarity between women intellectuals and writers. … whereby French literature is linked to a feminine troubadour history, the cours d’amour, and to a line of significant women from Lizan to Scudery, whose alter-ego Damophile is a figure of ridicule. Funning through the work analysed are anxieties about the social space of the salon (we see this in Gournay’s reprimands of contemporary readers, in Scudery’s Sapho, hounded by persistent hangers-on, in Antoinette Deshouliere’s representation of flatterers who are a nuisance), even as we also encounter a celebration of these spaces, whether fictional or historical, physical, or, in the case of Mare-Jeanne L’Hertier’ periodical, virtual. “

p. 245 “For the immediate successor of the figure of the “femme savante” we need to look to mid-18th century England at the ‘Bluestocking Circle ‘ of Elizabeth Montagu…p. 246 “also fed back into French culture in the late 18th and into the 19th century by way of its calque “Les Bas=Blues,”… connotes all that was pejorative about the 17th-century femme savante, particularly unwomanliness”… That connotation of manliness is evident in the well=known series of 40 plates “Les Bas-Blues” by Honore Daumier printed in August 1844 in Le Charivari magazine, in which women are ridiculed for neglecting their wifely or motherly duties while studying or are presented as haggard or unattractive in their pursuit of knowledge”.
p. 249 Next in line of negative or contested figures for the female intellectual might be the late 19th-century/early 20th century phenomenon of the ‘Girton Girl’… literally to women who studied at Girton College in Cambridge, the first college for women founded by Emily Davies in 1869, but the term came to stand more broadly for a certain type of female intellectual… could have positive or negative force, but its charged meaning derived essentially from a distrust of learned women.”