Philobiblon

Does anyone know of a book/article with a list of initials used by pamphlet writers in late Elizabethan/early Jacobean London? I’m looking for an S.P. in 1594, and it is hard to know where to start!

The story goes that tight-fitting T-shirts with the slogan “This is what a feminist looks like” are highly popular on US campuses. Great, I say.

Unfortunately some are complaining:

“I think these T-shirts feed into anti-feminist rhetoric that says that women who stand up for their rights are somehow unattractive, not sexy, humorless and not getting any,” [Pamela] Paul told Women’s eNews. “It may look like a proactive gesture, but what else should a feminist look like? Why shouldn’t a strong woman look good? It’s giving legitimacy to the criticism that is so ludicrous that it doesn’t merit acknowledgement. I think it’s kind of a sad way to represent power.”

Pluh-leese! Someone is supporting feminism, publicly saying: “I am a feminist”. There couldn’t be a better message. And the shape of the T-shirt they put that message on, be it XXXL, or super-tight cropped, does not matter in the slightest, in fact it helps to say “feminists come in different shapes, sizes and lifestyles”, as, of course, they do. And they should support each other in making whatever choices (wardrobe or more serious) they make.

The general view is that the residents of London are isolated, self-focused, uncaring individuals, not a community. Nonsense.

My lovely neighbour and dog-sitter, already working for a tiny hourly rate, insisted on giving me back £10 of what I paid her yesterday (which included an overnight stay), and has volunteered to have Champ for a small sum each week – “the gas money” she calls it.

I already had considerable faith in human nature, but this has further boosted it.

(Unfortunately, with Champ in terms of leaving him on his own, it is one step forward and one back. He is a little better about being in the room on his own, and I can get out the door for about 30 seconds before he starts whining, but I did a 30-minute test with a tape-recorder running this afternoon and he howled and whined loudly at regular intervals – 30s to a minute – throughout. He just is not happy on his own.)

In an interview with The Times, Malcolm Wicks, the Energy Minister, said: “There is crass irresponsibility in some of the larger monstrosities people drive around suburbia and in London. We have to move against this kind of thing.”

Nice words from the minister, and he is promising an increase in taxes to discourage this anti-social behaviour, but there’s nothing concrete there. A government that can dream up new repressive, police-state legislation at the drop of the prime minister’s hat seems to be taking an astonishingly long time over a simple change in charges.
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The Guardian’s Reader’s Editor, Ian Mayes, for whom I have enormous respect, today brings up the interesting issue of “corrections and clarifications” on news stories in an online archive.

The paper’s policy is that these should always be immediately visible on a story (at the top) and kept to a minimum. When you think about it, there is a powerful possible shadow of 1984 over the fact that our archives are increasingly electronic – far, far easier to airbrush inconvenient pieces out of history.

I’m sometimes accused of naivety, but I tend to think that human nature, given the chance, tends towards the humane, the caring and the sensible. And sometimes those voices gain power. It is thus lovely to read about the 18th-century West African Islamic scholar, Sheikh Uthman dan Fodio.

Female circumcision was another major social issue the Sheikh delved into. This practice was in the Sudan, Somalia and was going across to his country and he stopped people from doing it. He brought the hadith of the Prophet showing that only a little bit was allowed to be removed from the tip of the clitoris, but was by no means necessary as it wasn’t really part of Islam. His argument against it, once again went into graphic details of how if men allowed this to happen then a woman would not be able to achieve her climax in a physical relationship, which would then cause their relationship to deteriorate. To have a more fulfilling relationship, they should allow her to retain what Allah gave her. This obviously was a heavy argument for the Sheikh to be making, especially in the 18th century!

Miss Frances Williams Wynn is today reproducing two letters to a bereaved young widow in India by Bishop Reginald Heber, who seems to have been best known has a writer of hymns.

Heber seems to be a rather better theological controversist than consoler, however, since he spends most of his time in arcane points, particularly on the state of the soul after death and on the power of prayers for it (on which he is certainly unsound in CofE terms).

But perhaps the most fun is to be had from speculating about the cause of the young husband’s death – “the fatal accident … an instantaneous death without pain, and while engaged in innocent amusement”. Hunting maybe? The bishop would probably have considered that innocent amusement, even if we do not.