Philobiblon

… the wealth of information on the web, I mean.
There are now six new survey of London volumes at British History online, covering Westminster, Soho and Mayfair.

Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived — this is a mantra that few English school students could have avoided learning at some point. They might have even enjoyed finding out about Henry VIII and the frisson of sex and danger that surrounded him; so different to the monarch they know, in her sensible shoes and frumpy hats.

But it can be a bit hard keeping those Cs and Ks straight, so the writers of Divorced Beheaded Died, which premiered last night at the Jermyn Street Theatre, have kept it simple, only putting the first three on stage. Catherine of Aragon (Melanie Dagg), Anne Boleyn (Stephanie Fastre) and Jane Seymour (Frederica Dunstan) are in some sort of heavenly waiting room; you might call it Limbo, but we never get to that level of theological sophistication.

They are the caricatures you remember from high school history: Catherine’s the solemn, humorless one with a strong foreign (if rather indeterminate) accent; Anne’s all sex and temper; Jane’s all simper and stupidity. They think it is 1536, but suddenly Mary Boleyn — Anne’s sister — joins them in this curious room, and they learn it is 1543.

There’s news to catch up on. So for an hour there’s a potted history lesson, with multiple flashbacks to the earlier years of Henry’s reign. It is more or less a comedy, if of the rather obvious kind, with many of the jokes coming from the use of contemporary slang and putdowns by women in Tudor dress. In such a production “What century are you living in?” is a dead cert for a laugh, but not exactly an original one. READ MORE

Had cause yesterday visit the shiny new University College London, completed less than a year ago, which I look out at from my window every morning,(and have a nice little haematoma in my arm to to prove it). It left me reflecting anew on how really, really poor most architects are, particularly at getting the details right for human and environmental issues. (The weird sickly green colour of the outside of the building is another subject altogether.)

Sure it has a lovely airy atrium – that’s well enough (although the fancy main electronic door was out of order, in a rather permanent-looking way – so you had to push open the heavy side doors. I can’t imagine how little old ladies on sticks manage that, since they are seriously heavy.)

Most of the main out-patient facilities are on the first and second floor, sensibly enough, but when I approached reception I was directed to “lift to the left”. So, wholly unnecessarily, I took one of the large bank of lifts up one floor, with a flood of other people.

As you’d expect in a hospital a good percentage of these were frail aged, in wheelchairs, on crutches etc – people who needed the lift. But a majority of them were like me – people who had no need for lift, whose health would have benefited from the stairs.

Out of curiosity on the way out I went looking for them. It was a serpentine path, through several sets of doors, having to dodge trolleys outside the lifts dedicated to them. And the stairs are already dingy and uninviting. They might as well have a sign on them “Don’t Use Me!” There were no more than half a dozen people on them, all staff.

This is what you call designing to damage the environment and public health. Put the lift beside the stairs – stairs first in most people’s path – and you help both. It isn’t rocket science. (And in buildings that aren’t hospitals, hide the lifts and make the stairs highly prominent.)

You’ll often find posts about environmental issues, and even more frequently about feminism, here; nice to be able to combine the two:

Juliet Davenport’s Good Energy churns out wind, solar and small-scale hydroelectric energy. Lizzie Vann’s Organix Brands produces organic baby meals. Su Hardy’s Mooncup provides reusable sanitary protection to protect forests from being cut for paper pulp. Safia Minney’s People Tree sells glamorous women’s fashion–from office suits to party dresses–that aren’t made by exploited garment workers.
One of them will win the first Women in Ethical Business award, a new annual prize for a female CEO to be announced in London on March 16.

From De ratione studii (1511), written by Erasmus and John Colet, setting out plans for the studies at St Paul’s School: a teacher should not be “content with the standard ten or twelve authors, but would require a veritable universe of learning”.

It seems to me that sums up the real arrival of the Renaissance, or if you prefer humanist learning, in England.

And it ties rather neatly with a recent IHR seminar that I hadn’t got around to writing up: “Humanism, reading and political writing”, presented by Daniel Wakelin. It was in the late medieval seminar, so the Latin went straight over my head, and it was a bit earlier than I’m now really looking at, 15th-century rather than 16th, but it was interesting, the main argument being (as I understood it) that while humanism has been accused of being an “apology for princes”, it was merely a technique and approach that could be used for a variety of political purposes.

(Quote from The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600 A. Kinney, ed. p. 7. Pace earlier discussions, from what I’ve read thus far this is an unusually lucid and sensible volume; technical terms are used and explained, but not thrown at the reader as though this were a paintball contest – a refreshing change from some of the other “English studies” stuff I’ve been reading recently.

Interesting piece in The Times today about Margaret, second Duchess of Portland, an Enlightenment giant:

The duchess, with her inquiring mind, combining a passion for science with a love of the arts and, operating within a network of the most creative, forward-thinking figures of the age, was “the embodiment of the Enlightenment”, according to Derek Adlam, the curator of the remaining Portland collection. Her original collection “if it had survived would have had the potential to be one of the great museum collections that would have grown into a national institution, and she would have been famous. It would be the Portland Museum, which would have been equal to the British Museum.”
Before her death, however, she issued instructions that because of the expense of her elder son’s political career, her other son’s debts and her children’s general lack of enthusiasm for maintaining the collection, it should be sold off. At the London auction there were more than 4,000 lots. Lisa Gee, the director of the gallery, wonders what might have happened if the duchess had been a man. “She had no ego about this thing that she had done,” she says. “You could argue that a more masculine personality might have insisted the collection remain intact as a monument to himself. But she wanted to do right by her kids.”

You won’t, however, have found the story on The Times’s webpage. There doesn’t appear to be any arts pointer at all on the front webpage. Under “women”, however, there’s: “Fashion – from trends to catwalk collections; Sarah Jessica Parker – sex and the pity; Hollywood idols – the real deals”. That’s just in case anyone thought this was THE Times.