Philobiblon

I was working yesterday from Halkett and Laing, A Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonomous Publications in the English Language, Third ed, Longman, 1980, in search of a 16th-century author I know as S.P. (And thanks to my commenter Clanger: I reckon I might know who he is, although more work is needed.)

But I was taken by the story of how this foundational book came into being. (In the preface by John Horden.)

The foundation of the work was done by Samuel Halkett, Keeper of the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, Edinburgh, then continued (I’m simplifying) after his death by John Laing. A prospectus had been issued by a publisher and subscribers sought in 1871, but a statement by Miss Catherine Laing, John’s daughter explained why the first volume (of four) was not issued until 1882 and the last in 1888:

“At the time of my father’s death, eight years ago, there came into my hands an enormous mass of materials, comprising, in addition to his own collections, those of Mr Halkett and Mr HB Wheatley. No attempt had been made to arrange those materials … In the process of reducing the slips to some rough alphabetical order, I discovered that a large number consisted of merely a word or two of the title, with a reference to one or more authorities. Consequently, those titles had to be complete, references verified, and not infrequently, in the case of duplicate slips drawn from different sources, rival claims of authorship examined.”

Horden says, (p. xi): “From this and the rest of her remarks … it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that strict justice would have required the inclusion of Catherine Laing’s name on the title-page.”

Why does this not surprise me?

… and off Blogger – probably a move that is long overdue. I’d use WordPress, and probably the same host as I have My London Your London on – since it seems OK – BlueHost.com. But anyone have any tips about the process of making the move? All help gratefully received …

A British nurse whose work in sexual health has been nationally recognised has been personally targetted by anti-abortion campaigners.

Hours before Sue Bush, 52, was named Nurse of the Year for her work in sexual health and abortion services on Wednesday, her home address was sent out across the country by UK LifeLeague.
The militant group, which is under police surveillance for inciting public harassment, described the nurse as “a cold-hearted baby murderer” who should be put in prison. It also sent out a picture of an aborted foetus and called on its supporters to contact her at home.
Ms Bush, a gynaecology nurse, was honoured by Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, for her work to help women to cope with the stress of undergoing an abortion. A unit set up by the nurse at King’s College Hospital, in South London, has been praised for reducing the systemic problems encountered when trying to have a pregnancy terminated.

Except of course it would be descending to their level, it would be very tempting to research the people behind this, then target them the same way …

And of course America likes to say nasty things about the human rights records of Iran and Zimbabwe, but amazing how often it lines up with them in international arenas – one might call it the “axis of fundamentalists”.

At the end of January, these homophobic nations voted to keep the two groups from participating in the Economic And Social Council (ECOSOC), the only body at the United Nations that allows nongovernmental organizations to distribute materials and observe its meetings. This privilege is known as “consultative status” and, of the 2,700 groups that enjoy it, not one of them is an organization working exclusively for queer human rights.
Evidently, the groups’ attempt to join the conversation wasn’t even worth discussing. Rather than letting the groups present their case to the council, their applications were rejected out of hand and without review, a move the Associated Press called “almost unprecedented.”

Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi have pretty much laid to rest that old shibboleth that “women aren’t tough enough to become national leaders”, but they have a compatriot, far earlier in time, less known, but operating in what was undoubtedly a n exponentially more difficult and dangerous environment. Her name was Ranavalona, and her title Queen of Madagascar. She reigned from 1828 to 1861, dying peacefully in her bed of old age, having kept her country independent despite the best efforts of the French and the English.

No, I hadn’t heard of her either, but the story of her rise to power, and her maintenance of it for 33 years, is quite a tale. For she was not some accidental queen, falling into power by birth or marriage. She was not even born royal, but was the adopted daughter of the dynasty-founding king Andrianampoinimerinandriantsimitoviaminandriampanjaka. (No, I didn’t have my elbow on the keyboard; that was his name, meaning “the beloved prince of Imerina who surpasses the reigning prince”.)

That adoption came in recognition of the services her father had rendered to the monarch, and she became the wife of his son, Radama. (For the Ancient Egyptian custom of brother-sister marriage was followed by the ruling Merina dynasty.) But they seem not to have got on — the fact that he executed several of her close relatives when he came to the throne might have had something to do with that — and she never bore him a child.

When King Radama died, her position was potentially deadly. The rightful heir to the throne, by long tradition, was the eldest son of his eldest sister, Prince Rakatobe, and he was no friend of Ranavalona. If she were to bear a male child, by any father, even after the death of the king, he would theoretically be a legitimate claimant to the throne. There was little doubt that Rakatobe, given the throne, would ensure, very finally, that could not happen.

But Ranavalona had already built up a network of supporters. The old king, her husband, had been a great fan of “modernity”, and had been content to allow in, with the Westerners’ technology, their religion, Christianity. Perhaps because of personal preference, perhaps because she was a natural opposition figure, the priests and supporters of the old religion, the ombiasy, had formed up around her. Rapidly, beginning with just two loyal officers, Ranavalona organised a palace coup and with the backing of the priests and judges in the capital – with a little bloodshed along the way – she was proclaimed Queen of Madagascar on August 1, 1828. She then killed all potential rival claimants, except a couple who were quick enough to flee into exile. (Normal procedure in Madagascar of the time.)

I read all of this in the first popular work on the queen, by Keith Laidler. It is a great tale, but a terribly disappointing book. The title gives it away really: Female Caligula: Ranavalona – The Mad Queen of Madagascar. But before I started reading, I maintained faint hopes that maybe this was chosen by a sales-chasing publisher, and behind the pulp fiction title I would find solid research and a fair telling of the tale. I didn’t.

Laidler swallows every fantastical tale recorded by scorned missionaries, fearful envoys, the queen’s political opponents and European observers horrified by “native barbarism”. First, he has her sleeping with every important male in her regime. One of the officers who started the coup, of course, then her two chief ministers, then a truly fascinating character, Jean Laborde, a Frenchman, son of a blacksmith, who made a small fortune by trade in Bombay, then lost it all in a mad bid for shipwrecked gold on the shores of Madagascar that left him washed up, again with nothing, in the queen’s realm. Laborde was to oversee in Madagascar (to his own great enrichment) a whole manufacturing and armaments industry that would make the country self-sufficient in weapons and other military essentials for decades. Of course, as male historians so often concluded, these men didn’t serve a female monarch from fear, or ambition, or greed – it must have been sex.

Later in the reign, Ranavalona probably did become more bloodthirsty, and more anti-Christian, first banning the missionaries, then starting to persecute their followers. But really, how could Laidler fall for that old “babies on bayonets” story about a pregnant woman being burnt alive, the stress bring on labour, then the baby being thrown back into the flames? Surely he must know that Christian story has been around, and repeated endlessly about different victims, since the early Roman persecutions?

Ranavalona certainly was no saint; she lived in a violent, bloodthirsty culture, and I’m not making any grand claims on that score – she was part of her time. Perhaps, as Ladiler reports, she did go a bit crackers in the end — the thickening arteries/too long-in-power “Mugabe effect” — but look at this overall. She got herself into power, she kept her nation militarily and cultural independent for three decades, against the powerful would-be Western colonisers. That’s success in anybody’s political terms, and that a woman of roughly age 40 when she came to the throne should have achieved all of that by sleeping with the right blokes – well it is laughable.

You might still want to read this book – it is the only way to get to know about a great woman of history. (And it also includes an introduction to a wonderful 19th-century Austrian woman traveller, Ida Pfeiffer.) Just do so with a highlighter read to identify the particularly hilariously bad bits of research and interpretation.

Links: An account of one American student’s search for Ranavalona and there was a resultant research article. (I won’t point to Wikipedia, because her entry is (now) heavily biased against her.)

The experts agree that Shakespeare wrote As You Like It in 1599, about the same time as The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night, all of which have challenging, central parts for women, roles that would of course have been played by a boy actor. It seems likely a particularly talented child inspired these parts and even today, it is the performance of these that largely determines the success or failure of a production.

No need to worry – in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of As You Like It, which has just opened at the revamped Novello Theatre in London (the old Strand), Lia Williams is entirely up to the challenge of Rosalind. In long-limbed awkward youthfulness she’s believable enough to spend much of the play in boy’s disguise without being ridiculous, yet her emotions are always close enough to the surface that this is far from mere masquerade.

Yet she’s matched and balanced by Amanda Harris’s expressive Celia — played for laughs rather than deep feeling, but they are great laughs — and Barnaby Kay’s suitably leading man-sexy Orlando. I saw today’s matinee production, and the teenage girls in the audience definitely approved of the latter.

But you didn’t need to be seduced by youthful appeal to enjoy this show. To the purse-lipped elderly woman in front of me who complained I was laughing too loud (and she later accused the woman in front of her of wearing earrings that were “too sparkly”) – yes, this is a comedy. You are meant to laugh, and it is something you can be sure to do in this production.READ MORE

To the Historical Association dining club last night, and an interesting and appropriately provocative talk from Alice Hogge, author of God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot. (No risk of post-prandial somnolence here.)

Her “secret agents” are the Catholics who tried to maintain the faith in England after the Reformation, through the reigns of Elizabeth and James, up to the Plot. And the author was, at least for the purposes of the evening discussion, definitely on their side.

Her thesis is that England (at least outside the South-East) was overwhelmingly and fervently Catholic at the start of Elizabeth’s reign, and that it was forced into compliance. (Not, I might say, a view I share – but this is one of those historiographical debates that is just going to run and run.)

She suggested that Elizabeth was successful in maintaining the Church of England through three mechanisms:

England was at war with the continental powers, and so was inclined to “pull together” on that basis

After two decades of internal strife there wasn’t much appetite for more trouble

Her calculated use of ambiguity – no one quite knew what she or her church stood for.

That at least worked until the outbreak of the Northern Rebellion of 1569. Then came the Jesuits, who the author maintains are really ordinary Englishmen from fairly ordinary backgrounds, much the same sort of class who had earlier become martyrs under “Bloody” Mary. These were, she argues, the “native” church, while Protestantism was a “Germano-Swiss construct” imported into England.

That’s what you call revisionist history. Not perhaps, as was said last night, one to be tried in Lewes on Bonfire Night. But a fascinating talk, and it is always good to look at history from the “other” side.