I’ve got the office lurgy, feeling like hell (if the first person who got it didn’t come in but just kept it safely at home how much better the world would be!) so I might not be back for a day or so.

But I take back all the negative things I’ve said about bureaucracy, at least temporarily, since my application for British citizenship was approved in about a month, the mail this morning told me, when the website says it takes nine months!

Bark, bark. (That’s my burning throat, not a dog) – off to bed with The First Man in Rome …

A couple of weeks ago I discovered the 18th-century German playwright Friedrich Schiller. (Yes, very belatedly.)

Having loved the production of his Don Carlos now in London, I went on Saturday night to the other end of the theatre world to see his Maria Stuart at a fringe venue in Southwark, the Union Theatre.

The friend with whom I went wasn’t entirely convinced by the idea, and almost tried to persuade me to see The History Boys instead, but in the end, after some doubtful moments, she was glad she hadn’t.

The acting was surprisingly good, in places excellent, particularly by the actress in the lead role, and if Queen Elizabeth at first seemed a bit of an odd presentation, it grew on you.

The trains rattled overhead (the theatre is in the railway arches), they should to do something to stop the CD player on the stage manager’s computer whirring all the time, but this is the fringe. What really could be done is to rein in the director’s flights of fancy that has the players occasionally moving into arty slow motion dances between scenes, and quite why a telephone suddenly appears at the start of the second act, when the rest is more or less an original-setting production, is utterly beyond me.

But overall it is well worth ten quid if you can get to see it. (The curious “leave a message on the tape if you want tickets” method of booking seems to work.)

And if Maria Stuart appears anyway in the world near you go to see it; this is a spectacularly fine piece of drama.

P.S. I can also recommend the nearby Baltic “vodka shot” bar – very good fun (and the music is at a volume that makes conversation possible!) The ginger vodka is dangerous delicious, and the plum brandy not bad at all.

A tag: [theatre]

I’ve been doing lots of blog browsing – checking up for my host role in Carnivalesque, so it counts as work, really!

I’m saving the historical gems for the carnival, but three other glittering posts to share:

1. A joke to be enjoyed by anyone who has ever had any contact with “consultants”. (And in my UN development days I was one, at least part-time, which involved in one instance my advising a woman on a country about which I knew nothing, and she’d been doing a PhD in Sydney when I was in nappies – I’m afraid I didn’t “value-add” much there, and probably picked out a few “dogs”.)

2. Dr Charles muses on the potential medical risks of thongs. (I mean the underwear sort, not the rubber flip-flop sort, for Australian readers.)

3. The serious one. MGK was visiting a Microsoft project trying to realise Vannevar Bush’s truly revolutionary post-WWII vision of information management and pointing out some potential hitches in the plans. I find this fascinating because it is something I have wanted ever ince the internet started, and indeed before.

I was one of those odd children who wanted to collect facts and figures and never to forget them – the wall above my desk when I was 11 or so was a sea of nails with folders of facts hang on them, and ever since I’ve been battling to keep track of everything I want to know. And as I said in my most recent thesis, it is what the internet really needs. (Search for Vannevar to get to the relevant bit.)

On that line, I was interested to read Clioweb’s post on the “Scribe” notetaking programme, apparently specifically designed for historians, and a commenter’s reference to Endnotes.

Some time soon, and yes I do mean pretty soon, I hope to create a lot more space in my life for historical research, and I will need to move on from my undergraduate-acquired method of research – photocopying everything that doesn’t move and scribbling all over it, and filling books with Stick-it notes. Any comments or recommendations would be most welcome.

There’s been much talk of the usefulness of the web in research, and it certainly is invaluable in making easily accessible many forms of texts previously rare or hard to reach, but in many ways I can’t help feeling we’re still about the stage they were on radio when they read out the newspapers for “news” bulletins. Our habitus, to use Bourdieu’s invaluable concept, has yet to catch up with our technology.

So I was interested to see a site on research into the effects of the reservations for women of seats in India’s local government, the panchayats. The authors say: We seek your inputs regarding the sort of questions we need to ask: Perspectives; Any research studies that may have been done; Questionnaires; Experience at the field level; Anything………”

I can’t imagine that too many of the women on the panchayats would have internet access – although I bet there would be a few – but it is easy to see how this model might be used to encourage participation by the subjects of studies in the design of the studies on them, potentially a revolution.

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If you are at all interested in science, then you have to read a physics professor’s argument for radical science, which addresses, if does not answer, the fascinating question: Where do hypotheses come from?

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Iraq as the new Iran? This excellent Washington Post article on Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has some frightening input into this possibility, although is scrupulously fair. And it points out that you can see for yourself at Sistani.org, with his writings available in English, French, Urdu and Arabic. A sample:

Question:I want to ask about talking to ones fiancee on telephone, is it permissible or not?
Answer:If talking is free of provocative words and if there is no fear of falling in sin, there is no objection.

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And if you need to find hope for sanity in that other great fundamentalist state, read this account of how to bring up an atheist child in America.

The next Carnivalesque will be here, on Wednesday 2 March. But I need your help …

Submissions of blog posts on any early modern history subject under the sun should be sent to natalieben at journ.freeserve.co.uk as soon as possible. Don’t be shy – please nominate the favourites on your own blog, but also particularly any that you’ve come across off the routes of previous carnivals.

And if you’re thinking “Carnivalesque?”, there’s an explanation of this gathering of early modernists here.

If you’ve inexplicably missed out on the experience, visit Carnivalesque No 1, on the blog of the founder and carnival mistress extraordinaire Sharon, and then No 2.

For these purposes “early modern” is defined as covering the period between c.1450-1850. If you’ve just put up or read a brilliant post that doesn’t fit that criteria, well then why not send it to the next History Carnival, for which the deadline is February 25. Details here.

Remember Mademoiselle Rose Bertin (milliner to Marie Antoinette): “There is nothing new except what is forgotten”

Was reading that there’s nothing new about nefarious practices among drug “companies”.

In the early 16th-century a “wonder drug”, guaiacum, from the Americas, was discovered, and thought to cure syphillis. (The theory was the disease had come from there, which it hadn’t, so the cure must also.)

Ulrich von Hutton wrote a whole treatise on its virtues in 1519, dedicating it to the Archbishop with Mainz with the telling words: “I hope that Your Eminence has escaped the pox but should you catch it (Heaven forbid but you can never tell) I would be glad to treat and heal you.”

In 1530 the physician Girolamo Francastoro created the name still use today in a poem on extolling guaiacum’s powers, and the merchant house of Fugger, which had the import monopoly, had an extensive “PR” campaign for the chain of hospitals, the only places where it could be obtained.

Paracelsus, who doesn’t come off to well in other scientific respects, at least saw through this, denouncing the drug as a scam and recommending the mercury treatment that would continue for centuries. (For my previous posting on this see here – but be warned it is not for the squeamish.)

But, “the Fuggers responded by using their financial muscle to suppress Paracelsus’s publications and ridicule his scientific credibility. The ethically dubious world of patent medicines was born,” says Jerry Brotton, in The Renaissance Bazaar, pp. 192-3, from which this story is taken.

And not just patent, I’d say.

For Paracelsus see an excellent detailed account at the (US) National Library of Medicine or the short version on Wikipedia. And guaiacum, although the resin not the 16th-century choice of wood, is used by herbalists today.

Footnote: Trying to decide whether to use one or two Ls in the title, I learnt that the term skulduggery is thought to be from Scots sculduddery – “obscenity, fornication”. Language is a funny thing.

A tag: [history]