More from Natalie Zemon Davis, from the famous “Women on Top” essay.

“The most popular comic example of the female’s temporary rule, however, is Phyllis riding Aristotle, a motif recurring in stories, paintings, and household objects from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries.” (p. 135-6)

Apparently, the story goes that his pupil Alexander (the Great) was admonished by the philosopher for paying excessive attention to the lady in question, one of his new subjects from India. Phyliss got her revenge in front of Alexander by flirting with the old man and getting him to get down on all fours, to be ridden like a horse, with saddle and bridle.

More on the source here; some images here and here.

Oddly enough, although I am something of a habitue of art galleries and museums I’ve never come across this before. Perhaps it wasn’t a favourite topic for all those 18th-, 19th and 20th-century (male) collectors who shaped them.

I just got around to looking her up, and she seems to have been quite a figure in literary circles. (And it seems she was the artist in my new/old volumes.)

From The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846 Vol. 2

“I like Mrs. Jameson nevertheless –I like her more. She appreciates you–and it is my turn to praise for that, now. I am to see her again to-morrow morning, when she has the goodness to promise to bring some etchings of her own, her illustrations of the new essays, for me to look at.” (p5)

“Mrs. Jameson came late to-day, at five–and was hurried and could not stay ten minutes, but showed me her etchings and very kindly left a ‘Dead St. Cecilia’ which I admired most, for its beautiful lifelessness.” (p. 9)

I also found her Shakespeare’s Heroines and a rather dense theoretical piece on her that also includes a brief biography. It claims that in the 1820s and 30s she was “one of the first women to make a reputation … as a multi-faceted professional writer”. A biography of Jane Barker, to give just one example, makes similar claim, but for a woman living a century earlier.

Mind you, being a journalist I should know how many repetitive “firsts” there are in the world, in all sorts of areas.

The letters material comes from questia.com, a reasonably cheap subscription site that shows the real possibilities of the web. It boasts the full texts, fully searchable, of a huge number of books, even if it is a sometimes uneven selection with a bias to those out of copyright. Just imagine this, but the entire contents of every new book published, and gradually most of the older ones too: an entire on-line British Library. It must come one day.

In England and American we’ve had, according to common labels, second and perhaps third wave feminism: thoroughly ethnocentric labels.

The first-wave of feminism, although we’ll never be able to recover it unless time machines are invented, was probably paleolithic, but reading any period of history the continual presence of such “waves” soon become obvious.

I’m reading Natalie Zemon Davis’s Society and Culture in Early Modern France, which contains her famous essay on “Women on Top”. (It must be the single most-cited article that I’ve come across so I thought I had to buy the book: abebooks came through again, it’s amazing how often American bookshops are cheaper, even with the postage. The price of the book was about £1!)

Writing about charivaris, “a noisy, masked demonstration to humiliate some wrongdoer in the community”, Davis says: that while in the countryside protests against second marriages were dominant, in the cities most common were those against domineering wives. She says: “there were important and little-understood changes going on in the relations between men and women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, reflected in the charivaris against henpecked husbands, in the worsening position of women in French law, and in the independent interest of some city women in Protestantism.” (Stanford Uni Press, 1979, p. 117.)

So much historical writing still seems to read the conduct books and other injunctions to women and assume they were meek and complicit in their own oppression; I very much doubt that has ever been the case!

… well temple perhaps is a better word.

I was reading ‘The Mind in the Cave’, as mentioned yesterday, because I was in southwest France, not far from the Peche-Merle caves, the best original paintings that can now be seen, since Lascaux is closed.

What the texts I’ve read on the paintings don’t emphasis is the glorious nature of the caves themselves: all the standard limestone features of stalagmites and ‘tites, and also the incredible difficulties the “artists” had in getting to the sites that they did.

One area of Pech-Merle required a kilometre-long crawl along a narrow space in which you could not even lift your head: the experience of the first person to go along that, not having any idea at all of what he or she might encounter, with only a flickering torch, hardly bears thinking about, and even for those who came after it must have been terrifying.

Then some of the finger-scratchings in the ceiling, which could only have been done by climbing a pile of enormous, apparently precariously balanced boulders. A fall would surely have resulted in a broken leg at the least, and could you have then got out? (There is apparently evidence of some scaffolding in some caves, but here the position suggests the drawer must have climbed on the rocks.)

The paintings themselves frequently show considerable artistic ability, just a single line can suggest the entire shape of a mammoth’s head, or the haunch of a deer. (I’m particularly alert to this since I utterly lack it myself – I love art, but I can’t draw.)

I would one day love to learn more about the paleolithic experience, and maybe even write about it: most of the fictional representations of which I am aware are disappointing.

Yesterday’s thoughts brought me back to the Upper Paleolithic, and most brilliant book that I’ve read in years, The Mind in the Cave, by David Lewis-Williams.

It seeks to understand something of the cave paintings of Europe by considering that anatomically, including in terms of brain structure, the people who painted them were identifical to us. It suggests furthermore that while cultural frameworks have a massive effect on conscious thoughts, the brain when in altered states – induced by drugs, meditation, or even the effect of crawling several kilometres underground in very difficult conditions – behaves in remarkable similar ways across cultures.

Thus, after considering parallel reports of altered states, he suggests that the cave painters believed the walls of at least some caves were thin membranes through which it was possible to touch or draw out the animals from the “underworld”, or otherworld.

This is particularly useful in explaining the quite common effect of paintings being done one on top of the other with no apparent concern for the predecessors. Each painting was an event, not a work of art. Also the way that natural shapes in caves are used in the creation of the image: a bump is a nose, a broken-off piece an ear, etc.

The book also considers the reason why the art developed in Europe and not elsewhere, saying that the single different condition was the presence side by side for a considerable period of anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals. It suggests (and I’m not sure if it doesn’t go a little too far here) that the modern humans realised they had a more complex understanding of religion and the abstract than did their rivals, and therefore sought much harder to develop it.

He focuses particularly on the Chatelperronian Neanderthals, who borrowed techniques of stone tool making, burial and personal ornamentation, apparently from modern humans, but were unable to follow them, he suggests, with advanced hunting techniques, burials with elaborate grave goods and image-making because their minds just could not get around these concepts.

Fascinating stuff!

Reading the Guardian Review review of Imperial Hubris, about militant Islam, I was moved to go back for another look at Malise Ruthven’s A Fury of God: The Islamist Attack on America, which I still think is one of the most original and perceptive approaches to the topic.

Two of the main points that I got out of it are how much radical Islam has been influenced by radical Western thought, from Lenin to the Baader-Meinhof gang, and how its members almost always come from a science/engineering, that is very Western-influenced objectivist educational tradition, which encourages them to read religious texts in a highly literal way.

There’s much more to it than that – it also contains a history of the intellectual tradition that led to al-Qa’ida (yes there is one) – but well, I’d recommend you read the book.

In a broader sense it is a reminder that human nature and the human condition can produce very similar reactions in widely varying circumstances. Indeed, you could probably draw some parallels between some of the radical groups in 1650s England and al-Qa’ida – the Fifth Monarchists are perhaps the best candidates – which brings me to the new novel Havoc in its Third Year, which is being glowingly reviewed everywhere, e.g. the Guardian. It is set in Puritan England, but is being, so far as I’ve seen, universally regarded as a parable for our times.

I bet back in paleolithic Europe there was a group of young men running around destroying cave paintings because they thought they were dangerous perversions … well something like that anyway.

Plus ca change …