the law, or at least the use of its principles, can be useful to women.

I enjoyed the tale from the Times Literary Supplement of July 30, page 11, in a book review of The English and the Normans, by H.M. Thomas:

When Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, attempted to ravish Christina of Markyate, the niece of his former English mistress Alveva, she escaped by swearing she was only getting out of bed to lock the chamber door, but omitting to specify that she would lock it from the outside. The legal scrupulosity with which the Normans pursued wickedness could be turned against them.

… there were private collections.

From John Evelyn’s diary, December 16, 1686.

“I carried the Countesse of Sunderland to see the rarities of one Mr Charleton in the Middle Temple, who shew’d us such a collection as I had never seene in all my travels abroad, either of private gentlemen or princes. It consisted of miniatures, drawings, shells, insects, medailes, natural things, animals (of which divers, I think 100, were kept in glasses of spirits of wine), minerals, precious stones, vessells, curiosities in amber, christal, achat, &c; all being very perfect and rare in their kind, especially his bookes of birds, fish, flowers and shells, drawn and miniatur’d to the life. … This gentleman’s whole collection, gather’d by himselfe travelling over most parts of Europe, is estimated at £8000.”

A note in my edition says this collection was purchased by Sir Hans Sloane and hence became part of the foundation collection of the British Museum.

I was particularly taken by this since I work (voluntarily) every fortnight in the BM’s new Enlightenment Gallery, which recalls this early comprehensive approach to collecting. The juxtaposition of times, cultures and modes of thought that it creates can indeed be enlightening.

I do handling, which means having ancient objects that visitors can hold — our oldest human-made one is a 350,000-year-old handaxe. Holding it really does make history come alive.

The Victorian children’s versions – which we are still reading – bear only the scantest similarity to the originals, I’ve discovered, since picking up Aesop: The Complete Fables, O. and R. Temple (trans), Penguin, 1998, in the British Museum bookshop. Anyone who writes lots of essays would find it a great resource for colourful introductions: every human quandary is covered, and every emotion.
It can be bleak, e.g.

The Dogs Reconciled with the Wolves
“The wolves said to the dogs: ‘Why, when you are so like us in all respects, don’t we come to some brotherly understanding? For there is no difference between us in some of our ways of thinking. We live in freedom; you submit and are enslaved by man and endure his blows. You wear collars and watch over their flocks, and when your masters eat, all they throw to you are some bones. But take our words for it, if you hand over the flocks to us we can all club together and gorge our appetites jointly.’
The dogs were sympathetic to this proposal, so the wolves, making their way inside the sheepfold, tore the dogs to pieces.
(Such is the reward that traitors who betray their fatherland deserve.) No 216, p. 163.

But I think my favourite is The Middle-aged Man and His Mistresses

“A middle-aged man who was going grey had two mistresses, one young and the other old. Now she who was advanced in years had a sense of shame at having sexual intercourse with a lover younger than herself. And so she did not fail, each time that he came to her house, to pull out all of his black hairs.
The young mistress, on her part, recoiled from the idea of having an old lover, and so she pulled out his white hairs.
Thus it happened that, plucked in turn by the one and then the old, he became bald.
(That which is ill-matched always gets into difficulties.)” No. 52 (p.42)

I did say they weren’t child’s play!

… and even the Jacobeans were at least pretending to be shocked, when Anne of Denmark, the Queen of James I, appeared as Pallas (Wisdom and Defence) in the first masque she arranged, Vision of Twelve Goddess, played at Hampton Court on January 8, 1604.
As was appropriate for a warrior, she was in a short skirt. That frequently prissy bachelor Dudley Carleton complained:

“Her clothes were not so much below the knee but that we might see a woman had both feet and legs, which I never knew before.”

He could have worked for the Daily Mail!

From: Writing Women in Jacobean England, B.K. Lewalski, Harvard Uni Press, 1993, p. 30.

Today started with the mail: another rejection for my book proposal. Shortly afterwards some bastard stole the front wheel of my bicycle, forcing a long, wearying and eventually expensive trudge to the bike shop.

I did get an hour in the British Library, without results of note, so today I’m cribbing my quote from a regular email that I’d recommend,  Today in Literature, which has a free version and a $20 a year one:    http://www.todayinliterature.com/

“The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.”Don Marquis, who was born on this day in 1878. He also said: “I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it’s a paragraph in my column.”

Personally, I tend to go the other way … might be a message in there somewhere!

… but he did have some sense.

At  a mini-exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery on 17th-century science, I met Theodore de Mayerne (1573-1655), the Hugenot physician who emigrated to England after initially visiting to treat Anne of Denmark in 1606.

He wrote in his diary that the King “asserts the art of medicine to be supported by mere conjecture, and useless because uncertain”.