p. 6 “Williamson was a practiced suit-and-helmet diver. Hurley claimed to be practicsed at diving but the proof is hard to find… the way Hurley and Williamson conceptualised the undersea and visualised marine animals was mediated by the artificial underwater environments of aquariums… an optical devise invented forviewing the underwater and its creatures in the safe, dry space of land and air”

p 7 To anyone who was British-descended, and white, the coral islands, reefs and waterways of the Bahamas and Australia in the 1920s were known as the empire’s “possessions”. THe “edenic isles set in sparkling seas” – as David Arnold described Western ideas of the tropics – generated much imperial self-satisfaction. .. the British Empire was also a “coral empire” in which the figure of the coral reef became a suggestive symbol of expansionism.”

p.18 “coral reefs were models for a wide variety of social claims about the British Empire.In 1861, they were a demonstration of the correct structure of a colonial society in whjich “the broader the base, the loftier the apex”. In 1908, they wer seen as mirrors of the human character, which “like a coral reef, is made bit by bit”. They served as a precautionary tale for the potential chaos and randoness of exxpanionsim, with some observers concluding that the British Empire “grew like a coral reef, without a plan”. They justified the significance of brotherhoods, guilds, and fraternities because “society has been built up like a coral atoll of innumerable fraternities – social, political and industrial”. And, when, in 1929, there was mounting concerns across the empire about worker exploitation, coral reefs served as a threat and a warning to anyone who would forget that “{the workers] build the reef, and the reef maintains them. Disaster to the reed meas death to its inhabitants”.

p. 72 “Williamson’s chapter on sharks in Twenty Years Under the Sea syands as one of the earliest, lengthy, firsthand observations of shark behaviour. But he was not a disinterested observer: sharks were vicious, untristworthy and dangerous. Mostly, he felt horrified by them and called them “wolves of the sea”, “man-eaters”, “ravenous beasts”, “the enemy” “frenzied demons” and “cold-blooded cannibals”. … The undersea harboured shady life and suspect characters, of which the shark and the octopius were Williamon’s most feared..”

p. 73 “Killing shatks was blood sport, and the joy of killing a display of masculinity and bravery despire the reality that Williamson preferred the protected space of the photosphere to immersion in the sea. The scene in which he had the camera turned on himself as he stabbed a shark – a shark that had been attracted to his boat by a dead gorse and animal blood poured into the water – takes place very quickly. By completing the act, Williamson had delivered on a promise to a financial baker that he would secure on film a fight between a man and a “man eater”.

p. 101 Williamson “no eyes are like that of the octopus. They are everyting that is horrible. Dead eyes. The eyes of a corpse through which the demon peers forther, unearthly, expressionless, yet filled with such bestial malignancy that one’s very soul seems to shrink beneath their gaze, and cold perspiration beads the brow.”

p. 108 “In 1922, at Coogee, a beach in Sydney once described as “shark infested”, 80,000 white Australians gathered to watch nine Loyalty Islanders of the South Pacific take to the surg in lioncloths to hunt and kill sharks with knives. Spectators were disappointed when no sharkes were sighted, but the story shows that by 1920, the spectacle of Indigenous men fighting srarks had become a way of defining Islander peoples, and something of a blood sport”

p. 108 “The motif of the shark and “native diver” became a common signt in Australian popular culture illustrations of the 20th century. In 1948, for instance, Sanitorium, a food company that produced breakfast cereal issued a set of pictorial cards of the Great Barrier Reef for children to collect. One card shows a naked diver at the Great Barrier Reed, a figure not distinguished by name as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander but implied to be Indigenous. The male figure is shown striking through the underwater followed by a shark… Also in the card set was .. a struggle between an Indigenous diver and a giant clam. The viewer is left to imagine the man drowning or being eaten alive, if not by the clam then the shark. From a very young age then, Australian children learned through popular imagery to recognise and stereotype racial difference and species difference, to imagine both the racial and animal Other as savage and terrifying, and to displace animality onto the bodies of Indigenous people”

p. 119 “when Hurley ventured forth, the Torres Strait Islands, Papua and the former British New Guinea were known as Australia’s “tropical possessions” and “our unknown lands”.

p. 121 The heroic life entails the idea of leaving behind the everyday world of domestic affairs to enter one of unfamiliarity and danger. It entails a masculine ideal of putting distance between heroics and the feminity fo the everyday. Even in 1915, Hurley was praised as the main who made the unknown known. He was described as “Australia’s most daring photographer”… conceiving of wilderness as a stage on which to act out masciline ideals of “battling” and then return home with evidence in the form of photographs and films.

p. 125 Diaries … there are no descriptions of swimming – only descriptions of wading in the shallows. .. Hurley did, though, watch intently as two Torres Strait Islander, who were assistants, dived underwater to collect diant clams and marine life that would later serve as camera subjects. As with JE Williamson’s “native” labourers, the men who assisted Hurley made it easy for him to undertake photography and filmmaking without he himself having to prepare, collect, carry, and operate equipment and machines on his own…. The situation was similar to the more general social condition described by James Clifford in relation to the invisibility of “native labour”. “europeans moved through unfamiliar places, their relative comfort and safety were ensured by a well-developed infrastructure of guides, assistants, suppliers, translators and carriers. Does the labour of these people count as #travel’?”

p. 127 “The collection of photographs produced on the second expedition, which show fish and corals underwater but wer in fact photographed in an aquarium, are to this day labelled “underwater photographs”, a categorisation that implies they were taken by a diver submerged in the sea.”

p. 191 “There are many photographs of Carl Akeley and his helpers on location in Africa, preparing drawings of the environment for future reference when designing dioramas. Akeley had implicit faith in the unity of science, fact and documentary … Donna Haraway argues that the fear of nature faking was a fear of the “failure of order” of class, race and sex, a stable social order based on ideologies that deremined what was real and true, and a social order that had been in place for centuries. Never before had that social order been so undermined as it was by modern society’s increasing inclination towards simulation and deception, by the social challenges presented by the emancipation of women, and by the increasing agency sought by non-white people.”

p. 219 Williamson’s account of the dying stingray recalls a recent argument put forward by Timothy Merton about human pity towards neighbours in the nonhuman worl in which he states that “pity for the living world is an aspect of a sadistic relish for devouring it”. When nature is externalised as somthing outside and distant from human life, pity is another way of reinforcing the exclusion and objectification of others.”

p. 227 “With the camera, or “techno-remora” as Haraway calls it, strapped to the back of the turtle, it does suggest that humans are in control. Yet when watching the turtle from the viewing position of the GoPro, there is a sense of being drawn into a political frame where much more is at stake than the pleasure of viewing. Rather, there is some hesitations and uncertainty about our own place in the world that comes from seeing the subjectivity and sentience of the turtle. It comes from noticing the turtles decisions, movements, expressions, actions, thinking, personality, appearance, performances, aesthetics and subjectivity, and from feeling bound to the turtle through the camera. The crittercam is effective in encouraging something that Jonathan Burt appreciates in watching worthwhile films about animals, namely “a sense of what is meant by our co-habitation with other forms of life.”

Podcast

Fascinating in detail, and quite spectacular in its account of how examination of a single footnote, and detective work around it, led to a significant rethinking of the relationship between Daoism and Buddhism.

“The Declarations of the Perfected collects fragmentary texts—poems, information on the realm of the dead, instructions for practice—revealed to Yang Xi (330—ca. 386) by celestial beings. These texts were assembled and annotated by Tao Hongjing (456–536).”

p. 12 A recent book by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang purports to explain ‘How China became capitalist’ but that is to explain something that never happened. The chinese economy is exactly what the Chinese leaders say it is: a socialist market economy. It is a socialist economy in which market mechanisms are used to a significant degree, and a market economy with extensive state ownership and controls.”

p. 13 “Behind the official banks, which are state owned, is a murky sector of quasi=private shadow banking, must of it technically illegal, which offers investors higher returns than they can get in banks and norrowers credit which they might otherwise not find… This sector now accounts for a third or more of all credit in the economy and has been growing ferociously in recent years, at an estimated annual rate in turnover of some 30 per cent.”

p. 15 “Foreign visitors gaze in amazement at the lights and glitter of Chsanhai and see there CHina’s new capitalism before their eyes – but mostly without knowing that Shanghai has an exceptionally small private sector (the Shanghai economis is about 80% in public ownership, measured in production)”

p. 19 “The official GDP of the provinces adds up to about 10% more than the GDP of the nation.. China may have grown to the world’ secon biggest economy, but even if the official statistics were true, that still amounts to only about 10% of global GDP for 20% of global population. In per capita terms, CHina’s national income is at best a sixth of that of the United States, the economy it is supposedly overtaking.”

p. 20 “Mega-growth is now over and is starting to be seen, correctly, as a relatively short period of recovery… The population is no longer growing other than by increased logevity. The national birth rate is 1.6 or 1.7 children per woman, in cities below 1 and in large cities fown to 0.7 or less. IN the next 15 years the share of the population that is 60 or older will increase from 14 to 25%.”

p/ 21 “A recent study for another international consultancy, the COnference Board, finds actual annual growth in years with official rates of about 10% yo have been typically about 7-7.5%. Taking the best growth periods for China and other East Asian countries, the study finds China’s growth to fall slightly short of that of South Kirea, Taiwan and Japan. .. Estimates by researchers at the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission suggest that almost half of the total investment in the Chinese economy in the years 2009-2013 (the period of post-2008-recession stimulus) was ‘ineffective’.”

p. 22 “The economy is probably about a third smaller than it is made out to be officially. Rather than up there with the United States, it is a second-tier economy, more like Hapan or Germany, and in per capita terms only a middle-income one. … Another effective is that economic inequality, although groteque even by official statistics, has probably been underestimated, since the share of wealth held by the very rich has been estimated relative to an inflated total.”

p. 29 South Korea’s modernisation is the greatest development story ever told. China’s development in some ways looks similar: rising from the ashes of dstruction, strong leadership by an authoritarian state, a complex mesh of state and capitalism, rapid growth. But that comparison does not hold long…. THe Chinese story is one of bigness, but in greatness it is not much up against, for example, the story of South Korea, or for that matter of Taiwan. .. in the time South Korea made itself a high-income country, China has made itself no more than a middle-income one… China’s modernisation is narrowly economic. In South Korea and Taiwan, modernisation has been comprehensive: economic yes, but also political and social.

p. 30 “I am not all that impressed by China’s growht. It is not unprecedented, not unique, and not lasting. It has been , in its best times, pretty typical for East Asia. The economy got off to a good start after the revolution in 1949 but then ground to a halt in a wasted generation. It picked up again as of the 1980s, but if we take the entire period of the People’s Republic it has been less than it should have been by the standards of the region… IT has been assumed that what enabled the South Korean state to lead as effectively as it did was that it had autocratic strength.. HOwever, in our study we found that although the development state had strength, and used, it, strength was not its defining characteristic. What made this state effective was rather an unexpectedly sophisticated use of strength… it was not by subduing its population with strength that they pulled the country along in development. They did that by mobilising their population into a grand project of modernisation. Success came from the way the state worked with society.”

p. 31 “Both regimes were challenged by uprisings in their population, in Korea in 1987 and China in 1989, but reacted differently. In Korea, the authoritarian regime tried to survive… but was unable to hold on to power and stepped aside to allow democratic reform. In China, the regime did not give in, but reached for its ultimate pwoer resource, the military, and crushed the revolt with weaponry. In Korea, there being no party-state, the leaders could not react similarly. They did not have a similar resource of ultimate power at their disposal and did not have the justification for the use of force that is contained in the ideological and organisational structure of a party-state.Presiding over a country that was not monolithic but built on vibrant civil society institutions which had evolved during the period of modernisation, including in business and voluntarism, the authoritarian leader could relinquish control without fearing that their project of modernisation would collapse, indeed had to give in such an attempt to hold on to power with force would have destroyed the project that was their raison d’etre and their only claim to legitimacy.

p. 33 South Kirea was an unruly nation, and those who are old enough will remember, for example, the constant street battles between students and police. This unrest was important not because, until the end, it threatened the regime, but because it contributed to never silencing the demand for democracy. But this unruliness was still on the surface. Underneath as a compliant and hard-working population. .. The government … extracted obedience by delivering economic growth. It bought itself legitimacy with the help of education and social security. It have people reasons for compliance by forcing employers, at least in the big corporations, to provide occupational welfare to workers nad their families, and to be at least marginally better employers than they were themselves inclined to be, and by directing voluntary agencies to deliver social services. And importantly, it mobilsed people across the country through a cultural revolution under the name of the Saemaul movement ..paternalistic movements .. extractive movements that put rural communities and industrial labourersand their families to work in development projects large and small … without much of government funding. But they were also organisations that gave millions of Kireans the experience of being members and particiants in associations, committees, councils and the like. They were grassroots movements that fed into, as did the betwork of voluntary agencies, civil society vibrancy.”

p. 35 IN territory, CHina is about the same as Canada or the United States but smaller than Russia. In population it is enormous, now nearing 1.4 billion people, over four times as many as the United States and 10 times as many as Russia. Much of the country is rough mountainous terrain and a surprisingly small part comfortable arable land. The Chinese population has grown from about 500 million in 1949 , and is still growing, although more slowly. It is expected to peak at between 1.5 and 1.6 billion around mid-century and then start falling. By that time, China will probably have been overtaken by India as the world’s most populous country.”

p. 37 “In Giangzhoi, the city, in the kind of development that is possible only in a command economy, has in the couse of a few years, created a mega-university complex on an idland in the Pearl River by clearing away the peasantry that used to cultivate its land and having 10 universities build new campuses one next to the other. If you drive through, you see a landscape of shiny and impressive architecture, but inside, buildings only 10 years old are already worn and crumbling. The regime has thrown money into GDP growth, but not generally obtained comensurate growth. Standards of living have been rising, but at less than the pace of economic growth.

p. 38 Nearly half the population remains rural, far removed from life in modern cities, much of it living off backwards agriculture and in developing country conditions. The modern economy is geared to copying what others have invented or to doing the assembly work on foreign designs, but has so far developed less innovation capacity and does not have a single world-class brand to its name.”

p. 127 Chinese schooling appears to be performing well in some international comparisons of Educational quality, notably in the PISA study undertaken by OECD. the results, however, as so often with statistics from China, are bogus. in the PISA study, China is represented by Shanghai, it’s most advanced City, and Shanghai by a selection of schools that excludes those for migrant children.

p. 134 “The best interpretation of social policies in China today is that they are designed to do what is necessary as seen from the needs of the regime. When necessity presents itself, provision materialises. When mass unemployment struck in the 1990s, social assistance was provided with some energy. When necessity recedes, provision is tempered… When marketization resulted in a housing crisis for those who had not got on to the ladder of upwards prices early enough, some public housing provision was brought back… {Leaders] are not in seach of any broad consensus. Their social policy is exactly what it is intended to be: another instrument of stability and control, so much and no more.”

p. 137 “while the state may in some ways have retreated from directly running things, the party has extended its reach… it does not tell everyone everything he or she must do. But it does control that the people do not do what they must not, and it does so in great detail, from not hvaing children that should not be had via not reading or seeing or hearing what should not be read or seen or heard, to not practicing faiths that should not be practices – and anove all to not organising… Under Mao, people were expected not only to believe in the part and to obey the party line but also to show their devotion in their daily lives, fror example in the way they dressed and the entertainment they enjoyed. This nonsense the Chinese have been freed from. … It is not that they are not controlled when it matters, only that they are not bossed around when it does not matter.”

p. 138 “Behind it all lies, always, the threat of punishment, harassment, detention, the loss of jor or home, retribution against family and friends, violence and ultimately death…. It is not just an authoritarian state. It is a dictatorship.” But I have also said ‘dictatorship’ is not an adequate label. It is too unsophisticated. China is now a dictatorship in which dictate is restrained and in which, except in the last resort, indirect control is substituted for direct command… makes the CHinese state a kind of dictatorship never seen before. That kind of dictatorship needs a name. It is not an autocracy; that is too benevolent. It is nor a dictatorship like others; that is too primitive. I give it the name of controlocracy.”

p. 176 “What we are seeing in the China Dream is the embryo of an ideology that is ultra-dangerous. It is that because it sits on a rhetoric of power and national greatness and because, ultimately, it is an ideology in which the person ceases to exist as an autonomous being and is subsumed in the nation. If individual happiness comes from national greatness, then the pursuit of national greatness is an undivided good. … there is no autonous good for individual women and men that might restrain the national project or the policies of the party-state that is the custodian of that project… at its core … a fascist idea, the fascist idea. Even communist ideology (if of course not practice) has been built in the enlightenment spirit that persons are objectives and that systems are for their good, and that they prove themselves by promoting the good of individual women and men… This is not abstract theorising. In Fascist Europe there was no limit to repression, no limit to aggression, no limit to evil, no limit to political murder, and no limit to sacrifice that was not for the good of the people. .. It is too early to tell. After Mao and until Xi Jinpiang, the Chinese state was in my schema a trivial one, successful and increasingly strong but with a regime carefully dedicated to self-preservation and ready to accept almost any price for stability. That may endure. The Chinese state is a sophisticated dictatorship but, as things stand today, possibly not yet an ideological one. It is a near totalitarian regime but not fully totalitarian.”

p.

p. 139 “Columanus’s spirital guidance “held out – humanely, intimately, personally – a lifeline to the individual members of an aristocratic society that was violent, guilty and fearful. The violence and the guilt we can read about in the the pages of Gregory of Tours …. fear of treachery, fear of revende, fear of shame, fear of pain, and above all fear of death and what might be beyond it. Penance healed guilt and drove out fear … could not the offering to God – in a society in which every cog of social intercourse was oiled by rthe giving of gifts – of a monastery, richly endowed, splendidly furniches, peopled by the founder’s own kin turned monks expert in praryer, buy His favour?

p. 140 One of the earliest Frankish converts to the Clumbanian monastic life was a young man named Chagnoald… belonged to an aristocratic family then settled near Meaux, to the east of Paris, although it had originated in Burgundy…While staying with Chagneric (his father), Columbanus blessed his young daughter Burgundofara (Fara, Fare) and “dedicated her to the Lord”. … When she grew up she entered monastic life and founded a nunnery upon one of the family’s estates, Eboracum, later to take its name from her, Fara’s monastery, Faremoutier, now Faremoutiers-En-Bric.

p. 141. her brother Chagnoald left Luxeuil to become bishop of Laon, … a third, …after service in the royal chancery of Dagobert I (d. 639) had become bishop of Meaux. Burgundofaraa’s will, dated 633 or 634, has survived. It shows how well endowed her nunnery was and how the different members of the family had contributed to these endowments… Faremoutiers later received endowments from Queen Balthild, wife of Clovis II (d. 657). Balthild was of English birth…. According to Bede the Kentish princess Eorcengota, great granddaughter of Ethelbert and Bertha, became a nun at Farenoutiers, and two East Anglian princesses became successive abbesses there.”

p. 181 In Gaul, the monastery of Nivelles was founded by Itta, widow of Pippin I – ancestors of Charlemagne – in 640, on advice from St Amandus. Its first abbess, Gertrude, was her daughter, and successive abbesses were also drawn from this high-ranking, aristocratic family often known from its most famous sons as the Pippinids. In England, Whitby was founded by King Oswy in 657. Its first abbess was Hilda, great-niece of Edwin of Northumbria; on her death in 680 she was succeeded by Eanflaed, widow of Oswy, daughter of Edwin and early patron of Wilfridl she in her turn by her daughter Alflaed. It is somehow appropriate that there should survive a letter which passed between Alflaed and Abbess Adela of Pfazel, near Trier. For Pfalzel was another Pippinid house and Abbess Adela unsurprisingly connected to the Pippinid dynasty; she was the sister-in-law of Pipppin II, grandson of Pippin I.

p. 183 “Bede tells a story .. involving the nunnery of Coldingham… like Whitby, was closely associated with the Northumbrian royal family. Its abbess at this time, about 680, was Abbe, sister of King Oswy.. As Bede tells it, the nuns of Coldingam were too given to a secular manner of life… “they occupy their spare time in weaving more delicate clothes with which to adorn themselves like brides, and make friends with visiting men. When the nunnery was accidentally dsetroyed by fire, Bede saw in this the manifestation of divine displeasure. Aldhelm uttered similar condemnations of worldly dress in writing to the nuns of Barking, founded by Bishop Eorcenwald of London for his sister. Excavations at the site have brought forward fragments of gold thread and some silver-gilt pins, which could have formed part of the elaborately decorated headdresses… women’s dress among the Franks and the English changed under the influence of Mediterranean and especially Byzantine models in the wake of the coming of Christianity”. A telling example of this is furnished by the so-called “Chemise of Sainte-Bathilde”, preserved in Bathild’s monastery of Chelles: a fragment of a linen shirt, with embroidery in four colours round the neck to simulate a necklace with a cross pendant from it. We cannot tell whether this garment really did belong to Balthild, though it would seem to date from her lifetime… the Empress Theodora, Justinian’s wife, is depicted wearing on ein the mosaics of San Vitale in Ravenna.”

p. 217 “The dissemination of Bede’s historical works in the Frankish kingdom provided food for thought and models for action in the mission field. King Alhred of Northumbria and his queen Osgifu assured Lul in 773 that “We have been careful to do as you asked about yourself and authority they are commended with everlasting memorial of writing and offered daily to God with the help of prayers. A bond of prayer … transcended space and time, had bridged not only the sea which divided England and Germany but also that other sea which divided the living from the dead… at some point between 765 and 774 King Alhred convened a synod which despatched another Northumbrian, the priest Willehad, across the sea. He worked initially in the north Frisian area where Boniface had perished. Later, in about 780, he was recruited by Charlemagne to work further east among the Saxons. When his work was interuppted by Widuking’s recolt he managed to escape … settled for two years of prayer and study at Echternach … presided over at this time by Abbot Beornrad, another Englishman … who was later to become archbishop of Sens and one of Charlemagne’s leading counsellors.”

p. 241 “from Ireland … St Brigit of Kildare. Although dates in the 5th century were later allotted to Brigit, it is practically certain that she never existed… Many scholars consider it likely that Brigit’s cult was the continuation of the cult of a Celtic fire-goddess. .. feast day on 1 February conincides with the pre-Christian festival of spring called Imbolg… the old Irish word erlam, “patron saint”, had the original meaning of “god of the tribe” or “tutelary deity”.

p. 247 “Columba’s grandest encounter on this journey took place at the court of the Pictish king Bridei (or Brude). The king’s chief magician – who was also his foster-father – was named Broichan. Columba had come to the Pictish court to seek the release of a captive Irishwoman, who to have occasioned these laborious journeyings and high-level diplomacy was probably a person of some considerable standing.”

p. 259 We now know that the practice of furnishing graves was maintained well into the Christian period. Among the Franks of northern Gaul, the Anglo=Saxons of eastern England, the Bavarians, and a little later the Slavs of Moravia, the men and women of the aristocracy continued to be laid to rest clothed, armed, bejewelled and equipped with the necessities of life in the Hereafter.

p. 261 At Eglwys Gwmyn in modern Dyfed, looking out over Carmarthen Bay, … stands a stone pillar commemorating in both Latin and ogham script a woman named Avitoria, daughter of Cunignos. It is difficult to assign even approximate dates to stones such as this, but the most expert modern enquirers would be inclined to place the inscription somewere in the sixth century. … We cannot be absolutey certain that Avitoria was a Christian .. however the feeling that what we seem to have … is an early Christian cemetery is strengthened by the widespread occurence of similar physical features in many more such graveyards in the western parts of the British Isles.”

p. 275 It is now clear that literacy among the laity in the 9th century was more widespread than once was thought, a tribute to the educational energies of the Carolingian reformers… a new emphasis on the non-Romance vernaculars for literurgical and homiletic uses (hymns, prayers, creeds, sermons etc)… We have works of Christian devotion composed for the use of the laity… Most remarkable of all, we even possess one such work composed by a member of the laity, the manual of advice for her son written in about 840 by a southern French lady named Dhuda. Such evidence tells us little directly about the quality of belief, but its mere existence and survival encourage the feeling that at least in some laity quarters Christian observance was taken seriously.”

p. 277 “Baptism gave life and salvation. .. Stephen’s biography of Wilfrid tells a heart-rending story of a mother who beought the bishop to baptise her dead son and thus “to save him from the lion’s mouth”… a rare and precious glimpse of a lay perception of baptism in the England of the 670s…. Infants could not receive the instructions which had traditionally preceeded baptism, nor could they make the renunciations and promises which were a part of the baptismal ritual. Sponsors had to act on their behalf. Hence the institution of godparenthood.”

p. 309 al-Andalus in the 850s “Flora’s story was particularly harrowing. She was another child of a mixed marriage, her father a Muslim and her mother a Christian. Her father died when she was very young and her mother brought her up a Christian. However, this had to be kept secret from her elder brother, who was an extremely zealous Muslim. Glora would later recall how difficult it had been to fast secretly in Lent. Eventually she ran away from home with her sister and the two young women took refuge in a nunnery. However, her brother tracked Flora down – we don’t know what happened to the sister – and handed her over to the authorities as an apostate. She was imprisoned, which was when Sabigotho met her. Refusing to renounce Christianity, Flora was executed in November 851.”

p. 343. “The geographical position of Bavaria meant that her relations with the Italian powers to the south were as significant as those with the Franks to the west. Agilolfing lorship reached deep into the Alps and intermittently beyond them, a force to be recokoned with by Lombard kings at Pavia, Byzantine officials at Ravenna and popes at Rome. The Bavarian princess Theodelinda married, around the year 600, two successive Lombard kings and was the mother and regent for another, King Adaloald… The last of the Agilofings, Tassilo III, also married a Lombard princess.”

p. 402 The medieval settlements in Greenland produced no native historians… We know just enough to sense a certain vitality in the Christian culture of the settlements during the 12th and 13th centuries. The cathedral at Gardar was rebuilt on a larger scale by Bishop Jon Smyrill, Jong th Hawk, whose episcopate fell between 1189 and 1209. It had glass windows and three fireplaces. The bones of a man who may have been Jon Smyrill have been excavated in the north transept. They were identifiable as the remains of a bishop by his gold episcopal ring and the crozier which had been placed across his body. This crozier had a finely carved head of walrus ivory, probably Icelandic work of the late 12th century. It has been speculated that it could have been carved by the celebrated Icelandic artist Margret hin haga, Margaret the Dextrous, who worked to commissions from Bishop Pall of Skalahoir, whom Bishop Jon Smyrill is known to have visited in 1202-3.”

p. 409 These 11th-century Danish bishops may have been, some of them, a roughish lot. Egilbert of Odense was an ex-pirate, Avoco of Roskilde was another drunk who met the same fate as the bibulous Henry of Lund. Christian of Aarhus was one of the leaders of a raid on England in 106970. One can readily imagine the reactions to them of smooth prelates like Fulbert of Cartres. Yet it was the lead given by these bishops that enabled the Danish church to become firmly rooted in its native soil”

p. 425 “As far as we can tell, Christianity entered Poland from Bohemia. It appears to have done so, as so often elsewhere, as the result of a dynastic marriage. In about 964 the Polish ruler Mieszko married Dobrava, the daughter of BoleslasI of Bohemia. It was a name of happy omen, commented Thietemar of Mersebeurg, airing his knowledge of Slavonic, because Dobrava meant “good”. She brough Christian priests and books with her to Poland, and soon the heathen husband was brought to god by his Christian wife. .. He established a new residence for himself at Gniezno (Gnesen) which had a chapel dedicated to St George. In this choice of saintly patron we might detect the influence of Dobrava, whose sister Maria was abbess of the nunnery of St George in Prague. … Mieszko’s second wife was a German girl of very high family, the daughter of Dietrich, margrave of the north-eastern frontier. The alliance was so important to both parties that she had to be hauled out of the nunnery of Kalbe to exchange a heavenly for an earthly bridegroom. Theitmar was shocked at this, though he admitted that she subsequently performed many Christian good works.”

p. 431 The abandonment by the Magyars of a nomadic way of life and the permanent settlement in the Pannonian plain was followed by the expansion of east-west trade through the region and the gradual consolidation of power in the hands of a single princely dynasty, the Arpads. It is a familiar pattern. This does not mean that conversion to Christianity would follow as the night the day; but we may, ny now, be unsurprised to learn that it do so follow. The earliest ruler of the settled Magyars to adopt Christianity was Geza, probably around 980. The adoption took the form – again, not unfamiliar – of simply adding the Christian deity to his pantheon of traditional gods. When his bishop taxed him with this Geza is said to have replied “that he was a rich man and well able to afford sacrifices to all his gods”, so at least Thietmar of Merseburg had heard. Theitmar had also heard tales about Geza’s wife [Sarolt], that she was a hard drinker, rode like a night and had killed a man with her bare hands. Bruno of Querfurt reported that Adalbert’s missionary dealings were more with her than his husband, because “she held the whole kingdom in her hands”. Thietmar knew her by a Slav name, not a Magyar one. He rendered it Beleknegini and tells us that in Slavonic this means “beautiful lady” (more acccurately, actually, ‘white lady’). Had Geza married into a Christian Slav family – like Mieszk of Poland – and this was one means by which Christianity got a toehold at the Magyar court? If so, then the coming of Christianity to Hungary was evidently a rather more complicated matter than the Passau version would have had it; or, for the matter of that, the Constantinopolitan version”.

p. 469 It is not often that we can witness the foundation of a parish. But … in the year 922 a church was consecrated in the name of St John the Baptist at the village of Mundarn in the district of Berga, high in the Pyrenees to the borth of Barcelona. It had been built on the order of a lady named Emma, who was abbess of the nunnery of San Juan de las Abadesas, Emma Barcelona, the daughter of Count Wifred the Hairy of Carvelona (d. 898) who had been the uncrowned king of the SPanish March (though nominally subject to the king of West Francia. Wifred had founded the nunnery in about 892 and installed his daughter as its first abeess, a familiar arrangement. Emma president over San Juan de la Abadesas for 50 years. Evidently an active and decisive woman, she devoted her considerable energies, among other things, to the orgnaisation of pastoral ministry on the monastic estates… whatever rural pastoral organisation had existed in the Romano-Visigothic period (if any) had been disrupted during the period of Islamic rule, which had come to an end only during Emma’s father’s lifetime and to some degree owing to his efforts… So she commissioned the building of the church at Mundarn and then invited the local bishop Rudolfo (or Ralph) or Urgel – who was her brother – to come and dedicate it…. She provided the new church with vestements and bookss: a chasuble, stole, maniple and alb; a missal, lectionary, psalter, antiphonal and a selection of ‘uplifting homilies from the holy Fathers of the Catholic church’… she also gave a house on the south side of the church as a residence for the parish priest together with various plots of land for his support” … On gets a sense, in studying these rare survivals, that setting up a new parish in Catalonia in the early 10th century was something that people knew how to do. It was not some unfamiliar new departure.”

p. 504 “Raiding brough Christian captives into Lithuania… A writer of the mid13th thought that the Lithuanian aristocracy would be easy to convert because so many of its members had been brought up by Christian wet-nurses and nannies. Foreign merchants brough theiir faith with them, just as they had done in earlier centuries to the ports of the north German and Danish coastlines. .. A complicated web of diplomact bound the Lithuanian ruling dynasty into the princely houses of Christendom. “

“Three Acres and a Cow” David H Haney

P. 19 “the Liberals supported the widespread establishment of small holdings, in opposition to the Tories, who represented the landholding class. As early as 1879, William Gladstone spoke of the need for “petite culture” in England, referring to the perceived success of the proprietary peasants in France. The chief figure behind this movement was Liberal Member of Parliament Jesse Collings, whose phrase “three acres and a cow” became a popular slogan. Beginning in 1887, Collings set in motion the passage of a series of Acts of Parliament designed to provide individuals with allotments and small holdings from which they could derive all or part of their income. This series of Acts culminated in those of 1908 1909 and 1920, which directed local county councils to procure and administrate allotments and smallboldings for either lease or sale, according to local demands. This was a highly political issue, with some politicians categorically denouncing the notion of small holdings as a viable economic solution. Published government reports from 1909-10 indicate significant popular interest, but a massive amount of small holdings was never provided, largely due to apathy and interference from government officials and the landed classes. (See maps etc Report of the Land Division for 1909 (Board and Agriculture and Fisheries)

William Booth of Salvation Army “succeeded. In raising £100,000 to purchase nine hundred acres of farmland and to set up operations next to the village of Hadleigh in Essex near the Thames Estuary,,, more land gradually acquired bringing the total area to more than 3,000 acres. While not entirely economically self-sufficient, the venture was by all accounts a success, as the primary goal was to retrain destitute down-and-out men. (In 1895 there were 350 men in residence.) The majority o the men trained at Hadleigh were sent to colonies overseas, as Booth had promised with Canada a preferred destination. But the outbreak of WWI marked the gradual decline of the British Empire, and the farm as well.”

”The landscape of the Dutch IJsselmeer Polders: Amsterdam and its food supply system 1930-69” Z Hemel

P. 128 “In 1941, when the general plan for the Southwestern polder was drawn up, the capital set up a Municipal Zuider Zee Committee… growing opposition to the large-scale technical works within the Dutch local history and nature conservation movements led to the Organization of a Preservation Day in Amsterdam held in September 1942,,, Fir the first time there was something that could be called a dialogue between the bureaucratic apparatus and town planners, landscape architects and preservationists… in 1940 Dudok developed a sketch in which the polder space was apportioned with great belts of wood, an unprecedented proposal, as it earmarked precious fertile land as forest area. Van Eesteren supported Dudok’s idea, not just for aesthetic reasons but because he thought it was ecologically sound: it prevented erosion, blocked the wind moistened the land, and offered shelter to useful birds and insects.”

p. 139 Although the Southwestern polder was never drained and Lelystad was build according to a somewhat different scheme (because the Dutch state considered Van Eesteren’s plan too bold and optimistic), most of the structure plan has been implemented. .. Food production on farms in the Ijselmeer polders ranks among the most productive in the world. ,, Even the introduction of a nature reserve of more than 56 square km between Lelystad and Almere – which some say happened by accident because nature took over when a planned industrial estate was no longer needed, – can be seen as the late fulfilment of the vision of Van Eesteren,,,, Beauty and function really coincided… and in 2-12, the new town Almere won the bid for the Florida and will host the prestigious world horticultural expo in the year 2-22. The MVRDV-designed plan for the expo proposes building a city that is literally green as well as ecological. As Windy Maas, one of the founders of MVRDV explains it will be a city “that provides food and energy, cleans its own water, recycles waste and holds a great biodiversity,,, Can this symbiosis between city and countryside offer essential argumentation to the global concerns regarding urbanisation and consumption?”

”From Beets in the Bronx to chard in Chicago,” L Lawson and L Drake

P. 143 “while general applauded as self-help and community activism, some geographers and urban studies scholars have exposed deeper political implications, questioning whether community gardens represent stopgap solutions that facilitate neoliberal policies or are emblematic of “rights to the city” Social justice discourse”

P, 145 “In the American city of the 1890s, gardening was an attractive solution for a range of economic, social and environmental concerns… the effort to engage unemployed workers in gardening for food and income, known as vacant lot cultivation associations. Starting in Detroit in 1894, the success of “Pingree’s Potato Patches” inspired charitable organisation in many other Us cities.. discourse primarily centred on the survival of individual families – allowing poor residents to grow a wide variety of food for household consumption, including food that could be stored for winter, and to sell surplus produce.

P. 148 Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor “the AICP report noted that gardening kept people busy so they could not organise or riot: “as long as US soldiers will shoot rioters, we need not fear an actual insurrection… [nonetheless] the idle man is still the dangerous one.”

p 152 WWII “agricultural experts considered gardening as a way to expand domestic diet options and improve nutritional outcomes. The importance of gardening was not just in the material production of food but also in the symbolic linkage of civilians and soldiers abroad, because “food will be one of our major weapons of war”. Campaigns thus promoted gardening in any available space, from backyards to public land and vacant lots, emphasising food production and an ethic of collaboration, collective welfare and national morale.”

“Transforming a Hostile Environment: Japanese Immigrant Farmers in Metropolitan California”

P. 198 Having developed irrigation for the region

S arid landscapes and a strategy for growing high-value speciality crops, California led the West in agricultural productivity by 1900. That year, more than 5.5 million thriving orange trees fulfilled the promise of California as an agricultural Eden, and the image of shiny-leaved, fragrant citrus trees was deployed by powerful marketing organisations to draw migrants from other parts of the US… developed as a type of industrialised agribusiness that specifically welcomed immigrants as long as they contributed to a cheap pool of farm labour. Out-of-work Chinese railroad labourers were the first major immigrant group… By 1882, when these workers represented up to 3,4 of Californian farm labourers, long-boiling, anti-Chinese organizing resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first major law restricting immigration to the Unite States. Yet landholders’ continuing need fir cheap labour opened the door to emigrants from Japan … between 1900 and 1910 when the Japanese population in California quadrupled to 41,356,,, men between the ages of 20 and 44 made up the majority of the first generation immigrants.. Issei leaders such as SAN Francisco-based publisher Kyutaro Abiko helped transform the vision of success for Japanese immigrants from that of temporary sojourner to rooted family farmer. Yet transitioning from a bachelor society was not a smooth process. Up to 1910, the dramatic gender imbalance in Japanese immigrant communities meant that Hapanese wives often lived in isolation in rural or urban setting surrounded by men, and often had to deal with harassment and even rape. When they fled their situation, Japanese newspapers frequently ran kakeochi (husband desertio) advertisements containing descriptions of runaway wives and their villainous lovers. But women looking to extricate themselves from unhappy marriages found that their status in an overwhelmingly male society also meant that new possibilities err plentiful in California’s early Japanese settlements.”

“How Tokyo invented sushi” J. Sand

P. 224 “the type most people would think of as ordinary sushi – can be dated through reasonably reliable sources to a restauranteur’s invention iOS the 1810s or 1820s in Tokyo (then known as Edo) although, as with most food concoctions, there is some fuzziness about what previcely was being invented. What the Japanese call sushi on the other hand, is a broader category of food and more ancient. The word simply means pickled rice.. mixing vinegar into cooked rice preserves it. Vinegared or salted cooked rice, in turn, makes a good medium for preserving other foods. In Japan and elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia, a variety of preserved fish dishes can be found that used cooked rice this way; it is likely that some date to prehistoric times. Typically the fish is laid on top or buried between layers of fermenting rice and pressed under weights for days, weeks or even years… Pressing removed the oil from the fish while fermentation of the rice, in essence, “cooked” its proteins… techniques for preserving proteins have special importance in the context of a peasant’s subsistence economy, in which people must ration their food supplies…. the simple nigirisushi, dependent on fresh ingredients, was an urban version .. by 1700 a population of 1 million … remarkable a city of this size could be effectively supplied with food when all transport relied on human and animal energy, and the regime severely restricted the use even of wheeled vehicles., ,, copious amounts of fresh fish, so fresh that some of it, at least, could be eaten raw. ,, rapid cargo boats that combined sails and oars brought fish caught in the outer bay and on the Pacific coast to the market… these boats were permitted to enter the bay without stopping for inspection at the guardhouse where other ships were inspected before entering”.

Paris is a land of plenty – kitchen gardens as an urban phenomenon in a modern-era European city (16th-18th century)

P. 274 The Maria’s were small plots of land intensively cultivated by market gardeners, who could rent or own the land.. during the three centuries of the ancien regime, the Masai’s attempted to hold out against urban expansion, but they were constantly pushed farther away, towards the outskirts of the city, as the built-up area advanced..when a road crossed a malaise that was then allotted, topamony my recalled the area’s market gardening past. Thus in the 18th century were laid the Rus de Maria’s, Rue des Terre-Fortes, Rue des Petit-Champs, Rue Nuevo de Petits Champs, rue du Pont auc Chou, Rue du Chenin Vert, Cul De Dac des Jardinieres, and Rue de l’oseille, remembering land use, gardeners and crops.

P. 275 population of about 604,000 As the population’s diet was mainly based on bread and soup, it was crucial for the authorities to ensure that the markets were supplied with vegetables for the cooking pot. (As is evident from the word’s etymology, the “portages”had to provide vegetables and herbs for the pot.) The ancien regime embraced a new enthusiasm for dishes made of fresh salad vegetables and fruits, and this was particularly so in the case of the elite by birth or wealth. Developed from the final decades of the 16th century to the early decades of the 17th, this new French way of cooking advocated early vegetables and lettuces, orprimeurs, and fresh fruits to be eastern as soon as they were ready or ripe, rather than dried vegetables and fruits for storage. The cooks also replaced exotic spices with native herbs – one of the most important of them was parsley, and so the culinery regime of the bouquet garni began..

P. 277 The fruit and vegetable garden was an integral part of the French cultural model that was developed under the Bourbons; therefore, the social spectrum of Parisians engaged in gardening was particularly wide, ranging from the highest echelons of the aristocracy to the market gardeners.”

P. 285 The choice of vegetables with very short period of edible ripeness, of growing early vegetables and of increasing the number of harvests on the ame plots of land throughout the year made possible the continuation of commercial horticulture in Paris… an ardent (about an acre) of Maria’s enabled a family of market gardeners to live from their work.. a significantly higher return on investment to fields sown with cereal crops or planted with grapes… in the 178-s the rent.. was.. 3 to 4 times higher… than in cereal-growing areas”.

P. 286 “Growing plants on layers of manure resulted in the stimulation of vegetative development due to the warmth produced by the decomposing manure and straw. Vegetable seedlings were planted in a layer of compost placed on top of a layer of animal manure … technique in common use from the 16th century onwards for the growing of cucumbers and melons. ,,, gardeners cleared away this urban waste free of charge and so they contributed to the cleaning of roads and streets.”

“Market gardens in Paris” S. Taylor-Leduc

P. 301 “circulars intelligent: Parisian waste returns as food.. today we would describe as an urban ecosystem. In the 19th century, such holistic systems fascinated city planners, politicians, economists, sanitation reformers, and utopian visionaries.. from 1858 to 1900, 1,6th of the area of Paris was sued to produce more than 100,000 tonnes of high-value vegetable crops annually.. remarkable productivity, unequalled by contemporary industrial standards,.. market gardeners were at the center, not the periphery, f 19th-century Oarisian urban planning and food culture.”

p. Emile Zola’s portrayal of the Carreau in The Belly of Paris remains one of the most evocative descriptions of vegetables in 19th-century literature.”

p. 17 “The hungry became figures of humanitarian concern only when novel forms of news reporting connected people emotionally with the suffering of the hungry and refuted the Malthusian model of causation. In this sense hunger became news during the 1840s but it was not until the last decades of the ninteenth century that it became firmly estanlished as a humanitarian cause celebre- one that would later give rise to organizations intent on the conquest of hunger, like Save the Children and Oxfam.”

p. 45 “Refuting the widespread belief that the famine was an act of providence (John) Mitchell argued that it was manmade in England, where the potato blight was the pretext for a knowingly perpetrated genocide. Using Britain’s own parliamentary reports, blue blooks, and census figure, he provided a litany of examples – ample harvests, exports of grain from Ireland, the profiteering use of relief supplies, the absence of British funds for relief, incompetent and murderous bureacrats, and opportunistic Anglo-Irish landlords determined to rid themselves of unproductive tenants – that demonstrated a concerted British policy of starvation and depopulation…. His associationof classical political economy with the English and famine was doubly damning; it undercut both the presumed universality of the laws of political economy and it promise to deliver the wealth of nations, at least to any nation other than England.”

p. 61 “The hunger strike arrived in Britain on 5 July 1909. On that day Marion Dunlop refused her prison food, to protest at the government’s refusal to recogise her offence (which was writing a clause of the Bill of Rights on the walls of the Houses of Parliament) as a political rather than a criminal act. Released after 91 hourson hunger strike, she was greeted by the WSPU as an exemplary figure whose protest had demonstrated her selfless commitment to the cause…the enthusiasm soon spread to Ireland. .. Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, one of the first to go on hunger strike, recalled that the “hunger strike was then a new weapon – we were the first to try it out in Ireland. Consequently, she wrote: “Sinn Fein and it allies regarded [the tactic] as a womanish thing. This was soon to change. During the 1920s, in the rush to assemble an exclusively male republican tradition for the huger strike, its prior history was quickly forgotten … gendered the hunger strike in particular wys to suit their idea of who was capable of the requisite self-sacrifice and discipline.”

p. 88 Edwardian years “Maud Pember Reeves … recognized the importance of nutritional science in analysing the adequacy of diets but lamented those who championed scientific diets and classes in household management were blind to the realities the labouring poor were facing. A poor woman, she insisted, was not inefficient or ignorant of nutritional principles; she had “but one pair of hands and but one overburdened brain.. give her six children, and between the bearing and the reading of them she has little extra vitality left for scientific cookin, even if she could afford the necessary time and appliances. And even if she did, she would still have to conend with the well-established taste of family members, especially the male breadwinner, who would probably “entirely refuce the scientific food”. The poor assessed their diet not by nutritional standards but by its taste. .. the insistence that food had a social and cultural meaning of its own, quite apart from its nutritional value, was to be lost for a generation, before being rediscovered by anthropologists.”

p. 145 “Most social nutritionists, however, believed that the market was not a sufficient mechanism for the reconstruction of postwar society nutritionally. Writing in the year that the Beveridge Report captured the social democratic agenda for postwar reconstruction, Orr insisted that after the war “the main function of the Government will be the promotion of the welfare of the people governed, and food policy will be based not on trade interests but on the nutritional needs of the people”. The Wartime Food Survey had shown what planning could achieve, .. The Ministry fo Food’s white paper on postwar food policy hailed this triumph of planning [improved diets during the war] as the key to the future. Acknowledging that poverty was the primary cause of hunger and malnutrition, it stated that the task of the emerging welfare state was to ensure that all members of society had a sufficient income to secure a healthy diet. … it outlined two specific objectives for the Ministry of Food: to extend the wartime system of foods for nursing mothers and children on welfare, so that all “boys and girls of this country shall be equipped to face life in the best physical and mental condiition that a full diet can secure”, and “to assist the adult citizens in choosing foods of the right nutritional value” through the regulation of advertising and food labelling” as well as”the widest measures of education and publicitiy.

p.245 When Mary Docherty asked Hannington whether she could join the NUWM’s second national hunger march in 1929, he bluntly replied: “No, nae women were allowed.” Yet later that year the NUWM created a women’s department under the direction of Maud Brown, and she secured women’s limited participation in the third national Hunger March. What really brought women into the fold was the means test on family life, and the disqualification fo 179,888 married women from unemployment relief under the Anomolies Act of June 1931. In 1932, some 50 women, ranging in age from 16 to 63, marched from Burnley to London and into the mythology of the movement. … Yet deep down the hunger march remained an inveterately masculine phenomenon. Women were not even allowed on the Jarrow march. |Ellen Wilkinson, who was the only woman alllowed on the march, believed they would “add complications” … undercut the image of a hunger march as a display of the strength and dignity of unemployed men,.. the right to welfare they articulated was based on the assumption that the needs of the unemployed man always came first.”