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Books Early modern history History Women's history

Notes from Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450-1700, James Daybell (ed)

October 24, 2020 – 10:07 pm

p. 42 “Extended networks of collateral relatives, neigbbours and friends also functioned as additional resources for ariscratic widows and wives in trouble. Lady Margaret Beaufort opened her great household at Collyweston to numberous women of this kind. Lady Anne Clifford, her half-brother’s daughter, and her two dughters found refuce with her when she separated from her husband, Henry, Lord Clifford. Elizabeth, Lady Scrope, lived at Collyweston after the death of her second husband, Sir Henry Westworth, in 1501. When her steopson, Sir Richard, disputed the terms of her marriage contract with his father, Lady Margaret intervened and forced him to sign heavy bonds in which he promised to accept the findings of an arbitration panel headed by her chamberlain. … Another of Margaret’s widowed friends, Cecily, Viscountess Welles, visited Collyweston frequently. When she died in 1506 Lady Margaret arranged for prayers to be said for her in her private chapel. Three years later, she bequeathed “a heart of hold with a fair sapphire” to Lady Powis’s daugher in her own will.”

p. 43 “A similar circle gathered around Elizabeth Mowbray, duchess of Norfolk, who retired to the Minories in London in 1488. … the group included her sister in law, Dame Jane Talbot, widow of Sir Humphrey, Elizabeth Brackenbury, coheir of Sir Robert, a follower of Richard III who had died at Bosworth, and Mary Tyrell, Anne Montgomery’s niece. Anne Montgomery died and was buried at the Minories in 1498. Subsequently both the duchess and Dame Talbot asked to be bured near her, a final tribute to the strength of their mutual ties.”

“Decades later, two high-ranking noblewomen, Elenaor, countess of Rutland, and Catherine, countess of Westmorland, who were connected by the marriage of their children, retired together to Haliwell, the London home of the Rutland heir, Hentry, the second earl. When they died in the early 1550s, they were both buried in the nearby church of St Leonard Shoreditch. Margaret, the second earl’s wife and the countess of Westmorland’s daughter, was also buried there in 1559. The internment of three countesses at St Leonard’s turned it into a mausoleum for members of the earl of Rutland’s family. Eventially two of Eleanor, countess of Rutland’s sons, Oliver and Sir Thomas, her daughter, Anne, and her granddaughter, Catherine Nevill, wife of Sir John Constable, were also duried there. Lady Constable’s sister, Lady Adeline Neville, built a monument in the church marking their tombs.”

p. 53 “both rhetoric and pragmatics encourage us to attend to context. They offer concepts of decorum of appropriateness, the fit of the words to the audience and the occasiona, as a critical measure for the value of the verbal performance as social activity. How strongly aware Elizabethan writers were of the adequacy of that fit is suggested when a copy of Lady Catherine Grey’s petition for the Queen’s forgiveness regarding her illicit marriage to the earl of Hertford is sent by her uncle in advance of her advice to Sir William Cecil to guard against there being “onni faute foud with onni word theerin wrytten”. Politeness analysis, as developed within pragmatics, can help to show that how a gentlewoman frames a request depends to a very large extend on the power relations obtaining in the situation. For example, consider the verbal complexity of Elizabeth Cavendish’s request to her mother, the countess of Shrewsbury, that her mother should neither believe nor spread lies about her – “I myght be so bould as to crave at your Ladyships hands that it wold please you to exteme (esteem) shuch falce bruts [rumours]… as lightly as you have don when others were in the like cas”. The complicated redundancy in the framing of the request reflects the power difference between them and the daughter’s corresponding estimation of the repair work required to counter the risk implicit in making the difficult request… Pragmatics is not wholly responsive to the discourse conditions of the Elizabethan political scene, in which a noblewoman’s social rank, marital status, property holdings, relationship to a patron or favoured faction, accompanying gratuity, previous expense laid out for a New Year’s gift for the Queen, all may affect the reception and efficiacy of a supplicatory letter as much as the virtuosity or decorum of its style. In this essay I will eventually draw upon Pierre Bourdieu’s economic model of linguistic exchange, which regards linguistic skill as only one among other forms of symbolic capital affecting how an utterance is received in any field or market.”

p. 212 “one of the manuscripts I am going to discuss describes a kind of sub-university for women in the 1630s made up of women who were sent to be educated by the wife of the Principal of New Inn Hall, Dr Rogers. Another mentions a kind of Nonconformist academy for the daughters of Dissenting families, run by a Mr Hill in Godmersham in Kent in 1671.”

p. 212 “Attitudes to female publication are shown in Robery Boyle’s dedication of his book, Occasional Reflections, to Katherine Ranelagh. Although she was ‘so great a Mistress of Wit, and Eloquence’, and encouraged him to publish his writing, she refused herself to publish anything at all: “her Modesty did … confine her pen to Excellent Letters.”… Katherine Ranelagh joins the list of early modern literary figures who thought Margaret Cavendish seriously deranged – “I am resolved she scapes Bedlam onely by being too rich to {be} sent thereto” she wrote in 1657.”

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Books Early modern history History Women's history

Notes from Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

October 20, 2020 – 10:01 pm

p. 31 “Lalande’s depiction of rag-pickers – female, itinerant and consigned to the background – encapsulates the identity, activity and cultural status of rag-collectors in Europe in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the 18th century. .. In Nuremberg, where the first paper-mill north of the Alps was established in 1390, one early twentieth-century commentator notes more explicitly that “collecting rags frm early days [was] the perogative of women”. .. the low end of the textile trades, a broad range of already low-prestige tasks related to the manufacture, upkeep and reuse of cloth and clothing, which often fell to women.”

p. 35 In 1588, John Spilman, jeweller to Queen Elizabeth, established a successful paper-mill in Dartford, Kent, having acquired a monoloply on rag-collection and the production of paper. A letter of complaint about Spilman dated 21 May 1601, written by the Lord Mayor William Rider and the Aldermen to the Privy Council…[Spliman “began to offer wrong to the charter of the city by authorizing great numberts of poor people, especially girls and vagrant women, to collect rags etc within the city and liberties, who under the pretence of that service, ranged abroad in every street, begging at men’s doors, whereby the discipline of the city was weakened”

p. 39 Rag-pickers feature in two short anonymous plays printed after the closure of the theatres in 1642, The New Brawl (1654) and The Gossips’ Brawl (1655) embed these rag-women in a wider labour force of marginalised women. The Gossips’ Brawl portrays .. the rag-raker Jone Ruggles, the fishwife Doll Crabbe, the tub-woman Megg Lant-Ale and the hostess Bess Bungole – as vulgar, drunk and quarrelsome.”

p. 50 Arguably the most influential account of widow stationers was put forward by Edward Arber in 1894. In the introduction to his fifth and final volume of his monumental Transcript of the Stationers’ Registers, Aerber attempts to “trace the career of a London stationer from his boyhood to his death”… Aerber suggested that an apprentice could marry the daughter of the master printer for whom he worked .. if that did not work out, the young stationer could opt to ‘marry a Printers’ widow”… repeated in the most important studies of women stationers, including those by Pearl Hogrefe, who surmuses that “even the ugliest and most vile-tempered woman in London could have found an ambitious man ready to take her – and her print shop”. .. but the fundamental problem with the story is that very few stationers – and no apprentices – became master printers by marrying a widow. .. overwhelmingly did so by purchasing a printing house and its equipment or by inheriting them”

p. 52 “Remarriage enabled widow printers to remain active in the book trade and to continue to be involved in running a printing house… widow printers who remarried other stationers are thus almost always among the women who printed and published editions themselves”.

p. 57 The most prolific widow publisher from 1540 to 1640 was Anne Griffin, who brought out a total of 68 editions from 1622 to 1649… p 59 “instrumental in the formation of a loose network of widows who printed and published together from 1634 to 1638… widow printers were hiring widow booksellers… while widow booksellers were hiring widow publishers to produce the editions the booksellers had decided to bring out. This network was composed of the printers Mary Dawson, Anne Griffin and Elizabeth Purslowe (but not Elizabeth Allde) and the booksellers Anne Boler, Anne Moore, John Newbery, |Joyce Norton, Anne Vincent and Joan Man (but not Mary Allett). All together, they collaborated in the publication of 26 editions from 1634-1638, 18 of which involved Griffin.”

p. 146 Isabella Whitney “It has been suggested that most of her work was influenced by the prevailing modes and content of 1560s and 1570s poetry; as I will demonstrate, they were perhaps more immediately inspired by a number of titles that were readily available through Jones. In short, Jones’s bookshop appears to have been a familiar haven for Whitney, one that afforded he a library of London’s newest print offerings.”

p. 148 “she may have also had some relationship with John Allde, William Howe and/or Thomas Colwell. In the 1560s, these four bookmen, either singly or cooperatively, brought out a significant number of ballads; indeed Jones and Colwell were particularly preoccupied with financing and distributing verse broadsides as part of a general publishing strategy.. a significant portion of their output… had to do with the occupations of women and/or relationships between men and women, and a significant subset of these appear to address a female audience from the perspective of a woman. All of these ballads have literally been read out of existence, but the Stationers’ Register records a large number of titles that could have been written by Whitney between 1563 and 1571.”

p. 154 ‘Will and Testament’ was yet another product of time spent in Jones’s bookshop; Whitney appears to have composed the oem after erusing The Will of the Devil. The anonymous pamphley appears to have been first brought to press by the printer Humphrey Powell in the late 1540s and its short length, virulent anti-Catholicism and satiric tone were fashioned for England’s first generation of middling Anglican-Protestant book buyters. The bulk of it is dedicated to the ‘Testament and lasy Wyll” of Belseebub”, which consistens of the demi-devil distributing the rituals, articles and suns of his followers back to his followers. These devotees consist of Catholic clergymen, reprobates like usurers and knaves, and a large host of tradesmen, professionals and townswomen. Jones acquired the satiric pamplet in the mid-1560s. Repinted in the late 1560s and in an expanded edition in the early 1580s, it proved to be one of his most popular early offerings and was undoubtedly part of the ‘ware’ that Whitney advertises in her ‘Will and Testament’.”

M. O’Callaghan, 2019, mt Printer must ue somwhat to his share’ Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones and Crafting Books,’ Women’s Writing 26 (1), pp. 15-34.

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Books Politics

Notes from Trade Wars are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace

October 18, 2020 – 6:03 pm

p. 12 George Washington and Alexander Hamilton … The United States, they decided, would have to become economically self-sufficient to guarantee its newfound political indeendence… To use the language of Ricardo, Ameicans would have to make both cloth and wine, regardless of what any economic theory might suggest… Under the right conditions, the new United States could transform itself into a manufacturing superpower – but those conditions needed to be created by a strong state to encourage the market to create the right sort of manufacturing capacity.”

p. 13 “the goal was to promotr entrepreneurship and investment. Hamilton believed that the guaranteed domestic market would make it easier for Americans to start new businesses in what were then the high tech industries of textiles, nails, glassmaking, and gun-making.”

p. 16 “in 1941, List expanded his ideas into The National System of Political Economy, a mix of theory, history and reporting mean to give statesmen in what he hoped would become the new German nation. His thesis was that “free competition between two nations which are highly civilised can only be mutually beneficial in case both of them are in a nearly equal position of industrial development.” A country such as Germany, which was less developed but “possesses the “mental and material means ” to become wealthy, should insyead avoid free trade and “strengthen her own individual powers”.

p. 28 “American exports of goods to Canada and Mexico are worth about as much as US exports of goods to the European Union, China, Japan and Korea combined. Much of the value of US exports to its neighbours, however, comes from elsewhere. A seatbelt for an American-made care or light truck, for example, might have its fibers manufactured in Mexico, woven and dyed to take advantage of abundant water, sent back to Mexico to be sewn up, and then installed somewhere at a plant in the United States.”

p. 29 “The increasing importance of these global value chains means that conventional bilateral trade data no longer do a good job of measuring the actual value created by workers and machines in each country. .. For the United states, imports are overstated by about 16% while exports are overstated by about 20%. Chinese imports and exports are both overstated by about 30%.”

p. 30 Qhwn the US income tax was introduced in 1913, it assessed nothing on money earned abroad. Nobody seemed to mind until the 1950s when American companies started agreessively relocating parts of their businesses to foreign countries to exploit lower tax rates. By the early 1960s, this was starting to have a meaningful impact on the tax base.”

p. 31 “Everything changed in 1996 with Treasury DEcision 8697. The new rule, which came to be known as ‘check-the-box’ by practitioners, was supposed to make things sipler for tax filers and make life easier for Internal Revenue Service examiners. Instead, it opened up massive loopoles in the corporate tax code. Among other things, income from royalties and licences could now be treated the same as income from foreign factories. The IRS quickly recognized tsome of the implications and proposed a new rule … but political interference blocked any fix.”

p. 32 “As foreign sales rose in importance and large US companies got better at profit shirting, their effective tax rate dropped from a bit over 35% in thre mid-1990s to about 30% by the early 2000s to about 26% by the mid-2010s. Although the tax law passed at the end of 2017 lowered the effective corporate tax rate below 20% and more or less replaced America’s worldwide system of corporate taxation with a territorial system, it did not remove the incentives for profit shifting.”

p. 104 Unfortunately for China, the choices of the past few decades have become politically entrenched. It is easy for an antidemocratic authoritarian regime to suppress workers’ rights and shift spending power from consumers to large companies. Stalin did it, after all. The problem is that years of state-sponsorred income concentration creates a potent group of ‘vested interests’… that will fiercely resist ant reforms that would shift spending power back to consumers. Any successful adjustment process will require a new relationship between the government, the people and the elites.”

p. 222 From a certain perspective, the United States – and the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, all of which play a similar role in the global economy — therefore resembles the importial colonies of Europe in the late 19th century. Back then, subject peoples were forced to buy Europe’s excess production in exchange for taking on unneeced debt. Remarkably, a similar situation exists today. Instead of violence, however, the modern regime depends on the English-speaking countries’ political commitment to open markets. This is a choice, but in democracies, the people have the option to change their mind.”

p. 223 “addressing trade imbalances through tariffs is likely to be ineffective at best and harmful under certain conditions. That is why it matters that capital controls are becoming increasinly popular, especially in other English-speaking economies. New Zeland recently banned all nonresidents from buying residential property. Australia limits foreign buyers to new homes, which has helped stimulate construction, and it taxes foreign purchases, although the rates vary state by state. Some local governments in Canada have begun taxing foreign purchasers of housing…. When the system was first constructed, the US exonomy was about equal in size to the entire rest of the world. Today, however, the United States makes up less than a quarter of global output. Compared to 70 years ago, the rest of the world is now three times bigger relative to the United States, which means that America has far less capacity to absorn the rest of the world’s savings imbalances. If the US share of the global economy continues to shrink, the burden imposed on Americans will continue to rise until … the system will break down. Yet no one in the American political mainstream has felt comfortable challenging this system until recently. This apparent surprise can be explained by America’s own class wars. After all, plenty of Americans have prospoered producing financial assets to accommodate the rest of the world’s excess savings.. inflates the incomes of the financiers… as well as their political clout.”

Interesting book, though still struggling to understand how it could be written now with _no_ reference I could find (and none in the index) to climate emergency and environmental limits.

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Books History Women's history

Notes from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself

July 31, 2020 – 8:04 pm

by Harriet A Jacobs, edited and with intro by Jean Fagan Yellin (1987)

p. xxi Both its style and content are completely consistent with Jacob’s private correspondence and with her pseudonymous public letters to the newspapers – which unquestionably she wrote herself.”

p. xxvi “Like the persepctive of other slave narratives, the angle of vision of Incidents is revolutionary; and like other narrrators, Jacobs asserts her authoriship in the subtitle, uses the first person, and addresses the subject of the oppression of chattel slavery and the struggle for freedom from the viewpoitn of one who has been enslaved…. the special subject of this narrative, a woman’s struggle against her oppression in slavery as a sexual object and a mother”.

p. 8 Aged 12, her mistress dies: “She possessed but few slaves, and at her death these were distributed among her relatives. Five of them were my grandmother’s children and had shared the same milk that nourished her mother’s children. Nowithstanding my grandmother’s long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.”

p. 11 “My grandmother’s mistess had always promied her that, at her death, she should be free, and it was said that in her will she made good the promise. But when the estate was settled, Dr Flint told the faithful old servant that, under existing circumstances, it was necessary she be sold.”

“At last a feeble voice said “Fifty dollars.” It came from a maiden lady, 70 years old, the sister of my hrandmother’s deceased mistress. .. her wishes were respected and no one bid above her. She could neither read nor write, and when the bill of sale was made out, she signed it with a crosss. But what consequence was that, when she had a big heart overflowing with human kindness. She gave the old servant her freedom.”

p. 12 “Mrs Flint, like many southern women, was totally deficient in energy. She had not strength to superintend her household affairs, but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash…. If dinner was not served at the exact time on a particular Saturday, she would station herself in the kitchen and wait till it was dished, and then spit in all the kettles and pans that had been used for cooking. She did this to prevent the cook and her children from eking out their meagre fare.”

p. 13 “When the mother was delivered into the trader’s hands, she said: “You promised to treat me well.” To which he replied, “You have let your tongue run too far, damn you!” She had forgotten it was a crime for a slave to tell who was the father of her child.”

p. 28 ” I longed for some one to condife in… But Dr Flint swore he would kill me, if I was not as silent as the grave … I was lucky that I did not live on a distant plantation but in a town … the doctor, as a professional man, deemed it prudent to keep up some outward show of decency.”

p. 80 “My children grew finely, and Dr Flint would often say to me, with an exulting smile, “These brats will bring me a handsome sum of money one of these days.

I thought to myself that, God being my helper, they should never pass into his hands… The money for the freedom of myself and my children could be obtained, but I derived no advantage from that circumstance. Dr Flint loved money, but he loved power more.”

p. 143 Aunt Nancy “had been married at 20 years of age, that is, so far as a slave can marry. She had the consent of her master and mistress, and a glergyman performed the ceremony. But it was a mere form, without any legal value. Her master or mistress could annul it any day they pleased. She had always slept on the floor in the entry, near Mrs Flint’s chamber door, that she might be within call. When she was married, she was told she might have the use of a small room in an outhouse. Her mother and her husband furnished it. He was a seafaring man, and was allowed to sleep there when he was at home. But on the wedding evening, the bride was ordered to her old post on the entry door…. She kept her station there through summer and winter, until she had given premature birth to six children. and all the while she was employed as night-nurse to Mrs Flint’s children.”

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Books Politics

Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers by David Scott Fitzgerald

July 8, 2020 – 2:48 pm

p. 253

Persecuted people seeking asylum must first reach a territory where they can make a claim. Governments of countries in the Global North try to evade the spirit of refugee protection laws, while plausibly complying with their letter, by keep asylum seekers away from their borders using techniques of remote control. Legal scholars have rightly criticized the “hyper-legal” logic of these policies. The fact that so many people who are able to evade the deadly barriers have successfully gained asylum highlights tha these policies deliveratly prevent refugees from reaching sanctuary. The reluctance of governments to rescue drowning refugees at the conclusion of the Mare Nostrum program in the Med in 2014 encapsulates the basic logic of remote control of people seeking asylum. Leaders in the Global North know people are dying. As long as government agents and refugees are not situated in a common physical space, governments deny responsibility. By cracking down on NGos at sea, governments ensure that even private actors are not in a position to render aid or force the state to activate norms of rescue and sanctuary.”

p. 264 “In a speech to the European Parliament in 2014, Pope Francis… “We cannot allow the Mediterranean to become a vast cemetery!”.. Yet the Med continues to be a cemetery without graves. Since the 1930s it has swallowed Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, Eritreans and Ethiopians, Somalis and Syrians, and Palestinians fleeing Israel’s cage around Gaza. Buffering and interception takes place at sea, in Central American jungles, and deserts from Sonora to the Sahara.”

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Books Politics

Notes from The Far Right Today, by Cas Muddle

July 6, 2020 – 3:47 pm

“These on the Fourth Wave”

p. 164 “While the extreme right remains largely marginal and marginalized, the populist radical right has become mainstreamed in most western democracies. Mainstreaming takes places because populist radical right parties and mainstream parties address increasinly similar issues and because they offer increasingly similar issue positions. The change can come from movement by the populist radical right (moderation) by the mainstream (radicalization), or by both at the same time (convergence).

At the beginning of the third wave, populist radical right parties were seen as ‘niche parties’ which mainly addressed socio-cultural issues like crime and immigration. In contrast, mainstream parties competed primiarly on the basis of socio-economic issues like taxation and unemployment. But in the last two decades, socio-cultural issues have come to dominate the political adenda. .. mainstream and populist radical right parties not only address the same issues, they also increasingly offer similar issue positions. Research shows that this is the consequence more of the radicalization of mainstream parties than of the moderation of populist radical right parties…. mainstream parties have radicalized, mocing further towards the (populist radical) right in terms of, first and foremost, immigration and integration, but also law and order, European integration (or international collaboration more generally), and populism.”

p. 166 “in some countries they do not even have to be (officially) part of the government to dictate a significant part of its agenda, most notably immigration and integration policies, such as in the Czech Republic, Frnace, of the UK. It is important to remember that this is taking place as populist radical right parties are still, in almost all countries, a political minority – on average the third biggest party in the country.”

p. 169 “Populist radical right parties, and particularly ideas, are increasingly tolerated, and even embraced, by business, civil society, economic, media and political circles. This has reached new levels in the wake of Brexit and Trump in 2016, which saw an outpouring of understanding for ‘working-class voters’ that was often framed within an outright populist narrative. The common people (“Somewheres”) were the political victims of an out-of-touch elite (“Anywheres”). This frame is not just pushed in rightwing media, notably Murdoch-owned media in Anglo-Saxon countries, but also enthusiastically embraced by liveral media. .. it reduces the working class to just whites and nativists, another problematic simplification”.

p. 172 “Most far-right groups are ambivalent sexist: that is, combining aspects of both benevolent sexism and hostile sexism… more traditional interpretations of masculinity predominate, in which men are expected to be strong protectors of weak women, toxic masculinity, in which mental and sexual frustration is taken out on independent and ‘opinionated’ women is increasingly prominent.”

p179 What to do in response? “Rather than following the far right’s issues, let alone their frames, we should address the issues that concern us, as well as the majority of the population, and posit our own, ideologically informed, positions…. we should set clear limits to what collaborations and positions are consistent with liberal democratic values – ideally before we are confronted with a significant far-right challenge.”

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