Category Archives: Arts

Books History Women's history

Notes from Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War

March 17, 2019 – 9:40 am

p. 34 It is, moreover, notable that women appear to have played a significant role in literature and learning throughout the period, whether as recipients of complex and challenging Latin works, such as Aldhelm’s twin work in both prose and verse on virginity, sent to the nuns of Barking, or as teachers of ppetry and producers of their own verse, such as Eadburh, abbess if Minister-in-Thanet (d. 751) and her younger contemporaries Leofgyth and Berhtgyth, both of whom have left poems associated with Boniface’s mission to Germania. Powerful women in the late 7th century also fostered learning and literature in the north, notably Abbess Hild of Whitby (614-680), whose monastery was the setting, Bede says, of the first Christian poetry in traditional Old English metre, by the illiterate cowherd Caedmon. Bede is uncharacteristically shy  about asserting that Caedmon reported his first faltering verses to Hild herself, and it seems likely that the supposed event took place in the time of her successors, Eanflaed (d. c. 685) or Aelflaed (654-714), respectively the sister and niece of King Aldfrith of Northumbria (r. 685-705), who himself had a well-documented interest in verse in several languages, including both Latin and Irish.”

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Books Environmental politics History Politics Women's history

Notes from Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day

February 17, 2019 – 9:47 pm

Fascinating, broad-ranging study

p. 67 “Aristotle … the crucial contrast between ancient and modern here is one of approach, not invention, as the Politics expounds an essentially ‘open’ form of population thinking, which emerged from a world comprising a multiplicity of autonomous city-states of varying size and constitution, unlike the ‘closed’ model of the 19th-century European nation-state. Fertility and mortality, the two cornerstones of modern demography, play a minor role in Aristotle’s considerations because, for him, mobility and shifting patterns of membership were the main shapers of any community.”

p. 71 “Plato decreed that his ideal polis should contain 5,040 citizen farmers, male heads of landed households….Aristotle’s Politics … took exception to the size of Magneia’s population. The territory required to sustain such a multitude of people is impossibly vast, he alleged. But Aristotle’s objections .. were not just practical. A key point of his programme is that in measuring the greatness of a polis, biggest is not best. Greatness is about happiness and prosperity, which is produced by effectiveness, not numbers.”

Exhibit 3

“one of the most influential and enduring ideas in the history of generation and reproduction: that one’s birth circumstances can shape the course of one’s life. This powerful and alluring concept developed in Babylonia and eventually spread far across Eurasia thanks to influential proponents such as Ptolemy in the Roman Empire, al-Biruni in the medieval Islamic world and Sacrobosco in the Latin West .. Babylonian scholars began reading the gods’ intentions in the night sky in the third millennium BC. For around 2,000 years after that, celestial divination was exclusively a method for ruulers to check that their actions and intentions met with divine favour; the gods did not concern themselves with the fate of individuals. However, in 484BC, the Persian king Darius severed royal ties with the Babylonian intelligentsia after a political revolt, and scholars had to find new clients, new sources of income and prestige. Over the next few decades, a radical reconceptualization of the night sky took place that enabled individual destinies to be foretold. The two earliest extant horoscopes both date to 410BC, and by 400BC, give or take five years, the constellations on the eclipse – the path of the moon – had become 12 zodiacal signs of exactly equal sizes. They bear essentially the same names today as they did then.”

p. 253 In the era before the 19th-century rise of national statistics, we find a conception of population that was more attentive to the heterogeneity of sub-populations and its importance. Early modern population thinking did not standardize populations, nor pretend to treat them equally. Distinctive histories and political, cultural and religious differences were recognized to shape what numerical information should be collected, on which groups, and its interpretation. From the 16th or the early 19th century, balancing the heterogeneity of memberships making up the population of a state was a fundamental ground of the form and legitimacy of government, and of arguments for democracy…it reminds us of a fruitful way of thinking about aggregate properties of societies and states, different from the one we now take for granted. Its open, bottom-up reasoning about human numbers focused on how sub-populations are formed, sustained and compromised in relation to others and to wider forces.”

p. 321 “forceps, according to Aveling, prompted a sudden increase in man-midwifery, including lecture courses on obstetrics for male practitioners, lying-in hospitals staffed by men; and men attending route births. The boom was swiftly met by criticism, often centred on the threat to women’s modesty… upon closer examination cannot bear the full weight of the shift from female to male birth attendants. Sarah Stone, practicising in Bristol in the 1720s, complained about all the anatomically trained man-midwives in business. “For dissecting the Dead, and being just and tender to the Living, are vastly different.” The Chamberlens had no disciples in the city in this period, so forceps were not the reason that Bristol matrons started routinely hiring man-midives. Second, man-midwives did not always advocate the new technology.. Third .. the Camberlen family mobilized not one new technology, but three: the Vectis, the filley and the forceps… Wilson suggests that the most fundamental shift was not technological but mental: the idea that a surgeon had a role in the delivery of a living baby.”

p. 332 – suggests part of a shift of a number of professions from female to male, e.g. alewives, as economic opportunities developed and also “a somewhat peculiar version of a bigger project: the Enlightenment attempt to improve the life chances of mothers and babies.”

p. 345 “During the 18th-century debates about population, doctors, clergymen, mathematicians, government bureaucrats and others developed methods which drew on a wide range of public and private records to quantify features of populations. These numerical techniques were part of a general effort to ameliorate suffering and death, and they stimulated comparisons, which in turn contributed to the new statistical idea of population and the role of reproduction in determining its size. At the beginning of the 19th-century, in the wake of the French Revolution and Malthus’s Essay, governments began to institute civil registration of births, deaths and marriages, as well as regular census, thus providing more uniform and inclusive accounts of the national population.”

p. 633 “Often misread as a technological determinist who overstated the role of biological sex difference in her call for ‘control of human fertility’, Firestone is more accurately understood as a theorist of consciousness. Among the first to articulate the principle that reproduction is neither outside history nor inside the body, Ifrestone argued that the social organisation of reproduction, rather than biological destiny, determined not only female but human potential.”

p. 635 Far from becoming free individuals within a new economy of contractual labour, modern science and medicine reinforced women’s subjugation to a sexual division of labour allegedly based in natural fact. Activities which have never been inherently debilitating – pregnancy is not a disease, childcare can be shared and maternity if not incompatible with paid employment – were redefined for many (not all) modern women in terms of biological destin6y, thus justifying their sequestration as wives and mothers within the timeless sphere of domesticity.”

p. 637 “from a feminist point of view, the possibility of theorizing identity, status, classificatory systems, kinship, ritual, language and group organisation as social technologies offered the important possibility of accounting for reproductive causality by means other than physiology… social organisation not only plays a causal role in the determination of reproductive outcomes, but must be seen as constitutive of reproductivity itself.”

p. 350 “The story of the ‘nuptiality valve’ in western Europe before 1850 is now familiar, with a sizeable component of women’s reproductive capacity under-exploited or unexploited because of the relatively late age of marriage, and a significant number of women never marrying. It has frequently been asserted that this nuptiality pattern acted as a safety vale in the creation of demographic homeostasis… if mortality is assumed to have been unstable… nuptiality must e the principle ‘driver’ of fertility. France in the period c. 1650-1800 exemplifies such n interrelationship. A demographic equilibrium continually re-established itself, despite disturbances large initiated by epidemics… for much of the late 17th and 18th centuries, the number of hearths in the Paris basin barely changed at all… demographers use the concept of an agricultural holding or craft workshop as fulfilling a function analogous to that of a territory in a bird population in which a new breeding pair I allowed to establish itself only once a next is vacated”

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Books Environmental politics History

Notes from Landskipping by Anna Pavord

February 2, 2019 – 10:36 pm

p. 109 William Cobbett’s “reports of his Rural Rides started to appear in 1821, in the pages of his journal, the Political register… rode with the eyes of a yeoman farmer, constantly appraising the capabilities of the land he was passing through. He appreciated well-grown crops, well-tended orchards, properly managed flocks. He was fantastically energetic, endlessly curious, splenetic, endearing in his lack of self-doubt… If only farmers would do things his way, sow more swedes, and sow that seed in drills rather than broadcast, then agriculture in Britain might yet be saved. ‘Cobbett’s Quackeries’, his enemies called these obsessions – for American corn (the maize that is now widely grown by farmers for cattle doffer), for robina as a fast-growing fuel, for straw plaiting as a way of providing an income for countrywomen. Why should Leghorn bonnets make Italy rich, when plaiting straw for the bonnets could equally well be done here in England?”

p. 111 “It was because of this sympathy with the labourer (the Political Register had a circulation of c. 60,000, mostly among working men) that Cobbett always felt happiest in relatively sheltered, well-wooded country. He felt no connection with the high, open landscape of the Cotswolds.. going towards Cirencester in October 1821, he noted fields ‘fenced with stone, laid together in walls without mortar or earth … There is very little wood here. The labourers seem miserably poor….in the high chalk lands round Salisbury, where fuel had to be bought, he remembered the miserable sight of the poor taking turns to make a fire so that four or five kettles could be boiled on the one flame. ‘What a winter life must those lead, whose turn it is not to make the fire.’”

p. 112 “The kind of landscape he responds to manifests itself in Mr Sloper’s farm at West Woody in Hampshire: ‘large tracts of turnips; clean land; stubbles ploughed up early; ploughing with oxen; and a very large and singularly fine flock of sheep. Everything that you see, land, stock, implements, fences, buildings; all do credit to the owner; bespeak his sound judgement, his industry, and care.” Cobbett likes a landscape to be productive, shipshape. “

p. 117 “Riding back to London from Dover on 3 September 1823, he notes the wretched condition of the labourers in the district: “Invariably have I observed, that the richer the soil, and the more destitute the woods; that is to say, the more purely a corn country, the more miserable the labourers.. In this beautiful island, every inch of land is appropriated by the rich. No hedges, no ditches, no commons, no grassy lanes: a country divided into great farms; a few trees surround the great farm-house. All the rest is bare of trees; and the wretched labourer has not a stick of wood, and has no place for a pig or cow to graze, or even to lie down upon. The rabbit countries are the countries for labouring men. There the ground is not so valuable.”

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Books Politics

Notes from The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Wellbeing

February 2, 2019 – 10:28 pm

p. 26 Perhaps because people tend to imagine that human beings have always lived in hierarchical societies, we rarely, if ever, stop to imagine what it would be like to belong to a community of near equals, free of the insecurities caused by class and status divisions. We assume that the only way to regain the confidence and social ease which we lack would be to increase our own status … in tribal societies without settled agriculture, in which people live in non-hierarchical communities, several studies have shown that blood pressure shows no tendency to rise with age… That was true even when comparisons were adjusted for the effects on blood pressure of things like diet, salt intake an obesity… recorded changes in blood pressure among nuns living in a closed order in Italy. Though they were eating much the same diet as the rest of the local population, the study found the had no rise in blood pressure as they aged during a 20-year follow-up period.”

p. 27 “people living in countries with bigger income differences between rich and poor are more prone to status anxiety. Regardless of individual income levels, people in more unequal societies became more worried about how they are seen and judged … particularly strong effects on people’s levels of stress hormones. … some people feel that social life is a constant battle with low self-esteem. Lacking in confidence and overcome by extreme shyness, they tend to withdraw from social life and often become depressed… the other common response is almost the opposite. Many people respond … by projecting an exaggeratedly positive view of themselves, apparently to conceal their self-doubt. Modesty .. tends to be replaced by narcissism and a kind of self-enhancement or self-promotion.”

p. 29 “it is mistaken to think that the hierarchy in the societies we analyse is meritocratic, ordering people by inherent ability … brain imaging techniques and our growing knowledge of the malleability of the human brain, have made it clear that the most important differences in ability result from an individual’s position in the social hierarchy, rather than being determinants of it.”

“Aspects of the cultural differences between classes seem to exist primarily to provide tests of status, almost for the purpose of identifying those who can be devalued and excluded.

“we can move towards a society which will cease to generate such intense and counterproductive feelings of insecurity and self-doubt by fostering a radical egalitarianism in terms of income class and power.”

p. 30 “however it is no longer possible to make suggestions of radical reform .. without also taking account of the urgent need for them to become environmentally sustainable”… “rather than having to tighten our belts and accept a deterioration in our real equality of life, we show that the key is to replace materialism – as a false source of wellbeing – with a way of life more fundamentally consistent with our human sociality.”

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Books Early modern history History Women's history

Notes from Queenship at the Renaissance Courts of Britain: Catherine of Aragon and Margaret Tudor: 1503 to 1533 by Michelle L Beer

February 2, 2019 – 10:23 pm

Page 60  in the summer of 1520 Catherine of Aragon had to navigate one of the most difficult ceremonial events of her political career,  the Field of Cloth of Gold. this famous meeting of the English and French monarchs and their royal Courts in a field in Northern France  was designed by Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister, to cement the Anglo-French alliance that formed the heart of his planning for a European-wide peace.  Catherine however the meeting with the French as a threat to English friendship with her own dynasty, headed by her nephew Charles V King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.  As queen, she could not publicly oppose her husband’s intentions to meet the French, so she had to work within the ritual framework of court spectacle in order to express her opposition and propose an alternative alliance …  clothing and appearance took on a heightened importance during this event, especially as the French and English courts to outdo each other by displaying their taste, wealth and ingenuity.”



Page 73  Henry VIII and James IV were masters of royal spectacle and the reigns were high points for the participation of women in court entertainment and sociability.  while both promoted royal power through magnificence spectacle and pageantry the most successful expressions of majesty required the Queen to be by their side…..  as young active monarchs both kings were frequently at the centre of these entertainment often featuring in pageants, dances and tournaments designed to exhibit the kings’ own skill as well as  entertain ambassadors and noble visitors at their courts. Catherine and Margaret participated in these revels as the honoured audience for their husbands’ exploits, and the rivers were important in forming a strong royal partnership.

page 74  in May 1517 Katherine and Margaret performed a public and deliberately staged into session before Henry VIII when they pleaded for the lives of a group of London Apprentice Boys who were about to be executed for the part in the evil May Day riots full stop this act may have earned Catherine lasting Fame as a champion of the London poor,  and it was certainly a calculated decision by Catherine and Margaret to adopt a more active role on this occasion. years earlier, Margaret had repeatedly tried to intervene with her husband before the Battle of Flodden, pleading with him not to lead his forces in person. Both Queen’s understood how to modulate their public roles- active and passive –  to suit their own agenda

page 75 the adoption of the Burgundian-style tournaments in England and Scotland  in the later years of the 15th century been became important opportunities for queens like Catherine or Margaret to contribute to the magnificence of their husbands’ monarchy.  in particular, the fashion for a lovely stage tournament requires a new degree of participation by the Queen and her ladies. developed at the courts of Rene of Anjou and the dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century,  tournaments featuring a dramatic plot and elaborate costumes were favoured by monarchs across Europe, including Henry VII, Henry VIII and James IV. Above all, these Productions require the presence of a lady (the queen)  in order to fulfill their dramatic plots, which were ‘ a predetermined romantic Saga which was always to find its hero and heroine in the King and his consort’.

page 76  Catherine’s important role is the inspiration and validation of her husband’s chivalric prowess was publicly noted and celebrated at the English court.  a Tudor Carol written in Catherine voice proclaims the Kings prowess in the tournament and demonstrates the relationship between between the Queen and her Lord in the chivalric tradition:…  although the author of the lyrics and the census of its performance is unknown, the addressee of the poem is the King and the speaker is Catherine. the song may have been performed as part of the festivities after the tournament perhaps even by Catherine or,  more likely, buy one of her ladies.”

Page 81  the Queen and her ladies …  it was crucial that they understood how to participate in games of courtly love and chivalric play. … lack of participation in such events,  either through disinterest or misunderstanding, could seriously damage the relationship between the King and his wife. Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves got off to a rocky start when he visited her in disguise before the wedding,  and she ignored him. During his marriage to Catherine, Henry frequently wore a mask to hide his identity while participating in court entertainments, and Catherine’s correct identification of him as the king proved his natural superiority.”

Page 100  in pre-modern Europe queens had access to patronage available through their own not in substantial resources and through the relationship with their husbands.  for instance, Anne of Brittany, independent ruler of Brittany and queen consort of France, is an extreme example of the dual opportunities available to Queen’s as patrons,  Esso patronage could be accomplished through the independent Resources as Duchess of Brittany or who royal access as Queen of France…. in the 17th century Henrietta Maria, consort of Charles I of England,  collaborated with her husband over the artistic patronage for which he is famous.

Page 112  Catherine and Margaret also use gifts of clothing to reward members of their husbands’ households.  Margaret seems to have been particularly fond of William Dunbar, James’s court poet who celebrated her marriage in 1503 with the poem “The Thrissil and the Rois”.   Many of Dunbar’s poems are set in the Queen’s chamber or in the company of the Queen, and they paint a lively picture of life in the Queen’s household. it is therefore unsurprising that Margaret would wish to reward the poet with the gift of a doublet from her Wardrobe.

Page 117 as the New King Henry VIII wrote to his new father-in-law Ferdinand,  it was ‘ very desirable’ to unite English and Spanish families through marriage.  Henry was referring to The Marriage of one of Catherine’s ladies, Ines de Vanegas( sometimes anglicised to Agnes),  who married William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, in 1509.Ines had served Catherine since 1500, and probably knew the Queen for far longer through her mother,  who has been Catherine’s nurse since 1495. … she was likely an asset to Mountjoy in his diplomatic service to Spain.”

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Books History Women's history

Notes from Female Authorship, Patronage and Translation in Late Medieval France, by Annelise Pollock Renck

January 2, 2019 – 10:30 pm

p. 29 To highlight their roles in the creation of these texts while again asserting their authority, medieval writers called attention to their talents as readers, In so doing, these medieval writers not only reinforced their reliability as interpreters of ancient auctores and thus used the weight of these earlier writers’ auctoritas, but also established individual identities, by effectively saying ‘I, personally, am a better reader than others’.

For example, Deborah McGrady’s discussion of Christine de Pizan shows how a 15th-century writer laid out her interpretative prowess as a reader of the Roman de la Rose and beyond in order to prove herself worthy of being read. Asserting one’s greater skill as a reader broke from Christian churchly tradition based on Augustinian truth, wherein all interpretations were accepted, because all of them were readings of the truth that comes directly from God. This emphasis on readerly skill worked, paradoxically, to establish writerly mastery: not of original texts, per se, but of texts made by individuals rather than by the ancients, the Christian community, or by God himself.

Vernacular writers deployed multiple textual and visual cues to assert this individuality. For example, a writer might use the frist-person pronoun ‘je’ to underline personal agency. By saying ‘I wrote’. ‘I compiled’ or ‘I read’, writers highlighted their existence and their participation in the process of reading, interpretation and finally writing…. A common trope in the Middle Ages was that of the author’s nightly writing, based on the vern ‘verillier’, many authors claim that they worked on their texts all night, thus underlining their personal role in its creation. This claim is not so much a way of asserting originality, but rather brings to the fore the many hands at work in medieval textual creation.”

p. 57 the iconography in 15th-century medieval Books of Hours advance an image of Mary as a reader that linked female religious devotion with the act of reading. These manuscripts contributed to a socialization of the viewing subject that asserted the acceptability and even desirability of female readership as well as female literacy and education.”

p. 64 “It was Christine de Pizan who constructed one of the first conceptions of female authorship. She did so by constantly calling attention to her own identity as female writer, crafting her own literary authority, and positioning herself in the pose of reading or writing in the numerous manuscripts whose production she oversaw. Throughout all three of these processes, Chrstine drew upon Christian doctrine repeatedly, tapping into the cultural background between female literacy and devotion already at work in the Book of Hours.”

p. 77 [Antoine Dufour’s Vie Des Femmes Delebres – which used Boccaccio’s c. 1362 De mulieribus Claris and Jacopo Filippo Foresti’s De pluramis Claris selectisque mulieribus of 1497] ]  “Antoine Verard’s 1493 printed edition ultimately reveals three aspects of the context in which famous-women biographies were printed. First, the anonymous translator, like Antoine Dufour after him, specifies that his text is meant for women, thus indicating that there was a substantial female readership in late medieval France – or at least that either the anonymous translator or Verard believed this to be the case. Second, we can infer that either the publisher Verard or the anonymous translator (or perhaps, both) viewed Anne de Bretagne’s political and social influence on their intended audience to be expansive enough to motivate the dedication of their edition to her. Third, by stating explicitly that his text is meant to defend women, the writer of the dedication enters into a dialogue about the virtues and vices of the female sex, thereby underlining for us the debate’s cultural relevancy at the turn of the 16th century. Finally, we can note the shift from Boccaccio’s writing to instruct women in 1392 to the Verard translator’s claim to defend them in 1493.”

p. 169 Anne de Graville is known to have read both male-authored querelle texts and Christine de Pizan’s works, assimilating these rhetorical and visual models into her own literary output.. Marguerite de Navarre read Christine de Pizan and grew up under the tutelage of her mother, Louise de Savoie… represent a contingent of women  who became authors in no small part due to their educational milieu and their exposure to Christine de Pizan’s works and those of the male translators studied in this book. … Pernetter du Guillet and her work reach outside of court circles and into a context of print readership in Lyon… Louise Labe, like Pernetter, also stood outside the more royal milieu surrounding Anne and Marguerite; yet, she also assimilated Christine’s call to write into her own address to female readers and the works of 15th-century male translators into her poetic voice.”

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