From the inbox: the latest report of the excavation of Old Nisa, a Partian site in Turkmenistan, has been posted. Some lovely architectural detail…
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History Women's history“Pigkeeper and poet”
September 30, 2006 – 3:43 pm
What a lovely combination. The London Library has a small display of some of the life membership application forms that it has received over the years – there are all the usual ones you’d except, from Bernard Shaw to Virginia Woolf, but also featured is “Mrs Harley Moseley”, who joined in 1956 from St Mawes, Truro, Cornwall, listing her occupation as “pigkeeper and poet”.
Google has failed me on this one … can anyone supply any info?
Good old Aphra
September 29, 2006 – 9:12 pm
It has been sitting in my to-read pile (which hasn’t yet quite taken over the house) for a long time, but I’ve finally got around to reading Maureen Duffy’s The Passionate Shepherdess: The Life of Aphra Behn. It was published first in 1977, although I’ve been reading the preface-updated 2000 paperback. Since it is such a popular topic I’ve no doubt aspects of the account have been modified by subsequent research, but it is an excellent read, and a decent piece of what in 1977 was real recovery work.
I’ll share just a little part that appealed, talking about her play Sir Timothy Tawdry:
Dellmor: Gods what an odious thing mere coupling is!
A thing which every sensual animal
Can do – as well as we – but prithee tell me,
Is there naught else between the nobler creatures?
Flauntit: Not that I know of, sir – Lord he’s very silly or very innocent, I hope he has his maidenhead; if so and rich too, Oh what a booty were this for me!By introducing the brothel and Betty Flauntit’s attempts to get Bellmor for his money, Aphra Behn has made a parallel between prostitution and forced marriage …
Bellmor: Will you now show me some of your arts of love?
For I am very apt to learn of beauty – Gods –
What is’t I negotiate for? – a woman!
Making a bargain to possess a woman!
Oh, never, never!
You can see why later, more genteel generations had troubles with Aphra – suuch bluntness wouldn’t come back into fashion for centuries.
Don’t tell UKIP…
September 24, 2006 – 7:54 pm
… but it seems Britons are predominately genetically Basques, descended from the settlers who arrived in Britain from about 12,000 to 7,000 years ago (before the land bridge to the rest of the Continent was broken).
The English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix.
And a bit more of the party
September 20, 2006 – 8:20 pm
The Carnival of Asian History is up on the delightfully named Mutant Frog Travelogue. Having been to North Korea I’ve got a particular interest in the place, so was fascinated by the link to a story about border issues there, but there’s much more … a syllabus for a course on Japanese women, for example. Do go over and check it out.
Get your science history research done now
September 19, 2006 – 7:48 pm
The main journals of the Royal Society, the Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings, from Volume One, Issue One in March 1665, have been put online, but they will only be free until December.
Also great fun for browsing. In the first volume, I came across the account from the great Robert Boyle:
By the same Noble person was lately communicated to the Royal Society an Account of a very Odd Monstrous Birth, produced at Limmington in Hampshire, where a Butcher, having caused a Cow (which cast her Calf the year before) to be covered, that she might the sooner he fatted, killed her when fat, and opening the Womb, which he found heavy to admiration, saw in it a Calf, which had begun to have hair, whose hinder Leggs had no Joynts, and whose Tongue was, Cerberus-like, triple, to eash side of his Mouth one, and one in the midst. Between the Fore-leggs and the Hinder-leggs was a great Stone, on which the Calf rid … The Stone, according to the Letter of Mr David Thomas, who sent this Account to Mr Boyle, is with Doctor Haughteyn of Salisbury, to whom he also referreth for further Information.
This struck me as a fascinating combination of early attempts at a scientific method – sources of information and pre-existing circumstances are carefully detailed – with what in the end amounts to exactly the same contents as the popular pamphlets that described similar events. Although I suppose they aren’t trying to draw a political or religious message from them, as a pamphlet would.
(Article found here.
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