Category Archives: History

Early modern history Women's history

When a poet really, really gets it wrong…

July 8, 2006 – 11:54 pm

I’ve been reading a very handy 1956 thesis – happily available on microfilm – Conventions and Characteristics of the English Funeral Elegy of the Earlier Seventeenth Century, (University of Missouri). And I just had to share what the author, H.H. Hale, describes as the “most graceless” example, Francis Beaumont’s “Elegy on the Lady Markham” a relative of the influential Lucy, Countess of Bedford.

The poet tells his readers that although he never saw Lady Markham in life he fell in love with her corpse, and likes the fact he can now…

Her grassgreene mantle, and her sheet display,
And touc her naked, and though th’ envious mould
In which she lies uncovered, moist and cold,
Strive to corrupt her, she will not abide
With any art her blemishes to hide…”

He directs the worms to gently eat her flesh, to eat into her ear-lobes to form holes for earrings, and finally to eat her epitaph upon her forehead: “Living, she was young, faire, and full of wit / Dead, all her faults are in her forehead writ.”
p. 38-39

Seriously sick!

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Early modern history Women's history

For the Bible scholars among you …

July 8, 2006 – 8:05 pm

… or just those who didn’t get hopelessly bored at Sunday school, I’m working on a late 16th-century elegy for a twice-widowed rich London woman, with the following passage, which refers, I assume, to women from the Bible:

So that hir three-fold godly life alludeth
To virgin Ruth, wife Sara, widdow Judith

I’m struggling to make sense of this.

The Bible Ruth that seems to get all the Google hits is a widow, so that is a bit puzzling.

Sara, if the wife of Abraham hardly seems to present an ideal life.

The lead widow Judith is the one who cut off Holofernes’ head, but although she’s a favourite figure for painting she hardly seems like an ideal model.

As ever, TIA!

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Lady of Quality

The King is Dead, Long Live the Queen

July 5, 2006 – 8:17 am

My 19th-century blogger, Frances Williams Wynn, is today reporting on on the death of William IV and the accession of Queen Victoria. She’s displaying her typical bluntness about the king’s sins, but thinks he had a good death:

It is very interesting to compare the appearance of the town now, with that which it wore after the death of George IV.; then few, very few, thought it necessary to assume the mask of grief; now one feeling seems to actuate the nation ; party is forgotten, and all mourn, if not so deeply, quite as unanimously, as they did for Princess Charlotte. After a few days of short unsatisfactory bulletins, a prayer for the King was ordered, and sent with pitiful economy by the two-penny post, so that, though the prayer appeared in every newspaper of Saturday evening, it was received by hardly any of the London clergy in time for morning service on Sunday. In our chapel, prayers were desired for Our Sovereign Lord the King, lying dangerously ill; and these introduced in the Litany just as they would have been for the poorest of his subjects!

I love that line about the two-penny post…

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Early modern history Feminism Women's history

How women’s literary work is lost, and, sometimes, saved

July 4, 2006 – 10:55 pm

Writing a poem was a task that anyone with any claim to education could do in the early modern period pretty well as easily as we write an email, and they could be written, almost, anywhere – the bottom of trenchers (plates) being a particular favourite for ephemeral verses. Women might often embroider them, a form that was hardly more lasting, but this lovely example comes from a manuscript of 1603, in which it was recorded for posterity. Its title tells all:

A gentlewoman yt married a yonge Gent who after forsooke whereuppon she tooke hir needle in which she was excelent and worked upon hir Sampler thus

Come give me needle stitchcloth silke and haire,
That I may sitt and sigh and sow and singe,
For perfect collours to discribe the aire
A subtle persinge changinge constant thinge.

No false stitch will I make my hart is true,
Plaine stitche my sampler is for to complaine
Now men have tongues of hony, harts of rue,
True tongues and harts are one, Men makes them twain.

Give me black silk that sable suites my hart
And yet som white though white words do deceive
No greene at all for youth and I must part,
Purple and blew, fast love and faith to weave.
Mayden no more sleepeless ile go to bedd
Take all away, the work works in my hedd.
(pp. 155-6)

A nice variation on washing your troubles away, and that line “tongues of honey, hearts of rue” (rue being of course a bitter herb) is a beautiful one.

This is from an excellent, extremely broadranging anthology, Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology (1520-1700), edited by Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson. (I’ve made a note to myself to immediately latch on to anything in which Stevenson is involved. As I’ve noted elsewhere, her Women Latin Poets is brilliant.)

So many of these sorts of anthologies just rehash the usual suspects; it is lovely to see lots of new voices here. (It has just fallen open at “Verces made by Mistress Battina Cromwell, wife to Henry Cromwell ers Sir Oliver Cromwell’s sone”.)

It even has poems in Welsh – and translations…

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Lady of Quality Women's history

A summary of Frances Williams Wynn research

July 1, 2006 – 9:10 pm

I’ve just posted over on Revise and Dissent a summary of my findings from the research trip to Aberystwyth that looked at the papers of Miss Williams Wynn, my retroblogger.

Having given it a bit of thought, I can’t see that I’m going to have the time in the next decade or two to make her a research priority. She’s an interesting character, and a well-travelled woman: one of the diaries I’ve extracted there talks about her current journey being her 26th! (which I think means to the Continent). I may be wrong, but I don’t think much has been done about this type of “women’s Grand Tour”, which if her example is typical seems to consist of a number of short summer trips, rather than the men’s single, extended version.

But hopefully someone might pick up her story and do more with it – there definitely some good stuff there. As I said there, if anyone is interested please get in touch. I’d be happy to share all the material I’ve got. (About twice as much as I posted.)

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Feminism History

Homer, she was brilliant…

July 1, 2006 – 8:51 am

Dr Dalby, whose study, Rediscovering Homer, will be published by W. W. Norton in September, said: “It is possible, even probable, that this poet was a woman. As a working hypothesis, this helps to explain certain features in which these epics are better — more subtle, more complex, more universal — than most others.”

Well, the short answer is of course that we’ll never know. Interesting thought though.

But I was amused by the “official” response:

Anthony Snodgrass, Emeritus Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University, said that the Odyssey could have been written by a woman because it is about “a world at peace in general terms, with domesticity, fidelity . . . endurance and determination rather than aggression”. But he added: “The idea of a woman writing the Iliad and not being bored out of her mind by the endless fighting and killings is a bit more far-fetched.”

… because of course a woman in the Greece of some 3,000 years ago, in a culture of which we know very little, had the same interests as a “proper” middle-class British woman of the 20th century, of a type with which he is acquainted.

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