Category Archives: History

History

History carnival, and an apology…

April 16, 2006 – 8:16 am

First the apology, to those who’ve asked and those who haven’t: yes Friday Femmes Fatales is running late again this week. (Hopefully it will arrive tonight.)

Now the excuses: Green campaiging (1,000 newsletters out in the past two days, and 2,000 sitting reproachfully on the floor that should mostly be delivered before postal ballots go out at the end of this week for the May 4 election), and I’m working on an all-new, shiny Philobiblon. There’s nothing but a rough layout yet (no content), but it is philobiblon.co.uk, for anyone who feels like being a design critic.

And today I’m off on a jaunt – to cycle the Thames (well as much of the Thames path as I can manage).

But would I leave you without anything to read? Of course not! History Carnival No 29 is up over on (a)musings of a grad student. I haven’t had time for a proper read, but it looks like a cracker.

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Feminism History

What the Romans did TO us (i.e. women)

April 13, 2006 – 7:57 pm

A recent popular history television series ran along the lines of What the Romans Did For Us – with lists of all the usual “civilising influences” – “concrete, fast food to frescos and lighthouses to loos”.

Yet having just finished Boudicca’s Heirs, by Dorothy Watts, I also know what the Romans did to “us” – if you count the (roughly, very roughly in their case) half of the population that is female as “us”. Watts work is subtitled “Women in Early Britain” and is an up-to-date (2005) account of what the archaeological record reveals (with also notes of how this matches the historical record).

The overwhelming, almost shattering, fact is that while in the preceding Iron Age numbers of men and women were pretty much matched, soon after the Romans arrived there is a suddenly shift in the nation’s graveyards – the number of women drops significantly. The only explanation, Watts concludes, is that the Romans brought with them, with all their “civilising” influences, the previously unknown practice of female infanticide – and female infanticide to the level of the worst of India or China today, that saw up to seven per cent of the women “lost”.

read more »

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Early modern history History Theatre

A women’s story through male eyes

April 13, 2006 – 2:45 pm

The basic story of the Salem witchcraft trials is well known. At its centre was a group of young women who made increasingly wild accusations about spirits, demonic possession, and malevolent attacks. It is these young women, led by the spiteful, slighted Abigail (Elaine Cassidy) who open Arthur Miller’s powerful exploration of the story, The Crucible.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s version – its first Miller production – has just transferred to the Gielgud in London. This is a powerful, classy effort (as you’d expect), with a highly topical theme. Miller wrote the play in the Fifties, when McCarthyism was at its height, and today, with restrictive new laws forbidding “glorification of terrorism” coming into effect today, and a scent of panic in the air, it is again all too relevant.

The three hours never drag, as a small Puritan town gradually implodes into a frenzy of wild allegation. Miller presents, and the production magnifies, one potential slant of the conflict, as a class and generational war that sees the poorer, younger women finally getting their revenge against the older women and men who’ve used their labour and heavily disciplined their lives.

The production makes particular effective use of the pregnant pause, the long heavy silence, its actors arrayed in carefully composed tableaus that are almost picture-perfect, within stone-grey wallls that hold – just – the threat of nature, or sexuality, of change, without. READ MORE

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History Politics

The non-religious Settlement

April 13, 2006 – 11:35 am

Interesting comment piece in the Guardian this morning, which suggests that the post-Civil War settlement between the Church of England and the government and society involve a tacit agreement:

Safe though he was, the nice country vicar in effect inoculated vast swaths of the English against Christianity. A religion of hospital visiting and flower arranging, with a side offering of heritage conservation, replaced the risk-all faith of a man who asked his adherents to take up their cross and follow him. The nice country vicar represented a very English modus vivendi between the sacred and the secular, with the sacred, in swallowing many of its convictions, paying by far the heaviest price for the deal.
In exchange for a walk-on part during major family occasions and the opportunity to be custodian of the country’s most impressive collection of buildings, the vicar promised discretion in all things pertaining to faith: he agreed to treat God as a private matter. In a country exhausted by wars about religion, the creation of the nonreligious priest was a masterstroke of English inventiveness. And once the priest had been cut off from the source of his fire and reassigned to judge marrows at the village fete, his transformation from figure of fear to figure of fun was complete.

I tend to broadly agree with that, although not with his next step – he wants to restore the fiery religion, I’d like to take this historical progression to its logical conclusion – get rid of the religion altogether, run the church as a community centre and choose a community worker to do the visiting, tea drinker and marrow-judging.

While I’m talking history, if you’re a history blogger, watch out. The UK glorification of terrorism act comes into effect today. Be careful what you write about those Vandals….

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Early modern history Women's history

Aphra Behn’s tomb…

April 11, 2006 – 3:54 pm

An interesting query from Holly, who’s been contributing to the “really dead women authors meme” about the location of Aphra Behn’s tomb in Westminister Abbey, and why she isn’t in “Poets’ Corner”.

I happen to have sitting beside my bed in my “to read” pile Maureen Duffy’s biography. It says:

“Thrysis [Thomas Sprat, “Birmingham’s old chaplain, who was Dean of Westminster], I believe, was responsible for her burial in Westminster Abbey on April 20th, no doubt backed by Burnet and by those of sufficient wit and position not to mind the odium or satire that accure to them from such an act. She lies in the cloister and not among the ‘trading poets’ in poets’ corner, but with the Bettertons and Anne Bracegirdle.” (p. 294)

So it sounds like she was classed as “theatre” rather than “literature”.

There’s an image of the tomb here.

Can anyone add to this?

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History Women's history

Beauty and fashion as a cultural construct

April 10, 2006 – 11:59 pm


This is a postcard postmarked in Bristol at 10pm on April 11, 1907, labelled “Miss Edna May”. That anyone could have considered that hat a flattering or attractive piece of fashion is beyond me…

I think this must be the actress who was born Edna May Nutter (can see why she dropped the surname…) although the photographer (or perhaps retoucher) has done a good job in this pic in hiding her “horse face”. (Who says the past was genteel?)

The message on the back, sent to a Miss E.M. Ingles of 71 Marle Hill Pde, Cheltenham, is equally blunt: “Dear Eva, Just a postcard to help you on. Can you let know by Sunday morn. the name of the Sec.y of the Education Cmm.ttee for Cheltenham. That means I want a letter. Yours etc. Percy.”

The tone is definitely exasperated and blunt. You have to wonder why it mattered…

UPDATE: Thanks to Penny, who in the comments pointed out that I had the wrong actress Edna May.

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