p. 51 “The evidence about women arrested in June 1848 confirms in detail what contemporary writers say in general terms about accessory roles, but also reveals that some female participants plated a determined and assertive role … Forty of the 118 women convicted on the list in register F 2585 are known to have plated what may be termed a primary role in the June Days: specifically they built barricades, appeared armed on them, fired on troops from barricades or windows, sounded the alarm by ringing the local steeple bell, and organised the defence of their own quarter, including inciting men to battle. Undoubtedly some of these militant women were acting on political motives, and a few had a past history of insurgency. A 76-year-old veteran of previous revolutions, Veuve Anne-Marie Henry, a retired dressmaker, led women in the fighting on the barricade of Rue des Trois-Couronnes in Belleville. Described by the historian Pierre Dominique as ‘an old virago’, Veuve Henry demanded arms at the Mairie de Belleville with the dry ‘Kill and assassinate’. She threatened to stab those who dismantled the barricades, exclaiming ‘There they are, the brigands who took down the barricade, kill them.’ And declared that, had she had her knife to hand, she would have plunged it into their stomachs. In particular, she designated the home of a chandler named Lhomme for attack. A wood-carver, Elisabeth Guibal, of the Faubourg St Antoine, who had been wonded in the shooting on the Boulevard des Capucines on 23 February, lost her claim to a state pension when it was discovered that during the June Days she had run around the streets carrying a sabre, smashing gunshop windows in order to steal arms. Arrested on 25 June, Guibal was denounced by her whole neighbourhood for being constantly at the barricades of the Faubourg St Antoine, and attempting to terrorize the tenants of the quarter into joining the rebellion by threatening to set their houses on fire. … Augstine Falaise, a young piano-teacher of the Place des Vosges, (then still referred to as the Place Royale) tore up a pavement in the Rue du Temple with her two cousins, in Febrary 1848, for which action they earned the nickname Depauvesues; in June the three women helped erect barricades in the Rue Jarente and Rue du Val Ste Catherine, their radical affiliations leading many later to testify against them. Another woman with a revolutionary past who may well have participated in the June Days before evading arrest and disappearing for two years was Louise Bretagne, the veteran of 1830 and 1832. In 1848 she was living in the Rue Mouffetard and working as a washerwoman and was reported to be very poor and frequently drunk.
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With a focus on the women, who are more prominent in the early period and less so in the later …

From Thomas Tusser, in 1562, talks about the work of housewifery, which is much focused on the garden …
“In Marche, and in Aprill, from morning to night;
in sowing and setting, good huswives delight.
To have in their garden, or some other plot;
to trim up their house, and to furnish their plot.

Have millons (melons) at Milhelmas, parsnips in lent;
in June buttered beans, saveth fish to be spent.
With these, and good pottagethrough having than;
thou winnest the heart of thy labouring man.’

He also house the housewife planting raspberries and roses together, and keeping bees. p. 14

Samuel Hartlib reports the rise of market gardening in the UK, (although Cochester had a vegetable market by 1529, and one is reported outside St Paul’s in London in the 13th century) in the early 1600s, helped by the arrival of Dutch refugees and their skills from the late 1560s. Through the dearth of the 1590s they helped keep London fed, “One of the factors that made the Dutch and Flemish so successful was their intensive use of manure … these gardeners would dig through the gravel deposits that ringed London, selling the stone for ballast in ships and street repairs. The holes were then filled with ‘the filth of the city… as rich and black as thick ink’.” p. 29

But some Londoners “thought the intensive cultivation would ruin the soil, so were reluctant to rent out their land to Hugenot gardeners”. p. 31

“One hundred years earlier, vegetables were regarded as food for peasants, with the wealthy eating meat and fish dressed with rich sauces, followed by dishes of sweetmeats.By the early 17th century, new vegetables such as artichokes and asparagus were beginning to feature in the fashionable diet.”

“Goodwife Cantrey makes a tantalisingly fleeting appearance in the mid-17th century. The wife of a Northamptonshire yeoman farmer, she planted a herb plot with fennel for an infusion to ease weak eyes, camomile for headaches and goat’s rue as an antidote to the plague. An idea of some of the flowers and fruit that she cultivated in her garden has also survived in the form of a receipt for plants supplied on 28 July 1658 to the Harton family of Kirby Hall. The list inclused lupins, larkspurs, sabious, sweet wiliams, honeysuckle and ‘double hollioake’, along with four sorts of gooseberries – white, green, red and yellow – double currants and ‘violette plumbe’….

An elderly lady from Essex, interviewed in the 1990s, recalled her grandmother using bottles of different tinctures on a sunny windowsil: one with marigold flowers in alcohol for sprains and sores, another of Madonna lily infused in oil to ease burns. A traditional recipe was to pick the flowers of St John’s wort on 24 June, the saint’s day, and put them on a windowsill in water until the sun turned the liquid red. The so-called blood of St John could then be used to treat skin complaints, as well as a balm against evil and the plague.” p. 37

In London … “Given that many physicians and apothecaries could not grow their own medicinal herbs, they had to turn to women gardeners. Early 17th-century records show that the physicians of St Thomas’s hospital in London employed a herb woman to provide the raw materials for the medicines and ointments that the chief medical officer, the apothecary, prescribed for his patients .. In 1629 it as noted that the apothecary was paid £60 per annum … the herb woman a mere £4. The apothecary was expected to pay for his ingredients out of his salary, so the herb woman may have received additional money.” p. 39

“By the end of the 17th century an increasing number of herbwomen were acquiring more respected social status, especially those able to rent stalls in London’s markets, where they sold not only medicinal plants but also herbs for stewing and cooking. .. The records for the Fleet Market for the years 1737-38 for instance, identify Mary Leech and Judith Vardey as specialists in ‘Physick Hrebs’. The records for the following years, 1739-40, go further, specifying the location of the hardens from which the herbs were gathered. Some herb women were located near the City, such as Hannah Smith from Grub Street in Finsbury, but most came from neighbouring suburbs such as Bethnal Green and stepney Green, Bermondsey, Camberwell and Vauxhall. … As well as selling planst at the herb market in Covent Garden, the women were employed toe strew halls in the hall in Southwark. One woman who held a long tenure as a regular supplier of herbs to Bridge House was Mary Earle, who died in 1758, leaving bequests to £20 to each of her granddaughters, £30 to her grandson, and her remaining estate to her daughter-in-law, a substantial estate for a woman.” pp. 42-3

For Michelmas 1698 John Risdall or Risden is recorded as the head gardener at Arbury, at an annual salary of £20 …. the Arbury records are particularly interesting in showing the range, albeit repetitive, of the tasks assigned to the women. Ann Suffolk and a woman named as Elizabeth were recorded working in the harden in April 1699, weeding and sweeping the grass. These two tasks took up a large proportion of their time throughout the summer, but they are also noted gathering herbs for the stillroom, carrying gravel, gathering strawberries and herbs for the kitchen, cutting rot out of apples, husking walnuts and cutting shreds. The last task refers to the lengths of cloth or leather that were cut into thin strips for fixing espaliers and climbers on walls. The women are recorded in February 2701 “straighting nails” for Risdall to use in tghe kitchen garden. During harvest time, they are often noted as absent, but appear in other account books for the estate, paid for bringing in the hay.” p. 75

From Venantius Fortunatus: A Latin Poet in Merovingian Gaul by Judith George

p.2 “This period was one of cultural transition, the Gallo-Romans clinging their traditional Romanitas, the Franks assimilating it with verve and enthusiasm. The impact of a poet of Fortunatus’ calibre and pedigree, an embodiment of the literary tradition they revered, on so susceptible an audience was bound to be strong. Even two generations later, the grandson of Dynamius, a Provencal noble and patron of the poet, composed an epitaph for his grandparents, with pride in their association wjth Fortunatus… his influence can be seen in writers not only in Gaul, but also in Anglo-Saxon England and in Ireland, well into the Middle Ages.”

p. 13 “The nuns of Radegund’s community in Poitiers adopted the Rule of Caesarius, which specified they should learn to read, and spend two hours a day doing so. Caesaria, abbess of the convent of St Jean in Arles, advised them: ‘COnstantly read and listen to the holy writings … gather from them previous pearls to hand on your ears, make from them rings and bracelets’… one of the biographies of their founder was written by a nun, Baudonivia, confirms the general practice of more than basic literacy.”

p. 163 “Baudonivia records of Radegund that: “She was always anxious for peace, always concerned with the wellbeing of her country. When there was tension between the kingdoms, since she loved all the kings, she prayed for the life of all and taught us to pray without ceasing for their settled state. When she heard there was any ill feeling between them, she feared with all her being and sent letters to both sides alike, so they would not resort to arms or war between themselves, but should establish peace, and thus the country not come to disaster. Likewise, she directed requests to their chief men that they should give peaceable advice to the high kings, so that, under their government, the wellbeing of the people and country should be improved.”

p. 35 “Panegyric was one of the most important literary genres in public and ceremonial life in the classical world, a vital tool of political communication and negotiation, especially between a ruler and his people. .. the fourth-century panegyrists under the Tetrarchy and the Gallic rhetorical schools that this genre reached a peak in its popularity, its recognized part in cultural life, its wide use as a subtle and influential political tool and in the full exploration of its literary potential.”

p. 59 “the address to Chilperic … was given in a tense political situation, where Fortunatus was playing an active and interventionist role. The formal structure of the genre brought to bear on Chilperic the full prestigious weight of Roman panegyric, playing on the king’s cultural aspirations, and holding up to him a mirror of the ideal statesman, the Christian ruler.”

A shorter verson was first published on Blogcritics

There’s a whole book about the history of Delphi, and the material to fill it handsomely, because it was an important place in the ancient world, influential and often rich for many of the centuries from before Greek history was recorded well into the 4th century AD.

But it wasn’t, by and large powerful. It wasn’t the centre of an empire, it never had large bodies of troops to call on, it lived in large part on its wits, navigating its way through the Persian Wars (probably rather less than heroically), the Peloponnesian War, centuries of Roman emperors and their foibles.

That makes its history, I found, particularly interesting. Most of the human race, for most of our history, has lived like this, town burghers, village elders, huddling anxiously together, trying decide which side to choose in a conflict, or whether they can get away with sitting on the fence, calculating whether flattery is a good option, or an appearance of independent mindedness. Most of us haven’t been at the centre, from which most history is written, but the peripheries, trying to cope with the power of the centre.

That balancing act is central to Michael Scott’s very readable but still scholarly and serious complete account of the Greek settlement’s history. I was particularly impressed by his credible refusal to try to answer unanswerable questions: not choosing which record of the oracle’s pronouncements to “believe”, but acknowledging that they were shaped to the purposes of the writers who recorded them often centuries after their reported utterance.

He doesn’t try to solve the puzzle of the lack of a chasm beneath the temple of Apollo, while recording the recent geological revelations that the site is at the centre of two fault lines, perfectly placed to produce the fissured bedrock beneath the temple, through which fumes of ethane, methane and ethylene, from the underlying bituminous limestone might have risen. Indeed, he notes that intoxication of the priestess, if part of the practice, doesn’t really do anything to explain how for 1,000 years carefully crafted prophecies emerged from the depths of the temple and were at the centre of maintaining the economic future of a inconveniently located site that had nothing obvious to recommend it as a place for a visit beyond its mystique.

He’s also interesting on the place of the oracle at its peak time, that of the classic period of Greek history, when city states with varying methods of government often used it as a “tie-breaker” in making tough decisions about their actions – his comparison with management consultants is interesting, although I rather like the idea of turning his approach around: thinking about management consultants as being like the Pythia – about the same level of science and probably as good at judging the desires of those who employ them.
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