Category Archives: Women’s history

Books History Women's history

Notes from Cleopatra’s Daughter And Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era

June 14, 2023 – 10:30 pm

p. ix Emphasis is on Cleopatra Selene of Mauretania, Glahpyra of Cappadocia, Salome of Judea, Dynamis of Bosporus and Pythodoris of Pontos. They were contemporaries, related through marriage to one another, and were closely allied with the imperial family in Rome and its own women, such as Livia and the younger Antonia, who themselves took on many of the characteristics of Hellenistic queens. The most famous was Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra VII and the triumvir Marcus Antonius, but the others were also of great importance in their own territories. .. In modern diction they are called “queens” (with the exception of Salome), an inadequate translation of the Greek words basileia and basillissa. Their role models went back to the heroic age as well as various prototypes from the late Classical and Hellensitic periods, and the concept of ‘queen’ had developed an important royal dynamic int he generations before … The women could offer greater political stability and status than their husbands, who might be subject to sudden death while on campaign, and their closeness to the imperial family provided precedents for the role of Roman aristocratic women. Cleopatra Selene was a cousion of members of the ruling Julio-Claudian family and was thus related to three Roman emperors. Others had personal contact with the imperial elite in Rome. Cleopatra Selen and Pythodoris were patronesses of intellectual culture and implemented the work of major scholars. And the descendants of the queens held royal power on the borders of the Roman Empire for generations afterwards.

p. 143 “it was Octavia who noused the queen’s children after their mother’s death; Cleopatra may have nad some hint that this could happen, or even suggested it to Octavian, knowing that Octavia had taken in another royal refugee, Juba, for a number of years. Cleopatra Selene lived in Rome for only five years, but she did so from the ahe of 10 to 15, certaimly a seminal period in any young person’s development. In 25bc Octavia implemented the marriage of the two royal refugees and they were sent to Mauretania. With Greek, Roman and probably Egyptian blood, the young princess found that yher years in Rome well prepared her for her new role as queen.”

p. 99 “The most important royal woman of the later Augustan era was Pythodoris, who, for more than half a century, ruled much of central and northern Asia Minor and the eastern Black Sea littoral. She survived well into the period of Tiberius and became the ancestor of a line of royal women that extended past the middle of the 1sy century AD. Like all women in antiquity, she remains shadowy, but due to the euologistic comments of the geographer and historian Strabo of Amaseia, her career is better documented than that of many of her ruling colleagues.

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Books Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Leftist Internationalisms: A Transational Political History

June 14, 2023 – 10:09 pm

p. 16  the 1960s were also a crucial moment for what Francisco Dahan labels as the ‘global left-feminist movement’ whose contribution to the international codification of women’s rights is only starting to be explored. if the transnational nature and internationally engagement of early 20th century feminism are widely recognized, recent research is increasingly focusing on transnational networks that epitomised ‘forms of feminism that did not adhere to the frameworks of the West and global North’ originating both in the Socialist countries and in the Global South, especially in Latin America. Works dealing with the role played by feminist organizations from the Eastern block during the Cold War also show the global influence they had in the Promotion of a feminist agenda in international organisations, primarily the UN, whilst highlighting the consolidation of strong bilateral connections between communist and non-aligned Southern countries through this channel.

p. 98 in Australia, the Labour Party, headed by Bob Hawke, initiated financial deregulation and a floating national currency, prompting the economists Elizabeth Humphries and Daniel Cahill to emphasize its ‘active role in constructing neoliberalism in the country’. at the same time, the New Zealand Labour Party, which also came to power in 1983, ‘ushered in a period of radical deregulation known as Rogernomics – named for treasury minister Roger Douglas. These moves have led numerous scholars to conclude that socialism had entered an era of widespread neoliberal influence, particularly in Western Europe. in his authoritative test on the long-term history of the Left, Geoff Eley argued that Mitterand’s France and Gonzalez’s Spain rivaled the neoliberal economics off Thatchers Britain after 1982.

P 110 Exloring the socioeconomic landscape of the 1980s through the lens of supranational socialist organisation offers new insight into the relationship between democratic socialism and capitalism. Although socialist leaders had become increasingly reliant on economic experts who praised the virtues of austerity and supply-side policies, the genesis of Global Challenge confirms that there was also an ‘epistemically community’ that continued to believe in the prospect of a new international economic order based on ‘global Keynesian’ policies.

The story is unquestionably a tal of defeat, however. Coupled with the tense international political climate of the time, the SI’s structural weaknesses contributed to its inability to bring about meaningful change in the early 1980s. Most critically, the SI ailed to establish relationships with the leading politicians and experts of its members parties, most of whom were unwilling to engage in an ideological debate to begin with. The disconnect between these two circles helps explain why their economic philosophies took such divergent paths = @global neo=Keynesian relaunch” for the former and “austerity with a human fac” for the latter. .. the case of Michael Manley, whose abrupt conversion sowed profound disillusionment among socialists about the capacity of public institutions to offset the detrimental effects of ‘capitalism unleashed’. After his re=election as prime minister in 1989, the leader of the PNP promptly abandoned his former ideological convictions and began promoting a pro-market approach to the economy…. In an interview with a journalist from Le Monde, he openly admitted that the time for a mixed economy was over and that his vision for the economic development of Jamaica would henceforth rely on private enterprise and using the country’s modest resources to create a pro-business environment.@

P. 174 “The Wellesley conference – despite, or perhaps cause of, all the friction it generated – had important legacies for transnational feminism… ‘a painful clash between well-meaning American academicians who believed themselves to be ahead of American men, and free from colonial and imperialist limitations on one hand, and, on the other hand, overly optimistic third=world women who had believed that the impossible dialogue between developed,developing people could be restored by women, between women and for women,’ One of the immediate results of this conflict was the determination of many South-based intellectuals to claim control over knowledge production about their own societies…. The following year, this group founded AAWORD (Association of African Women for Research and Development.@ For organisations such as AAWORD, the United Nations and other institutions of liberal internationalism provided the structure, legitimacy and occasionally funding that supported networks of activist intellectuals offering a critical assessment of capitalist modernisation and emergency neoliberalism. The UN Decade for Women brought an explosion of civil society organisations and networks… Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN) consisted principally of activist intellectuals who ran in policy making circles” and Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe. “brought together academic feminists with burn-it-down activists and free-thinking creatives”.

P. 177 “All three networks advocated for a political economy orientated towards social, cultural and ecological wellbeing and sustainability rather than developmentalist emphasis on growth, productivity and efficiency. These were, of course, longstanding priorities of women’s movements, dating back more than a century, but the UN Decade of Women spotlighted the gendered critiques of late 20th-century development schemes, which were predicated upon the Fordist imagery of a male headed, heteronormative, nuclear family, as the Danish economist Ester Boserup famously drew attention to the inappropriateness of this model.”

P. 181 “AAWORD members underscored that the pressure to shift agricultural land to commodities production and higher yield processes had fostered food insecurity and desertification – both problems that contributed substantially to women’s labour problems. … The report from their 1982 meeting in Dakar … “This present world crisis is the result of a process of Mail development originating from a growth model geared to the use of resources for private profit and power. This kind of development fails to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the majority of the world‘s people and it penetrates all political and economic systems”

P. The authors of this critique – Nawal El-Sadawi, Fatima Mernissi and Mallorca Vajrathorn – all worked within the UN during this period… with other prominent network leaders such as Devaki Jain, Marie-Angelique Savane and Peggy Antrobus and renowned intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, all contributed to the noted (and in some circles notorious) 1984 volume Sisterhood is Global.

Leftist Internationalisms: A Transational POlitical History

p. 16  the 1960s were also a crucial moment for what Francisco dahan labels as the ‘global left-feminist movement’ whose contribution to the international codification of women’s rights is only starting to be explored. if the transnational nature and internationally engagement of early 20th century feminism are widely recognized, recent research is increasingly focusing on transnational networks that epitomised ‘forms of feminism that did not adhere to the frameworks of the West and global North’ originating both in the Socialist countries and in the Global South, especially in Latin America. Works dealing with the role played by feminist organizations from the Eastern block during the Cold War also show the global influence they had in the Promotion of a feminist agenda in international organisations, primarily the UN, whilst highlighting the consolidation of strong bilateral connections between communist and non-aligned Southern countries through this channel.

p. 98 in Australia, the Labour Party, headed by Bob Hawke, initiated financial deregulation and a floating national currency, prompting the economists Elizabeth Humphries and Daniel Cahill to emphasize its ‘active role in constructing neoliberalism in the country’. at the same time, the New Zealand Labour Party, which also came to power in 1983, ‘ushered in a period of radical deregulation known as Rogernomics – named for treasury minister Roger Douglas. These moves have led numerous scholars to conclude that socialism had entered an era of widespread neoliberal influence, particularly in Western Europe. in his authoritative test on the long-term history of the Left, Geoff Eley argued that Mitterand’s France and Gonzalez’s Spain rivaled the neoliberal economics off Thatchers Britain after 1982.

P 110 Exloring the socioeconomic landscape of the 1980s through the lens of supranational socialist organisation offers new insight into the relationship between democratic socialism and capitalism. Although socialist leaders had become increasingly reliant on economic experts who praised the virtues of austerity and supply-side policies, the genesis of Global Challenge confirms that there was also an ‘epistemically community’ that continued to believe in the prospect of a new international economic order based on ‘global Keynesian’ policies.

The story is unquestionably a tal of defeat, however. Coupled with the tense international political climate of the time, the SI’s structural weaknesses contributed to its inability to bring about meaningful change in the early 1980s. Most critically, the SI ailed to establish relationships with the leading politicians and experts of its members parties, most of whom were unwilling to engage in an ideological debate to begin with. The disconnect between these two circles helps explain why their economic philosophies took such divergent paths = @global neo=Keynesian relaunch” for the former and “austerity with a human fac” for the latter. .. the case of Michael Manley, whose abrupt conversion sowed profound disillusionment among socialists about the capacity of public institutions to offset the detrimental effects of ‘capitalism unleashed’. After his re=election as prime minister in 1989, the leader of the PNP promptly abandoned his former ideological convictions and began promoting a pro-market approach to the economy…. In an interview with a journalist from Le Monde, he openly admitted that the time for a mixed economy was over and that his vision for the economic development of Jamaica would henceforth rely on private enterprise and using the country’s modest resources to create a pro-business environment.@

P. 174 “The Wellesley conference – despite, or perhaps cause of, all the friction it generated – had important legacies for transnational feminism… ‘a painful clash between well-meaning American academicians who believed themselves to be ahead of American men, and free from colonial and imperialist limitations on one hand, and, on the other hand, overly optimistic third=world women who had believed that the impossible dialogue between developed,developing people could be restored by women, between women and for women,’ One of the immediate results of this conflict was the determination of many South-based intellectuals to claim control over knowledge production about their own societies…. The following year, this group founded AAWORD (Association of African Women for Research and Development.@ For organisations such as AAWORD, the United Nations and other institutions of liberal internationalism provided the structure, legitimacy and occasionally funding that supported networks of activist intellectuals offering a critical assessment of capitalist modernisation and emergency neoliberalism. The UN Decade for Women brought an explosion of civil society organisations and networks… Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN) @ consisted principally of activist intellectuals who ran in policy making circles” and Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe. “brought together academic feminists with burn-it-down activists and free-thinking creatives”.

P. 177 “All three networks advocated for a political economy orientated towards social, cultural and ecological wellbeing and sustainability rather than developmentalist emphasis on growth, productivity and efficiency. These were, of course, longstanding priorities of women’s movements, dating back more than a century, but the UN Decade of Women spotlighted the gendered critiques of late 20th-century development schemes, which were predicated upon the Fordist imagery of a male headed, heteronormative, nuclear family, as the Danish economist Ester Boserup famously drew attention to the inappropriateness of this model.”

P. 181 “AAWORD members underscored that the pressure to shift agricultural land to commodities production and higher yield processes had fostered food insecurity and desertification – both problems that contributed substantially to women’s labour problems. … The report from their 1982 meeting in Dakar … “This present world crisis is the result of a process of Mail development originating from a growth model geared to the use of resources for private profit and power. This kind of development fails to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the majority of the world‘s people and it penetrates all political and economic systems”

P. The authors of this critique – Nawal El-Sadawi, Fatima Mernissi and Mallorca Vajrathorn – all worked within the UN during this period… with other prominent network leaders such as Devaki Jain, Marie-Angelique Savane and Peggy Antrobus and renowned intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, all contributed to the noted (and in some circles notorious) 1984 volume Sisterhood is Global.

Leftist Internationalisms: A Transational Political History

p. 16  the 1960s were also a crucial moment for what Francisco dahan labels as the ‘global left-feminist movement’ whose contribution to the international codification of women’s rights is only starting to be explored. if the transnational nature and internationally engagement of early 20th century feminism are widely recognized, recent research is increasingly focusing on transnational networks that epitomised ‘forms of feminism that did not adhere to the frameworks of the West and global North’ originating both in the Socialist countries and in the Global South, especially in Latin America. Works dealing with the role played by feminist organizations from the Eastern block during the Cold War also show the global influence they had in the Promotion of a feminist agenda in international organisations, primarily the UN, whilst highlighting the consolidation of strong bilateral connections between communist and non-aligned Southern countries through this channel.

p. 98 in Australia, the Labour Party, headed by Bob Hawke, initiated financial deregulation and a floating national currency, prompting the economists Elizabeth Humphries and Daniel Cahill to emphasize its ‘active role in constructing neoliberalism in the country’. at the same time, the New Zealand Labour Party, which also came to power in 1983, ‘ushered in a period of radical deregulation known as Rogernomics – named for treasury minister Roger Douglas. These moves have led numerous scholars to conclude that socialism had entered an era of widespread neoliberal influence, particularly in Western Europe. in his authoritative test on the long-term history of the Left, Geoff Eley argued that Mitterand’s France and Gonzalez’s Spain rivaled the neoliberal economics off Thatchers Britain after 1982.

P 110 Exloring the socioeconomic landscape of the 1980s through the lens of supranational socialist organisation offers new insight into the relationship between democratic socialism and capitalism. Although socialist leaders had become increasingly reliant on economic experts who praised the virtues of austerity and supply-side policies, the genesis of Global Challenge confirms that there was also an ‘epistemically community’ that continued to believe in the prospect of a new international economic order based on ‘global Keynesian’ policies.

The story is unquestionably a tal of defeat, however. Coupled with the tense international political climate of the time, the SI’s structural weaknesses contributed to its inability to bring about meaningful change in the early 1980s. Most critically, the SI ailed to establish relationships with the leading politicians and experts of its members parties, most of whom were unwilling to engage in an ideological debate to begin with. The disconnect between these two circles helps explain why their economic philosophies took such divergent paths = @global neo=Keynesian relaunch” for the former and “austerity with a human fac” for the latter. .. the case of Michael Manley, whose abrupt conversion sowed profound disillusionment among socialists about the capacity of public institutions to offset the detrimental effects of ‘capitalism unleashed’. After his re=election as prime minister in 1989, the leader of the PNP promptly abandoned his former ideological convictions and began promoting a pro-market approach to the economy…. In an interview with a journalist from Le Monde, he openly admitted that the time for a mixed economy was over and that his vision for the economic development of Jamaica would henceforth rely on private enterprise and using the country’s modest resources to create a pro-business environment.@

P. 174 “The Wellesley conference – despite, or perhaps cause of, all the friction it generated – had important legacies for transnational feminism… ‘a painful clash between well-meaning American academicians who believed themselves to be ahead of American men, and free from colonial and imperialist limitations on one hand, and, on the other hand, overly optimistic third=world women who had believed that the impossible dialogue between developed,developing people could be restored by women, between women and for women,’ One of the immediate results of this conflict was the determination of many South-based intellectuals to claim control over knowledge production about their own societies…. The following year, this group founded AAWORD (Association of African Women for Research and Development.@ For organisations such as AAWORD, the United Nations and other institutions of liberal internationalism provided the structure, legitimacy and occasionally funding that supported networks of activist intellectuals offering a critical assessment of capitalist modernisation and emergency neoliberalism. The UN Decade for Women brought an explosion of civil society organisations and networks… Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN) @ consisted principally of activist intellectuals who ran in policy making circles” and Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe. “brought together academic feminists with burn-it-down activists and free-thinking creatives”.

P. 177 “All three networks advocated for a political economy orientated towards social, cultural and ecological wellbeing and sustainability rather than developmentalist emphasis on growth, productivity and efficiency. These were, of course, longstanding priorities of women’s movements, dating back more than a century, but the UN Decade of Women spotlighted the gendered critiques of late 20th-century development schemes, which were predicated upon the Fordist imagery of a male headed, heteronormative, nuclear family, as the Danish economist Ester Boserup famously drew attention to the inappropriateness of this model.”

P. 181 “AAWORD members underscored that the pressure to shift agricultural land to commodities production and higher yield processes had fostered food insecurity and desertification – both problems that contributed substantially to women’s labour problems. … The report from their 1982 meeting in Dakar … “This present world crisis is the result of a process of Mail development originating from a growth model geared to the use of resources for private profit and power. This kind of development fails to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the majority of the world‘s people and it penetrates all political and economic systems”

P. The authors of this critique – Nawal El-Sadawi, Fatima Mernissi and Mallorca Vajrathorn – all worked within the UN during this period… with other prominent network leaders such as Devaki Jain, Marie-Angelique Savane and Peggy Antrobus and renowned intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, all contributed to the noted (and in some circles notorious) 1984 volume Sisterhood is Global.

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Notes from Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (2023)

April 20, 2023 – 4:03 pm

p. 5-6 The first explicit statements about Sappho’s involvement in female homoeroticism date from the Hellenistic and Roman period… written four centuries or more after Sappho. Earlier testimonia portray Sappho as interested in men; in Attic comedies dating from the 4th century BCE, she is imagined to have had several male lovers at the same time. The earliest literary document that may reflect the reception of Sappho’s songs is a song by the Greek poet Anakreon. In this song, dating to the second half of the 6th century BCE, a male speaker complains that a girl from Lesbos, whom he desires, pays him no attention because of his white hair (a feminine noun in Greek) and instead gapes at another woman or another feminine object… the whole point of the song is that this is left ambiguous… How precisely the meaning of this verb or Anakreon’s girl of Lesbos relates to Sappho’s poetry is not clear, but they most likely reflect the reception of her poetry, which was very popular in this period. The Greeks at this time imagined Sappho to be hypersexual and equally interested in men and woman. … four Athenian vase paintings, although older than our written accounts, are also only indirect witnesses to Sappho. They date from the end of the 6th to the first hald of the 5th century BCE and associate Sappho with drinking parties (so-called symposia) or picture her in the private quarters of women, in which her poetry was apparently performed in classical Athens. We do not know how these performances relate to the original performance of her songs, let alone whether these portraits of Sappho resemble her real appearance in any way.”

p. 7 “Greek scholars from Alexandria edited around nine “books” (papyrus scrolls actually) with poetry of Sappho in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE… roughly 10,000 lines, of which only 650 survive. … the Suda ascribes the invention of the plectrum (string pick) to her. Sappho was indeed known not only as a poet but also as a musician. Like other lyric poets in this period, she performed her poetry to music or had other perform it for her… Of the melodies accompanying these songs nothing has survived.”

p. 15 “This may explain the mention of ‘pupils’ in the Suda and other sources; they are anachronistic references to the young women she trained in her choruses.”

“Another question is whether we can reconcile Sappho’s choral activities with the erotic relationships she sings about. Some scholars have suggested that Sappho had a homoerotic relationship with one girl in the chorus, which somehow would be the model for the whole group… They point to groups of boys that formed around one aristocratic boy and his adult lover on acnient Crete as a possible parallel. Another possibility is that the homoerotic feelings Sappho and the other female performers of her songs sing about do not reflect actual relationships, but are intended to be forms of public praise or statements about the general power of love.”

Four modern reconstructions of Sappho dominate the lierature about her: Sappho the chorus organiser, Sappho the teacher, Sappho the priestes, and Sappho the banqueter. Of these four the suggestion that she led young women’s choruses is the most plausible”

p. 17 However one would like to reconstruct Sappho’s life, above all she is a poet and the earliest Greek woman of whom at leasta substantial body of poetry is preserved. Other women poets date mainly from the Hellenistic period, and much less of their work has survived.”

p. 59 “My skin was [delicate] before, but now old age
[claims it]; my hair turned from black [to white].

My spirit has grown heavy; knees buckle
that once would dance light as fawns

I often groan, but what can I do?
It is impoosible for humans not to age

For they say, [pierced] by love rosy-armed Dawn
went to the ends of the earth holding Tithonos,

beautiful and young, but in time gray old age
seized him, even with a deathless wife…..

Yet I love the finer things. [Know] that passion for
the light of life has also granted me brilliance and beauty.”

p 88 The sweetest apple reddens on a high branch
high upon highest, missed by the applepickers:

No, they didn’t miss, so much as couldn’t touch.

Herdsmen cruh under their feet
a hyacinth in the mountains; on the ground
purple blooms…

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Books History Women's history

Notes from A Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England

August 29, 2022 – 9:52 pm

P 50 According to the historian Barbara Hanawalt, who focused on a sample of 575 homocides in Northamptonshire occurring in 70 years of relatively complete records,between 1300 and 1472, murder remained not only sn almost ubiquitous activity but an overwhelmingly male one; 99% of the accused and 94% of the victims were men. (interestingly though in London during the same period, Hanawalt established that women appeared more frequently as perpetrators (7%) and as victims (10%).  The Northamptonshire killers tended to come from the middle ranks of society and contained a high number of what might be called ‘ middling peasants’, along with tradesmen (tailors, brewers, porters) a fair number of clergy, and more than a sprinkling of servants. .. dominated by killings outside the family, a quarter of which were committed during thefts or burglaries.”

p. 51 One well-documented (and not untypical) case from 14th-century London, Walter de Benington and 17 companions came to the brewhouse of Gilbert de Mordone, refused to leabe when asked to do so having consumed four gallons of beer, made it clear that they intended to carry on drinking, molested a young girl and then assaulted Gilbert de Mordone and his brewer. The brewer took up a staff and killed Walter. The inquest jury returned a verdict of self-defence.”

p. 127 From around 1725, men from more humble stations in society no longer carried the formidable staffs, sometimes iron-tipped, that had been regarded as essential implements of self-defence in the 16th and 17th centuries. True, gun ownership had become more widespread, but guns were rarely employed in the kinds of quarrels that had once claimed lives. And while a large number of men continued to carry knives (which, one should remember, were essential work tools for many) they were less inclined to draw them in anger than their ancestors had been. Now it was far more likely that a quarrel would end in a fist fight rather than a stabbing,

p. 183 a couple of married in middle age. Catherine was 40, a spinster and a woman of property when in 1792 she married Robert, a widower in his 50s. First all went well , but … Robert was suffering from ‘family concerns’, presumably financial, and it seems likely that Catherine had granted him property to help him out. Thereaftter, so far as we can tell, Robert became fixated on acquiring as much of his wife’s property as possible… he had her locked up in an attic, though he did at least instruct the servants to pass food to her. In desperation, she knocked a hole through the wall of the attic into an adjoining house, and managed to make contact with a servant there. The servant go a message to her friends and they rescued her … our sources dry up at the cliff-hanging moment.”

p. 185 In 1670, Lady Grace Chatsworth complained that when she had been lying in bed, heaviuly pregnant, ill and suffering from a fever, her husband had deliberately brought “a company of musicians” into the chamber nest to hers and “caused them to strike and play very loudly to the danger of her health”. She had asked her husband to send them away, she said, but he had refused to do so, and they say “drinking & making a grievous noyse and caused the music to play until 12 o’clock at night.”

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Notes from Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain

August 29, 2022 – 9:08 pm

p. 4 Given the importance that Caesar attributed to the Bruids, and their apparently centrality in Gaullish society, one would expect them to feature prominently in his long and detailed description of his conquest of the region; but they are completely invisible in it. Nor do they appear at all in his account of his two expeditions to Britain. They are only mentioned , in fact, in that self-contained survey section on native customs, which does not seem to have any relevance to his practical experiences in Gaul. That this is not simply an authorial policy on Caesar’s own part is strongly suggested by the fact that his history of the Gallic war was continued after his feath by another Roman politician, Aulus Hirtus, who also made no mention of Druids in his depiction of the action,

p. 5 Cicero “ commented that he had met a Gallic Druid, Divitiacus of the Aedui tribe. This man had claimed to Cicero to be learned in the ways of the natural world, and he made predictions, sometimes observing the flight of the birds and sometimes spontaneously,,, Caesar wrote quite a lot about him, because he was the most steadfast native ally of Rome. He never, however, called him a Druid; Diviacus is represented rather, as a leading Gallic politicians and spokesman for his tribe in an assembly of chiefs…. Sean Dunham has made this one prop of his argument that Caesar’s account of Druids as a special caste is misleading and that druides was in fact simply a Latinisation of the native term for the religious functions of chiefs and leading aristocrats of Gaul. Roman senators, after all, doubled as priests just as Diviciacus seems to have done.”

p. 9 “It was once suggested that Strabo was adding a little extra information to a medly of Caesar and Diodorus, and that Pomponius was just a rehasj of Caesar with a few imaginative flourishes. The last of these arguments may still stand, although it is also possible that Pomponius was quoting another authority or authorities, now completely lost. In the case of Diodorus and Strabo the situation has been made to seem simpler. Since the 1950s there’s been a widespread consensus that behind the description of Gaul given in both lies a single lost source: the work of a Greek philosopher from Syria, Posidonus, who visitred southeastern Gaul in the early first century BCE> It has also been proposed that Posidonius represents the earlier authority who Caesar might have been quoting for his set portrait of Gallic society. If this is the case, then pretty well all that is recorded of Druids before the Roman conquest disrupted their society and authority rests on the indirect testimony of one traveller.

Specialists of the period have therefore come to speak of a Posidonian tradition of Greek and Roman writing about the ancient Druids … were at once quite sophisticated thinks and scientists, with a firm belief in the immortality of the soul, and practitioners of large-scale human sacrifice by a variety of cruel means … suggested that Posidonius exaggerated the sophistication … by imposing Greek concepts of philosophy on it… accused him of acting as a propogandist by tainting the Gallic tribes with barbarism. Piggott noticed that the description of human sacrifice by shooting to death with arrows is off, because archery is not mentioned in any accounts of the warfare of the Gauls or related peoples.

p. 21 Suetonius and Loiny both stated that the Druids had been suppressed by imperial decree, but Pliny then proceeded to write as if they still existed, raining the possibility that only their political power and religious role had been destroyed. If that was the case, it would explain the remaining references to them in ancient texts, three of which appear in the series of potted biographies of Roman emperors known collectively as the Agustan History. In each of these a Gallic dryas or drydis, or a group of druidae, makes a prophecy to an emperor or future emperor that turns out to be perfectly accurate… the prophets concerned are clearly female. In one case she is the landlady from whom the emperor-to-be is rending a billet during his service in Gaul. These are the first and only appearances of female Druids, by name, in the whole of ancient literature. It is possible that they had always been present in Gallic society. It is possible that, with the annihilation of their religious and political role, the Druids as a whole were reduced to local healers, soothsayers and folk magicians, and came to include women as part of this loosening of their society identity. It is also possible that terms related to Druid were being applied by Roman authors who knew little of Gaul and the Gallic language, to kinds of magical practitioner very different from the original Druids.”

p. 48 “This is how an Iron Age Druid is fashioned: from selected parts of Greek, Roman, Irish or Welsh texts usually mixed with archaeological data. The process made to compose the result is more or less an arbitrary one, determined by the instincts, attitudes, context and loyalties of the person engaged in it. Virtually none of the ingredients employed have the status of solid material… The manner in which these ancient and medieval images of them have been put to use is therefore a perfect case study of the way in which the modern British have liked to think and feel: about humanity, nationhood, religion, morality and the cosmos.”

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Notes from Elizabethan Democracy and Epistolary Culture by Elizabeth R Williamson

July 17, 2022 – 8:05 pm

p. 37 “the embassy undertaken by Sir Amias Paulet as resident ambassador to France from 1576-9.

“The ambassador’s wife, Margaret, and their six children were part of the embassy, and accordingly were expected to take leave from the Queen in person. Though most ambassadors travelled without their wives, the practice was increasing: Gemma Allen puts the percentage of 16th century ambassadorial wives on embassy at 25%, rising in the 17th century. Hilliard [miniaturist who could sketch Elizabeth’s potential suitor Francois, Duke of Alencon] was recently married and so his wife Alice accompanied him in the embassy train, and the household’s chaplain, Arthur Wake, brought his wife and departed with her when she became pregnant. .. It is telling of the general perception of the wife of the political man that one place she does appear is in a fondly recalled domestic vignette, written by Francis Bacon, years later, where she cures a wart on his finger. The meeting of female domestic responsibility and political activity in the embassy in glimpsed in Hotman’s single reference to the role of the wife in The Ambassador. After warning that care is to be taken concerning who is accepted into the household, since there are ‘so many spies”, he syayes: “It shalbe the best way, if he can, to bring his wife with him, whose eie will stoppe infinite abuses amongst gis people, and disorders in his house, unlesse hee can trust there with some one of his owne followers, that may carry an eye and charge over the rest.”… she is in charge of internal security and supervision of all who come into the household; this is a key role, particularly for a large embassy, and one that places her firmly in the diplomatic world of information gathering and political communication.

p. 38 There is a brief mention of Lady Paulete in her husband’s correspondence that hints at an even weightetier, though subtle, role in diplomatic activity. In a letter to Queen Elizabeth on 22 June 1577, Paulet describes his recent audience with the French King and Wueen Mother, stating “and thus I was dismissed from the K and the Q mother, after that I had thanked Q mother for the good intertaynement which she had given my wife on Sondaye last, as indeed bothe shee and the Frenche King’s wife did use her with great favor and familiatitie, and amongst theire other talke made great protestacions of theire sincere affection towards your Majesteie”… it is a political statement to entertain the wife of the English ambassador… both a ceremonial activity and one that contains the opportunity to negotiate on an ostensibly informal level ,,, women in court could find it easier than men to conduct diplomacy with other women in power during leisure time; it is thus even more relevant to search for women in diplomacy in embassies to France around this time, considering the powerful political presence of the French Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici.”… one of Paulet’s daughters and his eldest son Hugh died during his appointment.”

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