My recent short piece on the the Byzantine composer Kassia has drawn some info on a female composer much closer to our own time, Rebecca Clarke, who still encountered many of the same obstacles of discrimination.
And attempts to recover her story have been hampered – although apparently no longer – by the modern laws of copyright – so crazy that this should persist after a person’s death.
According to a comment piece in the Telegraph, they were gentle caring people who just wanted to rescue “fallen women” from the gutter, and who blamed the men who used their services…
It isn’t my period of historical study, but I’d hazard a guess that for a Victorianist it would make a great foundation for a Carnival of Bad History post.
Well maybe a little: you do get the odd article about “Men” these days.
In a 1921 essay Rose Macaulay “hones in on the gendered politics of knowledge. By treating women as a topic (which men are not)… newspapers of the period assumed the more powerful subvject position of observer and disseminator of knowledge about women, who ware placed in the passive position of object-of-scrutiny. Macaulay’s essay invites this reading with a metaphor that signals the objectivification, even dehumanization, of women when treated as an object of commentary: “Women are regarded in some quarters rather as a curious and interesting kind of bettle, whose habits repay investigation.”
(From Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street, Ashgate, 2006, p.140)
Mildred, Anne, Elizabeth, Katherine and Margaret – these were the highly educated, celebrated daughters of Anthony Booke, the tutor to Edward IV and active parliamentarian under Elizabeth. There are all interesting in different ways, but I confess that I struggle to keep them all separate – as they acquire husbands and new names, it all seems a bit of a tangle. So since I’ve been re-reading Silent But for the Word, one of the early classics of Renaissance women’s studies, thought I’d set out a primer:
Mildred, the eldest, married William Cecil, the first Baron Burghley and Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary. She was celebrated by Roger Ascham as one of the most learned women in England, doing translations from Greek of early church fathers, being said to particularly like reading Basil the Great, Cyril, Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen. (Important at the time because this was the “pure” church, uncorrupted by Catholicism.) She was described by the Spanish ambassador as a “furious heretic” who had greaty influence over her husband.
Anne, who married Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, translated Latin sermons and the Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, which was an official document of the English Church, ordered to be widely distributed by the Convecation of 1563. She was a strong supporter of Reformist preachers.
Elizabeth first married Sir Thomas Hoby (who had translated the influential Castiglione’s Courtier, and then Lord John Russell. She also translated from religious material from Latin, and was acclaimed for her skills in writing epitaphs, in Latin, Greek and English. Her letters also show a mind well attuned to legal niceties.
Katharine married the diplomat Sir Henry Killigrew. Her Latin verse to Mildred asking for one of his missions to be withdrawn, has survived, and is less than subtle. In George Ballard’s translation: “His staye let Cornwall’s shore engage; / and peace with Mildred dwell./ Else war with Cecil’s name I wage/ Perpetual war. – farewell.”
Little is known of Margaret, who died young.
From: Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes towards Learned Women in the Renaissance, pp. 107-125, in Silent.
The good news is this particular woman, Mary Hamilton, courtier and one-time amour of the Prince Regent, is, hopefully, going to be saved for British history,. The bad news is that her papers could ever have got close to escaping the country.
The ‘sub-governess’ was an accomplished diarist and letter-writer and attempts are now being made to keep her extraordinary, largely unpublished letters and journals in this country.
A month ago David Lammy, the Arts Minister, put a temporary block on private plans to sell the archive abroad and last week the John Rylands university library in Manchester expressed an interest in buying the documents from the owners at the recommended price of £123,500 so that historians could have access to the fascinating picture she painted of court life in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The government decision on the export licence application for the archive will be deferred until 12 January, but this could be extended until early April in the light of a serious attempt to raise the money needed to buy it.
Another of the “rediscovered” women of history: Kassia (also Cassia, Kassiane, Eikasia and Ikasia) was a 9th-century nun in Constantinople and “the outstanding female poet of the middle Byzantine period”. She’s one of only four positively identified female Byzantine hymnographers (although it seems a safe bet there were more).
Tradition suggests that she was a participant in the “bride show” (the means by which Byzantine princes/emperors sometimes chose a bride, by giving a golden apple to his choice. But seems she wasn’t thrilled:
Struck by Kassia’s beauty, Emperor Theophilos pronounced: “Ach, what a flood of terrible things came through woman!”
She replied, yet with modesty: “But also through women better things spring.”
Stung to the heart by these words, Theophilos passed her by, and gave the golden apple to Theodora who came from Paphlagonia.
Some 49 of her hymns survive and 23 are in the liturgical books, which presumably mean they are still being sung today.
But she also wrote non-liturgical stuff, which is beautifully pithy and reminds me of the writing of the roughly contemporary Shei Shonagon. For example a few of her sententiae:
I hate the rich man moaning as if he were poor.
I hate one who conforms himself to all ways.
I hate one who does everything for recognition.There is absolutely no cure for stupidity,
no help for it except death!
A stupid person when honoured, is overbearing to all…
If a stupid person is young and in power,
alas and woe and what a disaster!A crisis will reveal a genuine friend,
who will not abandon one whom he loves.
Kassia became the hegoumene, Superior, of a monastery on the eastern slope of the seventh hill of Constantinople, near the walls of Constantine. It is easy to imagine her as an extremely sharp-eyed governor…
(From Anna M. Silvas, “Kassia the Nun,” in Lynda Garland (ed) Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800-1200, Ashgate, 2006.)
Looking around this I found a good piece on women and medieval music, a piece about another female composer, “the daughter of Ioannes Kladas” – this also has a listing of Kassia’s works. Wikipedia, however, needs a bit of work.
A recording of women’s medieval music, including Kassia’s, is available on Amazon UK
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