Category Archives: Women’s history

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Notes from Rebel Girls: How Votes for Women Changed Edwardian Lives

July 9, 2018 – 1:08 pm

p. 102

“On Monday 4 February (1907) two of the striking weavers appeared in the magistrates’ court, accused of unlawful violence. The weighty Lancashire textiles trade unionist, David Shackleton MP, alarmed at suffragette incitement of his members, arrived in Hebden Bridge and condemned the violence. Letters critical of the suffragettes began to appear in the local press. Nonetheless, even on the eve of their trial, Adela Pankhurst and Jennie Baines continued to address open air meetings.

On Thursday 7 February, Jennie Baines and Laura Wilson appeared before Todmorden magistrates. Both denied the charges” and refused to pay fines or sureties. Laura retaliated: ‘I shall not find sureties to keep the peace… I shall not pay any fines or costs imposed on me by men who do not allow me to have a woman in Court to plead with me. I refuse to be bound over. That afternoon, both women were taken by trains to Leeds’ forbidding Armley gaol, the first suffragettes to be incarcerated in a |Yorkshire prison. They were seen off at the station by a handful of sympathisers. That night in Hebden Bridge, Adela plus Laura’s husband George Wilson justified what had occurred: the only way to settle strikes was by labour representation in parliament. (However, while still defiant, there was no longer the fill-the-gaols incitement: two imprisonments were sobering enough.) Even though their son was only five years old, George’s loyalty to Laura during her imprisonment contrasts with Hannah Mitchell’s experience: ‘Most of us who were married found that ‘Votes for Women’ were of less interest to our husbands than their own dinners. George Wilson’s commitment vividly illustrates how suffragette militancy within local West Riding communities sprang from labour movement solidarities which the WSPU could conveniently tap into.”

p. 103 “Nationally, early 1907 was a time of tremendous WSPU optimism and growth. The leadership exhorted supporters that ‘The help of every woman in the country is needed now if the fetters are to be struck off that keep women a subject race.’ It was indeed about this time that a Hebden Bridge WSPU branch was formed. On the night of Saturday 9 February, just two days after Jennie Baines and Laura Wilson were carted off to Armley, a local mass indignation meeting was held. The joint Hebden Bridge branch secretaries were Edith Berkley, another experienced fustian clothing machinist, and Louie Cobbe, Lilian’s younger sister. Within a few weeks, WSPU branches sprang up like mushrooms along the Calder Valley: not only in Hebden Bridge and Halifax, but in smaller communities like Elland too.”

p. 103 Lavena (Saltonstall) even found herself at the sharp end of the local anti-suffragette backlash. She was certainly keenly aware of how a single woman, out earning her living independently of her family and speaking her own mind, was viewed by the local community. Later she recalled with vehement passion: ‘Should any girls show a tendency to politics, or to ideas of her own, she is looked upon by the vast majority of women as a person who neglects doorsteps and home matters, and is therefore not fit to associate with their respectable daughters and sisters. If girls develop any craving for a different life or wider ideas, their mothers fear that they are going to become Socialists or Suffragettes – a Socialist being a person with lax views about other people’s watches and purses, and other people’s husbands or wives, and a Suffragette a person whose house is always untidy… Who is going to tell these mothers that daughters were not given to them merely to dress and domesticate. Who is going to tell them that they have a higher duty to perform to them than merely teaching them housework? Who is going to tell them that it is as cruel to discourage a child from making use of its own talent or individuality as it would be to discourage a child from using its limbs?”

p. 107 Over 500 ILP women signed the Manifesto to the Women’s Social and Political Union published at New Year 1907. Of these, 136 came from the West Riding of Yorkshire and a further 146 from Lancashire: together they added up to well over half of all signatories. And of the 58 WSPU branches now sprung up across the country, almost a quarter lay in Yorkshire, most in the West Riding textile towns. For such Pennine textile communities in northern England were the heartland of early WSPU support. Their very names – Halifax and Hebden Bridge, Bradford and Keighley, Leeds and Dewsbury – conjured up countless bales of wool, the racket of looms, the whirr of sewing machines.”

p.302 The Third rebel girl who left Britain, Dora Thewlis, also emigrated to Australia … like so many other Edwardians, was primarily an economic migrant. Some time before 1914, along with her elder sister and about 20 other Huddersfield girls, she left in search of a better life than that offered by the long hours in the Yorkshire textile mills. Dora went to Warnambool in the Melbourne region, where she worked in blanket-weaving. .. in 1918, she married Jack Dow, a second-generation Australian, and they had two children.”

p. 303 “Lavena Saltonstall – last hear of springing to defend the broad WEA curriculum against attacks about ‘cloroforming the workers’ – remained active in the Halifax WEA until 1916. Then, in June 1917, in Halifax Unitarian Chapel, 34-year-old Lavena, now working as an electrical engineer’s clerk, married George Naket of Bradford, a 40-year-old private in the Duke of Wellington’s regiment. But after the War, this talented self-taught feminist journalist, happy to take on anti-suffragists, sadly disappears from view.”

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Notes from Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne

June 1, 2018 – 7:51 pm

p. 33 For misogyny, though often personal in tone, is most productively understood as a politically phenomenon. Specifically, I argue that misogyny ought to be understood as the system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance.

p. 68 According to my account, misogynist hostility can be anything that is suitable to serve a punitive, deterrent, or warning function, which (according to your theory of punishment) my be anything aversive to human beings in general, or the woman being targeted in particular. Misogynist hostility encompasses myriad “down girl” moves – so many as to make the list seem likely to be indefinitely extensible. But, to generalize: adults are insultingly likened to children, people to animals or even to objects. As well as infantilizing and belittling, there’s ridiculing, humiliating, mocking, slurring, vilifying, demonizing, as well as sexualising, or alternatively, desexualising, silencing, shunning, shaming, blaming, patronizing, condescending, and other forms of treatment that are dismissive and disparaging in specific social contexts. Then there is violence and threatening behaviours, including “punching down” – that is deferred or displaced aggression. And since, on my account, one woman can often serve as a stand-in or representative for a whole host of others in the misogynist imagination, almost any woman will be vulnerable to some form of misogynist hostility from some source or other.

p. 69 Misogyny need not and usually will not arise from specialised attitudes, like the idea that women are seen as sexual objects, viewed as sub-human, or having a hateful, detestable “essence”. Rather, it’s generally about the enforcement and re-establishment of patriarchal order and the protests when it gets challenged. Disgust flows from, and augments, these social processes.”

p. 74 misogynists may simply be people who are consistent overachievers in contr4ibuting to misogynist social environments (whether or not the system counts as misogynistic, all things considered. The point is that their efforts are pushing strongly in this direction.) Alternatively, misogynist may be people who have been heavily influenced in their beliefs, desires, actions, values, allegiances, expectations, rhetoric and so on, by a misogynist social atmosphere.”

p. 77 Many if not most of us at the current historical juncture are likely to be capable of channelling misogynistic social forces on occasion, regardless of sincere egalitarian beliefs and feminist commitments. I am sure I am no exception to this. Such channeling may take the form not only of unwitting policing and enforcing distinctively gendered norms and expectations, but also, on my analysis, over-policing and over0enforcing gender-neutral and potentially valid norms, e.g. genuine moral obligations. If the result is that we evince excessively or distinctively hostile reactions to the women implicitly deemed to be wayward in some way (again, rightly or wrongly) as compared with her male counterparts, then it will still count as misogyny that she faces in my book.”

p. 196 In June 2016, Standford Universiry student Brock Turner, age 20, was tried for treating a young woman, age 22, like a proverbial piece of meat – sexually assaulting her behind a dumpster, after a party on campus… This case vividly illustrates the often overlooked mirror image of misogyny – himpathy, as I’ll call it … it’s so common that we regard it as business as usual… The specific form of himpathy on display here is the excessive sympathy sometimes shown towards male perpetrators of sexual violence. It is frequently extended in contemporary America to men who are white, nondisabled and otherwise privileged “golden boys” such as Turner, the recipient of a Stanford swimming scholarship. There is a subsequent reluctance to believe the women who testify against these men, or even to punish the golden boys whose guilt has been firmly established – as, again, Turner’s was.”

p. 263 Misogyny often involves distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women, by lights of their conformity to patriarchal norms and values. So, at the highest level of generality, it’s not surprising that women who aspire to be ‘good’ have social incentives to distance themselves from a woman deemed ‘bad’ as Clinton often was, and to publicly participate when she was ostracized and punished for supposed moral crimes and misdemeanours.”

p. 264 “penalizing successful women serves an ego-protective function (only) for other women. It defuses the threatening sense that a similar – and similarly good, decent and/or ‘real’ woman – is more competent or accomplished than they are. And tellingly, it appears that this is linked to a lack of self-belief that can be assuaged by positive feedback.”

p. 264 “In the days following the election, it was common for those of us grieving the result to judge the white women who voted for Donald Trump even more harshly than their white male counterparts. I was guilty of this myself. But … I subsequently came to redirect a good portion of my anger towards the patriarchal system that makes even young women believe … that they are unlikely to succeed in high-powered, male-dominated roles….It is wrong but natural to protect oneself from the prospect of threatening others who challenge one’s extant sense that one couldn’t have been the president (say), notwithstanding one’s best efforts. A way to do this is to hold that these women are different and in some way inferior or objectionable or otherwise suspect. They are, say, ruthless, callous, or uncaring. Or their success makes them witches: their power is black magic.

p. 276 Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard. “The two were consistently described in a strikingly similar way, especially given the difference between them in appearance, age and history (though not their center-left politics, notably.) The belief in female leaders in politics seems to founder even at the level of visual perception. They look hollow, stuff, wooden robotic, as well as fake and inauthentic. Their energy doesn’t appear to come from inside them: nor, it appears, do their values – which are subsequently held to be merely a product of mercurial, outward social forces.”

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Notes from Women and Liberty 1600-1800: Philosophical Essays

April 4, 2018 – 9:33 pm

p. 50 Gabrielle Suchon was born in Semur (in Burgundy, not far from Dijon), her parents were of minor gentry and there were numerous jurists in the family. Her father died when she was 13. At a certain point, she entered a convent, and at some other point she left it. Upon leaving the convent, she supported herself as a teacher while living with her mother, and led what has been described as a studious life. She died in 703 at 72…. In each of her major works, she inveighs against the institution of marriage and the harm marriage brings to women, so it might well be that she refused to marry. But she also attacks the oppressive conditions of convents, especially for those without vocation.

p. 51 Such authored two major works: 1 Treatise on Ethics and Politics Divided into Three Parts: Freedom, Knowledge and Authority, where it is shown that person of the [female] sex have a natural capacity that enables them to exercise these three prerogatives now denied them. It was originally published in 1693 under the pseudonym ‘GS Aristophile’ then reprinted in 1694, with a slightly modified title. And 2. On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen, or Life without Commitments was published in 1700 under her own name. The latter work was reviewed in print, and so, we can assume, read by others, if not widely read. Both works are striking in demonstrating a pointed concern with the situation and status of women, even while they aim to develop an ethical and political theory. That is, Suchon’s theoretical aspirations are intimately tied to her concern for liberating – this is, ensuring genuine freedom for – women.”

“… there are unanswered questions about Suchon’s influence on those who followed her. In her The Sex of Knowing, Michele Le Doueff suggested that perhaps Rousseau plagiarized Suchon. There are passages that support this suggestion. In the Treatise on Ethics and Politics, Suchon talks of women as essentially free, but constrained by chains which they have helped to forge by unthinkingly accepting the institutions and conventions which prescribe their conduct. Rousseau’s oft-quoted opening to The Social Contract that ‘man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains’ echoes Suchon’s language. However, Rebecca Wilkin and Sonja Ruud have found no evidence that either Roussea or Madame Duplin, a woman for whom Rousseau served as secretary while she was writing her Ouvrage sur les femmes, concerning the equality of the sexes, reach Suchon… it might be possible for a thinker to have import without there being a well-established direct causal impact.”

p. 86 “In Hamburg, as the impact of the revolution in France led to civil unrest, Elise Reimarus published a pamphlet, Freihart, which was intended to demonstrate that genuine liberty is only available to those subject to civil law. … A little later, in Naples, the journal of the short-lived republican government of 1799, Il Monitore napoletano, edited by Eleanor Fonseca Pimental, declared: “Freedom consist in this, that every citizen can do whatever is not prohibited by law, and which does not harm others.”

p. 109 “Sophie de Grouchy’s 1798 distinction between negative and positive right, which, upon examination, prefigures the famous distinction between positive and negative liberty.”

p.122 “Because Berlin only had an eye for the ‘fathers’ of the tradition, he failed to live up to the inclusive spirit that is characteristic of liberalism at its best. By ignoring De Grouchy, he failed to give the mothers of this tradition – De Grouchy and her friends Olympe de Gouges, Harriet Taylor, and so on – their due. This is not just a matter of accurate record keeping and historical justice. When the sons and daughters of a tradition are told only about the fathers, their (moral) education gives them not only a skewed narrative of reality, it also limits the possibilities available to the play of their imaginations.”

p. 141 Margaret Cavendish “Her natural philosophy shows the same creativity and willingness to go against the grain of her contemporaries’ views. For example, Hobbes, Descartes, Robert Boyle and other natural philosophers of the 17th century conceived of matter as naturally inert, capable of moving only when moved by some external force. In their view, the motions of this matter are governed by various deterministic laws of nature .. the corporeal world is fundamentally law-governed and predictable… For Cavendish, Nature is one fully continuous, infinite entity, composed of three intermixed types, or ‘degrees’ of matter. Two of these – the ‘rational’ matter and the ‘sensitive’ matter – are intrinsically self-moving, which Cavendish claims entails that they are also perceptive and knowing. The third type, ‘dull’ matter, lacks self-motion; it moves only because it is blended with self-moving matter. The three degrees of matter are completely intermixed, so that every part of Nature, no matter how small, will contain all three types of matter.”

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Notes from The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews

March 20, 2018 – 10:50 pm

p. 19

“The famous saga of Eric the Red may be called so but it is really about a skorungur, which is what we call a strong woman hero. Her name was Gudrid the Far-Traveller, his wife, and she lived in the 10th century.” ….Like Thilda says, the Icelandic women are strong because they are descended from Vikings and conquerors and raised by the icy sea wings which sting their cheeks and the hot geyser steams which scald them. And in a land where fire and ice are in battle and care little for anything around them, all people must be strong … Thilda’s story gives me a feeling like recognition, a sense of inevitability and completion, a slotting into place… I recognise it by knowing its antithesis; my home and environment. See, where I am from there is not this boundlessness. The outside that I know is broken to pieces and scattered. Our cul-de-sac is on a suburban estate built on the site of an old power station that had been running up until the eighties. All the houses look the same with neatly trimmed rectangular lawns and faux-Tudor beams, no weeds (there are sprays for those), and the streets are named after famous ships. Our town was typical of Midlands industry because it is well connected to the canal and river systems. There was a power station, a vinegar factor, a sugar beet factor and several carpet factories, one of which my mum worked in as a secretary while I was in her belly. The power station was coal-fired and archaic and the factories moved to China so they knocked it all down and built the suburbs and a giant Tesco. My mum and dad got jobs a 30-minute drive away, closer to the city, and no one could grow anything to eat in their gardens because the power station left radon in the topsoil.”

p. 268 Edmund Hillary the mountaineer climbed Everest because it was there. Astronaut Gene Cernan of Apollos 10 and 17, when asked why he thought we went to the moon, said because it’s there. When Tenzing Norgay the Sterpa got to the top of Everest he got on his knees, buried some biscuits in offering and prated to the goddess of the mountain for disturbing her. We should have gone to the moon like Tenzing Norgay. Maybe this really is the point in the age where everything changes, a rewriting of myths, a sort of coming-of-age of the human narrative. Remember that everyone mocked Copernicus at first when he said that maybe Earth did not sit at the centre of the universe, hey guys, maybe it does not all revolve around us. Which is what Lovelock and Margulis were saying too. These ideas do not instantaneously propagate. They resonate only once a situation occurs that prompts their germination.”

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Notes from Hypatia by Edward J Watts

March 20, 2018 – 10:48 pm

p. 1 “In the spring of 45, however, the Roman imperial machine in the great city of Alexandria seized up. The trouble began with the election of Cyril as Bishop of Alexandria in 412. After the death of Cyril’s predecessor, the Christian community in the city split in two camps with one side supporting Cyril and the other supporting a rival named Timothy. It took three days of street fighting and of the intervention of Egypt’s top military official to prevail… By 415 the confrontations … brought the Bishop into conflict with the Roman governor Orestes…. Cyril summoned a mob of monks to Alexandria. He hoped they would intimidate the governor into an agreement. But violent protests have unpredictable consequences. Instead of persuading Orestes to talk, one of the monks hit him in the head with a stone. Orestes had the monk arrested, tortured and killed…. Cyril and his associates began to blame their problems on the regular audiences that Orestes had with the female philosopher named Hypatia. The daughter of a prominent Alexandrian mathematician Hypatia had been Alexandria’s leading thinker for nearly 35 years. Philosophers had no formal authority in the later Roman world, but some of them enjoyed immense influence. They had traditionally advised cities and officials about policy while standing apart from the transactions that bound the Roman elite to one another. Concerned only with truth and uninterested in reputation or personal gain, these public intellectuals involved themselves political life only to the degree that their actions made cities more justly governed. If deployed at the right time and in the right way, their counsel could diffuse tension by adding a calm and rational voice to heated confrontations. Her status is a philosopher gave her tremendous symbolic power in a city that was struggling to hold itself together. Her presence at his side made the governor appear to be the reasonable party in the dispute…. Christians loyal to Cyril… began to murmur that Hypatia had bewitched the governor and used her magic to keep him alienated from Cyril. ..In March 415 this frustration led a member of the Alexandrian church named Peter to gather a crowd of Cyrillian supporters that could confront Hypatia. We do not know what Peter and his associates initially planned to do when they found her. Mobs gathered all the time in the Roman world. They usually screamed and yelled. Sometimes they vandalised property. In rare cases they even killed. It was however exceptional for a member of the Roman elite to be physically assaulted by a mob. This mob was different in it either went out with an uncommonly violent sense of purpose or had uncommon luck in finding Hypatia teaching in a public classroom travelling in one of Alexandria’s streets…. Peter and his partisans grabbed her. they shredded her clothes and her body with pottery fragments, tore out her eyes, drag her corpse through the streets of Alexandria, and then burnt her remains.”

P 51 As the 380 s gave way to the 390s, Hypatia faced many of the same professional and personal challenges encountered by mid-career professionals in the modern world. By her 35th birthday, Hypatia had created a distinctive brand of philosophical teaching that combined the rigor of the leading Alexandrian mathematicians with the sophistication of Plotinian and Porphyrian Platonism. … [but] steady expansion of Iamlichian teaching into leading centres of scholarship like Alexandria and Athens mean Hypatia’s teaching began to look increasingly dated. .. The emergence of a militant anti pagan tendency among some Alexandrian Christians early years of the decade presented a different challenge. The non-confessional intellectual middle ground that Hypatia cultivated continued to draw elite Christian students like Synesius who valued traditional education. The wider world, however, was increasingly polarized in the 390s by a toxic combination of anti-pagan imperial legislation and aggressive actions against pagans by Alexandria’s Christian leadership destablised the city.”

p. 92 Female philosophers were not particularly rare in antiquity. as early as 1690, Gilles Menage collected the names and identifying details for over 65 female philosophers. it’s now includes figures ranging across time from Aspasia and Theano in the fifth century BCE through 6th century CE figures like Theodora, the woman to whom Demascius dedicated his Life of Isiodore. .. Hypatia had four significant female contemporaries who were trained as philosophers, philosophy or mathematics, played a public role like the one she assumed. three of these, Panrosian of Alexandria, Sosipatra of Pergamun, and the wife of Maximus of Ephesus, are older than Hypatia. The fourth woman, Aschlepignia of Athens, was the daughter of Hypatia’s younger rival, the Athenian philosopher Plutarch.

 

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Notes from The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nisey

February 23, 2018 – 8:49 pm

p. 18 But however alarming the demons of fornication may have been, the most fearsome demons of all were to be found, teeming like flies on a corpse, around the traditional gods of the empire. Jupiter, Aphrodite, Bacchus and |Isis, all of them in the eyes of these Christian writers, were demonic. In sermon after sermon, tract after tract, Christian preachers and writers reminded the faithful in violently disapproving language that the ‘error’ of the pagan religions was demonically inspired. … As Augustine thundered: ‘All the pagans were under the power of demons. Temples were built to demons, altars were set up to demons, priests ordained for the service of demons, sacrifices offered to demons, and ecstatic ravers were brought in as prophets for demons. The demons’ motivations in all of this was simple: if they had human followers, then they would have sacrifices, and these sacrifices were their food. To this end, Christian writers explained, demons had created the entire Greco-Roman religious system so that ‘they may procure for themselves a proper diet of fumes and blood offered to their statues and images’.”

p. 19 Christian preachers began to exhibit a new, almost hysterical, desire for purity … one had to avoid all contact with the blood, smoke, water and even the smell of other people’s sacrifices. .. At the close of the 4th century, a fitful Christian wrote an anxious letter to Augustine. May a Christian use baths which are used by pagans on a feast day, he asked, either while the pagans are there or after they have left. May a Christian sit in a sedan chair if a pagan has sat in that same chair during the feast day celebrations of an ‘idol’? If a thirst Christian comes across a well in a deserted temple, may they drink from it? If a Christian is starving, and on the point of death, and they see food in an idol’s temple, may they eat it?

p.44 “There was a strong strain of scepticism in Greek and Roman thought. As Pliny the Elder put it: “I deem it a mark of human stupidity to seek to discover the shape and form of God. Whoever God is – provided there is a God … he consists wholly of sense, sight and hearing, wholly of soul, wholly of mind, wholly of himself.” Pliny suggested that what divinity there was, was to be found in humanity itself: “God,” he wrote, “is one mortal helping another.” Rome was not an empire of atheists, emperors were even deified after their death and their ‘genius’ (divine spirit) then worshipped. Nevertheless, even the emperors themselves didn’t always take this too seriously. The emperor Vespasian is said to have announced the severity of his final illness by declaring: ‘Gah, I think I’m turning into a god.’ But Romans were not all cynics… it was a commonly held belief that Rome’s great success depended on the goodwill of the gods. As a character in a Roman history observed: “All went well so long as we obeyed the gods, and ill when we spurned them… Religious they may have been: dogmatic and unbending they were not. Like the Roman Empire, the Roman pantheon could happily expand. Rome was not a paragon of religious pluralism. It had no scruples about banning or suppressing practices – whether Druidic or Bacchic or Manichean – that seemed for any reason pernicious. But equally it could admit foreign gods – though as with so much else in Rome a bureaucratic process had first to be observed. To ignore this process and worship a foreign god that had not been accepted was a socially unacceptable act; it risked upsetting the contract with the incumbent gods and spreading disaster and pestilience.”

p. 68 Pliny (governor in Bithnyia under Trajan) letter 10.96 is nothing less than the very first record of the Christians by a Roman writer… Pliny’s problem with all of this is not religious. He is not upset because Jupiter has been neglected, or Hera has been slighted: he is upset because the citizens of his province are becoming disgruntled by the Christian’s behaviour. Anonymous pamphlets, containing the names of local Christians, have started to appear. Whoever it is who has been writing these, Pliny is now obliged to react. Not because he is fervently religious – he is not – but because it is his job as governor to keep the province calm .. Discontented locals had to be taken seriously; if they were not listened to, a situation might develop where riots could break out – for which Pliny would be held responsible. Pontius Pilate might have been the first official to be reluctantly pressed into action against Christians by local agitators – but he was certainly not the last. Even the locals who were forcing Pliny’s hand might not have been complaining about Christians for religious reasons. It has been speculated …Local tradesmen were angry because this surge in Christian sentiment had led to a drop in the sales of sacrificial meat and their profits were suffering: anti-Christian sentiment caused less by Satan than by a slow trade in sausage meat.”

p. 70 “all over the empire, Romans were frustratingly unwilling to play their role as bloodthirsty martyr-makers. Many even refuse to execute Christians when they arrive in front of them. Arrius Antonius was a Roman governor of Asia who in the late second century had executed a number of Christians in his province. He was perhaps unprepared for what came next. Instead of fleeing, local Christians suddenly turned up and , in one large mob, presented themselves before him. Antonius did indeed dutifully kill a few (presumably there is only so much temptation a Roman can stand) but rather than despatching the rest of pleasure, he turned to them with what, even with the passage of almost two millllennia, sounds unmistakeably like exasperation: ‘Oh you ghastly people,’ he said. ‘If you want to die you have cliffs you can jump off and nooses to hand yourself with….

Other Christians who were deprived of execution turned instead to suicide. In 4th-century North Africa, locals watched in horror as faithful and ‘deranged men, … because they love the name martyr and because they desire human praise more than divine charity, they kill themselves’. The methods of suicide varied but drowning, setting oneself on fire and jumping off cliffs were among the most popular. Whatever the method, the aim was always the same: martyrdom,l eternal glory in heaven and eternal fame on earth – or so it was hoped.”

p. 74 “When a young girl called Eulalia presents herself before a governor he struggles to dissuade her. Think of your future marriage, he begs. ‘Think of the great joys you are cutting off … The family you are bereaving follows you with tears .. you are dying in the bloom of youth…your rash conduct is breaking their hearts.’ Eulalia…ignores him. … Realizing that Christians found full meat sacrifices repellent, officials also tried to tempt them with smaller acts of obedience. Just put out your fingers, Eulalia’s judge begs her, and just touch a little of that incense, and you will escape cruel suffering.”

p. 76 “Maximus, having offered that bribe to the soldier and soon-to-be martyr Julies and been rebuffed… comes up with an almost Jesuitical solution to the problem. ‘If you think [sacrifice] is a sin,’ he suggests, then ‘let me take the blame. I am the one who is forcing you, so that you may hot give the impression of having consented voluntarily. Afterwards you can go home in peace, you will pick up your ten-year bonus and no one will ever trouble you again.”

p. 119 “At the end of the 4th century, the orator Libanius looked out and described in despair what he observed. He and other worshippers of the old gods saw, he said, their temples ‘in ruins, their ritual banned, their altars overturned, their sacrifices suppressed, their priests sent packing, and their property divided up between a crew of rascals.. It is thought that when Constantine had come to the throne, 10 per cent of the empire, at most, were Christian… by the end of that first, tumultuous century of Christian rule, estimates suggest that this figure had been reversed: now between 70 and 90 per cent of the empire were now Christian. One law from around that time declared, entirely untruthfully, that there were no more ‘pagans’. None. The aggression of the claim is remarkable. Christians were writing the wicked ‘pagans; out of existence…. If some of these millions were converting not out of love of Christ but out of fear of his enforcers? No matter, argued Christian preachers. Better to be scared in this life than burn in the next.”

p. 142 “it was felt that Greek and Roman authors should be ignored when they talked about their gods ‘and especially when they represent them as bring many’ – which was basically all of the time… Better, Basil wrote, to avoid dangerous works altogether. “Just as in culling roses we avoid the thorns, from such writings as these we will gather everything useful, and guard against the noxious’. As Basil explained, such ecclesiastical censorship was not illiberal; it was loving. Just as Augustine advocated the beating of heretics with rods out of fatherly care, so Basil advocated the removal of great tracts of the classical canon as an act of ‘great care’ to ensure the soul was safely guarded.”.. Later generations would present Basil as a liberal intellectual.. That is nonsense. Supremacy was precisely what Basil wanted – and he got it.”

p. 146 “This was a new literary world and a newly serious one… The power of this Christian talk was produced by many things, among them a remorseless horatory pedagogy, a hectoring moralising of the individual, and a ceaseless management of the minutiae of everyday life. Above all, it was a form of speech marked by an absence of humour. It was a morose and a deadly serious word.

p. 147 “For many hardline Christian clerics, the entire edifice of academic learning was considered dubious. In some ways there was a novel egalitarianism in this: with Christianity, the humblest fisherman could touch the face of God without having his hand stayed by quibbling scholars. But there was a more aggressive and sins=ter side to it, too. St Paul had succinectly and influently said that ‘the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God’.”

p. 148 “Heretics were intellectual therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect.”

p. 152 In the third century their had been 28 public libraries in Rome and many private ones. By the end of the 4th they were, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus observed with sorrow, “like tombs, permanently shut”. Was Christianity’s rise cause or mere correlation in this? Christian emperors would later struggle to increase literacy to ensure that the state even had enough literate functionaries. Certain fields of enquiry start to become not only off-limits but illegal. As a law of AD388 announced: “There shall be no opportunity for any man to go out to the public and to argue about religion or to discuss it or to give any counsel’… Philosophers who wished their works and careers to survive in this Christian world had to curb their teachings… Any theories that stated that the world was eternal – for that contradicted the idea o Creation – were, as the academic Dirk Rohmann has pointed out, also suppressed. The stated aim of historians also started to change too. … the last of the pagan historians, Ammianus Marcellinus.. posterity ought to be an “impartial judge of the past”. Christian historians took a different view. As the influential Christian writer Eusebius – the ‘father of Church history’ – wrote, the job of the historian was not to record everything but instead only those things that would do a Christian good to read.”

p. 153 “the shocking death of Hypatia ought to have merited a goo deal of attention in the histories of the period. Instead, it is treated lightly and obliquely, if at all. In history, as in life, no one in Alexandria was punished for her murder… Some writers were highly critical – even to fervent Christian eyes this was an appalling act. But not all: as one Christian bishop later recorded with admiration, once the satanic woman had been destroyed, then all the people surrounded Cyril in acclamation for he had ‘destroyed the last remains of idolatory in the city’.”

p. 162 One of the most infamous assaults on books and thinkers tool place in Antioch. Here, at the end of the 4th century, an accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals… As Ammianus describes it [he was there], “the racks were set up, and leaden weights, cords and scourges put in readiness. The air was filled with the appalling yells of savage voices mixed with the clanking of chains, .. A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded… the burning of books on bonfires of volumes were used as post-hoc justification for the slaughter .. they were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence. Many intelllectuals started to pre-empt the persecutors and set light to their own books.”

p. 127 Hypatia .. always dressed in the austere and concealing uniform of a philospher’s cloak. .. It is said one of her students fell in love with her and ‘not being able to control his passion, confessed his feelings’. Hypatia responded briskly ‘ She brought him some of her sanitary towels and threw them before him, and said. ‘You love this, young man, and there is nothing beautiful about it.

By the early 5th century AD, Hypatia had become something of a local celebrity. Alexandria was a city that had, for hundreds of years, been in thrall to its intellectuals…. ..

p. 129 Library … the number of scrolls that it held is contested, .. there were perhaps as many as 500,000 scrolls…. Even the major monastic libraries of the 12th century contained no more than 500 or so… by 1338, the library of the Sorbonne in Paris, the richest in the Christian world, offered a theoretical 1,728 works for loan – 300 of which as its registered noted, it had already managed to lose.  t wasn’t only books that Alexandria collected but intellectuals. Scholars here were treated with reverence and to some marvellous facilities. .. the Great Library and the Musaeum provided them with a charming existence: there were covered walkways to stroll through, gardens in which to rest and a hall to lecture in. .. academics were also given a stipend from public funds, board and lodging, and meals in an elegant, domed-roofed dining hall. There may also have been, somewhat incongruously, a zoo.”

p. 131 y Hypatia’s time the library had gone, the last of it with the Christian destruction of the great temple of Serapis. “Whenever anyone new and notable visited Alexandria, one of the first things they did was to pay Hypatia a visit. Orestes, the aristocratic governor of Alexandria, and on eo fthe most important men in the city, had become a confidant, friend and a powerful ally – and, as it would turn out, a dangerous one. In a world that was becoming increasingly riven along sectarian lines, Hypatia was determinedly non-partisan in her behaviour, treating non-Christian and Christian with meticulous equality.

p. 132 “In the spring of the year 415, relations between Christians and non-Christians in Alexandria were tense. … the city had a new bishop, Cyril. After the zealot Theophilus, many Alexandrians must have hoped that their next cleric would be more conciliatory … he was, after all, Theophilus’s nephew. And true to family form, her was a thug…

p. 134 “the numbers of Cyril’s militia swelled. Around 500 monks descended from their shacks and caves in the nearby hills, determined to fight for their bishop. Unwashed, uneducated, unbending in their faith, they were, as even the Christian writer Socrates admits, men of a very fiery disposition.” Confrontation between them and the governor…

p. 135 “And then the whispering began. It was Hypatia’s fault, said the Christians, that the governor was being so stubborn… Fanned by the parablani, the remours started to catch and flame. Hypatia was not merely a difficult woman, they said. Hadn’t everyone seen her use symbols in her work, and astrolabes? The illiterate parabalani (‘bestial men, truly abdominable’ as one philosopher would later call them) knew what these instruments were. They were not the tools of philosophy and mathematics, no: they were the work of the Devil. Hypatia was not a philosopher: she was a creature of Hell.. She was ‘atheizing’ Alexandria. One day in March AD 435, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a ‘multitude of believers in God’. They ordered her to get down from her chariot … the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter – a ‘perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ’ surged round and seized ‘the pagan woman’. They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the cloths from her body then, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say, that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the ‘luminous child of reason’ onto a pyre and burned her.

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