To prove there is nothing really new about blogging, I quote a passage about the woman who I feel I must adopt as the patron of this blog, Anne Clifford, a formidable Jacobean who outlived two husbands and ruled an aristocratic estate on her own for more than 30 years. It is reported that:

She would frequently bring out of the rich Store-house of her Memory, things old and new. Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors and with these her Walls, her Bed, her Hangings and Furniture must be adorned; causing her Servants to write them in Papers, and her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in the time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make their discants on them. So that, though she had not many Books in her Chamber, yet it was dressed up with the flowers of a Library.

She also commissioned a wonderful family portrait, now in the Tate Britain.

Quote from B. Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England, Hardvard Uni Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1993, p. 139.

the law, or at least the use of its principles, can be useful to women.

I enjoyed the tale from the Times Literary Supplement of July 30, page 11, in a book review of The English and the Normans, by H.M. Thomas:

When Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, attempted to ravish Christina of Markyate, the niece of his former English mistress Alveva, she escaped by swearing she was only getting out of bed to lock the chamber door, but omitting to specify that she would lock it from the outside. The legal scrupulosity with which the Normans pursued wickedness could be turned against them.

… there were private collections.

From John Evelyn’s diary, December 16, 1686.

“I carried the Countesse of Sunderland to see the rarities of one Mr Charleton in the Middle Temple, who shew’d us such a collection as I had never seene in all my travels abroad, either of private gentlemen or princes. It consisted of miniatures, drawings, shells, insects, medailes, natural things, animals (of which divers, I think 100, were kept in glasses of spirits of wine), minerals, precious stones, vessells, curiosities in amber, christal, achat, &c; all being very perfect and rare in their kind, especially his bookes of birds, fish, flowers and shells, drawn and miniatur’d to the life. … This gentleman’s whole collection, gather’d by himselfe travelling over most parts of Europe, is estimated at £8000.”

A note in my edition says this collection was purchased by Sir Hans Sloane and hence became part of the foundation collection of the British Museum.

I was particularly taken by this since I work (voluntarily) every fortnight in the BM’s new Enlightenment Gallery, which recalls this early comprehensive approach to collecting. The juxtaposition of times, cultures and modes of thought that it creates can indeed be enlightening.

I do handling, which means having ancient objects that visitors can hold — our oldest human-made one is a 350,000-year-old handaxe. Holding it really does make history come alive.

The Victorian children’s versions – which we are still reading – bear only the scantest similarity to the originals, I’ve discovered, since picking up Aesop: The Complete Fables, O. and R. Temple (trans), Penguin, 1998, in the British Museum bookshop. Anyone who writes lots of essays would find it a great resource for colourful introductions: every human quandary is covered, and every emotion.
It can be bleak, e.g.

The Dogs Reconciled with the Wolves
“The wolves said to the dogs: ‘Why, when you are so like us in all respects, don’t we come to some brotherly understanding? For there is no difference between us in some of our ways of thinking. We live in freedom; you submit and are enslaved by man and endure his blows. You wear collars and watch over their flocks, and when your masters eat, all they throw to you are some bones. But take our words for it, if you hand over the flocks to us we can all club together and gorge our appetites jointly.’
The dogs were sympathetic to this proposal, so the wolves, making their way inside the sheepfold, tore the dogs to pieces.
(Such is the reward that traitors who betray their fatherland deserve.) No 216, p. 163.

But I think my favourite is The Middle-aged Man and His Mistresses

“A middle-aged man who was going grey had two mistresses, one young and the other old. Now she who was advanced in years had a sense of shame at having sexual intercourse with a lover younger than herself. And so she did not fail, each time that he came to her house, to pull out all of his black hairs.
The young mistress, on her part, recoiled from the idea of having an old lover, and so she pulled out his white hairs.
Thus it happened that, plucked in turn by the one and then the old, he became bald.
(That which is ill-matched always gets into difficulties.)” No. 52 (p.42)

I did say they weren’t child’s play!