A final note on Barbara Tuchman. I was unfair to say she only did highbrow journalism. She also wrote “real”, on the ground, articles, including a piece for The Nation on Madrid in the Civil War (November 6, 1937), “What Madrid reads”.
She writes: “If the war has permeated 90 percent of the newsprint, some pages still remain untouched by it. In one of the new weeklies, between two articles on “The Magnificent Discipline of the Republican Army” and “The New Workers’ Institute of Valencia,” appears a fiction serial entitled “Marion: Neither Maid, Wife, nor Widow.” Marion is pure anachronism. She hails taxis and wears evening dresses, two things that might belong to the Stone Age, so vanished are they from the Madrid of today.
“Even the daily papers leave a corner open to matters outside the war. The siege of Gijon, the speeches of Dr Negrin in Geneva, the problems of evacuation and food, the machinations of the ‘Fifth Column’, the disputes of the CNT and the UGT occupy the news and editorial columns. But you can still turn to the back page of El Liberal and find an agony column overflowing with ardor. ‘Single lady, serious, would like to become acquainted with a gentleman of position and education.’ ‘Gentleman, 38, cultivated, well-employed, would like to become acquainted, object matrimony, with lady 30 to 35, not tall, good-natured.’
“This is the quality of Madrid. A year of siege and shells has shattered the surface of life, but underneath the old wheels are still turning. Life conforms to civil war where it must and clings to the old ways where it can.'” (p. 103)
You don’t find male war-correspondents noticing things like that – at least not unless the newsdesk forces it out of them.
More on Tuchman here, including source details, and here.

I nipped up to the British Museum this morning for a talk on “animals in ice age art”, a complement to my recent visit to the Peche Merle caves. (Discussed here and here.)
It was a good chance to look closely at some of the paleolithic items, including the wolverine pendant. It was interesting to learn that even among Arctic Circle hunter today these fierce predators (related to weasels, but in size between a fox and a wolf) are still a high-status species, so anyone who kills one can be assured of a great fuss being made about it. Their fur is also excellent for shedding water, usefully reducing the risk of your clothes sticking to your skin.
(This last point I already knew from Jean Auel’s “Earth’s Children” series, for which I must confess a shameful addiction – the writing is terrible, but the research seems pretty good, and the thesis – of one woman single-handedly inventing most of the advances of the Upper Paleolithic- irresistible!)
This piece, dated to about 12,500BP, is somewhat unusual for its time, however, in depicting a predator; the earlier art tends to show lions, wolves etc, and the later more horses, reindeer and other prey species. (Such as this horse.)
One theory suggests that as anatomically modern humans moved into Europe they first encountered, and did battle with, lots of animals which regarded them as dinner, but later on, having cut their numbers, they were more interested in their own dinner.
The other main point I got out of the talk is that the images on this portable art on useable, and used objects, the “art of the light”, very closely match – in subject, motifs, design, perspective, pretty well anything you can think of – the “art of the night” (in the caves). It was suggested that this might mean that the cave art was not an “elite”, restricted art, available only to the specially initiated, but “democratic”, available to all, or at least all who could navigate the passages to get to it.
Mmmmm, not sure about that … it seems to make sense, but if there was thought be a lot of power in the cave paintings would not inevitably someone have tried to restrict access to them?

The second Early Modern Bloggers carnival is in full swing over at Houyhnhnm Land – an informal, BYO occasion. (Mine’s now a nice little French rose). On the carnival yours truly has a modest little stall.
The site that most interested me was The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, by which you can get a daily dose of the great man.

A sample from page 4:
“Begun at Florence, in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli, on the 22nd day of March 1508. And this is to be a collection without order, taken from many papers which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they may treat. But I believe that before I am at the end of this [task] I shall have to repeat the same things several times; for which, O reader! do not blame me, for the subjects are many and memory cannot retain them [all] and say: ‘I will not write this because I wrote it before.'”

(I know the feeling – I can never remember to whom I have told various anecdotes; I get half-way through a tale and can see from the look in the listener’s eye they’ve heard this one before.)

Women and pets in medieval times proved just as interesting as I had hoped last night. I learnt that while Keith Thomas had suggested that the idea of pets was not invented until early modern times, there’s plenty of evidence of a “pet” relationship in medieval times (although the term itself was indeed not invented until later).

Lap dogs, cats, squirrels, monkeys and talking and singing birds were not eaten, kept in the house and given a name – a working definition of what a pet is. Naming conventions, however, were quite different from today, so Philip Sparrow was not exactly unique – all sparrows were called Philip, or so people thought! Similarly a terrier might be called Terri, and apparently the word donkey came from Duncan, that species’ generic name.

Giving pets individual “human” names is, however, a 19th and 20th-century invention.

Fluffy white lapdogs, of the sort seen in the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, seem to have been the most popular.

Men and women wrote eulogies when their pets died, and they seem to have been just as attached to them as anyone today.
For example, the mourning owner of the famous sparrow wrote:
“It had a velvet cap,
And would sit upon my lap
And seek after small worms,
And sometime white bread-crumbs;
And many times and oft
Between my breaste`s soft
It would lie and rest;
It was proper and prest.
Sometime he would gasp
When he saw a wasp;
A fly or a gnat,
He would fly at that;
And prettily he would pant
When he saw an ant.
Lord, how he would pry
After the butterfly!
Lord, how he would hop
After the gressop!
And when I said, ‘Phip, Phip!’
Then he would leap and skip,
And take me by the lip.
Alas, it will me slo
That Philip is gone me fro!”

(I don’t feel so bad about the dog pages of my website now.)

The tomb of Petrarch in Arqua was said to have also contained the body of his beloved cat. An early 20th-century visitor reports seeing in his house in the town what was said to be its mummy, “underwrit by an inscription in Latin which testifies that the cat was the poet’s first love, not Laura, and that to her are due the thanks of humanity for saving from the rats his precious manuscripts”. Plain-Towns of Italy: The Cities of Old Venetia by Egerton R. Williams Jr.; Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911.

While researching the vital issue of the cat I also found a collection of papers on Petarch here.

I’m only just too late to topically note, from my daily Dictionary of National Biography email, that there is a woman, and she’s a merchant who must have been of some standing, in the Guy Fawkes story:

“They sent Fawkes-the unknown face-out to reconnoitre, but he came back with encouraging news that the tenant of a ground-floor vault below the Lords’ chamber, a coal merchant appropriately named Ellen Bright, was vacating her premises. Percy at once set about securing the lease.” (That’s where they put the gunpowder, after finding the foundations too tough to tunnel through).

More about the emails here.

The fact that blogger has been slow, and sometimes stopped, over the past couple of days – I’d have to guess due to a surge of post-election feeling – has made me (somewhat belatedly I admit) think about backups. I note from my profile that I’m past the 25,000 words mark, and the blog now contains lots of research that it would be a real pain to replicate. Does anyone know of a simple, easy way of backing up a blog on to a CD, or into a file that you could post to yourself, or similar?
TIA