I’m one who always tends to the nurture side on those endless nurture/nature child-raising arguments, so I like to think I’m pretty well switched on to an awareness of cultural constructs, yet I was pulled up short by the following paragraphs:

“Smell is not simply a biological and psychological phenomenon … Smell is cultural, hence a social and historical phenomenon. Odours are invested with cultural values and employed by societies as a means of a model for definiting and interacting with the world. The intimate, emotionally charged nature of the olfactory experience ensures that such value-coded odours are interiorized by members of society in a deelpy personal way…

“The devaluation of smell in the contemporary West is directly linked to the revaluation of the sense which took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The philosophers and scientists of that period decided that, while sight was the pre-eminent sence of reason and civilization, smell was the sense of madness and savagery.” (p. 3-4)

This is from Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott, Routledge, 1994. Good smells and bad smells it seems, are not just a biological fact.

The first half of the book — all I’ve managed to read thus far — is an historical survey, with some great details, e.g.

* The Persian king Darius III had in his retinue 14 perfumers and 46 garland-makers. (p. 16)

* There’s nothing new about what we think of as one of our latest extravagances, perfume for dogs. For a favourite dog, a prescription from Athenaeus: “Strew then soft carpets underneath the dog … and with Megalian oils anoint his feet.” (p. 19)
(Megalium, the great creation of the Roman perfumer Megallus, was made of balsam, rush, reed, behen nut oil, cassia and resin.”) (p. 15)
For much, much more, see Pliny.

* “Queen Elizabeth I (of England) preferred her apartments to be strewn with meadowsweet … Rosewater and sugar boiled together made the room of Edward VI smell ‘ as though it were full of roses’, while rosemary and sudar perfumed the chambers of Queen Anne. George III is said to have used a pillow filled with fragrant hops as an aid to his slumber.” (p. 65) (Nothing new about all of those microwave wheat pillows then …)

* When the Great Plague sent the price of herbs and other perfumes soaring, the poor had to make do with what they could, a well-tarred rope, perhaps, or “socks from’s sweating feete”. (p. 61) Eau de Cologne was too originally a plague preventative. (p. 73)

… to be continued ….

I’ve recently been venturing into a new area of Ebay, “collectables, postcards”. What sent me there was a brainwave for a present, so I won’t mention the front of the cards I’m buying, but what I have found interesting is the back. Seemingly the majority of cards on sale are, as the jargon goes, “postally unused”, but it is the used ones I find most interesting.

There’s a sense of pathos, but also fascination, in a tiny insight into a moment in the lives of people of which you otherwise know, and probably can know, nothing.

I’ve got one postmarked Pocklington, 6PM, April 28, 1911. It reads:
Dear Floiry,
Sorry I cannot meet you at Pock tomorrow as Baby is poorly it is a bad cold and his teeth I will see Maud (?) and then I will meet you next Sat as she will get you it done hope you are well we are all well at home except Baby.
Love to you from all at home from Mother AR.

It is addressed to Miss ? Robinson c/o Mr E Pearson Manor Farm Mellonily (?) Pocklington.

Pocklington describes itself today as: “a classic English market town situated at the foot of the Yorkshire Wolds, about 15 miles from the city of York, in the East Riding of Yorkshire”.

The writing to me seems reasonably educated, and the spelling correct, despite the entire absence of punctuation, and I’m imagining maybe a local family of perhaps the yeoman class in which the oldest daughter, perhaps in her late teens, is working as a governess or companion with the local gentry family, and having perhaps her monthly day off, when she would normally meet her mother in the market town …
Sound feasible?

I’m also curious whether much academic work has been done on postcards. I was musing that you could do some fascinating stuff say from the Seventies when the British (I gather) started going to Spain in large numbers on package holidays. Analysis of the postcards home, if you could assemble a collection of them, might be very revealing.

An atheist martyr

This review of How modern life emerged from eighteenth-century Edinburgh introduced me to Thomas Aikenhead who, in 1687, aged 18, was hanged for his beliefs.

On the scaffold, Aikenhead declared that he had come to doubt the objectivity of good and evil, and that he believed moral laws to be the work of governments or men.

It looks like a must-read book, but the review is a good place to start.

Forgotten woman

“Will you walk into my parlour? said the Spider to the Fly.”

I suspect that line was a part of many people’s childhoods, yet I hadn’t realised either how old it was or that the poem was by a woman, Mary Botham Howitt (1799- 1888), who I learnt about from the Women writers group.

She had an adventurous life, in which she and her husband sought a variety of outlets and venues in which to make money from writing, in contact with Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Tennyson, Wordsworth and others, finally settling in Rome.

There’s a short biography here, and the poem, if you’re trying to remember the words, here.

Women’s justice

As if I didn’t have enough to read, I’ve recently signed up for the Taylor & Francis journals daily keyword searches (although don’t ask me exactly how, the website being rather less than user-friendly), which is throwing up all sorts of interesting things, or at least the abstracts thereof, e.g. “Contemporary feminist writers: envisioning a just world” in the Contemporary Justice Review.

“A vision of feminist social justice emerges in the writings of contemporary American women writers Toni Morrison, Joy Harjo, Barbara Kingsolver, and Adrienne Rich. Their collective bodies of work envision a world that does not devalue and separate people, a world connected to ideals of justice grounded in the interrelationships of words and deeds. These writers argue that we need to create a new way of seeing and interacting with the world around us, recognizing our individual responsibilities for creating better communities, questioning government actions, and seeking, above all, a society that sustains people regardless of gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, or access to resources.”

Thanks to the assistance of David Smith I’ve now got my Sitemeter referrals working, so I’ve been collecting some of the odder ways people reached Philobiblon.

* “The legend of Cat Women” via Google, which threw up my Not for cat-lovers monstrous births post, which must have been a bit of a shock.

* “Molton Brown handwash” searched for on the BBC site, which directed someone to my sarcastic comments about a Buckingham Palace exhibition.

* I don’t know what the person who asked Google to find “W.I.T.C.H.” Once you’ll meet him Caleb and Cornelia images wanted, but I doubt they’ll find it on my blog.

* And as for the bloke looking for “naked girls” and Iran, I’m glad he was disappointed.

I’ve recently read Marguerite Yourcenar’s The Abyss and her Alexis, and was very interested in this account of her life. Oddly enough, she strikes me as having quite a bit in common with Michel Houellebecq, both being very much outsiders in the literary world, and French people living in Anglophone environments, although one looked to the past and the other to the future.

Yourcenar’s Alexis, however, was emotionally sophisticated for a work written by someone aged 24, and bravely amoral for something written in 1929. (It is in effect a soliloquy from a gay man of 24 explaining why he is leaving his young wife and their child.)

In the preface in my edition, dated 1963, she writes: “I have sometimes thought of composing a response from Monique … But for now I have abandoned that project. Nothing is more secret than a woman’s existence. The tale of Monique would probably be much more difficult to write than the admissions of Alexis.”

This strikes as a very odd thing for a woman to write, and reminded me that I was struck in The Abyss by the way that the male characters in general seem much more developed than the female, who don’t often proceed beyond a sketch.

She seems to have tried for most of her life to be as “unwomanly” as possible. She also wrote in what must have seemed at the time in an unwomanly way, not being emotionally involved with her characters. In fact she often, particularly in The Abyss, kills them off enitrely pitilessly.

I have to say that I quite like Yourcenar’s distance, I suppose because what I perceive as “sentimentality” often puts me off novels. And I do think in The Abyss you get inside the head of Zeno, the main character who was something of a mix of Da Vinci, Paracelsus, Copernicus, and Giordano Bruno, just that he tries to approach himself and his own life from a distance, not to throw himself emotionally headlong into things.

Both of these factors probably have quite a bit to do with her being the first woman inducted into the Académie Française, as well as her astonishing erudition.

Now I REALLY have to find time to read The Memoirs of Hadrian, since at least on this account it is supposed to be even better than The Abyss.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a Dorothy L Sayers fan, so when Sharon on Early Modern Notes mentioned a new Harriet Vane novel, I was on Amazon in a flash. It turns out that Thrones, Dominations is a fragment written by Sayers in 1936 and worked up by a modern writer, Jill Paton Walsh.

Now I know: this is unPC, it is not really a Sayers, dead writers should be allowed to rest in peace etc, etc … but Harriet Vane, and Lord Peter Wimsey, are two “people” you just want to spend more time with.

So does it work? Well I’m almost sorry to admit that it does.

The book starts a bit slowly, and is rather too overtly “psychological” in places, but it has settled down well by the middle section. And the end is Peter’s mother, the Duchess, writing in her diary in a way that I find greatly endearing.

For those who like “closure”, it also completes the story by telling of the couple’s Second World War and after.

This is apparently carried in the next book, produced in the same way, A Presumption of Death.

Even if slightly guiltily, I guess I’ll have to buy that too.