Mary Wollstonecraft and Hillary Clinton are not at first glance an obvious pair, yet Naomi Wolf makes links in the way they were regarded and treated.

I’d suggest it is part of a broader pattern – that also includes, I thought while reading this, women accused of serious crimes — that there is no way these women can behave that will not attract criticism. If they act “womanly” they’ll be “faking it”; if they act like sensible, strong adults, they’ll be “ball-breakers” or “unnatural”.

I’m thinking here particularly of the case of Lindy Chamberlain, who was convicted, if you bring it right down to brass tacks, because she didn’t cry in public.

Illustrating that the same pattern occurs across cultures and centuries, there’s the case of Catherine the Great. “Is it true about Catherine the Great and the horse?” one site asks, answering in the negative, but repeating another favourite set of sexual slurs.

From the printer Caxton, who died in 1491

“I see that the children ben borne within the sayd cyte encrease and prouffyte not like their faders and olders; but for mooste parte, after they ben comeyn to theyr perfight yeres of discretion and rypnes of age, kno well that theyre faders have lefte to them grete quantite of goodes, yet scarcely among ten two thrive. O blessed Lord! when I remember this, I am al abashed; I cannot judge the cause; but fayrer ne wyser, ne bet bespeken children in theyre youth ben no wher than there ben in London; but at ther full ryping, there is no carnel, ne good word found en, but chaff for the most part.”

As you probably guessed that’s original spelling; I’ve got it all except the “ten two thrive” – is that maybe two-tenths?, and I can’t work out “carnel”.

This is from a delightful popular history book of 1904, London in the Time of the Tudors, Sir Walter Besant, Adan & Charles Black, London, p. 274

He also makes a nice collection of Elizabethan expletives: “The old Catholic oaths ‘By’r Lady’, ‘By the Mass’ and so forth, vanished with the Reformation. We now find a lot of meaningless ejaculations, such as ‘God’s Wounds’, ‘God’s Fools,’ ‘God’s Dines’, Cocke’s Bones,’ ‘Deuce take me’, ‘Bones a God’ and ‘Bones a me’. The now familiar ‘Damn’ makes its appearance in literature; but indeed it had flourished in the mouths of people for many generations.” (p. 285-6)

I wonder why “bones” were so popular in this context?

* A wonderful project: a grand survey of Women Latin Poets. I keep falling over early modern English women writing in Latin – nice to have my impression that there were many more around than is generally recognised. (One can only hope there’ll also be an affordable paperback edition – £85! for the hardback.)

* I just stumbled across Notes on Rhetoric’s collection of blog-commenting strategies. Check out which ones your opponents are using, or bone up on a few new ones of your own. (Well if you are into that sort of thing. Most of the comments here are delightfully informative, useful or otherwise constructive, and I’m happy to keep it that way!)

* As you’ve no doubt noticed, much of the reporting about the terrorist attacks in London is shown, in hours, days or weeks, to be total tosh. Matthew Parris, probably the best commentator in the British media, explores the problem and concludes:

From a certain point of view, the journalist, the politician, the police chief and the terrorist can be seen as locked in a macabre waltz of the mind, no less distorting for being unconscious. We should not to join that dance.

*The Telegraph deserves to be commended for its survey (as solid-looking as any such survey can be) of the attitudes of British Muslims to the London attacks. Get the facts here; it is one of those stories that is bound to be quoted and misquoted for some time to come.

Where are all the female bloggers? Here, in my weekly top ten.

You’ve probably read about all you can take for the moment on the abortion views of US Supreme Court nominee John Roberts (my judgement: just look at who nominated him and there’s your answer, sadly), but The Gimp Parade has information on his stance on disablity rights that you might not have come across.

Mind the Gap has got angry about Playboy merchandise in WH Smith (the largest chain of newsagents in Britain). She says: “I hate to think about the reactions in the mind of some Playboy reader when he sees a 12-year-old girl in a little T-shirt adorned with our bunny friend.” In the post to which I’m pointing she suggests what you can do about it.

100 word minimum is a blog that is self-explanatory in intention. The author describes herself as a “recovering computer engineering student”, and quotes Jane Austen: “it is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated”. That pretty well describes the post to which I’ve pointed, about making a coffee cake. Santiago dreaming is also concentrating on the details of life’s sometimes messy fabric.

Moving on from food, I’ve got virtually no sense of smell, so have never worried much about perfumes, but this post by Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, which sees scent as central to identity, almost converted me.

On to sight, and Breebop is an artist who, I’d suggest, is under-rating her own work. Judge for yourself: I find this “warrior woman” an attractive painting.

But you couldn’t under-rate the bravery of one traveller. Unlike those males who load themselves down with a fridge to walk around Ireland, and similar such stunts, The Adventures of Gimpy Girl is recording a trip around China in a (necessary) wheelchair. (And I might add this will be highly educative for the locals, for my experience in Asia is that disability is utterly invisible, because it is hidden away as a source of embarrassment.)

Still on the adventurous side, 360 degrees of sky is written by an Irishwoman working in Zambia. This post contains “breaking news” about “code chicken”, which reminds me of being a country journalist, when my all-time low story was “soaker hoses stolen from garden shed”.

Completing the short international tour, Stitched in Holland has been making cross-continental links with her needlework, while La Coquette who begs “don’t hate me because I live in Paris”, is reflecting on an international bloggers’ picnic.

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Here’s No 14 if you missed it.

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Please, if you’re impressed by something by a female blogger in the next week – particularly by someone who doesn’t yet get a lot of traffic – tell me about it, in the comments here, or by email. Remember, I’m going for a list of 200 different female bloggers.

There have been a few minor pops in London – one on a bus and on a couple of Tube trains – with no one hurt. Let’s hope a sense of proportion is maintained.

In the interests of that, I’m sharing a small piece from this week’s Private Eye.

My bet is that this is a pretty amateurish effort to cause panic. The sensible thing is to ensure it doesn’t.

I was planning to go to the library but have put it off, just because the traffic is bound to be bedlam all afternoon.

I have to thank the Blogcritic Roger Asbury for pointing me to a fascinating book, Peter Gardenfors’s How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking.It is one of those all-too-rare syntheses of thought drawing in material from a range of fields and schools – lovely to find a generalist in a complex field.

Inevitably, this produces the occasional exclamation of “what!” when you come across something that seems questionable from a field with which you are familiar. My moment was the claim that “an oral culture has no experience of a lengthy, epic-size or novel-size climatic linear plot” (quoting W. Ong). To which I reply, Homer!?

Nonetheless, the exploration of the state of knowledge of evolutionary psychology generally seems well-informed and up-to-date. (Though I make no claim to specialist knowledge.)

My particular area of interest is hominid evolution: I hold in the British Museum a 350,000-year-old hand-axe made in what is now Kent by a predecessor of the Neanderthals and wonder: if you could hop in your time machine and go back to meet her (or him – no way of knowing, although they were obviously right-handed), could you communicate with them. Would they understand a summoning gesture as “come here” or a pushing-away motion as “go away”?

Then of course there’s the fascinating question of the smile. At some point a grimace of anger or threat became an expression of friendship or pleasure: when?

Gardenfors doesn’t answer those questions, but he does provide some hints about the intelligence of hominids.

Some are convinced that Homo habilis in Kenya and Tanzania carried flint tools and raw materials for them several kilometres, indicating a form of planning well beyond chimpanzees; “the longest time elapsing between the manufacture and the use of a tool by a chimpanzee that has been observed is 17 minutes”. (p. 79)

There is also the point that humans sweat much more than other primates, meaning they must either remain close to water sources, or learn how to carry it. Sadly, if H. habilis did carry water, the chances of an organic vessel – probably a skin – being preserved are vanishingly small. But when I hold that Homo heidelbergensis hand-axe, I think she would have worked it out.

This slim volume ranges well forward of this point, however, also saying that much of our current mode of thought didn’t evolve until the Middle Ages.

“Before the Middle Ages writing only functioned as a support for memory – it was never a replacement for memory. The content of what was treated existed in the mind and not int the text. The idea that written language carries an autonomous meaning, that is independent of the author and the reader, is established first in the Middle Ages – that is when writing is assigned a literal meaning that does not change with a change in context … linguistic markers for speech acts such as ‘claim’, ‘doubt, ‘deny’, ‘confirm’ and ‘interpret’ are introduced first during the Middle Ages or even later. Such markers are not needed in an oral tradition where sentence melody and other expressive forms make it clear what kind of speech act is performed.”

I’m going to have to think about that one (is this only a European view, I wonder?), but it does remind me of the fact that in the early Middle Ages, at least, university students were not allowed to read books on their own, for fear they would get the wrong idea, but had to listen to their teacher reading it out to them. (This is a reminder of one of my favourite themes, that books and the written word are not some fixed reality like gravity, but cultural artefacts with different meanings in different contexts.)

Read this book and I can pretty well guarantee you’ll find some new view of one of your favourite puzzles.