… and it is, as ever, a spectacular collection. Please help to spread the word…

Among the posts that took my fancy are one about how humour in the form of insults isn’t humour at all on Sivacracy.net. (Oddly enough my post on patriarchy over at Blogcritics has been attracting a whole lot of commenters notable for their lack of a sense of humour …)

There are several enormously powerful posts from America on the threats to the rights to abortion and contraception, while the UK bloggers are focusing on issues of rape and sexual assault.

But the highlight of those I’ve read so far is that by Mega on Days In a Wanna Be Punk’s Life. She addresses a commenter who called her a “female chauvinist” and thanks him for his concern about her underwear and her menstrual status.

But I won’t point you to any others – please do go and read a great selection on Angry for a Reason, who has done a great job!

William Caxton started printing in England, then his sidekick De Worde took over, and whosh, next thing you know you are drowning in a sea of Elizabethan pamphlets, nearly all printed by men, with the odd widow thrown in. That’s right, isn’t it?

Well oddly enough, it seems there are some unmarried women in the tale, but, surprise, surprise, they’ve disappeared…

“Single-leaf prints were multiple reproductions of the same image, often accmpanied by xylographic text, that is, with text produced in relief print from a wood-block, painstakingly cut letter by letter …”

On the Continent the Bridgettine order was well-known for producing these for devotional purposes, with many surviving example being associated with a general chapter held in 1487 at Gnadenberg in the Upper Palatine. There are also a number of English examples, probably printed at the rich and important Syon abbey, in Isleworth (up the Thames from London).

Block books, “printed from wood-blocks, were once thought to represent an interim stage between single-;eaf prints and books printed with moveable type. Paper analysis has shown, however, that block books cannot be dated any earlier than 1460-1470, post-dating the invention of printing with moveable type for at least a ecade. .. generally considered a more primtive technology, but it may not have been so regarded when both were new ad existed side by side.”

From: Driver, M.W. The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late MedievaL England and its Sources, The British Library, 2004.

(Although I suppose to fair, gender issues aren’t the only thing at work here; they were on the “wrong” side, religious-wise.)

It is something that still raises my blood pressure thinking about it. My poor Mum, who was never very high in self-confidence and ego, really wanted a job as an estate agent, and would have been very good at it, because she was really good at people.

It would have been her first real “career” job, after taking a range of part-time secretarial posts when I was young, so that she was always able to take me to and pick me up from school. But I was now 11, and other possibilities beckoned. The choice was down between her and a male applicant, but the employer chose the man, telling Mum that “your child might get sick or something”. Mum never went for another professional job.

Now the same employer mightn’t actually say that flat out, but it seems his compatriots are still thinking it…

The review concluded that mothers were the most disadvantaged group in the job market, after calculating which groups face the biggest “penalties” when analysing data dating back to 1974.
It was found that mothers with young children have a 40 per cent disadvantage. The next most disadvantaged groups were Pakistani and Bangladeshi women, with a 30 per cent disadvantage, and mothers with children over 11 years, at almost 20 per cent.

Then of course there are other disdvantages. The Guardian gets a bloke to list his ten favourite verse novels. Nine of them are by blokes; one is by a long-dead woman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

That’s the power of the “old media”, but the new can be as bad: Amazon is in hot water, in an uncomfortable reminder of the potential power of these new virtual behmouths, over the anti-abortion slant of its search results:

Campaigners complained that requests for information on abortion generated the response “Did you mean adoption?” at the top of the page. They expressed their suspicion that Amazon was tampering with its search results to appease pro-life groups, and expressing what appeared to be an “editorial position”.
Amazon has hurriedly taken down the question but continues to risk the ire of pro-choice groups because adoption is still listed as a related topic. Customers are not offered listings on abortion when they search on adoption.

Then Afghanistan – remember that? George Bush’s success story? Well the UN is tell refugees don’t come home because of the parlous state of the security and general situations. Is it any wonder the US can’t catch Bin Laden?

Finally – I do try to get one bit of good news in the round-up, a lovely profile of Janet Todd:

From the trend-setting encyclopaedia of women writers that she brought out in 1984, through the seven-volume edition of the works of Aphra Behn (a Mother of the English Novel), a seven-volume edition of the works of Mary Wollstonecraft (with Marilyn Butler), to the nine-volume Jane Austen edition (currently under way with CUP), Todd has tramped the Himalayan ranges of her subject. She is the kind of academic who, unlike most of her colleagues, will leave monuments behind her. Useful monuments.

I know the world has been waiting on tenterhooks to find out the meaning of the emblem of the 16th-century printer Thomas Creede: well meet “Truth”. That’s who it is. (That’s according to Bigmore and Wyman A Bibliography of Printing, Volume I, p. 148-9.)

Creede himself wasn’t however, above the odd porkie: in 1595 he was fined and put on a £40 bond for having kept an apprentice without enfranchising him after the proper period.

Now you are going to ask why she’s naked – well beyond the obvious answer of “sales”.

Marina Warner’s brilliant Monuments and Maidens tells me:

“In general, mediaeval Christian iconography did not represent Truth naked: following rather the more traditional imagery of the virtues, it depicted her as a clothed virgin.
In language, however, the association of truth with disclosure is very ancient indeed, and this metaphor, when applied anthropomorphically, was translated into nakedness. .. Horace speaks of nuda veritas and Petronius of nuda virtus… truth possesses an eschatological body, transfigured and innocent, “sprung out of the earth”, she is also primordial and aboriginal, like nature …”

Warner traces her through Alberti, Botticelli’s The Calumny of Apelles and to the pageant at which Elizabeth was welcomed to London in 1559, although then Truth wore white silk. (pp. 317-9)

Regular readers won’t be surprised to know I now have a new question: can anyone suggest a good/standard text for the history of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, covering particularly the late 16th century? (This is traditionally where I say you are all scholars and gentlepersons and worth more money…)

It is not that history repeats itself, exactly, just that the same debates come up again and again. So it was that when “English literature” was just getting established in the 16th century, there was a concerted struggle over whether poetry should rhyme.

“But the question of rhyme was nor simply a small technical question about the following of ancient models. It was a fundamental element in the definition of poetry itself and the question of its relationship to the other half of the liveral arts, the quadrivium, those arts concerned with measure and proportion. The opponents of rhyme — among whom we may principally number William Webbe and Thomas Campion, along with Ascham himself — all acknowledge the close relationship of poetry to rhetoric, or eloquence in general, and thereby agree that poetry has been a principal source of civil order.” (in Kinney (ed) The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600, CUP, p. 42)

Webbe was seeking “the means, which we yet want, to discern between good writers and bad, but perhaps also challenge from the rude multitude of rustical rhymers, who will be called poets, the right practice and orderly course of true poetry.” (From A Discourse of English Poetry, 1586, quoted p. 265.)

Looking at some of the rhymes I’m working on now, I kind of wish that they’d won at the time, rather than blank verse having had to wait until the 20th century to win out.

Three of the four pamphlets I’m looking at that are “elegies” for Dame Helen Branch (who died aged 90 in 1594) give her burial date. One doesn’t, which has led me to think that it is likely to have been the earlies, produced before the funeral.

But it has the following lines …

The yeare was fifteene hundreth, ninetie foure,
And grateful Abchurch hath her bones in store.

Now does “in store” suggest something temporary? There were – for reasons on which I am unclear – 18 days between her death and her funeral. (The only possibly explanation I have is that London had been hit by massive, exceptional storms in the weeks before her death, which might have disrupted things?)

Or is it “in store” just because it rhymes with “foure”?

There may be no answer to this, but I am open to suggestions…

There’s a fascinating insight into the mindset of the patriarchy, or at least of one of its defenders, in Foreign Policy this month. Phillip Longman’s argument in a nutshell is that only the rule of the fathers will ensure that large numbers of children are born. Therefore we must have a full on, father-knows-best-and-rules-all (probably with a heavy leather belt), patriarchy.

Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood. Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.
Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles.

The fallacies are obvious. One is that Earth can continue to support an infinitely increasing population, until, presumably, each person has just enough space to stand. That’s so obviously ridiculous — when the world’s ecosystems are already showing severe signs of collapse — that it hardly requires a response.

But let’s for a moment follow his social Darwinism, and consider the claim that societies that outbreed other societies will eventually come to rule them, which seems thus far to have done India and China little good. What has finally started to lift them is education, training, investment in people — things that are only possible with relatively small families. For what is needed today is clearly a skilled, educated workforce.

Longman manages to provide no evidence for his claim that sheer numbers are important, beyond suggesting that America’s problems in Iraq come because it hasn’t got enough people for the military. (Not that they don’t want to join the military because it suddenly looks like a lousy career option, to be fighting an unwinnable, unpopular war.) Although he does manage to drag the fall of the Roman Empire, always a conservative classic, even though it undermines his own argument: “What was once the Roman Empire remained populated. Only the composition of the population changed.”

But, Longman claims, since children always turned out like their parents (how then did we get to such a “parlous” state of affairs?) the patriarchy is going to win anyway, so everything’s all right, since every citizen will soon believe in a “patriarchal God [who] commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father.”

One of the other (many) faults in his argument? Oh, yes, that the West is not still a patriarchy – a place ruled by men. Funnily enough, women are still astonishingly thin on the ground in positions of real power in governments, in businesses, in pretty well anywhere at all. Funnily enough, the only states that might have a reasonable claim to have grown beyond patriarchy are the Scandinavian countries. And they – with excellent parental pay and conditions, childcare etc, are the states getting closest to replacement rates of reproduction.

Perhaps the answer is not to grow the patriarchy, but to genuinely get rid of it, if you do in fact want to encourage women to have children?