You’ll often find posts about environmental issues, and even more frequently about feminism, here; nice to be able to combine the two:

Juliet Davenport’s Good Energy churns out wind, solar and small-scale hydroelectric energy. Lizzie Vann’s Organix Brands produces organic baby meals. Su Hardy’s Mooncup provides reusable sanitary protection to protect forests from being cut for paper pulp. Safia Minney’s People Tree sells glamorous women’s fashion–from office suits to party dresses–that aren’t made by exploited garment workers.
One of them will win the first Women in Ethical Business award, a new annual prize for a female CEO to be announced in London on March 16.

From De ratione studii (1511), written by Erasmus and John Colet, setting out plans for the studies at St Paul’s School: a teacher should not be “content with the standard ten or twelve authors, but would require a veritable universe of learning”.

It seems to me that sums up the real arrival of the Renaissance, or if you prefer humanist learning, in England.

And it ties rather neatly with a recent IHR seminar that I hadn’t got around to writing up: “Humanism, reading and political writing”, presented by Daniel Wakelin. It was in the late medieval seminar, so the Latin went straight over my head, and it was a bit earlier than I’m now really looking at, 15th-century rather than 16th, but it was interesting, the main argument being (as I understood it) that while humanism has been accused of being an “apology for princes”, it was merely a technique and approach that could be used for a variety of political purposes.

(Quote from The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600 A. Kinney, ed. p. 7. Pace earlier discussions, from what I’ve read thus far this is an unusually lucid and sensible volume; technical terms are used and explained, but not thrown at the reader as though this were a paintball contest – a refreshing change from some of the other “English studies” stuff I’ve been reading recently.

Interesting piece in The Times today about Margaret, second Duchess of Portland, an Enlightenment giant:

The duchess, with her inquiring mind, combining a passion for science with a love of the arts and, operating within a network of the most creative, forward-thinking figures of the age, was “the embodiment of the Enlightenment”, according to Derek Adlam, the curator of the remaining Portland collection. Her original collection “if it had survived would have had the potential to be one of the great museum collections that would have grown into a national institution, and she would have been famous. It would be the Portland Museum, which would have been equal to the British Museum.”
Before her death, however, she issued instructions that because of the expense of her elder son’s political career, her other son’s debts and her children’s general lack of enthusiasm for maintaining the collection, it should be sold off. At the London auction there were more than 4,000 lots. Lisa Gee, the director of the gallery, wonders what might have happened if the duchess had been a man. “She had no ego about this thing that she had done,” she says. “You could argue that a more masculine personality might have insisted the collection remain intact as a monument to himself. But she wanted to do right by her kids.”

You won’t, however, have found the story on The Times’s webpage. There doesn’t appear to be any arts pointer at all on the front webpage. Under “women”, however, there’s: “Fashion – from trends to catwalk collections; Sarah Jessica Parker – sex and the pity; Hollywood idols – the real deals”. That’s just in case anyone thought this was THE Times.

“I was recently at an academic talk where a brief fight broke out between professors over the number of Holy Prepuces (The Greatest Genital Relic Ever Sold) littering medieval Europe–that is, how many churches claimed to have the bit of foreskin that Jesus had cut off during his circumcision.”

What better introduction could there be to Carnivaleque No XII, now up on Alun’s eponymous blog.

Well there might be a better one:

“The history of all times, and of today especially teaches that … women will be forgotten if they forget to think about themselves.”

Yep, it is a special themed edition for Women’s History Month, so even if you don’t consider yourself a historian, or even a history reader, I reckon you’ll find something of interest.

(And thanks to Alun for giving me a prominent place…)

Just been reading a couple of brilliant posts that I’ve got to share:

The most interesting male feminist blogger on the web (that I know of), Hugo Schywzer, has a great post about the reality of the pressure of sexual double-standards on students’ lives as first-generation immigrants in America:

It is Brumberg who first drew my attention to statistics about menarche, marriage, and the loss of virginity. She points out that a century ago, girls menstruated for the first time at an average age of 16 and got married at an average age of around 21. Today, girls menstruate at an average age of just under 12 and get married for the first time at just over 25.
…Here’s where it gets interesting. A century ago, the time between the onset of puberty and marriage was but five years; today it’s close to fifteen. If a contemporary young woman is trying to “wait” until marriage to lose her virginity, she is waiting — in a very real sense — three times as long as women did in her great-great grandmother’s era!

And of course that same pressure on women’s viriginity is being applied across American society.

And that is happening at the same time as access to birth control and abortion is being restricted, indeed when the government is trying to take control of women’s bodies. (Heo Cwaeth is – and good on her – determined to fight; in that posts she powerfully draws together a number of events to find that the US government has declared war on women.)

I am now dedicated to learning how to fight in myriad ways, and you can bet your bottom dollar that any attempted rapist will be short at least one dangling participle at the end of the exchange. I encourage you to do the same. I have volunteered my home in a blue state as a safe haven for my already enslaved sisters in South Dakota, and soon to be enslaved sisters in other red states. I encourage those of you who can to do the same. We have been told for millenia that emotion is bad, only reason is accepted. We have then been presented with “reason” that is merely the systematized emotion of others. Let the pharisees call their hate “reason,” it’s time for us to act. I ask you, what’s more reasonable than responding to the very real threat of physical violence than learning how to inflict injuries of your own? What’s more reasonable than opening up your home and your life to runaway slaves?

That leaves me thinking about what the fundamentalists are doing to America, and if they really get it. Yes, they are trying to take utter control of women’s bodies (and minds) and turn them into Stepford wives. And they think that will produce some sort of Fifties Brady Bunch idyll.

But what is it going to do to the economics of America, or at least these states? If you force women (and men) not to have sex outside marriage (for fear of pregnancy, if nothing else, having restricted and often ended access to birth control) they will, inevitably, marry young.

And that will stop them getting education, stop them participating to their full capacity in the workplace, in short cost them vast amounts of money. To consider a British study:

A 24-year-old mid-skilled woman giving birth would, she found, earn a staggering £560,000 less at today’s prices over her lifetime than a childless counterpart. Giving birth at 28 would only cost £165,000.

Now of course that is a loss to the individual woman, but it is also a loss to society.

This isn’t the 1950s. To compete economically, to maintain a “developed” lifestyle, you need a highly educated, flexible workforce operating to its full intellectual and creative potential. If you greatly restrict the contribution of half of them – and as we know from the Third World, when you restrict the education of women you tend to cut the educational attainment of their children – you are going to be very ill-equipped to compete.

The American “red” states, where the fundamentalists wield real power, might be sending themselves back to the Fifties in more ways than one. They might in effect be, by choice “under-developing” themselves, taking themselves back to poverty and “Third World” economic status.

Wonder what the right-wing extreme capitalist types with whom they are politically aligned make of that?

UPDATE: Moving this to a third continent, to demonstrate what having babies does to the income and employment prospects of women, read Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony (who is in Australia).

My 19th-century blogger Frances Williams Wynn is today reporting on accounts of the madness of King George from one of his physicians, Sir Henry Halford . She’s displaying a critical mind and a fine turn of phrase:

Sir Henry is apt to be the hero of his own stories, and to boast a degree of intimacy and confidence which I am sometimes inclined to doubt. The history of the change on the subject of the Catholic question is very curious, but I own I feel it rather difficult to believe that Sir Henry was admitted into a secret so closely kept.

But the accounts of the relationship with the Prince Regent, and about telling the King about Princess Amelia’s will (her jewels left to a handsome attendant), ring true.

All-in-all an interesting near-contemporary account, I’d suggest.