Philobiblon

* An interesting review of Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy, which reports:

For Dolan … “conflict between incompatible models and irreconcilable expectations is the history of marriage.” She rejects the standard story that marriage has moved from “patriarchal to companionate, from obedience to intimacy, from sacrament to contract.”
None of those transitions fully took place, she writes — indeed, they’ve “stalled.” Rather, we have “inherited three models of marriage from early modern England (1550-1700): marriage as hierarchy, as fusion, and as contract. These three models are incompatible and, to make matters worse, each is riddled with internal contradictions.”

* The Telegraph has been indulging in a spot of Australian geneology, reaching the conclusion that the Australian prime minister is a descendant of underwear and sugar thieves and forgers.

* A cycling column is not the place you might expect to find history, but this has some interesting background on how political conservatives have at times embraced cycling. “An editorial in the world’s first dedicated cycling magazine [in France] thundered in 1869: “It supplants the raw and unintelligent speed of the masses with the speed of the individual.””

* And there’s a new theory about why the Mary Rose sank. I’m not sure it really supplants the old ones, but it does add an extra bit of texture to early modern history.