Bavardess

Back from the dead

2010-12-11T20:13:00.003+13:00

Literally. No, I haven't personally had a brush with mortality, but I have been dealing with one deposition, a handful of murders and a bunch of drawing-and-quarterings (drawings-and-quarterings?). It’s not that I live in a particularly rough ‘hood. It’s just that since I last posted, I’ve been spending most of my waking life getting the Big Research Project for this year into coherent form (with chapters and everything!). The death of my deposed king, Richard II, was described by the chronicler Thomas Walsingham as the result of self-imposed starvation, but the Chronicle of Adam Usk posits a more sinister cause. After his deposition, Richard had been imprisoned by Henry IV, against whom a number of Richard’s faithful earls had rebelled in the Epiphany Rising of January 1400. The rising failed and the earls were executed:

"And now those in whom Richard, late king, did put his trust for help were fallen. And when he heard thereof, he grieved more sorely and mourned even to death, which came to him most miserably on the last day of February, as he lay in chains in the castle of Pontefract, tormented by Sir Thomas Swinford with starving fare."*

That reference to the chains makes it all sound more than a bit suspicious, but perhaps it was just being stuck in Pontefract that made Richard lose the will to live. There’s less doubt about the death of his uncle, the duke of Gloucester, whose alleged murder – by being held down and smothered with a featherbed – is rather gruesomely recounted in the Rolls of Parliament, along with numerous accusations and counter-accusations of treason. I’ve been rather struck by Paul Binski's explanation of why drawing and quartering was the preferred penalty for condemned traitors. Noting the connection between the king’s body as both an individual, mortal body and the microcosm of the immortal body politic of the realm, he points out that monarchs “had the power to divide others who threatened the body politic with division.”** It's a timely and somewhat chilling reminder that the texts and discourses that so often preoccupy us as researchers had material, visceral impacts on historical human flesh.

In the course of this year's research, I've become very interested in how gender ideals are expressed through the sexed embodiment of institutions in late medieval political thought - for example, the body politic as an extension of the male body of the king, or the household as an extension of the body of its master/father. On the latter idea, Derek Neal's 2008 book The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England*** offers a valuable analysis. He does a great job of relating the discursive models of masculinity expressed in 14th-15th century legal, moral and didactic texts to the way masculinity was actually performed by individual men, as refracted through records of their involvement in court cases, guild activities, civic disputes and other ‘real’ historical events.

So, anyway, I got the final draft of the research project to my supervisor last week. Barring any major criticisms (which I don’t anticipate, based on feedback on the first draft), I should then only need to do some minor proofing/punctuation fixes and tidy up my footnotes (nightmarish!) before it’s ready to submit. I had the oddest feeling when I did the final ‘save’ on that document – like there was suddenly a void I wasn’t quite sure how to fill. That didn’t last long, though, as I reacquainted myself with the joys of being able to go for a long run by the sea (followed by a paddle, water temperature permitting) without having that constant itch at the back of my mind telling me I needed to get back to work.

In other news, I’ve had my abstract accepted for the conference in February (more on that in another post, but thanks to everyone who gave me such good advice on writing it!). I still need to write the actual paper, but I think that may just wait until after Christmas.

*Chronicon Adae de Usk, A.D. 1377-1421, pp.198-9 of the 1904 edition edited and translated by Sir Edward Maunde Thompson. [You can read this edition of the chronicle online at the Internet Archive.]
**Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, London: British Museum Press, 1996, p. 65.
***Derek Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Wetting the baby's head

2010-08-01T13:42:00.004+12:00

On Friday, I wetted the baby's head, so to speak, by presenting my research project at my School's annual postgraduate research seminar. I was speaking at 10am, and while I was listening to the students who went before me, I went through a few angsty moments of self-doubt, thinking, "do I really have an argument here?" and "all these people going to think my ideas are whack". But, in the end, it went really well and I got a lot of positive feedback (including from the Dean of the Graduate Research School, who asked some good questions that allowed me to bring in a few choice points I'd had to remove from my original presentation to keep it within the time limit. Very gratifying.)

The thing that was great about the day was that the research projects presented were so varied. The School combines the departments of History, Religious Studies and Philosophy, so amongst the topics were the history of a secretive quasi-fascist group operating in NZ in the 1930s, the peculiar historiography of a highly controversial incident that took place during the 19thC Taranaki land wars, Theosophy and quantum physics, time and the nature of God, the history and demise of technical schools, and Muslim-non-Muslim relations in NZ post-9/11 (by a scholarship student from Pakistan. It was very interesting to hear her perspective as both a Muslim and a non-New Zealander.) There was one other medievalist presenting, whose work is on the Hospitallers in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. We had a good chat at one of the breaks and she gave me some tips on a surprising number of medieval manuscripts held by several NZ libraries. (But I forgot to ask her if she'd seen Kingdom of Heaven. You all know how much I love that movie.)

Afterwards, I was kind of buzzing. I always get quite nervous just before I have to speak, but I do get a kick out of the actual 'performance'. So before jumping in the car to drive the 90 minutes home, I headed to a local park and decompressed with a long run through the native bush alongside the river. I love running in the bush. All those narrow loamy tracks winding away from me into cool green shadows. The way I can't hear anything but the call of tui, my own breathing, and the occasional rush and gurgle of a stream or river. The elegant strength of soaring mamaku and kahikatea, and the delicate beauty of unfurling ponga fronds. At home, I have plenty of places to enjoy this goodness, but they all require running up and down hills - sometimes seriously big ones! So it was lovely to be able to enjoy the bush sans searing lungs and burning calf muscles for a change.

And now, thanks to all your great advice on my last post, I have my first proper conference abstract just about finished and ready to send to my supervisor tomorrow morning. After fluffing around over it for the better part of a couple of weeks, I woke up yesterday morning with the whole thing - including the rather catchy title - quite clearly formed in my head. I just had to get up and type it. (I love it when that happens.)

Awesome abstracts anyone?

2010-07-28T20:20:00.003+12:00

So, things are starting to get a bit more serious for me in this whole postgraduate study adventure, and my supervisor is starting to push me (oh-so-gently and enthusiastically) into submitting abstracts for conference presentations. I'm used to giving presentations - I've been doing it for years in my work so I have no great anxieties about public speaking. And I'm also pretty confident my research is starting to generate some interesting and worthwhile things to say. BUT I have no real experience of academic conferences and I'm not quite sure how best to go about writing the abstract. (I'm not even worrying about the actual presentation content at this stage. I figure I'll tackle that as and when something actually gets accepted!)

The first conference I'm looking at is a big medieval/early modern shindig here in NZ early next year. They require a 200 word abstract for a 20 minute paper. Some of the other CFPs my supervisor has pushed my way ask for anything up to 500 words, but presentations always seem to be about 20 minutes in length. (Curious: is this some kind of 'gold standard' in terms of academic conferences?) I figure such a short time slot requires something really tight and specific - like a brief source-based case study or example that illustrates a wider theme or interpretation - rather than anything broader or more generalised. Does that sound like a good way to approach it? And is it normal to quote from or reference sources in the abstract? Or would you just give an outline of your argument and where it fits into the existing scholarship on the topic? (Or do you even worry about that second bit?)

So, questions, questions. Naturally, I'll be asking my supervisor for her help, but do any of you have any tips for writing a really kick-ass abstract? Or links to good posts or advice on the best way to structure it? I remember Notorious PhD had some good stuff up towards the end of last year (maybe?) on seminar presentations, but damned if I can find it now.

On that note, I'm presenting my current research project to the world (well, to all the bods from the School of History, Philosophy and Classics anyway) for the first time at a postgrad Research Seminar this Friday. When I was doing the methodology weekender a couple of weeks ago, a few of us were talking about what we were going to be presenting and my topic seemed to arouse quite a bit of interest. On the face of it, it sounds pretty racy - there's nothing like a medieval chronicler for giving you good opening lines to work with. I just hope I don't disappoint!

A medievalist meets Maori history

2010-07-18T23:27:00.004+12:00

It’s Sunday evening, and I’ve just returned from one of the periodic two-day intensive courses on historical methodology I’m being put through this year. Today’s session was on Maori historical methodology - whether there is such a thing, and if so, what it is and how, and by whom, it should be applied. As someone steeped in medieval European history, you might think this would be completely irrelevant for me - and that’s what I thought, too, at first - but that didn’t turn out to be the case. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it was quite a revelatory session.

The crux of the matter we discussed was the question of who ‘owns’ history, and there was much conversation about contemporary debates over whether or not Pakeha (New Zealanders of white European descent) can write Maori history, and if so, how they should go about it. For historians trained in the western tradition of academic history, where documents and archives are often considered the authoritative starting point, it must be something of a mind shift to be told that they cannot even access those archives until they have talked to the kaumatua (tribal elders) and established a relationship of trust. Often, too, the written archives - which are most frequently, though not always, ‘outsider’ views of Maori history and cultural traditions - are considered inferior to the oral traditions maintained on the marae.

I’m a complete neophyte in this area, so I hope any tangata whenua who may read this will not be offended by my naivety, but the aspect of Maori historical epistemology that really entranced me was that Maori do not view time as linear, but as cyclical, where past, present and future all co-exist. It’s not just that Maori have enormous respect for their ancestors, but that they are their ancestors and their ancestors are (in) them. Sir Tipene O’Regan, an historian and Maori ‘elder statesman’, put it this way:

“I and my tribe are the present expression of our tupuna [ancestors] and the source of our uri, our descendants. We are both past and future, as well as ourselves…To inquire into my history or that of my people, you must inquire into my whakapapa. My tupuna may be dead but they are also in me and I am alive. To know them, you must know me! In order to deal with them, you must deal with me!”

For me, the most compelling aspect is whakapapa, which is genealogy but also so much more than genealogy. It is tracing a relationship back to its beginning, to the elemental forces that formed the sea and the land, human life and all that sustained it. As I observed at one point today, during a (rather heated) debate about Pakeha doing Maori history, and about the ‘ownership’ of histories which involve both Maori and Pakeha ancestors, it seems to me that at some point, all Maori history is also ‘family’ history, with all the fraught emotional baggage and byzantine politics that can entail.

I think it was Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie(2) who pointed out that western academic history is utterly wedded to a Judeo-Christian linear view of time, involving a one-way trip from Creation, through Fall and Resurrection/ redemption, to, eventually, an end times/Apocalypse scenario. This linearity is so fundamental to the epistemologies of western societies that I suspect even those of us who are non-believers are probably incapable of ever really escaping it in order to see life on Earth in some other way. Having said that, it seems to me that some of the new work on the ‘post-medieval’ is beginning to challenge and disrupt that linearity from the inside, by consciously interrogating the role a certain idea of the ‘medieval’ past plays in constructing our own ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ worldview.

That’s a topic for another discussion, but in the meantime, can I just say that I am heartily glad I have settled on 14th century England, rather than 19th century New Zealand, as my field of research?

1. Tipene O’Regan, “Who Owns the Past? Change in Maori Perceptions of the Past”, in John Wilson, ed., From the Beginning: The Archaeology of the Maori, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1987, p.142.

2. I could be wrong here. Maybe it was Braudel? I know it was one of those Annales dudes, but it's Sunday night and I'm too lazy to go and dig out my notes...

Francophilia: Pour Bastille Day - Le Tour

2010-07-14T23:02:00.005+12:00

It’s Quatorze Juillet, and I’m celebrating Bastille Day by watching the six hours of Tour de France coverage I taped overnight. I enjoy watching other cycling events, like the Giro d’Italia and that uniquely gruelling madness known as the ‘Hell of the North’ - the one-day classic from Paris to Roubaix that is distinguished by the bone-shattering, tire-tearing sections ridden over the narrow cobbled pavé. There, the weather gods frequently conspire to produce a combination of rain and cold that is misery for road cyclists (though it makes for great entertainment for us armchair athletes).

But there’s something special about the Tour de France. Something romantic in the true Byronic sense about some of those epic high mountain climbs like the Col de la Croix de Fer, the Col du Galibier and the monstrous Col du Tourmalet, where the epic battles of the Tour are waged. Sometimes it’s men pitting themselves against other men, more often it's men battling against themselves, simply to survive to the finish and ride again the next day.

When I think back to some my favourite moments of Tours past, it’s always those elemental dramas that stand out. Tiny, gnomelike Marco Pantani, all guts and teeth, soaring up Alpe d’Huez in the boiling heat miles ahead of the rest of the field. Thomas Voekler, amongst the most unlikely wearers of the maillot jaune ever, dropped over and over again on the vicious slopes of the Pyrenees and, every time, clawing his way back to hang on to the jersey for another day. Tyler Hamilton riding the entire 2003 Tour with a broken collarbone but still winning stage 16 from Pau to Bayonne with a ridiculous solo breakaway and finishing fourth overall. In the same Tour, Lance Armstrong taking a hair-rising ride across an alpine field - on a road bike!- to avoid hitting Joseba Beloki after the latter’s sickening crash on the descent into Gap. (Sadly, Beloki never really came back from that one. He returned to racing, but never again came so close to winning one of the ‘grand tours’.)

Yeah, yeah, I know - over the years, most of these guys have been implicated in drug scandals, and those that haven’t are probably lucky and/or particularly well-served in the undetectable chemicals department, as opposed to ‘clean’. (Lance Armstrong, I’m looking at you.) But I sometimes wonder if you’d have to literally be superhuman to ride some of these routes - and not only that, but to do them day after day for three weeks - without some kind of artificial help. I’ve driven up Alpe d’Huez, and it was so steep for such a long way, we had to have the car in second gear! In some strange ways, the dopage has only added to the distinctive nature of the Tour. I mean, who can forget the oh-so-Gallic Richard Virenque, all-time King of the Mountains, sobbing unashamedly on national television during the infamous l’affaire Festina? It all seems quite consistent with the early history of the Tour, when to stop off for a stiffening brandy or even a hit of cocaine ('the natural stimulant') was not unheard of, and competitors accused the organisers of trying to murder them by making them ride the high mountains. Stages were up to 300 miles long, on virtually unpaved roads with bikes that had no derailleurs. Who wouldn’t take drugs to survive that??

So, in honour of today’s Bastille Day stage (which the French will go all-out to win, as they always do), I leave you with a clip of one of the great stage wins of Tours past: Marco Pantani screaming past King of the Mountains Richard Virenque (in the polka dot jersey) and eventual Tour overall winner Jan Ullrich to take the victory on Alpe d’Huez in 1997.

Photo credit: Hippolyte Aucouturier (could you get a name - or a moustache - that is more French??) at the start of the 1905 Tour in Paris, from a great series of historical Tour photos at The Wall Street Journal.

Oral histories and medieval texts

2010-07-09T16:49:00.003+12:00

It's been an unconscionable time since I last posted anything here, and (a few) inquiring minds have been asking what I’ve been up to. The fact is, up until last week, I was buried deep in an oral history project. (Well, to be honest, it was that and the World Cup. Viva Espagne!)

So, this oral history lark has turned out to be a much more interesting project than I expected. For history postgraduates in this country, training in the theory and methodology of oral history is pretty much required if you expect to work in the field, as much of the historical research done by organisations like the NZ History unit and through the Waitangi Tribunal and the Treaty of Waitangi claims process involves gathering oral histories from people who are still alive. Suffice it to say that as a sworn medievalist, I didn't initially expect this to have much relevance to my own research. But a few of you pointed out on my last post that oral history could potentially provide me with a new perspective on medieval history. This thought was echoed by one of the oral history advocates I’ve been reading up on, who noted that many of the documentary sources we rely on as medievalists – such as chronicles and inquisitorial proceedings – were originally based on oral testimony. They therefore raise many of the same practical and theoretical issues as oral histories, such as the ways that collective or public memory (the 'master narratives', if you will) shape the memories of individuals, questions around the validity and reliability of memory, and the difficulties inherent in capturing meanings conveyed through the sounds and silences of a human voice and translating those into words on a page.

As I’ve been discovering through my work with fourteenth century English chronicles, these accounts were not only based at least partly on oral testimony, they were also designed to be read aloud in the abbeys within which they were (usually) created or to an audience of aristocratic or royal patrons. This has led me to dig deeper into theories of authorship/authority, readership, and reception, and has enhanced my awareness that meanings in historical texts are not fixed, but are constantly shifting in response to the changing relationships between authors, readers and listeners.

Interviewing people for my own oral history project really brought home to me how much ‘editing’ – intentional and unintentional – goes into creating a historical source. For example, I was very conscious of how much I was 'shaping' my evidence simply through the questions I chose to ask or not ask during the interview process. I also got a strong sense of how my interviewees were shaping their memories of the past in order to fit with their experience of the present and to create a coherent narrative of their own lives. One of the big theoretical debates in the field of oral history seems to be the fact that historians in part create (through recording oral history interviews and then making written abstracts or transcripts from them) the sources they later rely on to support their analysis and interpretation. Try taking any oral conversation and turning it into written text and you'll quickly become aware of these problems. How do you deal with slang or idiomatic expressions that your readers may not later understand? What do you do with repetitions, contradictions, and 'crutch words', such as "like" and "you know"? How do you represent tonal changes and body language, which can utterly contradict what is actually said? And how do you handle gaps and silences, which may contain as much or more meaning than the spoken words themselves (as any good post-structuralist can tell you)?

Many medieval documentary sources often involve a high degree of mediation. For example, in the case of a legal deposition or inquisitorial record, the original oral testimony (which may or may not be heavily shaped by the inquisitor's questions) is given in, say, fourteenth century English or French or Catalan. This is translated and written down by hand in Latin, and later, the hand-written document may be converted into a printed Latin text. Finally, the medieval Latin is translated into modern English or French or Spanish, if one happens to be working with recent translations. So I think many of the same issues of interpretation and shifting meanings arise as with oral histories. For the research I’m currently doing, I’m working with several fourteenth century chronicles where the original Latin version is printed side-by-side with a modern (late nineteenth to early twenty-first century) English translation. Working back and forth between the Latin and the English, I can see where different translators have interpreted the Latin in quite different terms, and even where translators have simply not translated into English some of the more controversial elements of the original Latin. This applies especially - but not only - to translations done in the late nineteenth century and the earlier part of the twentieth century. It’s hugely frustrating, but also very instructive in terms of giving a perspective on how the historian’s own socio-cultural context and political position colours the history they write, even in something so seemingly transparent as a straightforward Latin-to-English translation.

I'll write more on this translation issue soon, as I have some great examples to share with you. In the meantime, I'll be busy watching the World Cup final and, naturellement, my beloved Tour de France. Today's stage from Epernay to Montargis went through the gorgeous medieval town of Provins and straight past the cafe where I once drank (gagged down) possibly the worst cup of coffee of my life.

While I was sleeping...

2010-04-30T22:39:00.004+12:00

Well, not actually sleeping. More like agonising over a literature review (why is it that you ALWAYS find five articles that totally change your thinking just when you think you’ve finally nailed it??), trying to figure out if I can produce something worthwhile for the SMFS graduate student essay competition (my supervisor is very enthused about this), and getting to grips with oral history. The latter is a requirement of my last taught postgrad paper, in historical methodology. If you want to work in any kind of professional history job in this country (and there are actually quite a few, given the whole Treaty of Waitangi claims industry), it seems you need to understand the theory and methodologies of oral history. For pretty obvious reasons, it’s not relevant to my interests in medieval history, but it’s kind of fun all the same. My efforts to come up with the most interesting project for the least amount of effort have me interviewing a few friends of my partner on their experiences of ‘coming of age’ as a male in the 1980s. Not as frivolous as it sounds, because it was a period that saw big shifts in the experience of ‘manhood’ in NZ, including the challenges posed to the entrenched rugby-racing-beer culture by the huge Springbok tour protests, and the bitterly-contested passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act.

Not posting here for ages turned out to be a kind of an unintended social experiment. Everything I’ve written so far was just sitting there, waiting to be read or not read, as the case may be. I figured that with no new material, I’d probably just disappear into digital oblivion. Not quite, as it turns out. One thing that happened was the last post I happened to write, on cross-dressing, took on a bit of a life of its own, even getting linked from I Blame the Patriarchy, one of my favourite blogs ever. (Though I’ve never yet had the guts to comment there. Like the best lovers, it scares, amuses and stimulates me all at the same time.)

In other news, we’ve been watching the HBO series Carnivale on DVD. I’m a great movie lover, but in many ways I prefer series, because they get the chance to really develop complex characters and plot lines. Deadwood is probably one of my favourite entertainment experiences ever (though to be fair, I’ve had a bit of a thing for Ian McShane ever since Lovejoy). Carnivale hooked me in pretty quickly with its nasty 1930s travelling show aesthetic (reminds me of all those sinister small-town ‘museums’ we used to drive past on our trips to South Carolina or Florida when I was a kid). I love all the allusions to Gnosticism and Templar myths (cheesy as they may be - though not quite to Dan Brown proportions). But overall, this series is not quite doing it for me at the moment. It’s almost like the writers have tried to cram too much mystical weirdness in there, at the expense of a really strong central narrative drive.

So, this was a bit of a random catch-all, just to let you know I’m still here. I can’t promise to be a better poster in future, because I know I’m the kind of person who tends to be totally passionate about things for a brief period of time, and then entirely loses interest. It’s terribly flighty, but at this point in my life, I’ve accepted that it's who I am. I just make the most of the passion when it strikes. Thanks to all of you who’ve still been commenting, even on the old posts. I’m still reading your blogs, and I’ll be back to commenting soon.

Cross-dressing and other curiosities

2010-02-10T17:30:00.002+13:00

This past weekend, we Wellingtonians hosted our round of the IRB international rugby Sevens competition. This is a huge event for the city and brings a massive influx of players and spectators from around the world. The tournament runs from Friday afternoon through to Saturday evening, but the town is basically en fête for days beforehand. Lots of locals take Friday off work (or simply fail to return after lunch). By 9am Friday morning, the pubs I passed on my way to work were all cranking and hoards of costumed fans were already spilling out into the streets of the CBD.

The costume thing has become a distinctive feature of the Wellington event. It started with a few groups of hardcore fans dressing up the first year, but now literally thousands of people dress up - perhaps as an unspoken alternative to the fun of Halloween, which we don’t really do in this country. The costumes seem to get more spectacular every year, and often show a good deal of creativity, planning and effort. This year’s offerings included a bunch of guys dressed as the components of a sandwich (two slices of bread, ham, tomato, cheese and an egg), and a massive bunch who came dressed as the 101 Dalmatians (yes, there were actually 101 of them).

What always fascinates me, though, is the number of guys for whom getting into costume is license to get into drag. This certainly taps into the carnivalesque nature of the event, as it creates an opening for symbolic transgression of gender roles and social order. I’m sure the guys heading to the rugby in their mini skirts and high heels weren’t thinking about this, but it’s fascinating to consider them as modern actors in a very old communal play. This form of ritualised inversion helps social groups ‘let off steam’ by symbolically testing the limits of communal values without actually breaking those barriers. In sixteenth century France, these young men might have dressed as kings or bishops, using parody of their ‘betters’ to offer a ritualised challenge to rigid social and political hierarchies. In modern Western societies - particularly one like New Zealand, where class boundaries are quite blurred and permeable - gender remains as a very visible stratifying system by which our social roles and behaviour get ordered.

It’s interesting that in this society, at least, a woman dressing like a man is no longer considered transgressive at all (except, perhaps, by my mother). In fact, according to the doyennes of fashion in New York and Paris, every few years it becomes positively the height of style. But going the other way is still taboo except in circumstances like the sevens tournament or fancy dress parties. I’m no sociologist but I’m sure there is a hugely complex web of factors contributing to this state. As a medievalist, though, I'm prompted to speculate about the notion from Aristotelian natural philosophy that things can move from a state of lesser to greater perfection (in medieval terms, from female to male) but not the other way around. Thus, female saints cross-dressing as males became a pretty standard trope in medieval hagiography. In these narratives, when a woman dressed as a man and, by implication, took on manly virtues, it became one sign of sanctity. But I can’t think of any examples going the other way, nor can I imagine that given the general medieval worldview on gender and natural order, a cross-dressed man could have been seen as anything other than dangerously transgressive. Anyone know of any examples to the contrary?

Here’s my favourite Sevens costume (entirely gender-neutral, unless you consider filling the chilly bin with beer is a man’s job) -

History written in sand

2010-01-28T18:53:00.004+13:00

While I was wittering on about learning Russian, Belle posted a link to this most beguiling piece of performance art. The things this woman does with sand are amazing, and her tracing of recent Ukrainian history is entrancing and chilling at the same time.

(Click here if you can't play the embedded version below.)

Seven things...

2010-01-25T19:17:00.003+13:00

Having been given the hard word by Good (Enough) Woman, and with no further ado, here are seven things you wouldn’t know about me from reading my blog...

1. I’m a bit of a science nerd, and have two-thirds of a BSc degree in Exercise Science. A few years ago, I considered a career change to the sports science field, but after doing some personal training I discovered I had no patience for ~~lazy whiners~~ the clients.

2. Though I’m currently owned by two cats, I’ve also had dogs in the past. I always snort disdainfully at those clueless dog-owners on television programmes like It’s Me or the Dog, and say things like “I would never have allowed my dogs to behave like that!” But the truth is that one of them, in particular, was a right little scallywag despite his many obedience club certificates. My son once had to go to school and tell the teacher that yes, the dog really had eaten his homework.

3. I used to be a kickass belly dancer. I still think that my regular dancing gigs at private functions and at the local Turkish restaurant were the easiest dosh I ever made (and always in cold, hard cash).

4. I’m anxious about climate change but at the same time, I can’t shake my penchant for classic American muscle cars. I’ve owned various cars over the years (mostly squeaky Japanese sports cars) but the darling of them all was a royal blue 1965 Ford Mustang.

5. Like GEW, I’m a headbanger from way back. The first record I ever bought with my own money (yes, it was all vinyl back then kiddies!) was AC/DC’s Back in Black (and it’s still on my iPod today). Generally, I preferred the dirty and vaguely menacing products of Britain’s industrial wastelands (Black Sabbath, Judas Priest) to the shiny LA hair bands. Van Halen excepted.

6. The first time I went to university (straight out of school), I majored in Anthropology and Religious Studies. I had no clue what I wanted to do with a degree and picked these subjects mainly because they sounded interesting and my friends were doing them.

7. I’m a dreadful hoarder of books and papers, and also very lazy about tidying. This lethal combination means that my study is now so stuffed with crap, I can barely get in the door. However, instead of clearing it out and organising it, I’ve simply moved all my work-in-progress piles to the dining room table.

ETA: Oh wait. You might have guessed about number 5 from reading this post.

I'm cheating on my first love with Russian

2010-01-23T15:42:00.007+13:00

I’ve been learning French for several years, and I adore the language. I’ve grown to really like my classmates and a number of us have now been through four or five terms together. We’ve fallen into a happy routine of taking turns to bring the wine each week and laughing over it as we confess our latest vocabulary faux pas. It’s possible I may even have developed a leetle, tiny girl-crush on my teacher, a beautiful and charming lass of French Indochine heritage and strange musical tastes. She once played us the Jacques Brel song Ne me quitte pas and was perplexed that we thought it a cheesy old load of nonsense with weird stalkerish undertones.

But this term, I’m cheating on my first love because I’ve finally found a night class in Russian. I’ve had a strange yearning to learn Russian for years. Recently, it became almost overwhelming as a result of watching this fascinating BBC series, in which Jonathan Dimbleby spends 18 weeks travelling from Murmansk to Vladivostok. I know very little about Russia, apart from the corners of its history I traversed in the course of an undergraduate paper on the Napoleonic Wars. Also, some odds and ends about Catherine the Great, although I never fell for the story that she was crushed to death while trying to have sex with a stallion (this is one of those scurrilous myths that often get attached to powerful women, and despite all evidence to the contrary, never seem to die).

I imagine all Russians to be like Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises, all smouldering gangland staunchness and chewy Russian consonants. Either that, or like the icily elegant socialites Dimbleby meets in St Petersburg, who dismiss Western democracy and American consumer culture with a disdainful wrinkling of their White Russian noses. I’ve never been to Russia but a visit to the Hermitage Museum is definitely on my list of things to do before I die. That, and swilling French champagne in the Baroque dining room of some decaying St Petersburg hotel that’s seen better days.

Oy. I just had a look at the Hermitage website. The Cyrillic script is utterly mystifying. At least with French, you’re on somewhat familiar territory, even if the particular letter combinations and the accents create different spoken sounds from English. It’s just occurred to me how much of a challenge it’s going to be to learn this entirely new alphabet - like learning to read all over again!

Image: The almost impossibly fairytale-like Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood in St Petersburg (eat your heart out, Walt Disney). Apparently, it got this rather gruesome moniker care of being the site of Tsar Alexander II’s assassination.

If clothes maketh the man, can hair maketh the virgin?

2010-01-18T08:55:00.006+13:00

Or more specifically, could an image of a queen with her hair worn down but simply plaited be interpreted as a marker of virginity? I ask because in the course of my research on Richard II, I’ve found myself pondering the possible meanings of a suggestive image from his charter to Shrewsbury in 1389. Unfortunately, I can’t find an image of the manuscript illumination, but it features Richard II sitting all kingly on his throne, while Queen Anne kneels beside (and slightly below) him, depicting her classic intercessory role as mediator between the king and his subjects. Anne is crowned but otherwise her hair is uncovered and it is shown hanging down her back in a long plait.

I know that ‘unbound’ hair was used as a symbol of virginity, for example in the coronation rituals for new queens and for nuns taking final vows. The picture to the left is from the Liber Regalis, a 14th century coronation ordo, and you can just see the queen’s hair falling down her back. But does the concept ‘unbound’ always mean fully loose, as it is shown here, or could it include plaited but not otherwise pinned up or covered?

I’m aware that image does not necessarily (or even frequently) reflect reality. This portrayal of Anne on her knees, pleading with her husband/king for the liberties of the town, should most obviously be read as a representation of her symbolic role as queenly intercessor - mirroring the Virgin Mary’s intercession with Christ on behalf of humanity. But at the same time, I wonder if there is a more subtle message being conveyed. If plaited hair can carry the same connotations as fully unbound hair, could it also be read as an allusion to the possibility that Richard and Anne had a chaste marriage? This is something that has been suggested by a few historians as an explanation for their failure to have children. (By 1389, they had been married for seven years and Anne was 21 - getting on a bit in the child-bearing stakes by late medieval royal/aristocratic standards.) It’s curious, too, that despite Richard’s deposition and the opportunities opened up by subsequent noble rebellions and rumours of his imminent return, no ‘pretender’ ever emerged who claimed to be his son (legitimate or otherwise) and heir.

The possibility that Richard and Anne had a chaste marriage is one of those ‘arguments from absence’ that can be so difficult to sustain (and indeed, the articles I’ve read so far that discuss the possibility stretch the available evidence rather thin). Richard certainly portrayed himself as a model of orthodox piety and ‘hammer of heretics’ - it was even reported that he processed barefoot with the monks of Westminster. By the late Middle Ages, chaste marriage had emerged as an attractive model for pious laypeople who, for whatever reason (including an arranged marriage), had been unable to take up a formal religious occupation. Perhaps the most notorious example was that of the married mystic Margery Kempe, who basically bought off her husband by agreeing to cover his (considerable) financial debts if he would discharge her ‘marriage debt’ and agree to stop having sex with her.

Richard and Anne’s childlessness contributed to the instability of Richard’s reign as the lack of an heir of the body arguably made it that much easier for Henry of Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) to establish his claim to the throne. Strangely, though, none of the chronicle sources make much of this apparent failure at one of the fundamental obligations of kingship. If Richard and Anne’s marriage was indeed chaste, one would expect more rumour and gossip, as they weren’t just any couple but the king and queen of England. On Anne’s death, one would also have expected more criticism of Richard’s decision to take as his second wife a girl of six years old, meaning even the potential for an heir would be postponed by canon law for at least six years. Whether Richard and Anne had a chaste marriage or there was some other reason they didn’t reproduce, consideration of the apparent ‘failure’ of this royal marriage (and of Richard as a man) from a political perspective also marks an odd lacuna in many modern interpretations of Richard’s reign.

Sod the resolutions

2010-01-11T12:54:00.002+13:00

For many reasons, I am not a great fan of the New Year holiday. Not the least of these reasons is the many New Year's days I've spent nursing wicked hangovers and vowing never to drink again. I managed to avoid that particular trap this year, and I also managed to avoid making any New Year's resolutions, which I know from past experience that I'd probably break within a month.

Another reason I don't like New Year is the accompanying deluge of advertising from Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and just about every gym in town, trying to convince us to part with our cash in pursuit of some mythical 'ideal self' that we could finally attain this year if only we'd just try that little bit harder. Now, I'm not against fitness or healthy eating per se (in fact, I've been known to indulge in these things myself from time to time). What bugs me is the blatant targeting of all this 'New year new you!' self-improvement crap at women, and the insidious ways women's perfectly normal human imperfections are used as the ammunition to generate guilt, fear and ultimately - of course - product sales.

I could write a very long and humourless rant on this topic, but I think this hilarious clip from That Mitchell and Webb Look really says it all.

Vikings to Brits: "Charlemagne made me do it!"

2010-01-02T15:06:00.004+13:00

From Medieval News comes this item on a new book by Robert Ferguson, in which he claims the Vikings were not truly the aggressors in the bouts of pillaging and raiding that made them so famous. In fact, it was all Charlemagne’s fault. According to Medieval News,

"A new theory about what drove the Vikings to raid Western Europe in the late eight and ninth centuries has been published. It suggests that the Vikings in Denmark were reacting to a threat from the Carolingian ruler Charlemagne, who was seeking to destroy their society and impose Christianity on them."

Disclaimer: I haven’t actually read this book, nor am I familiar with Robert Ferguson’s scholarship or credentials. But whenever someone comes along who turns cherished master narratives on their heads - or at least makes us think again about long-held assumptions - my interest is always piqued. On the face of it, though, this seems like a pretty radical reinterpretation of the Viking invasions. (I’m sorely tempted to make a glib comparison between Ferguson's depiction of Viking aggression-as-defence and reactionary men’s rights activists who claim dysfunctional and violent men are simply the sad victims of expansionary feminism.)

The Medieval News article continues -

‘With the accession of Charlemagne in 771, the Carolingians began to implement a new program of converting their pagan and neighbors and promoting Christianity. Charlemagne launched numerous invasions of the Saxon peoples led by Widukind.  

In a podcast interview [available through the BBC History Magazine website], Ferguson adds the goals of Charlemagne were to force the Saxons "to abandon their culture, political system, beliefs and everything, and make them part Christians ['part Christians'? I think this is a typo, unless Charlemagne was happy with superficial expressions of faith versus full and genuine conversion] and part of his empire."  

Ferguson notes an episode of "ethnic-cleansing:" when, in 782, Charlemagne's armies forcibly baptised and then executed 4,500 Saxon captives at Verden, a town close to Denmark. The Danes would have been well aware of what was happening with the Saxons anyways, as Widukind was married to sister of the Danish king, Sigfrid, and often took refuge in Denmark to escape the Carolingians.  

Considering the situation, Ferguson writes, "Should the Vikings simply wait for Charlemagne's armies to arrive and set about the task? Or should they fight to defend their culture?"  

But the Norse could not fight the Carolingian military directly - instead they went after soft targets, such as monasteries, which were symbols of the growing Christian encroachment. Ferguson says, "everything points to a hatred that goes beyond just robbers who just wanted money."’

I’m no expert on the earlier Middle Ages/Charlemagne/pre-Conquest England, but I know some of you reading this are. Out of curiosity, I’d love to know what you make of Ferguson’s assertions. Has his theory been canvassed before? Is it crazy-talk? Can the Vikings really be rehabilitated as victims of Charlemagne’s attempts at ‘ethnic cleansing’ and forced Christianisation?

Summer of research progress report

2009-12-31T14:45:00.004+13:00

Exhibit A: The learned Miss Jones, one of the two kittens we adopted for Christmas. Her brother is a cat-man of more plebeian tastes and prefers to spend his time rolling around under the sports section of the newspaper.

Exhibit B (located beneath Exhibit A): A sampling of the books I’ve read so far in my summer of research. I’ve only skimmed to the good bits in the chronicles at this point, but I’ll be going back for close reading later (and probably more than once).

The weather has been conducive to long uninterrupted spells of reading in the garden, so I’ve also managed to plough through quite a bit of other material, amongst which:

Michael Bennett’s Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (which is still irritating me with its referencing, or lack thereof, but this post by Gesta on writing book reviews makes me realise I was probably unfair in blaming Bennett instead of his publisher.)
Nigel Saul’s Richard II and his EHR article “Richard II and the vocabulary of kingship”. I was surprised to find Saul’s 1997 book is the first scholarly bio of Richard II since Anthony Steel’s 1962 outing.
Lynn Staley’s Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II. I found this a richly detailed interdisciplinary study of the social and political contexts of works by Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain poet and other 14thC texts. It also offers some valuable insights that I haven't come across elsewhere (yet) into Charles V of France's influence on Richard II's court and the connections between literary patronage and ideas about kingship.
Jeffrey J. Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler’s Becoming Male in the Middle Ages
Paul Strohm’s Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts
Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval
Karma Lochrie et al., Constructing Medieval Sexuality. I read Mark Jordan’s chapter, “Homosexuality, luxuria and textual abuse”, on the bus. That got me some odd looks.
Assorted articles on feminist and queer theory

In addition, I’ve re-read Christopher Fletcher’s useful article “Manhood and politics in the reign of Richard II”. I wasn’t able to track down a copy of Fletcher’s 2008 book on the same subject through my library system, so I ended up ordering it from Amazon. It’s hardcover and a bit pricey (though way cheaper than the list price in pounds), but with the NZ dollar being so strong against the US dollar at the moment and it being Christmas and all, I was able to talk myself into it. From what I can gather from the reviews, Fletcher achieves an innovative gender-based reading of the sources on Richard II’s kingship, but he also gets called out for skating over some major issues. One reviewer also calls Fletcher’s assessments of other scholars’ work “uncharitably critical”. Sounds like it should be a lively read if nothing else.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve also developed a much more refined picture in my mind of the approach I want to take to this research project and of the specific questions I’m going to be working to answer. Thanks to some unexpected connections the background reading has been sparking, my ideas have changed a fair amount since their initial incarnation. I expect they’ll morph quite a bit more in the coming months but at least now I feel like I have a clear direction and some markers to follow. (This is just as well, because it won’t be long before I need to front up to the Postgraduate Research Committee with the formal research proposal.)

I’ve been relieved to find that, as I suspected, I’m going to be covering some solid new ground and my advisor is pretty excited about it. I went through these weird phases of anxiety at first, swinging between ‘wow, I can’t believe no one has thought about this topic in this way before,’ and ‘crap, maybe no one has done this before for a good reason’. Now that my project has been approved in principle by both my advisor and the postgrad research co-ordinator (thus validating it is indeed worth pursuing), I’ve settled into a sort of steady state where I crack open each new book or article alternately hoping to find something along my lines that will be useful, and fearing that I’ll find my great original idea isn’t so original after all.

Here’s a question for all you scholarly and creative types, though. I’m really excited about this project and want to prattle on about it to anyone who will listen. But at the same time, I’m instinctively wary about putting too much detail about it on the public interwebs, given those cases we all hear about of academic plagiarism and people having their ideas nicked before they can take credit for them. In fact, I haven’t mentioned a couple of the books/articles I’ve read, as I feel like the titles alone could give away a bit too much about the way I’m thinking (this is, of course, assuming anyone but me even gives a damn). Is this just paranoia? Am I being overly cautious? Do you talk about your original ideas and research in any specificity online before you present or publish in a more formal context? If so, have you ever had an ‘oh crap’ moment, where you suspect someone else has pinched your work?

Disrupting the otherness of the medieval past

2009-12-20T11:32:00.004+13:00

It gives me a certain amount of satisfaction to read this article on the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new Medieval and Renaissance galleries. The museum’s decision to present these collections in a single contiguous space works to destabilise the conventional narrative of historical progress from the ‘dark ages’ to a nascent ‘age of reason’ (or, literally, ‘rebirth’). According to the article:

"The V&A is managing to display some brutishly large cojones. This is not just an excellent museum addition. It is also a particularly brave one.

What is being challenged? Everything. The complete caboodle. Before we even set foot inside this theatre of delights, its title warns us of a revolution ahead. Medieval and Renaissance are, after all, two slabs of civilisation that we generally keep well apart. These two epochs are usually understood as near opposites, driven by dramatically different world-views. The medieval age is felt to have been gloomy, backward and propelled by fiery belief, while the Renaissance was enlightened, progressive and propelled by reason."

This traditional framing of discrete periods in Western history persuades us to see the present moment in time as the apogee of a linear progression in which the Middle Ages (a problematic term in itself. The middle of what?) is the brutal and intellectually stunted precursor to the increasingly enlightened Early Modern/Renaissance and Modern. In this vision, the medieval past is indeed another country, populated by the utterly strange and the irrationally violent. It’s presented as a time and place hopelessly tainted by Catholic groupthink that was then surpassed by the ‘discovery of the individual’ who, at his/her (usually ‘his’) finest, is driven by reason rather than superstition. Much more like ‘us’ in the modern West, in fact.

I have a Google alert set up for ‘medieval history’ and it’s quite depressing to see the number of links it produces with a first sentence along the lines of ‘the medieval period was a very serious, dark period of time’ or talking about ‘the savage unrestrained medieval times’. (Those are both real examples from the past week or so.) Contrived divisions between the medieval, the early modern and the modern are to some degree necessary to the discipline of history, as without any boundaries and the specialisation that goes with them, it would be virtually impossible to produce rich, accurate and detailed historical interpretations. But at the same time, when they are accepted without question as natural or logical, these standard periodisations become problematic because they help perpetuate the view of the medieval as utterly Other from the modern. This in turn underpins a teleology that says all history is a linear march of progress from a dark, barbaric and backwards past to enlightened, democratic (and implicitly westernised) modernity. The political uses of such a vision of history can be clearly discerned in those depictions of Islam and the Muslim world as ‘medieval’ that are all-too-common in the Western mainstream media at the moment.

This notion of the ‘othering’ of the medieval is something Magistra recently touched on in another excellent post in our on-going discussion about history writing, fiction and emotional engagement. Because I’m lazy, I’m going to paraphrase here something I wrote in the comments at Magistra’s blog -

We need to avoid romanticising the distant past while also resisting that still-compelling whiggish narrative of progress from the Dark Ages (or ‘medieval’ in its most pejorative sense) through Renaissance and Enlightenment to modernity, but that's a tricky path to navigate at times. That's partly why I try to avoid the standard periodisation labels when it comes to talking to people about what I'm doing (although I admit I don’t always succeed at this, because adopting the existing classifications makes things a whole lot simpler from a pragmatic perspective).

I want to disrupt and interrogate the divides that say you're either a medievalist or an early modernist/renaissance specialist or a modernist, based on a rather arbitrary imposition of dates that in itself implies a teleology of progress. The classic periodisation really only holds if you stick to a fairly narrow range of political/economic/socio-cultural indicators within quite discrete temporal and geographical limits. It starts to break down once you cross the traditional boundaries of 'England' or 'Western Europe', and when you start to look at themes like gender and sexuality, the history of non-elites and marginal groups, popular beliefs versus institutional religion and so on. That approach can reveal as many broad continuities and congruences between the medieval and the early modern or modern as it reveals big changes and ruptures. Feminist historians have been engaging with questions of periodisation since (at least) the 1970s, with work like Joan Kelly’s classic article “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” [1] providing significant new interpretations of received master narratives. More recently, feminist historian Judith Bennett’s History Matters [2] explored the question of change and continuity with her notion of patriarchal equilibrium, the merits and drawbacks of which were debated across a number of feminist history blogs earlier this year.

I find it an intellectual and emotional challenge to apply this thinking to my own historical research, because it’s tough to do without breaking all the rules about anachronism and sentimentalising, over-simplifying or distorting the past. I’m definitely one of those people who was originally drawn to medieval history precisely because I did perceive it as tantalisingly and exotically ‘other’. This process of exploring how the othering of the medieval shapes my own subjectivity at a specific moment in the historical present is an on-going one (and one that is much enriched by reading blogs like In the Middle and Modern Medieval, as well as those linked above).

1. Joan Kelly, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, Chicago University Press, 1984.

2. Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Flames of justice

2009-12-16T10:31:00.003+13:00

Occasionally (very occasionally), the contract corporate communications work I do part-time intersects with my true love, which is of course studying history. Such a serendipitous cross-over happened just recently, as I’ve been writing some case studies for a company involved in upgrading the technology in a number of New Zealand’s historic courtrooms.

I was tracking down some background on the Old High Court building, which has now been incorporated into a brand spanking new Supreme Court complex, when I came across this little gem from the Supreme Court’s Conservation Report. It’s the tale of one Sir Hubert Ostler, a future Crown Solicitor and Crown Prosecutor. In 1910, Sir Hubert was a new appointee to the Crown Law Office and worked in a room above the court, but his career could well have been snuffed out by this little misjudgment:

“My desk was near the window and I generally worked with the window open. One day I was concentrating on some work and as I read I lit my pipe, shook the match and thinking it was out, dropped it into the wastepaper basket, which happened to be fairly full. But the match had not been extinguished, and presently I heard a noise and on looking round found a merry fire, the paper being well alight.

I promptly picked up the basket and dropped it out of the window and on looking out to watch the result I saw it descend on the head of Mr Justice Cooper, who had just emerged from the door. There was no time to warn him. It landed on his hat and blazing papers were shot out and showered around him like a Greek fire. He let out a yell and jumped liked a frightened horse…” [1]

The archaeologists have done some major excavating work on the construction site for the new Supreme Court, which lies next to the Old High Court building. This land was originally part of the harbour but was reclaimed in stages from the 1850s to provide some much-needed flat building space between the water and the steep, bush-covered hills. Archaeological finds on the Supreme Court site have encompassed both indigenous artefacts such as Maori kete (baskets, which were possibly used for bringing goods to trade with the colonists) and the prosaic leavings of daily life in the European settler community. The latter includes china fragments, wine goblets, gin and beer bottles, pharmaceutical bottles, and a rather beautiful Belle Epoque-style cold cream container.

Below is a Wellington City Council map showing the harbour reclamations and their dates superimposed on modern Wellington. Much of what is now the CBD is within the green area of reclaimed land. This is an interesting prospect considering this city is smack in the middle of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a zone at high risk of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis. I try very hard not to think about that - and about the fact that the scientists keep warning us we’re well overdue for ‘the big one’ - when I’m up on the 25th floor of some waterside high rise and a tremor hits.

Writing about the court’s conservation reports has reminded me I must track down a friendly local archaeologist to help me identify a few bits and pieces that were unearthed under our 1890s cottage when the drains were replaced recently. They include a couple of lead soldiers (?? - I think they’d be lead, if they are indeed from around the turn of last century) and some interesting old glass bottles.

1. The full story is published in R. Cooke (Ed.), Portrait of a Profession: The Centennial Book of the New Zealand Law Society, Reed, 1969.

Beaver, or a little mystery solved

2009-12-11T16:33:00.006+13:00

Ah, I love it when I find the answer to one of the mysteries of modern life in the Middle Ages.

This happened to me recently in relation to an ad from this series for a new brand of tampons. It shows a young woman spending the day with a cute furry beaver, buying it treats and, presumably, sharing girly secrets. The punch line is “You only have one, so look after it.” I was watching a movie with some friends when the ad ran, and it sparked a lively debate over where and how the word ‘beaver’ as a synonym for vagina could possibly have originated*. Theories ran from the mundane (“Um, they’re both furry?”) to the more bizarre. (I wondered if there might be some connection between the beaver’s giant teeth and the mythical vagina dentata, but clearly I watch too many B-grade horror flicks.)

A few days later I was reading Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero’s Premodern Sexualities (at the hairdressers. Hint: If you are one of those people who would rather read than make banal chitchat with the hairdresser, take something like this along with you. I promise you will not get asked any more than a single question about it.) Anyway, I was up to Elizabeth Pittenger’s chapter “Explicit Ink”, which examines the connections between sexuality and Latin grammar in Alain de Lille’s twelfth century classic De planctu Naturae (The Complaint of Nature), and I experienced a little thrill of discovery when I came across this passage:

“Apocope [a Latin term meaning to lop off the end of words] serves as a figure…more curiously, for the beaver’s habit of chewing off its own genitals (Pr. 1, 103). The image is generated from the pun of the signifier “castor,” “beaver,” and its proximity to castration.” (p. 234).

Apparently, this whole ‘beaver = castration’ pun was considered the height of wit amongst later medieval Latinists, and what could be more symbolic of the feminine than losing your balls? I have no idea whether this really is the derivation of our modern slang term, but it’s better than any of the ideas my friends and I came up with. If you have a more convincing explanation, I’d like to hear it. (Really, I would! I’ve always been fascinated by the history of slang terms and argot.)

Always reliable on subjects like this, Got Medieval has more bizarre medieval beaver lore here.

* Is this a UK/Australian/New Zealand term? Or do North Americans use it too?

Image: A beaver castrating itself, from a mid-10th century Byzantine materia medica (Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.652).

(Also, apologies for the disconcerting change of font styles in this post. Obviously, Blogger is not liking me at the moment but I am in no mood to wrestle with the stupid HTML tags.)

Who'da thunk it?

2009-12-08T23:37:00.000+13:00

So apparently, I’m “literati”. Yes, that is according to an email I received recently informing me that I’ve been included on this list of the “100 best blogs for the literati”. And they weren’t even asking me for my bank account details (though to be fair, the message was sandwiched between two emails from a very nice person in Nigeria.)

The site says -

“If you feel that you’re destined to be an intellectual long after you graduate from college, you’re going to have to work a little harder to keep up with high brow culture and scholarly debates on your own. These 100 blogs will help you jump in on the discussions influencing the art, literature, political and culture worlds, even without the support of your professors and fellow classmates.”

I have just two things to say about this:

1. I’m in good company. The other blogs in the History section include the excellent book history blogs Wynken de Worde and Bookn3rd, both favourites of mine. Check them out if you haven’t already.

2. High brow culture?? Wait till they see what I’ve got in store for you next week…

History, politics and scholarly subjectivity

2009-12-05T18:22:00.004+13:00

Magistra et Mater and I, along with assorted commentators, have recently been engaging in a wide-ranging discussion on historical fiction and the writing of history. (See here, here and here.) In Magistra’s latest contribution, Emotional engagement and historians’ values, she makes the point that while it may be valid for historians to use their academic work to support their social activism, they still have to adhere to the core values of honesty and accuracy. Otherwise, they’re engaging in writing fiction or propaganda, not history. In other words, historians can’t just jettison or manipulate the evidence if it doesn’t fit their particular view of the world.

Damned straight, I say. However, the deep, persistent and often problematic connections between the worlds of professional history and politics can make the noble values of ‘honesty’ and ‘accuracy’ much more difficult to pin down in practice than in theory. ‘Honest’ according to whom? (Let’s face it - we humans sometimes have trouble even being honest with ourselves.) ‘Accurate’ by what measures? These are questions I started to engage with at a theoretical level in undergrad classes in historiography, during which we discussed (sometimes heatedly) historical debates such as Australia’s so-called History Wars. The issue is becoming more immediate to me as a postgraduate student because I’m engaging in original research, actually putting something new out there with my name on it and in which I have to present my evidence and argue a position. It’s forcing me to become more self-reflexive and to grapple with questions of my own scholarly subjectivity. How does my subjectivity shape the questions I choose to ask and the ways that I present my evidence (right down to picking images to accompany the text)? Can I even be fully aware of my own subjectivity and if so, am I a fully autonomous subject?

That’s a high-falutin' philosophical tangent that I won’t pursue any further here, except to say that I don’t believe any historian can be truly objective in the purist scientific sense because our own subjectivity is always going to colour the kinds of questions we ask of the evidence - and even what we consider as evidence. For example, some historians might only see official documents - such as judicial or administrative records or state papers - as real evidence, whereas others will find literary sources or material culture (buildings, household utensils etc.) equally valid. Some scholars might read those official records purely to glean the facts (names, dates, places etc.), whereas others will apply readings more informed by literary theory to dig deeper into how and why a particular text came to take the form it did. They will look as much to what isn’t said - to the gaps, silences and absences - and to meanings that are conveyed unintentionally, in order to extend interpretation beyond the limits of the original author’s purpose (stated or implicit).

This is the point at which many historians trained in the strictly empirical traditions of ‘scientific’ history become very anxious about people manipulating the evidence to fit a theory or a particular political agenda. Certainly, this does happen, and when it does, it’s bad history. But the fetishisation of archive sources as objective evidence of the past can equally blind us to the reality that those dryly-official documents and records are still created, authored texts. As the French historian Roger Chartier said, ‘no text, even…the most “objective” (for example, a statistical table drawn up by a government agency), maintains a transparent relationship with the reality that it apprehends.’

Chartier’s argument has been resonating with me during the last couple of weeks as I’ve been reading some recent historical studies of Richard II’s reign. Historians of this period generally draw on the many surviving contemporary or near-contemporary chronicles as well as on official records and it’s quite revealing to see the different ways they treat the two types of sources. A citation from a chronicle is almost always accompanied by an attempt to corroborate the information from another source and is frequently also qualified by discussion of the chronicle writer’s known political and/or religious biases. That approach is perfectly sound, as later medieval chroniclers were generally writing in the service of patrons and they sometimes shaped and re-worked their texts quite extensively to meet the exigencies of changing political situations.

What interests me, though, is that the same qualifications are much less frequently applied to the ‘official’ sources. Instead, these are generally treated as accurate, reliable and unproblematic accounts of events as they actually happened. Nigel Saul offers one of the rare exceptions when he points out, “The parliament roll suffers from all the usual weaknesses of that source: it is highly edited; it is composed mainly of memoranda and petitions to which the king gave his reply; and it contains few reports of speeches or discussions.” [2]

Social activism and emotional engagement

I want to come back now to another aspect of Magistra’s latest post, namely the connection of history and social activism. She notes the two historians that I named as being particularly good at emotionally engaging their readers (Marcus Rediker and Judith Walkowitz) are modernists working on the 18th and 19th centuries. Thinking about this some more, I wondered if for that reason, readers could more easily make a connection between these writers’ historical subjects - broadly speaking, victims of the Atlantic slave trade and working-class women in Victorian England - and their own direct experiences of 20th century social justice movements such as civil rights and feminism.

For someone like me, with leftwing progressive political sympathies, it’s true that the history of marginal groups readily engages both my intellectual interest and my empathy as a human being. However, this is certainly not the case for many other people who study history. I’m reminded of an undergraduate paper I did on the Napoleonic Wars, when the students included both history majors and Bachelor of Defence Studies majors (all serving military). As you would expect, the course covered the military, political and economic aspects of war and empire, but it also explored broader social and cultural themes. The BDS guys were mostly either perplexed or annoyed at having to consider how war and the economic measures needed to support it affected civilian populations. For them, the life-altering impact of Napoleon’s wars on peasant communities or women or the clergy - the facet of the course that held the most appeal for me - was just not relevant, let along interesting or emotionally engaging.

I guess this comes back to a very personal question: why do history? Why does spending our lives in libraries and archives, puzzling over artefacts left by those long dead, have such appeal? (It certainly ain’t for the money.) I would argue that without some aspiration beyond simply uncovering and assembling an accurate collection of facts, we’re nothing more than modern antiquarians. For my own part, I’m driven not simply by curiosity or the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake, but by a desire to understand patterns and connections in the past that also speak to the present. On this, I’m with Michel Foucault, who believed the point of history is “to show how that-which-is has not always been,” and so to show “why and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is.” [3]

That’s idealistic, I know. Maybe it’s even a little bit utopian. But that’s the way I roll.

1. Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, p. 43.
2. Nigel Saul, Richard II, p. 222
3. Quoted in Joan W. Scott’s article 'Back to the Future' in History & Theory 47, no. 2 (2008), p. 284.

Fourteen centuries of excruciating composition (and counting...)

2009-12-01T21:25:00.007+13:00

I feel like I’ve been banging on a bit lately about my perception that the quality of writing amongst otherwise well-educated and articulate people has been going to hell in a hand basket. And it seems I’m not the only one to think this, as these representative samples from Clio Bluestocking Tales and Dame Eleanor Hull testify.

Regardless of whether I’m right or wrong, this particular gripe usually makes me feel just a wee bit curmudgeonly. I start to suspect the real problem may lay somewhere in the intersection between my advancing age and retreating patience, rather than in any objective decline in standards. This charming little post by Alice Rio (from Jonathan Jarrett’s back catalogue at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe) tends to confirm my suspicions. I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting the relevant chunk here, because it is just so apt. It’s from a seventh century manuscript that appears to have been written by a rather grumpy monk:

“Another text, addressed to young men who do not know how to write. I wonder that, after such a long time, my speech has in no way been followed on the page, and the borrowed writing tablets which you bring back soiled with your text, as if from dictation, are filled with the wrong words.”

I bet that after writing that, our monk got together with his mates over a pint of ale to moan about how “novices these days wouldn’t know what to do with a semicolon if it came up and bit them on the arse!”

Image: A novice monk being punished for misusing the possessive apostrophe.

Summer of research, ridin' and relaxin'

2009-11-26T20:55:00.006+13:00

Spring has come late to these parts, and today was one of the first days there was real heat in the sun. I sat on the front porch reading, enveloped in the scents from the jasmine and climbing roses that are running riot around the balcony, watching the fat, furry bumbler bees (as my nephew calls them) slip dozily from bloom to bloom. My coursework is done for the year, so I now have the summer ahead of me to mull over the research project that will occupy a lot of my time over the coming year.

I’ve got some broad ideas about what I want to tackle and how, but I haven’t refined the research question(s) so narrowly yet as to require really intensive reading (or to get alternately obsessed and fed up with the subject). I’m interested in taking up Joan Scott’s challenge to examine the ways that ‘gender constructs politics and politics constructs gender’, so I’m thinking I may do something around competing constructions of misrule and the gendering of dissent during the troubled reign of Richard II of England. That leads to lots of related threads - starting with that classic late medieval triangle of heresy, sodomy and treason - that could also prove rich avenues for investigation.

I love this stage of the process, where I can dip in and out of lots of different books and articles, following up any little obscure angle that intrigues me. It suits my magpie brain. I have a nice big stack of background reading, theory, and secondary sources on the period to work through over the next couple of months, and I’ll also be making a start on tracking down primary sources I may want to use. There is a huge amount of this material for Richard’s reign and its post-deposition aftermath, including a bunch of French and English chronicles and extensive judicial and administrative records. (Bonus - thanks to the prompt from Dame Eleanor Hull, I also discovered my university library has an edition of the Calendar of Patent Rolls for Richard II’s reign stashed in offsite storage, so I won’t need to interloan.)

As this project takes shape over the coming months, I will probably torture you periodically with oblique accounts of my discoveries. But for now, I’m going to go and pour myself a glass of cider, so I’ll leave you with my thoughts on other good things about summer:

Monteiths Crushed Apple Cider served over ice in a big goblet
Hitting the single track at Makara Peak
Eating fish and chips on the beach, and washing away the salty, greasy goodness with a glass of crispy sauvignon blanc
Swimming twilight laps around Oriental Bay fountain
Breaking out the fairy lights and turning our patio into a Greek-taverna-by-proxy

To those of you facing down winter in unkindly climes, I send my commiserations.

* The image is of a 14th century music manuscript of the English round Sumer is i-cumen in.

Carnivalesque 56 early modern edition

2009-11-24T11:47:00.002+13:00

Carnivalesque 56, the early modern edition, is now up at Investigations of a Dog.

There's an eclectic selection of subject matter, from the American Founding Fathers, military culture in Stuart England and Oliver Cromwell's boots through to conjuring tricks, scurrilous political pamphlets and a notorious London sex criminal with a predilection for spanking.

Writing a scholarly book? Allow me to offer some advice...

2009-11-21T15:23:00.006+13:00

With my coursework and exams over for this year, I’ve started doing some background reading for a major research exercise I’ll be starting in late January. I was quite enjoying this early exploratory stage of the research process until I started reading Michael Bennett’s Richard II and the Revolution of 1399. Despite being clearly written and having many pretty pictures, this book is sorely testing my patience right now. Every time I walk past my desk and see Richard’s simpering mug peering up from the cover, I can feel my blood pressure rising.

Don’t get me wrong. Bennett’s book is a sound piece of scholarship and I have nothing to argue with in terms of his evidence and interpretations. It’s a well-constructed, straightforward account - as much as such a thing is possible - of the rebellions and convoluted political machinations that destabilised England during the reign of Richard II and eventually led to his deposition. (His cousin Henry of Bolingbroke replaced him, becoming Henry IV.) My beef with this book is that while it is thick with footnote references - nearly 1500 for a book just over 200 pages long - it has no fricking bibliography.

Bennett cites easily 100-plus individual sources (probably way more. It’s hard to tell, as there’s no bibliography!), including a stack of primary material, and it’s the pointers to these primary sources that mainly interest me. But as I flick back and forth from the text to the references, I’m finding I have to scan through pages of dense footnotes arranged in double columns of tiny type to find my way back to the original citation that includes the work’s full name. As many of these sources have similar names - for example, the Historia Vitae et Regni Ricardi Secundi and the Annales Ricardi Secundi or the Chronicles of London and The Great Chronicle of London - it’s easy to get a bit mixed up and forget which abbreviated title goes with which source. There’s also the occasional mysterious citation like ‘Tout, Chapters’ or ‘Rymer, Feodera’ that there is no way for me to identify except by combing through all those hundreds of previous footnotes for the first usage.

This is deeply irritating and it is messing with my research process. Normally, when I come across a decent bibliography of primary sources while I’m doing background reading on a topic, I keep a photocopy of it with notes on which sources are likely to be worth chasing up. That can save me a lot of hunting around later when I start to do the more in-depth, detailed research.

The book also features plates from a British Library manuscript that is not fully referenced elsewhere (there is no list of plates, for example). The sequence of plates - which depicts the argy-bargy between Richard II and Henry of Bolingbroke that eventually ends in Richard becoming Henry’s prisoner - makes me think the manuscript might have some useful things to say about how Henry IV spun Richard’s deposition. However, with no dating, provenance or other information provided, I’m going to have to (hopefully) the details out of the BL catalogue before I can make a call on that. It’s not a huge drama, but it is a bit annoying.

Worse, the author has liberally sprinkled his footnotes with such arcane abbreviations such as CPR, CCR and RP without providing any table explaining what they mean (or indeed, from what I can determine, including a full citation anywhere in his references). This seems such an oversight that I wondered at first if the publishers had cocked up the printing and left out the customary table of abbreviations.

Given the context, it’s clear to me that CPR and CCR are Calendars of Patent and Close Rolls respectively, and that RP is Rotuli Parliamentorum (as the first reference is to a parliamentary petition relating to the Statue of Praemunire). But would a neophyte undergraduate have a hope of guessing that? I think not. I’m still a bit stumped with BIHR. Is this the Bulletin for the Institute of Historical Research or perhaps the British Institute of Historical Research? Or could it be something else entirely? I’m off to do a search of the library catalogue to see if I can figure it out (or if any of you wise readers can clue me in, I’ll send you a virtual chocolate fish).

So, dear scholars, I leave you with this thought. If you happen to be in the process of preparing a book for press, think of us poor readers and insist on a decent bibliography, preferably one that lists the primary and secondary sources separately. (Maybe I'm being too optimistic here. As the author, do you even get a say in that?) If you can’t manage that, for the love of god, please, PLEASE tell us what your abbreviations mean!

Take that, cultural imperialists!

2009-11-17T15:10:00.006+13:00

I’m relieved to see that Google has been forced to see sense on its Google Books digitisation project and concede to a fairer settlement with rights holders. Google promoted its plan to digitise the world’s books and make them freely available online as a magnanimous gesture to education the world over. Unfortunately, the original out-of-court Google Books Settlement disregarded the claims of non-US rights-holders, and had authors and publishers in New Zealand (and a lot of other countries) crying ‘cultural imperialism!’

The attitude that ‘if it’s not currently sold in the US it’s free for the taking’ really got Kiwi writers’ hackles up. (Though it was the pressure put on by the EU and its individual members - France and Germany made formal complaints - that probably made Google back down.)

As the NZ Press Association explained the original deal back in August -

“If a book is not generally available for sale in the US, even though it is widely available elsewhere, it is considered out of print and Google can display excerpts without consent…. It has digitised books by Janet Frame, Hone Tuwhare, Sir Edmund Hillary, Witi Ihimaera, Michael King, James K Baxter and Keri Hulme, all without any permission from anyone.”

These are best-selling, iconic New Zealand authors, whose books are all currently in print and widely available in this country. Just because mainstream US booksellers have not seen any value in stocking them does not make them ‘out of print’ and therefore freely available for Google to do with them what it likes.

Further, while authors and publishers could opt out, asking that their books not be included as part of the digitisation project, “Google was under no obligation to agree to that request. The rights-holder then had the right to take their chances and sue the multi-billion dollar company.”

Yeah, good luck with that, tiny NZ publishing house. New Zealand authors would fare even less well. The local market is so small that even best-selling authors sometimes need to do the odd bit of corporate huckstering to pay the mortgage. There are still some significant problems with the revised settlement (here’s a good analysis), but at least Google has been stopped in its book-plundering tracks and forced to recognise that the world of publishing does not begin and end at the US border.

Debating history-as-fiction and fiction-as-history

2009-11-15T14:59:00.003+13:00

While I was busy contemplating the awfulness of Colin Farrell’s bleach job in the film Alexander, Magistra et Mater picked up on my post as the opportunity to ask some deeper questions about “the rising cultural importance of historical novels … [and] the uneasy relationship between the two genres of history and historical fiction.” What, she asks, “do authors or would-be authors of historical novels think that writing fiction allows them to do that more conventional historical forms don’t?”

Amongst the possible answers she poses is the ability to gain a much wider audience and therefore to sell more books than the lowly historian could ever dream was possible. The historical novelist may also have the ability to write more vividly than the historian, though I think this is debateable. Some best-selling 'historical' novelists write dreadfully clunky, lifeless prose (Dan Brown, I’m looking at you!), while some historians have the ability to sweep you along in stories that are more exciting than any fiction. Of course, the novelist also has the unique freedom to make things up when it suits them.

It seems to me that Magistra is also touching on some much bigger issues, such as those old unanswerable questions about the purpose of history and the historian’s role in society, and whether history is an art or a science. If we consider that the historian has some responsibility to reach out to the general public (and I do, because if historians don’t do this, then politicians have free reign to manipulate history to suit their own purposes), then we have to be concerned about developing the communication skills to engage a wider audience at least some of the time. I’m also of the school that believes that the way scholarly and academic history is written - the narrative approach used, the rhetorical constructs chosen and so on - is as much a part of the history itself as the research, the facts, the analysis and the scholarly apparatus.

I find it interesting that Magistra appears to make a very black-and-white distinction between being a writer of fiction and being an historian, as though one can be one or the other but not both. The creative writing that I do definitely enriches and improves my academic writing, and a number of the novelists I enjoy reading are qualified historians (have PhDs in history), so I see more overlap between the genres and skills than she perhaps does. To me, it’s a bit of a cop out to think conveying the facts in dull, workmanlike prose is enough just because the historian’s task is to write about ‘what really happened’. Yes, it’s true that most historians aren’t going to be able to come near what the best writers (of fiction or non-fiction) are capable of, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t take good writing as seriously as they do thorough research and well-supported analysis.

I also believe that novelists should not be the only ones aspiring to make us emotionally engage with the past. Historians like Marcus Rediker or Judith Walkowitz have the ability to tell what really happened with faultless attention to the scholarly apparatus, and to make us care about what happened and possibly use that knowledge of the past to help fuel change in the present. To my mind, that is an extremely important skill for historians to possess, particularly those who work on the histories of the marginal and the previously unconsidered (the poor, the mentally ill, migrants, slaves etc.). But it does open up the fraught question of whether academic history should also be serving the causes of social activism (as many historians believe - that was, after all, integral to the feminist history that emerged in the 1970s), or is indeed by its very nature political regardless of any claims to objectivity.

To write history that engages us on both the intellectual and emotional planes does not mean making things up. But it does require a more mindful approach and a commitment to honing one’s writing as a craft in and of itself that perhaps some (many?) academic historians either don’t have time for or don’t consider a core part of the job. In my experience, writing skills are often an under-rated, if not completely ignored, aspect of the teaching of history at university level. (For any history teachers/professors reading this, do you consider teaching the skill of writing in itself as part of your purview? Or is that something for the literature/composition teachers to worry about?)

Magistra is right in saying “Most of the books by academic medievalists/early modernists which do find a wider audience are either on conventional kings and battles topics or are lucky enough to have found sources/archives which contain a lot of information on a small group of people (such as the inquisition records for Montaillou)”. But in the case of Montaillou*, for example, it was not simply the unique nature of the evidence that made it such a popular work but Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s vigorous and accessible prose style, which is characteristic of the best of the Annales school. (It might also reflect a different and distinctly French view of the historian’s function in society, and therefore of what types of skills the profession requires.)

Having said all that, I confess I’m bothered when writers of historical fiction try to blur the boundaries and claim more for their creations than they merit. For example, this quote highlighted by Magistra really disturbs me: ‘As [novelist] Sarah Dunant puts it in History Today: ‘I want to sink the reader deep into the period, to say, “Have the confidence to follow me because I know what is true”'. My response to that is to say yes, Ms Dunant, you may have done in-depth historical research and ‘know what is true’, but when it comes to choosing between what is true and what is interesting or what best moves the story along, you’re going to pick the latter every time.

* This was a history of the lives and beliefs of peasants living in the village of Montaillou, in what is now southwest France, in the early 14th century. It was based primarily on the previously unexamined records of the Catholic inquisitor Jacques Fournier. Le Roy Ladurie's interpretation is profoundly flawed because he took Fournier's highly-mediated accounts as factual descriptions , but the book still stands as one of the first examples of 'history from below', which sought to expand academic history beyond the study of the lives of elites.

History and fiction: The good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain dull

2009-11-13T13:19:00.015+13:00

Now that my university coursework is over for this year, I’m planning to spend some time over the summer doing some creative writing. Yes, I am one of those students of history who also harbours a secret longing to write historical fiction. Medieval mystery/crime fiction, to be exact. (I confess, I’m a walking cliché.) I have a few chapters written and a vague plot outline but I don’t really expect to produce anything as substantial as a complete first draft any time soon. For me, fiction writing is primarily a form of relaxation, a way of escaping the constraints and conventions of the academic and business writing that consumes so much of my time. (This blog is another such outlet, where the rules don’t apply.)

Having said that, I do take my fiction writing seriously in the sense that I’m aware of, and try to avoid, most of the dreadful clangers discussed so passionately here. Many historians find historical fiction hard to read (or watch) not necessarily because the authors may bend the facts a bit to suit their plot, but because of their tendency to have their 14th or 16th or 18th century characters act, think, and believe in thoroughly 21st century modes. Thus, you get 14th century serving wenches espousing the values of third-wave feminism and 16th century atheists who declare their rational faith in science instead of God. (The renowned French historian Lucien Febvre wrote a fascinating and very readable book, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, in which he argued that 16th century French language did not contain the words or constructs - as he put it, ‘l’outillage mentale’ - to even *think* an idea like atheism as we know it today.)

Personally, I don't mind a bit of anachronism in my historical fiction, whether literary or cinematic, provided it's well-written or well-acted and, as Maximus said, I am entertained. Topping my list of execrable historical films is Kingdom of Heaven. On paper (and barring Orlando Bloom), this film had all the elements to make for top-notch cinema. Ridley Scott, crusading knights, Saladin, a leprous king and dirty dynastic dealings over a disputed crown (Ha! I could have said ‘diadem’ there, but enough alliteration for one day)… even if you took no liberties at all with the historical record you’d have a rollicking story. I just don’t understand how it could turn out so absolutely lifeless. Poor old Jeremy Irons spent most of the movie looking like he wished he were anywhere else. Running a close second is Alexander, although it must be said that this film at least had some unintentional humour value. I laughed out loud at Colin Farrell’s appalling bleach job, which made him look like a regular at Hair Jude in Levin. And why on earth did everyone have fake Irish accents? It was like something out of Monty Python.

On the positive side of the ledger I put The Name of the Rose, which manages to pull off an almost impossible mélange of papal and royal intrigue, Aristotelian science versus ‘dark ages’ superstition, apocalyptic prophecies, witchcraft, heresy, demonic possession and a visit from celebrity Inquisitor Bernardo Gui. Oh, and there are a bunch of gruesome murders to be solved by Sean Connery, playing the kind of monk one perhaps wishes hadn’t taken a vow of celibacy. And from the land of the small screen comes my current Sunday night indulgence, The Tudors. I’m not sure how historically accurate this series is (any Tudor scholars out there care to weigh in on this?), but the extremely high production values and the quality of the writing and acting lift it out of the usual run of historico-romantic television schmaltz.

Speaking of schmaltz, I’ve had a kind of hankering lately to watch Shogun again, although I suspect my present self would probably be aghast at it’s mixture of Anglo-centric superiority and rampant orientalism. Whereas my past self was too busy being dazzled by Richard Chamberlain’s samurai swashbuckling. Ah, the early 80s, when Richard Chamberlain reigned as indisputable king of the historical mini-series. Actually, that must have been a pretty new television genre back then. Anyone know what the first historical mini-series was? My memories reach back as far as the mid-70s television phenomenon that was Roots, but was there anything before that?

Anyway, back to my obsession with The Tudors. I'm watching the third series and I’m liking the way the writers have managed to incorporate the complexities of European politics and religious upheaval during this period, instead of just doing the standard romanticised 'six wives' story. They’re not shying away from showing Henry VIII's sociopathic bullying and his anxieties about failing to measure up to François Ier in the Renaissance prince stakes, either. Also, without suddenly making Henry wear a fat suit or start dribbling, the director has managed to convey his increasing dissipation and hint at the horrors to come (which can't be easy for the crew, given Henry is played by the rather dishy Jonathan Rhys Meyers).

Incidentally, I’m no fan of the psychohistory (that is, seeking the answers to questions about complex historical change in the personality quirks of so-called ‘great men’), but out of curiosity I looked up ‘sociopath’ and found these amongst the signs listed in the DSM. If the shoe fits, Henry…

Inability to make or keep friends, or maintain relationships such as marriage - check. (In no small part because he keeps having his nearest and dearest executed.)
Apparent lack of remorse or empathy; inability to care about hurting others - check. (See under 1, above.)
Impulsivity and/or recklessness - check. (“Have you got me my divorce yet? Screw the pope, let’s make ME head of the Church of England!”)
Poor behavioural controls — expressions of irritability, annoyance, impatience, threats, aggression, and verbal abuse; inadequate control of anger and temper - Uh, check, check, check, check and check.
Narcissism, elevated self-appraisal or a sense of extreme entitlement -check. (But I’m inclined to give him a pass on this one. He is King of England, after all…)
Tendency to violate the boundaries and rights of others - check. (See under 1, above. See also, ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’.)

Francophilia: Asterix in Paris

2009-11-10T22:44:00.005+13:00

Two of my favourite French cultural icons are being brought together with an exhibition of Asterix and friends at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. The show, appropriately, is being housed in the museum’s frigidarium, a part of the building that has survived since the Romans ran Gaul.

In the typically irreverent style of Asterix’s creators Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny, the show features some great cartoon parodies of classic artworks.

I love this version of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV -

And here is their take on Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, with a fish (what, no roast boar?!) standing in for the human corpse -

It’s interesting to hear how Uderzo and Goscinny incorporated historical research into their artistic process. The exhibition’s curator Emmanuelle Héran says that ‘while neither spoke Latin (they relied on dictionaries for quotations) and weren’t experts on Roman or Gaulish history, they did plenty of school-book research. The exhibition shows them devouring Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars and you can see notes Goscinny scribbled in biro on pieces of exercise book paper as preparation for Asterix and the Olympic Games. “No pine trees, cypresses” […] “From 776 B.C. the Games are held for 5 days between the end of June and the first days of September”’.

Apparently, historians were sometimes distressed by their gleeful anachronisms. (I can just imagine the kind of wizened carrot-up-his-bum scholar that would take issue with Asterix. It’s a cartoon, people.) Luckily, Goscinny and Uderzo were more interested in having a laugh than providing accurate depictions of the past. Otherwise, we might never have witnessed the joyous concurrence of a 16th century square-rigged pirate ship and a Viking longboat.

Strangely, while I enjoy reading the Asterix cartoons in French, I think they’re actually funnier in English. I don’t know, maybe the English language is more suited to puns and word play. For instance, the drug reference makes Getafix a much wittier name for a druidic pharmacologist than the original Panoramix. And isn't Cacophonix a more suitable moniker for the no-talent Bard than the French Assurancetourix (which sounds like rental car insurance)?

In French class last term, my classmates and I could get away with drinking wine and waffling about movies, rugby and what we did over the weekend. This term, we have to read French novels and come to class prepared with lots of intelligent things to say about them whilst exhibiting the ability to ‘think in French’. At the moment, I’m leavening my reading of Les Liaisons Dangereuses with liberal doses of Asterix en Hispanie (but don’t tell my teacher).

Inside my brain

2009-11-08T22:41:00.006+13:00

Check this out. It’s a Wordle, a graphical representation of this blog showing which words get used the most and relative relationships between different terms. You can basically consider it as a picture of what may be going on inside my brain at any given moment (or at least the stuff that’s fit for public consumption).

I like the quirkily appropriate way some of the associations are working here. Note, for example, the bundle ‘political violence state’ in the upper left quadrant, and at bottom left, ‘Christians bad’ (this is how I felt when the door-to-door Catholics recently came calling while I was studying for my final exam). At top right, we have ‘analysis pain’ and ‘connect better’, which I could read as either a set of instructions to myself or a whimper of despair, depending on how my research is going. And in the middle, the ‘Times Muslims experience’ sounds like I’m advertising an odd sort of son-et-lumière show.

I don’t know if I should thank Jliedl or curse her for the link, given the time I’ve frittered away playing with this toy over the last week or so. Meanwhile, someone more insightful than I am has been considering the Wordle as teaching tool and gateway drug to textual analysis. Over at Muhlberger’s Early History, some unexpected results were obtained by running the text of Geoffroi de Charny’s 14th century book of questions on war through the Wordle generator. Muhlberger notes, ‘I am not surprised that "Charny" and "arms" are big; but I am rather taken aback by the size of "prisoner" and the near invisibility of "knight."’

I might try this out on some of my corporate clients. It would be a great way of hammering home the point I’m always trying to make, which is that they spend way, WAY too much time talking about themselves.

ETA a correction to the name of the Charny text.

Torture museums and public history

2009-11-04T16:57:00.004+13:00

When I posted recently on the use of scold’s bridle in early modern England, a number of you commented that you felt as chilled as I did when contemplating the role these devices played in the brutal enforcement of gender and class order. Several of you also mentioned you had seen these devices in museums in the UK and Europe, and that set me off on another train of thought.

On the one hand, it’s essential that museums, as educators and interpreters of public history, tell the full story about the past even when it’s unpalatable for the tourists. But on the other hand, I can’t help but be disturbed by the gruesome voyeurism and the titillation that is sometimes enabled (and even promoted) by museums. It seems that as cash-strapped museums struggle to make themselves more appealing to the tourists, the temptation to go for the sensational in the quest to make a buck may just be getting to be too much for some of them.

Something like the London Dungeon is probably an extreme example that, judging by the way it promotes itself, happily blurs the line between museum and ghoulish entertainment. The Dungeon urges schools to “Put aside the textbooks, bring the past to life and give your class a history lesson to remember with a visit to the Dungeons! … Our teams of live actors blend carefully researched historical fact with outstanding special effects to provide your class with an exciting, educational and unforgettable journey into the depths of history that is, above all, seriously scary fun!” Not only that, but with the Dungeons Resource Pack, teachers can “Take history's horrible bits back to your classroom and allow your pupils to build on their new found knowledge and enthusiasm. …Combine the Dungeons' usual dose of interactive fun and gore with national curriculum topics of study.”

The London Dungeon’s shtick promotes a vicarious experience of London’s ‘dark underbelly’, complete with the usual relish in displaying medieval instruments of torture and recounting the ‘fun history’ of sexual sadists like Jack the Ripper*. As another example, the organisers of this major touring exhibition of historical torture devices don’t baulk at promoting the titillation factor, promising, “Students too, will have the chance to satisfy their curiosity on … Tortura’s more flashy and fleshy attraction.” Can you imagine if this same sensibility - or rather lack of it - was applied to museum representations of more recent history? Say, Cambodia’s Killing Fields or Srebrenica? No? So why does it seem perfectly acceptable to make slick ‘multimedia entertainment’ out of it just because the victims and perpetrators lived in the ‘distant’ past?

I hate seeing topics like the European witchcraft persecutions and the Inquisition treated in ways that cynically exploit our seemingly insatiable desire for images of violence and torture as entertainment (images that are often sexualised in highly problematic ways)**. I certainly don’t believe museums should avoid or sanitise topics like this. But whether they succeed in making people think more deeply - both about the past and the present - or merely give passive viewers a cheap thrill depends very much on how things are presented. Put into their wider social, political and cultural context, such subjects can be powerful prompts to question the forces that shape individual lives and wider society, both historically and in our own time. But too often, these types of exhibits never rise above gratuitous displays of torture implements, presented shorn of all context and achieving little but to elicit gasps of voyeuristic horror.

As museums begin to utilise new technologies to make their exhibits more interactive and engaging (read, more effective at competing for the tourist dollar), I think this is going to become a much more sensitive issue. When you replace dusty old glass cases and typewritten index cards with fully sensory, 3D experiences, the line between education and entertainment is bound to get even more blurred. I think that is going to make it even trickier for museums to deal appropriately with the dark side of history.

** As an aside, Judith Walkowitz’s The City of Dreadful Delight does a fine job of locating the Jack the Ripper episode within its much broader and more complex historical and cultural context of class conflict, sexual politics, racism and the role of the media in Victorian England. It’s a scholarly work (careful footnoting of sources, full bibliography etc.) but Walkowitz’s clear and dynamic writing style also makes it very readable for the layperson.

** Do a Google image search on ‘inquisition museum’. I rest my case.

Carnivaleque 55: Ancient/medieval All Hallows Eve edition

2009-10-31T13:09:00.011+13:00

Gather round the fire and turn out the lights, for it’s time to share tales of the spooky, strange and unexpected in this Halloween edition of ancient/medieval Carnivalesque…

A gold hoard fit for a goblin king
The historical blogosphere has been abuzz recently with news and speculation about the discovery of the Staffordshire hoard. This pile of gold and silver goodness must have goblins everywhere cackling with glee. Meanwhile, medievalists are alternately waxing lyrical about the romance of treasure, and debating the origins and possible interpretations of the find. (As for me, I reckon it’s a deposit scheme set up by the chaps at Gringotts.)

Vampires and werewolves and Chaucer, oh my!
In parts of rural France, twilight is known as ‘the hour between the dog and the wolf’. For Geoffrey Chaucer, though, twilight is all about the ‘sparklie vampyres’.

And speaking of vampires, if you’re after a nice sharp wooden stake…
You could do worse than check out the Anglo-Saxon wooden architecture discussed here. Using the example of a surviving 12thC stave-church in Norway, Carla Nayland makes the important point that we might need to use a bit more imagination envisioning the upperworks of Anglo-Saxon wooden buildings. (Bonus - Carla includes a stunning photo of said Norwegian church.)

Haunted by the ghost of Conference Past
The Ruminate has a thoughtful piece up that forms part of recent debate over the present and future of the International Congress on Medieval Studies, more fondly known as Kalamazoo. Included is a chilling cautionary tale about the consequences of giving a bad paper. Read on, if you dare…

Stalking and slaughter
Of deer, that is, as described in S.A. Mileson's Parks in Medieval England, a newly published historical study in a still relatively undeveloped field. It's reviewed here by Philobiblon.

Grave expectations
If you work for Caligula, chances are that sooner or later, things are going to go belly-up (or should that be belly-open?) for you. Executed Today tells the story of the execution of former Roman Consul Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus as the result of a dark plot. The extract from Roman historian Cassius Dio puts another nail in the coffin of Caligula’s reputation.

Revelations of Divine Love and Zombies
Speaking of coffins, In the Middle contemplates a rewrite of Julian of Norwich with zombies, while the commenters contemplate buried-alive anchoresses as the ultimate undead.

It’s not Halloween without some good old-fashioned witch persecution (or in this case, heretics)
Muhlberger’s Early History reviews A Most Holy War: the Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom by Mark Gregory Pegg. Pegg’s work opens up a whole new perspective on the thirteenth century Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heretics of southern France.

For less scary bedtime stories
Wormtalk and Slugspeak announce that "For the first time in 1000 years, the Homilies of Wulfstan are recorded and available on the internet. Take a listen and enjoy all the ranty goodness of Wulfstan."

Eat the rich
And finally, while you’re here you might enjoy this gruesome little tale of clerical cannibalism. If Zombie Cannibal Priests From Hell isn’t already a movie, it should be!

Women, know your limits!

2009-10-29T12:51:00.003+13:00

From The New York Times comes one of the few half-decent analyses of a recent study showing that women are less happy than men and that our unhappiness has been steadily increasing since the 1970s. It may be no surprise to you to hear that conservative pundits are gleefully using said study to ‘prove’ women are unhappier because of feminism. No indeed, it’s not that we’re unhappy because we still have to put up with crap like this. It’s because getting the vote has cruelly raised our expectations beyond our capabilities, and now we aspire to ridiculous things like having fair access to education and equal pay for equal work. If we’d just heed biology’s dictates and go back to having babies and keeping house like we’re designed to, we’d all be blissful.

This subject would usually trigger a great long rant from me, but luckily for you I have a final exam to get to (Advanced Historiography - one question, three hours – should be fun). So instead, I’ll leave you to enjoy this documentary, er, I mean, comedy gem.

The slipperiness of premodern sex

2009-10-24T18:34:00.008+13:00

(For Ginger, to whom I promised anatomical drawings.)
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been following the various discourses swirling around the case of South African athlete Caster Semenya with some interest. The tragedy of her situation makes me wonder whether medieval concepts of sex and gender could offer us an opening to ways of conceptualising biological sex that are more holistic (and realistic) than the strictly male/female binary into which we keep trying to rigidly divide the entire human species in all its marvellous variety and diversity.

Medieval mentalities were coloured by incredibly complex and nuanced perceptions of sexuality, gender and the body*. According to medieval medical theory**, physical sex was not an immutable oppositional binary grounded in biological difference; in fact, one’s biological sex was a very slippery and unstable state indeed. Humoral medicine held that all humans started with a common set of male reproductive organs (the male being the generative first principle). A favourable combination of hotter and drier humors resulted in the penis and testicles becoming fully formed (and reaching a state of perfection) external to the body – et voila, you have a male baby. By contrast, females were the result of a kind of under-cooking in utero, with a combination of less favourable cool and humid humors creating an imperfect internal construction of the penis and testicles as womb and ovaries.

Medical texts and anatomy illustrations from the period*** reflect this conception of the female as inverted (and therefore imperfect) male. At top left is an illustration from a 1523 anatomy by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi. It shows the female reproductive system, but the schematic and labelling clearly indicates it is based on a male model. And below is a beautifully detailed illustration of the female generative organs from the famous 1543 De humani corporis fabrica of Andreas Vesalius. The resemblance to a male penis is marked (right down to a certain suggestion of hairiness).

The fortuitous combination of hot and dry humors that created male physical sex was also believed to produce such superior masculine characteristics as strength, reason, continence and a bent for action. By contrast, cool, damp humors rendered women passive, weak and ruled by emotion or passion rather than reason. Women were also characterised as more lustful and sexually disordered than men, and medieval commentators speculated this was the result of a constant yearning by women to heat themselves up.

Sex as continuum instead of opposition

Within this worldview, physical sex was conceived of as a continuum that may have had ‘clearly male’ and ‘clearly female’ marked at each end, but where there could be slippage between a whole range of men-women and women-men in between. For example, the lactating Christ-as-mother figure, a popular motif of late medieval piety, blurred the boundaries between male and female just as it did between human and god.

With no clearly determined biological binary of male or female sex, sexual difference was grounded in a masculine/feminine gender dichotomy, and it was the individual’s social role, behaviour and character that defined, and could potentially even alter, their physical sex. A trope that appears in the fabliaux of late medieval France is that of the female who presents as male – adopting male clothing and exhibiting such masculine attributes as boisterousness and physical prowess – and in the denouement, has a penis spontaneously spring from her body.

Virago as a strategic performance of gender

In a subtler act of gender-bending, ‘lordly women’ could adopt the self-representation of virago (derived from ‘virgin’, which was also a much more ambiguous state in medieval thinking than it is today). As virago, they overcame to varying degrees their innate female weaknesses in order to lay claim to the masculine virtues of reason, strength and continence that made them fit to wield power. Magistra et Mater recently posted about Kimberly LoPrete’s work on perceptions of ‘lordly women’ in the high Middle Ages. It’s interesting to consider whether they were seen simply as unusually competent women filling a masculine role, or whether they actually became gendered as masculine. A third possibility may be that they occupied an indeterminate position, taking on some aspects of maleness but in other ways remaining female (and this position may have shifted towards more or less masculinity/femininity depending on the context and circumstances).

Gender as the starting point for sex

In medieval thought, then, it was gender – the social and cultural role and behaviour of the individual – that was the starting point for determining physical sex and not the other way around. For those of us living now, there are some obvious problems with this model, with the privileging of the male as first principle being the most glaring. But on the other hand, the fluidity and mutability of medieval conceptualisations of sex seem to me to offer some potential avenues to thinking about sex and gender that could relax our grip on a reductionist and repressive biological opposition. It occurs to me that by questioning the definitions and the limits of this ‘self-evident’ and ‘natural’ binary, what I’m really seeking is to foster some dialogue between the premodern and the postmodern that will eventually enable us to comprehend and accept the rich heterogeneity of the human species.

* For more on this, see for starters the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, Karma Lochrie, Joan Cadden, Thomas Laqueur, Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset.

** When I say ‘medieval’ here, I’m talking about the eleventh century re-discovery of Galen and the translation of Arabic texts such as Avicenna’s Canon into Latin

*** The two examples here are from early 16thC printed anatomies, but the illustrations are consistent with those in much older manuscripts. Berengario, for example, was heavily influenced by the texts of Mondino dei Luzzi (d. 1326).

Image credits:
Jacopo Berengario da Carpi
Isagogae breues, perlucidae ac uberrimae, in anatomiam humani corporis a communi medicorum academia usitatam. (Bologna: Beneditcus Hector, 1523).
NIH National Library of Medicine

Andreas Vesalius
De humani corporis fabrica. (Basel: Oporinus, 1543).
Wellcome Library

Incidentally, the Wellcome Library has a fantastic store of historical and contemporary images online in categories including illness and wellness, nature, culture and war. They're freely available for download for personal, academic teaching or study use. (Why didn’t they have cool stuff like this when I was at school??)

Reminder: Carnivalesque ancient/medieval All Hallows Eve edition

2009-10-22T16:30:00.004+13:00

The All Hallows Eve ancient/medieval edition of Carnivalesque will be hosted here at Bavardess on October 31.

There’s still time to nominate your favourite ancient/medieval posts from September and October by completing the form here, or by emailing me directly on bavardess AT gmail DOT com.

And thanks to everyone who’s already sent in nominations - they’ve led me to discover some interesting new blogs this month!

Could 'Wolf Hall' be historical fiction that works?

2009-10-20T08:45:00.005+13:00

I’m chuffed Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker prize for her latest novel Wolf Hall. The book is described as a “Tudor corridors-of-power saga” that “turns the historical figure of Thomas Cromwell — Henry VIII's shadowy political fixer — into a compelling, complex literary hero.” It comes hard on the heels of the saucy television series The Tudors, high on of my list of must-watch television indulgences. In this show, everyone is gorgeous (and clean!), and even pious saint-to-be Sir Thomas More is a brooding hottie in a hair shirt and velvet breeches.

I haven’t read Wolf Hall yet, but it’s on my pile of books for the summer holidays. I know many historians find it painful to read historical novels, probably because the mantras we’ve learned about reliability of evidence and avoiding anachronism at all costs are so deeply ingrained. I’ve been interested in history since I was a child, and I’ve always enjoyed reading historical whodunits by the likes of Paul Doherty and Ellis Peters, but even I find I’m much more critical of historical fiction than I used to be.

That said, if anyone can make this work, Mantel can. She has long been one of my favourite authors, with an incredible ability to really get inside your head and make you experience being her characters. In my opinion, Beyond Black is her best book It’s about a psychic who is stalked by abusive ghosts from her childhood as she works the seedy pubs and halls of a bleakly suburban post-Thatcher England, and it manages to be poignant, funny and terrifying all at the same time. Beyond Black is one of those rare stories that linger and haunt you long after you’ve turned the last page.

But much as I love Mantel’s writing, I was more than a bit peeved by this weird opinion piece, in which she sets up a false comparison between historians and historical novelists. She obviously has little respect for and less understanding of what historians actually do and how they work, saying:

“The past is not dead ground, and to traverse it is not a sterile exercise. History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. The most scrupulous historian is an unreliable narrator; he brings to the enterprise the biases of his training and the vagaries of his personal temperament, and he is often obliged, in order to make his name, to murder his forefathers by coming up with a different take on events from the one that held sway when he himself learned the discipline; he must make the old new, because his department's academic standing depends on it.”

This makes the historical profession sound like it’s nothing more than the idiosyncratic pursuit of personal follies and academic rivalries. The way Mantel puts it, writing history is basically the same as writing fiction, though perhaps with a bit more focus on the collection of dull old ‘facts’ and less conjecture about people’s personal feelings.

I can understand that Mantel is probably fed up to the back teeth with pedantic critics pointing out errors or distortions of fact in her novels. But seriously folks, there's a whole lot more to writing history than this!

Henry VIII was a greenie??!

2009-10-16T15:11:00.008+13:00

Yep, between busting up the monasteries and dispatching a few wives, Henry VIII was apparently driven by his green eco-sensibilities to create the 10,000-acre forest at Hampton Court . At least, that’s the story according to a recent lecture by the Prince of Wales. This and other such spurious uses of history get a lashing in The Telegraph, and are discussed with a good deal more depth and complexity in the Times Higher Education supplement.

Says Professor Pat Thane of the University of London:

"There is widespread abuse and misuse of history in public life, ranging from the silly to the downright dangerous. Bad history can create real problems by distorting understanding of contemporary issues when politicians and others use history as a rhetorical tool to conjure up past golden ages, appeal to founding fathers or simply to rewrite it for political ends.”

Further (as many of us know to our cost), “bad history can lead to bad policy analysis and bad policy”.

The strong connection between history and contemporary politics brings me back to the recent discussion we had here on the moral role of the historian in society (and, incidentally, should also answer all those people who ask ‘what’s the point of studying history?’). In the THE article, several highly respected historians weigh in on how to manage the delicate balance between past and present by using our knowledge of the past to help us understand the complexities of the modern world but without distorting history to serve specific political or cultural ends.

Crusades specialist Jonathan Phillips, for example,

"Is wary about drawing facile parallels with - or citing the past's lessons for - today's Middle East. Indeed, he believes that studying the period may help us understand "the sheer complexity of the region, then as now".

"It is far too simplistic to see the Crusades as a battle between Christians or the West and Muslims, since there were Christians fighting Christians, Muslims fighting Muslims, alliances across the religious divide - and the Greek Orthodox Church was always opposed to Crusading," he says.

But although they have to embrace complexity, Phillips adds, historians must also accept and be sensitive to the fact that "for much of the Muslim world, the Crusades have acquired a toxic meaning as part of a historical continuum - of Westerners invading, killing and conquering, as they were to do again in colonial times".

"Policymakers have come to realise that something serious underlay the Islamic response to George W. Bush's unthinking use of the word 'crusade'," he says.

The medievalist Miri Rubin thinks it is inevitable that past and present always interact, and therefore medievalists have an important role to play in shedding light on current issues.

"I find people have real misconceptions about issues of religious prejudice and the sometimes-related violence," Rubin explains. "People think of pre-modern Europe as a place where crowds - the mob, the unlettered - took to the streets in religious violence, especially against Jews.

"Such behaviour is invoked in our own times as 'medieval' and people who do such things - in the Balkans in the 1990s, for example - are deemed to be 'throwbacks' to another time. In this manner, they are classed as 'aberrant', and so can be bracketed and put aside.

"The truth is that, then as now, violence in the streets is inspired by key actors, who act knowingly, and who are informed and often linked up with privileged access to media. There are agents provocateurs - preachers, journalists, politicians - who endorse behaviour by those who respect their authority. So, rather than the product of 'ignorance' or 'age-old hatred', responsibility for violence ought to be identified along lines of communication and excitation."

The THE article goes on to deal with issues such as the troubled connections between a Whiggish history of ‘liberty, democracy and material progress’, colonialism, national identity, and contemporary ideas of citizenship.

As some tonic to the abuse of history, the THE notes that the History and Policy group, a partnership between the universities of Cambridge and London that "works for better public policy through an understanding of history” has started its own 'Bad History' series. Here, mercilessly exposed with relish and wit, are the grievous historical errors, oversights and deliberate distortions that are being used to justify current policy.

Research inspiration: A migraine and a moment of clarity

2009-10-15T09:04:00.004+13:00

It’s official. Hard work is totally overrated. At least that seems to be the case when it comes to getting those exhilarating original insights that are the heart of great research projects and breakthroughs. According to recent scientific research, when we’re daydreaming or otherwise not making a conscious effort at thinking (sadly, I’m not sure being drunk counts), our little neurons are valiantly working away, finding connections between concepts and ideas that would never occur to our conscious minds.

I had this experience myself this week. For the last few months, I’ve been working on a handful of disparate strands of research and trying to pull them together into a single coherent research project to start on next month. My last research project examined connections between regulation of women’s sexual behaviour (specifically, prostitution) and anxieties about political and social disorder in late 14th – early 15th century England. This period was marked by endemic war, the emergence of the Lollard heresy, a major rebellion, and the deposition of King Richard II, and I was pretty sure there were opportunities to use my earlier research as a departure point for a meaty analysis involving gender, sexuality, dissent, concepts of misrule, and the production of ethnicity and nationhood. (I’m deliberately being a bit vague here, as I don’t want to give too much away at this point.)

But damn me, try as I might – and my research journal is full of scrawled arrows, borderline illegible mind maps, and ‘see pg. x’ notations to prove it – I could not connect the threads into any sensible pattern. I certainly couldn’t capture the essence of the project in a single sentence, which I usually tend to think means it’s either unmanageably broad or not very well conceptualised.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, I was whacked with a truly nasty migraine. I get these on a fairly regular basis and for the first few hours, the pain is so intense I can’t think at all. I lose sensation in my left side, see showers of little gold stars and spend a good deal of time vomiting. But once the pain passes (usually about 3 or 4am), I experience an odd kind of euphoria – a sort of fugue state that is more than simply absence-of-pain and in which I float between full wakefulness and sleep for an hour or more. It’s in this state that I often have startlingly clear insights and make totally unexpected connections that I never seem to reach through any normal waking thought process. And it was in that state early on Wednesday morning that I suddenly understood, in a singular moment of pure perception, how all the different threads I’m trying to follow with this new research project connect up into one perfectly coherent unity.

What’s interesting is that in my normal, wide-awake state, I tend to think almost exclusively in words, stacking up my ideas in predictable linear flows of sentences and paragraphs. But my big insights, those intuitive associations and leaps of logic that are the stuff of true intellectual creativity, tend to come to me in my ‘fugue state’ as impressions or patterns that I sense rather than read. They aren’t wholly visual but they aren’t a sensible flow or collection of words, either.

I have a feeling of being somehow disassociated from myself when I’m in this state, and when I was younger the sensation kind of freaked me out. Now, I’ve learned to use it, although I’m bummed that it seems to depend on having the migraine first. I’ve heard of other people experiencing similar connections between migraine and creativity – it must reset the wiring in your brain or something. If you get migraines, does this sound familiar to you? If not, when do you get your best ideas and insights? When you’re working directly on the problem or with your research materials? Daydreaming? Doing something else entirely? And do you get your insights as pictures, words or through some other sense (like those medieval mystics whose visions of the divine were experienced as taste and smell)?

Relic rage

2009-10-12T14:24:00.003+13:00

Come on, people, I thought we’d sorted this one already? The latest debunkers of the Shroud of Turin have now demonstrated that given only medieval methods and materials, the relic could have been created inside about a week, backing up the long-standing claim that it was probably a 14th century forgery. Those who still say such an act of fakery would have been unthinkable in this 'age of faith' seriously underestimate the resourcefulness of medieval people when it came to acquiring relics.

Relics, after all, were big business for popular pilgrimage spots, bringing in the punters to make their donations to the shrine itself and then spend up large on tourist trinkets like pilgrimage badges. Competition amongst the various shrines was fierce, and late medieval texts by both religious writers and laymen refer to avaricious monks making forgeries and condemn or mock the proliferation of sham shrines and relics (though most didn’t disavow that miracles that could be produced by the genuine article).

The lengths to which some people were prepared to go to secure a relic could be pretty extreme. One of my favourite stories is that of Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln (later St. Hugh). On a pilgrimage to the abbey of Fécamp in Normandy, he asked for a piece of the arm bone of St. Mary Magdalene – the abbey’s most precious relic – to take back to England with him. His request denied by the monks (you can imagine the haggling: ‘The index finger? No? How about the pinkie? Come on, chaps, I’d settle for the tip’), our quick-witted bishop seizes on the relic and takes a bite – a chunk! – out of the poor lady’s arm. I can just picture the undignified scuffle that must then have ensued, with the monks trying to wrestle the bit of bone out of Hugh’s mouth and the bishop, jaws tightly clamped, fiercely resisting them. (Hugh later tasted a bit of his own medicine when his head was stolen from its shrine in 1364.)

I had my own close encounter with a saintly skeleton at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pierre d'Hautvillers, which is nestled in a hilltop village overlooking some of the best vineyards of Champagne. Here, boxed up in this somewhat neglected-looking reliquary on one side of the abbey church, are the bones of St. Nivard, Archbishop of Reims (655 – 669) and brother-in-law of the Frankish king Childeric II. He was the founder of the abbey, but we bubbly-quaffing pilgrims now know it much better as the final resting place of friar Dom Pérignon.

CFPosts: Carnivalesque ancient/medieval All Hallows Eve edition

2009-10-09T11:36:00.003+13:00

The All Hallows Eve ancient/medieval edition of Carnivalesque will be hosted here at Bavardess on October 31.

In this edition, Carnivalesque will traverse the worlds of the living and the dead to explore tales of mystics and monsters, saints and spirits, zombies, gasts, ghouls, myths, beliefs, fears and fancies…

Nominate your favourite ancient/medieval posts from September and October by completing the nomination form here, or by emailing me directly on bavardess AT gmail DOT com.

And please spread the word through your own blog if you wish.

Skelly-tun and friend are from a French Book of Hours, ca. 1470. Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.167.

Riffling through Margaret of York's library

2009-10-04T19:21:00.004+13:00

I’m not much of a social butterfly. I tend to quickly run short on patience when I’m stuck talking to people who don’t have much of interest to say. I find one way to predict the potential boredom factor of pending conversations is to stealthily scope out what people like to read. I do this all the time when I visit people’s houses. If they have a shelf full of Mills & Boons – or, even worse horrors, NO BOOKS AT ALL! – chances are our social intercourse is probably going to be pretty brief and unfulfilling. If, on the other hand, the shelves reveal some classic fiction or a sprinkling of lovely, gory whodunits, well then, things are looking up for our relationship. And if there’s some history and philosophy there as well, it’s possible I may be your new best, ear-bending friend.

So I wonder, how would I have got on with Margaret of York (1446 – 1503), whose personal library has been catalogued as part of LibraryThing’s I See Dead People’s Books project? Margaret, whose library represents the oldest collection so far catalogued, was the Duchess of Burgundy by marriage, and sister of Edward the IV and Richard III. Like many noblewomen of her period, she was an intelligent and skilled politician, using marriage alliances to manoeuvre her way through the byzantine politics that marked fifteenth century relations between the ruling houses of Europe. (Not least of her problems, of course, were the Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York.)

It’s no surprise to find titles like Les faits d'Alexandre le Grand by Quintus Curtius Rufus or Les chroniques des comtes de Flandre amongst Margaret’s books of history and philosophy, and the classical authors Seneca and Justinus are also represented. For lighter reading, there is courtly romance in the form of Raoul Le Fevre’s The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy. This was the first book printed in English and Margaret’s copy is the only one that survives. A well-educated and cultivated woman, Margaret’s patronage supported numerous artists and writers including the printer William Caxton. The title page of this book features an engraving of Caxton presenting it to her.

By far the bulk of Margaret’s library comprises religious and meditational works. Her lifetime was a period of great religious turmoil in Europe, marked by fierce debates over the authority of the papacy, the corruption of the Catholic Church, and the emergence of heretical sects like the Lollards. Literacy was increasing as the development of printing was making books cheaper and more accessible, and the trade was partly fuelled by demand for works of devotion and meditation written in English and designed for a lay readership. Such books promoted an interior, personal relationship with the divine, thus helping lay the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. One of the central tenets of Lollardy, for example, was that the faithful should come to know God by reading scripture for themselves. The Oxford Doctor John Wycliffe, who is usually considered the sect's founder, translated the Latin Vulgate Bible into vernacular English in 1382. Like many proto-Protestant sects, the Lollards rejected the validity of the Catholic hierarchy of priesthood and Pope mediating between the people and God, and also denounced many of the ritualistic elements of Catholicism, such as saints and pilgrimage.

Amongst Margaret’s books are some texts that are characteristic of this new form of literate lay devotion, including The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis and The Mirror of Sinners (both medieval bestsellers, and The Imitation of Christ is still in print today). But from what we know of her, Margaret remained conventionally Catholic, and this is reflected in her collection of saints’ lives and her Guide to the pilgrimage churches of Rome. Like all good English nobles, she had a Life of St. Edmund the Martyr, and she also had several works by Jean de Gerson, theologian, chancellor of the University of Paris, and rabid persecutor of heretics.

Bridling the scold, or women’s speech silenced

2009-09-26T19:32:00.006+12:00

I’ve been doing some research this month for an encyclopedia entry I’m writing on the ritual of the ‘skimmington’ or ‘skimmington ride’ in early modern England. The skimmington was a form of community censure that in England was primarily aimed at women who transgressed gender norms by dominating or beating their husbands, a transgression that was generally assumed to go hand-in-hand with female sexual infidelity.

Accounts of skimmington rituals tend to be embedded in broader analyses of patriarchal authority and social order during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so the material I’ve been looking for has often appeared alongside discussion of other gendered constructions of crime and punishment, such as the use of the cucking stool to punish women accused of ‘scolding’ and whoring. In a strong strand of continuity from the medieval period, such censure persistently conflated uncontrolled or unruly female speech with female sexual disorder, with both forms of specifically female ‘sinfulness’ perceived as threats to proper patriarchal authority and social hierarchy. (Lydia Boose, in the article ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’*, introduces an intriguing reading of the unruly female tongue – represented in the ‘scold’ – as an unauthorised appropriation of phallic authority which carries with it the implicit threat of male castration and a usurpation of man’s ‘natural right’ to rule.)

Anyway, I’d been reading through all this material with my usual sense of intellectual curiosity coupled with relative emotional detachment until I ran across a detailed account on the use of the ‘scold’s bridle’ or ‘brank’, a particularly nasty piece apparatus that emerges in records of the late sixteenth century as a tool of coercion to enforce women’s silence. The bridle was a metal contraption that covered or encircled the woman’s head and incorporated an iron bar or ‘gag’ to hold her tongue down, thus preventing speech. The association of the unruly woman with a horse that needs breaking is obvious, and no doubt part of the punishment was the shame of being reduced to the status of an animal.

A woman accused of scolding – basically, any form of unsanctioned female speech that was perceived as unruly or disruptive – had this vicious device forcibly shoved into her mouth and locked around her head. She was then subjected to the ritualised public humiliation of being led or dragged through the town, tied up in the public square and pelted with rubbish and excrement, urinated on, and otherwise mocked and degraded. In parts of England, there is also some evidence to indicate that a husband could have his wife bridled and tied up to a hook embedded beside the fireplace in their home.

Scold’s bridles took various forms, but their general design is such that at the least, they would inflict a measure of pain and discomfort. Some versions, which featured spikes or rasps on the gag part that is inserted into the woman’s mouth, would clearly inflict severe pain and damage. A 1653 account from Newcastle talks of a woman being led through the town with blood pouring from her mouth; other accounts allude to teeth being broken or wrenched out, and even of jawbones and cheekbones being cracked. A perilously high price to pay for the ‘sin’ of voicing an opinion.

I found these descriptions of the scold’s bridle and its use – numerous of which have been preserved by various nineteenth century antiquarians and folklorists** – deeply unsettling to my normal scholarly sang-froid. In fact, I found them downright chilling. I felt both nauseated and enraged at the extent of physical violation and psychological degradation women may be subjected to in order to enforce a suitably meek and silent feminine demeanour in the face of male authority. When women today express what is often trivialised or dismissed as ‘unreasonable’ or ‘irrational’ anger at attempts to silence them, I think it’s against history such as this that their anger should be read.

* Lynda E. Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1991): 179-213.

** Boose includes descriptions from an 1858 account by one T. N. Brushfield of the Chester Archaeological society, and reproduces some of the drawings he made of devices he had turned up in places including women’s work houses and mental institutions. It adds another layer of horror to the history of these devices that by the eighteenth century, although they had largely fallen out of use for the public punishment of mouthy women, they appear to have found a new home amongst the tools of coercion and control behind the walls of state-run institutions wherein were incarcerated some of society’s most marginal and vulnerable members.

The images are from 1899’s Bygone Punishments by William Andrews , which draws on Brushfield’s earlier work.

ETA: After I posted this, I remembered a podcast I listened to recently featuring Martin Rediker talking about his book The Slave Ship: A Human History (great book, by the way. I thoroughly recommend it). While I’d previously understood on an intellectual level what he meant when he was talking about how personally draining doing this sort of history is, it wasn’t until I read the material on the scold’s bridles that I really understood at a visceral, emotional level what the cost of doing this type of ‘history from below’ – the history of the poor and despised, the marginal and the silenced – can potentially be.

Just write, damn you!

2009-09-17T18:52:00.002+12:00

So it seems I’m not the only one who’s engaged in a grim battle to write at the moment. Academic, Hopeful is trying to wrestle the thesis into submission. Clio Bluestocking has writer’s block (though she phrases it rather better as “I cannot get to the place where I keep the words.”). Fait Attention is writing the ‘why this happened’ chapter, and finding historical explanation is never as simple and straightforward as it may at first seem. And Notorious PhD reflects on writing as an act of defiant optimism in the face of the sterile corporatisation of education.

As for me, I got nuttin’. My word count for the day – hell, my word count for the month! – is a big fat goose egg. I can’t figure out why I’m not into full on panic mode at the moment, because I have a major essay due on Monday and no sign of even a shitty first draft yet. Oh, I have lots of notes, both in Word and scrawled on various index cards and sheets of paper (many of which are currently drifting aimlessly around the legs of my sofa. My feet are up on the coffee table so they can’t pounce on me and assert their demands to be immediately organised into their rightful paragraphs.) I even have a very detailed outline, including a bunch of quotes and citations I want to use, which is derived from a recent seminar presentation on this very essay topic.

But despite having all the groundwork in place, I’ve been finding all sorts of ways to procrastinate the act of writing. I’ve formatted up some references I have no real intention of using (for some bizarre reason, my institution does not use any of the standard citation models in EndNote but has its very own, unique-in-all-the-world reference system, so I always have to fiddle about with adding commas in the right places and other such pointless activities). I’ve read a completely extraneous book chapter that I know will add nothing to my overall argument but simply re-states information for which I’ve already got better citations. I’ve taken the pup for several walks even he doesn’t need. (Who knew ten-month-old puppies actually don’t have a boundless supply of energy?)

I’ve been alternately kicking myself around the house yelling, “just write, damn you!”, and falling into zen-like states wherein I manage to convince myself that inspiration will come when the time is right, and when it does, the words will flow “like water my friend”. Academic, Hopeful’s post backs me up with the advice, “Don't worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.” But if that’s the case, it better hurry the hell up!

Bruce Lee advises, “You must be like water, my friend.”

On the moral responsibility of the historian

2009-09-15T17:22:00.004+12:00

(and other such heavy-duty ponderings...)

I’ve just been on another residential seminar at the university for the paper I’m taking in Advanced Historiography. Basically, this is the study of how historical knowledge is generated and transmitted, and incorporating a soupçon of methodology and a tasty portion of philosophy. This is a required paper for postgraduate students and a number of my classmates were having a good old moan about it, expressing the desire to just do history, without having to think about how and why they’re doing it the particular way they’ve chosen to do it.

To each their own and all that, but I’m actually really enjoying this paper. I’ve discovered some interesting (if sometimes irritatingly pompous) late-nineteenth and early twentieth century writers that I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise, and I’ve gained a better insight into French culture and politics by engaging with the work of the Annales school. In particular, I’m really enjoying wrestling with poststructuralist approaches history, in both their ‘standard’ and overtly feminist guises.

Poststructuralism’s challenges to the claims empirically grounded knowledge are inherently and deliberately destabilising, so they make many people (including most of my classmates at this seminar) deeply uncomfortable. And, as usually happens when people start questioning the possibility of eliciting objective truths about the past or questioning the politics involved in creating knowledge, it’s not long before the phrase ‘moral relativism’ gets an airing, closely followed by a reference to the David Irving case.

Fear not, I’m not about to get into the ins and outs of that story here. But what interested me when we discussed the case in class were the questions raised about whether historians have some sort of moral responsibility in society (over and above their responsibilities as professional scholars). Lord Acton, Cambridge Regius professor and first editor of the Cambridge Modern History, certainly thought so, advocating “it is the office of historical science to maintain morality as the sole impartial criterion of men and things.” (Incidentally, he was also the guy who said “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” in a debate over whether popes and kings should be judged by the same standards as us mere mortals.)

The question of the historian’s moral role is one I find somewhat difficult to resolve myself. For a start, it’s much easier to suspend moral judgement and remain neutral when it comes to issues and actions in the distant past – whether or not Richard II betrayed the people after the Peasants' Revolt, for example – than it is when it comes to much more recent historical debates, in which there seems to be much more at stake for those of us living now.

When this discussion came up during our seminar, I was also struck by the question of ‘whose morals?’ At first, there seemed to be an implicit assumption amongst the other students that we all shared a common moral standard, broadly based on a Judeo-Christian belief system. When I pointed out I was not a Christian – indeed, that I didn’t believe in any god – that created a plenty of consternation. It seems to be a widely held belief that if you don’t at some level believe in a god (and in my experience, the assumption generally seems to be a Christian god), you have nothing on which to base your morality. (And as an aside, I find it deeply strange that people feel they’re free to talk to me about going to church, god etc., but if I say I’m an atheist, they get very uncomfortable all of a sudden. It’s a real conversation-stopper.)

I find the idea that you can’t be moral without a god to be bizarre, and frankly, a bit offensive. But then I end up struggling to find some philosophical position from which to argue for a fundamental human morality that doesn’t require god as an enforcer. I tend to end up with three options. The first is that humans are naturally and inherently altruistic (perhaps we could call this the Jean-Jacques Rousseau theory), but frankly, looking at the world around me (and human actions throughout history), I have some trouble really accepting this. The second is what I guess falls into the category of evolutionary theory, whereby we assume that humans, as social animals, can only survive by helping each other more often than we hurt each other. This seems a bit too essentialist to me, and doesn’t leave much room for individual or group agency, or for any higher ideals above purely survival of the species. It also smacks of sociobiology, which I’m keen to avoid like the plague for all sorts of political and practical reasons.

So finally, I’m left with falling back on the values of liberal, secular humanism, but I recognise that these ideals are historical products of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment west. I’m also aware that while on the surface, they may seem (at least to many of us in the west) flawless in theory, if not in practice, their history means they carry their own problematic meanings and associations.

Eh, I guess I’ll be pondering this for a good long while, and may even resort to reading something like this. (Though the reviews aren't that promising. Any other suggestions most welcome!)

In the meantime, I think I'll leave the last word to Ricky in Trailer Park Boys: “I’m not a pessimist, I’m an optometrist.”

(And if this post made your head hurt, here's some more Rickyisms to alleviate the strain.)

Lest we remember

2009-09-11T09:48:00.003+12:00

I’m back from holiday and for my sins, this week I’m puppy-sitting while the pup’s owners head off on their holiday. This morning, I took the beastie for one of our favourite walks around the neighbourhood, taking in the local war memorial. The memorial sits on top of a hill, tucked into a little patch of grass and bush off the road. It has a great view over the harbour and city, so I usually stop there for a few minutes and enjoy the scenery while the pup has a bit of a run in the grass.

Pretty much every town in New Zealand has one of these 1914 – 1918 memorials. In the smaller provincial towns, it’s sobering to see how many of the soldiers listed have the same surnames and to reflect on the impact their loss must have had on their families and communities. My local memorial is no different, and the list of the dead usually elicits in me a certain wistfulness. But today, for some reason, I was struck instead by the standard war memorial admonition, ‘Lest we forget’.

Lest we forget? I think it may be more apt to say ‘Lest we remember’. While the memorials keep us focused on a romanticised image of the flower of the country’s youth falling heroically in some foreign field, we can avoid remembering the greed, egotism, racism and vicious nationalism (on all sides) that fuels most wars. And we can avoid remembering darker legacies, like domestic internment or the systematic rape and other crimes perpetrated against civilian populations as part of the ‘collateral damage’ of victory.

Then there are the smaller domestic tragedies. The children fathered by servicemen on leave who were left unacknowledged and unsupported, and were sometimes shunned by their communities for their illegitimacy. The children who were sent away from their homes in places like Belfast and London to protect them from the bombing, but who ended up in rural foster homes where they were neglected, abused, and worked like slave labour. Or even the simple, gnawing want created by a war machine that sucked up almost all available resources and made rationing a way of life, not just during the conflict but for years after it.

It was only after I finished writing this post that I realised what day it is today. I expect that the news and documentary channels will be running their usual mix of commemorative programmes and exposés of terrorism. We’ll be asked not to forget the civilian lives lost on September 11, and the US and British soldiers who’ve died since in this futile ‘war on terror’.

But I don’t expect we’ll be called upon to remember the dead and maimed amongst the Iraqi civilian population (including those raped and/or murdered by their ‘liberators’), or to remember the many private interests who have profited from this latest war to the tune of billions. And I don't expect we'll be asked to remember, or even think about, how our own fear of a Muslim 'other' who is not and can never be 'like us' prevents us from searching for any solution that doesn't involve either conquest or assimilation.

There's an Aussie in my soup

2009-09-01T11:01:00.005+12:00

I’ve just realised I missed posting anything for the entire month of August. It’s partly because I was just too damned busy at the start of the month finishing off some projects before I could go on holiday for three weeks. I’ve been in the beautiful South Island town of Wanaka, enjoying some great skiing and snowboarding and a lot of excellent Otago pinot noir and pinot gris.

The only problem this year is the very noticeable infestation (I know I shouldn’t put it like that, but I can’t really think of a better term) of Australians. Kevin Rudd’s stimulus package – Australian taxpayers got an average of about $1000 each to help kick-start the Australian economy – back-fired somewhat as they’re all over here, spending it in the New Zealand economy. And while the local businesses here are loving the cash injection, sadly there are suddenly queues at Treble Cone, where we used to be able to ski all day without ever having to wait to get on a chairlift. Saturday was an awesome blue sky powder day (photo below for your edification) but the wait to get on the chairlift was 20 minutes.

[Warning: What could be construed as a wee tiny rant follows.]

Worse, most of the Aussies I’ve encountered on this trip (to be fair, mostly young white men) confirm the stereotype: brash, loud, excruciatingly nasal accent; arrogant; somewhat racist. Extremely (uncomfortably) sexist. Also, completely dangerous yobs on snowboards. The kind that think it’s hilarious to race through the beginners area cutting so close to the already-shaky novices they make them startle and fall down.

On the plus side, there are also lots of French people here this year, so I’ve been able to get some practice at conversation. They seem delighted that anyone local would attempt to speak to them in their own language. Odd when you think about it, because most native English-speakers seem to take it for granted that the locals will converse with them in English when they visit France. Oh, and in general, the Frenchies’ opinion of the Aussies they’ve encountered has not been much better than mine. As one Frenchman put it to me, “They seem to lack…how you say…civilisation?”

I know this post lacked anything whatsoever to do with history, but I’m heading home tomorrow so it will be back to regular programming after that. Also, back to catching up on the many blog posts I’ve missed this last month that have now stacked up to terrifying proportions in my Google Reader.

I've been told this is the best view from a ski field anywhere in the world.

Researching medieval soldiers

2009-07-29T09:22:00.004+12:00

A quickie post from me today, as I’m madly trying to do research for a seminar and paper due early in September, and I need to get a couple of weeks of skiing in between now and then.

For those of you who, like me, have to work at a distance from the major UK and US archives, I’ve just discovered ResearchBuzz. This useful-looking site aggregates new information on search engines, online databases and other sources of digital information (including maps and image databases, by the looks of it). They’re not all history-related, but a recent post advised of a new online database of 90,000-odd soldiers who served in the Hundred Years War (1369 – 1453), assembled by researchers at the universities of Reading and Southampton. Related links point to online sources for York Castle Prison records, Great Reform Act plans for Scotland and other such history-related goodies.

I’m going to have a trawl around later this week and see what the database on medieval soldiers is like, so I’ll report back on that and on any other useful links I find. In the meantime, if you’ve got any favourite online databases of historical records (especially for the fourteenth – sixteenth centuries in England or France), please share them with me!

The history of violence

2009-07-24T10:39:00.006+12:00

We had an interesting discussion in my French class this week about the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. We started by talking about Rousseau, Voltaire and the Encyclopédie, but then New Guy raised an issue that kicked off a debate I seem to be having on a regular basis lately. New Guy – who is a lawyer and struck me as rather right wing and conservative (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”) – suggested that Europe after the Enlightenment and Revolution was much more violent than it had been under the ancien régime. Therefore, he implied, these movements had been generally bad things, which had led to 20th century nightmares like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. I’m well aware that the 19th century in Europe was heinously violent, with revolution after revolution in Germany and elsewhere, but I don’t know enough to make any intelligent comment on the causal connections between those events and the rise of a Hitler or a Stalin. Nor am I trying to downplay the scale of the wars and atrocities that have scarred the world over the last century.

But I do know enough to say that the world before the 18th century was no picnic, either. I think there is a certain romanticism about the distant past – especially our ‘own’ past – that precludes many people from seeing and engaging with its less palatable aspects. The History Channel and Hollywood have a lot to answer for here, with their relentless spectacles of ‘merrie olde Englande’ and the romance of medieval chivalry. But life in general was brutish, particularly if you were female, young or poor.

When people talk about the world being more violent today, I suspect they’re only considering the carnage they’re seeing on the news every night. They’re not considering that in places like England and France, public torture and judicial murder used to be an entertaining day out for the family. (Can Grand Theft Auto really compare to seeing your neighbour being hung, drawn and quartered or burned to death as a witch or heretic?) And while domestic violence is a huge problem in our society, men no longer have the unquestioned legal right to beat their servants, wives and children. (Let’s not forget that masters could beat their apprentices, too, a form of ‘workplace bargaining’ that draconian bosses would probably love to revive.) People who say society is more violent today are also forgetting the completely arbitrary nature of justice a few hundred years ago, when a starving peasant who killed a rabbit for the pot could find himself following it to oblivion at his lord’s pleasure.

And then there’s the Renaissance, which is often portrayed as a sort of golden age when everyone sat around marvelling at the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel. It was also a period when the countries of Europe were almost constantly at war with each other and with themselves. I heard a podcast a while ago in which Thomas Laqueur was talking about the St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre of August, 1572. Over three days, something like 3000 people were killed in the city of Paris – at that time a city of perhaps 100,000 souls. Think about the impact of violent death on that scale on a population that size. If you live in an average-sized town, imagine what would happen if that many of your fellow residents were suddenly victims of the most extreme and nasty murders. There can have been very few, if any, people who weren’t directly affected by a slaughter that had the streets of Paris literally running ankle-deep in blood.

I don’t know, what do you think? Did the democratic revolutions of the 19th century bring more bad than good? Is the media making us paranoid by feeding us a constant diet of death and destruction (fear sells, after all)? Or is the world truly a more violent place now than it was a few hundred years ago?

* The illustration is a 15th century woodcut of the Dance of Death, an extremely common subject of late medieval art.

** The photo is of the Château d’Amboise. In 1560, a political plot to kidnap the young king François II was exposed here. Between 1200 and 1500 conspirators were executed and their bodies strung up from the château’s walls.

Friday Francophilia: Le Tour, toujours

2009-07-17T19:49:00.005+12:00

On Bastille Day, I watched the peloton roll across the russet plains of the Limousin while thunderheads crouched on the horizon, and I asked myself why I love this event so much.

I actually can’t remember the first time I watched the Tour de France, but I do remember being instantly seduced by the beauty and rhythmic precision of the multi-coloured echelons sweeping along the D roads of rural France. I know it was before Lance Armstrong’s time, because the race is always different and more unpredictable when he hasn’t got the best, most expensive team in the world calling the shots. It was thanks to Lance, though, that the television coverage shifted from a precious 30 minutes of highlights a day to showing full stages.

It’s the drama that most attracts and holds me, I think. The breakaways that succeed for 150 kilometres, only to be chased down a few hundred metres from the finish line. Hollow-eyed riders literally clenching their teeth in pain as they struggle up monstrous mountains, their entire world shrunk to trying desperately not to lose the wheel of the bike in front. The cat-and-mouse battle that erupts a couple of kilometres from the end when a breakaway does succeed, and men who’ve worked together for hours to stay ahead of the bunch suddenly become sworn enemies. And, always, the men battling at the back, even behind the autobus, sharing food and support though they’re from different teams, trying to get each other to the finish line before the elimination time.

Then there are those bigger-than-life characters that seem to consider this as a metaphor for life itself and not merely a job. Tiny Marco Pantani with his enormous heart, soaring up Alpe d’Huez in his trademark bandana and silver earring. The crafty old sprinter Erik Zabel in Hell on Wheels, showing his human side by suggesting rum and coke would make a good recovery drink at the end of a particularly vicious mountain stage. And then there was Thomas Voeckler in 2004’s tour, clinging to the maillot jaune through the Pyrenees and into the Alps, against all hope and expectation. All day long, race radio would report ‘yellow jersey dropped, yellow jersey dropped’. The cameras would show Thomas, head hanging over the handlebars as he crawled along in his painfully awkward pedaling style, looking all but dead. But every time he went down, he would somehow find the guts to fight his way back to the group.

The Tour is, in all ways, quintessentially French. What could be more French than the calf-eyed Richard Virenque, undisputed king of the mountains, openly sobbing on national television as he begged forgiveness for his brush with the perennial Tour drug scandal? Drugs, of one kind or another, have been part of the Tour from its inception, though the early riders favoured cigarettes with a cognac or a bottle of wine instead of EPO or testosterone. And in what other sporting event would the guy who finished dead last – the lanterne rouge – be fêted as much as the winner?

Back in 2006, I was staying in an alpine village when the Tour was due to come through on its way to Alpe d’Huez. For days before, the people living in this charming though somewhat rundown backwater had been decorating their streets and houses with banners, signs and balloons, and on the day of the race the entire town was en fête. They treated us – complete strangers from the other end of the world – as friends and neighbours, related by a common love for this unique sporting event. The Luxembourg rider Frank Schleck won that day’s stage, and the man from Luxembourg who was staying at our hotel celebrated that evening by buying everyone in the hotel bar endless rounds of champagne (the good stuff, too!).

I think the thing I love most is the way the people of France have always taken the Tour to their heart. Year after year, even after all the disappointments of drug scandals and France’s losing streak (much better this year, though, with a clutch of stage wins), they decorate their towns and create massive sculptures out of hay and farm equipment in their fields. They line the roadsides and wait hours for a glimpse of riders who streak past at 50 or 60kph. They hike up mountains and camp out for days for the opportunity to run next to the riders for a few seconds as they drag themselves up to the summits.

And then, of course, there’s the scenery. La belle France, indeed.

Remembering the women of the French Revolution

2009-07-14T19:02:00.006+12:00

Mais oui, it is Bastille Day and as usual, I’m raising glass of champagne in honour of liberté, égalité and fraternité and looking forward to the traditional French win in today’s Tour de France stage.

I’ve always been quite stirred by this celebration of reason and enlightenment, but I was just a wee bit disillusioned to find out how undemocratic France’s shift towards democracy really was. Sure, you could have your liberty, your equality and your brotherhood – just as long as you were, well, a ‘brother’. A property-owning male, in other words.

The early days of the French Revolution had carried heady promise for women intent on carving out an active role for themselves in the political governance of the emerging Republic. The sans-culotte women of Paris are famed for their role in forcing Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to leave Versailles for house arrest in Paris, while smart, fiery and passionate women took leading roles in political organisations like the Jacobin Club and even formed their own short-lived Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Théroigne de Méricourt, swaggering through Paris dressed in her riding habit, took up arms to fight for the radical changes she wanted to see in society. And Olympe de Gouge’s Declaration of the Rights of Women decried the absence of women from the visionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and argued for full suffrage as well as for women to be allowed to be elected to the parlements and to act as magistrates. Olympe paid the ultimate price for her temerity, being guillotined during the Terror.

Many of the early gains these women made in the Revolution were too fragile to survive Napoléon’s ultra-conservative social reforms. But their enduring inspiration fired up generations of feminists who came after them, and who fought and continue to fight for women's rights to full citizenship and full humanity. So today, I’ll raise my glass in memory of Olympe, Théroigne and all the thousands of nameless women who were brave enough to write and campaign and stand side-by-side with men at the barricades, fighting for a more just world.

Corporate-speak and the violence of abstraction

2009-07-08T18:36:00.002+12:00

Aaagh!! I’ve spent the last few days on a writing project for a corporate client. This work pays well, but sometimes it certainly takes its pound of flesh, as I discovered today after an exhausting meeting with the business owners to review content for their website. Now, they hired me and agreed to pay me the big bucks because they recognise my ability to communicate with people in writing. They agreed to provide me with a brief on what they wanted to say (okay, their ‘key messages and talking points’), and leave the final decisions on editorial content and style to me. So, I was more than a little peeved when they returned my pages littered with changes.

It wasn’t so much the way they’d altered my active voice to passive voice (what is it that businesses find so compelling in that?), or replaced my plain English with paragraph-long sentences full of incomprehensible jargon. No, it was the way they’d replaced my references to ‘people’ and ‘teams’ with the truly execrable ‘human capital’.

Yes, ‘human capital’. Possibly one of the most offensive, dehumanising expressions in common use today. Just one little consonant and a vowel sound away from ‘human cattle’.

So there we sat, tussling over the changes. I began by trying to keep my outrage in check. "Human capital is a very abstract term, it’s HR company jargon," I said. They said, "It makes us sound global and up-to-date". (Sound global?? What the hell does that mean?) I said, "Wait a minute. You’re supposed to be talking about people you like and value here. Why would you describe them in a way that is so dehumanising?" They dug their toes in.

And then, dear reader, I’m afraid I lost it.

Yes, I delivered a heated little lecture on eighteenth and nineteenth century labour practices and the human exploitation that fuelled the rise of capitalism. I said that ‘human capital’ was an expression slave owners probably would have used had they been cunning enough to think of it.

I stated my belief that the only people who could think this term is acceptable are those who’ve been privileged enough to never have experienced the dreadful, trapped feeling of being ‘owned’ by an employer. Either metaphorically, because you have no choice but to put up with dreadful employment conditions if you want to survive, or literally. I pointed out that slavery may have been abolished in the western world but it still, shamefully, exists elsewhere.

I may have mentioned Irish indentured servants. I definitely channelled E.P. Thompson (via Marcus Rediker) and railed about ‘the violence of abstraction’.

In the end, I couldn’t tell if they were contrite or just convinced I was a bit mad. I hope I’ve opened their eyes, even if only a little bit. But I wonder if I’ll still have a job tomorrow?

A round-up of things (mostly) medieval

2009-07-07T14:42:00.002+12:00

I’m in the throes of writing a paper this week and haven’t had much time for musing. So, in lieu of a proper post, here’s a quick round-up of interesting things-historical from elsewhere in the webosphere.

The Guardian considers supposed fear of protest harboured by British politicians, putting recent incidents into a longer historical context which incorporates the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, the 1688 Glorious Revolution (so-called), and Chartist protests in the nineteenth century.

Over in A Corner of Tenth Century Europe, there is a fascinating post that sheds a different light on power structures in 10thC Normandy, pointing to the possibility of heretofore-unconsidered Viking princes operating there independently of the Norman lords.

To continue the theme of power and its uses/abuses, Magistra et Mater has been doing a great series summarising a recent conference dedicated to the historian Pauline Stafford. Stafford’s interests include queenship, family and ‘female lordship’, and Magistra’s posts cover some interesting new scholarship on violence, power and gender in medieval Europe. There’s lots of good stuff here that I’ll be coming back to in a later post (when I have time to write it!).

Clio Bluestocking has a typically insightful post about how the ‘self-help’ culture is producing students with some pretty strange ideas about the abolitionist movement and slavery in the United States.

Closer to home, the winter lecture series at Auckland University is promising to “remove the black singlet ‘straightjacket’ on our history”. Other topics will include the Maori ‘renaissance’, New Zealand at war, and the role of Empire. Also –

It will be argued that “the rebranding of old stuff as trendy and desirable” demonstrates widespread interest in our history. Moreover professional historians cannot ignore the popularity of events such as art deco weekends and medieval jousting tournaments.

Finally, if you’re lucky enough to be visiting New York anytime soon, the Morgan Library & Museum – home of some of the beautiful and quirky illuminations featured as Mmm…marginalia at Got Medieval – is holding an exhibition called ‘Pages of Gold: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan’.

According to The New York Times, “This quietly compelling show assembles ‘orphan’ leaves (illuminated pages separated from medieval manuscripts and sold, individually, to collectors). Organized geographically, the show allows a comparison of illumination styles in England, Italy, Spain and other countries and regions. It also highlights the figures who created and participated in the market for single leaves. They include an Italian abbot, an English art historian and a mysterious artist known as the Spanish Forger.” Sounds intriguing, yes? If you get a chance to check it out, please report back!

More thoughts on academic careers

2009-07-03T09:48:00.002+12:00

I’ve been away for the last few days at a residential graduate seminar and while I was there, I had a few more thoughts on the merits (or not) of the academic life.

The seminar itself was great, just the sort of stuff I love. It was for the standard advanced historiography course, and we all took great delight in debating various philosophical approaches to history and theories of historical change. Three different professors, each of whom seemed oddly suited to their subject matter, guided us through the various sessions over several days.

First up was a be-spectacled, soft-spoken tie-wearing gent (in all senses of the word) who dealt with the 18th and 19th century historians – men like Edward Gibbon and Thomas Babington Macaulay who saw history as a leisurely literary pursuit for the cultured man-of-letters. Next came our Sorbonne-educated expert on the French Annales school. Elegantly dressed and precisely spoken, with beautifully accented French, she shared her experience of studying under the renowned French Revolution specialist Michel Vovelle. Finally – and a stark contrast – our expert on the British Marxists was a bearded, wild-haired enthusiast who regaled us with his own stories of discovering social radicalism as a 19-year-old student at the height of the Thatcher years. (A discovery, which, he wryly pointed out, was the perfect platform from which to launch a rebellion against his staunchly right-wing father – Freud in history, indeed.)

Here’s the thing that gave me pause, though. These people are all very accomplished, with international reputations in their fields and a veritable bookshelf of books between them. They are excellent teachers, each with their own unique style of pedagogy, and all of them take several courses each year alongside plenty of research and writing. But if I decided to follow an academic career path, it wouldn’t be until I reached this level of seniority, after many, many years of hard work (assuming I could even get there), that I would be earning what I earn now in a challenging but not particularly difficult job in the private sector (pro rata based on my hourly rate, as I only work 15 – 20 hours a week).

Their working conditions aren’t great, either. The building which houses the History department was once the epitome of elegant Art Deco, but it doesn't appear to have been renovated since it was built in the early 1930s. Inside, it’s dim and dank with a pervasive smell of mould (and the occasional piquant whiff of dead mouse). There are years’ worth of water stains on the ceiling and, underfoot, carpet that looks like it saw the last days of World War II. A few of the best offices have nice views over the surrounding trees and parks, but it would take a heroic obliviousness to your surroundings not to get depressed in the tiny windowless inner offices. Adding insult to injury, it is quite noticeable that the business and science faculties on this campus are ensconced in much newer, nicer buildings (I know, I’ve checked them out).

The other thing that struck me during this course was the average age of our graduate group. Most of them were at least in their late thirties or early forties, and a couple were a good deal older (I’d guess late fifties – early sixties). Only two were in their early twenties, and appeared to have followed the traditional trajectory from school to undergrad to grad school. This raised a few questions for me. First, is this kind of age distribution unique to my institution? If not, are young people just starting out in their careers no longer very interested in working in the public university system (at lease in the Humanities)? And if that’s the case, where will our next generation of history professors come from?

Career angst and the scholarly life

2009-06-26T10:40:00.005+12:00

Academic, Hopeful has a post up this week asking how graduate students should react to the inevitable question “what are you going to do next?” and/or variations on the theme of “why don’t you get a real job?”.

I’m having a hell of a month, just crazy-busy, and this post came close to triggering my own little existential crisis. I’ve come to graduate study as an older student, having already had two other careers. I suspect that because of my age, I've probably missed the boat on the standard academic career trajectory to tenured professor (and given the parlous state of academia these days, I’m not entirely sure it’s a career I would want anyway). The alternatives might be finding a niche in non-tenure-track academia, working as an independent scholar, or even being a genteel lady writer of historically-accurate medieval murder mysteries (I secretly quite fancy this last option).

Generally, people react positively when I tell them I’m doing graduate study until they find out I’m not doing something ‘useful’ like an MBA or a law degree. When I tell them I’m studying history, I’ll be received with bemused silence, a stuttered ‘why are you studying THAT?’, or – perhaps the most irritating response –patronising indulgence, as if I’m engaged in a somewhat eccentric hobby but at least it's keeping me out of trouble.

My personal experience is merely a microcosm. Those of us pursuing Humanities degrees are more likely to be accused of elitist dilettantism by politicians who have become increasingly focused on universities as factories for churning out tomorrow’s happy work-bots, rather than places where the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual freedom are considered as social goods in their own right. Because my main interest is medieval history, I get really prickly at the fact medieval studies often gets a star mention in newspaper articles scoffing at the ‘useless’ things universities are teaching these days. Yes, ‘useless’ things like critical thinking (perhaps politicians would secretly prefer it if the rest of us had less training in this area?), the ability to effectively analyse and synthesise complex information, or the skills to read and research both widely and deeply and then assess all the evidence on its own merits.

I’m fortunate to have earned a scholarship that covers my tuition fees (though who knows how long that will last?), and I also make enough from part-time PR contracting to pay the bills and keep a roof over my head. Without those factors, would I still be pursuing graduate study? I don’t know, and I’m certainly conscious of the financial privilege that makes my current situation viable. But at the same time, I simply can’t imagine being content with an existence where I’m not engaging in a life of the mind that rises above the mundane issues of our day-to-day world.

It’s difficult, daunting, and sometimes-tedious work (formatting references, anyone?), but when I’m doing it, there’s a thrumming inside me, a steady stretching of both cognition and intuition that seems to reverberate through my very centre. To anyone who hasn’t had the experience, it’s difficult to describe the sensation of discovering a single paragraph in 400 pages of text that opens a door in your mind, maybe even utterly changing the way you’ve been looking at the world. Or the secret thrill of finding a group of 600-year-old legal cases that appear – finally! – to confirm a theory you’ve been quietly harbouring for ages. Or the sheer enjoyment of the robust intellectual exercise that is taken tussling over the cracks in someone else’s long-cherished theory.

Rembrandt’s scholar may be a crusty old guy wearing a ruff, but I experience deep sense of empathy when I look at him. Across the gap of centuries, I can sense the cramping in his hand as he takes yet another page of notes, and I can feel the tired itchiness of eyes and a brain that have been tightly focused for hours. In him, I see my own drive to keep reading, keep looking, keep questioning. A drive that can sometimes be stronger than those most basic human needs of sleep and food. A drive provoked by an even deeper fear (certain knowledge that is yet unacknowledged), that my days will run out before my questions do.

That is ‘why’ and that is ‘what comes next’ because for me, it is coterminous with life itself.

* Image: Rembrandt, A Scholar, 1631. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

A veritable medieval feast

2009-06-21T19:15:00.003+12:00

The latest edition of Carnivalesque is now up at Food History, featuring an eclectic collection of posts on medieval catering, celebrity executions, maps, manuscripts, marginalia, miracle-making and a sprinkling of good old-fashioned rebellion.

Enjoy! (but my advice to you is not to visit Food History hungry...)

History played for laughs

2009-06-19T10:33:00.005+12:00

My chickens are coming home to roost this week as I’m coming to realise how much I have to get done by early September. For school, that includes two research essays and a seminar presentation, and for work a major website project for which I am writing all the content and coordinating the design and development teams (herding cats). Oh, and I need to fit a couple of weeks of skiing in there, too. And it’s nearly the END of JUNE! So it was either turn to drink or find a little light relief.

An article this week on the Blackadder series – “the most successful historical television sitcom yet conceived” – reminded me how much this show made me laugh when it first came out. Here’s a scene from one of my favourite episodes in which, after the murder of Thomas Becket, the king has made his venal and slithering son Prince Edmund Blackadder the Archbishop of Canterbury. Blackadder and his henchmen immediately set about figuring out how they can make some cash out of the gig, and I think their take on the booming late medieval trade in indulgences and false relics would have brought a smile to Geoffrey Chaucer’s lips.

Revolting peasants and 'whores of the devil'

2009-06-15T17:56:00.006+12:00

On this day in 1381, the Peasants’ Revolt reached a climax with the meeting between King Richard II and the rebels at Smithfield in London, during which their leader Wat Tyler was killed. Having cut a swathe across southeast England, the revolt’s leaders Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball, along with thousands of followers (which included people of the yeoman and artisanal classes as well as peasants), had descended on London with the intent of confronting the king. The Anonimalle Chronicle records their demands -

That for the future no man should be in serfdom, nor make any manner of homage or suit to any lord, but should give a rent of 4d an acre for his land. They asked also that no one should serve any man except by his own good will, and on terms of regular covenant.

The focus of the rebels’ ire was not so much the king himself. He was only 14 and, the rebels said, had been led astray by wicked councillors, chief amongst them the regent John of Gaunt (Richard’s uncle), Chancellor Archbishop Sudbury and the treasurer Sir Robert Hales. Along with demanding and end to villeinage, the rebels wanted these councillors removed from office. Dissatisfied with the king’s response to their stipulations, the rebels had rampaged through the city of London for several days and much destruction, looting and killing ensued. The Fleet and Newgate prisons were broken open, John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace was burnt, Sudbury and Hales were executed, and the rebels raided the Tower of London itself.

The Peasants’ Revolt and its social, political, cultural and economic contexts makes for highly productive research partly because a rich vein of sources survives that enables in-depth study from diverse perspectives. The written evidence alone includes tax records, legal statutes, trial records from multiple jurisdictions, writs of inquiry, petitions, the Rolls of Parliament, and the detailed pardons issued by the king after the event. Several chroniclers have also left us narrative accounts of varying reliability.

There is still much debate about the deeper long-term causes of the rebellion, but most scholars agree that the imposition of a third poll tax on a population already paying heavily for unsuccessful foreign wars was the immediate spark that caused diffuse grumblings and isolated rioting to ignite into organised insurrection. The revolt has been the subject of historical analysis from broadly socio-economic, political and religious perspectives but for me, another interesting aspect emerges when it is viewed through the lens of gender.

While most historical accounts up until the 1980s (at least) discuss the revolt as an almost wholly male enterprise, source documents including trial records and pardons show women were very much active participants, and even instigators and organisers of rebellion. At left, for example, is an extract from a commission of Oyer and Terminer (‘hear and determine’) held in Essex directly after the revolt to seek out those responsible. Amongst the people accused of riding armed through the countryside and inciting the commons to rise against the king is one “Nichola Cartere who was lately taken as wife by William Dekne of South Benfleet”*. In another case, records from the court of King’s Bench describe Johanna Ferrour as the “chief perpetrator and leader” of a rebel group from Kent who burnt the Savoy and executed Sudbury and Hales**.

For me, these accounts raise a whole swag of questions about women as active agents in insurrection. Just for starters, on what grounds did they claim their authority to lead men in an armed conflict and why were men apparently willing to follow them? Were they acting alone or as part of a couple or family group? Were their motivations personal (vengeance and/or monetary gain) or broadly idealistic/political? How did officials react to their challenge, and was this reaction different in regards to women rebels versus men rebels?

The chronicles of the revolt also use distinctly gendered language to frame the rebellion. Thomas Walsingham, for example, describes the rebels as “whores of the devil”, and language that represents rebellion through images of out-of-control women appears throughout the other chronicles and official accounts. This doesn’t so much reflect the writers’ preoccupation with actual women as rebels as it does the common medieval association of threats of political and social disorder with a peculiarly feminine sexual disorder. In this sense, while women as individual actors may have been largely absent from medieval sources for political history, the feminine was very much present in discourses about power.

In another example from the Walsingham chronicle, the king’s mother Joan of Kent (sister-in-law and influential supporter of the hated John of Gaunt) suffers what reads uncomfortably like a metaphorical rape when the rebels invade her bedroom*. They “search the most secret places there at their wicked will”, lay on a bed and demand that Joan kisses them, and drive their swords into the bedclothes in gestures that are unmistakably phallic. The king’s men (and by association, the king) seem helpless in the face of this masculine sexual aggression, and stand by passively while the rebels stroke “and lay their uncouth and sordid hands on the beards of several most noble knights”. This gendered discourse emerges again in the tracts and documents that advocated and justified Richard II’s deposition in 1399.

What do these representations of rebellion tell us about the dynamics of gender and power in late medieval England? There seem to be oppositional ideas at work here that that connect conceptualisations of the masculine and feminine to political ideology that defines and shapes the legitimate and illegitimate exercise of authority (although anything more than a cursory look reveals complexities that go well beyond these simple binaries). Histories that approach the Peasants’ Revolt from traditional political or socio-economic perspectives that overlook the role of women and dismiss gender as a valid frame for analysis risk missing the opportunity to create a greater depth of understanding of how discourses of gender and sexuality shaped (and continue to shape) political ideology and practice.

Image: The rebel leaders John Ball (on horseback) and Wat Tyler meet outside London, from a late 15th century edition of Froissart’s Chronicle.

* From the permanent online exhibit at the British National Archives.
** On this and other cases involving women as perpetrators and leaders of the revolt, see Sylvia Federico, “The imaginary society : women in 1381”.
*** On this incident and its wider implications, see Mark Ormrod, “In bed with Joan of Kent: The king’s mother and the Peasants’ Revolt”.

Medieval women and the myth of illiteracy

2009-06-12T18:03:00.012+12:00

An intriguing manuscript recently surfaced in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples that sheds new light on the reading abilities and habits of women in late medieval England. The manuscript, which was serendipitously unearthed by Canadian scholar James Weldon while he was looking for something else entirely, has attracted some attention from the mainstream media*. This article rather flippantly describes the manuscript as a ‘medieval women’s magazine’, composed as it is of a varied collection of ‘articles’ (if you will) on topics of supposed feminine interest – as the subhead puts it, ‘Canadian researcher discovers historic document filled with romance and recipes’. The anthology is written in Middle English and includes extracts from a variety of different sources, including medicinal recipes, household tips, romances and a saint's life.

The Naples manuscript is a rare example of vernacular literature that appears to be aimed at a secular female readership, and as such is a pretty interesting find in itself. But what also interests me are the reader comments at the end of the newspaper article. Overall, they reflect the popular belief that most people in the Middle Ages were illiterate, and that literacy was a privilege almost exclusive to male secular and clerical elites. This assumption has led some scholars astray when it comes to considering the contribution women – especially non-aristocratic women – could have made to the literary culture of late medieval England, and it has produced interpretations that dismiss works purportedly by women as the work of men writing under pseudonyms.

Such has been the case with The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s), which many a scholar has argued was entirely the creative production of male scribes (I talked a bit about their varying interpretations in a previous post). At the start of her book, Margery describes herself as illiterate and thus entirely reliant on her priestly collaborators, but this statement cannot be read as transparent. On one level, it operates to place her within an orthodox tradition of women’s mystical experience recorded and transmitted by male clerics. In this respect, Margery’s ‘illiteracy’ serves an important strategic function by shielding her from charges of heresy, which at this time was strongly associated with women’s ability to read the Bible in vernacular English.

When I started doing some research on the Book, I discovered another interesting angle around the concept of 'literacy' (which incidentally gave me a good reminder about not applying modern categories and definitions to analysis of the past). I'd approached the problem of Margery’s authorship by first asking the question, ‘given Margery’s social background and family history (as she tells it herself and from what we know based on other records), how probable is it that she would have truly been functionally illiterate?’. To answer this question, I was initially thinking broadly in terms of a 21st century standard of illiteracy – roughly, the inability to read and write at a basic level that allows one to function in society.

However, with a bit more research, I discovered that this definition becomes quite misleading when applied to the later Middle Ages. To be ‘literate’ during this period meant to be ‘Latinate’ – to have the skills to read and write in Latin. These were skills almost exclusively reserved to men, particularly as the developing university system excluded women and tied Latinity to a clerical education. But at the same time, English culture was undergoing a transition to the vernacular. Strong growth in lay piety was creating demand for works of devotion and meditation written in English and this drove a corresponding expansion in the ability to read in English. Alongside this trend, technological advances like the replacement of parchment with paper and the development of methods for bulk book production were making books cheaper and more accessible to the urban merchant and trading classes.

The women of these classes were generally capable of at least the basics of reading and writing in English – enough to enable them to pursue their religious devotions (and possibly educate their children and servants), run households, and work in family businesses. Far from being illiterate, by the 14th century they had emerged as a distinctive group of book owners, something we know by the number of books accounted for in their wills. The discovery of the Naples manuscript is a timely reminder that we need to leave behind old-fashioned assumptions about just how 'dark' the 'dark ages' really were, and instead look more deeply into the many ways women of all classes – not just the aristocratic elite – were participating in cultural production and reproduction during this period.

Image: The gisant of Alienor d'Aquitaine at the Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud. She is depicted reading rather than in the more usual pose of hands piously folded in prayer.

* Props to jliedl for the original link.

Lessons for girls: If you don't ask, you don't get

2009-06-07T20:02:00.006+12:00

I’ve been prompted to add my own contribution to the Lessons for Girls meme kicked off by Historiann by some new research on gender and pay (in)equity. The research on the technology sector shows that even in this relatively new industry, which you might expect to be free of the shackles of historically embedded gender inequities, women still earn on average $5,000 less than men in jobs where in all other respects (skills, experience, qualifications) they are on an equal footing.

Why is this? One reason is that in a competitive world, if you don’t ask for something – or even vociferously demand it – you’re not going to get it. And it seems that too many women simply don’t ask.

AbsoluteIT director Grant Burley says the extent of the difference between the earning power of men and women – approximately $5,000 – was a surprise. He puts it down to the fact women don’t always negotiate as aggressively as men when they’re offered jobs.
“As a recruitment firm, we see evidence of that – when job offers are made, there’s less bargaining from female candidates”.

When we are less assertive than men in our pay negotiations, it may only make a small initial difference between what we earn and what our male colleagues earn. But that small difference gets magnified over time when annual raises or bonuses are based on a percentage of base salary. Dr Crazy recently ran some numbers for academia which showed how big the gap in salaries can become over the long term when women don’t hold out for what they want (and deserve) early in their careers.

So why don’t we women put more monetary value on what we bring to the workplace? As a girl, I was brought up to take what I was given without complaint, so when I started working, I believed that asking for more made me ungrateful and greedy. I thought that if I displayed a forthright interest in money, it would be seen as a sign of flawed character and might even prompt my potential employer to withdraw their offer in distaste. It was many years before I got past the unspoken conviction that bargaining for higher pay was somehow classless and, dare I say it, ‘unladylike’. I hope you can learn from my mistakes.

When you get that job offer, don’t immediately say yes. Don’t take the first offer on the table out of unwarranted gratitude for even being considered for the role. And don’t fall into the trap of thinking, ‘they really want me, but they’ve said they can’t afford to offer me more’. You are always worth more than their first offer and they expect you to negotiate. If you had a Y chromosome, you’d bargain as a matter of course. Consider your many talents, your experience, the qualifications you worked so hard to attain. And then ASK FOR MORE. Believe me, you would if you were a man. And if you don’t, nobody is going to just up and give it to you.

Money is not inherently dirty and it is not a character flaw in women to want more of it (within reason – I’m not saying we should start channelling Gordon Gekko). Asking to be properly remunerated for what you do doesn’t make you arrogant or selfish or greedy. Dealing fairly but firmly in pay negotiations does not make you an aggressive bitch. It makes you smart.

Updated: This post sparked some lively discussion over at Historiann and at The Chronicle of Higher Education - check out the comment threads.

Oh, and in case anyone thinks I believe that all it takes to close the pay gap is for women to get better at salary negotiation, here's a refresher on pay equity and patriarchal equilibrium.

Silencing and the sexual slur

2009-06-04T08:25:00.008+12:00

Last month, I wrote about the issue of gendering public space and how tactics used to constrain and silence people in the physical world have emerged in the online world, often in distinctly gendered forms. I had a number of replies, both in the comments here and via email, recounting personal experiences of this. I also received this comment:

For better or for worse, crude sexualised insults are part of the blogosphere's vernacular... The correctness or otherwise of insisting on sanitised discourse is worth pondering.

And ponder I did. Was I being a hopeless idealist? Or simply talking out of my ass? (My commenter, who is an IRL friend, would probably vouch for the latter and then prescribe a calming glass of pinot gris). Perhaps I didn’t make my point clearly enough, leading my commenter to assume I’m advocating some sort of censorship. I’m not. Quite the opposite, in fact. I understand very well that censorship has always been the servant of political, social and cultural oppression. But when people scorn a valid argument or silence the speaker by using humiliation or intimidation, or by wilfully misrepresenting what was said, that is a form of censorship, albeit an informal one. What else can it be called when power is deliberately wielded to deter others from voicing their opinions or beliefs, whether the forum is real or virtual?

Maybe it’s my naturally rebellious side, but I’m also bothered by the notion that just because something exists (crude sexualised insults in the blogosphere) that is the way it must be and we should all just lump it. Crude sexualised insults used to be much more widely accepted as part of normal workplace culture, too. They function as a way to police boundaries and enforce hierarchy, and things only change because people get to the point where they refuse to passively accept it, “like it or not”.

Passive acceptance is what enables a mass media culture (I almost wrote ‘ass media’ there – Freudian slip much??) that is governed by the lowest common denominator, where intellect is openly mocked and political debate is reduced to facile sound bites and vacuous rhetoric. Really, how low does the lowest common denominator need to get before we stop placidly tolerating it? Frankly, I’m with Howard Beale: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Let me be clear here. I’m not talking about common or garden variety swearing (to object to that would make me a hypocrite of the highest order). Nor am I offended by sexual banter per se: It can be plenty of fun to indulge in when it’s exchanged between people operating on a basis of equal power and mutual consent. But sexualised language becomes more problematic when it’s used to construct and perpetuate unequal relationships of power. The sexual slur has always played a potent role in political and social discourse because it is so effective at achieving this end. As one demonstration this effectiveness, consider the scandalous, scurrilous and downright pornographic pamphlets produced about Marie Antoinette and other hated representatives of the ancien regime. Their accusations and lurid portrayals were generally ludicrous (and frequently physically impossible except on the part of a contortionist – or maybe I’m just not as flexible as I used to be). But this highly sexualised polemic, particularly that directed against the queen, played a critical strategic role in the French Revolution and, especially, in The Terror of 1793-4*.

All of this is to say that the sexual epithet is rarely transparent or simple. It carries with it a host of deeper claims – often the unconscious products of gender, race and/or class privilege – about who can and cannot hold power.

When we bridle at such usage, either online or in the real world, we’re usually told to let it slide or that we should ‘lighten up’ and ‘get a sense of humour’. Sometimes, ignoring it or walking away is the best course of action, especially when it’s an argument you know you can’t win (cue the old adage about refusing to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent). But not always. Sometimes we need to expose and confront the claims that inhere in sexualised insults, to refuse to brush them off as ‘just jokes’. Sometimes, we need to challenge ourselves to think more deeply about the potency of language to create and define our realities. And then we need to ask ourselves if those are the realities within which we truly want to exist.

* For more on this, check out the excellent book Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen

Textual interventions and medieval mashups

2009-05-31T14:09:00.009+12:00

Social media expert Chris Brogan has a post up this week reflecting on the “next media company” and the transformations of traditional media being rendered by Web 2.0. In this new world, content is no longer delivered via a one-way relationship to a passive audience, but is produced, reproduced, added to and changed by many different reader-writers. In this process, publication is merely the first step rather than the last. Signification is ever evolving and morphing, and meaning is inherently unstable and slippery, as it is in all texts. (I use the term ‘text’ here in the sense that literary theorist Roland Barthes expresses it, wherein everything that is interpreted comprises a text, not just the written word.)

As I read Brogan’s post, I had a distinct feeling of déjà vu. It all started sounding like the process of copying, recopying, annotating, excising and interpolating that was integral to the production of medieval manuscripts. Anyone working with these texts must get to grips not only with their primary content, but with the acts of erasure, addition and change (both deliberate and inadvertent) carried out by each hand they passed through. The annotations that mark the margins of these works – both words and images – tell their own stories and serve their own ends. Each new encounter between text and reader generates new interpretations from a variety of perspectives (geographical, temporal, cultural, political and social), subtly shifting meanings or even rendering new meanings that directly conflict with the original writer’s purposes.

Take, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe. Probably written in the early 1430s, this is widely regarded as the first autobiography in vernacular English. It purports to be the story of a moderately well-off Englishwoman’s transformation from conventional wife and mother into edgy religious mystic, after a spiritual crisis sparked by the birth of her first child. Both its creation and its reception – by contemporary audiences (as reported by the author herself) and by later readers – have been the source of perennial controversy. Margery claims to be illiterate, so is the book actually the creative product of male scribes? Or are these priestly scribes a cover, which she uses to shield herself from charges of heresy or to claim a spiritual authority which was elusive for women in the Middle Ages? Is the Book a work of authentic religious mysticism? A subversive social and political commentary on Lancastrian England? Or the ravings of a woman suffering post-natal depression and ‘feminine hysteria’ because she can’t fit herself to the traditional stereotype of wife and mother? (It won’t surprise you to know that the latter interpretation has been depressingly common amongst male scholars.)

The treatment of the text itself has been integral to the many ways it has been interpreted. In 1501, the printer Wynkyn de Worde included extracts in a devotional work aimed at lay readers. Because only the least controversial passages were reproduced, religious scholars and historians who based their interpretations on this version dismissed the writer as a conventionally pious and not terribly interesting person who could certainly not be classed a mystic or spiritual leader (not least because she was a married woman and a mother, and was therefore unable to claim the state of virginity that conferred authority on other female mystics).

The Wynkyn de Worde text was the best-known account of Margery’s experience until the rediscovery of a full manuscript copy of the Book in 1934. This manuscript was originally in the possession of the Carthusian monks of Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire, a particularly austere and spiritual house. Throughout, it is amended and annotated by several hands, of which at least two appear to be monks from the priory. Their interventions place Margery’s text into a broader framework of late medieval devotional piety and affective spiritual expression, and indicate that this deeply religious male readership regarded Margery as a genuine mystic.

In a number of cases, the second monkish commentator (early sixteenth century) interacts with and reinterprets not only the original text, but also the annotations of the first commentator (fifteenth century), effectively creating texts-within-texts. The commentators have also added their own illustrations, perhaps designed to guide interpretation by later readers. One of these is a small but detailed drawing of a tower, commonly used in medieval iconography to represent virginity. The image can be read to signify that for these monks, Margery’s own claim to be ‘a virgin in her soul’ – to have reclaimed spiritual virginity as a sign of God’s grace – was authentic and not the product of hysteria, wishful thinking or an unseemly (feminine) desire for attention.

But the added marginalia point to conflict, tension and ambiguity as well as endorsement. One commentator inserted marginal instructions for reading the text that put its chapters into a different sequence from that in the Book as originally written. He has also drawn common devotional symbols such as the (sacred) heart and the flame (of divine love) alongside passages that describe some of Margery’s more extreme and dramatic expressions of piety (which included uncontrolled crying, being struck dumb, and ‘roaring’). These drawings could be read either as signs of the commentator’s empathy with Margery’s unusual experience of the divine, or as his attempt to produce readings that filter her account through the lens of more conventional devotional practice, thus sanitising her mystical experience and shaping it to fit an accepted formula.

In the history of The Book of Margery Kempe and its many readings, we have a classic exemplar of the marginalia and annotations in medieval manuscripts – the emendations, excisions, redactions and interpolations – being as critical to producing meanings as is the central or primary text itself. The medieval reader/annotator/writer was acutely aware that manuscripts – rare and precious as they were – were communal products and their textual interpretation was an active and collaborative process rather than a matter of passive reception of fixed meanings. In this medieval ‘mash up’ of text, marginalia and images, significations were constantly being shifted, subverted, reinterpreted and recreated to fit the changing needs and expectations of diverse communities.

So all this has me wondering, is this ‘next media’ or ‘new media’ culture we're starting to engage in really so new? Or can it be seen as the evolution of very old practices that have simply been made more visible – and, it must be said, much more accessible – by a universe of new tools?

Surfing and scholarship

2009-05-26T12:17:00.014+12:00

As someone whose historical research interests centre on late medieval/early modern England and France, I can sometimes feel a little isolated in my far-flung post-colonial corner of the world. But lately, I find myself constantly delighted by the many ways the web is dissolving both geographical and temporal barriers. I can access ever-growing digital collections of documents and texts dating back to the twelfth century, making it possible to undertake original research without leaving my study. And there are some beautiful sites where I can view photographic images of medieval manuscripts, invaluable because they show not just the primary content but also the marginalia and annotations that provide critical clues to the history, interpretation, dissemination and multiple purposes of a particular text. (For a quirky example, see this tale of two lions and the change of noble ownership they represent.)

And through the self-publishing miracle that is the blog, I’ve been able to make contact with some of the leading scholars in my areas of interest. I’ve participated in challenging discussions about specific historical interpretations and theoretical approaches; and I’ve debated the roles – both real and ideal – of the historical profession in contemporary society. Most recently, I’ve come across the innovative Carnivalesque project, which each month showcases a selection of recent posts on ancient, medieval and early modern history from professors, graduate students and independent scholars. Writers nominate their own or others' best posts for inclusion and hosting moves to a different blog with each edition, providing a variety of perspectives on the monthly theme. It’s not constrained by the rigorous peer review process (and glacial publishing timelines) of a traditional academic journal, but it is a credible forum where dubious scholarship or poorly supported claims will be quickly challenged by people who are experts in their fields.

There are loads of good blogs on medieval and early modern history, from the serious-minded – where posts often feature an impressive depth of detail and careful interpretation reminiscent of scholarly articles – to the hilariously light-hearted (Got Medieval and Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog spring to mind). I’ll soon be adding my own favourites to this site, so you’ll be able to check them out for yourself. Nominations are also welcome, as I’d hate to think I’m missing out on any gems!

Picture credit: Crusade scene from the Hours of Pierre de Bosredont, France, ca.1465 (Pierpont Morgan Library)

Friday Francophilia: D'oh!

2009-05-22T19:29:00.005+12:00

Merde. Just when I thought I was getting the hang of this speaking French lark, smugly ensconced as I am in my Avancé class, I find I’ve been blithely going around calling French people fuckers. To their faces. Yes, wine glass clutched tipsily in one hand, I’ve been happily saying salut (‘cheers’) but they’ve been hearing salou (something considerably less convivial). Apparently we native English speakers, especially those of us of the antipodean variety, have a real problem perfecting the finer points of pronouncing French vowel sounds.

So to all my French friends, I can only say je suis très désolée! And I think in future I’ll stick to the pompously Anglo-Indian sounding but safe tchin.

In the meantime, here’s some more fun with badly spoken French, from Flight of the Conchords.

Whoops, apocalypse! Or, ask a medievalist if you want to understand the modern world

2009-05-19T10:09:00.019+12:00

Hi, my name is Bavardess, and I’m a medievalist. I enjoy talking to anyone who’ll listen about my various research projects on late medieval rebellions, de jure and de facto structures of medieval prostitution, and the lives of urban working women in 14th century England. But now, when my friends and colleagues respond (as they often do) with a bemused “well that’s all very interesting, but what’s the point?”, I can point them here where my fellow medievalist Dan Jones explains that it takes an understanding of the Middle Ages to understand the present (props to Modern Medieval for the link).

Sure, I think Jones has his tongue pretty firmly in his cheek when he says,

Where Geoffrey Chaucer and his fellows had the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Hundred Years War and the Mediaeval Warm Period, so we have Swine Flu, the G20 riots, Afghanistan and Al Gore. The names have changed, but the horsemen ain’t.

But his underlying point is sound. We do seem to be in another one of those periods of general crisis – endemic war, the threat of large-scale disease, social disorder and economic chaos – that so distinctively marked the later Middle Ages throughout western Europe. People who have studied those phenomena in detail in the past, analysing the ways they inter-relate to each other and to wider social, cultural, economic and political trends, have valuable insights and theoretical frameworks to offer as we grapple with the here-and-now.

Okay, if you start making direct one-to-one comparisons or sweeping generalisations, anyone with the most basic training in the theory and practice of professional history is going to pull you up pretty quickly. We’ll talk to you about contingency and context, and tell you that it’s not a simple case of history repeating itself (either as tragedy or as farce – sorry, Marx). But as those of us with research interests before the 17th or 18th century can attest, there is much to be gained by understanding how medieval world-views and idea(l)s about gender, sexuality, religion, political philosophy, science and medicine shaped and continue to shape the modern world.

My own research interests are clustering around the intersections between 14th century constructions of gender and conceptions of legitimately and illegitimately wielded political power. So for me, watching how constructions of gender played a significant role – both overtly and covertly – in last year’s US and New Zealand elections was fascinating. Just ask, and I’ll be happy to blab away about this for hours.

P.S. And who says we medievalists can’t get drunk and have a little kinky fun while we're buried in those archives?

P.P.S. The picture above is 'La Bête de la mer', a panel from the Apocalypse Tapestry at the Chateau d'Angers in France. The seven-headed panther-like beastie is being invested with power by the Dragon, which means the rest of us are in deep shit.

On service, social pressure and separation

2009-05-18T09:49:00.012+12:00

The Letters to Our Daughters project featured a thought-provoking entry this week from Dr Pamela Carmines, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Cellular & Integrative Physiology at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine. She raised the issue of women in academia frequently carrying heavier service commitments than their male colleagues. This reduces the amount of time they can dedicate to their own “hot science, papers and GRANTS!”, with the flow-on effect of limiting their career advancement and/or causing their professional efforts to be taken less seriously than those of male counterparts.

Both within and outside academia, women are often expected to take on more service commitments and to provide support to colleagues or junior staff, sometimes at the expense of getting ahead with their own work. I believe this is directly related to broader gender-based social pressure for women to be ‘nice’, nurturing and co-operative instead of just saying no. Even when we do say no, we often find ourselves feeling compelled to explain our decision and come up with a slew of good excuses, whereas in my experience, males will usually feel quite comfortable leaving it at a simple ‘nope, sorry, I can’t’. As someone who has an irritating propensity to say ‘yes’ and over-commit myself, this is something that concerns me when it comes to ring-fencing time to work on projects that are important to me and to advancing my career.

The other interesting point Dr Carmines raises is the existence of special women’s committees within larger professional groups and societies. Does this serve to ghettoise women and make it harder for them and their work to be taken seriously? As she asks:

Is it possible that compartmentalizing ourselves into the women's group associated with an organization might actually impede our efforts to have "equal" (or higher) status in the eyes of our male peers?

Or are women’s committees serving a necessary purpose? It's probable that without them, women would have even less influence and recognition in fields still seen as traditionally masculine, such as the 'hard sciences' and IT. And certainly, their very existence highlights the fact that such initiatives are needed because gender-based discrimination continues to be a big problem in many professional and academic settings.

The question of separation versus integration is a topic of perennial debate in the field of women’s history, too. The methods and theoretical approaches developed by historians of women and historians working from broadly feminist perspectives have revolutionised the discipline of history over the last few decades. But it also seems that the establishment of women’s history as a recognised specialty within the academy has enabled some (many?) scholars working within specialties such as political and diplomatic history to assume they don’t need to integrate women into their historical inquiries, because ‘the women’s historians do women’s history’. As a result, women – who make up over half the human race – are still invisible or appear as only token participants in many of the ‘master narratives’ of western history*.

*My own research is centred on England/western Europe, so I don’t know if this is the case elsewhere. If you’re a historian working outside that framework (or within it), what’s your experience?

Patriarchal Equilibrium - 1, Pay Equity - 0

2009-05-15T17:04:00.015+12:00

These are darkening days for the female population of New Zealand. This week, the news came out that the Department of Labour’s Pay and Employment Equity Unit has been ‘disestablished’ (that’s bureaucratic weasel-speak for binned). Earlier this year, a couple of its major investigations were scrapped based on a specious argument for ‘pay restraint’ – that is to say, the government simply can’t afford to redress gender-based pay imbalances. Sadly, the move has come as no great surprise to me. The centre-right National government elected last November has been ‘reprioritising’ government spending, and using the convenient excuse of the global financial crisis to gut programmes aimed at combating discrimination and promoting social justice. It's par for the course. The last time a National government was elected, back in 1990, its first move was to repeal the Employment Equity Act.

There was an excellent and wide-ranging roundtable across several history blogs back in March, where feminist scholars discussed historian Judith M. Bennett’s book History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. Bennett specialises in the history of non-elite women in late medieval/early modern England. Her thesis in History Matters is that when a long-term perspective is applied to the historical analysis of women’s and men’s status in society (legal rights, economic conditions and so on), it becomes clear that what she terms "patriarchal equilibrium" is at work. So while conditions for women have improved over the centuries, those for men have also improved, with the result that in absolute terms, men preserve their privileged position in society. Bennett uses the example of wage rates, pointing out that the gap between what men and women earn for the same types of work hasn’t really closed much at all since the later Middle Ages. It has drifted up and down a bit, but over the long term, women have consistently earned between about 50 and 80 percent of what men earn for the same work.

So check this out: According to recent statistics reported by the Department of Labour, New Zealand women earn 78.9% of men’s average weekly earnings, and 86.7% of men’s average hourly earnings. The graph at right, from Statistics New Zealand, shows patriarchal equilibrium in action*. Over the last few years, men and women both benefited from the country’s economic boom and hourly rates have climbed, but as you can clearly see, the gap between women’s wages and men’s wages has nonetheless remained pretty constant. Now that the boom times are over, there is going to be additional pressure on women’s lower wages. At the same time, the message coming loud and clear from the National government (all naturally rolling in fat pay packets themselves) is that as a nation, pay equity is ‘a luxury we can’t afford’. With the dissolution of the Pay and Employment Equity Unit, those at the bottom of the privilege pile are once again being asked to sacrifice themselves at the altar of economic best interests.

Once upon a time, we Kiwis could be proud of our progressive stance on women’s rights. In 1893, New Zealand became the first self-governing nation in which women won the fight for full suffrage. We’ve had two women Prime Ministers and women have held the posts of chief justice, attorney general and governor-general. But the evidence of a handful of women in senior leadership positions doesn’t nullify the argument that there are still systemic gender-based inequities in our society – although that is what National’s Justice Minister Simon Power tried to suggest this week in the face of criticism from the UN Human Rights Committee.

For those of us who’ve been around the block more than a few times and who have taken to the streets in the past to protest discrimination of all kinds, the disbanding of the Pay and Employment Equity Unit feels like the first shot across the bows. I’m fully expecting to see further retroactive moves. My guess? Restricting access to abortion will soon be back on the agenda in the interests of ‘protecting family values’, while reducing the Domestic Purposes Benefit (for single parents, most of whom are women) and/or tightening the eligibility criteria will be another ideological move made in the guise of ‘reducing government spending in these tough economic times’.

I wonder what the situation is like in other countries. Are you seeing similar retrenchments being made in anti-discrimination and broadly social justice-based programmes under cover of reining in spending in a screwed economy? And for any New Zealanders reading, am I on the money here? If so, what do you think will be next in National’s firing line?

* For more on New Zealand, check out this paper presented at the 2001 Women’s Studies Association Conference. Amongst other things, the authors discuss statistics showing continued under-representation and under-valuing of women in academia and the public sector.

Wednesday Francophilia: Do words create realities?

2009-05-13T22:31:00.013+12:00

It’s Wednesday, so it must be French night. I’ve been doing lessons with the same core group of people for a couple of years now, and we’ve fine-tuned our rota for bringing the wine each week. Tonight, we were pondering the finer points of the conditionnel passé and I admit it, a glass of chardonnay down and my mind was drifting a bit. I was thinking about how when you learn a foreign language, you start to realise how much words really do construct realities and even set limits on the tangible world.

A case in point: In French, the word for ‘wife’ and ‘woman’ is the same – la femme. When you’re listening to someone talk, you have to pay close attention to context to tell which noun is intended and even then it may not be clear. It’s almost as though you can’t be a woman unless you’re a wife. I’m guessing the word itself is the product of a long history in which this was the case, with women only being defined in terms of their relationship to a man. One went from being une fille (both ‘daughter’ and ‘girl’) to being une femme. For men, the case is different. You can be un mari (husband) as well as un homme (man), or you can be the latter while not being the former.

When this difference is embedded deep in the substratum of a society, through its shared language, I can see how it becomes very difficult for women to sever the bonds that have named and defined them exclusively in terms of their relationships to men. I also suspect that the overtly gendered nature of the French language (every noun is either masculine or feminine, le or la) helps produce and reproduce what is a noticeably more gendered society. Sure, this is quite a generalisation and it’s based purely on my own limited observations, but I reckon I’m onto something. What do you think?

I’m fascinated by linguistics, semiotics and post-structural/ deconstructionist theories of language and it doesn’t surprise me that some of the biggest names in these fields were native French speakers – viz. Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault for starters. It’s all hugely complex and intriguing, and I'm loving learning much more about it as my studies in history advance and I become immersed in theory. The freaky thing, though, is that it has completely changed the way I look at the world around me. So many things I used to simply take for granted, I am now picking apart, inverting, subverting and rejecting. What about you? Have you had any of those 'a ha' moments where the theory suddenly starts making sense in the real world and patterns become visible that you never noticed before? Share, s'il vous plait.

'Twilight'? No fangs!

2009-05-11T10:21:00.006+12:00

Well, that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

How can the undead be so unutterably dull? Perhaps hanging around in the Pacific Northwest for a couple of hundred years bleaches you of all personality, as well as of skin colour. But it wasn’t the execrable acting, the lousy pacing or the goofy special effects that bugged me the most about this film. In fact, the cheapo effects actually made for some pretty funny moments, including lead vampire dude speed-running on the end of a cable that made him look like a puppet escapee from Team America.

What bothered me most was a barely hidden subtext about the dangers of female sexuality, although I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me as the author is apparently a big-time God-botherer. For what feels like hours, the two protagonists brood at each other and force themselves to resist temptation. Naturally, the human female is weaker and is all ‘damn the torpedoes, let’s go for it’, and vampire-bloke proves his superiority by manfully resisting her. The wages of sin in this case is not just death, but un-death (and losing your mortal soul along with your purity ring). This subtext is even less subtle on the book, which has cover art depicting a woman’s hands hold a shiny red apple. Yes, Eve, we all know what that means.

The other thing that disturbed me was when vampire-dude admitted he’d been hanging out in his girlfriend’s bedroom every night watching her sleep. She seems to think this is sweet. I think it’s stalking. When this sort of creepy male behaviour is portrayed to millions of adolescent girls as normal and even desirable, it’s no wonder they have problems reporting harassment and stalking until things get extreme.

A wicked winter storm is howling through here this evening, so I think I’ll expunge Twilight from my brain with a dose of real vampire action: Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic Dracula, washed down with an appropriately rich, dark and spicy Peter Lehmann shiraz.

Lessons for girls, or why I hate Disney

2009-05-09T17:18:00.009+12:00

There has been a great discussion over at Historiann's place this week on anger, and society’s implicit messages that anger is not an appropriate emotional outlet for women. As Historiann pointed out:

Girls are subjected to an impressive load of anti-anger propaganda. Snow White and Cinderella, at least in the mid-century modern Disneyfied versions we’re stuck with today in U.S. popular culture, are both specifically praised for remaining sweet and good-natured in spite of the fact that they’re turned into indentured servants by their stepmothers.

The lesson for girls? Forget Disney’s parade of simpering cheerful victims. It’s okay – hell, it’s healthy! – to get angry (though generally, it’s not okay to punch people or kick them in shins, tempting as that might be at times). Now I personally don’t have too much of a problem expressing my anger, but it does my head in that the response I often get is not acknowledgement that this may be a valid reaction to the situation at hand, or even rational argument to counter the reasons for my anger, but patronising advice to ‘just calm down’ and ‘don’t get hysterical’. This generally results in me becoming more spitting mad, because it is an obvious silencing tactic – whether deliberately deployed or not – that ignores or invalidates whatever I have to say and denies me my voice.

Disney also taught us that nice girls always do what they’re asked to and never say no. Did Cinderella ever say ‘take your chimney cleaning rag and stick it where the sun don’t shine’? No, I didn’t think so. For me, learning to say no has been a tougher lesson than being okay with anger, and it’s one I still haven’t fully mastered.

I succumbed again yesterday when I agreed to do an urgent task for someone at work, derailing my own research plans to start ploughing through the 21 books I have lined up to read in the next couple of weeks. I could legitimately have said no – I’m engaged to work three days a week at this company and today wasn’t one of my days, plus I didn’t have the information I needed readily to hand. But the words ‘sure, no problem’ were out of my mouth instinctively before my brain had even fully engaged with the request. I don’t begrudge the person who asked, as he is often the first person to offer help to others, but in hindsight it does strike me as disturbing that it didn’t even occur to me that saying no was an option until it was too late. I was never a fan of Disney’s ‘princess stories’ even as a kid, so it seriously pisses me off that some of those twisted Disney values have managed to weasel their way into my subconscious anyway.

Gendering public space: Battle is joined online

2009-05-07T09:48:00.013+12:00

Gendered control of public space has long functioned as a way of marginalising women and enforcing hierarchical power structures that privilege the masculine. In medieval Europe such control was often institutionalised, with town regulations dictating curfews while sumptuary laws imposed regulations on women’s clothing. The overt threat of rape and other forms of sexual violence was also used to deter women from going out in public without a male escort – usually a husband, father or brother who had legal and moral authority over them.

We might think, ‘phew, thank god we’ve moved on from those bad old days’, but this article makes me wonder (yet again) how much that is really the case. Linked on Digg, Fast Company’s story about the most influential women in Web 2.0 drew comments from the dismissive (“there are no women on the web”) to the outright hostile, with crude sexualised insults being the order of the day. The aspect that bothered me most was the barely veiled masculinised aggression, the attitude that ‘this is OUR space and if you women dare to tread here, you will get what you deserve’.

I’m tempted to say Digg represents the atypical views of an insular community of techy geeks who are externalising fears about their own sexual and social inadequacy, but I don’t think it’s as simple or as isolated as that. I’ve seen this type of behaviour on a number of blogs I frequent run by women historians (for example, the excellent Historiann: History and sexual politics 1492 to the present). It seems that simply stating one is a feminist is an intolerable provocation for the men (presumably, from their screen names) that occasionally turn up there not to engage in reasoned, intelligent debate, but to insult and bully in an attempt to silence.

How did this happen? It seems that in the virtual public space of the twenty-first century, women are having to fight the same old battles to be heard, to be respected, to be taken seriously and to be safe from sexual harassment and aggression that we have had to fight over centuries in the real world. At first, the realisation depressed me. But depression was quickly superseded by rage. The web and its new crop of social media tools offer enormous promise to promote human rights across national borders and to give the voiceless a place to speak out. But this promise isn’t going to be realised if we back down in the face of aggression - whether overt or implicit - from those who would seek to replicate in the virtual world the same inequities and barriers that we are struggling to dismantle in the real world. If as a female, you’ve met with this type of silencing tactic online, I’d be interested in hearing about your experience. And regardless of your political position or your gender, if you witness this sort of behaviour being used to try to exclude people from a virtual public space, don’t let it pass unchallenged.

Done, done, and I'm onto the next one

2009-04-30T19:27:00.003+12:00

That research essay I was sweating over? It’s done. After a final few days tweaking down to the exact word I wanted in the exact place in this sentence just here. Oh, and cutting a good thousand-plus words – I always write way too long and my dump file for this essay could have been another in itself. The whole process of re-writing and final editing seemed oddly… organised this time, though. I actually had time to get through four drafts. The first two were pretty choppy, but the second two were really in the world of refining ideas and crystallising the argument structure, not the initial ‘how the hell am I going to make sense out of all this??’.

I think I’m finally starting to really internalise the advice to ‘write early and often’. Normally, I’d do ALL the reading and research, and make ALL the notes first. Then I’d go back through the big pile of notes to start outlining the essay. But this time, I’ve been making notes in a Word document as I go along, sketching out the main planks for my argument (and noting what sort of evidence I need to support them and where in my big pile of notes I’ll find it), and also collecting particularly good quotes and points that I may want to develop. So, when it came time to write the first draft, I already had something of an outline to work with and I could immediately see which parts were going to be worth keeping and expanding, and which were going to get jettisoned.

So, it’s finished and I even had a couple of days in hand to do the final fiddly bits like checking all my references were properly formatted and that I’d included everything I needed to in the bibliography. Now it’s been handed in, I go into ‘doubt’ mode. Yes, I wake up in the night thinking was my argument clear enough on that point?’ and ‘oh crap, maybe that bit I jettisoned was actually really crucial’.

To take my mind off things for a few days before I move on to the next one (British Marxists or the Annales school – I haven’t quite decided yet as I find both groups really interesting), I am doing my usual little ‘junk food for the mind’ indulgence. Yes, for the rest of this week, it’s going to be OK magazine and some crap-ass reality TV. I admit that last night, I even watched ‘Rock of Love’ with Bret Michaels! Thank god for C4, MTV and the E! Channel.