Early Modern Notes

Natalie at Philobiblon yesterday posted a little nugget she’d come across in her reading:

the case of Mary Lady Broughton, “widow” and “Keeper of the Gatehouse Prison” (in Westminster). On 29 August 1670 she was accused of “wittingly and wilfully” suffering Thomas Ridley, who was in her custody on the charge of stealing a silver cup worth 25 shillings, to escape.

(I could just note that being accused of ‘negligently’ allowing prisoners to escape, with fines if convicted, was an occupational hazard of being a gaoler - or a constable - in the seventeenth century. But I digress.)

Anyway, as I commented to Natalie, I wondered if her ‘Mary Lady Broughton’ might just be related to the ‘Dame Mary Broughton’ of Marchwiail in Denbighshire, who was accused, with her two sons, of assault in Denbighshire in 1683. Natalie, unfortunately had only the bare details of the case and didn’t know anything more about Mary Broughton, the keeper of the Gatehouse Prison (ie, at the Tower of London)* - this was just an incidental snippet she came across while researching her main interest: “the Gatehouse in an earlier period, from 1633 when Lady Eleanor Davies was imprisoned there, but I know the jailer then was one Aquila Weekes".

But (says I, getting very excited, but remember I am a history nerd) - one of Dame Mary’s sons was called Aquila Wykes/Wickes!

And a little genealogical googling revealed quite quickly that the Gatehouse gaolkeeper of 1633 was Mary Broughton’s (nee Knightley) first husband and she did indeed take over running the prison after his death - and (ah, how romantic) her second husband Sir Edward Broughton was one of her Royalist prisoners just before the Restoration.

But a bit more to come. The Aquila Weekes who was running the Gatehouse in the 1630s wasn’t the first man of that name to have the job - his father Aquila Weekes/Wykes senior had done it before him, and was the gaoler there when Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned just before his execution… So we have a family ‘dynasty’ running this prison for a large part of the seventeenth century (obscured by Mary’s remarriage and change of name). She died during the 1690s; I don’t know at what point she gave up the post or whom it was passed on to after that. Maybe Google would come up with more if I dig a bit further (in the Journal of the House of Lords in 1675 the keeper of the Gatehouse prison was required to take a prisoner into ‘his’ custody, but that might be just convention…).

I think that I’ve come across references to the post of gaoler being handed down in families before; and I’ve certainly found a widow taking over from her deceased husband (but only temporarily rather than the decades Mary must have been in charge at the Gatehouse). But I can’t think right now of scholarly work - books, or even substantial chunks of books, or articles - specifically on early modern gaolers. Anybody know of anything?

And I would probably never have known about this set of connections to the Dame Mary Broughton I came across in the Denbighshire court records if it hadn’t been for Natalie blogging about this tiny piece of information that had caught her eye…

…

*Correction: My London geography is useless, but that’s no excuse for getting these prisons mixed up. The Tower of London page came up when I googled the Gatehouse, and Raleigh was on the list, so… The Gatehouse was a small prison in Westminster - as I’d already noted, in fact. D’oh.

Everybody’s (still) talking about Stephen Greenblatt’s book on Will Shakespeare…

Leonardo da Vinci gets some attention too…

And then there are the passions of Raphael…

Is there anything new to say about Horatio Nelson and Trafalgar? Apparently, yes…

Catch up on Arrival Day and Jewish history in America…

David Starkey gets mellow in his old age? Whatever next…

Or you could reflect on why campus novels are so much more interesting than the real thing…

Or be charmed by an interview with Philip Pullman…

.
Meanwhile, I’m galloping through Tamburlaine Must Die (liking it, but The Cutting Room was better), with some Minette Walters and Josephine Tey lined up to go… Or maybe I’ll be more serious and dip into The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500-1850…

And nearly forgot this article on the Scottish Enlightenment

I rounded up some of the bulls. I took the photo. I couldn’t resist sharing it with you.

I think my old housemate still has some more of these too. We did like this wine a lot. (In fact, we were drinking it when we decided to get a house together. That was an… interesting evening.)

And I know it’s not Friday, but I don’t care. Now I’m going to watch the OC and West Wing on the video for the rest of the evening.

Ralph Luker has commented on historical insults v. blogging insults over at Cliopatria, and put up some links for those wishing to emulate Shakespeare et al in the finer art of insult. Thought you might like to know that I have dug out the sexual slander files from my MA dissertation and will hopefully transfer them into a database to play with, so I may bring you more before long…

I love Spanish food. I mentioned last week that I enjoy Mediterranean cooking, but if I had to pick one country’s food and drink, it would be Spain.

Because of…

(more…)

This particular painting at the V & A Encounters exhibition caught my attention, and I have to take issue with the curators on this one:

Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match , Johan Zoffany, Lucknow 1784
(Note: this should now open in a new window so you can easily switch between the image and my scintillating prose…)

According to the label, in “Europe cockfighting was considered cruel”. Thus, the painting represents “part of the racy and relaxed lifestyle of many Europeans in India”. It would seem that the V & A has directly lifted this from the Tate (which owns the painting), so I’m not entirely blaming the V & A for this. And if anything the Tate’s commentary is worse. (Or, let’s say, there’s an interesting difference of nuance in which the Tate’s tone is distinctly more moralising…)

This picture shows an unruly sporting event at the court of the Nawab (governor) of Oudh in northern India. It highlights the looser moral codes of colonial life. In Britain, cockfighting was frowned on as cruel, but in colonial India the ‘normal’ rules of morality did not apply.

It would be accurate to say that some late eighteenth-century Europeans considered cockfighting (and other activities such as bullfighting and bearbaiting) cruel, and that it was increasingly controversial. It was still extremely popular, however. The Europeans depicted in the painting could easily have attended cockfights at home, certainly in major cities like London.

Some may have had mixed feelings about them. James Boswell apparently attended one that lasted for more than an hour in December 1762. He wrote that he felt sorry for the cocks; but nonetheless he went, and stayed to watch (see the article by Tobias Hug). But even ambivalence was not a new feature of the later eighteenth century. (And not all of the controversy was about ‘cruelty’; for many opponents, it was the disorderly behaviour of the audience that was to be most abhorred.) It’s clear that cockfighting remained a popular activity in Britain, across the social spectrum, until the nineteenth century: see this article (I will try to look for more references online and at home this weekend).

So the museums’ interpretation of the painting make no sense. It seems to be quite simply anachronistic; reading the painting through a nineteenth-century (and later) lens, not a contemporary one. Indeed, it might be possible to invert the reading in some ways: cockfighting would in fact have been something familiar and immediately recognisable to Europeans amidst the unfamiliar sights and sounds of Indian society and culture - so the painting might be taken to highlight similarities rather than contrasts.

Besides, can we really assume that European visitors took none of the controversy over cockfighting with them when they went out to India? You can’t really see the detail at this scale, but I wasn’t convinced that all of the Europeans in the painting were equally enthusiastic about being there. And look at them, huddled together under their canopy. One or two have ventured forward slightly to speak to the fat man handling the bird on the right; but the only one who can be said to fully enter into the spirit of things is Colonel Mordaunt (the man in white) himself.

The view that Europeans in India led a ‘racy and relaxed lifestyle’ with ‘looser moral codes’ than at home may be accurate, but this particular painting cannot justifiably be utilised to illustrate it. I don’t know how the painting should be interpreted; it intrigues me, but I’m not an art historian; and I don’t know that much about eighteenth-century India either. It may have come to mean that to later generations. But, for the time at which it was painted, I do know as a social historian of Britain that what the V & A and the Tate were trying to tell me simply won’t wash.

Update
I now have my copy of Keith Thomas’ splendid book Man and the natural world: changing attitudes in England 1500-1800 in front of me (mainly ch. 4). It can be argued that there was a growing social divide over this one (in Britain anyway): opposition to cruel sports and pastimes was by the end of the eighteenth century ‘the orthodoxy of the educated middle classes’; but it would seem that the plebs and the gentry alike felt differently about it (Thomas sees a parallel between opposition to animal sports and to the aristocratic duel). Cockfighting lasted longer than some (such as badger-baiting, bull-baiting or bear-baiting) ‘because it could be defended as the spontaneous expression of the birds’ natural instincts’. Cockpits did not become illegal until the 1830s, and cockfighting was banned outright in England and Wales in 1849 - though not until 1895 in Scotland.

All of which adds to my feeling that there are much more interesting things waiting to be said about the meanings of Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, and how the painting might have contributed to British/European ideas about India - both at the time it was painted and subsequent developments.

And Welsh connections…
By the way, one of the most popular forms of cockfighting was known as the ‘Welsh Main’, a ‘knockout’ competition. There is an article by Iorwerth Peate about cockfighting in Wales (I can supply the full reference for anyone interested). There were cockpits throughout Wales, and the old Denbigh cockpit is one of the exhibits at the Museum of Welsh Life.

Until mid-November, an exhibition of nineteenth-century French political caricatures in the Long Room, Trinity College, Dublin. To mark the recent acquisition of the Glucksman Collection of 750 hand-coloured caricatures covering the period 1798 to 1830 (about 300 on Napoleon), the exhibition features aspects of the Emperor’s career. One of the collection’s most striking features is that the caricatures all bear manuscript annotations by the anonymous compiler, which give some explanation of the context and occasionally give the writer’s personal opinions. (Which is always fun, no?)

Admission includes viewing the Old Library and the Book of Kells exhibition. Opening hours: Monday to Saturday 9.30am to 5pm, Sunday 12noon to 4.30pm. Admission rates: adults 7.50 euros, students and OAPs 6.50 euros (group discounts, and school groups accompanied by teachers go free).

What is wrong with this map of the British Isles?

If you’re not sure, read this.

Well, the people at the Eurostat Yearbook 2004 didn’t know. So you wouldn’t be alone.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Thanks to sepoy for the email with the original tip off…

Yesterday I took a day off work and went to see the V & A’s current exhibition Encounters: the meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800. “It explores”, we are promised, “how East and West perceived and represented each other and how the appeal of the exotic shaped both cultures.”

And that promise is kept well. Half of what’s presented here will be quite familiar to many Europeans with even a passing interest in history: the porcelain, the textiles, carved ivory, lacquerware and all the other beautiful goods that were brought to Europe; the missionaries; the men of the eighteenth century (like William Fullerton) who went to India and embraced the sub-continent’s culture (and women…) in a way that (as we’re reminded) became in the nineteenth century impossible for imperialist governors to imagine.

It’s the other half that makes the exhibition something different, something special: where, for once, we learn what ‘they’ thought of ‘us’. In China and Japan at least, the answer is frequently: not a great deal. Europeans were barbarians; the Japanese called the Portuguese ‘nankan-jin’ (southern barbarians), and depicted them as comic figures with big noses (and even bigger trousers). There is a laugh-out loud seventeenth-century Japanese print mocking the sexual prowess (and smell) of the Dutch male, too. Some of it strangely made me think of modern European attitudes towards America and Americans, our stereotypes of brash, unsophisticated Yanks (even as the USA emerged as the world’s most important political, economic, cultural power).

Europeans are clearly depicted as marginal and inferior in several of the paintings (this, for example. But Chinese disdain was perhaps best expressed in a poem on a wall hanging depicting Lord Macartney’s (not very successful) trade embassy to Beijing in 1793, and commenting on the gifts the envoys had presented to the emperor:

… While they appear ordinary their hearts are good and true
Yet their gifts are not precious but curiosities, whose subtleties have been exaggerated…

One of the gifts was a telescope. Later in the exhibition, there is another telescope, from just a few years earlier, that was also a gift to Chinese rulers, though this time in Canton (Guangdong) province. The second one is accompanied by a label claiming that it “demonstrates how much European technical novelties were prized at the imperial court”. But the object itself cannot tell us how it was received. The words of the poem surely should warn against any simple notion that merely because powerful people accept gifts, they ‘prize’ them (except as symbols of power). The exhibition is at its best, rather, when it gives us the (translated) words (and images) created by these people, so unfamiliar to us in time and place – which it does, powerfully, again and again.

There is the beautiful scroll, from China again and dated 1781-5, showing a man and woman from each of a range of countries or ethnicities. A translation of the commentary for the picture of the British couple was provided: British men “are commonly dressed in wool and flannel and like drinking.” (The man carries a bottle.) “Women, before marriage, bind their waists to make them narrow.” And: “Some people carry a snuff bottle in a little bag made of golden threads.” (!)

Accuracy is hardly always the overriding concern of representations of the ‘Other’ on either side of these encounters. Nonetheless, that snuff bottle detail surely comes from first-hand observation (and, after all, ‘some’ is a pretty elastic quantity…). And eighteenth-century British men commonly did like drinking, though whether they were worse than any other European males is of course another matter. Yet the roll was perhaps most striking for its overall effect, all these couples beautifully pictured (but who were they meant to be? I longed for more information, not just on the British pair), and the interest in ‘other’ peoples suggested by the roll – in contrast, perhaps, to European stereotypes of Chinese ‘insularity’.

Conversely we learn how Chinese maps not only placed China at the centre of the world but contained little information about anywhere beyond China’s borders. We’re starting to see the complexity and diversity of possible attitudes. And there was one picture that was for me startling and intriguing. It’s an eighteenth-century Japanese portrayal of three scholars, Japanese, Chinese and European, at a table. The Japanese scholar is at the centre; he is sitting close to the European on his right; the Chinese scholar is set apart from them. In this view, then, Japanese intellectuals (at least) considered themselves to have more in common with westerners than with their own neighbours.

Mutual fascination and ambivalence was really the key theme of the exhibition. Regional variety, too, was emphasised; for example, the way in which Japan and China regulated and restricted the movements of Europeans, kept them at arms-length, compared to the much freer interactions permitted in India. Like Guardian’s reviewer, though, I wondered just how far any of these interactions went:

as with present-day globalisation, it is hard to marvel at the free flow and consumption of diverse commodities and artefacts without wondering whether they advanced understanding and sympathy across nations and cultures at the same time.

(By coincidence, Another Damned Medievalist asked the same question at Blogenspiel very recently.) Interest, fascination even, does not necessarily entail either sympathy or understanding. As I suggested already, there can be some dissonance between the positive, optimistic story – of ‘fluidity’, of mutual exchange and enrichment – that the V & A wants to tell us through the cultural artefacts, and what those artefacts themselves frequently say or portray.

The exhibition largely steers clear of issues of imperialism, racism, exploitation; the message is that these are features of the nineteenth century. Well, yes, it’s not hard to see that there were enormous differences between the situation in (say) 1650 and that of 1850. But there is little sense of how relations or attitudes developed over the centuries, especially during the eighteenth century (in part, perhaps, because a chronological framework was deliberately eschewed in favour of a thematic one). The final section of the exhibition, ‘Exchanges’, presents ‘Europe in Asia’ and ‘Asia in Europe’; it’s packed with artefacts, mostly eighteenth century. The contrast was perfectly clear: the Europeans imported from Asia all those luxury goods, beautiful and often purely decorative things – unless and until they could manage to copy them more cheaply at home (such as cotton fabrics); from Europe, Asians imported technology. Maps and guns. That disparity – given the eighteenth-century emphasis – seemed to signify, disturbingly, just how things were, indeed, changing and how soon Asian political autonomy would be under threat (even in those countries that were not formally colonised).

Perhaps the exhibition shouldn’t be criticised for not dwelling on the development of European imperialism, when it spends so much time looking through the eyes of those who were later on the receiving end. For, if that splendidly condescending verse of 1793 and other exhibits are anything to go by – though I’m happy to be corrected by the experts if this hardly well-informed judgment is mistaken – Asia did not see European dominance coming either. Perhaps the final message is a melancholy one, despite the up-beat tone of the exhibition. ‘Encounters’ between Europeans and Asians during those three hundred years created many things of astonishing beauty, and for some generated wealth and new opportunities, cultural and economic. But in the end, they did not bring Asia’s political elites understanding of the aggression that the Europeans were increasingly prepared to bring to bear to protect and further their interests in Asia – any more than those encounters taught westerners respect for Asian civilisations and cultures. Each continued to see the other as ‘barbarians’ – and, disastrously, terrifyingly, that barely seems to have changed in the two centuries that have since passed.

Enough for today. I have one or two thoughts raised by particular exhibits, but they can wait for their own posts. If you can get there, this is well worth £8 of your money (I think there are student concessions) and a few hours of your life…

Further notes and resources:
A 2-day conference is to be held on 12-13 November 2004.
Telegraph review (registration required; excerpt at Renaissance weblog)
Exhibition links
East and South-east Asia links here at EMN (sorry, I haven’t got to the Indian sub-continent yet in this series)

Also this exhibition web page: Luxury textiles east and west

After bouncing emails to and fro with the support people at the DNB, our people have told me that the Athens subscription to the DNB hasn’t been finally sorted out yet so no I don’t have remote access, only on campus. So why does the electronic resources web page tell me that I do, then? Thanks a bunch.

(I realise that I should probably consider myself lucky to have this access at all, and be grateful that our university is prepared to invest in so many good, and expensive, online resources - not least the OED and EEBO. I’m just pissed off that this misinformation - or pre-emptive information, shall we say - on the Aber IS website has wasted my time, not to mention the poor sods at the DNB who were getting my cranky emails. And I want DNB! I had a fun blogging idea for it!)

The Little Professor drew my attention to this article by Mark Edmundson, All Entertainment All The Time, and I think I was even more irritated by it than she was. A few main gripes (which partly overlap with hers):

1. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Edmundson was distressed by student evaluations of a class on the works of Sigmund Freud along these lines: “Edmundson has done a fantastic job,” said one reviewer, “of presenting this difficult, important and controversial material in an enjoyable and approachable way.”

So he’d rather his students found it dull and inaccessible, presumably. He goes on to excoriate them for appreciating the ‘enjoyable and approachable’ aspect without once giving any credit for the other part of the comment: this student has understood that Freud is not only ‘difficult’ but also ‘important and controversial’. It doesn’t seem to occur to Edmundson that making difficult subjects ‘enjoyable’ and ‘approachable’ might be a path to better understanding. He also complains that his students failed to “see intellectual work as confrontation between two people, reader and author": doesn’t that one word, ‘controversial’, suggest that they have in fact understood that in some way? (I wonder how the students themselves would feel if they read his entirely negative reaction to their enthusiasm? Just a little hurt?)

2. “Why hadn’t anyone been changed by my course?” I’m basically repeating the LP here, but this really got my goat: how does he know they hadn’t been changed? (Also, if they hadn’t previously understood Freud’s significance and now did, it strikes me that that’s a worthwhile change in itself.)

3. The ‘critique’ of TV.

TV is a tranquilizing medium, a soporific, inducing in its devotees a light narcosis. It reduces anxiety, steadies and quiets the nerves. But also deadens. Like every narcotic, it will be consumed in certain doses, produce something like a hangover, the habitual watchers’ irritable languor that persists after the TV is off. It’s been said that the illusion of knowing and control that heroin engenders isn’t entirely unlike the TV consumer’s habitual smug-torpor, and that seems about right.

Oh, come on. I mix a fair bit with people who research in audience studies (ie, take the trouble to ask the audiences about their responses rather than making patronising and usually snobbish assumptions about them), so I’ve picked up a lot of their irritation at this kind of crass characterisation of the effects of TV (and film) watching. But personal experience should tell us that this kind of generalisation is utter rubbish. Sometimes I watch TV to be soothed and amused. Sometimes I watch it to learn and be stimulated, or provoked and challenged. Sometimes I slump; sometimes I shout at the screen. Haven’t I written here before about why I love good quality TV history?

4. More generally, how about some evidence for all the generalisations? As ever, there are good points to be found somewhere in the mix. But, as the LP says: “Is there some reason why academics bewailing the decline and fall of academia refuse to undertake anything that looks vaguely like the systematic gathering of evidence?” (And I have to continue her line here, because it’s just so irresistible.)

My own skeptical interpretation of such essays, to be honest, is that they are a wonderful way of inflating one’s vita without having to do anything but contemplate the elegantly decorated interior of one’s own hospitable brain. I suspect that this opinion may not make me well-loved in some quarters, but so be it.

Well, dear Little Professor, it makes me love you even more than I did before.

You may remember that I got slightly miffed the other week about some one hotlinking an image on EMR (which has not stopped, by the way, although as that URL no longer points to that image it suggests that they haven’t actually looked at the profile in some time…).

Thanks to misteraitch at Giornale Nuovo, I discovered that it’s in fact quite easy to block hotlinking through my control panel (hadn’t even noticed that there!). So, still being pro-active for the weekend, I have activated Hotlink Protection, which means that no one can hotlink to images on this site - including the blog - unless I specifically allow it.

If you are hotlinking one of my own images (such as the documents) for reasonable, limited educational purposes, and for some reason you aren’t in a position to download a copy to your own server (which I am quite happy for you to do, though with proper credit, please), get in touch to explain and I may well put you on the privileged list.

I fear, however, that the anti-spam may be overdoing it. It has caught one spam comment today, but also a legit one. So if a few of my regular readers would care to send a short comment so we can put it to the test… Update: It’s okay, I know why it did it. But you could always send a message to say Hi anyway…

Quick PS: I managed to forget to enable my own hotlink to the original EMN blog. What an eejit…

I’ve finally started to list at EMR some of the links that I’ve been posting here over the summer - though so far they’ve only got as far as the New Links page. But it’s a start.

Given the size of EMR these days (not to mention the difficulties I often have deciding what pages to put things into, seeing as I try to avoid duplication), I’ve been giving some thought to converting it to a database format (and it occurred to me that it might be possible to adapt WordPress to do it). But I don’t know how much work it would take; I have no idea how many items are listed there now… And I don’t have time to learn PHP and so on from scratch (I’m gradually learning to tinker around the edges, but that’s all), so I would need some kind of database software. Has anyone reading this converted a resource-heavy website like EMR from static HTML to the dynamic database format, with the minimum of techie know-how? Are there any useful ‘how-to’ websites out there? Is it possible to use WP in that way? Or are there better (cheap or free…) programs for that kind of job? This is likely to be a long term project, if it ever happens at all. But I’m starting to think it might work better than the current set up.

Steve asked: what did they do in the seventeenth century for tittle-tattle?

A very good question, although in certain respects the answer would be: pretty much what we do now. A crucial difference in England and Wales (I’m not sure about the Scottish situation?) until the end of the seventeenth century - with an important exception - arises from the strict government controls imposed on the press (and similarly elsewhere in Europe; the idea that freedom of the press was a positive thing did not really emerge until the eighteenth century). This confined presses to London, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as restricting the content of what they could print. (Explicit) criticism of (or scandal about) the government, the monarchy and the church was not allowed. So, although the first English newspapers date from the 1620s, they were slow to develop and not particularly exciting publications (see these pages for an overview and some primary sources; also this and some comments from George Williams). Only with the final lapse of the licensing acts (which was certainly not the end of censorship) in 1695 did the remarkable flowering and diversification of print culture - including news print - that’s such a feature of the eighteenth century really take off.

The important exception, however, was during the civil wars period in the 1640s when, amidst all the political turmoil, the licensing laws lapsed, and there was an explosion of radical, subversive and sometimes scandalous cheap print. Supporters of either side could buy newspapers full of propaganda and scurrilous stories about the enemy in addition to much more serious political and religious pamphlets and texts. For examples: this exhibit; clippings from Mercuris Aulicus (pro-Royalist); the execution of Charles I.

It’s worth adding that despite the restrictions, ‘ephemeral’ literature was already a thriving business in the seventeenth century. Broadsheet ballads on a wide range of topics were bought both to be read - with their striking woodcut prints, they might be pasted on walls like posters - as well as sung. Crime literature is another example (perhaps as old as print itself). It came in two main, though overlapping, forms: a) ‘rogue literature’, filled with stock characters from the ‘criminal underworld’, and ‘criminal lives’ (of highwaymen, pirates etc), which although ostensibly about ‘real’ individuals were often heavily fictionalised, not to say mythologised and stereotyped; and b) pamphlet accounts of sensational crimes and trials (usually murder, witchcraft and the like), in which individual cases were used to illustrate a religious, ‘providentialist’ message (ie, God will always bring heinous crimes to light, no matter how the perpetrators try to hide them and the criminals will in the end see the error of their ways). These would usually (claim to) be based on original legal documents (witness examinations etc), eye-witness trial reports and (sometimes) interviews with the criminals themselves. But that’s a whole topic in itself, so I’ll save it for another time…

Back to scandal. Rather than print, the main written vehicle for scandal, both within neighbourhoods and for the bigger political scene, was probably through manuscript media. ‘Verse libels’ (which could sometimes make it into print) proliferated; they were frequently extremely rude about their victims - scatological and/or sexual - and could land their authors and those who circulated them in trouble with the courts. (Unfortunately, I’m having difficulty at the moment locating any suitable examples. This might have to wait till I get home.)

In fact, our main sources for both written and oral gossip and scandal, neighbourhood slanders and political controversies, are court records. I’ve put up a couple of short examples of both at EMR (unfortunately, no document images for these):

Seditious words

Sexual slander

I’ve written on this blog about seditious words before. You can also read this and find further reading at my crime bibliography and this course bibliography on sedition, riot and popular protest. Adam Fox’s book Oral and literate culture in early modern England also contains a great discussion of how political rumours - and sometimes panics - were spread orally. Indeed, this is an expanding research topic. I have waiting for me at home a copy of The spoken word: oral culture in Britain 1500-1850 (ed. by Fox and Daniel Woolf); a number of chapters in The politics of the excluded 1500-1800 (ed Tim Harris) also focus on this.

Sexual defamation and gossip has been on the historiographical agenda for a little longer - much of it the work of historians concerned with women and/or gender. (I have yet another bibliography for those interested…) The English historians have focused on church court records, which are, believe me, truly wonderful things. (Later, for your delectation, I think I’ll put up some of the York depositions from my MA research, but they’re currently stored on another computer somewhere.) Church courts weren’t simply in the business of disciplining those who transgressed against the church’s authority; a large part of church court business consisted of suits between private individuals. Litigation in the church courts was relatively cheap and easy, and was certainly not confined to the wealthy.

A large proportion of the ‘causes’ or suits were about sexual defamation (if anything, increasingly so as the church courts declined in authority and popularity from the later seventeenth century onwards). That reflected the limits of these courts’ jurisdiction: only slanders that alleged activities that, if true, could lead to a prosecution in the church courts. Slanders alleging secular crimes had to be taken to the secular courts, which could also consider sexual slanders, as you can see from the example I’ve given. ‘Mixed’ spiritual/secular slanders - ‘thou art a thief and a whore’, let’s say - were a grey area, but did often end up in the church courts.

Probably the majority of suits concerned insults (something else I’ve mentioned here on the blog) flung directly at the plaintiff, often in the course of an argument. Others (often the most interesting) centre on reported gossip and sometimes the spread of a rumour can be traced - in pubs and parlours, on the streets and in workplaces. “What news?", apparently, used to be the standard question asked of those joining gatherings. And that’s where things have changed least, including our attitudes to gossip. We disapprove of it; but we do it anyway. It’s destructive of reputations; but it’s also an important form of social glue.

Probably more to be added later, but it’s time for lunch…

This is probably me being anal, but I’m going to be pro-active about the spam comments business, on the principle that it can only get worse and an hour or two put in now may save me a lot of hassle later. So this weekend’s blog housekeeping will include installing some fixes that won’t affect your viewing and commenting pleasure (or make extra work for me; no way am I introducing comment moderation as standard). I’ve already done a couple of easy things in the admin interface. But the main things I have in mind this weekend:

1) there’s apparently a plugin I can install to close comments after a certain period of time (although I haven’t found a link to download it yet…)

2) a little trickery from the WP support forums to keep away autospammers (it involves renaming the comments file, and looks easy enough)

3) try out the comment spam blacklist that I’ve also seen references to

Not that I’ll be able to tell whether any of it works, really; but if anyone has had miraculous results with something that was simple to implement, I’d like to know.

Also: I swear that I recently found an section in the admin interface where you could set how much time has to elapse before a commenter can post a comment (to the same thread) again (the correct term, I now know, is ‘timeout’). But now I can’t find it. Did I imagine it?

And by the way, if you’re getting a lot of email spam from your website (or possibly even from email links in your comments on blogs), I already have something to fix it in use on EMR: the obfuscator. It works: I now get almost no spam to that address. Happy about that.

Update I have done 1 (definitely works) and 3 (hopefully works). Comments will be closed after 30 days; I don’t think I’ve ever had a comment after that length of time! I’m not sure about doing 2, however. If I rename my comments.php file so that spammers won’t recognize it, well, I can’t easily recognise it either, can I? What if I forget what I renamed it to? (I have now done it anyway; it’s still recognisable to me, but should fool a bot.) And for WP’ers out there who are concerned about these things, this page contains all the solutions.

I enjoyed writing yesterday’s foodie post, and I think it’s high time this blog allowed me a regular outlet of frivolity, indulgence and general silliness. But why just on food? So think of yesterday’s scribblings as the inauguration of…

…wherein I shall amuse myself with thoughts on such vital issues as food, footwear, clothing, pop music, trashy fiction and TV, and things that are either fluffy or purple or both - and other topics that might take my fancy and have nothing whatsoever to do with anything ’serious’ or useful. Probably with pictures.

Hee hee.

The October edition of Common-place is out.

There is a nice piece on history and fiction by Suzanne Lebsock, writing of her decision to stick to the ‘facts’, not to make up anything about the history she wanted to tell - despite the frustrations caused by the patchiness of original sources (cf. Ken McGoogan’s justifications for making stuff up when it suited him). There are moments that seem to suggest a slightly naive belief in the neutrality of historical ‘fact’ (vs politicised fiction/spin…); but the excellent point she makes is that sometimes truth can be stranger, more unexpected and implausible (according to stereotyped expectations) than any fiction and that invention may undermine the credibility of those truths. If she invented details, and events, to suit her story, to make her life easier, it could become all too easy for readers to dismiss, for example, the brilliance of a young uneducated black woman in 1895 - on trial for her life and too poor to hire an attorney - vigorously defending herself in a courtroom, cleverly forcing an admission of perjury from a witness.

Would it not be an option to invent some small details: the color of Pokey’s dress, for example, or the tilt of her hat? My sense is that if historians want to be believed on the big things, we should exercise care on the little ones. Had I concocted something unusual about the courthouse itself–say, the unique outdoor staircase that led to the courtroom on the second floor–why would a reader buy my account of Pokey Barnes’s performance in that same courtroom? I might have attempted to add drama by matching the weather to the mood, tossing in the occasional dark and stormy night, for instance. But then why should readers believe that men whose class and color qualified them as “rednecks” risked their lives to prevent their black neighbors from being lynched?

Anne G Myles considers the modern resonances of early modern Barbary captive narratives; Paul Heinegg and Henry B Hoff find free African Americans in colonial America; Michelle L Craig reports on the difficulties and rewards of archival research in Dominica. Among other things.

Go see for yourself.

I’ve decided to indulge myself by blogging about food from time to time. Not rants about the food industry, just what I’ve been up to in the kitchen lately and my favourite foods (and drinks). It’s not for dieters or those of you trying to feed families on minuscule budgets (so I’ll always give you the choice of whether to read on or not); I know very well that I’ve joined the ranks of those with the luxury of choice. Which is why this is such an indulgence.

There will be plenty of a) cheese and butter; b) olive oil; c) sausages; d) fresh veg and potatoes (among other things). But not a) ready meals (except the kind I made myself earlier); b) dieting and calorie counting; c) margarine (yuck); d) sugary stuff. Too many trips to the deli, but not many to the cake shop. (My favourite foods are nearly all savouries.) I’m not the world’s greatest cook, but I do like cooking as long as it stays fairly simple and doesn’t need weighing out and elaborate fussing over. So there may be a few recipes, but nothing fancy.

Want to come into my larder?

(more…)

Oxford University Press is pleased to announce plans to publish a major six-volume reference work entitled the African-American History Reference Series. The work’s nearly 2500 articles have been carefully selected by a distinguished group of editors and advisers and will cover all aspects of African-American history and culture… Far more than just a biographical survey, each volume focuses on the age, the times, the events, and the people who affected the life of the central figure (and who were in turn affected by that central figure) and the development of African-American history and culture during the period.

We are currently finishing up the assignment of entries for Volumes One and Two:

THE COLONIAL WORLD AND THE YOUNG NATION, Volume 1, edited by Graham Russell Hodges.

This volume focuses on the making of African American society in early America. The transition from Africa to America is covered as well as and the way an African presence shaped the development of American society…

THE WORLD OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, Volume 2, edited by Paul Finkelman and L. Diane Barnes.

This volume covers the important events in African American history during the nineteenth century, spanning Douglass’s life…

These are the wanted topics of interest to early modernists:

Africa, Idea of (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 2,000 words
Antiquity (Vol. 1: 1619-1830) 3,000 words
Demographics (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 3,000 words
Economic Life (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 3,000 words
Education (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 4,000 words
Emancipation (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 1,000 words
Folklore (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 2,500 words
Language (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 2,000 words
Oratory and Verbal Arts (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 2,000 words
Segregation (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 1,500 words
Slave Narratives (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 2,000 words

There is a very tight deadline, 22 October 2004. The contact for those interested in contributing is Anthony Aiello at anthony.aiello@oup.com or 212-726-6144, who will provide further information if required. ("Please include a copy of your resume or CV in anyemail correspondence, and be prepared to do so if contacting Mr. Aiello by phone.")

I’ll also keep the original email in my inbox for a few days in case anybody would like me to forward a copy to them… (It has more detail about the contents and vulgar things like payment. And also the 19th-century topics, for anyone interested.)