Early Modern Notes

Caleb - many thanks - pointed me to this beautiful blog. (It is a little slow to load on my dialup connection, but worth the wait.) Go see lots of wonderful pictures and writing (there is an unmissable post on books and reading…).

And make sure you stop by at Caleb’s blog. Some outstanding meditations on book stores, reading, ‘climates of opinion’ and war lately…

A couple of interesting things for you today. First up, from Renaissance Weblog, a link to this interesting article on the role played by glass in the ‘transformation’ of Europe between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, written by Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin.

Often in history, we witness the generation of new knowledge through experimentation, which then leads to significant innovations and a richer appreciation of new or improved physical artifacts. These artifacts, if they are useful, in demand, and relatively easy to produce, are often disseminated in large quantities. These objects then change the conditions of everyday life and may fund further theoretical explorations. Such artifacts can do this in two ways: by generating wealth that funds increased efforts to acquire fresh knowledge and by providing better tools for scientific enquiry.

Secondly, sort of relevant to my post last week on Carnival and the carnivalesque, the vernacular body has a (very free, apparently) translation and some thoughts on the fifteenth-century Dutch poem, Het Luilekkerland.

Hot women! Virgins!
Wham and bam and thank you ma’am.

It’s not sinful or scandalous,
that’s just the way it’s done here.

What a spread: white linens,
with bread aplenty and wine galore.
Fish treats, meat snacks too:
Each man to his fancy.

Eating and drinking the whole day long,
and laughing is so important that
it’s practically the national hobby.

Nice place, uh?

And get this: it rains three times a day,
with custard tarts, smoked eels
and meat pies tumbling out of the sky!

elck comments that this imagery “is particularly poignant in the third quarter of the sixteenth-century in Flanders, a time of war, conflict and famine", but is none too keen on the “utopias, paradise, pie-in-the-sky, fountains-of-youth and cloud-cuckoo-lands” of literature such as this. “I detest all such places, in theory and in practice, for in their name, atrocities are committed and, just as bad, the many wonders of our flawed quotidian world fly by unlooked for and unnoticed.” Maybe. I’m not so sure that the topsy-turvy Land-of-Cockaigne world of Het Luilekkerland is really that much like the heavenly after-lives offered to us as rewards for religious faith (not all of which include inexhaustible supplies of virgins). A comment to the post says: “One aspect of the Land of Cockaigne that you failed to mention strikes me as more important than its cornucopia aspect, and that is its definition as impossible. Everything is upside-down and backwards.” It’s anarchic, beyond normal control. And we can’t spend all of our mental lives in this everyday world… as elck, creator of one of the most creative, poetic blogs I have the pleasure to read, surely knows?

Quick update before going to bed: Make that three things. Chapati Mystery has posted about the history (and future?) of cricket, including some links to early rules of the game, pre MCC, and its greatest future challenge: the USA.

They don’t seem to have the attention span of the rest of the known universe. So while everyone from Malaysia to Canada can play the ODI in the version that it stands, the Americans cannot be bothered. Hence, there is talk of a shorter version of test cricket. But the bigger lure for the Americans is an even shorter version of the ODI called Twenty20 [with cheerleaders and names like Tigers, Foxes and Dragons]. Greg Chappell wants to give cricket ” a face-lift, or at least a dash of botox, to give it some freshness.” Which means, shorter run-ups, funkier field placements and, maybe, more cheerleaders. W.G. Grace is spinning in his grave.

Here it is, just in time for the weekend: some of the best blog writing out there on early modern related topics, from late June (so I cheated slightly…) to the end of August. What a talented bunch.

Early in July, George H Williams was to be found in the Methodist archives in Manchester, taking in the bands, scrapping with lamp posts and sharing his research discoveries and questions with his readers. He was intrigued by the marginalia in an eighteenth-century bible, and what they revealed about its owner’s (a Methodist preacher) reading habits. And he mused on a situation familiar to many historians: so many sources, so little time…

The challenge, of course, is relatively limited time. I could research until the end of time, always finding a need for new information. But the fact is that I am here in England for only so long, and I only have so many years to work before I have to have produced enough published material to make tenure…

Miriam Jones of Scribblingwoman also paid a visit to Britain in July (although some might say that she seemed most interested in taking pictures of the local fauna and flora) Shortly before her trip, however, she found time for some seventeenth-century theatre. She disagreed vehemently with critics of the performance of Molière’s Le malade imaginaire. Too ‘dark’? Not if they understood the play’s own history.

We cannot now think of Le Malade imaginaire apart from the knowledge that the playwright was ill as he wrote it, that he himself played Argan, that he was so weak that he barely made it through the fourth night, and that he died shortly after. How can any actor playing Argan rail against the blindness of doctors and the pain inflicted by their treatments … for laughs?…

And now for our token medievalist: at Blogenspiel, Another Damned Medievalist has some forceful things to say about the use and abuse of the F-word. ADM is concerned, moreover, that this is symptomatic of wider problems in the teaching and understanding of history, not just medieval history but a far more recent past served up to us by politicians.

What I dread is that I will get these students… and will have to fight tooth and nail to explain to them that the ‘F’ word isn’t what they’ve learned, and instead is many things and nothing in particular. I’ll have to explain the nuances of historiographic debate, and then go into much longer and more complex examples from England, West Francia, East Francia, France, and Germany (not to mention various Spanish kingdoms and Portugal), over a very long period, to demonstrate that what they think of as Feudalism never actually existed in the way it’s been explained…

(I feel perfectly justified in including this because a) it’s great and b) when do you think that alleged ‘transition’ from Feudalism to Capitalism is supposed to take place, if not during the early modern period?)

Konrad Lawson at Muninn, meanwhile, was thinking about some myths of Japanese history, again highlighting the importance of good history teaching.

I took a great seminar on the history of the Chûshingura… (the famous Japanese saga of the revenge of the 47 ronin) with Henry D. Smith at Columbia 2 years ago. We focused mostly on the imaginative potential of a historical event and the many fascinating ways that this event has moved through Japanese culture since the early 18th century…

Nathanael D Robinson at Cliopatria, too, explores some myths, this time back in the USA. Now, one might not immediately bracket together California and early modern history, but he took us on a fascinating tour of its late-eighteenth century origins and the subsequent legends.

The myth, of course, is that of Catholic missions and Father Junipero Serra: a Franciscan who was sent to establish a firm Spanish presence in Alta California against the encroachment of British and Russian traders and to Catholicize the natives. The mission were outposts whereat Europeans and natives coexisted. They were the basis for the settlement of California…

Moving on to art history, Claire at Fenland (17th century as was) found us some gorgeous online resources in her own specialist area, seventeenth-century portrait prints. Portraits of ambassadors from Java to the court of Charles II offered us unexpected insights into European political rivalries of the time. She was curious, too, about the meanings of some of the prints she’d found.

I would be interested to learn more about the iconography of this Dutch print of Oliver Cromwell. Do the horns suggest that he is a cuckold? What is the significance of the owl in the dark (?) glasses? Is it wisdom blinded or have I got it completely wrong? What do you think?…

From Mr H’s Giornale Nuovo, beauty and entertainment in equal measure, with the sixteenth-century ‘Book of Drolleries’. “Drolleries are decorative thumbnail illustrations which adorn the margins of certain manuscripts, often depicting fanciful or grotesque hybrid creatures.” The post abounds with images of these delightful, er, beasts as well as links to learn more.

Art historians online have plenty to keep them amused. Brandon at Siris was, however, somewhat vexed at the lack of substantial online resources for early modern philosophy.

Looking at these four figures, Cockburn, Astell, Norris, and Campbell has reminded me of just how little one can glean from the internet in philosophy. To be sure, this is not entirely surprising. Philosophy is, after all, the Infinite Field of Study…

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber asked an intriguing question (taken up by scribblingwoman with a couple of nice links, by the way): is blogging comparable to the early modern coffee-house culture?

Sennett is writing about the eighteenth century coffee-house as a place where people could escape from their private lives, reinventing themselves, and engaging in good conversation with others, regardless of their background or their everyday selves. They could assume new identities, try out novel arguments usw…

And Natalie at Philobiblion comments that women were to be found in those coffee houses more often than some theorists have assumed.

An excellent article in the journal The Seventeenth Century suggests that working-class women, at least, often went into coffee shops, while middle-class women might well have done this, in addition to using them to transact business just as the men did… Of course women could be there for other reasons: “There being scarce a Coffee-House but affords a Tawdry Woman, a wanton Daughter, or a Buzome Maide, to accommodate Customers …”

For myself (sometimes wanton though never buxom), I wondered if blogging verges on the carnivalesque.

So there you have it: from medieval England and France to eighteenth-century Japan via California, amidst many strange beasties (and that’s just the bloggers, no doubt), this has been the first ever early modern blog carnival. And, I hope, not the last.

Brandon’s philosophy resources blog Houyhnhnm Land is now settled into its new home (with the help of WordPress). There are recent postings on the 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, Margaret Cavendish, Damaris Cudworth, James Beattie and more (go and look, I can’t be bothered with the links. I’m on holiday, remember?). No, I hadn’t heard of half of them either. But I have now…

I’ve been looking at the Philosophers’ Carnival after noticing Brandon’s references to this and also to the well-established and vigorous Christian Carnivals, and wondering whether there are enough early modernists blogging to put together our own version? It needs a) a range or suitable articles from blogs to include (ie, must focus on historical or historiographical topics, including literary, science, philosophical…) and b) people willing to take turns as hosts. We might not be able to do it fortnightly as the philosophers are planning to do; after all blogging early modernists are still a pretty small group, but I think there’s probably enough going on now to try monthly at least.

If you look at the principles of the Philosopher’s Carnival, you’ll get the idea, and you could think about posts you’ve read or written within the last few months that could be included. E-mail me with suggestions at advertise-with-us@earlymodernweb.org.uk, and if I get enough, I’ll write a ‘tryout’ issue. Equally importantly, I’ll then want other people to pick up the baton. It would be particularly splendid, of course, if there are (or someone would write) any blog articles about early modern carnivals to kick it off… I think we could be wide and inclusive about the chronological framework, by the way.

(And what about a broader Historians’ Carnival? This concept just looks such fun…)

Update: There’s a Carnival of the Cats too! Aahhh…

More:
This seems to be the mummy and daddy of ‘em all: Carnival of the Vanities (includes a list of offspring).

Take note everyone: the marvellously pretty (and informative) Renaissance Weblog is back from summer hols.

Checking out links to EMN at Technorati, I stumbled across a pretty new (July) blog, Philobiblion, that I’m adding to the blogroll (along with some other new additions today). But I wanted to draw your attention to this one since it has lots of medieval and early modern stuff and is fun to read too. Hi Natalie!

Whoops, I’ve just realised that I never created a ‘Blogs’ category. How remiss of me…