Early Modern Notes

There is this unintentionally (I think) hilarious article in the Times Online about swearing. One of my favourite topics!

What makes it funny, first off? All of the swearwords have been asterisked out.

And then, I always have to giggle at people whose line is ‘no, really, I’m not one of those old fogeys who’s offended by swearing. But…’ And the ‘but’ is the old chestnut that swearing is just fine as long as it’s creative and clever and discriminating and suitably restrained and blah blah blah. (Talk about missing the fucking point.)

[I should add at this point that I don’t have problems with people who are genuinely offended by swearing. It’s supposed to be offensive. But if you don’t like swearing, then just be honest about it. This self-righteous ‘yesbuttery’ just gets on my tits.]

And personally I don’t think that someone who came up with the following sentence is all that well placed to lecture anyone else about good language use:

Morrissey, however, is someone who manages to be a lyrical genius without practically ever resorting to swearing.

‘Without practically ever’? Dearie me.

(Did you see how restrained I was there? Do I get points?)

Yes, it’s that time of year again! (And I haven’t written on the topic lately so I’m not bored with it yet.) [Update: but I am bored with looking at it now so most of it’s going under the fold until I think of something new to say.]

The latest diatribe against Mickey Mouse HE courses (pdf) is out, ‘The Non-Courses Report’, produced by a group called the Taxpayers Alliance. And for once, there seems to have been some effort at proper research; not all of the courses listed are full Bachelors level degrees, but they do all seem to be at minimum Foundation degrees or other minimum two year courses. (So at least we’re not talking about another story that finds a single module or one-term course with a wacky title from a minute HE college that doesn’t even award degrees and then shrieks UNIVERSITY DEGREES GOING DOWN THE TUBES!!!)

The report is a fascinating mixture of the sensible, peculiar and shoddy. The authors say they have asked two questions, which sound fairly reasonable: (more…)

The NYT has an interesting article on progress in digitisation of historical sources, and the gaps being left behind (reg. required) (h-t).

It contains an argument, though, that I have some nagging doubts about: that, as more sources are digitised, those which remain available only in the archives will be more neglected than they were before.

Even with outside help, experts say, entire swaths of political and cultural history are in danger of being forgotten by new generations of amateur researchers and serious scholars. …

While the Internet boom has made information more accessible and widespread than ever, that very ubiquity also threatens records and artifacts that do not easily lend themselves to digitization — because of cost, but also because Web surfers and more devoted data hounds simply find it easier to go online than to travel far and wide to see tangible artifacts.

“This is the great problem right now, and it’s a scary thing,” said the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. “The dots are only connected by a few of us who are willing to go to the places to make those connections.”

But only a few of us ever were willing or able to go out there in the first place. Archival research has always been a minority pursuit, given the commitment and resources (including time) it demands. For most sane people, there must be more appealing pursuits.

Is it really the case, though, that the minority will be even smaller in the future because some research can be done without leaving one’s desk? Or is digital history creating large numbers of new researchers who, even if what they’re doing is limited by what’s available online, would never have even contemplated visiting archives or record offices to look at original documents?

I can imagine scenarios in which academics and postgrad students make decisions to restrict research projects (largely) to what they can do at their computer, where they might previously have unwillingly endured research trips. (Though I do find it harder to imagine any historian building a serious academic career entirely based on digital sources.) On the other hand, I can imagine how digital sources are likely to open up new possibilities for scholars whose options were previously narrowly circumscribed by their circumstances, lack of material resources, other personal and professional obligations.

[ETA: Writing that reminded me of something I’d read about Natalie Zemon Davis. The confiscation of your passport (as a suspected Communist) is undoubtedly a more unusual restriction on research travel, although she also faced more familiar problems; the way in which she subsequently made a virtue out of necessity is also well worth reading.]

I can imagine how the priorities of digitisation projects are likely to reinforce the emphasis of much popular history. At the same time, not all digital sources are records of the Great and Good. Far from it. There are now vast swathes of online sources about ordinary people, records which would previously have been accessible only to the chosen crazy dedicated few.

Loss or gain?

A libertarian argues that The left has been infected by the disease of intolerance (as if (a) the left has in the past been some kind of free-for-all, and (b) the right is such a shining beacon of tolerance).

Free speech in British universities is under attack by lefty academics and students because (among other things)

* A student union has banned the Daily Mail
* Another union banned the playing of Eminen records because of the use of words like ‘fags’
* Another one banned Israeli Embassy representatives from speaking there
* And other unions “have banned the sale of Coca-Cola and Kit-Kats in protest at the working practises of their parent companies”.

Since when was eating KitKats an expression of free speech, for chrissakes?

More generally, I don’t see that what any organisation, including a students’ union, decides - especially if based on a vote by the members - to sell or not sell in its own shops has anything to do with freedom of expression. Or that making a decision that might (probably marginally) reduce the profits of major companies like Coca Cola and Nestle has anything to do with intolerance.

From my mailbox today:

Futhark is a new journal dedicated to the publication of scholarly studies based on premodern texts (prior to 1945) from a humanistic perspective, though not necessarily philological.

Dunno, I always thought that ‘premodern’ meant before 1800 or thereabouts.* I suppose it’s inevitable, however established our basic historiographical period conventions may seem right now, that it should be updated and that ‘modern’ is going to be a continually moving target.** (OED: “Of or relating to the present and recent times, as opposed to the remote past; of, relating to, or originating in the current age or period”; “Characteristic of the present time, or the time of writing; not old-fashioned, antiquated, or obsolete; employing the most up-to-date ideas, techniques, or equipment”. Etc, etc. And I don’t even want to start on all the varieties of usage for ‘early modern’.)

But still, anything more than 60 years old is now classified as ‘premodern’?

………

*Not that I’ve ever liked ‘premodern’, I should point out. As an undergrad, I once wrote a fantastically profound snotty and precocious essay mostly about everything wrong with the concept ‘premodern’ (or perhaps it was ‘preindustrial’) - just because the term happened to appear in the essay question. I got away with it, as I recall.

**Well, unless someone somewhere can come up with a new concept to replace it altogether, I suppose (and I mean something less lame than ‘postmodern’).

I’ve been reflecting on what Ahistoricality said in the Carnival of Bad History

…Yes, I’m complaining: the number of independent submissions from the historical blogosphere was pitiful, in spite of the publicity I got from some of the best-read bloggers in the ’sphere. Given the educational potential, political abuses and cultural damage of bad history, I would have thought that they’d be lining up to host and flooding the inbox with submissions. Nope.

I think that [part of] the trouble is that if you’re an even half-way decent blogging historian, you don’t feel that you can just dash off a quick post about the latest spot of Bad History you encountered. You have to go do research: if you’re having a go at someone else’s use of evidence, yours has to be watertight. Mostly you don’t start. Or you write a paragraph and then decide you need to go to the library to check something out (just to be sure), so it sits in your drafts folder for the next six months.

Because you just don’t have the time.

Spot the error in the argument of this post at Crooked Timber on The traditionality of modernity.

I’m trying to remember if this is one that turns up in Fischer’s Historian’s fallacies…

If you don’t get it straightaway, I’ve left a comment there.

So our leader-in-waiting wants Remembrance Sunday to become ‘British Day’, modelled on US Fourth of July celebrations.

All I can say is: he can try to manufacture a national day if he wants, and I’m not opposed in principle (though I’m not convinced it’d work), but he should leave Remembrance Sunday alone. Surely the point is that that’s an international day, a day when we should put nationalism to one side: indeed, when we might do well to reflect on its dark side, the ways in which it’s contributed to conflict and destruction in the modern world.

You know, I fear that we’re going to be subjected to a stream of Tony-ish bright ideas over the next couple of years as Gordon tries to show us that he isn’t really boring after all. Please, please, spare us…

So I read eb’s comments on new forms of online-database serendipity (made in response to this post at Cliopatria).* You might remember that I posted about RSS feeds for e-journals last week. Now, I’ll check out the TOCs for several history journals to which the university has subscriptions, and I make a point of regularly downloading articles that sound interesting and aren’t in my immediate research area. (Right now I have this intriguing article to read about the meanings of “1066″ that I’d probably never have spotted otherwise.) I do the same kind of thing with JSTOR when something catches my interest. Great, eh?

The only thing is that I’m starting to accumulate the PDF file equivalent of that pile of books sitting over there that I know I’m never to going to get round to reading…

…

*I know this is heresy, but personally I think that this business of physically browsing the stacks is much overrated. Continually being interrupted by those annoying people who have the nerve to want to get to the same shelves as you in a library that’s either hot and stuffy or freezing cold (depending on which floor you’re on and which way the windows face, our library manages both) and lugging around piles of heavy journals to find a desk where you can take notes (many of our journals are reference only) or to the photocopier (and so many journals are so tightly bound with such tiny margins - bloody cheapskates - that you can hardly open them wide enough to get a readable photocopy anyway) where you run out of credit on your photocopying card with one page of the article left so you have to go down two flights of stairs to the nearest slot machine and you’ll probably forget to take the photocopying away out of the copier when you’re done anyway… pfffffft.

Nearly forgot this. That annoying twit Simon Hoggart had this to say last week:

One sign of the infantilisation of our national life is the growing tendency to anthropomorphise inanimate objects. Blackpool buses which are not picking up passengers say: “Sorry, I’m not in service”, as if they were Clara the talking bus from Thomas the Tank Engine…

As plenty of archaeologists and medievalists would be able to tell him, there is a very long and widespread tradition (from ancient civilizations through to the early modern period) of inscriptions on artefacts that will say, for example, “A made me”, or “B owns me”.

It’s common on medieval and early modern church bells. I particularly like a more unusual one from Helmdon Parish Church in Oxfordshire, dated 1679:

THAT ALL MAY CWM AND NON MAY STAY AT HOM I RING TO SERMON WITH A LUSTY BOM

Or you could have the 1834 inscription on one of its neighbours. Same general idea… somewhat different tone.

OBEY OUR CALL THE RIGHT THE GOOD OLD WAY, SHUN SCHISM’S WILES, NOR EVER FROM IT STRAY.

I may or may not edit this post over the weekend. I have a feeling I should write something about The Telegraph’s poll on British identity (and some other articles and stuff).

But when you start by reading the line “[British] People also know how much they owe to the fact that Britain has not been invaded since 1066″, you can’t help thinking you’re in fairly dodgy territory. Admittedly, the French effort to invade via south-west Wales in 1797 was a bit of a farce, so alright, we could put that to one side. (Don’t know that contemporaries were quite so dismissive though. And they did land on the British mainland.) And 1688 - well, there was a sort of ‘invitation’ to William, with his Dutch troops, so perhaps that’s different too.

But what about 1485? Or even 1470-71 (twice)?* Or perhaps none of these count, since the armies were not led by ‘foreigners’ (even if they contained a lot of them, and were largely backed by foreign money). And it doesn’t count either, I suppose, that English armies invaded and occupied Wales in the thirteenth century, and ‘visited’ Scotland on an almost regular basis well into the sixteenth century (and, yes, Scottish armies on occasion returned a few favours too). A bit of Rough Wooing, anybody?

The Telegraph can get very worked up about British people’s ignorance of ‘their own’ history sometimes. But clearly not when that ignorance suits the purposes of a set of articles like these. It looks to me like they’re going to be the usual lazy anglocentric (and southern-anglocentric at that) thou-shalt-never-criticise-or-question-Britain’s-greatness kind of shite to me. I just look at them and start to feel very, very tired. I know I should engage. I should do something. But don’t be surprised if I can’t get up the energy.

But if anybody does read them and gets some pleasant surprises, let me know.

*1485: Henry Tudor and a French-backed army, landed in south-west Wales and marched east to England and you know the rest, right? 1470: the French-backed army of Henry VI (Lancastrian, deposed in 1461) and his son, throwing out Edward IV, who escaped to Burgundy. 1471: Edward IV (Yorkist) and his Burgundian-backed army chucked the Lancastrians out again. (I used to know all the details of those ones too. I had this Wars of the Roses thing going at one time.)

…………

NB: If I don’t update on this over the weekend, there might be a different reason. The necessary piece of kit has arrived in the shop and I’m planning on going wireless. So there’s always the possibility that I might break my internet connection completely in the process and not be able to fix it until Monday.

And this is all I intend to say on the matter of Tribble v Academic Bloggers (the subject of much controversy over the last couple of weeks, for anyone who didn’t already know; catch up here, if you’re really bothered).

What she said. I thought the article was entirely ignorant about the reality of academic blogging, and of concern only if significant numbers of people on search committees (and fortunately for me, the CHE is virtually unknown amongst British academics…) were to take it seriously and, on finding that any job applicant has a blog, simply dismiss that person out of hand without actually reading it.

Having said that, I think that bloggers are responsible for what they put out online under their own names; it’s a public sphere and it’s a good idea to behave accordingly (with courtesy and fairness and so on); and if you want to blog regularly on very controversial and sensitive, or very personal and intimate, topics, then it’s wise to go pseudonymous. Think about what you write.

But saying that you should blog carefully and responsibly is not the same as advising you never to put your name to an opinion on academic and/or social issues on a blog (or any other online space). All forms of conventional academic publication involve taking risks. If you write a book, it could get bad reviews, which a potential employer can read. If you publish articles in journals, the potential employer can read them and might hate them. A colleague of the potential employer might have met you at a conference and thought your paper was half-baked rubbish. You don’t try to prevent these situations by not publishing. Instead, you do your best to produce good quality, professional work.

To be away from your internet connection and your TV.

At 8.50am Thursday morning I was on a train somewhere in mid-Wales on my way to a conference in Oxford on… violence.

Getting into Birmingham just after 10.30, the only clue to what had happened, if I’d known how to interpret it, was that the next London Euston train had been cancelled (but this is not such a rare occurrence as to arouse extraordinary suspicions). But then came the announcement once I was on the Oxford train: We strongly advise you not to travel to London; because of the security situation, there is no public transport running in the city.

And only when I arrived in Oxford and started talking to others attending the conference did I really start to find out what had happened.

But we were there for business, and we got on with it. We stepped into the peculiar social bubble that is an academic conference and we talked about history and violence and politics, and the food and the weather, and academia and gossip and sex, and books and our research obsessions… and all the things academics talk about at conferences.

Occasionally we got reports and numbers from people who’d gone to the TV room to watch the news, and I made it to a computer for a while, but didn’t really try too hard to learn too much; what had happened a few miles away from us was a lurking presence, we were all aware of it, all too aware of it. I think I didn’t want to know more than was absolutely necessary. I certainly didn’t want to start in on the bloggers’ analysis. And most of all, I think I didn’t want to fill in details; I didn’t want to know names and faces, because if I started on that path, what would happen?

We carried on. We kept what was happening out there at a safe distance. And when I finally opened a paper on Saturday afternoon on the train home, I cried. For the deaths, and for the still alive, frantically scouring the city for missing loved ones.

But I was proud too.

Now, I’ve never exactly been in love with London in the way that many people are. And most of the time I consider myself far too cynical to be a patriot. (And, yes, let’s not get it too much out of proportion: this is not the worst thing that’s ever happened to London, where bombs and terror are not new; but it is the worst thing for a very long time.)

But yes, I am proud: of the responses of those who were there and caught up in this horror. Of their calmness and courage through terror and shock and pain. Their generosity and willingness to help each other. Their defiance. Proud of the emergency services and the hospitals and their staff. Proud of those who are even now deep underground facing a little hell on earth.

And proud of the message they’ve sent out by their deeds and words:

Fuck You.

Fuck you, wherever you are, you cringing cowardly little pieces of scum: don’t you know that adversity draws us Brits together as nothing else can? We will argue for the next 7 years and beyond about the bloody Olympics. But on this we stand together. We will mourn and we will remember. When we get you, we will ensure that you have justice; we will give you a fair trial. We won’t even kill you. On both of which counts, we will prove that whatever our faults, we are better than you.

.

PS: We also reserve the right to take the piss.

Robert Fisk has a column in today’s Independent; unfortunately it’s one you have to pay to read online. So no link. (*UPDATE* I found a free access version at Fisk’s website. So you can read and decide for yourselves whether what follows is a fair representation.) Anyway, the headline is “Let us rebel against poisonous academics and their preposterous claptrap of exclusion”. Which pretty much sums up the tone of the contents.

Words or phrases that Fisk thinks are just too big and hard include:

matrilineal
emic
etic
metaphorical constructs
fundamental dialogic immediacy
prosocial tendences
exilic spirituality
interplay
political and mythic interdependencies
othering
ubiquitous human psychological process of othering
problematize
meaning system
elite
paradoxicality
cognitive dissonance
dialogic injuries
cultural envelope
family psychodynamics
social intercourse

Keep Out, these words say to us. This Is Something You Are Not Clever Enough to Understand.

(And don’t suggest that he should try expanding his vocabulary by looking them up. He says firmly, early on: ” ‘Matrilineal’ doesn’t exist in my dictionary. Nor is it likely to.”)*

This “language of exclusion”, he thinks, “must have grown up in universities over the past 20 years; after all any non-university educated man or woman can pick an academic treatise or PhD thesis written in the 1920s or ’30s and - however Hegelian the subject - fully understand its meaning. No longer.” (That just seems such a challenge: pick some random Hegelian philosophy theses from the early 20th century and see what my mum and dad make of them. Or me, for that matter. Yeah, I can see us now, full of enlightenment, chatting about Hegel over the Sunday roast.)

I know, most of those words I’ve listed (but ‘elite’?) are not exactly what you’d find in everyday speech or even in a broadsheet newspaper. And I often struggle with ‘theory’ people’s writing; but, very often, less because of individual words or concepts than the clunking, convoluted manner in which the buggers string them together. (In other words it’s not the language/vocabulary that’s the problem, it’s a lack of writing skills. And it’s quite true that poor writing + heavy theory (tends to) = extreme violence to language.) I’m not defending bad writing here.

But how about an alternative list of academic words for you?

anagenesis
phosphatized
hyphae
photoautotrophs
lichenoidal
phylogenetic
ventral ectoblasts
nematode cell lineages
synapomorphies

Know what any of those mean? (PZ, sit down.) They were picked at random from PZ Myers’ beautiful blog Pharyngula; they’re all terms from biology, and I think are all evolution-related. I could equally turn to online conversations between physicists or chemists to find incomprehensible terminology. Or what about the impenetrable thickets, to most of us, of economics and statistics? Do you know what the following mean: linear regression, multivariate regression, loess smoother…? (Randomly picked up at Crooked Timber.)

My point is not to complain about these disciplines for using language I don’t understand. Quite the opposite, in fact. (And, just to make this clear, PZ is a marvellous writer.) We have no problem recognising that many academics in science fields need specialist language in order to do their job, and that frequently means impenetrability to the majority of people outside their fields. When someone like Fisk talks about ‘academics’ in this kind of article, he doesn’t mean all academics, does he? I don’t notice him demanding that mathematicians stop using all those secret algebraic symbols which others (read: journalists, despite a few rhetorical flourishes about the little people) don’t understand. Mathematicians, stop doing that, you make us all feel stupid!

No, of course not. What Fisk is talking about are anthropologists, political theorists, literary theorists, linguists and so on (the ’soft’ social sciences and ‘theoretical’ humanities, if you like). And I object strongly to the idea that in these fields it is “poisonous” and “snobbishness” for us to do what is regarded as normal for other academic fields (and, of course, many non-academic specialist fields too): to develop our own concepts for our own use, which are complex because the subjects they are used to describe and analyse are complex; and which have to be learned.

Of course, at times we also need to communicate beyond our highly-trained colleagues and speak to wider audiences (including journalists with inadequate dictionaries). But, then, so do the scientists. If Fisk were simply saying that we should do more of that, fair enough. But what he actually does is to argue that humanities academics should not use any language beyond the capacities of the average a) journalist or b) first-year college student. Not in books, not in the classroom, not in lectures.

If the general public doesn’t understand what scientists are talking about, obviously it’s because the subjects are really hard. If it doesn’t understand what humanities scholars are talking about, blame the scholars for inventing a “secret language” that makes everyone else feel inferior and stupid. Because, of course, the subject of humanities (human beings and all their works…) isn’t at all hard to understand, is it?

* By the way, the first appearance of ‘matrilineal’ given in the OED is from 1904.

I’ve just read this piece in the Guardian. It talks about the need for academics to engage with people outside academia, to reach out to the wider public. So it got me thinking again about what I do in this blog.

Blogging is not mentioned (I don’t know if it’s even occurred to any of the academics interviewed*), but one of my goals here has been to create a space to talk about what I do to a wider audience than just other academic historians. Am I succeeding? I’ve had, it needs to be said, less time recently to write posts about my own research interests, although you can easily find (what I consider to be) the best stuff via the ‘Favourite Posts’ section in the sidebar. And it’s not part of the blog, but I’m particularly proud of this section of the main website, and I hope to do more like it at some point in the not too distant future. If I do, you’ll hear all about it here.

Anyway, I’d like it very much if you the readers - especially people who don’t usually comment, perhaps - could leave a few lines telling me a little bit about yourselves and what you do get out of reading this blog. You don’t need to identify yourselves (pseudonyms will be just fine), but if you could say a bit about whether you’re an academic/student (and if so, which discipline), or you do something else altogether (if so, did you ever study history at university/college?); what sort of interests in history you have; what you like best here. Perhaps you just come for entertainment; that’s fine (in fact, it’s great). But it’d interest (and gratify) me a lot to know if you feel that somewhere along the line you’ve learnt something new too, and even in an entertaining way.

(And if you feel too shy to do this online, you could send me an email to sharon@earlymodernweb.org.uk)

* At least one of them would probably be sniffy about what goes on here anyway, since his idea of engaging with the public seems to revolve primarily around confrontation: ‘fighting your corner’ and ‘rebutting argument’. I like my dialogues, on the whole, to be in a gentler mode. (I’m more interested in being a scholar who finds new ways to communicate my scholarship than in being a ‘public intellectual’ who loudly debates current affairs, I suppose.)

Last week (or the week before?), one of the contributors at C18-L drew my attention to a new piece of medical history research in which I have a certain personal interest: Did all those famous people really have epilepsy?

I’m an epileptic. I haven’t had a fit for a very long time, but I continue to take the medication to make sure that state of affairs continues. I was apparently relatively unusual in that it began well after childhood, and I only ever had a handful of fits, in the space of a few months, before we got the medication right (thankfully). I can’t help suspecting that, unless future historians have my medical records, they might well find it quite hard to determine whether I ‘really’ had epilepsy either. (But it certainly caused more than enough disruption to my life at the time.)

Diagnosing illnesses of people long dead is frequently difficult and controversial (George III: was it really porphyria? The Black Death: was it really bubonic plague? Nearly forgot: What killed Napoleon?). The external symptoms of epilepsy are pretty varied and often capable of confusion with other conditions; it’s hard to diagnose for certain without scanning technology (as the article points out). Quite rightly, overly confident diagnoses of historical afflictions founded on inadequate evidence can be criticised. And I still don’t think that it’s an acceptable methodology to use references to syphilis in a certain well-known writer’s work to suggest that he suffered from that disease, either.

But it works the other way round too: surely, what this researcher should be saying - particularly of the pre-modern personalities he studied, and more especially since this study seems to have been based purely on secondary sources - is that he doesn’t have the evidence to prove that those people were epileptics, and that we should be cautious in making that diagnosis, rather than that they were all, definitively, not-epileptics. Clearly, researchers with medical expertise have valuable knowledge to bring to the history of medicine. But I do often find myself wishing that they’d take a few lessons on the basics of historical research from us historians.

A quick Google for ‘Lady Skimmington’ produces this odd little titbit.

In Peter Ackroyd’s Albion, we read:

“In Wiltshire bands of peasants protested against the enclosure of common land by dressing as women and calling themselves ‘Lady Skimmington’; it was a way of breaking class barriers as well as sexual boundaries and testifies, perhaps inadvertently, to the English love of mixing or mingling different forms. Two male weavers in female disguise, calling themselves ‘General Ludd’s Wives’, led a crowd in destruction of looms and factories in Stockport; the riots against turnpike tolls and other taxes were led by men in drag and became known as the ‘Rebecca riots.’”

He goes on to point out that this kind of thing would not have happened in mainland Europe, the penalty for transvestism in France being public burning. [my emphasis]

I could hardly believe at first that that was an accurate version of what Ackroyd had said, but it’s repeated here, too. (I missed out on reading Albion: the origins of the English imagination, I must confess. I did mean to, but I was probably caught up in thesis writing at the time and then… forgot.)

Because you don’t need to read much early modern French history to know that exactly these forms of ritual transvestism were widely employed there, and indeed throughout Europe. (I think there’s a considerable gulf between the transvestism that might have got someone executed and the temporary cross-dressing of many festivals and rituals, somehow.) In fact, here’s an opportunity to turn to Natalie Zemon Davis for a few examples. Men dressed as women, sometimes going by titles such as ‘Mere Folle’, to head up the ‘Abbeys of Misrule’ that organised community shaming rituals (against adulterers, husband- and wife-beaters, unsuitable marriages, etc); the English ’skimmington’ was simply one of many such forms across Europe: “charivaris, scampanete, katzenmusik, cencerrada, rough music” (other British variants included ‘riding the stang’ and the Welsh ceffyl pren).

And just as in England and Wales these forms could be adapted to use in political and other protests, so in France: in Dijon in 1630, “Mere Folle and her Infanterie were part of an uprising in masquerade against royal tax officers” and “in the Beaujolais in the 1770’s, male peasants blackened their faces and dressed as women and then attacked surveyors measuring their lands for a new landlord”. And Davis gives further examples for England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland.*

Some of the Amazon reviews notice that Ackroyd’s book was indeed weak on any European comparison or context. However, a lot of the ’serious’ reviewers (say, these) simply gush about Ackroyd’s scholarship for his arguments about all the eccentric peculiarities of the English (a sceptical view) without noticing this apparent lack. But how can you argue that anything about a culture is unusual or specific if you don’t compare it, accurately, to others?

And a couple more complaints, while I think of it. It’s a bit curious to find the Rebecca Riots (south-west Wales) being used to illustrate a thesis on the ‘English’ imagination. But of course, the way he writes it, you can’t tell that they are a very localised Welsh phenomenon. (I wonder why, when he takes the trouble to locate the other two examples?) And you’d never know from reading that passage, either, that these episodes span over 200 years of history.

Is the whole book this sloppy? Why didn’t he stick to what he’s good at and write a novel about the theme? At least then it wouldn’t have the spurious authority of “twenty-one pages of endnotes”.

Nice to have got that rant out of my system.

………….

* Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on top’, in her Society and culture in early modern France (1965).

PZ Myers has some wise words on the problems of teaching science. (Update: this is well worth reading too.)

The real problem isn’t math, it’s epistemology. What we want from our students is that they understand how they know what they know. In the sciences, that often distills down into some properly applied mathematics and that common injunction on exams to “show your work.” It’s what we do in those peer-reviewed papers, which are all step-by-step explanations of how we got a particular answer. I suspect that one common thread among academics in all disciplines is that what we really like in a good paper is the logic and the story and the clever details that lead up to the conclusion, that what counts is the process.

The real problem is that so many people want the shortcut to the “right” answer… It’s Bronowski’s conflict between knowledge and certainty: most people prefer certainty, especially when knowledge might give them an answer they don’t like. And they especially favor certainty when it requires nothing more than learning a single datum, rather than the work it takes to do a calculation or derivation or document a chain of evidence. …

Our students aren’t buying a finished product, they’re getting a toolbox (with math at the heart of it) and instructions in how to use it. When they don’t realize that central fact, that’s when mutual disappointment occurs.

I think the parallels with teaching history (or other humanities disciplines) are clear. Yes, perhaps there are more ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers in (some branches of) science than in humanities disciplines, with significant implications for how practitioners view their craft, how confident they tend to be about their conclusions. (But how many people in the world have the comparative knowledge to judge that?) Science students are (perhaps) that much more likely to come to a question knowing that a correct answer to it does exist, that a score of 100% is possible. But it isn’t just about putting down that correct answer, even then. The process is vitally important too: show us your workings, how you got to the answer, show that you understood why and how. PZ himself points out parallels with history teaching: “historians have students who want history to be just the memorization of events that actually happened, rather than a difficult exercise in thinking and learning and evaluating.”

There’s one other difference, to my mind. The toolbox metaphor is fantastic - but I’m not sure that a historian’s toolbox would ever have a single core (ie, maths). Maybe the key skills of source criticism do represent that core, but I can’t help thinking that the historian’s toolbox is going to be a lot more ramshackle and thrown-together and idiosyncratic than that of a scientist. Thoughts, anyone?

PS: a question for linguists. Why do Americans do ‘math’ and the British do ‘maths’?

A number of bloggers have been drawing attention to the grotesque piece of proposed legislation in Virginia, which would have required all ‘fetal deaths’ to be reported to authorities within three days (the medical certificate had to be completed within 24 hours; in the case of a death without medical attendance the woman would have to report to law enforcement agencies within twelve hours), with a penalty of a fine of up to $2500 or up to a year in prison.

These bloggers and their commenters have discussed various implications of this proposal. I just want to explain why, as an early modernist who studies crime, and women’s history, it sent a particularly nasty shiver down my spine.

PZ Myers called it ‘medieval’, which is wrong. (A comment I haven’t got round to sending to Pharyngula yet: “Dear PZ, much as I enjoy this blog, I wish you and your readers would stop using ‘medieval’ as a blanket term to signify oppression-barbarism-irrationality-blind superstition-etc. It annoys me, and I’m not even a medievalist”.) Nope, if we’re going to apply any historical period to describe this one, it would in fact need to be: early modern.

In 1624, the English Parliament passed an ‘Act to prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children’, which remained in force until the early 19th century (its replacement was not, however, greatly different). It wasn’t just English law: there were similar laws passed in other European countries around this time. This particular statute expressed concern that ‘lewd women’ who bore bastards, ‘to avoid their shame, and to excape punishment’, secretly buried or hid their children’s deaths, afterwards claiming, if the body were found, that the child had been still-born.

There was indeed a problem for law-enforcers in such cases, of proving that the death of a new-born infant was the result of violence rather than natural causes. It was just as much of a problem, though, with babies born to married women as unmarried ones (and frequently almost as difficult with older infants too, in a period of high levels of infant mortality, when natural death could come suddenly from many only half-understood sources). It was the ‘lewd women’ concealing their ’shame’, not anxieties about cruelty and violence towards babies and small children, that was the primary issue with the law-makers.

So, the statute enacted that any woman who secretly gave birth to a illegitimate child and killed it, or procured its death, or attempted to conceal its death, ‘whether it were born alive or not’ (my emphasis), should ’suffer death as in case of murther’. That is: the Act did not, quite, presume murder in such cases; it simply made the concealment of a death in itself a capital crime.

In practice, as it turns out, right from the start (but increasingly so in the 18th century) courts and juries interpreted the evidence in cases brought before them with considerably leniency; sometimes they subverted the intent of the law altogether.* Most defendants were acquitted; many of those convicted were pardoned; they were rarely (though I wouldn’t go so far as to say never) executed unless there was clear evidence of severe violence committed on the body of a child - in other words, where they’d probably have been convicted of common law homicide in any case.

But even if acquitted they still had to go through the trial; and given the hostile reactions of neighbours expressed in pre-trial depositions (it was those neighbours, mostly married women, whose efforts brought cases to trial in the first place), it might be wondered what happened to them after they were freed. Even if they escaped the worst penalties of the law, they had been publicly exposed and humiliated. Some historians have seen the trials as intended to warn all other unmarried women of the perils of unchastity as much as to punish those on trial. If so, it mattered little if there were few hangings and the law was in essence operating as its creators intended: to help control and discipline the sexual behaviour of unmarried women. (Whether the ‘warnings’ in fact deterred any women from extra-marital sexual activity is, of course, another matter.)**

I’m not suggesting that the 1624 infanticide statute directly resembles the recent Virginia proposal. But I can’t get away from the echoes. This was the rationale given by the politician in charge of the proposal, when explaining that they hadn’t really intended it to cover what it seemed to cover:

This bill was requested by the Chesapeake Police Department in its legislative package due to instances of full term babies who were abandoned shortly after birth. These poor children died horrible deaths. If a coroner could not determine if the child was born alive, the person responsible for abandoning the child could only be charged with is the improper disposal of a human body.

Back in the early seventeenth century, by the way, there was considerable suspicion (not to say panic) that there were many ‘lewd’ women getting away with their promiscuity, by means of murder, and that the known instances were probably just the tip of an iceberg. Hence the need for drastic action. We’ll never know if they were right about the numbers (my gut feeling is that they were wrong. It’s not that easy to hide a pregnancy). But they were certainly wrong about what kinds of women were likely to be desperate to conceal their ’shame’: not disreputable ‘lewd’ ones - why would they care? - but women who had a reputation to lose, and whose livelihood depended on maintaining that reputation (a high proportion of women accused under the 1624 statute were servants).

Why do women perceive this new proposal as primarily an attempt to control them, their bodies and their sexual activity? Because the criminal law is not the way to solve a problem like this, any more than it was in the 17th century: if you’re really concerned to prevent the abandonment and death of newborn babies, what’s needed are not punishments but places where women can leave them safely and without stigma: the principle of Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital in the 18th century. A law that penalises concealment achieves little except to make women in those circumstances even more isolated and put them and their babies alike at even greater risk: if a woman is already desperate enough to hide her pregnancy, give birth alone and abandon (or kill) her child afterwards, a law like the one that was proposed in Virginia is irrelevant and is only going to make her even more desperate to cover up what’s happened to her. Ask more historians like me:*** this is old, old territory. We shouldn’t need to be going over it again in the 21st century.

Update: However, see this critical report on ’safe havens’, which have been adopted recently in a number of US states. I think its writers would agree that punitive measures are not the way to deal with unsafe abandonments of newborn children, but they argue strongly that anonymous legal abandonment is not the solution either.

……………………..

* By the 18th century, for example, women on trial often presented linen and other items as evidence that they had prepared for a live birth - therefore, they had not intended to kill their babies - and this was routinely accepted to produce acquittals. But strictly speaking it was entirely irrelevent to the wording of the statute.

** Despite the images of lewdness and promiscuity, it seems that many early modern single women who engaged in sexual intercourse did so in the context of established relationships, often only after promises of marriage; there is a good deal of statistical evidence that, while rates of illegitimacy were quite low during the period, rates of pre-marital pregnancy were much higher. But not all men kept their promises.

*** This is not, these days, a neglected historical subject: a couple of bibliographies. There is also a good deal of modern criminological research on the subjects of neonaticide and infanticide.

I came across this comment at Historiological Notes, made by a certain Sharon on 16 June.

I’m contemplating starting a blog to go with my Early Modern Resources site (www.earlymodernweb.org.uk) - perhaps mainly for adding new links so that they don’t simply get lost in my bookmarks files before they can be put on the website proper, perhaps something more than that. I don’t know if I have time to become a serious blogger! I like varied blogs, by the way. And ones that generate interesting discussions without taking themselves too seriously all the time…

There should be a warning on Blogger (just after the bit where it says: set up a blog in 5 minutes, it’s really easy!): BLOGGING IS ADDICTIVE. IT WILL SUCK YOU IN. YOU WILL NEVER ESCAPE.

Scrolled down a bit further. Sharon added on 26 June:

Update: I went ahead and made the blog: http://www.earlymodernweb.blogspot.com/

And it’s cool, really cool. (Except that I now have to learn to ration the time I give it so that I GET SOME WORK DONE.) I can do all sorts of news-type stuff for early modernists that I couldn’t put on my web site because I didn’t have time to update it every week; I can have a good rant (or a laff); I can try out bits of writing… though I don’t know yet how much of it will be serious or historiographical. That takes some brain work, after all. :~) But I would like it to be a good history-focused blog rather than personal ramblings. (Don’t get me wrong, there are many ‘personal’ blogs that I like a lot, and all good blogs should be personalised. That’s part of the appeal.) Without getting too pompous, I want to lead by example here. (Yeah, that was still a bit pompous, wasn’t it?)

I’m just amazed at all the possibilities that keep opening up. … But it probably will take time to get the word out more widely. I previously saw blogs as really just personal/political diaries, not ‘real’ academic tools - and I’ve been championing the internet for historians for over 4 years!

The post and the subsequent discussion is worth re-reading, by the way. Interesting (well, to me) how my blogging ‘philosophy’ was substantially in place within 10 days of opening for business. And, in a way, my personal answer to the discussions of academic women blogging: don’t just talk about it, do it. Show that it can be done, for anyone (female or male) worrying over whether to try, and how. Make it as good as you can. Express opinions (and be prepared to defend them). Have fun in the process.

It never occurred to me to blog pseudonymously or about my personal life. In any case, I still wouldn’t know what to say, except sometimes about cooking, if that counts as personal (I’m deeply jealous of the personal bloggers who have interesting lives to write about!), whereas I think that doing history is fascinating enough to write about whether anybody reads it or not. This blog was always going to be an extension to my existing online presence, which was ‘professional’ (as an academic resource site) and named from the beginning. So, anyway, it just never occurred to me, either, that there might be anything to worry about in doing it that way, as a woman, or as a starting-out academic, or any other of the many social categories to which I might belong.

Recently, profgrrl asked her readers a set of questions about why and how they blog (or don’t, even). A lot of people responded (though I forgot, I think…). We’re a garrulous lot by definition really: it isn’t hard to get us to open up and talk about why we do this, so I wish more people would actually do stuff like that before they start proposing grand unified theories of gender and blogging. So that’s my recommended post for weekend reading. And feel welcome to add your thoughts here.