(no subject)

Happy birthday, gchick!

Clio flips literary 'historians' with a sardine

Am currently reading rather interesting work on C19th female literary collaboration*.

However, apart from occasionally falling into clotted theoretical passages ('Habermas... blahblah... Bakhtin... blahblah... Butler... wifflewoffle...') it also does that thing that lit historians are prone to, alas, which is take textual stuff as reflecting reality and making the historian to scream quietly.

Srsly, folks, the reason why Some Menz were screaming about Wymmynz Place at, really, any given historical period would be because women were doing things that were outwith that place.

I was particularly WTF, in the discussion of 'Michael Field''s drama on Mary Queen of Scots, where the author is discussing the historical Mary, to see a cited passage about the utter anathema in which the concept of a woman holding rule was held.

And I am so 'in that case, how come there were so many women ruling in late C16th Europe, either as queens in their own right or as regents for minor children?'

The point of J Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was that there were all these women! ruling! and 'tes flying in the face of Nature!
( LOLKNOX )

The facts of realpolitik meant that, actually, things like nationality, religion, being the next clear heir, being plugged into existing networks of power, or simply, the alternatives being much worse, trumped the question of gender.

I also feel there's a certain unsoundness in some of the arguments about Victorian womanhood, but those are a lot more pervasive throughout the text and about nuance as much as anything. However ('as I have argued elsewhere') there is a shrill defensiveness about late Victorian male writing about the whole duty of womanhood that leads one to argue for Victorian masculinity being very precariously poised in the face of social change.

*Though I do keep wishing the author had extended their reading into fandom studies.

100 London things: 19

I haven't, I think, yet devoted a post to London's medical history and famed Temples of Healing.

So have St Bartholomew's Hospital, f. 1123 by Rahere, a courtier (in some traditions, the jester) of Henry I, and still operating on the same site, though with accreted layers of history of different epochs.

It has a museum (and archives) as well as a Grade II listed late Victorian pathological museum.

I recently spoke at an event at the latter on, ahem, certain diseases which have historically had a long association with urban and port life, with which Barts actually itself had a lengthy connection.

Way back at least as early as the C17th, Barts had 'foul wards' for patients suffering from Loathsome Diseases of Immorality, though not on the West Smithfield site, well away on the Kingsland Road in Hackney:

The important researches of Siena into the subject have indicated that Barts continued to play an important part in the provision of services for the poxed poor, because it was an ancient Royal foundation supported by endowments of property and not reliant on the goodwill of subscribers, who did not always want their money to be going to individuals who had brought their suffering upon themselves by Sin.

Barts continues to be a major flagship of medical science: I was obliged to attend this centre to follow up a mammogram issue, and it was all very impressive, and also very soothing.