It's Always More Complicated

How Queen Caroline turned King Arthur into an 18th‑century royal PR strategy (this one was the wife of George II - not the one Prinny tried to divorce - who he asserted to on her deathbed that he would not remarry but only have mistresses thereafter).

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Today’s arguments about disability benefits have been raging for 500 years - well, probably longer, but

One of the clearest examples comes from the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601, which was England’s first organised welfare system. It required parishes to support people who couldn’t earn a living because of age, illness or impairment. In practice, however, access to assistance was often contested.
Tudor writers spread stories about supposedly fake disabled beggars who tricked the public by covering themselves in artificial sores or pretending to have seizures. At the same time, local officials worried about the cost of supporting people who might need help for years. Claims could be rejected because an applicant was considered of poor moral character or because they were new to the parish.

Three brain myths that need to die:

While brain scientists hem and haw and hedge their bets, many people gravitate towards those who sound more certain—those who offer tidy explanations and definitive answers, whether or not they are true.
The result is that psychology has become home to an unusually persistent collection of zombie myths: ideas that have been debunked repeatedly but which refuse to die. Some of the most tenacious concern the structure and function of the brain itself, including whether we use just 10% of it, whether bigger brains are always better, and whether we harbour remnants of earlier brains within our own, from a reptilian “lizard brain” to the popular idea of an “inner chimp”. These ideas endure because they are neat and memorable, and perhaps because they place humans where we like to think we belong: at the pinnacle of evolution.
But these simple stories about the brain and its evolution are wrong. And, it turns out, the reality is far more interesting.

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Another myth - biographies about scientists do not necessarily inspire the kiddies: Children’s books about scientists convey demotivating messages:

First, scientific ability was portrayed equally often as fixed and as malleable, a pattern unlikely to support motivation. Second, interest in science was overwhelmingly portrayed as fixed: Most scientists were said to be captivated by science from a young age. Third, scientists in physics, engineering, and computer science were portrayed as more reliant on fixed ability than scientists in other fields. Fourth, biographies of female scientists disproportionately emphasized effort even after adjusting for the obstacles they faced, consistent with stereotypes attributing women’s success to hard work over talent. These findings suggest that well-intentioned efforts to diversify science through role model exposure in children’s science biographies may fall short.

This sort of thing is why I am so sad about the turn the Women's Institute lately took, it is not in their fine tradition: Women and environmental activism: the National Federation of Women’s Institutes

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Apparently Esperanto is Still A Thing: Nudists, peaceniks and freeloading travellers: the people keeping the Esperanto dream alive

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Rare jug showing Peterloo Massacre to go on display:

Experts believe the jug was made in the years following the massacre and that it reflected the escalating public anger felt in its aftermath, the People's History Museum said.

Dept of, Glad to see the article actually invokes phrenology: A scientist says he can scan prisoners’ brains for signs of evil. Did his disputed science put a man on death row? - though phrenology wasn't just about 'biological criminality'. (And I wonder does Dr Brain-Scan only think it's good for determining criminality, because some years ago I had the misfortune to feature on a TV programme on Sex Research which included some specimens of Modern Scientists who were all about their Machines That Went Bing! and could determine Sexual Orientation etc.)

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Dept of, and I have been to a lot of concerts there, as well: Trafalgar Square’s St Martin-in-the-Fields gives up secrets of its stones.

[Not] just... a church used by royalty, but one which launched London’s first free lending library, and to where the origins of the Big Issue, Amnesty International and Shelter can all be traced. Its steps are a well-known site of protest, notably the anti-apartheid demonstrations of the 1980s.

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Dept, the English identity and language is All More Complicated: How Did the English Arrive in Britain?

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Dept, literature is not actually a reflection of demographic actuality: do high maternal mortality rates ‘explain’ why stepmothers appear so often in fairy tales?.

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Dept, women in unexpected archives doing unexpected things: Tracing the hidden histories of women in the Stationers’ Company apprenticeship registers

Apropos of the Dance to the Music of Time reading group, and the recent sort-out of my desk drawers, I disinterred a CD on which I had a whole lot of saved emails from the late 90s-early 00s, including at least partial records of the listserv on which I was participating in discussion of DMT, back then.

Okay, from skimming through these generally, this seems to have traversed the period when I was having ISP issues and missing emails for the later volumes (though I think would also have been when I was travelling in NZ and Oz with rather intermittent internet access anyway). But still, interesting.

Also interesting, and a bit scary, honestly, that this was a fairly hectic period of my life work- and academic-wise, and yet I seem to have been heavily participating in a range of listservs in discussions which sometimes grew quite heated, strops thrown, etc. Also setting up my personal website.

But further on Powell-related matters, have just started A Buyer's Market and very early on we encounter the artist Deacon, who was 'a student of Esperanto (or, possibly, one of the lesser-known artificial languages)' - points there for knowing that there were a whole lot, well, several, competing artificial language systems at the period - and 'intermittently vegetarian'. Also into advocating decimal coinage, which hasn't featured so much among the concerns of my fubsy progressives, but is later found selling an anti-war tract. Though opposed to spelling reform (take that, GB Shaw!...). And wears sandals. (Also heavily gay-coded.)

This made me think of a thought I had had about the overlaps between various of these concerns of interwar progressives/eccentrics/life reformers, and I did actually look up Esperantist vegetarians and it was in fact A Thing from the early days.

So far at least no indication whether he is into anything like eurythmics/morris-dancing/yoga/etc.

Endangered Greek dialect is ‘living bridge’ to ancient world, researchers say:

An endangered form of Greek that is spoken by only a few thousand people in remote mountain villages of northern Turkey has been described as a “living bridge” to the ancient world, after researchers identified characteristics that have more in common with the language of Homer than with modern Greek. The precise number of speakers of Romeyka is hard to quantify. It has no written form, but has survived orally in the mountain villages around Trabzon*, near the Black Sea coast. With its remaining speakers ageing, the dialect is now threatened with extinction, leading a University of Cambridge academic to launch a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to record its unique linguistic structures before it is too late.

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Okay, this is Humour: It's that time of year when we carry out our annual manuscripts weigh-in:

In keeping with tradition, teams work overnight to weigh every manuscript in our collection. They then compare the results with the famous table compiled by Sir Horace Round (after whom the British Museum Round Reading Room was named). This enables scholars worldwide to embellish their papers with little-known facts that no-one could possibly verify, along the lines 'the Luttrell Psalter weighs as much as next door's dog'.
Here are some results from this year's survey. Note: manuscripts tend to gain an extra gram or two during Leap Years.
- The Bedford Hours, a masterpiece of 15th-century Parisian illumination: 9.0114 kg, or the same as a baby Pygmy Hippo (unwashed)

Kew Gardens blog: Uncovering our oldest specimen and the poisonous scandal behind its collector:

Unfortunately, Browne’s medical career did not proceed as smoothly as his botanical one. In 1693, he was at the centre of a poisoning scandal when James Wheeler, a member of the governing council of Fort St George, died after treatment under his care. Wheeler fell ill having been given medication ground in the same mortar in which arsenic had been prepared for another patient. Even though the medicine had been compounded by his assistant, Browne confessed to murder and went on trial, but was acquitted. His troubles did not stop there. In 1695, he was arrested for drunkenly challenging another former EIC surgeon to duel and two years later he was fined for robbing and attacking a Mughal customs official.

She was a leading patron of the natural sciences, with an extensive natural history collection of her own, and she hosted leading scientific figures at her grand house in Buckinghamshire, including Sir Joseph Banks, who became Kew's first unofficial director on his return from the travelling the South Seas with Captain Cook.

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Yorkshire estate known as world’s first nature reserve gets Grade II listing:

A Yorkshire parkland regarded as the world’s first nature reserve – which was created by an eccentric pioneering 19th-century environmentalist – has been given a Grade II listing. Historic England said Waterton Park, near Wakefield, was the earliest known example of a landscape designed specifically to attract and protect native wildlife. It was created by Charles Waterton, who is as interesting as the land he transformed.
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Yet his contemporaries often thought him eccentric for the way he managed his estate, such as his decisions to ban shooting on his land and to invite members of the public to visit it for free. Asylum patients were welcomed as part of their treatment.

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Not so much relevant to my interests as, I have been muttering about this for a very long time myself ahem ahem: review of Amy Milne-Smith. Out of His Mind: Masculinity and Mental Illness in Victorian Britain:

[T]urns attention to "madmen in the attic" during the period from 1845 until the First World War.... seeks to address a "lopsided" historiography that has tended to concentrate on madness among Victorian women (p. 5). Although women did tend to outnumber men in public asylums at any given time, this did not represent "a plague of women being locked away by a misogynistic culture" (p. 26). The fact that women tended to live longer meant that they might linger within the asylum, while male patients dominated military and criminal institutions.

Today there has been definitely A Theme in things popping up over various different places I interact with.

Two reviews via mailing lists:

Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism:

Hore ably makes the case for interpreting the works of these photographers across national and colonial boundaries, while acknowledging contingencies and the importance of the local. The tension between visions that highlight the grandeur of the majestically sublime in a universal sense, with attention to the specificity of developing understandings of geological formations across deep time is shown to reveal common pathways of settler-colonial thought. The “spectre of waste” and the deliberate erasure of Indigenous peoples from settler-colonial worldviews are identified as key to understanding how and why visions of nature return to common themes and compositions in service of notions of settler territoriality. In this way, Visions of Nature demonstrates how the constructed universality of Western aesthetics and sciences “cultivated ties to place and diminished existing Indigenous connection” (p. 235).

Pandemic India: From Cholera to Covid-19:

Arnold suggests convincingly that “the pandemic idea has had an intimate connection with the history of empire” (p. 242). India was the site of British imperial expansion and control through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was the site on which both discourse and institutions to study and control pandemics were developed under the “Raj.” Arnold makes an excellent case for the work of historians in studying pandemics—not just in the past, but also in the present (such as COVID-19). In this way, he engages with larger questions about continuities between colonial and postcolonial governance in India, drawing a clear line connecting the violence which characterizes the control of pandemics and contagion by the Raj and by the postcolonial Indian state.

Lourenco da Silva Mendonca and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century:

José Lingna Nafafé's remarkable book studies the efforts of an Angolan prince, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, to have slavery abolished by the Vatican’s Propaganda Fide tribunal in the Catholic world in the second half of the seventeenth century. Nafafé’s book then is a long-overdue analysis and recounting of Mendonça’s abolitionist efforts. As Nafafé emphasizes, not until the nineteenth century would we see so totalizing an effort to end slavery.
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Mendonça was a pioneer of human rights, fighting to free enslaved Africans and to keep more Africans from being enslaved, and should be studied with the likes of Bartolomé de las Casas as a foundational theoretician of human rights.

Apparently of a microhistory, but demonstrating how family histories illuminate wider historical stories: The Troubled House: Families, Heritance and the Reckoning of Empire. (I am intrigued that they were Welsh missionaries i.e. from an oppressed colonised population themselves. Layers.)

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Uncritical use of ahistorical painting: Robert Thom’s painting J. Marion Sims: Gynecologic Surgeon - a deconstruction of the origins of this image and its original purpose and context:

[T]his rendering is, in fact, a painting, that it was produced around 100 years after the history it describes, and that it was commissioned by a major pharmaceutical corporation, all of which shape how and what it means.

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The theme of internal colonisation or at least, repression of minorities: Writing an abstract in a language with no writing conventions:

The language that I will be discussing in this post is a Southern Italo-Romance language spoken in the southern Apulian town of San Marco in Lamis (Foggia). For the purposes of this discussion, I will refer to it as Sammarchese. Sammarchese is a so-called dialect of Italy spoken by approximately 15,000 people in the town and its surrounding area. For those who are not very familiar with the Italian linguistic landscape: in the Italophone world, a dialetto is a non-official language spoken alongside Italian, but contrary to what it is meant by dialect in the anglophone world, it is not a variety of the standard language, i.e., it does not come from Italian. The Romance dialects of Italy originate from Vulgar Latin, just like Italian, Spanish, or French. So Sammarchese, like other Romance dialetti, is a sister language to Italian.

This is an older post that I think fits in here: The Presence of Black Voters in the 18th and 19th Centuries:

In the last 20 years significant scholarship into Black British history has exposed the richness of Black lives in all areas of British life: Black MPs have been identified, as have Black property owners, and the mixed-race children of West Indian merchants and plantation owners have been recognised and studied. One enduring area of interest is the British electoral system; how it functions now is under consistent scrutiny and the introduction of political reform in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a subject of increasing historical interest.

What I read

Well, Fabulosa was pretty good, both about Polari per se and the gay social history, even if I thought it was a tad broad brush about the trajectories of change post 67. I was also a bit 'huh?' that someone who works in British slang and its diverse influences missed the Indian/or at least what one might consider Hobson-Jobson influences (some of which were not, I thought, peculiar to Polari, e.g. 'dhobie' I have encountered in other contexts).

Joanna Brady, Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady, #19) (2021), I thought was pretty good. Possibly a bit too cozy about law enforcement, but good on toxic blood families vs ties of affection.

AS Byatt, A Whistling Woman (2002) - o dear, Antonia, I think you lost the plot in this one, or it kept turning into another novel, or perhaps several, that you actually wanted to write, rather than the novel about the people that the readers who had stuck with the tetralogy since the beginning rather expected... And that ending! OMG, how could you? I do not think wonderful symbolickal burgeoning, I think, tired ol' cop-out. Could Do Better. No wonder it had faded/been mercifully erased from memory.

Naomi Mitchison, Behold Your King (1957). Didn't find this one of the great Mitchisons (I realise I am not that fond of New Testament rewritings) and - again with the cop-out - leaves them gazing at the tomb, i.e. we do not know what she was going to do about the resurrection.

There has also been a lot of dipping into 30s/40s sexological writings for a research rabbit-hole project.

On the go

Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (2012), as I thought I would give it another go.

Up next

Probably LMB, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, maybe.

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And tomorrow I am in anticipation of the books wot had been quietly sitting in a cupboard at my former workplace being delivered - which had been going to happen Before All This, and when I was in some hopes of having done some decluttering of the shelves in advance, SIIIIGH. There has been a bit of rearrangement but really - apart from having these books available to me - could do without.

Lucy Mangan speaks for me, and I am sure she (and her family) and I are not outliers in this:

I don’t know why, at the age of 46, ringing any kind of authority to make any kind of request or complaint fills me with apprehension, stress and tearful anxiety, but it does. I have tried to unpack my own root issue here in the hope of addressing it, but whatever psychological blockage there is remains unyielding. All I can say is that I know I am not alone. My mother, sister and several friends suffer the same handicap. There’s a fear of being told off mixed in there somewhere, a feeling that we’re transgressing some unspoken law that we don’t deserve help and should be able to manage without it. I haven’t been able to plumb it further than that.

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On an entirely different subject, are any dr rdrz acquainted with the cultural mores of South Africa? Students at Soas University of London have called for its director to resign after a meeting where he used the N-word. His defence, coming as he does from South Africa, is 'I come from a part of the world where we actually do use the word'. I wonder whether it is acceptable polite usage there; I consider that there are other parts of the world where it is used but is still not considered appropriate usage for directors of major academic institutions; directors of major academic institutions are surely expected to have some cultural sensitivity?

What I read

Finished Love Lives, and while I'm a bit raising my eyebrows at the title which I felt didn't entirely do it justice, and not sure I learnt anything entirely new from it, on the other hand, and this is quite A Thing, I was pretty much completely in concurrence with Dyhouse's take on the changes and continuities in romance/sex/marriage/women's lives and expectations during a period which not only have I personally lived through (she and I are pretty much contemporaries) I have also writ on as a historian myself, and have read a fair number of the literary texts she cites. It's very readable and synthesises a lot of primary and secondary sources. (It also provided me with a few references I hadn't already got for a side-project of my own.)

There was a new issue of The Scribbler and the latest Slightly Foxed.

On the go

Continued to dip into In the Land of Invented Languages, which as I may have already mentioned, is a bit orthogonal to my own interest in the subject. I got at least something out of the section on Esperanto and Esperantists, and there was some useful stuff on CK Ogden and Basic English, and it was nice to see something on Suzette Haden Elgin's Laadan, but there is rather too much on the wider reaches of strange eccentric people with weird and megalomaniac ideas about language.

Have now got stuck in to T Kingfisher, Paladin's Strength (The Saint of Steel #2) which came out the other day. (Though I don't call that so much foreshadowing the reveal as jumping up and down signaling it....)

Up next

Feeling ever so slightly spoilt for choice as several things that I thought might take some time to arrive have actually turned up. And A Desolation Called Peace drops this week.

Michigan couple with 14 sons finally has a daughter.

I mean, I'm hoping that this is not one of those cases in which a woman is so desperate to have a lickle gurlie that she can dress up in pretty pink frillies that she goes on popping out disappointing boy after disappointing boy -

- though even if not and this is one of those weird cults, I feel very very sorry for her on general principles, because a) 15 kids in nearly 30 years, which, when you come down to it (unless some were multiples) involves pushing one out every two years or so, which does not seem entirely optimum -

and b) house absolutely full to the rafters with the menfolx, though I observe that they are locally known as 14 Outdoorsmen, and honestly, one thinks of those species in which the father drives the offspring from the familial lair once they reach a certain age, to fend for themselves in the wild -

It does have a slightly fairytale/mythic resonance that made me think of this: Gender-swapped fairytales by which

a program that “swapped all gendered language in any text”, he to she, daughter to son and so on.... was applied... to the ur-narrative text, the fairytale, choosing the Fairy Books, edited by Andrew Lang, published at the back end of the 19th century and into the 20th. The result is blunt and impartial, deliberately so: there’s no finer human judgment applied story by story (is a pantaloon male or female? What about a ruffle?), it’s a straight computer-says-she switcheroo.

(Two week's worth of reading)

What I read

Finished Carmilla - suspect it had more impact back in its day, but has perhaps been overwritten for the modern reader by later developments in the genre?

Finished Mistress of Ambiguities, which sort of tied up some loose ends. I also note that the series started being written by two hands collaborating under the name of JF Rivkin, and the last couple were by only one of the authors, this possibly shows.

Dorothy Dunnett (originally as Dorothy Halliday), Dolly and the Singing Bird (1968). The first of the 'Dolly' thrillers featuring the famed portraitist and secret agent Johnson Johnson, who is a more muted version of The Dunnett Hero. This one relies on a twist which was first (I think) famously deployed by Dame Agatha. The narrator also seems to have a knowledge of sailing terms and ability to handle boat-related matters during moments of crisis that seem to develop according to the needs of the plot... I am also very much over that recurrent Dunnett character of the young woman irreparably damaged by some trauma. Especially as her heroes have pretty extreme traumas and manage to survive and get over them.

Still, I also read Dolly and the Cookie Bird (1970) and Dolly and the Doctor Bird (1971). Serious amount of period sexism and general attitudes. I suppose the 'young woman caught up in shenanigans and kept in the dark about what exactly is going on' was pretty much par for the genre, which I have not really been reading in since, well, maybe the early 80s?

Simon R Green, Till Sudden Death Do Us Part (Ishmael Jones #7) (2019), which I thought did some neat twisting of mundane/supernatural plots.

Simon Brett, The Killer in the Choir (2019). Not, I think, one of the stronger Fethering mysteries.

Alexis Hall, Iron and Velvet (Kate Kane, Paranormal Investigator #1) (2013). A great read for a long train journey. Have pre-ordered the next in the series.

Gretchen McCulloch Because Internet (2019).

Aya de Leon, The Boss (Justice Hustlers #2) (2017). Sort of a sequel to Uptown Thief - same setting, one of the other women connected with the women's health clinic, heists, unionising sex-workers, problems with the Ukrainian mob, relationships, families - this also enjoyably passed a lengthy train journey.

Stephanie Burgis, The Disastrous Début of Agatha Tremain (2012). Short but charming.

On the go

Dolly and the Starry Bird (1973) - well, maybe a young woman of the period like the narrator would have used the term 'pouf' as a descriptor and make rather a thing of her being quite okay with them...

Goodreads informs me that I have already read Ursula Le Guin's No Time to Spare but I'm dipping into it again.

Noel Streatfeild, A Shepherdess of Sheep (1934).

Up Next

Recently dropped to the e-reader, Sherry Thomas, The Art of Theft. Have also got the latest Sherwood Smith, A Time of Daughters, and the next one of Justice Hustlers, The Accidental Mistress (2018). The situation over Keep Calm and Kill the Chef has gone very quiet.

Was reminded, visiting the Fergusson Gallery in Perth, that I have got Richard Emerson's Rhythm and Colour (2018) and keep meaning to get to it.