It's Always More Complicated

A conversation on witchcraft: history, religion, and persecution - including Ronald Hutton (fangirling).

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And on subversive women: Archiving Bengal’s Revolutionary Women:

[M]any women participated in the revolutionary movement, taking on roles that challenged colonial authority and social norms. The militants who joined underground networks, manufactured explosives, and participated in acts of political violence, however, remain largely absent from both public memory and archival records. When they do appear in colonial documents, they are often framed through their relationships to men: as daughters, wives, or associates, rather than as political actors in their own right.

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More on grassroots activism: Travelling activists, Radical Hospitality, and the Intimate History of Socialist Organising in Britain, c. 1880-1914.

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Women in perhaps unexpected occupations (though I knew a little a bit about this since an old mate of mine did some research on the topic back in the 80s): Women in the Private Asylum Business in Nineteenth-Century England.

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This association is already fairly well-known but a nuanced set of arguments about the complexity of how it plays out: Inequality and health: Lost in the mists of time?:

Rather than behaving like a toxin that produces a sudden spike in mortality after a fixed incubation period, inequality is more like a fog that gradually seeps into bodies, relationships, and institutions over time.

What the information in one scroll recording an C18th Chancery suit opened up concerning George Orwell's ancestors (Jamaica connection).

Are we entirely surprised: A woman’s place was not in the home: New book challenges assumptions about women’s work in early modern history:

Far from being the unpaid homemakers and housewives of traditional historical record, women contributed to all the most important areas of the economy, such as agriculture, commerce, and care.
More than half of the work done by women in the period between the 16th and 18th centuries took place outside of the home, and around half of all housework and three-quarters of care work was conducted professionally for other households.

I posted this in a comment over at agonyaunt apropos of the woman who thinks her husband is too laid back (she sounds too tightly wound): ‘Rawdogging’ marathons: has gen Z discovered the secret to reclaiming our focus?:

Specifically, it means sitting still and staring into space for an extended period. Most importantly, without your phone.... It sounds as if the TikTok generation has somehow invented meditation. That’s one criticism levelled at rawdogging, but young people are battling monumental levels of distraction these days: while older generations had to learn to tolerate boredom, they must learn to cultivate it.

Back in the day late 70s/beginning of the 80s I encountered a person or two for whom meditation was just that, a dive into an escape from all the pressing troubles of their existing life (rather than dealing with those).

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Rather different from the early modern images of witchcraft and witches that the popular mind tries to impose on The Middle Ages: Medieval witch stories, and a literary grandmother for the Wife of Bath.

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Country diary: The unlikely success of wildlife in lead country: 'Bonsall, Derbyshire: It was, in fact, the poison in the ground that prevented this patch from becoming cattle country – then nature took care of itself'

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This is fascinating: Remembering Quintard Taylor: Historian of the Black West and beyond

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Poisoning Crimes and the ‘Mushroom Murderer’: Patterns and Precedents (Cassie Watson is one of the authors)

The fact that poisoning may not initially be suspected is yet another unique feature of this method of killing, and so proof of a criminal offence has often rested upon circumstantial evidence. The nineteenth-century development of forensic toxicology brought more cases to light and led to more convictions, but reliable toxicological and pathological evidence concerning the cause of illness and death is not the first but the second stage in a successful prosecution. There must be some formal suspicion raised first, to lead to a medico-legal investigation. Criminals might try to evade prosecution through claims of accidental poisoning, or may not be detected at all if symptoms are misattributed to other conditions.

For historical reasons I get emailed a lot of reviews of academic books: these crossed my path this week and I thought this was coincidental:

Joshua D. Rothman. The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America:

Rothman’s work charts the concurrent rise of both the domestic slave trade and the American financial system, arguing that both phenomena underwent a symbiotic evolution within the context of an expanding system of American enslavement. The Ledger and the Chain is also, however, a very intimate, personal, and often unsettling history of the individuals who profited from and made possible this vast industry. Rothman is interested in the world that these traders made. He is interested in the way those same traders were aided and abetted by the society that they inhabited, and in the way that the confluence of the two helped to construct and define American capitalism. And yet, for all this attention paid to the large-scale history of slavery and capitalism, The Ledger and the Chain is also an intimate, in-depth history of three individuals: the slave traders Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard.

Amanda Brickell Bellows. American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-emancipation Imagination:

Amanda Brickell Bellows explores how Americans and Russians responded to the nearly parallel abolition of slavery and serfdom in their respective societies. In particular, she examines these societal transformations through the lens of cultural production, exploring how writers, artists, and marketing experts in both nations created popular images of servitude and abolition in mass-oriented literature, periodicals, illustrations, paintings, and consumer advertisements. Both nations grappled with massive social, political, and economic transformations in the post-emancipation era. Russian serfdom was abolished by decree of Tsar Alexander II in 1861, freeing 40 percent of the Russian population from bondage, initiating an era of substantial change, modernization, urbanization, and geographic expansion. American slavery was abolished as a result of the US Civil War of 1861-65, freeing four million African Americans (over 11 percent of the American population) and initiating a period of modernization, (ultimately failed) attempts at democratization in the former slaveholding South, and geographic expansion. In the era of uncertainty, anxiety, and massive transformations that characterized the late nineteenth century in both nations, Bellows argues, cultural representations of systems of bondage and their aftermath affected the development of national consciousness and influenced public opinion about the proper place of formerly bonded people in rapidly changing societies.

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Conjuring and Counterfeits in the Court of Star Chamber (1605): we note the scepticism that Whitehand could really command spirits, rather than being a conman.

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Sanitising Georgette: ‘You Can’t Hide It’: Georgette Heyer and the Perils of Posthumous Revision - I'm pretty sure that this lightly expurgated recent edition of The Grand Sophy was the one I recently read.

(Okay I can see all sorts of other issues here....)

I'm now rather naughtily wondering whether other popular authors of her epoch who had Attitudes of the Period are going to get similar treatment - e.g. 'Sapper' or Dornford Yates, though I suspect nothing much would be left of the exploits of Bulldog Drummond.

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O tempora, o mores-ing over arthouse movies: Even the French are giving up on arthouse films. Is this the end of a cinematic era?

The Poncey-meter goes to 11 at this:

“There’s probably, in fact, more talented film-makers today than there was in the 70s. What there was in the 70s was better audiences.” The director added, “We now have audiences that don’t take movies seriously, so it’s hard to make a serious movie for them.”

Ah, the 70s - Carry On films - Hammer Horror (though I think these are gaining cult cred?) - Confessions of a Window Cleaner et al -

This is like 'people used to have attention spans', isn't it?

Siiiiigh: Warning for UK women over physical and financial toll of egg freezing: As increasing numbers choose the procedure, concerns grow over the lack of transparency in some clinics:

The HFEA said the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act dates back to 1990, long before egg freezing was a lucrative, highly commercialised business. And yet, more than 30 years on, at a time when egg freezing and IVF babies have become largely mainstream, the regulator is still working under the same law.“I would say that it’s very good, our legislation, at protecting eggs, sperm and embryos,” Rachel Cutting, a director at the HFEA, told the Observer. “But 30 years ago we weren’t operating in a commercial world and it would be beneficial for patients if that could be updated.”
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In its early days, the market was dominated by individual clinics owned and run by doctors, but now it is run by big business. “For the last 10 to 15 years we’ve seen a shift to having large groups of clinics that are financed through venture capitalists and business,” she said.
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“The HFE Act is outdated and one of the main ways is that it has the embryo at the centre of it. Now, 30-odd years later, where we’ve come to is a place where the patient should be at the centre.”

I will admit I groaned at seeing the headline Meet the 10 best new novelists for 2023, but I was moderately cheered when I looked at the ages and only one was under thirty, one is in their forties and two in their fifties, though it still leans towards the 30s.

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And as an Old, is this really such a Hot New Thing? Spellbound: why ‘witch lit’ is the hottest new genre on our bookshelves: 'Vampires and ghosts have long haunted popular fiction, but now a string of new releases is focusing on marginalised women with hidden powers'. We feel there's probably a lot of older stuff that would fit there could bear repackaging...

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Yes, sure, inspirational, but I think maybe there should be some mention of the extent to which this sort of thing has been in the frontline of CUTS, especially when it the sort of thing that counts as enrichment rather than qualification for the capitalist workplace, no? Meet the people who took an evening class… and changed their life. (I've just looked up the local community learning catalogue and wow, Gradgrind lives, it did not used to be thus.)

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Alison Selford was, as this obituary indicates, a rather remarkable woman in her own right. But might it have been worth mentioning that she came of a dynasty of formidable women, and that her aunts were Dr Letitia Fairfield and Dame Rebecca West?

What I read

Well, it was mostly The Count of Monte Cristo all of the time, and boy, one can see that set up tropes that resonate down the decades, what? Even if we also get the somewhat lampshaded debt to Ye Gothick (the lady who thinks he is a vampire), not to mention the potion that completely mimics death, enough so to fool several doctors. (On the 'framing the actual victim as the murderer' subplot, didn't Christie use that one somewhere?) Everybody waffles on at great length in rounded sentences. Nonetheless, page-turning forward momentum.

Then returned to Sun Bubble, which took a weird meta-turn at the end with Julia beginning to write the story of the 'Sun Bubble' relationship - various textual allusions to other contemporary writers and not sure whether Gaskell here was trying to compete in the lady-novelist litfic stakes??? Still weirdly unheimlich touches.

Alexis Hall, Husband Material arrived yesterday, and was a lovely frothy (with serious touches) change of pace.

Jem Bloomfield, Witchcraft and Paganism in Midcentury Women's Detective Fiction (2022): blurb:

This Element investigates the appearance of witchcraft and paganism in the novels of four of the most popular female detective authors of the era: Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Gladys Mitchell. The author approaches the theme of witchcraft and paganism not simply as a matter of content but as an influence which shapes the narrative and its possibilities. The 'witchy' detective novel, as the author calls it, brings together the conventions of Golden Age fiction with the images and enchantments of witchcraft and paganism to produce a hitherto unstudied mode of detective fiction in the midcentury.

On the go

Having just finished that latter, I have nothing actually on the go at present.

Up next

Still making up my mind.

The name Johann Hari rings some sort of bell, and it has a certain crack of doom in it?

Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.

You, dr rdrz, know me by now, and that I am a hedjog who looks askance at a lovely rosy vision of the somehow unified consciousness of the past (was that TS Eliot?), that Past when Things Were Better and we lived more in harmony with ourselves and nature.

And I think of the late C19th woezing over tit-bitty journalism - fun facts and listicles and so on, detached from any context.

And ads in magazines and books of my youth saying 'Have YOU got a grasshopper mind?' and offering remedies.

And I think it might have been Langhamer's book on women and leisure pointing out that women's work in the household was often a round of distraction, or at least bouncing between tasks and stopping the baby falling into the fire; and the reason stories and articles in women's mags were of the short length they were was so that they could be read in those brief moments while e.g. the potatoes boiled.

And of the Edwardian school children who learnt so much better once they got school meals and treated for nits and fleas.

As for those people not looking at the view but taking selfies: has this not been a plaint since the rise of cheaply available cameras and commercial film-processing?

I don't know what he's doing on social media/the web, but I observe a lot of intelligent and witty and creative interaction, I get a sense that people are out there writing and creating and researching and Doing Stuff, and indeed, Helping One Another. I will concede that this may be a rather niche corner of T'Internetz.

I.e. I would probably have guessed (and I would have been right) that my Twitter feed would be screaming WOT at the notion that there is an “untold history lesson” of what happened over three centuries of witch-hunting in the UK - described in the fine old 70s feminist spirituality woowoo term as 'the burning times', when, in England, anyway, no burnings took place and it was by no means a major site of the European witchcraze (Scotland, however...). This is not an untold history, and where are these people getting their sources? Margaret Murray??? (Visions of Professor Ronald Hutton beating his head on the desk.)

On distraction/not distraction, certainly there were people who needed to focus, for a period (sometimes long hours) so as not to fall into the machinery, or be eaten by the wild animals they were hunting, mess up the accounts they were copying (though I recall one of Sara Caudwell's mysteries turns on Hilary Tamar identifying a not unknown issue in manuscript transcription, of copying the same line twice instead of two consective lines...)

- and then they were exhausted.

And - to reiterate a theme that has come up here o so many times before - those individuals who were able to fall into an undistracted 'flow' state in most if not all cases were able to do so because somebody else, wife or other female relative or servants - was dealing with domestic distractions.

I will also allude to those discoveries that were made because somebody got distracted by that weird thing that was not the thing they were supposed to be attending to.

What I read

Finished The Witch, which is good, but somewhat heavy going, because it's taking on a lot of scholarship and debates and controversies covering a WIDE geographical range and a HUGE time-scale and is thus dense and chewy. It's (this is Hutton, after all) not about some Universal Unified Field Theory of the Witch Throughout History (bless) but very much about the specific in time and place: even when one can see longer and more distant influences it's very much about the particular.

Zoe Chant, Top Gun Tiger (Protection Inc #7 (2018): well, I zipped through this, but, I dunno, where can you go after shapeshifting extinct creatures including dinosaurs with extra powers? and cute little mystical beasties coming through some kind of dimensional portal, awww? While this winds up the Protection Inc sequence I see a spin-off is promised.

On the go

Am bogging down a bit in Foundryside - put it aside while I romped through Top Gun Tiger and found it hard to get going again.

Lara Feigel, Free Woman: Life, Liberation, and Doris Lessing (2018): have not got very far with this but would prefer less of her and more of Doris, really.

Up next

There's nothing that's really crying out 'Reeaaad meeee'.

Dept of Yayfulness: a new book by Ronald Hutton, this time on witches: The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.

And, Dept of Cults and the fears generated within enclosed communities: An account of the writer’s own life and her father’s in the Exclusive Brethren, and the chaos and freedom that followed the decision to walk out.

Dept of, Possibly Problematic Connections: Sugar by James Walvin review – from slavery to obesity: 'Walvin’s focus on corrupting appetites causes him to lose the plot' and get into some serious fat-shaming and woezing upon The Evilz of Modern Life.

Dept of, Nomination for the Bad Sex Award? Finely researched history and clumsy sex scenes collide in this thriller. Though is the legal side plausible, enquiring minds wish to know? 'takes a break from his legal career in white-collar fraud to go to the Hague and prosecute an alleged massacre'?

Dept of, Should One Mention Antonia Forest? Where are all the great books about women in sport? And in darker mode, Megan Abbott, Dare Me (cheerleading) and You Will Know Me (gymnastics). Am a bit miffed that no mention of the movie Pat and Mike, Katherine Hepburn being awesome and allegedly based on Babe Didrikson Zaharias.

Dept of, A Case for the Ponceyness Police: Victorian workhouse chic? Send them to pick oakum and be fed on gruel. (Okay, I'm now wondering about the latest hipster eatery, serving gruel and skilly... no seconds!)

In a listserv discussion of the trope of spinster as crazy cat lady:

Someone cites Kipling's 'The Cat Who Walked By Himself' from The Just-So Stories as an exemplar.

(They also consider this carefully crafted piece of narration 'accidentally hilarious'.)

Characterising the Woman as a spinster.

Er: did they not notice that one of the ways Cat beguiles Woman is by soothing the fractious baby? Woman may not be married as such, but she is certainly cohabiting in the cave with Man.

This goes rather further than the just 'not reading the question asked' thing that I have surely previously moaned about, a recent example of which was, in response to a request for recent historiography on early modern witchcraft, a recommendation of Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon. I yield to no-one in my admiration for that work, but it is very specifically about the rise of modern paganism since the late C19th and goes the distance in arguing against the idea that there were long-standing folk traditions and practices at the root of this.

I'm not sure I would attribute this entirely to the pernicious influence of Teh Internetz, having been irked, many years ago, by some distinguished literary scholar who made an absolutely balls-up of explaining what Hardy meant, in the preface to Jude the Obscure, when he wrote of

the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet; who do not recognize the necessity for most of her sex to follow marriage as a profession, and boast themselves as superior people because they are licensed to be loved on the premises.

Yet again, this surfaced on one of the listservs.

But, an interesting twist, apparently in France in the C19th some docs did employ vaginal stimulation to treat neurasthenia (okay, would like to see some citations on this, but I wouldn't rule it out, because, hey, Charcot and his hysterics, it's a different medico-cultural context). And, furthermore, this was apparently made illegal some time in C20th (again, cites would be welcomed on that).

Then I had a mental click and thought, is that about docs using a certain but outmoded treatment in all good faith (but whoa, there are a lot of outmoded treatments that docs went on/go on doing well past what one would imagine their use-by date and nobody makes leeches/cupping, whatever, actually illegal), or is it about docs claiming when accused of groping female patients that it's therapeutic, officer, voila the medical literature on the subject. That it's all about Protection of Chaste Womanhood (and less about the women than their outraged husbands and male relatives.) .

(Sort of analogous to the UK Witchcraft Act being actually about using the threat/promise of occult interventions to extort money, not summoning spirits from the vasty deep or cooking up a tasty eye of newt, toe of frog, fillet of fenny snake casserole: and people nonetheless thinking it was the latter.)

After all, even in these times there are cases of docs who finally get hauled up by the GMC for doing gratuitously intimate examinations for which there is no justification in the presenting symptoms (relatively recent case of a 'Harley St gyno' - who turned out to have no specialist qualifications at all, only the Harley St address and the smooth manner - who had been molesting his paying patients for years).

And what could be easier for a doc to say than 'she's hysterical/neurasthenic/delusional, she totally misunderstood my thoroughly professional interventions', when accused?

*Trust him, he's a doctor*

This all makes me wondering if we need to interrogate this debate from a different perspective, except, good luck with the access to GMC records..