December 17, 2006
Carnivalesque #22
On the table
Natalie Bennett writes about the Cooke sisters, learned women of the Renaissance, and reviews CJ Samson's Sovereign, the third Master Shardlake detective novel set in the age of Henry VIII.
Alan Baumler presents fascinating material in Keeping Halal in the Ming dynasty.
Confused about tipping? Raminagrobis's Straight Tip to All Cross Coves may not help you work out the correct percentage, but it does offer some interesting etymologies.
Really stretching the limits of the "early modern": Mary Mark Ockerbloom alerts us to Diplomatic Difficulties, a new selection of texts at A Celebration of Women Writers which focuses on "women who were first-hand observers or direct participants in the diplomatic process."
Conrad H. Roth translates and comments on a poem by Ausonius about an adulterous woman who poisons her husband but then worries that the poison was not strong enough.
Mark A. Rayner presents The Lost PowerPoint Slides (Pope Leo X Edition) at the skwib.
Across the table
T. Bridges justifies a madman, specifically, William Dowsing, at The Conventicle.
Gavin Robinson discusses shock tactics during the English Civil War at Investigations of a Dog, and explodes some myths about early-modern cavalry charges.
Abu Sahajj suggests that the work of modern American intellectuals "reflects a greater self-absorption than that of 18th century imperialist scholars" in An Occidental-Muslim's Criticism of Empires and Orthodoxies.
On periodization: Longer Than I Don't Remember: Idiosyncratic Periodization for Fun and Profit by Scott Eric Kaufman (host of the most recent History Carnival).
The Long Eighteenth just finished their second collaborative reading, of The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson by Blanford Parker (the first was of Michael McKeon's The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge).
At the table
After several weeks of posts on foie gras, Carolyn Smith-Kizer posts a recipe for Goose Pye at 18thC Cuisine.
And, given the season, recipes for Marchpane.
Books, art, and book art
Jem Webster goes museum hopping and offers Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's Four Figures on a Step (ca. 1655-60) for the reader's perusal.
Sharon points toward Joe Miller's Jests: or, The Wits Vade-Mecum (1739) at staggernation (also home of John Ashton's Modern Street Ballads (1888)).
Mister Aitch offers selections from A Catalogue of Engraved and Etched English Title Pages down to the death of William Faithorne, 1691, at Giornale Nuovo. An earlier post offers images from The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord, "an absorbing history of the study, classification and illustration of plants."
More? Visit Heidelberg Schlossgarten at BibliOdyssey. And linger for images from Fasiculus Rariorum, the Comic History of Rome, and, just today, Stilt Walkers.
Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie always has lots to look at. And don't forget to check the item of the day at the 18th-Century Reading Room.
Onstage
Jem Webster posts about how Daniel O'Quinn's Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 has affected his teaching.
Tim Abbott discovers an ancestor in the circus.
And — too good! — Hieronimo imagines — and begins — a Shakespearean history cycle about the Bush family. It's funny because it's true.
My graduate course, Women Onstage in the Long Eighteenth Century, just ended. I blogged; the students blogged; and we made forays into Wikipedia. Speaking of which …
Around the web
The latest in Random Wiki-Testing at Blogging the Renaissance. Hieronimo says this is not a meme, but it looks like fun. Might I add, as a suggestion, that people who do engage in this non-meme might want to consider making some edits if they don't like what they find?
The next Carnivalesque will be an ancient/medieval edition at Memorabilia Antonina on or about 25 January. Want to join the carnival? Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnivalesque using the quick and painless submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the index page. And please check out the Carnivalesque site.
Thanks to all who submitted links.
September 4, 2006
Women blog history
Huge list of women who blog about history, collectively and individually, at Cliopatria. Trillwing, who provoked Ralph E. Luker's post, was gracious in response. A most useful compilation; I was not aware of many of these bloggers.
October 9, 2005
No drugs or rock 'n' roll
Alterior is on an interesting kick.
Melinama talks about her crushes.
Mae West sings at PCL Linkdump.
"Darling! Our first argument!"
True Porn Clerk Stories (link via growabrain). Compelling.
Mark Dery reports on the Art and Politics of Netporn (ATTN: graphic images) (via BoingBoing):
Billed by its organizers, the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures in collaboration with Katrien Jacobs and Matteo Pasquinelli, as "the first major international conference on netporn criticism," the Art and Politics of Netporn (September 30-October 1, Amsterdam) made happy bedfellows of Tod Browning and Kraft-Ebbing, Larry Flynt and Foucault.
Pin-ups and French kissing at Bibi's.
From awhile back: dating zen and love zen.
Gallery of Bellydancing Librarians (via Metafilter).
September 17, 2005
Historical films
Ellen Moody, on C18-L, points toward a resource that I didn't know about: Modern History in the Movies, part of the Internet History Sourcebooks Project. Lots of Restoration and 18th material, usefully divided into various thematic groups, though it doesn't include everything: the focus is on films that would be useful for teaching history, it seems. Which would apparently not include Albert Finney as Tom Jones. Maybe I'll put together a mega-list in my (HA!) spare time. There are flurries of discussion on C18-L every now and then, and extremely useful lists like this one: they could be consolidated.
Maybe after the holidays.
September 12, 2005
Saving New Orleans history
This from the National Coalition for History (U.S.A.) (heads up from Anita Guerrini on C18-L):
HISTORY/ARCHIVES COMMUNITY RALLY TO ASSIST IN KATRINA AFTERMATH
As emergency officials continue to find and rescue survivors, recover bodies, and clean up the wreckage from Hurricane Katrina ... efforts are also underway by various history and archival organizations to pitch in and begin to survey the damage done to sites of historical significance and to preserve as much as possible. This rescue and salvage effort takes on special importance in a part of the country that is especially rich with historic sites, artifacts, and archives.
....
Virtually everything in the Latin Quarter and the Garden District suffered some damage. Preliminary reports indicate that the New Orleans Public Library was hit hard and its archive of city records, which are housed in the basement of the building, probably experienced flooding. At the New Orleans Notarial Archives, which hold some 40 million pages of signed acts compiled by notaries of new Orleans over three centuries, initial efforts to save historical documents were unsuccessful. A Swedish document salvage firm, hired by the archives to freeze-dry records to remove the moisture from them, was turned away by uniformed personnel as they attempted to enter the city. There are a considerable number of freezer trucks available as soon as they are allowed to access areas currently closed. In the case of both the public library and the notarial archives, time is of the essence as humidity, mold, and water damage may decimate these collections in a matter of days.
Read more. Various links toward the end.
May 22, 2005
Too good for 'em!!
The wonderful Sharon, who has singlehandedly done more to collect and make available early modern web resources than anyone I can think of, has posted her own transcription of
Not Punishment Enough,
FOR
Murtherers, High-way Men, and House-Breakers.
Offered to the Consideration of the Two HOUSES of PARLIAMENT.
...
LONDON, Printed for A. Baldwin in Warwick-Lane, 1701
In the note to the reader, the author writes,
... I send this Essay into the World, to set this Evil in its due light, and attempt its Cure. And if in it I have discovered more Zeal than Knowlege, yet the good end it aims at, with Candid Judges will cover abundance of faults.
She also links to William Paley's Reasons for Contentment, Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public (1792) (PDF), made available by Don Herzog of Left2Right. And to the Project Gutenberg version of Hannah More's Stories for the Young, Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious, posted a few months ago, and More's Village Politics, Addressed to All the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Labourers, in Great Britain, by Will Chip, A Country Carpenter [Written early in the French Revolution.].
As I said below, quite shortly we may never have to leave our desks. Which may be just as well given how rare research funding for the Humanities is becoming, in Canada at least.
April 24, 2005
Ye Olde Linkes
A Variety of Ladies' Head Dresses, The New lady's magazine (1786). Click for larger image.
Ladies' headdresses at the Beinecke (via Jim Chevalier on C18-L).
Sharon posts a multitude of links on crime. She writes, "Has to come around sooner or later in an election campaign." Indeed. She has also scored a copy of Hanging not punishment enough (1701) and plans to make it available. Please do!
The Gutenberg Bible held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is available on CD-ROM. G. Zombie has one. Here it is online. There are a number of other copies online: two at the British Library, which one can compare; the Göttingen Gutenberg Bible (ca. 1454); and the Keio Gutenberg Bible. Bible links from the University of Calgary. See also The Oliver Cromwell Website and The Goodspeed New Testament Manuscript Collection (both via Plep).
Libraries as fingerprints at Historiological Notes.
The fantastic architectural drawings of Achilles G. Rizzoli (1896-1981) at Giornale Nuovo.
The Opium Wars (via Plep).
Britain's 18th-c canal system being restored (via Metafilter).
Click for larger image.
April 3, 2005
Those were the days
The Juvenile Miscellany (1826-1836): Cover for 1828. Click for larger image.
Marking papers, still fighting a cold, hovering over at The Valve checking for comments on my comments, wondering how this ALSC issue is going to play out, particularly as I am an unregenerate race-class-gender kinda gal — but, the show must go on!
"Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera & Books." Doesn't seem to be much online, but here are some links to photos in the media.(via BoingBoing).
Visit Giornale Nuovo for misteraitch's post about George Psalmanazar (1679?-1763):
a man of uncertain origins who came to claim that he was a native of the island of Formosa (i.e. Taiwan). So little was known about this island in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century, that Psalmanazar got away with an elaborately fanciful back-story, one which he eventually expanded into a marvellously inventive book-length Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, which was published in London in 1704.
Read the post and see the novel illustrations of "Formosans" and their putative language.
A Small Gallery of Magazine Covers: covers of nineteenth-century children's magazines (lots of great illustrations, including the one above); old magazine covers from Nostalgiaville; "Magazine Covers and Cover Lines: An Illustrated History" by Gerald Grow, Ph.D. (has some nice late 18thc and 19thc covers) (all via growabrain. Check the post for other magazine links).
The original handwritten MSS of Madame Bovary will be online next year (also via growabrain. Be sure to see his other book links).
The Persistent Puppet: Pinocchio's Heirs in Contemporary Fiction and Film by Rebecca West. A lovely article about the century-old Italian tale and its successors (via Plep).
Ramelli's Machines: original drawings of 16thc machines (via Plep).
The rise of the English novel during the 18th century coincided with a growing pride in the landscape of Britain. As novels portrayed society, so maps and topographical views delineated the grandeur of Nature and the man–made elegance of new urban streets and squares. Town and country often provide the travelling backdrop to novels and poems, sometimes exerting such a strong a presence they almost become players in the plot.
From the British Library (via Plep).
Alexander Cruden and his concordance of the Bible (at Metafilter).
Moliere in English: translations by Timothy Mooney, online (via Plep).
Volcanoes, slugs and comets: rare scientific books at UCL (via C18-L, via Sharon).
Two posts by Sharon from some days back, Women’s history and gender history: what and why? and Alice Clark, working women’s historian. Loaded with her usual astute analysis, and links.
And, I don't usually post about ancient history, but this caught my eye: Welcome to the Obsolete Technology Website (via Plep).
from Ramelli's Machines
March 22, 2005
Back in the day
The Worst Jobs in History. Take the career guide quiz (link from Metafilter). I apparently am suited to be a Viking sailor/warrior. Or a Petardier's Assistant:
Picture yourself in flimsy clothes, blind drunk, carrying a bell-shaped gunpowder-filled container of brass or iron fixed to a wooden board – the petard – being shot at by musketeers while you try to reach the enemy's castle gate.
I hereby promise never to complain about my job again.
See also Life in Elizabethan England (via Plep).
March 15, 2005
How the Vote was Won
An early-twentieth-century suffragist comedy in one-act by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St. John.
Local readers: come to a read-through by the students of ENGL3622: Writing by Women II, on Monday March 21 at 2pm in the Whitebone Lounge at UNBSJ. All welcome; free admission.
Part of International Women's Week @ UNBSJ.
Download the poster (11"×8.5" PDF).
February 22, 2005
George Washington Gets Extreme Makeover
Jim Chevalier posted to the C-18-L listserv with a link to this story: in essence,
a team of scientists is creating a trio of action figures of [George] Washington as part of a larger [US]$95 million educational effort to reintroduce the first president to America, hoping to illustrate who he was better than those countless portraits.
Jim adds to his post:
I don't know if it ever occured to anyone to do this in Washington's lifetime, but the idea wasn't entirely unknown in our period [c18th]. When Simon-Henri Linguet was still a celebrated lawyer, in addition to the hats, etc. sold as Linguet souvenirs, there were apparently little Linguet dolls. Why not Washington dolls?
I think we Canadians are missing the boat here. How about a Sir John A. Macdonald action figure, complete with glass of gin for those two-day filibusters?
A few minutes of googling later: Good god, there already is one! And, he seems to be holding something, and it looks like a glass. That is so much more fun than wooden dentures.
Bonus link:
January 28, 2005
The performing arts
Garrick as Richard III [inside a gourd??]
Bibi points towards a guided tour of music halls, part of a larger site about performance in the U.K. called PeoplePlay UK: Theatre History Online. Nice pages on Restoration and c18th theatre: lots of graphics and goodies.
Too much of a yawn? Perhaps you'd like to check out buffology: "Every Buffy character, episode, cast member, writer and director and every word of every show, in a searchable database" (via BoingBoing).
WWW Virtual Library: Theatre and Drama.
International Theatre Resources from Artslynx.
Thai Elephant Orchestra (from Mirabilis).
January 14, 2005
It's payday
(Click for larger image)
and I just ordered this. For half price, my fellow dix-huitiémistes! I got very excited when I read that it was edited by William Smellie, but it was not the William Smellie I was thinking of.
Though they were both Scottish.
According to Robbie Burns,
SHREWD Willie Smellie to Crochallan came;
The old cock’d hat, the grey surtout the same;
His bristling beard just rising in its might,
’Twas four long nights and days to shaving night:
His uncomb’d grizzly locks, wild staring, thatch’d
A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch’d;
Yet tho’ his caustic wit was biting-rude,
His heart was warm, benevolent, and good.
Bonus links on the first Smellie:
William Smellie, A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery (1754)
Of the Management of new-born Children, with the Diseases to which they are subject; A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (1762)
Smellie lived for a time with William Hunter, author of Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata [The anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures] (1774), and of whom I have written.
Collection of obstetrical and gynecological instruments in the Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library.
Obstetric Literature and the Changing Character of Childbirth.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists Collection.
And the second:
Major Topics of the Encycopedia Britannica, First Edition (1768–1771)
Buffon's Natural History: General and Particular translated by William Smellie (8 volumes, 1781).
A Romantic Natural History Bibliography
Elegy on the death of Smellie's son (facsimile from the wonderful The Word on the Street).
"Romanticism and the Triumph of Life Science: Prospects for Study."
The Scottish Printing Archival Trust. See particularly Links to printing historical resources. Also of interest: First Scottish Books.
The Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers.
January 11, 2005
Unwanted children
Most are probably aware of the ill-considered bill which, had it become law, would have required women to report stillbirths and presumably miscarriages to local authorities within twelve hours. Most are probably also aware that "after a firestorm of controversy spread across the World Wide Web over the weekend," John Cosgrove, the proposer of the bill, has withdrawn it.
Posting has been fast and furious: Democracy for Virginia has a series of comprehensive posts. See also
Pharyngula: "Virginia is for hateful loons"
iBeth: "Safe Havens": Terrible Idea
The Well-Timed Period: "Del. Cosgrove: Don't Relax Just Yet"
Bitch Ph.D (and here)
apostropher: "All your baby are belong to us."
Rosemary Hurford is spitting mad.
getupgrrl's vagina is angry. And how.
Dr. B: Pardon My French.... and The Power of the Blogosphere.
A rant from Echidne.
(Not) Mousewords: "First these women blog, and next thing you know, they'll be letting them vote."
Our sisters to the South just dodged a bullet. But while they are jubilant, I don't suppose anyone is forgetting that that particular gun is still cocked and loaded.
Oops, a double entendre. But I don't feel in the least amused, writing this.
Sharon has an excellent post, outlining the history of legislation against infanticide in England (she also links to two excellent bibliographies, btw).
This whole story — apart from the apparent power of blogging — is disheartening. My dissertation was about infanticide in Britain in the 18th- and 19th centuries, so I am familiar with the history Sharon outlines. And with the hysteria over the visions of "dead babies on rubbish heaps" that gripped England in the Victorian era. And the ludicrous, punitive, and ignorant responses of the authorities.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
December 5, 2004
Art below stairs
Claire points towards the webpage for a show, now closed, called Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servants' Portraits, and Sharon, in the comments, recommends Erddig Hall, "famous for its portraits of the servants of the house from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (There is also a book, The Servants' Hall. Lots of pictures.)," while Natalie writes about Gwen John, sister of Augustus, one of whose earliest oils was of her cleaning woman, Mrs. Atkinson.
[The painting is "Heads of Six of Hogarth's Servants" by William Hogarth, c 1750-5, part of the Below Stairs exhibit. I've always liked this painting: the range of ages and faces, particularly the young boy at the top; the woman in the bottom right, the only one looking at the viewer; the old man, looking away from everyone else.]
November 14, 2004
UK history resource
A Vision of Britain Through Time: "A vision of Britain between 1801 and 2001. Including maps, statistical trends and historical descriptions." There is some earlier material, however; of particular interest to me is the section on Travellers' Tales ("Journeys around Britain, from the 12th to the 19th centuries"), which includes Daniel Defoe's A Tour through England and Wales divided into circuits or journeys (here's vol. 2). Though curiously, the sections about Wales have been left out. Who on earth would leave out Wales? (Though Sharon, to whom I owe the link, allows that "there are some doubts about how many of the places in Wales [Defoe] actually visited anyway").
Anyway, other travellers supply the lack. Here is George Borrow from Wild Wales (1854):
I departed for Swansea, distant about thirteen miles. Gutter Vawr consists of one street, extending for some little way along the Swansea road, the foundry, and a number of huts and houses scattered here and there. The population is composed almost entirely of miners, the workers at the foundry, and their families. For the first two or three miles the country through which I passed did not at all prepossess me in favour of Glamorganshire: it consisted of low, sullen, peaty hills. Subsequently, however, it improved rapidly, becoming bold, wild, and pleasantly wooded. The aspect of the day improved, also, with the appearance of the country. When I first started the morning was wretched and drizzly, but in less than an hour it cleared up wonderfully, and the sun began to flash out. As I looked on the bright luminary I thought of Ab Gwilym's ode to the sun and Glamorgan, and with breast heaving and with eyes full of tears, I began to repeat parts of it, or rather of a translation made in my happy boyish years:-
Each morn, benign of countenance,
Upon Glamorgan's pennon glance!
Afternoon in beauty clear
Above my own dear bounds appear!
Bright outline of a blessed clime,
Again, though sunk, arise sublime -
etc.
This reminds me of a joke — no, don't go — I heard one old fellow telling another in a pub in Bishopston, Gower, some years back:
An English tourist is walking about the hills of Wales, comes upon a local man, and greets him:
"I say! Do you suppose that we are going to see the sun today?"
"Oh, I hope so, sir. Not for me; I've seen the sun. But for my children."
And many more in this vein. I can tell you, after a few lagers and lime my breast was heaving and my eyes were full of tears.