Investigations of a Dog

So the FORWARD Symposium was a bit of an anti-climax as not many people turned up. Maybe it’ll be like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club: in a few years time everyone will be saying they were there. Was good to see Martyn Bennett again. It doesn’t seem like 7 years since he examined my PhD thesis. If I wanted to compare the speakers to British indie bands (and why wouldn’t I? It’s a perfectly normal thing to do) I’d say that Lucy Worsley was Velocette, Rodreguez King-Dorset was Radiohead, and I was The Indelicates. Make of that what you will. In the evening we went to Lincoln Drill Hall to see Richard Holmes and Gordon Corrigan talking about the First World War. They were both very good.

Below is my paper, along with a Zotero-able bibliography. It’s slightly different from what I actually said as I ad-libbed some extra bits but it’s near enough. (I had some trouble uploading the pictures through WordPress so some of them might be too big for some people, but I just couldn’t be bothered to set up thumbnails manually.)

(more…)

Last week I finally got round to reading Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender. Goldstein argues that gender shapes war, and that war shapes gender. The evidence for the first is very strong. War would be different if its conduct wasn’t dominated by gender ideology. War has occurred in nearly all cultures, but nearly all cultures in nearly all periods have excluded women from active combat roles. The argument that this is because women are biologically unsuited to combat does not stand up. Goldstein shows that although women are smaller and weaker than men on average individuals are distributed along bell curves which overlap. The top 10 to 15% of women are bigger and stronger than then bottom 10 to 15% of men. Therefore under some historical circumstances armies could have had more and better soldiers if they recruited women as well as men.

The second argument, that war shapes gender, isn’t so strong. It’s true that gender is at least as universal as war, but Goldstein acknowledges that gender roles vary widely across cultures in almost every respect other than combat roles and hunting. It seems hard to explain how all of this diversity could be directed towards the same purpose: to produce warriors or potential warriors. Goldstein is very much the voice of rational liberal 20th century America. Although he makes good use of anthropology and recognises the huge diversity of gathering-hunting cultures I think he underestimates the strangeness of medieval and early-modern European cultures.

As an alternative to the warrior, Goldstein suggests the provider as a new ideal of masculinity which American men might aspire to in future. The big problem here is that this model is suspiciously similar to the ideals of early-modern English patriarchy studied by Anthony Fletcher and Alexandra Shepard. There was more to the early-modern patriarch than just providing, but he was certainly more of a provider than a warrior. To be a man was to be the head of a household. Boys were toughened up, but this was mainly so that they could control their own bodies, their wives, their children, and their servants. The ordered household was seen as the basis of an ordered society. In contrast, the warrior was not much of a normative ideal. Grievances over billeting suggest that even before the civil wars English civilians saw English soldiers as dangerous outsiders. Stereotypes of professional soldiers had more in common with the disobedient anti-patriarchal forms of masculinity which Shepard identified among students and apprentices. War was disorder: the very thing that early-modern patriarchy most feared.

I’m still in awe of Goldstein’s ambitious scholarship, and I think we need more historians (particularly military historians) to show this kind of imagination. But I also think his work shows some of the weaknesses of broad comparative studies: they risk abstracting and generalising to such an extent that a lot of important differences can be lost.

1. Anthony J Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1995).
2. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
3. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).

Over at Medieval Cripples, Crazies and Imbeciles Pope Bonkface VIII (call him by his name) posted about a memorial plaque to a “dumb” astronomer which highlights the potential absurdities when “dumb” can mean unable to speak or just stupid. This made me realise that disability is yet another thing that intersects with my work on animals. In early-modern England (and presumably in other pre-modern cultures too) speech and reason were supposed to go together, and were supposed to set humans apart from animals. Therefore it might not be a coincidence that “dumb” has those two meanings: in early-modern culture they were very closely related. People who couldn’t speak might not just be seen as stupid, they could potentially have been seen as not entirely human. So Bruce Boehrer’s concept of relative anthropocentrism could apply to disability as well as race, gender, age, class etc.

Next week, on Wednesday 28th May, I’ll be speaking at the FORWARD Network Early Modern Social History Symposium at Nottingham Trent University. I’m going to talk about non-human animals in early-modern society: how we can bring them into social history and why we need to. The keynote speaker will be Lucy Worsley, and they also have what should be a fascinating paper on black dance by Rodreguez King-Dorset.

You can download a leaflet with more details here.

I’m very grateful to Rita Wierzbicki for inviting me to speak at what should be a very exciting event.

Abstract of my paper below: (more…)

Chris at Mixing Memory posted an amazing video of Joshua Klein talking about crows. He isn’t just talking about how clever crows are (they’re really clever) but about how we can find new kinds of relationships between humans and other species which aren’t based on domination or extermination. I think he’s achieved that most difficult of things: a view of the non-human which avoids anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism (interesting that Firefox’s spellchecker recognizes the second of those words but not the first – what does that tell us about dominant ideologies?). This is also another problem for the old anthropocentric view that speech and reason go together and that both define the human. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that crows are very good at thinking, but their communication system is very rudimentary. That suggests that thinking isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, linguistic (although there is also plenty evidence that once language enters the picture it does influence thought, even at the level of perceiving differences between colours). The example of crows also suggests that culture doesn’t depend on language: crows can exhibit learned behaviour which varies between groups. Where’s the animal/human boundary now?

This is the 14th Military History Carnival, with a special theme of Contested Boundaries. Today is also the day that Bloggers Unite encourages bloggers to write about human rights (hat tip: Mark Stoneman). I might post something on that theme later today if I have time (and I probably won’t have time), but this carnival edition gives plenty of attention to human rights issues.

(more…)

While trawling (not trolling) for more posts that I can include in the next MHC, I found something interesting via Muhlberger’s Early History:

The Soldier in Later Medieval England is a major research project directed by Anne Curry (who was my personal tutor when I was an undergraduate at Reading). They now have a pilot database online (with free access) with details of thousands of soldiers who fought in the Hundred Years War. This should be really useful for anyone interested in medieval military history, not least because the financial records that the data comes from give much more accurate figures for army sizes than the estimates in chronicles.

The 14th Military History Carnival will be here next week on Thursday 15th May. We still need more submissions: you can submit your own posts or someone else’s, relating to the Contested Boundaries theme or anything else within MHC’s usual remit. Please e-mail submissions to fallon.young@4-lom.com or use the the submission form.

More details of the Contested Boundaries theme:

This can cover disputed territories and borders, which are a big part of many wars. It can also cover cultural boundaries. How does war complicate, question or shift the boundaries between races, genders, classes, and sexual orientations, between able and disabled, or between human and animal? Above all, how is the boundary between war and peace constructed and contested? Just use your imagination.

You can submit your own posts or posts written by someone else. If you feel inspired to write something on this theme, then go for it. Considering the number of submissions we normally get it’s unlikely that your post will be rejected unless it’s outside the scope of the carnival or fails to meet basic standards of factual accuracy. Submissions don’t have to be limited to the theme. As usual, anything about armed forces and conflicts in any part of the world is eligible. Only wars that happened after 1 January 2001 are excluded. See the Military History Carnival page for more details of the carnival’s aims and scope.

Yesterday Bill Turkel announced that The Programming Historian is now available. This is a book, but not as we know it. It’s published in the form of a website and is completely free to access. As the name suggests, it’s an introduction to computer programming aimed specifically at historians. The tutorials will get you doing useful things as soon as possible, even if you have no previous experience of programming. If you do know programming it’s also worth a look. I found lots of useful tips in it.

By enabling more historians to make better use of digital technology the book is helping to change the way that we do history. And it’s also helping to change the way that we present our research, because it’s a concrete example of the advantages of open access publishing on the web. This means a whole lot more than not having to pay to read it. Although the book has been published, it’s still a work in progress. New chapters will be added in future, and existing ones can be improved in response to feedback from readers. Any typos, factual errors or unclear sentences can all be corrected very easily. Comments from reviewers are displayed on accompanying discussion pages so you can see how the text developed and what people thought of it. The book can keep growing to meet the needs of digital historians: there doesn’t ever have to be a point when it’s finally finished like there is with a printed book.

Go and read it. Now.

Via Archaeozoology, an interesting but difficult to spell blog about about the archaeology of non-human animals, I discovered another interesting archaeology blog. Middle Savagery is written by Colleen Morgan, a PhD student at UC Berkeley. She’s doing lots of innovative things with Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Second Life (don’t let the Goreans get you!).

I think maybe historians and archaeologists don’t talk to each other enough despite supposedly having a common interest in the past. My BA was originally going to be archaeology but I was bored with it after two terms and switched to history – I don’t think I would’ve done very well if I’d stuck with it. That bad experience has affected me for far longer than it should have done, and it’s about time I got over it. I was similarly disgusted with history after finishing my PhD but it only took me 5 years to get over that. (Disgust is a vice.) Studying the non-human is one obvious place where historians and archaeologists need to get together.

The web could well offer a way of breaking down barriers between disciplines. Since getting involved in blogging I’ve come into contact with lots of different ideas which I wouldn’t ever have thought about if I’d just been doing history in the traditional way. Reading blogs has given me easy access to literary theory, philosophy, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, various feminist perspectives and much more. Writing my blog allows me to try out ideas that are outside my specialist area without investing too much in them. And trying to think differently benefits my “proper” work.