Investigations of a Dog

The Horse as Cultural Icon: The Real and the Symbolic Horse in the Early Modern World is a new collection of essays about early-modern horses edited by Peter Edwards, Karl Enenkel and Elspeth Graham, and published by Brill. It should be out next week and it’s already available for preorder on Amazon US (if you’ve got loads of money) but I can’t find it on Amazon UK yet.

I’ve got a chapter in it about the military and social value of horses, mostly in early-modern England but it also touches on the middle ages and the First World War. It’s basically exploring Bruce Boehrer’s idea that horses were socially devalued in early-modern England. It includes an alternative narrative of cavalry warfare, a discussion of how horse ownership and cavalry service were (or weren’t) related to elite social status, and a look at the cultural myths of cavalry and chivalry in literature.

The full contents are:

1. Greg Bankoff, ‘Big Men, Small Horses: Ridership, Social Standing and Environmental Adaptation in the Early Modern Philippines’, pp. 99-120.
2. Pia F. Cuneo, ‘Visual Aids: Equestrian Iconography and the Training of Horse, Rider and Reader’, pp. 71-97.
3. Louise Hill Curth, ‘‘The Most Excellent of Animal Creatures’: Health Care for Horses in Early Modern England’, in pp. 217-40.
4. Peter Edwards, ‘Image and Reality: Upper Class Perceptions of the Horse in Early Modern England’, pp. 281-306.
5. Amanda Eisemann, ‘Forging Iron and Masculinity: Farrier Trade Identities in Early Modern Germany’, pp. 377-402.
6. Jennifer Flaherty, ‘‘Know Us by Our Horses’: Equine Imagery in Shakespeare’s Henriad’, pp. 307-25.
7. Elspeth Graham, ‘The Duke of Newcastle’s ‘Love For Good Horses’: An Exploration of Meanings’, pp. 37-69.
8. Ian F. MacInnes, ‘Altering a Race of Jades: Horse Breeding and Geohumoralism in Shakespeare’, pp. 175-89.
9. Richard Nash, ‘‘Beware a Bastard Breed’: Notes Towards a Revisionist History of the Thorough bred Racehorse’, pp. 191-216.
10. Gavin Robinson, ‘The Military Value of Horses and the Social Value of the Horse in Early Modern England’, pp. 351-76.
11. Elizabeth Anne Socolow, ‘Letting Loose the Horses: Sir Philip Sidney’s Exordium to The Defence of Poesie’, pp. 121-42.
12. Sandra Swart, ‘‘Dark Horses’: The Horse in Africa in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, pp. 241-60.
13. Elizabeth M. Tobey, ‘The Legacy of Federico Grisone’, pp. 143-71.
14. Andrea Tonni, ‘The Renaissance Studs of the Gonzagas of Mantua’, pp. 261-78.
15. Elaine Walker, ‘‘The Author of their Skill’: Human and Equine Understanding in the Duke of Newcastle’s ‘New Method’’, pp. 327-50.

The blogroll is back again and Google Reader shared items have gone because Google is about to destroy the sharing features in Reader. This is apparently an attempt to force us to switch to Google Plus but in my case it just means that I’ll switch to Liferea, which is a perfectly adequate RSS reader from the Ubuntu repository. I’ll miss the sharing but I’ll also have more time to do constructive things, and I’ll be slightly less dependent on Google services, so it’s not all bad.

Dealing with this has taken up the time I was going to use to write a proper post, so here are some acquisitions instead. Remember there’s still another week to take advantage of the Ashgate sale.

1. Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon Catholicism, gender, and seventeenth-century print culture (Notre Dame, Ind., 2005).
2. Peter Doyle, British Army Cap Badges of the First World War (2010).
3. Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London, 1637-45, illustrated edition. (1997).
4. Lien Luu, Immigrants and the industries of London, 1500-1700 (Aldershot, 2004).
5. Brian Manning, ed., Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973).
6. Jason McElligott and David L. (David Lawrence) Smith, eds., Royalists and Royalism During the English Civil Wars (Cambridge, 2007).
7. Mark Philp, ed., Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797-1815, illustrated edition. (2006).
8. Nehemiah Wallington, The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618-1654: A Selection, David Booy (ed.) (Aldershot, 2007).

Today this blog has made it to five years, although there have been some significant gaps so it’s not exactly five years of continuous blogging. My book has now passed peer review and I’ve got until the end of November to make the final revisions, so I’ll be able to post a bit more frequently now. For now here are some quick links and random thoughts:

• Brett Holman has made a free ebook version of his series of posts on the Sudeten crisis. Highly recommended: going through newspaper reports day by day gives a very different perspective on events.
• TARDIS Eruditorum is blog which offers intelligent and entertaining critiques of Doctor Who stories. It started working through them in chronological order from An Unearthly Child and is now into the Tom Baker years. There’s also a forthcoming book compiling expanded versions of all the Hartnell era stuff.
• Meanwhile Andrew Hickey has just started blogging his new book about Doctor Who, and has nearly finished another one about The Monkees.
• I’ve finally got the hang of the British Library’s computer ordering system for manuscripts, but I wish they had card readers like the PRO. I still don’t get what makes the difference between select manuscripts and normal ones. It seems completely arbitrary.
• I’ve found out that I have ancestors from the Isle of Man who can apparently be traced back to the 17th century. Plenty of material for future blog posts there.
• I’m not sure what to make of this Daily Telegraph report about a jug supposedly made from the skin of Oliver Cromwell’s horse. I’m usually sceptical about Cromwell relics, not least because it seems unlikely that puritans would have approved of something so idolatrous. Also the names of warhorses in the civil wars are almost never mentioned in contemporary records.
• The Common Swings has a new serialized story in progress involving a mysterious 1970s TV series.
• The National Archives are planning to digitize all of the WW1 war diaries in WO 95 and are looking for volunteers to help sort them out.
• Bench Grass continues to be brilliant.