Someone just found this blog by Googling for “What happened to Lady Brilliana Harley in the English Civil War”. Well, Lady Brilliana Harley is famous for taking charge of the defence of her home when it was besieged by the king’s soldiers. This was something she did. She wasn’t a passive object that things just happened to. This is only one example, but I suspect that it’s not unusual to ask what happened to a woman during a war and to ask what a man did during a war. Actually both women and men do things and and have things done to them in war and peace. This is basic empirical fact. But language and culture bias us to think of men as active and women as passive.

This is a selection of First World War photos from my collection, mostly bought from ebay. I’ve posted some horse photos over at The horse in history and culture. The ones here have more of a gender theme. Click on the thumbnails to see bigger versions.

Four male prisoners of war, two in drag. This was taken in the theatre at Cottbus PoW camp, where my great-grandad was held from 1917 to 1918. He performed in the theatre but there’s no evidence that he dressed as a woman. One of the paradoxes of the hyper-masculine environment of the 20th century British Army was that it often forced men into stereotypically feminine roles in order to stand in for the women who were excluded.

Royal Army Medical Corps group, taken in France, 1919. It clearly shows how uniforms reinforced gender roles. The men are wearing army service dress, just like combat soldiers, although their role is to provide medical care. The women are wearing long skirts and big head-dresses. Also notice that some of the men are very short. The man on the left of the middle row, standing between the corporal and the nurse with a dog at their feet, looks shorter than some of the women. If you look very closely you can see that some of the group are holding puppies.

A man and woman called Fred and Kitty, but I don’t know their surnames. Fred is a sergeant in the Army Service Corps, and Kitty is in civilian clothes. The poses reinforce the differences in dress, suggesting male dominance and female submission.

Territorial Royal Field Artillery corporal with a small boy. Probably taken in Cardiff or Pontypridd. Like the Sergeant in the previous photo, the corporal is wearing spurs. These were standard equipment for troops classed as mounted, which included field artillery and service corps because they relied on horses for transport. I love the little boy’s pose. Although man and boy are both male, they illustrate the hierarchy of masculinity: the corporal is more of a man because of his age, independence and military service.

A group of female munitions workers. The unprecedented expansion of both the British Army and the arms industry in the First World War, along with the assumption that women couldn’t or shouldn’t fight, led to more women working in munitions factories. This temporarily gave some women increased pay and freedom, but 90 years on women as a group still earn less than men as a group. Although the uniforms make some concessions to the practicalities of working in a factory, they also signify femininity.

The next edition of the Military History Carnival will be hosted by Brett Holman at Airminded on 15 February. Please send him suggestions for the best military history blogging since 17 January, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by twitter (@Airminded or tagged #mhc21).

Last year computer programming was out, but now it’s back in. For me anyway. Having finished my data entry job in October I’ve got more spare computer time, which means I can be more active in digital history again. Some things are different now. Zotero has groups and syncing. The Programming Historian has moved since the last time I looked at it. I can finish my digital edition of Sandall’s history of the 5th Lincolns because Major Teall’s epilogue came out of copyright in the UK at the start of this year. But the biggest change is that I’ve switched my operating system from Windows to Linux. When I built my new desktop PC (codenamed Zen) I installed Ubuntu, and I love it. My laptop (codenamed Orac) still has Windows Vista, but I don’t use it much.

Changing to a completely different operating system might sound like a big step but it was actually really easy. This is partly because most of the applications I use are cross platform. I use Firefox more than any other application (and possibly more than all other applications put together). Don’t think that I spend all my time idly browsing the web: Firefox is vital for my historical research and writing. I use Zotero to store, sort, and access all the bibliographic data plus associated notes and PDFs for my research projects. These can all be synced between my PCs via the Zotero server and my own WebDAV server. My works in progress are now drafted on a private wiki which is also necessarily accessed through my web browser. This is much more powerful and flexible than writing in Word like I used to. Every page has an edit history so I can easily compare versions and revert to an earlier one. Wikilinks make it easy to fit sections together in different orders and link to supplementary information. Thanks to Google my e-mail and RSS feed reader are also on the web. When I’m not using Firefox, I still mostly use cross-platform applications. For the last few years I’ve used oXygen for XML editing and jEdit for find and replace operations, both of which are written in Java. Python can run on Linux, Windows and Macs, and although that doesn’t necessarily make individual scripts cross-platform it doesn’t really matter when I’m writing them for myself. The only Windows specific app that I’ve relied on in the last few years is MS Access. Even that was mainly because I was getting paid good money to put data into it for someone else. For my own research I’ve got some old databases from my PhD research, but all I ever need to do with them is export data into other formats.

Given all this, changing to Linux was not likely to be much of a problem, but that would be understating things. In fact it turned out to be a big advantage. Ubuntu is actually much quicker and easier to install and set up than Windows. It just works out of the box and comes with most of the things that most people need to get started. Open Office, Firefox, and even Python are all pre-installed. Once I’d added my favourite Firefox extensions and synced my Zotero library I was ready to do most of what I need to do. The only tricky things were manually installing a proprietary graphics driver and setting up DVD playback, but even this wasn’t too hard. If you don’t have a powerful new graphics card and don’t need 3D performance out of it, the pre-installed open source driver will be adequate for desktop stuff. Even setting up a network printer was completely painless.

Adding new applications is generally much easier than on Windows. Instead of buying a CD or downloading an executable file you can just access software repositories via a menu and tick boxes to select apps you want to be downloaded and installed. Because most of these apps are free in every sense of the word (like Ubuntu itself) you won’t have to pay money or agree to a licence that sells your soul to the devil. Via the repositories I could easily install Geany (a code editor which I now use for Python programming: I actually like it more than Komodo), gFTP (FTP client), the aforementioned jEdit, and the BeautifulSoup library for Python. It only took a few simple commands at the terminal to install and set up an Apache server with PHP and MySQL for local testing. oXygen had to be downloaded and installed manually as it’s a proprietary application, but the academic licence is cheap and cross-platform: I originally bought it for Windows but my licence automatically carries over to Linux. To get it working properly I had to install the proprietary Sun version of Java, but that was easy to do via the repository. There is a thing called WINE which lets you run some Windows programs in Linux, but so far I’ve only used it for listening to music with Spotify.

With everything set up to my liking, Ubuntu has made me fitter, happier and more productive. It’s faster, more secure, more stable, and less annoying than Windows. You can start using it as soon as the desktop appears on the screen instead of waiting for it to finish starting, or dealing with a patronising storm of pop-ups about how your anti-virus might be out of date or how you’ve got unused icons on your desktop. The Blue Screen of Death is now just an unpleasant memory. Linux users generally don’t have virus scanners or software firewalls because we don’t need them. The only major problem I’ve had so far is when an upgrade to a new version didn’t agree with my proprietary graphics driver and made it impossible to boot to the desktop from the hard disk. Even that was surprisingly easy to recover from, as being able to run the operating system from the LiveCD makes it very easy to rescue any files which aren’t already backed up before doing a clean reinstall (and the reinstall process is quicker and easier than for Windows).

So those are my reasons for preferring Ubuntu to Windows. If you haven’t tried Linux before you can download Ubuntu, burn it onto a CD, and then boot from the CD, which gives you an option to try it out without actually installing it on your PC. And it won’t cost you anything. Meanwhile I’ll be getting on with my research, writing and programming. And blogging about those things…

After a long break, the next Military History Carnival will be at Edge of the American West on 17 January. You can submit posts using the submission form. If you’d like to host a future edition, pleace contact TJ at Battlefield Biker.

Back in July I posted a “review” of the Ladybird book Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History. One of the strange, interesting, and almost certainly untrue stories in it was that Cromwell and Charles I had a fight when they were small boys:

Oliver’s uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, was an important man, and lived on an estate much larger than the farm belonging to Oliver’s father. He was in fact so important in the county that on more than one occasion he was visited by the King, James I. On one of these visits the King was accompanied by his son Charles, and whilst Sir Oliver was entertaining the King, the two boys, Oliver Cromwell and Prince Charles, were sent into the garden to play. According to the story, the boys quarrelled and fought, and Oliver was the winner.

As I mentioned, one of the suspicious things about this story is the complete absence of Henry Prince of Wales, Charles’s older, more militaristic, and more Calvinist brother. That led me to believe that the story must have originated after Henry (who died as a teenager leaving Charles as heir to the throne) had faded from popular memory.

Now I’ve found a new lead. I’ve been reading Vernon Snow’s Essex the Rebel, a biography of the third Earl of Essex. During my PhD I read the bits about the civil war but skipped the rest. Now I’m going through the whole thing because I’m interested in all of Essex’s life. Page 43 mentions that at some time from 1609 to 1611 (dates are surprisingly vague in this book) Essex had an argument with Prince Henry while they were playing tennis. Henry called him “the son of a traitor”, and he responded by hitting the prince on the head with a tennis racket! James I seems to have Stoically accepted the assault on his son, telling him that “He who did strike him then, would be sure, with more violent blows, to strike his enemy in times to come”. This prophecy didn’t quite come true, as Essex became the military leader of the armed rebellion against Charles I in 1642. Like Prince Henry, Essex the Lord General has largely faded from popular memory. Just as Henry was overshadowed by Charles, Essex was overshadowed by Cromwell. If the tennis court incident is one of the influences on the story of Charles and Oliver fighting each other, this could be yet another case of Cromwell stealing Essex’s thunder.

Welcome to the 56th edition of Carnivalesque, the pre-modern history blog carnival. This is an early-modern edition, covering roughly 1500-1800.

Past, Present and Future

Seventeenth century archbishop James Ussher is famous/notorious for saying that the world was created at exactly 6pm on 22nd October 4004BC. The Renaissance Mathematicus explains why this isn’t really as stupid as it now sounds.

Historiann wonders what the Founding Fathers would really think of Barack Obama’s policies, and why anyone should care.

Lee Durbin at Marginalia looks at the film Prospero’s Books, making links between Shakespeare and modern technology.

Radicals

Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon reviews Ted Vallance’s latest book, A Radical History of Britain, which covers radical men and women in the English Revolution among other things.

The History Woman reviews Blair Worden’s Roundhead Reputations, which shows how the stories of famous parliamentarians were rewritten in the later seventeenth century to make them look less religious than they really were. Gracchi at Westminster Wisdom finds that this absence of religion is also a problem in Antonia Southern’s Forlorn Hope: Soldier Radicals of the Seventeenth Century.

Nick Poyntz at Mercurius Politicus reports on the recent auction of a pair of boots which might or might not have belonged to Oliver Cromwell, and puts together a whole collection of Cromwell relics. What would the famous Puritan have thought of this suspiciously Popish way of remembering him?

The Gentleman Administrator looks at a radical pamphlet from 1651 which represents Charles II as death.

Sex and Violence

At Fragments there are some excerpts from Thomas Platter’s observations of London in 1599, including drinking, prostitution, hanging and flogging.

Georgian London tells us all about notorious sex criminal Whipping Tom who stalked the Fleet Street area in the 1670s, spanking women. Contemporary pamphlets condemned him to a certain extent but also treated his activities as a bit of a joke and suggested that his victims liked it really. Tabloid hypocrisy and misogyny are nothing new.

Bavardess asks some awkward questions about the modern fashion for torture museums. Why is it alright to use pre-modern crimes against humanity as entertainment?

And Finally

Roy Booth at Early Modern Whale reads a guide to conjuring tricks from 1634 and finds that the book is a trick in itself because it’s blatantly plagiarized.

Much more original is David Lawrence’s The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645. As my review shows, it was worth the outrageous price.

Olivia Smith at Airs, Waters, Places finds a man who tried and failed to walk on water in 1669.

And at diapsalmata Whitney Anne Trettien shows some prints of disembodied legs and a drawing that is so bad it’s good.

That’s all for this month. The next Carnivalesque will be an ancient/medieval edition (at Zenobia: Empress of the East?) in December. You can submit posts using the ancient/medieval nomination form

The next early modern edition will be at The Gentleman Administrator in January. You can submit posts using the early-modern nomination form.

David Lawrence’s The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645 is the most expensive book I’ve ever bought. At £118 it was more than twice the previous record holder, Barbara Donagan’s War In England, but I really need it and it’s not in any of the libraries I can borrow books from. It turned out to be worth reading because it’s really good and vindicates some of the things I’ve written about drill books and cavalry tactics.

Lawrence draws on a lot of recent work about print culture to show the links between military theory and practice. Although he doesn’t use the phrase “communication circuit”, he does pay a lot of attention to the people (well, men mostly, although Christine de Pizan does get a mention) who wrote, printed, sold, bought, owned, read, used and commented on military manuals. That there were so many military books suggests that there was enough demand to make printing them commercially viable.

The first two chapters set the scene by giving an overview of English military culture in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. Lawrence builds on the work of people like Mark Fissel and David Trim which shows that England was not isolated, peaceful or militarily backward in this period. Many English professional soldiers served on the continent, especially in the Netherlands. Lawrence adds to this picture by showing that books were an important part of the military profession. The insult “paper soldiers” was applied selectively to those who either lacked practical experience or were disliked for some other reason. It took combat experience and book learning to make a complete soldier. One was not considered an adequate substitute for the other. Lawrence shows that books were an important part of the military circles which revolved around the Earl of Leicester, the Vere brothers, and Henry Prince of Wales. The multi-talented John Dee was heavily involved in this culture. He was interested in fortifications and sieges, had many military books in his library, and was a tutor to the Earl of Leicester.

In 1607 Jacob de Gheyn published the first ever drill book to include step by step engravings of the postures for pikemen and musketeers. Gervase Markham, not known for originality, became the first author to use copies de Gheyn’s engravings in an English drill book. Although professional soldiers considered books to be important, the English militia was slow to catch on. The first printed drill instructions were not issued until 1623. Infantry were the main users of drill books in the first half of the 17^th century. Lawrence has identified 94 military books published in England after 1603 and before the outbreak of civil war in 1642, of which 41 covered infantry combat. Many of these were written by experienced soldiers. They were based on practical experience, and in turn influenced the practice of those who used them. The Honourable Artillery Company in London was at the centre of English military culture. Company members were highly proficient in infantry drill and several of them wrote books on the subject. Nearly all of the infantry drill books published in England before the Civil Wars followed de Gheyn in describing Dutch drill. The newer Swedish drill developed by Gustavus Adolphus in the 1630s appears to have had very little influence in England before 1642. This backs up everyone who says that Prince Rupert was wrong to insist on Swedish infantry formations at Edgehill, and that the Earl of Lindsey was right to defend the Dutch drill which would have been more familiar to English soldiers.

Things could hardly have been more different for cavalry. Of the 94 early Stuart military books only one, Cruso’s Militarie instructions for the cavallrie, was solely about cavalry. A few more covered cavalry as well as infantry, but these were a tiny minority. None of them bore much relation to reality. Gervase Markham is well known as a prolific hack who would publish ill-informed opinions about anything if there was any money in it. Although he had some military experience, it apparently did not inform his drill books, which were mostly copied from other books. They included obsolete and useless formations taken from ancient history which were almost certainly not used by early-modern cavalry. Lawrence seems to have cleared up some of the confusion over Cruso’s biography. Although he served in the Norfolk militia, he almost certainly hadn’t served overseas and probably had no combat experience. His book was an academic work which mostly copied from and commented on other books. It devoted too much space to ancient history and other obsolete things, such as heavy lancers. Despite this, his book was quite popular and often recommended, perhaps because there was nothing else available. Robert Ward also lacked combat experience, copied from other authors, and included obsolete ancient formations. Lawrence does consider Ward to be better than Markham, and believes that his book was reasonably consistent. I think that a careful reading of Ward reveals some serious inconsistencies, probably as a result of carelessly copying bits from multiple sources, but this isn’t a major point as I think we both agree that Ward’s work was unrealistic.

John Vernon, who published a new cavalry drill book in 1644, was different in that his work was more practical and might have been based on personal experience. Lawrence repeats the story that Vernon was a parliamentarian cavalry officer but gives no reference. I’m a bit sceptical because I’ve never seen any definite evidence of an officer by this name. He certainly didn’t hold the rank of captain or above in Essex’s or Manchester’s army. The best John Tincey could show was that there might have been another Captain Vernon in addition to the better documented Captain Francis Vernon, treasurer of Essex’s army. Lawrence points out that some parts of Vernon’s book are derived from Cruso and others, but suggests that the original parts are probably fairly realistic. The biggest weakness of the cavalry chapter is that it doesn’t really compare theory with practice. There are no detailed quotes from eyewitness accounts of battles. Instead Lawrence relies on some lazy clichés, using the phrase “decayed serving men and tapsters” not once but twice. At least he doesn’t buy into the myth of shock. Although he sometimes uses the word “shock” he seems to mean sword fighting rather than “equine battering rams”.

The shortage of cavalry drill books leaves space for a look at a wider selection of horsemanship manuals. The increasing popularity of haute ecole/dressage/manege in the late 16^th century was regarded with suspicion by English soldiers and military theorists because they thought it would distract from more warlike pursuits such as jousting. Citing many modern and early-modern authorities, Lawrence concludes that manege would have had little military value. I’d say that it might have been marginally useful in the close combat between individuals and small groups which usually ensued if neither side ran away during a cavalry charge, but very few horses and men would have had the necessary training. Even the gentleman Sir Richard Bulstrode had to admit that he couldn’t control his horse at Powicke Bridge.

(There’s also a chapter on sieges which I haven’t read, but it’s probably good.)

One thing that slightly annoys me is that, like too many historians, Lawrence uses the word “evolution” to mean gradual change rather than random variation and natural selection. Maybe it’s just my scientific pedantry, or maybe it’s Darwin’s fault for borrowing an existing word instead of making up a new one, but I wish they wouldn’t do it. To me evolution versus revolution is a false dichotomy.

Overall this is a really good book. It’s much more sophisticated than Barbara Donagan’s work on drill books. Lawrence has not assumed that drill books either were or were not related to practice, but has worked hard to find evidence and considered different possibilities. His conclusion that infantry drill books were closely related to practice and that cavalry drill books were not blows away the false dichotomy of sceptics versus enthusiasts and shows that things were more complicated than anyone previously suggested. Because of the outrageous price I can’t really recommend that you rush out and buy it, but if you’re interested in early-modern military history or print culture it’s worth getting out of the library if they’ve got it.

I’ve been reading Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture by Catherine Roach, which is really good and has made me think about lots of things. These are some random observations about it or inspired by it.

The book is mostly about female strippers, although it does include a bit on male stripping. Male and female stripping seem to be vastly different cultures with hardly any overlap. Knowing about one doesn’t tell you much about the other, but comparing them says a lot about gender ideology in general. From here on you can assume that when I used the words “stripper” or “dancer” I’m talking about a woman, not a man.

Strippers subvert and resist patriarchal norms at the same time as replicating them. The whole book is about rejecting false dichotomies and recognising that something can be two or more contradictory things at the same time. “Is stripping empowering or demeaning?” is a stupid question. The only answer is “it’s more complicated than that”.

The seats right at the front of the stage near the tipping rail are often called “pervert row” by the dancers. I’m fascinated by the ways that the concept of perversion can used to delegitimize almost any form of sexuality or interest in sex, no matter how unperverted it is. What could be more heteronormative than a man looking at a naked woman? And yet this can commonly be labelled as “perving”. Men generally get a much better deal out of sexual double standards than women do, but their sexual freedom is still limited by those standards.

Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature (which I’m going to have to read – I got a copy off Amazon for only 1p!) includes a chapter on woman as show horse, which is very relevant to some of my ideas about how patriarchy blurs boundaries between women and horses. Roach contrasts this with a burlesque song called “Pony Girl”, in which the dehumanizing misogyny is ironically subverted by being both reduced to absurdity and reclaimed as a source of submissive pleasure. I’m not sure if Roach realized that this is an actual fetish which people really do, but its existence only strengthens her point. Men and women actually do find freedom and fulfilment by roleplaying ponies, and they can swap gender as well as species. I’ll probably have to write more posts about pony play at some point because it’s really interesting in terms of gender, sexuality, animal-human boundaries, subversion, resistance etc.

Pole dancing requires serious upper body strength. This is interesting because even Joshua Goldstein considered upper body strength to be one of the main limiting factors on women in combat roles. But some dancers prefer not to train in advanced pole tricks because the muscles they develop can be perceived as unfeminine and even intimidating by male clients. Just another way that patriarchal ideology makes women’s bodies conform to stereotypical ideals. Culture influences not only perceptions of reality, but reality itself. The stripper’s body is “clearly not natural, but is a construction and artefact of the culture” (p. 45).

Many dancers say they like wearing dangerously high heels because the shoes make them feel sexy, confident and powerful. (But could there be a difference between feeling powerful and actually being powerful? How does their experience compare with other women who are required to wear high heels at work?) This feeling seems to come mostly from the added height that they gain. Most women are shorter than most men (Goldstein’s figures, based on American 18 year olds, show that on average men are 8% taller than women, and that only 15% of women are taller than the shortest man). Being able to look down on them is a new and exciting experience. This ties in with Peter Edwards’s point that in early-modern England horses helped to reinforce authority because a man on a horse could literally look down on people on foot. Dancers would only ever wear their stripper shoes at work, and consider it “sluttish” for non-strippers to wear them in other contexts. Double standards manifest themselves in unexpected ways. Strippers can be patriarchal collaborators at the same time as challenging patriarchy by looking down on men. The dancers interviewed generally tend to define themselves in opposition to prostitutes. One of them describes a foot fetishist as “sick”. Not much sex-positive solidarity here, but this shows how patriarchy puts strippers in a position where they have to distance themselves from other kinds of sex workers, and from non-mainstream sexualities, in order to claim some legitimacy for stripping. It looks like a win-win situation for patriarchy. Closing down strip clubs isn’t going to end patriarchal equilibrium, but keeping them open isn’t either.

The need for dancers to play a role while interacting with clients can be alienating, leading to a false self. Having read Stephen Greenblatt, I’m not convinced that there is such a thing as an authentic self against which a “false” self can be judged. Following Judith Butler, Roach does emphasise that gender is always a performance, and that the gender performed by strippers is a hypersexualised, hyperfeminine version of an ideal woman. Stripping does seem to have an emotional/psychological cost, but is this caused by the ideology of authenticity and sincerity as much as by the falseness of the performance? Might Holden Caulfield have been happier if he admitted that “we are all phoneys”? If a performance in a strip club can be as good as the real thing, why not everywhere else too? And how can we know the difference? Is it that the stripper’s performance is too hyperreal to be real?

The “popular culture” in the title refers to the way that stripping has gone mainstream as what Roach calls “stripper culture”. Poledancing lessons are popular with lots of women, the stripper look is all over mainstream fashion, and stripper thongs are being marketed to pre-teen girls. One thing that struck me about this, which Roach doesn’t go into much detail about, is that by appropriating some aspects of stripping and taking them out of their previous context, the mainstream has effectively made stripper culture more patriarchal and misogynistic. Girls can go out dressed like strippers, but they don’t get the benefit of tips, bouncers, or no touching rules. They assume the semiotics of hypersexualized hyperfeminine availability, but without the protection, empowerment or profit that some strippers can get in well run clubs. Maybe that’s another reason why the real strippers call them sluttish.

Consent to work in the sex industry can be compromised by poverty. Consent is less meaningful when there is a limited range of choices on offer. Sex-positive feminism is not about complacently saying that sex work is OK, but about increasing the range of choices available and improving working conditions for those who do choose to do sex work. Carol Leigh: “the problems of prostitution don’t get solved until the problems of poverty get solved” (p. 131). Maybe the problem of patriarchy should be added to that, but patriarchy and poverty go together.

As a final thought, I wonder what would happen if a man went to a strip club in drag? How would it affect the gender dynamics? How would the dancers and other clients react? Would he even be allowed in?

The new ancient/medieval edition of Carnivalesque is now up at Bavardess (with a special Halloween theme).

The next early-modern edition will be right here at Investigations of a Dog on 22nd November. Send submissions to jenna@4-lom.com or use the early-modern nomination form.