Investigations of a Dog

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

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. (more…)

On YouTube you can watch a fantastic video of Lucy Worsley doing Henry VIII’s weekly shopping, followed by a virtual autopsy to show what all that food did to his body. I don’t buy the diabetes diagnosis though. It was obviously his humours getting out of balance. Can we have Lucy shopping for William Cavendish and his horses next?

[Edit: but there's a FedEx arrow. Go and read Innerbrat's critique of L'Oreal's pseudo science then see if you can spot it.]

Andrew Hickey linked to a post at the Universe of Discourse about syntax, arguing against a syntactical rule which says that the hypothetical verb “to flimp” can’t exist. Go and read that post for more explanation. While reading it occurred to me that the search for a universal syntax often ignores culturally specific meanings, and that sometimes arguments against it do too. David Dowty suggests the counter-example that “to cuckold” is “to have sexual intercourse with the woman who is married to”. For example, in the sentence “Peter cuckolded John”, John is the direct object. But if you expand it to Dowty’s version (“ Peter had sex with the woman who is married to John”) the woman is now an object (I’m a bit vague on whether she’s direct, or whether “sex” is the direct object and she’s indirect!), and John has been relegated to an adjectival clause which describes the woman. That’s one way of defining cuckold, but it seems to be very specific to modern Western liberal individualism. Having sex (probably consensual) with a woman who happens to have a husband. But things were different in cultures and societies which used the word cuckold more frequently than we do, such as early-modern England. In early-modern gender ideology wives were supposed to be subordinate to husbands. To cuckold a man was to take his property, and undermine his authority and masculinity. To put it another way, it was to injure him by using his wife, just like to stab someone is to injure them by using a sharp object. The indirect object implied by the verb is what is used to carry out the action. In Latin we would use the ablative of means to describe this relationship. A wife is necessary for cuckolding to take place, but she is absent from that sentence. Not even an object. Of course this is horribly misogynistic, but cuckold is a horribly misogynistic word from a horribly misogynistic culture.

This does not prove that “flimp” can’t exist. In fact Dowty’s cuckold example proves that it is syntactically possible. His interpretation is more possible now than it was 400 years ago, but that’s all down to social and cultural changes. It isn’t a syntax issue. Syntax allows many possibilities which aren’t used in practice, perhaps because they’re just not useful enough. But what is useful can be heavily influenced by social, cultural and political context, and therefore can change quite a lot. Taking “cuckold” and “stab” as starting points, I’ve been wondering how many others verbs there are which strongly imply an indirect object, and how this implication might be specific to certain times and places. There are some obvious modern examples where the verb is the same as, or derived from, the noun. You can’t phone someone without using a phone. But I’m pretty sure that cuckold isn’t derived from a word for wife. In order for the concept to make sense there has to be a social and cultural context which at least includes marriage (perhaps a specific form of marriage), and certain norms of sexual behavior. In the context of early modern England patriarchal hierarchy and definitions of masculinity add extra meanings which are not necessarily apparent today. These meanings have very little to do with syntax.

Following on from this, I think “pray” might be another example. An ancient Roman might pray to one of many gods. Catholics only have one god, but they could also pray to saints. But when a protestant prays, there is only one possibility. Feudal homage might be another source of examples. I’m a bit vague on the details, but there were probably circumstances where “I am going to pay homage” could only mean paying it to one specific person. It’s starting to look like power might be very significant here. A person would have to be very important to a lot of people before it was worth combining their name into a verb in the manner of “flimp”. (This is starting to remind me of a post at Babel’s Dawn about how semantics is now looking more important than syntax, but I can’t remember exactly which post it was.)

(Incidentally, I don’t think the wank example given at Universe of Discourse really works because “to wank to” has the preposition “to” tacked onto it, and requires the indirect object to be explicitly included in order to make a complete sentence.)

Chris Onstad is a genius, but this week I think he might have underestimated how rude 17th-century cheap print could be. For example, see Early Modern Whale on 17th century porn, or the effects of coffee (even I was surprised by the mention of dildos there!). At Mercurius Politicus there’s a pamphlet war involving woodcuts of she-devil toilet sex, while Ovid’s Ars Amatoria was one of the things guranteed to irritate a puritan. In Agnes Bowker’s Cat David Cressy dated the first picture of an erect penis in English popular print to 1641. And here are some breasts (illustrating the story of a very promiscuous woman) from LOL Manuscripts. Also in this old post (more popular with Google searchers than anything else I’ve ever written) I looked at how the Old Bailey Proceedings described two bestiality cases in more detail than was strictly necessary. The kind of prudishness parodied in Achewood is more often associated with the Victorians (and that might well be a myth that annoys 19th century specialists), but it could occur in 17th century print too. At LOL Manuscripts there’s a really bizarre example where a pamphlet has an uncensored picture of ass kissing but refuses to spell out the word “arse”!

So yes, people in the 17th century had sex, looked at porn, and used dildos. These are just some of the things that didn’t get mentioned in traditional historiography because they weren’t “proper” history.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Nottingham Trent University FORWARD Early Modern Social History Symposium

This symposium will take place at Nottingham Trent University on Wednesday 12th November 2008 from 1:00pm – 5:00pm

Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers, which explore the latest unique approaches to research in any aspect of Early Modern British and Irish Social History, including but not limited to topics of Family, Order, Reform, Women, Anarchy, Rebellion & Dissent

Abstract proposals should be no longer than 300 words and submitted to RitaWierzbicki_FORWARD@hotmail.com by Wednesday 22nd October 2008

For more information or to book your place for attendance, please direct your inquiries to the above e-mail address

Way back in October 2006 (when this blog was all shiny and new) I wrote about female saddlers in London during the English Civil War. My work on saddlers and harness makers (male as well as female) is quite open-ended. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it, so I’m just tying to find out as much as I can about these individuals and their families when I get the chance. A while ago I searched the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for wills of people I was interested in. These are available through DocumentsOnline, but I found it cheaper to print out copies while I was at the PRO (20p per sheet as opposed to £3.50 per will). I didn’t find a will for everyone (some might have had their wills proved in other courts) but I came up with a lot of hits. Recently I finally got round to transcribing them (which was good palaeography practice) and publishing the transcripts on Your Archives.

Although wills tend to come in a standard form, that structure can contain a lot of variety. They can tell us about people’s wealth, business activities, and families, and contain all kinds of incidental details which shed some light on their lives. Below is a selection of some of the more interesting things I found, with links to the full transcripts.

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Not really a proper post, just some random things:

Bill Turkel is always right. First because in the first of his excellent posts on analysing the Old Bailey Proceedings he recommended DownThemAll. This is a Firefox extension that lets you download all the files linked to from a web page in one go. You can set up filters to only download certain types of file, or you can select the files by clicking on a list, then download them all with one click. As well as the obvious benefits for digital historians it’s very handy if you want to download a whole album from LastFM.

Second, because in a post on infrastructure he recommended expensive ergonomic chairs. I’m currently waiting for delivery of a new chair so that I can spend a reasonable amount of time working at the computer without my back hurting. Cheap chairs are a false economy.

Over at Glod’n'Epix Esther posted some interesting thoughts on sexual harassment and gender stereotyping in live action role playing, which also led to some discussion of cross-dressing and gender swapping.

Gary Smailes has launched a new website called OneBook which features brief posts from different people recommending a book. Anyone can submit a post and they don’t have to be very long.

The Difficult Second Article is getting there but still needs a lot of work. Once this is out of the way I never want to hear anything about the causes of the English Civil War ever again.

I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hill’s The English Bible and I have to say I really enjoyed it. Apart from lots of useful historical insights it made me think that my generation’s equivalent of the bible is probably Star Wars.

And finally the latest early-modern edition of Carnivalesque is up at jliedl.ca.

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.)

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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…)