Investigations of a Dog

The future has taken root in the present. It is done.

Or in other words:

No more forever FINISHED ABANDONED COMPLETE DONE FINAL LAST FINISHED We finished it. I finished it for you.

Yesterday I sent off the final typescript of my book to Ashgate. So it’s all over (apart from proofreading, indexing and then promoting it when it comes out). The title is now Horses, People and Parliament in the English Civil War: Extracting Resources and Constructing Allegiance, and the ISBN is 978-1-4094-2093-4. There were more things I could have done to make it better, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and as it ended up at 99,037 words there wasn’t space for anything else. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and I think I’ve written something that’s good enough to kick ass. Determinism and essentialism don’t stand a chance.

So now what?

I’m going to watch every episode of Thundercats.

And probably some more sensible things too, but my plans are in the air because I’m waiting to hear details of some possible paid work. Expect more blog posts (and maybe better ones too) than I’ve managed so far this year.

Also congratulations to Brett Holman, who has just got a book contract from Ashgate. As one of them finishes another one starts…

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.

I’ve just finished writing an essay for a collection called The Horse as Cultural Icon: the Real and Symbolic Horse in the Early Modern World, edited by Peter Edwards and Elspeth Graham, which will be published by Brill (I’m not sure exactly when, but probably within the next twelve months). My chapter is called ‘The military value of horses and the social value of the horse in early-modern England’. It’s quite eclectic, mixing numbers from empirical research with words like semiotics and simulacrum, ranging from Milton and Shakespeare to anonymous scatological poems and cheap woodcuts. I took Bruce Boehrer’s essay ‘Shakespeare and the Social Devaluation of the Horse’ as a starting point and worked outwards, looking at how the middling sort appropriated the horse and how the elite tried to make it more exclusive. Although it’s mostly about the 16th and 17th centuries I went back into the middle ages and forward to the First World War to show how the social and cultural roles of horses aren’t necessarily related to the reality of war. I’ve cited Stephen Badsey and David Kenyon for proof that cavalry were still useful in the 20th century and that there was and is an awful lot of prejudice against them; and I’ve cited Michael Prestwich and Anne Curry to show that 14th and 15th century men-at-arms were flexible all-rounders and that only a minority of them were knights. By taking a longer view than most previous works on early-modern horses I’m trying to break out of a vaguely Marxist master narrative in which The Transition From Feudalism To Capitalism and the increasing use of gunpowder doomed the knight on his charger and gave the aristocracy an identity crisis, and in which social, economic and military base determines cultural superstructure. Rather than marking a turning point, Shakespeare’s treatment of horses and chivalry in Henry V seems to be part of a debate which was already going on in the 14th century, was still going on throughout the 17th century, and is perhaps still going on now. Cultural beliefs that cavalry were useless seem to be independent of how useful cavalry actually were.

The best thing is that I’ve used the phrase “order of magnitude” correctly and appropriately. I shouldn’t feel so pleased about this, but I get so annoyed by other historians misusing it to mean “quite a lot”.

Meanwhile I’m taking a break from posting here for a month or two (or maybe three) while I finish the first draft of my book. Before too long I’ll have made the inevitable transition from “oh no, I won’t be able to write enough” to “oh no, I’ve written too much”.

1. Bruce Boehrer, “Shakespeare and the social devaluation of the horse,” in The Culture of the Horse, ed. Karen L. Raber and Treva J. Tucker (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 
   

I’m writing a book! I’ve signed a contract with Ashgate Publishing for a monograph provisionally titled Horses, People and Parliament in the English Civil War: Negotiating Property and Constructing Allegiance. If everything goes to plan it should be out some time in 2012. Although I’ll be using some material from my PhD research this isn’t “the book of the thesis” as it’s going to have a completely different argument. I’m using the supply of horses to armies to show how military resources were contingent and had to be negotiated with civilians; how identities could be constructed using external signs or imposed on people who didn’t want them; and how these things feed into each other. Building on my empirical research into military administration and logistics, I want to show how the practicalities of fighting wars relate to politics, religion, gender and animal-human boundaries.

This probably won’t affect my blogging much – my posts won’t be any less frequent than they already are. Obviously I’m not going to post any of the text of the book on the web, but as I go I’ll be putting some research material on Flickr and Your Archives. I’m currently going through indemnity cases in SP 24 at the PRO (UK National Archives), and I need yet more material from SP 28 (a bottomless pit of civil war financial records).

Anyone with online access to War In History can now download my debut article which is about horses and the New Model Army. I haven’t got my hands on a hard copy yet, but it’s quite exciting to see it on the website. Now I just need to finish the Difficult Second Article…

1. Gavin Robinson, ‘Horse Supply and the Development of the New Model Army, 1642-1646’, War In History, 15 (April 2008), pp. 121-140.

I promised more thoughts about thinking, but that’ll be coming next week. For now I have some news which is more exciting for me than it will be for anyone else: my first article has been accepted for publication by War In History. I’m almost a real historian now!

The article is titled “Horse Supply and the Development of the New Model Army, 1642-46″, a more succinct version of the main argument of my PhD thesis that the Earl of Essex’s army is more important than most people realise. If you want to know more than that, you’ll just have to wait and see. It’s likely to be another 18 months before the article appears in print, but being able to put a forthcoming article on my CV could make a lot of difference.