Tag Archives: Renaissance

September 7, 2012

Eternal Elizabeth

By daseger

Today is the birthday (in 1533) of Queen Elizabeth I, a fact that would have been well-known in her own time.  The coincidence of Elizabeth’s birthday with the eve of the nativity of the Virgin Mary was not lost on her subjects, and obviously enhanced her public reputation as the Virgin Queen. In a Protestant England shed of its saints, Elizabeth must have offered some consolation. There is so much to say about Elizabeth, but too much to say in a blog post and little that has not been said before. In addition to her rather remarkable lifetime, the thing that has always impressed me about Elizabeth is her durability; even though she was a mortal person who died in 1603 she never really seems to go away. Every generation has had its Elizabeth:  the seventeenth century brought her back as a stark orderly contrast to Civil War-strife, there were lots of comparisons between Elizabeth and the equally-long-reigning Victoria in the nineteenth century, and we have certainly had our share of Elizabeths–from Bette Davis to Cate Blanchett to Judy Dench and Helen Mirren–in the last century.

Images of Elizabeth:  her lifetime.  Except where noted, all portraits are from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The “Clopton Portrait”, 1560, one of my favorites:  a portrait of the young queen before she became the subject of sophisticated royal iconography. Private Collection.

The “Pelican Portrait”, c. 1575, often attributed to Nicholas Hilliard.  Here we have a highly stylized Elizabeth and all sort of symbolism.  This mask-like face will be the template for some time.  The pelican brooch on her bodice is a reference to self-sacrifice:  a long-held legend told of pelicans feeding their children with their own blood.  At around this time, it was clear that Elizabeth would not marry, therefore she had sacrificed her personal desires for the English people. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

One of several official Armada portraits, this painting by George Gower marks the wondrous victory over the “invincible” Spanish Armada in 1588.  Elizabeth is now well on her way to becoming larger than life.

Elizabeth does not age in her portraits in the 1590s, even though she is in her sixties.  Her waistline gets smaller and smaller, and she wears increasingly fantastical clothing.  Commissioned by Bess of Hardwick in 1592, this painting is still at Hardwick Hall.  It has been copied many times, and the amazing skirt has served as the inspiration for wallpaper and textiles in the twentieth century. The drawing, from the collection of the British Library, is dated 1775.

Elizabeth Ever After:

Line engraving by Crispijn de Passe the Elder, after Isaac Oliver, 1603.  A very influential image, disseminated widely in the seventeenth century, and influencing images of Elizabeth to the present.  As an example, look at Alix Stone’s costume design for Elizabeth in a production  of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana, 1966.  Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In a 1868 lithograph, a Vision of Queen Elizabeth tries to rouse Queen Victoria from her prolonged mourning following Prince Albert’s death:  snap out of it!

Modern Elizabeths:  Bette Davis, one of my favorite Elizabeths, in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), and Cate Blanchett in the poster for Elizabeth (1998).  I love the poster (which is based on the “Coronation Portrait” of Elizabeth in the center–the original portrait, attributed to Nicholas Hilliard, was destroyed by fire and this is an early seventeenth-century copy), and Cate Blanchett, but the movie is a historical hot mess!

Appendix:  the best book on representations of Elizabeth:  Sir Roy Strong’s Cult of Elizabeth.  Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

September 5, 2012

Books for Back to School

By daseger

The Fall Semester starts today, and I get to impose reading on college students who are, make no mistake, reluctant readers. In my opinion, and experience, this particular generation is particularly reluctant:  they have so much else to do!  They have to keep track of their friends’ activities on Facebook, they have to check their phone messages, they have to text every waking thought and state of being, and as I teach at a large public university, they have to work.  In terms of daily priorities, I imagine that reading is very far down the list.  I do not despair, because once I get them to read (by forcing them to write papers) it is clear that the majority of my students can comprehend and analyze texts quite well, but I find myself putting more and more thought and time into choosing the books for my courses as I know that these books have a lot of competition:  they have to catch my students’ attention, and hold it.

I am teaching courses on Medieval Europe, Tudor-Stuart England, World History, and the Expansion of Europe this semester, and here are some of the texts that I’ve chosen for these courses, with a little bit of the rationale for my choices.  All of these courses (except for Expansion of Europe, which is a graduate seminar) have (boring) textbooks that the students read (I think/hope) for background, and several monographs which are the basis of their papers.  I will spare you the textbooks, which are a completely different teaching issue.  I’m almost to the point of ditching the textbooks altogether but not quite yet.

Another realization that has (much too slowly) dawned on me is that my students “learn” most of their history from movies, so when I get them in a class they have preconceived notions that I have to take on. Usually I get students who love Tudor England or medieval Europe, but actually know very little about these eras.  I used to reproach them, but now I’m more inclined to take advantage of their rather romantic interests.  For the Tudor-Stuart course, I’m actually assigning a biography of Anne Boleyn, for whom a veritable cult exists.  Anne Boleyn is now clearly more popular than even her superstar daughter Elizabeth I, so they’re going to read all about the tragic queen/master manipulator in context, from a reliable source:  Eric Ives’ updated biography is accessible yet scholarly, and I’m going to give them an essay prompt for the book that will force them to dig deeper.

Speaking of digging deeper, my medieval course is going to have a strong archeological theme this semester. Too often material sources (as opposed to literary ones) are not given serious consideration by historians, but students find archeology fascinating.  So I’ve chosen tw0 texts that I think should really illuminate (and de-romanticize) the Middle Ages for my students:  Barbarians to Angels.  The Dark Ages Reconsidered by Peter S. Wells, and Colin Platt’s King Death. The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late Medieval England.
I threw some architectural history in there too with Philip Ball’s Universe of Stone.  A Biography of Chartres Cathedral, which I also chose because it was written by a non-academic.  I like to contrast scholarly and trade publications in my courses, and my students (like the general reading public) inevitably favor the latter.

World History is a tough course, for both the students and myself:  it’s “big” history, hard to grasp.  We have a two-course core curriculum world history requirement at Salem State, and so our entire department (and a battalion of adjunct professors) teaches it.  I have to admit that I bring my decidedly Eurocentric perspective into my world history courses; I just can’t help myself.  The book that I chose for this semester’s course, Paul Freedman’s Out of the East:  Spices and the Medieval Imagination, reveals this bias, as it examines “the East” from a western focus. I’m hoping some of my students might point this out in their papers.  A somewhat similar book, perhaps more successfully global in its approach, is one of the eleven books I’ve assigned for my Expansion of Europe seminar, Timothy Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat.  The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Modern World.  I cannot recommend Brook’s book highly enough:  whether you know a little bit about the seventeenth century, or a lot, it accomplishes what the best history books do:  transportation to another world.  My students better like it.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture, History

August 24, 2012

Road Trip, Part Four: Huguenot Houses

By daseger

For the anniversary of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (24 August, 1572), on which perhaps 3000 Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants) were slain in the streets of Paris, I am backtracking back to the New York town of New Paltz to feature some houses built by Huguenot exiles from seventeenth-century France.  These are the houses of Protestant survivors of France’s intense religious conflict and repression in the early modern era.

The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre occurred during what became a very temporary truce in the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) for the occasion of a Capulet-Montague marriage between Henri of Navarre, symbolic leader of the noble Huguenot faction in France, and the French royal princess Marguerite of Valois.  All of the most powerful Protestant and Catholic nobles were gathered in Paris for the royal wedding, and what is generally assumed to have been a targeted assassination (engineered by the bride’s mother, the very Machiavellian Catherine de’ Medici) of Admiral Coligny, the Huguenots’ military leader, spilled out into the streets and was transformed into mob violence.  The wars continued, despite a very depleted Huguenot leadership and with pan-European support on both religious sides, until the bridegroom Henri of Navarre succeeded to the throne in 1589 (becoming Henri IV, the first of the last French dynasty, the Bourbons), made a political conversion to majority Catholicism (“Paris is well worth a mass”) and granted an official toleration decree to his former co-religionists with the Edict of Nantes (1598).

Saint Bartholomew‘s Day Massacre by François Dubois (Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne) clearly shows Admiral Coligny hanging out of a window (right background) and Catherine de’ Medici (in black, left background) examining a pile of corpses.  Prints of the massacre, like that of Gaspar Bouttats below (Antwerp, 1670; British Museum) circulated around western Europe for a century and more, creating a sense of martydom on the part of French Protestants and a European-wide Protestant unity.

Even though they had been granted a limited toleration (until Henri IV’s grandson Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685) many French Protestants saw the writing on the wall and left the country for more tolerant (or Protestant) places:  the Netherlands, Germany, England, and the New World. Salem had a small Huguenot community, centered around the successful merchant Philip English, but as my brother and I visited Historic Huguenot Street in New Paltz, New York, this week, I thought these Hudson River Valley houses would better commemorate the Huguenot experience.  These American colonial houses are also a great reminder for an Anglophile and New Anglophile such as myself that not all pre-revolutionary American houses are English in inspiration.

The Hugo Freer House, 32 Huguenot Street, New Paltz, NY; built in northern and southern sections, 1694 & 1735.

The New Paltz Huguenots (often alternatively referred to as Walloons, as many came from the northern French region that is now Belgium) emigrated to American in the 1660s and 1670s and established important contacts in the Dutch settlement of Wiltwyck, now nearby Kingston, New York.  Kingston, along with New York and Albany, was one of the three principal settlements in Dutch New Netherland, and there are some great old stone houses there too, but as it later served as the first capital of New York, the British burned much of it to the ground in the Revolutionary War.  Twelve Huguenot families, the original “Patentees”, established New Paltz in 1678 by purchasing 40,000 acres of land from the resident Eposus Indians; seven of their stone houses survive on Huguenot Street.

The Abraham Hasbrouck House, 94 Huguenot Street, built in 3 phases between 1720 and 1740; a 1940 HABS photograph from the Library of Congress, showing its later dormers; windows and doors of different heights and sizes testify to its structural history.

The Bevier-Elting House, Huguenot Street & Broadhead Avenue, begun in 1698.  These long, sloping roofs do remind me of English seventeenth-century houses in Massachusetts. But not the stone. I love these crooked windows!

The recently-restored Jean/Jacob Hasbrouck House, Huguenot & Front Streets, built c. 1721.

Our last stop in this preserved Huguenot village was the old Burying Ground, which has a reconstructed “Old French” church in its midst.  The gravestones were themselves testimonies to the development of this community, as the original Patentee families married both within and outside their circle over the centuries, transforming themselves from refugees to Americans.

The Old Burying Ground and the reconstructed Church; a 1951 photograph of the cemetery before the Church’s reconstruction by Erma Dewitt, Hudson River Valley Heritage; an eighteenth-century marker.

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Houses, Travel

June 8, 2012

My Renaissance Crush

By daseger

I check in with the clever blog My Daguerrotype Boyfriend (“where early photography meets extreme hotness”) on a regular basis, but I must admit that nineteenth-century men just don’t do it for me; I prefer to go back several centuries, to the Renaissance. This summer I’m teaching a course on the connections between art, science, and technology in Renaissance Europe, which has given me the opportunity to become reacquainted with my long-time Renaissance crush:  Domenico Ghirlandaio, whose formal name was Domenico di Tommaso Bigordi (1449-1494). Ghirlandaio, meaning “garland-maker”, was a nickname, and a reference to the garland-like jewelry made by his goldsmith father, with whom he trained. Since he is my crush, I’m simply going to call him Domenico from now on.

I have a crush on Domenico for a number of reasons.  I think he’s a great painter, and he must have been an effective teacher as well, as he ran one of the most important workshops in Florence and counted Michelangelo among his students.  Above all, though, I admire him because he’s such Renaissance man:  putting himself in the picture (literally, and several times) and striving to represent humanity above everything else, even beauty.  And on top of all this, he was very handsome, at least the way he depicted himself!

Such a Renaissance statement:  putting yourself in the picture, staring posterity in the eye:  here is Domenico in his 1488 painting Adoration of the Magi, cropped and in its entirety.

Collection of the Spedale degli Innocenti, Florence.

And here his a few years earlier, in Adoration of the Shepherds (1483-85; the Sassetti Chapel in the basilica of Santa Trinita, Florence), right in the thick of things, looking more thoughtful, less clean-shaven, and absolutely overwhelmed by the sight of the baby Jesus.

We also see Domenico on one of the St. Francis frescoes that surround the Shepherds altarpiece above in the Sassetti Chapel:  The Resurrection of the Boy.  He is on the extreme right, in the company of men who would no doubt be instantly recognizable to contemporaries.

In The Expulsion of Joachim from the Temple, a fresco in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Domenico has apparently placed himself in the company of his own relatives. This would be his last self-portrait, as he died four years later from a “pestilential fever”.  That year, 1494, was a terrible one for Florence, as the invading French King Charles VIII’s army entered the city, effectively ending its role as the center of Renaissance patronage.

But Domenico lives on, obviously.  Despite my crush, my very favorite Ghirlandaio painting does not feature the artist at all, but rather an old man.  The man depicted in An Old Man and his Grandson (circa 1490; The Louvre) is far from beautiful; viewed objectively, and apart from his setting, he could even be called repulsive.  But Domenico has made him beautiful as he gazes with obvious wonder and adoration at his young grandson, a perfect Renaissance specimen.  No better expression of Renaissance humanism can be found, in my opinion, which was confirmed by the choice of this painting for the cover of the catalog of the recent exhibition of Renaissance portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Renaissance Portrait:  from Donatello to Bellini). 

10 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Culture, History

May 23, 2012

Ever Eglantine

By daseger

I’ve got roses on the brain, but not just any rose, eglantine roses, a wild, shrubby variety (otherwise known as sweetbriar or Rosa rubiginosa or eglanteria) at once very common but surprisingly elusive now.  I’ve been thinking about these roses for several reasons.  It is late May, and my roses are about to bloom, and I’ve come to the realization that I just don’t like several of them:  hyper-hybridized varieties that let me down every summer. Too pumped up and showy.  I want to go back to basics, and the eglantine rose is a very old rose, pared down and rambling, with a lovely scent. Chaucer wrote about this rose, as did Shakespeare, and Elizabeth I adopted it as her favorite symbol.

A beautiful sweetbriar rose in the Cloisters Garden.

So I have personal reasons for thinking about the eglantine rose, but also scholarly ones.  Summer classes start this week, and after an administrative semester, I’m back to teaching (gratefully): a course on “Shakespeare’s England” and one on Renaissance art, science and technology.  Content from both will probably appear in future posts, and the eglantine rose definitely ties in to the first, because “Shakespeare’s England” was largely Elizabethan England, and Elizabeth loved eglantine roses. The last Tudor had her family emblem, the Tudor Rose, and she used it often, but she adopted the more natural eglantine, symbolizing royalty and chastity, as a personal device, particularly after she had forsaken marriage in favor of “marrying England”.  The “Phoenix Jewel”, from about 1574, show Elizabeth surrounded by intertwined Tudor and eglantine roses (as the Virgin Queen, she preferred white), though in the more public “Phoenix portrait”, from about the same period, she is holding the Tudor Rose. Almost two decades later, William Rogers’ print “Rosa Electa” shows her with the Tudor Rose on one side (left) and the eglantine on another:  at this last phase in her long reign, she was widely associated with eglantine roses, even sometimes referred to as the Eglantine.

The Tudor Rose in BL MS Royal 11 E xi, ff. 2v-3 (a canon for Henry VIII); The “Phoenix Jewel”, circa 1574, British Museum; The “Phoenix Portrait”, attributed to Nicholas Hilliard, c. 1575, National Portrait Gallery, London (on loan to the Tate Museum since 1965).

More visual evidence of the first Elizabeth’s association with eglantine roses is her court painter Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature, Young Man among Roses (1585-95), in which a young courtier (often identified as Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex) pays tribute to her simply by standing among eglantine roses (with his hand on his heart).  And then there is George Peele’s exhortation to his fellow Englishmen and -women to wear eglantine, and wreaths of roses red and white put on in honor of that day, for her Accession Day, November 17.

Nicholas Hilliard, Young Man among Roses (1585-95), Victoria & Albert Museum, London.


After Elizabeth, the eglantine rose continues to be admired, though perhaps not with the symbolism it had before. It’s a simple, country rose, contrasted with more extravagant varieties:  natural, wild.  Like all roses, it acquires all sorts of romantic associations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only to be turned into a tobacco brand in the twentieth!

“Rosa Eglanteria Zabeth” (Queen Elizabeth’s Eglantine Rose), Pierre-Joseph Redouté, later 18th century;  The “Wild Rose”, W.L. Ormsby lithograph, NYPL; a lithograph by Jane Elizabeth Giraud from “The Flowers of Milton”, 1846, NYPL; Tobacco Card, Duke University Emergence of Advertising Digital Collection.

The prettiest paper eglantine roses seem to be on paper:  William Morris chose the rose and its vine for one of his earliest, and most popular designs, “Trellis” (1864), and there is a lovely, simple pattern reproduced by Carter & Company Historic Wallpapers based on paper found in a house in Georgia that dates from the 1840s.  I love this company’s slogan:  History repeating itself….

“Trellis” wallpaper by William Morris, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; “Marietta Eglantine” wallpaper by Carter & Company Historic Wallpapers, LLC.

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture, Design, History

May 17, 2012

The Doctrine of Signatures

By daseger

This week’s blooming plant is the lungwort, or pulmonaria officinalis, a low-lying shade plant with speckled leaves that has always been the best example of the pre-modern theory of the Doctrine of Signatures for me.  An ancient theory that was embraced and expanded by several influential Renaissance writers, the doctrine held that the appearance of plants was an indication of their potential curative powers, or “virtues”.  Just as God created disease, he also gave man cures, hidden in nature, but marked by clues, or divine signatures.  I use the doctrine in class as one example of how closely tied medieval and early modern people were to nature, as clever a manifestation of God’s creation as themselves.  Lungwort, with its speckled lung-shaped leaves, was widely believed to contain virtues which could cure diseases of the lung, hence the name.

Lungwort in my garden yesterday, in British Library MS Egerton 747 (Nicolaus of Salerno, Tractatus de herbis , c.1280-1310), and as drawn Elizabeth Blackwell for her Curious Herbal, 1739 and Magdalena Bouchard  for Giorgio Bonelli’s, Hortus romanus, vol. 2, Rome, 1774, tab. 27  (Wellcome Library).

Paracelsus, in most ways a Renaissance medical revolutionary, nevertheless embraced the ancient doctrine in his “great” surgery book (Die grosse Wundartznei), published in 1537:  “I have oft-times declared, how by outward shapes and qualities of things we may know their inward virtues, which God has put in them for the good of man.  So in St. John’s Wort, we may take notice of the form of the leaves and flowers, the porosity of the leaves, the veins [which] signify to us that this herb helps both inward and outward holes or cuts in the skin.  The flowers of St. John’s Wort, when they are purified are like blood; which teaches us, that this herb is good for wounds.”  St. John’s Wort doesn’t seem as conspicuously “signed” as lungwort to me, but this passages shows you how far Renaissance doctors were prepared to go. Paracelsus does not mention the plant’s medieval virtue (illustrated below):  that of demon repellent!

BL MS. Sloane 4016:  St. John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum) repelling a demon, Northern Italy, c. 1440.

Later in the sixteenth century, another Renaissance “scientist” (you have to put that word in quotations before Sir Isaac Newton, at the very least) elaborated upon the doctrine in words and images.  Giambattista della Porta, who was also a relatively well-known playwright, was very interested in outward appearances, not only of plants but also of animals and humans, and how appearance affected behavior. His Phytognomonica (1588) contains wonderful, literal images of the doctrine, like the one below, of “ocular” plants like the aptly-named eyebright, which was said to improve sight.

Giambattista della Porta, Phytognomonica (1588), and a 1923 updated image from the Wellcome Library, London.

You can go on and on with the doctrine of signatures, so I’m going to end with one last image of a plant in my garden:  a maidenhair fern, which was (of course), perceived to be a plausible cure for that most common of ailments:  baldness.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Culture, History

April 27, 2012

Anniversary History

By daseger

Sometimes I think that all history in the public sphere is anniversaic, as if nothing in the past matters unless there’s a big anniversary involved, generally a centennial.  In the past few weeks, I’ve heard countless stories in the media about the sinking of the Titanic and the opening of Fenway Park, two very diverse events that happened in 1912 and thus share an anniversary in 2012.  On a more personal note, this is a big year for our family as my grandmother turns 100:  1912 was a very big year indeed.

As a professional historian, history-as-anniversary kind of bothers me: it is exclusively event-oriented, ignores more complex social, economic and cultural developments, and is so obviously subjective.  On the other hand, it does raise awareness about the past, which is always a good thing in my opinion, and it can be fun.  I thought I would sprint backwards through the last millennium and pick my own big events for the years 1812, 1712, 1612 and so on, thus demonstrating how very arbitrary such an exercise can be:  as someone trained in late medieval and early modern European history living in New England, my chosen events are going to be very different from those of, say, a modern African historian living on the West Coast.  So what is history?

I’m starting out here in Salem, a century ago, where crowds are in Town House Square, soon (April 29) to be the site of a campaign stop by former President Theodore Roosevelt, now a candidate for the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) party.  Roosevelt took the train up from Boston, gave a quick speech, and departed for the next town.

Moving backwards to 1812, my Salem perspective mandates that I pick the War of 1812 as my big event of the year (even though it certainly wasn’t over in 1812).  This war had a huge impact on Salem (and other eastern seaports), in effect ending its golden age.  This summer, there will be courses and exhibits at Salem State University and the Salem Athenaeum:  anniversary history.  I wonder if I was standing on Salem’s highest point, Legge’s Hill (now the site of a hulking YMCA, but offering the best view of Salem Harbor) could I have seen the engagement between the American Chesapeake and the British Shannon or the USS Constitution being chased by two British frigates?

The Constitution in 1803 by Salem artist Michele Felice Corne; the Capitol after burning by British Troops, 1814 (Drawing by George Munger, Library of Congress).

For the year 1712 I’m leaving Salem, no longer the center of the action, and crossing over to Britain. My big event for this year is the invention of the Newcomen Engine, the first machine to harness steam power for practical purposes–in this case, pumping out mines.  Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine might be less well-known than James Watt’s, which came later in the eighteenth century, but it was the first step of the Industrial Revolution.

The Newcomen Steam Engine, circa 1725.

I’m going to stay in Britain for the year 1612 and pick the Lancashire (Pendle) Witch Trials for my event of the year.  This was England’s largest witch hunt, small by continental comparison (12 accusations, 10 convictions on charges of murder by witchcraft, 10 executions) but one of the first trials in England which was focused on collective devil worship as opposed to individual maleficia.  It’s also an exceeding well-documented series of trials, and northern England seems to be gearing up for a Salem-esque 400th anniversary “commemoration”.

A 1612 chapbook about the Pendle Witches, and the 400th anniversary logo.

I’m heading to Italy for the year 1512: it’s the height of the Italian Renaissance and Michelangelo Buonarroti has completed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which is summarily unveiled to the public by Pope Julius II.  I don’t think I need to say anything else.

God Dividing the Waters detail, Sistine Chapel.

You notice that I haven’t left Europe?  I’m going to remain there for 1412 and choose a birth for that year:  the birth, sometime in January, of the “Maid of Orléans”, Joan of Arc, the French national heroine who inspired the French victory in the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) and was martyred and canonized as a consequence.

Jeanne d’Arc in the company of saints, miniature circa 1485.

I am going to leave Europe and the west for my next big event:  1312 marks the beginning of the reign of arguably the greatest medieval African ruler, Mansa Musa (I) of the Mali Empire in west Africa.  Known for his great wealth, his cultural patronage (including the building of Timbuktu) and his pilgrimage to Mecca, Mansa Musa appears in European maps and texts long after his death.

Mansa Musa in the center of the Catalan Atlas, c. 1375.

North to Europe (sort of):  1212 was a big year in the history of the Spanish Reconquista, the centuries-long struggle on the part of Iberian Christians to recapture their peninsula from Muslim rulers.  At the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa that year, King Alfonso VIII of Castile and his Christian allies (including many crusader knights) won a decisive victory, leading to the decline and fall of the Almohad Empire in Spain.

1112 might have been the year that Hildegard of Bingen, one of the most remarkable and accomplished women of the Middle Ages (mystic, author, artist, abbess, composer) was “enclosed” in the Church by her parents, commencing her spiritual and artistic journey.  In any case, it looks like 2012 will be the year that Hildegard finally receives her canonization, after a long campaign.

One last martyr.  2012 marks the millennial anniversary of the martyrdom of Aelfheagh (Alphege), the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was beaten to death by a mob of drunken Danish Vikings who had taken him prisoner on April 19, 1012.  The Danes who were occupying England at the time wanted “protection money” more than land or power, but the Archbishop refused to be ransomed, and so they killed him in frustration.  He was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to die a violent death (and subsequently be martyred and canonized):  Thomas à Becket apparently prayed to St. Alphege before he met his own death in Canterbury Cathedral.

British children as Vikings outside St. Alfege Church,  Greenwich, near the scene of the crime.  One view of St. Alphege Millennium observances held around Great Britain last week.

And that concludes my millennium of time-traveling (really hit-and-run) history!

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History

April 11, 2012

Spring Cleaning: a Spotty History

By daseger

In addition to dusting off my bicycle, I’ve also got to dust my house this spring, thought I must admit that my spring cleaning always gets delayed by the academic calendar:  I don’t really get to it until the semester is over in early May.  By that time, it’s a refreshing break from school, but the two pursuits–scholarship and housekeeping–are not entirely disconnected in my mind and life.  For the past few years, I’ve been slowly working on a book, tentatively titled The Practical Renaissance, about the practical applications of print and information culture in Elizabethan England.  My primary sources are popular “how-to” books which provided instructions for the improvement of health and household, several of which take on the brave new world of hygiene.

Standards of hygiene were obviously very different in the sixteenth century than they are today, but two concerns  really manifest themselves in my sources:  spot removal (and the care of textiles in general) and bugs.  One of the most versatile of my Elizabethan “practical” authors, Leonard Mascall, wrote about tree-grafting, fishing, animal husbandry and horticulture, as well as stain removal in his Profitable boke declaring dyuers approoved remedies to take out spottes and staines in Silkes, Velvets, Linnen and Woollen clothes.  Multiple editions of Mascall’s little book (which was a translation of  an earlier Dutch work) were published after 1583, testifying to its popularity.

Mascall and his fellow dispensers of household knowledge provided soap recipes (containing alum, egg whites, ashes, and various herbs) for “brightening” various fabrics, but one gets the sense that fumigating and perfuming were the main tasks of “cleaning” in Elizabethan households.  There are many recipes for “sweet bags” containing fragrant herbs that would be spread among the linen, a practice that would both “clean” household textiles and prevent their infestation by moths and other pests. Various herbs boiled down in a “perfuming pot” or cast into the fire would mask annoying household odors.  Instructions were also given for the delousing of both beds and bodies, which must have been a constant occupation.

Bed bugs in Hortus Sanitatis, 1536, and a page of very random recipes from John Partridge’s Widdowes Treasure, 1595.

In the seventeenth century, more comprehensive and detailed guides were published in multiple editions, becoming more authoritative in the process.  Two domestic bibles, seldom out of print, were Gervase Markham’s English House-Wife, first published in 1615, and Hannah Woolley’s Compleat Servant-Maid, or the Young Maidens Tutor (1677).  The books are longer but the recipes for cleanliness are still the same:  spot-cleaning of fabrics, sweet bags and sweet waters, perfumes and pomanders, musk balls and soap balls, shake the bedclothes to get the bed bugs out.  Unadulterated water is still a suspicious substance, with good reason.  You can see from the long title of Markham’s work that the seventeenth-century English housewife was supposed to possess a wealth of skills, encompassing everything from healing to distillation to maintaining the dairy.  Writing later in the seventeenth century, from a completely different perspective as both a woman and a former servant herself, Woolley’s very practical guide was geared towards prospective domestic servants who aspired to work in “great houses”.

The last two household compendiums to be published before the Industrial Revolution were Eliza Smith’s Compleat Housewife, or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion (1727) and Hannah Glasse’s Servant’s Directory, Improved, or Housekeeper’s Companion (1762), with instructions on how to mix up paints and varnishes, whiten fabric, and, of course, banish bugs and vermin.  Glasse’s work also contains the following directions for cleaning wood floors, a “green” approach that sounds like it might work today:  “Take tansy, mint, and balm; first sweep the room, then strew the herbs on the floor, and with a long hard brush rub them well all over the boards, till you have scrubb’d the floor clean.  When the boards are quite dry, sweep off the greens, and with a dry rubbing brush dry-rub them well, and they will look like mahogany, of a fine brown, and never want any other washing, and give a sweet smell to the room”.  You can see Glasse’s instructions enacted by the curators of the Rhode Island Historical Society on April 21 when they scrub down the John Brown House in eighteenth-century style (and eighteenth-century clothing).

The title page of Hannah Woolley’s Compleat Housewife and a popular mid-18th-century print of “The Housewife”:  She claims you Praise, who keeps all sweet and clean:  for Tidy Housewife is no Title mean”.  Mezzotint after Gerrit Dou by Richard Purcell for Henry Parker, 1759-66.  British Museum.

Of course, in the nineteenth century, everything changes:  there is a revolution of soap…and detergent, disinfectants, and bug spray.  The housewife (or her maid) still has to do the work, but she doesn’t have to make the products anymore.  Given their domain over the household, housewives add a new role to ther varied tasks:  that of targeted consumers of the myriad of cleaning products on an ever-expanding market, all promising cleaner homes, in the spring time and all year round.

British advertisements for household soap from the 1870s and 1880s from the British Library; John Henry Vanderpoel poster for Armour’s Laundry Soap, 1890s, New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

“Spring Cleaning” acquires a metaphorical meaning in the modern era, first and foremost when applied to gender politics as in the two images below from just before World War I, and later more generally.  Finally, a scene of futuristic domestic liberation from Popular Mechanics in 1950.

Women’s Work (cleaning up the house) and Men’s Work (cleaning up the city) as a Suffragette confronts her husband in a Puck cartoon from 1912, Women’s Suffrage sweeping away the evils of prostitution, drinking and gambling in a 1914 cartoon, and the housewife of tomorrow (2000) doing her spring cleaning, 1950.  All, Library of Congress.

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April 6, 2012

Easter Weekend Witches

By daseger

Given my city’s reputation, I think it is appropriate for a Salem-based blog to pay tribute to the Scandinavian tradition of påskkärringar: Easter witches.  According to this custom, most likely dating from a folklore “revival” in the nineteenth-century, Swedish children dress up as witches armed with broomsticks and copper kettles and go trick-or-treating on Maundy Thursday, the very day that their distant ancestors supposedly believed that “real” witches left on their journey to the faraway Blåkulla (Blue Mountain) to pay tribute to the Devil in a hedonistic sabbath.  These same witches returned from the mountain for Easter Sunday services (during which they would say their prayers backwards), if they could fit through the chimneys after several days of partying, or avoid the fires that were lit to keep them away.  Glad Påsk (Happy Easter) postcards from the first half of the century appear to feature the påskkärringar far more than they do eggs and chicks (or Jesus) and the tradition seems to be alive and well today.

It’s always interesting to trace modern customs and “traditions” as far back as you can go.  When you examine all the various details that make up the celebration of Easter in Sweden– flying witches, a far-off mountain, branches and bonfires, feasts–there definitely seem to be some pre-Christian elements, combined with pre-modern Christianity and modern commercialism.  At the very least, Blåkulla goes way back.  It is referenced in the key early modern source for Northern history and culture, the Historia de Gentibus Septentionalibus (History of the Northern Peoples) of Bishop Olaus Magnus, first published in 1555.  Magnus makes Blåkulla a bit more tangible by identifying it with a real island in the South Baltic, Blå Jungfrun, which retains its mystical reputation.  He also describes, with a bit of skepticism that is later lost, the activities of witches and devils and other magical beliefs and entities.

The island of Blå Jungfrun, now a Swedish national park; devils and “weather witches” from Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, Book Three.

Magnus was writing (and living) right on the precipice:  the period of 1560-1660 was one of intense religious conflict and witch-hunting in Europe.  Sweden managed to escape the former but not the latter, though it was a little delayed: the most intense series of witch trials in the north were the Mora and Torsåker Trials (1668-76), which resulted in the death of 85 people.  The testimony in these trials is characterized by 2 distinct themes:  references to Blåkulla, and the accusations of children, who claimed to have been abducted by witches to demonic sabbaths which took place there.  The reliance on child witnesses, who were allowed considerable time together to get their stories straight, is indeed remarkably similar to Salem.

Title page of Joseph Glanville’s popular Saducismus Triumphus:  or Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions(1682), which includes the Appendix: A True Account of What Happen’d in the Kingdom of Sweden in the Years 1669,1670, and Upwards.

Given the central role played by Swedish children in these late-seventeenth-century trials, it’s a big jarring to see them on Glad Påsk postcards from several centuries later, but this is only one more example of how something very serious (and scary) in the pre-modern past becomes benign in the near-present.  The Easter witches of the past century are so weighed down by kettles and cats, and the occasional chicken and egg, that they have no room for children on their trip to Blåkulla.

Glad Påsk postcards from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s:  by the last decade, Easter Witches were taking planes to Blåkulla!

12 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Culture, History

April 4, 2012

Alternate Histories

By daseger

I don’t really like to engage in “what if” history with my students or read alternative histories, but I like the visual images associated with the genre, ostensibly very current but actually quite historical itself.  Renaissance artists inserted anachronistic imagery in their works all the time, partly because they were so immersed in the classical era and could not help drawing comparisons to that time and their own. For example, the northern Renaissance painting The Martyrdom of St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins depicts contemporary Turkish soldiers slaying the virgins rather than the legendary Huns.  The Turks had conquered Constantinople in 1453 and were now poised to expand into Europe, whereas the Huns occupied a similar position a millennium before.

The Martyrdom of St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins, Master of the St. Ursula Legend, Cologne c. 1492. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Invasion seems to be the most popular premise for alternate histories:  the Turks in the Early Modern Era, Napoleon in the nineteenth century, Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler in the twentieth.  Widely acknowledged to be the first book in an emerging genre of alternate history, Louis Geoffroy’s Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoleon et la conquête du Monde (1836) envisioned a world pacified and modernized under the benevolent dictator Napoleon.  Between the reimagined Napoleonic worlds of the nineteenth century and the reimagined Germanic worlds of the twentieth century is a peculiar little story by Salem’s own Nathaniel Hawthorne, “P’s Correspondence” from Mosses from an Old Manse Volume II, in which the author’s deranged friend P recounts his encounters with Romantic poets of an earlier era in 1845 London.  Hawthorne’s version of Midnight in Paris!  Somehow Napoleon appears here too, completely feeble but still under guard, along with an even more incapacitated Sir Walter Scott.

A beautiful first edition of Geoffroy’s Histoire, a Currier & Ives print of the iconic Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques–Louis David (Library of Congress) , and a modern mash-up on a tee-shirt.

The twentieth century, with its succession of invasions and conquests and technology, created a natural environment for alternative histories, increasingly recognized as a genre with a special name:  uchronia (which seems to accommodate both “what if” speculations and constructed worlds).  The classic example is J.C. Squire’s If it Had Happened Otherwise:  Lapses into Imaginary History (1931; also published under a variant title:  If:  Or History Rewritten).  The quality of Squire’s contributors (including Winston Churchill) must have gone some way towards legitimizing the relatively new genre.

The late twentieth-century invention of photoshop brought about a whole new realm of visual alternative histories, and the most charming examples I could find were, of course, on Etsy, in the alternatehistories shop. So here, in sort-of chronological order, are slightly altered images of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Chicago during the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the Green Monster in Boston, just in time for opening day at Fenway next week.

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