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Whipping Tom, The Crack's Terror

2009-11-05T13:46:00Z

In my search for obscure references and bits of information on London immigrants, often from unlikely sources, I came across the story of Whipping Tom, the 'Tall Black Man' of Fleet Street during the late 1670s. As it turns out, he probably wasn't Black, but dressed all in black and covered his face with a black cloth. The idea that he was an immigrant is cast into even further improbability by his peculiarly English perversion: spanking. Yes, Tom would wait in dark alleys for unsuspecting ladies out and about at night, grab them, lift up their skirts and beat 'an Alarum' upon 'their Tobies' with his bare hand as he cried out 'Spanko!'.

Tom's speed and skill led him to be described 'as nimble as an Eel' in the execution of his work, and made him impossible to resist, or to catch. He often assaulted prostitutes, or 'Cracks', but any lady walking alone at night could be his target. His attacks went no further than a harsh spanking, but a contemporary account recorded that one one occasion 'he so swinged her tail, that tis thought, she will not be capable of her Trade for some time.' It is clear from the records involving Tom that he was seen as something of a joke. He was clearly a pervert who gained sexual gratification from his activities, but there is no record of him doing anything other than spanking, which the pamphlet pictured above describes in great detail. Especially detailed is the tale of the poor, stunned pease-pudding seller:

Another time the Woman that cries hot Gray Pease about the Streets, coming up Ram Alley in Fleet Street … a cold hand was lay’d upon her, and up flew her heels, and down fell the Pease Tub, when (as she has farther related) her sences were so charmed, that she lost all power of Resistance, and left him to Tyranize over her Posteriors at pleasure, the which when he had done, he left her to scrape up her ware as well as she could, for the use of such longing Ladies as are affected with such Diet.

Such anecdotes are amusing, but the relish with which it was reported places some culpability upon the victim, who must have enjoyed the attention in some way to be so acquiescent. Whipping Tom achieved no small fame, and Aphra Behn hit the nail on the head in her 1682 play The City Heiress when one of her characters chastises the other for his drunken moaning on women:

I shall have you whining when you are sober again, traversing your Chamber with Arms across, railing on Love and Women, and at last defeated, turn whipping Tom, to revenge your self on the whole Sex.

The belief was that Tom's victims were out and about alone at night (although the pease-pudding seller had every reason to be), and therefore deserved a spanking: Tom was an agent of social and sexual justice. He disappeared as quickly as he had come, perhaps leaving London, perhaps dying, but his legend lived on. Whipping Tom had passed so far into the London sub-conscious that in 1751, a Thomas Wallis was named Whipping Tom in the press after a sex-crime spree in, wait for it...yes, it's Hackney! Even better, our faithful Hackney Nightwatch came to the rescue. Thomas Wallis was a dangerous deviant whose attacks began with a spanking, but soon evolved into serious sexual assault. In 1751, Mr Hawkins had the trial and details printed up as a pamphlet to satisfy the popular curiosity. As always in the popular press at this time, coy wording and especial attention to the rude bits go hand in hand:

Mary Sutten the Milkmaid of Hackney also deposed that when the Prisener whipt'd her Backside in a Ditch near Shoulder of Mutten Fields, to prevent her Crying out, he stuff'd his Handkerchief into her Mouth, and wuld have thrust something else into another place, had not the Watchmen come happely to her assistance.

Thomas Wallis was dealt with in the appropriate 18thC manner for rapists: hanging. His namesake never quite fell out of the minds of Londoners walking the streets at night, but he was followed by more unpleasant attackers such as the piquerisitic London Monster (more on him another time). The reporting of Whipping Tom's attacks is uniquely English and a great illustration of the humour of the time. His assaults were viewed as terrifying for the victims, but ultimately harmless and with heavy comic potential. Poor Robin even implied in his Intelligence of 1677 that women walked the night-time streets of London in anticipation of having their 'Butt ends' made to cry 'Spanko!' Come on ladies, own up, you know you want it really....

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Disembodied Leg Prints, ca. 1650

2009-11-01T23:21:00Z

[From A Booke of Drawinges Performed acording to the best order for vse & Breuity that is yet Extant, ca. 1650; from British Printed Images to 1700.]

[Illustration in Samuel Clarke, A Generall Martyrologie (London, 1651); from British Printed Images to 1700.]

[Plate 1 from a drawing book, Un Libro da designiare; 1654 etching; from British Printed Images to 1700.]

Falmouth

2009-10-31T13:12:54Z

This post relates to my trip to England and Wales in September 2009.

After my little misadventure at Camelford, I started the next day out of position, and had a long way to go just to get back to my real hotel in Truro for a change of clothes. So for my day’s excursion I didn’t want to go too far from Truro, and luckily Falmouth is only a short trip by train.

What does Falmouth have? Yachts!

Ships!

Even a quasi-aircraft-carrier-cum-hospital ship (technically an aviation training and casualty receiving ship), RFA Argus, a veteran of wars from the Falklands to Iraq.

Falmouth has a deep harbour and a long nautical tradition, so it was a logical place to put the National Maritime Museum Cornwall. Unlike the National Maritime Museum in London (of which it is independent), the focus is more on small craft than big ships.

For example, this is a model of a fishing boat called Mystery. In 1854-5 its owners sailed it from Newlyn in Cornwall to Melbourne and back, looking for work!

A working replica of one of the first submarines, built by Dutchman Cornelius Drebbel for the Royal Navy in the 17th century. (They didn’t want it.)

A string vest which Ernest Shackleton wore during his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914-7. Despite the undoubted historical significance of this artefact, I must admit it made me think of this.

Victoria by the grace of God did grant somebody something … sorry, I don’t know what this is for, exactly. I just liked the calligraphy!

The other major attraction at Falmouth (for me, at least) was Pendennis Castle.

Pendennis is part of the Tudor harbour defences.

As such, where Falmouth in general is characterised by ships, Pendennis Castle is characterised by guns with which to sink them. (Well, to sink the enemy’s ships, but you get the idea.)

This a (reproduction) Tudor cannon, (mock) firing through a (glass-covered) gunport (but with real smoke).

An array of late-18th/early-19th century guns. A ship of the line could carry more, but it also was made of wood and could sink.

This looks mid-to-late 19th century to me — still muzzle-loading, anyway.

A technological advance in the 1890s — breech loading.

Although this example now has a fixed position, it originally had a disappearing mount: it would rise above the parapet to fire, and then would sink below to be reloaded. To much wear and tear; these were replaced in 1913. The concrete structure in front of the emplacement was built in the First World War, and served in the Second as an aircraft spotting station.

Speaking of aircraft, here’s an anti-aircraft gun. (There’s also a First World War-vintage 3-inch AA gun, but my photo of that is boring, to be honest.)

One of the two big 6-inch guns in the Half-Moon Battery, dating from the Second World War. Radar-directed, with a range of 12 miles.

Turning to the architecture, this is the Henrician tower. Construction began in 1539: the threats it guarded against were France and Spain. (The upper left window is, I think, the gunport shown several photos ago.)

A view from the tower’s battlements.

English Heritage’s flag flying proudly over the keep. (Not that Cornish nationalists would be proud of it.)

Little Dennis — a Tudor blockhouse built right out on the tip of the point.

Some different views of Falmouth and surrounds. St Anthony’s Lighthouse, across the Carrick Roads from Pendennis,

Part of the harbourside memorial to the raid on St Nazaire, which set sail from Falmouth on 26 March 1942.

For some reason, I like the idea of having a back door which leads directly to the sea …

A misprint in a lost book

2009-10-31T20:13:00Z

Thomas Webbe, Parson and Ranter, is fairly well known, with his own brief ODNB entry and having featured in Christopher Hill’s World Upside Down. I have been looking at the book by one of his antagonists, Edward Stokes’ The Wiltshire Rant (sic), 1653.

Webbe’s uneven career went through several phases of wild unconformity in thought and action, interspersed with spells when, for very understandable reasons, he chose to repent and conform. He was one of those people prosecuted under the May 1650 act which had made adultery a felony punishable by death. The jury, like sensible folk, had found him not guilty despite convincing testimony against him. From time to time, Webbe had to appear to have renounced his sins; but he went back to them as soon as he safely could.

The same resilience would have been manifest (I think) in his lost work, The Masse of Malice, where he seems to have chosen attack - without any scruple as to honesty - as the best way to defend himself. Edward Stokes was the local J.P., who had heard and believed one of Webbe’s repentances, but became his target in The Masse of Malice. Muddying the waters as much as possible, Webbe invented for Stokes a scatological blasphemy. This is Stokes’ report of what Webbe alleged in print, which was that:

“Finding a bottle he [Stokes] filled it with his Urine and set it by his Filth. He used the gesture of kneeling. And expressed himself in this abominable and blasphemous language to me, [Webbe] That I should kneel down and partake the Communion. Saith he, pointing to his dung, Here is the body of Christ. Pointing to his urine, saith he, Here is the bloud of Christ.”

Stokes could hardly let this go unchallenged. His account of Webbe’s talk and behaviour is fascinating for what it tells us about the ‘ranters’, and as a self-defence it is quite convincing. As Stokes points out, in his role as parson, Webbe (if he were as he claims to be, an innocent man reviled in a ‘mass of malice’) should not have let such blasphemy go unreported:

“The Libidinous Parson saith himself, That he made no words of the businesse till now, concealing it till now from all people, wherefore if M. Stokes were guilty, must not the Parson be as far forth guilty as himself; Is a man of his Coat and Calling to conceal a blasphemy of that nature, without check to the blasphemer or complaint to the Magistrate for two years together?”

But one thing particularly cheers Stokes – the intervention of the hand of God in the printing house, which subverted Webbe’s lies:

“Yet M. Stokes is beholding to the Christian moel-Parson, not for creating a most cursed and detestable blasphemy and fastening it upon him, but for weakning his own evidence, giving himself the lye, and clearing the accused, for so he doth in the 20^th line of the aforesaid 55. pag. in these words, Blasphemy that I never heard in my life. If he had said That he had never heard the like in his life, or never heard before, it might have been otherwise understood: But to conclude, after he hath filled up with most accursed circumstance a self-invented blasphemy, he clearly acquits the accused, and saith, blasphemy that I never heard in my life. Lord how good thou art? this is thy hand and thy doing! Thou hast made the Author of the Masse of malice to acquit the innocent, in the middest of his fierce and foul Charge, To thy name be all the glory.”

I think that ‘moel-Parson’ is an antedating of the OED’s ‘moil’ n. 1: so it means a tainted, besmeared parson. It’s a regional usage.

Webbe did cause a stir in Wiltshire. He’s mentioned in this webpage for Langley Burrell:

http://www.wiltshire.gov.uk/community/getcom.php?id=134

After remarrying locally when he took up the living (Webbe, whose qualifications were his own invention, got the preferment by promising to take no tithes), Webbe rewarded his patron, Henry White, by starting an adulterous affair with the patron’s wife, Mistress Mary White, ‘the little gentlewoman’, as Stokes calls her. When they were charged with ‘the felonious committing of the horrible and crying sin of adultery’ together, Mistress White got her husband to stand surety for her lover, rather than him go to jail. Webbe had been persuasive enough for the evidently not-that-injured husband allow Webbe to move into the disrupted marital home. Meanwhile, Webbe had arranged the seduction of his own wife, also Mary, artfully caught by him at the compromising moment, to allay her jealous protests at his own affair.

More sensationally still, Webbe took John Organ as his ‘man-wife’:

“Wherefore note that Webbs most principall favourite, and greatest choicest associate in the whole Country; for one of his own Sex, was one J O. a comely young man, and a man of a seeming sober behaviour, even as Webbe himself, of whom a stranger cannot but say, or at least think, that butter would not melt in his mouth (as we use to say) yet here you will perceive, as the Proverb is, The still Sow eats all the draught. This man with his Cob-webb seeming sobriety, and unclean inside, is taken by Tho. Webbe, as men use to take their wives, For better for worse: So I say, this man is honoured with the title of Webbs wife, for so he cals him, My wife O; and O owns Webb for a husband; and now where ever they come, 'tis my wife O, and my husband Webb. True it is, Webb is become a great lover of Musick, which to prophane hearts is an in-let to lust: but whether ever he plaied any hellish tune with his Organ or Church musick yea or no, is not yet discovered…”

Stokes, who tells all this, attempts from time to time a wavering irony and uneasy humour: the jokes on the names ‘Webbe’ and ‘Organ’ are typical. He is restrained here: he seems capable of thinking that ‘ranters’ might just pretend love for their (male) ‘fellow creature’ as part of their general effrontery.

Webbe’s lasting sexual affair was with Mary White. It all began jovially enough, with arguments from nature:

“this Deponent did then and oftentimes since bear the said M. Webb say, That he did live above Ordinances, and that it was lawfull for him to lye with any woman. And at one time above the rest, the said M. Webb, Mistress White, this Deponent, and divers others sitting in the Gate-house of the dwelling-house of the said Mistress White (there being tame Pidgeons in the Court) the said M. Webb observing a great Cock Pidgeon to tread divers of the Hen Pidgeons there, said unto those that were there present, that it was lawfull for every man and woman, and that they ought to take that liberty and freedom one with the other, as those Pidgeons did, although they were not married the one to the other.”

But the affair led to serious quarrels, with Mary White sometimes willing to proceed and testify against Webbe (perhaps after he gave her the French pox), at other times wearing him when they were finally imprisoned together, when Webbe, the man beaten at his own game:

“was exceedingly wearied and tired out with Mistress Whites company in Goal, that she by her flatteries and frowns still indeavoured to keep him in his evil and unclean courses with her, whose provocations and temptations gave him no rest; and therefore he humbly desires to be removed into any other prison out of her company, where he might be at rest.”

Webbe finally “earnestly desired M. Stokes his assistance to work a separation between him and Mistress White, in putting of them to severall Goales.”

My image of Ranters enjoying the company of the 'fellow creature' is from The Ranters Declaration, 1650.

The work and ideas of Gerrard Winstanley

2009-10-30T20:17:00Z

A CELEBRATION OF THE WORK AND IDEAS OF GERRARD WINSTANLEY

7pm, Thursday 19th November 2009,
Speakers: Thomas Corns, University of Bangor, co-author of a
biography of John Milton, and Ann Hughes, University of Keele,
author of “The Causes of the English Civil War” (1998)
Venue: Russell Room, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square,
London WC1 (Tube: Holborn).

The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley will be published in December in two volumes containing 1,000 pages. This will be the first comprehensive
edition of the Digger leader’s writings and will establish Winstanley’s
distinctive contribution to political and ethical ideas. Tom Corns and Ann Hughes, two of the editors of this new volume, will address Winstanley’s ideas and their relevance for today.

Books, Redundancy: Getting Past our Future, and On With Our Present

2009-10-26T15:31:00Z

Publishing is on the verge of becoming an interactivity involving the author, the publisher, and the reader.
//Frank Urbanowski

New technology is never enough. To bring it into common use and gain from it, society must change. The university presses have the know-how to gain from technological advances, but are waiting for scholars to incorporate the new technology into the way their research is presented to the reader.
// Colin Day

Any historian who has done long stints of research knows the frustration over his or her inability to communicate the fathomlessness of the archives and the bottomlessness of the past. If only my reader could have a look inside this box, you say to yourself, at all the letters in it, not just the lines from the letter I am quoting. If only I could follow that trail in my text just as I pursued it through the dossiers, when I felt free to take detours leading away from my main subject. If only I could show how themes crisscross outside my narrative and extend far beyond the boundaries of my book. Not that books should be exempt from the imperative of trimming a narrative down to a graceful shape. But instead of using an argument to close a case, they could open up new ways of making sense of the evidence, new possibilities of making available the raw material embedded in the story, a new consciousness of the complexities involved in construing the past.

I am not advocating the sheer accumulation of data, or arguing for links to databanks—so-called hyperlinks. These can amount to little more than an elaborate form of footnoting. Instead of bloating the electronic book, I think it possible to structure it in layers arranged like a pyramid. The top layer could be a concise account of the subject, available perhaps in paperback. The next layer could contain expanded versions of different aspects of the argument, not arranged sequentially as in a narrative, but rather as self-contained units that feed into the topmost story. The third layer could be composed of documentation, possibly of different kinds, each set off by interpretative essays. A fourth layer might be theoretical or historiographical, with selections from previous scholarship and discussions of them. A fifth layer could be pedagogic, consisting of suggestions for classroom discussion and a model syllabus. And a sixth layer could contain readers' reports, exchanges between the author and the editor, and letters from readers, who could provide a growing corpus of commentary as the book made its way through different groups of readers.

A new book of this kind would elicit a new kind of reading. Some readers might be satisfied with a study of the upper narrative. Others might also want to read vertically, pursuing certain themes deeper and deeper into the supporting essays and documentation. Still others might navigate in unanticipated directions, seeking connections that suit their own interests or reworking the material into constructions of their own.
//Robert Darnton

What do all these quotes have in common?

They were written in 1999, a full decade ago.

Not only are we still on the verge (the verge, the edge, pushed and pulled over the cliff -- perhaps floating, by now? have we taken off, or fallen?); not only are we still waiting for the scholars to use new technologies (there's something eerie in that quote -- waiting for the scholars to die out is what one thinks Day wished to say); not only can I think of no solid examples of Darnton's imagined multimedia "book" (or, for that matter, Vannevar Bush's Memex) . . . but our very rhetoric remains stuck in the same old mud of prediction and prophecy.

I'm frustrated. You can tell. Let me start again.

We've done a lot of looking forward, looking to the future -- the future of the humanities, the future of the digital humanities, the future of the future and its various futurologies. We've been doing this for a long time now. At least a decade, as these quotes attest. It's beginning to be redundant, as in redundāns, flowing back, overflowing, a word denoting both the structure of hyperstasis and the predictability of the everyday.

Or, redundant (adj.): having excess or duplicate parts that can continue to perform in the event of malfunction of some of the parts (of a device, circuit, computer system, etc.).

I've been researching digital scholarship (i.e. not research using digital tools, but original scholarship born digital) and am numbed by the flood of sameness. Page through any library sciences or publisher's journal and you find articles that could have been plucked right from 1999. Take, for instance,the October 2009 issue of Learned Publishing, the journal of Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers: "Making journals accessible to the visually impaired: the future is near"; "A decline to nothing? The tenuous existence of the small journal"; and the much more blunt, "We need publishing sets for data sets and data tables" (no trouble finding Toby Green's thesis!).

What decade are we in?

Am I being glib? Take another journal, the most recent issue of Library Hi Tech, in which the reader can bone up on "Archiving in the networked world: betting on the future"; or "Virtual research environments: Issues and opportunities for librarians"; or "On-demand virtual research environments and the changing roles of librarians." The future, its opportunities, its tenuous existence; our changing roles; it's enough to make one want to the goddamn roles to just change already, so we can get on shaping the opportunities of our future futures, which getting past the futurity (futureness?) of some futures seem ever further away.

I'm worried this ship won't sail. Am I being cranky?

My issue is not with these articles themselves; in fact, these authors are, on the whole, quite right. It is an inevitable and unavoidable fact that the future hasn't come, that opportunities for serious digital scholarship remain fleeting, and that the roles of libraries and digital humanities are and will continue to change. I'm cranky, rather, because I'm feeling the weight and burden of saying something new, something fresh, using words that have, after a decade, grown stale. More than feeling the burden personally, I'm frustrated at how disciplined the discipline has become already. While Johanna Drucker makes some seriously questionable statements about the state of digital humanities in her most recent book, Speclab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, I share her fundamental desire to "le[t] go of the positivist underpinnings of the Anglo-analytic mode of epistemological inquiry," to spin off into something new, something fresh, playful, imaginative -- to do a kind of détournement of e-scholarship.

Darnton's imagined book (like so many other imagined books -- the books of Mallarmé, of Leibniz, of Llull) remains purely imaginative, a potential unfulfilled even by Darnton himself, who this very month released a good old-fashioned book on the future books, entitled (what else?) The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. When I saw him talk at MIT last year, Darnton indicated his next book would incorporate some kind of wiki or user talk-back component. This, had he implemented it, would still be a far cry from his structured pyramid scheme (others have done similar forms of digital publishing with some success -- see, for instance, Chris Kelty's Two Bits or Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks.) Nevertheless, it would be something. Surely Darnton isn't in fear of the tenure committee -- surely he, of all people, has the freedom to realize the book's new potentials. Infrastructural barriers wouldn't impede him. I wonder what happened.

I'm eager for experimentation. I'm eager to get past the future, and on with the present.

the truth about the dinosaurs.

2009-10-22T01:10:49Z

the truth about the dinosaurs.

Failed engineering on St. Peter’s Day

2009-10-21T09:58:03Z

The gospel of Matthew explains how, after Jesus walked on the sea, St Peter also walked on water for a few moments before he became fearful and doubtful and fell in (Matthew 14: 28-31).

According to the publicity-pamphlet The Water-Walker well Wash’d, being A True Relation, of a Strange Perambulation of a Person in this Nation, upon a Watery Station, on such a fashion, as gave the Spectators small Delectation on Tuesday June 29. 1669, this very same feat – i.e. walking on water – was attempted by a man in Islington upon St. Peter’s Day who had used clever engineering rather than strong faith.

The pamphlet tells how the a large crowd assembled to see the water-walker, but:

…when he did out of his Cell appear,
Upon the Water like an Engineer:
And likely was to get Applause, when, see,
Just as he saluted, Down fell he.
Instead of walking then, alas! poor wretch!
He e’en sunk down, and fell upon his Breech.
He struggled to get up, but all in vain,
For as he strove to rise, he fell again.

The picture heading the pamphlet shows a man standing on little discs (one presumes based on lily-pads), holding a stick with a third lily-pad disc at its base for balancing on the water. The pamphlet, which seeks to stimulate interest in further water-walking performances, explicitly does not doubt the ingenuity of the invention, but rather attributes the failure of the show to the audacity of its scheduling on a holy day when a saint experienced a miracle:

For nor the weakness of the Engeneer,
Nor yet the strength of Wine, of Ale, or Beer
Did sink him, but I dare be bold to say,
It was the crossness of St. Peters day.
Doubtless he was presumptuous in excess,
That did thus dare, (although his Faith were less)
To be the Great St. Peters Emulator,
Thus on this day to walk upon the Water:
Though all his Engins were the sons of Art

The pamphlet is trying to conjure further interest in the water-walker as it ends by saying the pamphlet can be redeemed for another free view of the show next time he performs (‘This man has walkt on Water oft before, / And will again, or else be seen no more. / And this he’ll promise, that without a Boon, / Another day he will dance there alone. / And for his slip amends that he may make, / He’ll for your entrance this same Ticket take’).

With regards to science that mimics miracles this pamphlet confirms that there is demand for a show of walking on water but also suggests that the phenomenon should not be too closely aligned with St. Peter or some ‘crossness’ of the day will intervene.

Could 'Wolf Hall' be historical fiction that works?

2009-10-19T19:45:00Z

I’m chuffed Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker prize for her latest novel Wolf Hall. The book is described as a “Tudor corridors-of-power saga” that “turns the historical figure of Thomas Cromwell — Henry VIII's shadowy political fixer — into a compelling, complex literary hero.” It comes hard on the heels of the saucy television series The Tudors, high on of my list of must-watch television indulgences. In this show, everyone is gorgeous (and clean!), and even pious saint-to-be Sir Thomas More is a brooding hottie in a hair shirt and velvet breeches.

I haven’t read Wolf Hall yet, but it’s on my pile of books for the summer holidays. I know many historians find it painful to read historical novels, probably because the mantras we’ve learned about reliability of evidence and avoiding anachronism at all costs are so deeply ingrained. I’ve been interested in history since I was a child, and I’ve always enjoyed reading historical whodunits by the likes of Paul Doherty and Ellis Peters, but even I find I’m much more critical of historical fiction than I used to be.

That said, if anyone can make this work, Mantel can. She has long been one of my favourite authors, with an incredible ability to really get inside your head and make you experience being her characters. In my opinion, Beyond Black is her best book It’s about a psychic who is stalked by abusive ghosts from her childhood as she works the seedy pubs and halls of a bleakly suburban post-Thatcher England, and it manages to be poignant, funny and terrifying all at the same time. Beyond Black is one of those rare stories that linger and haunt you long after you’ve turned the last page.

But much as I love Mantel’s writing, I was more than a bit peeved by this weird opinion piece, in which she sets up a false comparison between historians and historical novelists. She obviously has little respect for and less understanding of what historians actually do and how they work, saying:

“The past is not dead ground, and to traverse it is not a sterile exercise. History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. The most scrupulous historian is an unreliable narrator; he brings to the enterprise the biases of his training and the vagaries of his personal temperament, and he is often obliged, in order to make his name, to murder his forefathers by coming up with a different take on events from the one that held sway when he himself learned the discipline; he must make the old new, because his department's academic standing depends on it.”

This makes the historical profession sound like it’s nothing more than the idiosyncratic pursuit of personal follies and academic rivalries. The way Mantel puts it, writing history is basically the same as writing fiction, though perhaps with a bit more focus on the collection of dull old ‘facts’ and less conjecture about people’s personal feelings.

I can understand that Mantel is probably fed up to the back teeth with pedantic critics pointing out errors or distortions of fact in her novels. But seriously folks, there's a whole lot more to writing history than this!

Book Review: Forlorn Hope: Soldier Radicals of the Seventeenth Century

2009-10-20T21:22:00Z

Antonia Southern's Forlorn Hope is an account of the English Civil War from the perspective of its military. She writes a collective biography of four radical soldiers- Thomas Rainborough, his brother William Rainborough, Edward Sexby and Richard Rumbold. All three lived interesting lives. Thomas Rainborough fought in Ireland, then in England- was an experienced commander on land and sea and Vice Admiral of the English navy for a couple of months. He was an opponent of Cromwell's at Putney, famously saying that the poorest he in England had as much a right to life as the richest he and consequently as much a right to the vote. His brother William was less senior and less famous- also commanded in Ireland and returned to England. William Rainborough was active within the army politically and later became a ranter- a religious radical who beleived that he was saved and therefore that it was impossible for him to sin. Edward Sexby was another radical figure whose political career began in 1647- also present at Putney, he memorably told the generals that if he did not receive the vote he did not understand what he had been fighting for. Sexby was promoted until 1653, when he was tried for corruption in Scotland and then he drifted into intelligence work and becoming a plotter with the royalists against Cromwell. Rumbold lastly was a soldier who signed one pamphlet during the civil war- he later emerged as a plotter against Charles II and was executed for his part in the Rye House Plot in 1683.

Southern has assembled an interesting caste therefore- their political careers span 40 years- from 1641 until 1683. All of them have lives that were veiled partially in obscurity: we do not know much about either Rainborough before the 1640s, Sexby's life before 1632 is a complete mystery (we know that in that year he was apprenticed) and Rumbold's is a product of speculation. One of them was ambushed and killed during the civil war (Thomas Rainborough), two were executed (Edward Sexby in 1657 and Rumbold in 1683) and we know nothing of what happened to William Rainborough in America. All four were politically committed- and through them Southern is able to tell us about other figures: Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax and Charles I perhaps most notably. However the book is not a success and partially that is because of its format- Southern adopts the approach of writing an essay about all three characters, this means that she repeats territory in the 1640s three times (first with Thomas, second with William and third with Sexby). The second major problem though is historical.

Southern has done some good work here- she obviously has tried to find out what she could about these men and their careers, her notes are reasonable- and Rumbold definitely is a figure that civil war historians ought not to forget about. However her work is flawed- partly because she is ignorant of more recent historiography (not her fault but Putney in particular has been revisited importantly since she wrote by John Morrill and others in ways that have changed our understanding of what the great debate was about) and partly because she misses several key things in the sources. Most notable is the fact that this is a very secular history of a very religious society. William Rainborough was a Ranter because he believed in a form of antinomianism- it would have been nice to hear more about the creed for which he risked his life. Southern tells us nothing- save she presumes that he did it because he was disappointed politically. Thomas Rainborough's arguments at Putney are strongly marked by religion: Southern knows this is true (she mentions it) but passes over it as insignificant before his support for democracy. Sexby is a very interesting and subtle thinker- Southern has little to say in explanation beyond contrasting him with what we might think today. Her tendency is to always compare the past to the present: perhaps her most illuminating insight is the way that she sees the profession of soldiery changing from a politically active into a democratically servile proffession- that seems to be her main interest but it is still a contrast between past and present rather than an examination of the past.

At some point, as historians we have to try and understand the world as they saw it rather than as we see them. It is not easy to do and the inevitability of failure hangs in the air but constantly asking what is different from where we stand or similar may not lead us to see that. I think Southern made a creditable effort here- it was her misfortune to publish just as the kind of history of the army that she wrote was going out of fashion, and just as others were about to publish more illuminating work- but she could have approached her sources and her figures with more imagination. Arnaldo Momigliano once said that there are two tasks as a historian: the first is to find a good question, the second to answer it. Though she partially fails the second test- her decision to write a biography of Sexby, Rainborough (both) and Rumbold was a good one- hopefully others will follow her lead.

POM-POM

2009-10-13T10:23:20Z

Animating genius Chris Bowles strikes again...

BUG 16 NEWS AND A CLASSIC NEIL YOUNG VID!

2009-10-19T20:49:16Z

BOOK NOW FOR BUG 16 OR BUG 16 THE DIRECTORS CUT: 12th & 20th NOVEMBER 2009

As I write there’s a few tickets left for both nights of the music video forum I host at the BFI Southbank and I’m very keen that you, a real, warm, intelligent, compassionate human being book them rather than some block booking from a production company who then fail to turn up having prevented you, the compassionate ones from getting tickets, resulting in great swathes of free seats in a supposedly sold out show which as we all know is a problem far greater than climate change, the credit crunch or any other of today’s so called ‘issues’. If you’ve never been to BUG before, please come, it’s one of the few live things I do and easily my favourite. I really think it might cheer you up and after the month you’ve had, you could use it! If you’ve had a really good month and you’re feeling emotionally robust you can go and see The Invention Of Lying instead.

You can book tickets for BUG 16 on Thursday 22nd starting at 8.45pm here

Or you can book tickets for BUG 16 The Directors Cut on Friday20th starting at 6.20pm (and featuring mostly the same content as BUG 16 but without the director interview and with a few extra sprinkles) here

WONDERIN’ DIRECTED BY TIM POPE

In the meantime here’s a video for Neil Young directed by Tim Pope, my charming guest at BUG 15. I suggest you spend a long time watching his vids and reading the accompanying anecdotes on his excellent website here. Tim is perhaps best known for his great Cure videos but amongst a huge amount else he has for a long time been a trusted Neil Young collaborator and though he’s ended up making vids for some of Young’s more outré material (and by ‘outré’ I do of course mean ‘stinké’) he always gets something unexpected and often hilarious out of the grumpy old genius.

The video for Wonderin’ below is from 1983 when Young had just released Everybody’s Rockin’, an album of doo wap pastiche that Geffen (his label at the time) decided was not what Neil Young fans wanted or expected to hear and sued him for being ‘unrepresentative of himself’. Incidentally that kind of twattish behaviour from Geffen was apparently what convinced Michael Stipe that REM should sign with IRS records and not Geffen. Here’s a review of Everybody’s Rockin’ that looks more kindly on it than perhaps it deserves but makes the point that looking back ‘through the lens of time’ (!) there are things to love about this crappy and bizarre detour, not least the superbly demented performance that Tim Pope gets out of Neil for this vid.

Don't quit your day job, Nicolas.

2009-10-16T00:35:00Z

[A delightful(ly bad) drawing from Nicolas Hanslopp's copy of Peter Mowle's Sartaine most holsome meditations verey meete to bee dulie considered (a poem in 5 books, dedicated to Lady Viscount Hereford) (1595; 1618-22); the book is bound with Hanslopp's commonplace book. Part of the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale (Osborn a6)]

Beautiful old map of Paris ‘Paris depuis Charles V...

2009-10-04T10:40:00Z

Beautiful old map of Paris

‘Paris depuis Charles V jusqu’a Charles IX, d’après le plan de l’Abbaye St. Victor.’ (via uconnlibrariesmagic)

do click through to the original size

The extraordinary research of the BCA

2009-10-13T10:13:05Z

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and you think it's a duck, then maybe you're just not being open-minded enough. Photo (cc) RealEstateZebra

I sent an email to the British Chiropractic Association’s enquiries email account recently.

Dear BCA,

I read with interest that the use of manipulation is documented ‘as far back as 2700-1500 BC in China and Greece.‘ Could you point me to the documentation for Greece? I’m researching the use of ancient history in justifications for complimentary medicine and I’m not familiar with any such documents. It would be helpful to know about them in my search for other medical texts.

Yours,

Alun Salt

I got a reply. There’s not a lot of evidence.

One possibility is that a fourth century BC tablet from Piraeus might show chiropractic-style treatment. The BCA’s enquiry person kindly linked to a page showing the tablet, which you can find listed as Votive relief to Asclepius, Piraeus Museum, catalogue number 405. As for documentation, I’ll quote: “Greek documents on manipulation from pre-Hippocratic times are more difficult – I don’t know of any (but that does not mean that they do not exist).”

This is interesting because the British Chiropractic Association have quietly announced the ancient history story of the decade. This even beats the Antikythera Mechanism as major news. Here’s the line:

The use of manipulation is documented as far back as 2700-1500 BC in China and Greece.

I’m not an expert on Chinese writing. I thought there was some nationalist vying with the Egyptians as to who had the oldest writing. The books I’ve found give dates of 1200 BC (Bagley 2004, p. 190) or The 14th to 11th centuries BC, with a possible predecessor around the 17th century BC (Norman 1988 p. 58). It would seem that the BCA have access to some previously unknown examples of Chinese writing, but that’s not even half the news.

They also have documentation from Greece in this 2700 BC to 1500 BC band. I don’t know of any 2700 BC writing from Greece, but there’s certainly a script known from around 1800 BC-ish. It’s not actually Greek script. That doesn’t really make an appearance till around the 8th century BC. Earlier than that you have Linear B. Linear B dates from the Mycenaean era. Deciphering Linear B is one of the great stories in ancient history, the bulk of it was done by the mathematician Michael Ventris in the early 1950s. But Linear B dates from the 15th century BC at the very oldest. That’s the 1400s BC, so it can’t be that the British Chiropractic Association is referring to. Still older, there’s Linear A.

Linear A is associated with the Minoan civilisation on Crete. It uses similar symbols to Linear B, but if the symbols have the same sounds, then it is a record of a language unlike any known language. If you want to be a big name ancient history then you could decipher it. Unless you’re too late, because this is what is so staggering about the British Chiropractic Association’s claim. It’s not simply that they may have discovered previously unknown writing in China. It’s the fact they’re able to decipher what these ancient texts means. Often early texts are tax records or similar which only exist in fragments. That these unknown texts should describe skilled medical treatments is stunning. Finding claims like casually announced on the BCA’s website is as amazing as discovering your neighbour has built a time machine in her garden shed.

An alternative, and I hesitate to bring this up because the British Chiropractic Association are notoriously litigious, is that their claim is nonsense. I’m not saying that it is because there are few organisations with the reputation for upright scientific behaviour enjoyed by the British Chiropractic Association. But purely hypothetically, let’s say that these texts didn’t exist. How would those claims get onto the website? The only way I could see would be if someone made them up. Now I’ll admit the word bogus is sailing into view. Such a claim would not be bogus, under English law, because it wouldn’t be intentionally dishonest. It could be written by someone entirely indifferent as to whether or not they were honest.

No, to find a bogus claim, what you’d have to send an email to their organisation, saying that they’re making an odd claim, have a reply back saying they don’t know of any evidence for what they claim and then find they’re still making the same claim on their webpage. That might be bogus because that would mean they are aware it’s a false claim, but still state it anyway. An exact legal opinion on the claim’s bogosity could vary depending on how expensive your lawyer is.

BUT – we know the BCA don’t make bogus claims, there’s a big court case going on defending their reputation. That’s how we know that the BCA must be sitting on one of the biggest archaeological and historical stories of the century.

If you’re interested in what is or is not a bogus claim, you might like to search for Simon Singh on Jack of Kent’s weblog.

References – ISBN links take you to Worldcat.

Bagley, R.W. (2004) ‘Anyang Writing and the Origin of the Chinese writing system’ in S.D. Houston (editor) The first writing: script invention as history and process. Cambridge University Press . pp 190-249. ISBN 0521838614

Norman, J. (1988) Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521296536

to e-book or not to e-book

2009-10-11T23:07:00Z

There's been a slew of stories over the last few months about electronic books, primarily of the Kindle variety, but some of them touch on general issues pertaining to the availability, use, and desirability of e-books. I've been trying to compose a post in response to them, but I keep getting overwhelmed. What to say in response to a prep school that replaces its library with a cappuccino machine and 18 e-readers? *head-desk* (The School Library Journal has a more articulate response.) What about the summer's too-perfect-to-be-true news that Amazon deleted copies of Orwell's works from the Kindles without informing owners? Make that another big #amazonfail moment after their first, horrendous mistake last spring when changes in their ranking system made thousands of gay and lesbian titles disappear from searches. Ooops. In further e-stories, there's the non-release as e-books of two of the Fall's big titles: Teddy Kennedy's posthumous True Compass and Sarah Palin's Going Rogue. What will those Cushing Academy students do when researching papers about the Obama election? I guess rely on Wikipedia. (For insight into why the memoirs aren't Kindled, see Daniel Gross's Moneybox column for Slate, in which he explains why the economics of publishing doesn't make sense for them as e-reads.) Oh, and speaking of students and e-readers, what do Princeton students have to say about using Kindles as part of a pilot program to replace textbooks with Kindles? According to one student quoted in the Daily Princetonian, "this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool." Finally, last week there was the New York Times piece worrying that books might be the next to be "Napsterized." (Remember Napster? Some of you young 'uns might not recall the world before digital music files, but let me tell you, it put the fear of Someone into the music industry when people started sharing their music online.) Joshua Kim's response on Inside Higher Ed brings those Napster concerns into a conversation with universities and libraries.

About a year ago, I posted about my perplexed response to a newspaper column that touted the joy of Kindle as being "almost like a book"--why read something that's almost as good as a book when you could read a book? I still stand by that point, but not because I'm a luddite. In that particular piece, I was reacting against a perception that e-reading had to be good because it was new. But I also don't think it has to be bad because it's new. My husband got a Kindle last spring and it's been great. For him, the joy of the machine is that it holds so much. Given his preference for texts that come in big, heavy books--military history, science fiction, jurisprudence--the fact that he can take his Kindle on trips means that he needn't break his back or run out of reading material. I still don't use it, and not only because he's the alpha gadgeteer in our household. My way of reading for work and research is to cover the page in notes, so paper copies work best for me. And most of my pleasure reading I do in a way that isolates me as much as possible from the world: glasses off, dark room, book light. We all have our own ways of reading and different technologies that meet those needs.

But much of what I'm seeing written in the popular press about e-book readers isn't, I don't think, taking into account the full picture. Some of the stories I mentioned above hint at the problem of Amazon's essential monopoly over the current e-field. I know Sony has an e-reader, but given Amazon's vertical integration, they hold an incredible portion of the e-market in their tight e-fist. (E-sorry. It's hard to stop the e-jokes.) If there was some competition in that market, the problems of pricing and availability and Big Brother would be different.

More to this blog's point, what does the current state of e-readers and discussion have to do with book history and book historians? So much of what we're considering today with Kindles focuses on books that were written to be distributed in print and then are transferred into an e-format. (Daniel Gross's book Dumb Money actually did this transference the other direction: he wrote it as an e-book for Free Press and it sold well enough that it's now available in print--see the Washington Post profile of him for more on that.) But what happens when we get to the day that works are created for and intended to be experienced as e-books? How will that change the experience of using books? And how will we ensure the survival of those books? As anyone who has been working with computers over the last few decades knows, technology becomes obsolete and earlier formats don't always carry over into new ones.

Similarly, how might the availability of new digital formats affect the process of creating works? According to Scott Karambis, for some creative artists, the availability of the digital world has changed how and what they write: author Justin Cronin relied on the ease of researching online to push his knowledge into new arenas when composing his newest novel, insisting that it made him become a different sort of writer. Karambis's blog post focuses more on the effect of technology on the process of creation and less on the impact of digital creations themselves (the blog is geared towards other folks in marketing, rather than, say, writers or book historians). Rachel Toor, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is more focused on the economic impact of e-books. Even though she loves reading e-books on her Kindle, she has decidedly more mixed feelings about being an e-writer. Might e-publishing save university publishers by bringing down costs and therefore recovering the economic viability of those scholarly monographs with small audiences? And the speed of electronic publishing is wonderful for timely subjects and for the responsiveness it generates for readers. But will people stumble across e-books the way they do physical books on bookshelves? Will writers be able to live off the advances from their e-books the way that some are able to today?

Toor and Cronin don't ask this in their reflections on writing and new technology, but I will: will we still have e-books to read if they aren't backed up on paper? Will we still be able to lend books to each other if they're tied to our e-readers? Will we still be able to talk back to our books, modify them, resist them?

I often, when teaching early modern book history, say to my students, "It's all about money!" And it often is. But it's also about creativity and interactivity and longevity. And we're still taking baby steps towards what it all might mean.

Newspapers and Letters

2009-10-10T17:12:00Z

Sir Samuel Luke to Samuel Moore '3 lines of your wise news would have been 100 times more acceptable than your 3 pennyworth of diurnals' quoted in Barbara Donegan War in England 1642-9 p. 112

Thomas Rokeby to Adam Baynes 'I thanke you for your news for Irland; I do rather believe itt from your writings than if itt came from the press' (British Library Additional Manuscripts series MSS 21417 folio 250)

There is a regular debate on the blogosphere about whether to trust online or offline media. It is quite interesting that is not a new debate. At every change in media there has been a discussion about how the new media affects the way that truth is told. In the mid-seventeenth century during the English Civil War, the English printing and publication industry exploded. Jason Peacey in his work on pamphleteering tells a story about the economic basis behind that publishing: how great peers and Parliamentary factions, not to mention Oxford royalists, coordinated with writers like Marchamont Nedham and Henry Parker to produce newspapers and pamphlets. The profusion of these newspapers and pamphlets is most marked when you look at a catalogue of them- such as the Thomason Papers in the British Library- pamphlet after pamphlet, newsbook after newsbook came out during the civil war. Often newspapers survived only for a couple of weeks before folding but the longest surviving- the Perfect Diurnal, Mercurius Pragmaticus, Mercurius Britannicus and others- went on for several years and were influential upon politics and politicians.

However newspapers were not read without the same kinds of anxiety as we see today about the profusion of online media. Both Thomas Rokeby, an officer in the New Model Army, and Sir Samuel Luke, Parliament's intelligence chief, were intelligent observers of British politics and neither of them liked to receive, as their own letters demonstrate, news via the papers. As Barbara Donagan in her interesting War in England demonstrates news travelled by post as much as by newspaper distribution- this was as true after 1649 as it was beforehand. We can see clear evidence of it in the Clarke Papers wherein newsletters sent from London by men like Richard Hatton were preserved and in the Baynes Papers, Baynes seems to have spent a lot of time in London writing to the north about what was going on in the capital. Such practices continued pre-civil war patterns of information distribution: Richard Cust in an important article in the 1980s showed that newsletter writers informed the politics of the 1620s and 1630s by distributing to their county patrons or friends the news of the latest deeds at court and the latest debates in Parliament. Letters were a vital and trusted means of communicating- one of the reasons so many civilians fell afoul of both Parliamentary and royalist networks in the civil war is that they were avid letter writers, communicating news both good and bad for each side into letters to friends on opposite sides of the country.

One of the many reasons for this was the lively print market. Amongst newspapers today it is pretty easy to tell which are trustworthy and which not: in general the Financial Times is probably more scrupulous about its sources than the Daily Star. In the seventeenth century thanks to the profusion of pamphlets and newsbooks it was not quite so clear which to trust and which not to trust: in their advertising newsbooks often carried the ascription 'by authority' as a kind of sign of the faith that their readers should have in them. But modern historians believe that many of them were edited several times after they left the journalist's hand- by printers and patrons- or indeed that the news was filtered through a journalistic prism so that supposed letters from abroad were altered and doctored. One of the signs of the distrust that newspapers were held in is demonstrated by the fact that they frequently borrowed the letter form: so a letter from a place whether in Ireland, Scotland, the regions or indeed overseas would appear in the newspaper. Such letters were often doctored: Blair Worden has argued that at least one letter supposedly from Leiden published in Mercurius Politicus was actually written from London, by a certain Mr John Milton and published as though its author was Dutch (Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England pp 208-13).

It is not impossible to believe that similar things happen on blogs today or will happen in the future. Nor that brands are being at the moment developed around particular authors for reliability. Newspapers went through the same process of becoming more and more trusted and reliable over time. The newsbooks of the seventeenth century were complicated literary productions often with a single group of authors who worked closely with sponsors to produce them- they were not works of fiction but as contemporaries believed were not exact fact. They borrowed from the more trusted forms such as letters in order to substantiate their offerings with the overtone of reliability. But ultimately in a society in which personal contact was privileged over textual contact and a man's reputation fortified his word, letters carrying information were more prized by some than anonymous or pseudynomous newsbooks. Sir Samuel Luke and Thomas Rokeby definitely read newsbooks, they preferred to receive letters.

Publication Announcement: Wollstonecraft Drawings

2009-10-07T18:50:20Z

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of an electronic edition of Blake’s ten monochrome wash drawings illustrating Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life and the first and second editions of the book containing Blake’s six engravings of his designs. The designs and inscribed texts in all three series are fully searchable and are supported by our Inote and ImageSizer applications.

In 1788, Joseph Johnson published the first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s morally instructive narrative for children, Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. A few years later, Johnson decided to issue a new edition, for which he commissioned Blake to prepare a series of illustrations. Blake’s extant drawings, now in the Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, are datable to c. 1791. In addition to these ten designs, Blake must have executed at least one further drawing as a preliminary for his fifth plate; this drawing is untraced. Six designs were selected for publication in the 1791 edition of Wollstonecraft’s book; Blake engraved the designs himself. The first and second states of Blake’s plates appear variously in copies of the 1791 edition. The second edition to contain Blake’s plates was published by Johnson in 1796; it contains the third (final) states of Blake’s plates. The copy of the 1791 edition now in the Archive is from the Huntington Library; it contains the second states of the plates. The copy of the 1796 edition in the Archive is from the Essick collection and contains the third (final) states of the plates.

Modern interpreters of the illustrations have detected a pictorial critique of Wollstonecraft’s stories. Blake appears to have found her morality too calculating, rationalistic, and rigid. He represents Wollstonecraft’s spokesperson, Mrs. Mason, as a domineering presence. From Blake’s perspective, Mason’s acts of charity are excessively condescending and tend to reinforce the underlying social conditions that create disparities between wealth and poverty. As Blake wrote in “The Human Abstract,” “Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor.”

With this publication, the Archive adds a new set of scholarly tools. These tools, known collectively as our Related Works system, are designed to show relationships among works and individual objects in the Archive. They function at two levels. First, work index pages now include active links to related materials in the Archive (for example, a set of preliminary sketches for a group of engravings).

Second, the “Show Me” menu on object view pages now includes “Related Works in the Archive.” Like the work-level menu, this list includes active links to the related objects and is meant to allow study of the related materials side-by-side.

The Wollstonecraft illustrations are the first publication in the Archive to use this feature.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

bookporn #43: heffers, cambridge

2009-10-05T21:15:16Z

A bookporn entry in commemoration of my return to England — I present a bookshop in Cambridge that should have ascended its luscious throne a long time ago: Heffers. Heffers began as a family business, and continues to lay claim to over a hundred continuous years of Cambridge bookselling, since 1876

even though it was bought over by Oxford’s Blackwell’s in 1999. (growl)

What I love about Heffers is the impossible cunning of its architecture. It takes its two floors of allocated building space and somehow, by some astonishing & satanic feat of interior design, engineering and L-dimensional skulduggery, somehow pulls four floors out of the rabbit’s hat. In all the following photos you will be able to discern, among those stern concrete pillars, four levels of gorgeous bookery. (Click through to Flickr for exposition).

The skulduggery continues. We have here a space deceptively masquerading as a cafe from the top of the stairs, until you move closer, and lo! a hitherto hidden Book Cranny balloons into sight.

Heffers also has nested nooks — crannies within crannies;

its History section curls away into two cosy corners in the basement, segueing into Classics and Philosophy at its fringes;

and, right at the back — no doubt situated according to some greater, inscrutable design between Politics and Medicine — a resident skeleton.

Love Heffers! it’s one of a kind. If you can stagger past the Cambridge kitsch out front, creep past the alleged bestsellers and resist the stationery sirens, the lower mezzanine floor now features a brand new secondhand books section. And from past experience, a secondhand bookstore in a town stuffed with owlish academics is Not To Be Sniffed At.

Interviewing the Regius

2009-10-03T22:28:00Z

An interview with Quentin Skinner, who though he never taught me, has taught me through his books and articles and who has been incredibly influential on my approach to history and to thought. I would urge watching it- some of it is personal to Skinner and his circle but much of it is about the world of learning he inhabits- Machiavelli, Hobbes, Wittgenstein and Collingwood- and furthermore the argument he has developed about liberty. Skinner, for those who haven't come across him, was Regius Professor at Cambridge until this year. He is incredibly important as a philosopher of the history of ideas, basing his arguments upon John Austin's theory of illocutory action. He is also an important scholar: for example he traced a concept of liberty back through time which he argued was different to our current one- liberty as a non-dependent state (rather than as an uncoerced action)- this concept Skinner argued was the principle legacy of ancient Rome through the digest of law to early modern philosophers like John Milton. He sees Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan as a sophisticated demolition of that argument. His work though includes much more- and in these interviews he surveys both it and his influences.

mercurius' shared items in Google Reader

Whipping Tom, The Crack's Terror

Disembodied Leg Prints, ca. 1650

Falmouth

A misprint in a lost book

The work and ideas of Gerrard Winstanley

Books, Redundancy: Getting Past our Future, and On With Our Present

the truth about the dinosaurs.

Failed engineering on St. Peter’s Day

Could 'Wolf Hall' be historical fiction that works?

Book Review: Forlorn Hope: Soldier Radicals of the Seventeenth Century

POM-POM

BUG 16 NEWS AND A CLASSIC NEIL YOUNG VID!

BOOK NOW FOR BUG 16 OR BUG 16 THE DIRECTORS CUT: 12th & 20th NOVEMBER 2009

WONDERIN’ DIRECTED BY TIM POPE

Don't quit your day job, Nicolas.

Beautiful old map of Paris ‘Paris depuis Charles V...

The extraordinary research of the BCA

Related Posts:

to e-book or not to e-book

Newspapers and Letters

Publication Announcement: Wollstonecraft Drawings

bookporn #43: heffers, cambridge

Interviewing the Regius