Serendipities

From now on, I would have to take time off to find out how to write about magical objects like sweets, wires, bags, screens and cards, about the tender madness of mundane actions like counting, folding and falling over, about the secret life of substances. I was going to have to write amid things, rather than getting on top of them, especially the strangeness of intimate feelings and conditions, like embarrassment and fatigue and envy and itch and shame.

These are the words of Steven Connor. Connor seeks to move away from cultural history’s concerns with representations, discourses, and cultural politics, and to return to embodied experiences of the world. He argues that we have become so absorbed in what representations do to us, that we have neglected to see what we do to representations. Reacting to the prevalence of poststructuralism in cultural-historical criticism, Connor proposes a return to lived experience. He calls this proposed direction Cultural Phenomenology. The author of a cultural history of skin, Connor is interested in cultural histories of things such as shame, or folding, or forgetfulness (see his list of the kinds of things that might interest a cultural phenomenologist). In what is not quite a manifesto, but which does contain a number of cultural-phenomenological maxims, Connor explains his ideas. He writes, for example, that

“Modes of life - collective as well as individual modes - are more important and interesting [...] than styles, texts, images, discourses, and other modes of collective representation, which become interesting and significant in the ways in which they are used, to make up the worldhood of our worlds.”

Connor draws on phenomenologists (and explains where he parts ways with them), cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, and his ideas also resemble the study of the everyday, such as De Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life. What does he propose?

What do I mean by cultural phenomenology? Here, at least, is what I think it could do. Cultural phenomenology would aim to enlarge, diversify and particularise the study of culture. Instead of readings of abstract structures, functions and dynamics, cultural phenomenology would home in on substances, habits, organs, rituals, obsessions, pathologies, processes and patterns of feeling. Such interests would be at once philosophical and poetic, explanatory and exploratory, analytic and evocative. Above all, whatever interpreting and explication cultural phenomenology managed to pull off would be achieved in the manner in which it got amid a given subject or problem, not by the degree to which it got on top of it.

The essays on his website focus on subjects such as “wires” or “corridors” and explore various ways in which these have been experienced in historical and contemporary culture. I sometimes found myself asking — ‘but to what end?’ — but I think that Steven Connor would say that I am too much caught up in current modes of criticism. He proposes a different mode of writing, in which words such as “discourse”, “boundary”, or “marginality” are banned, because they are too abstract and intimidating. This mode of writing could break out of the narrow bandwidth of critical, analytical academic writing to express admiration, nostalgia, panic, or boredom.

Connors phenomenological turn from representation to notions of experience and embodiment seems to resonate with a trend in cultural historical research. I remember a lecture by the eminent American theoretician Hayden White in Groningen last year, in which he argued for the importance of lived experience. He proposed a mode of historical investigaton that based itself in descriptions of historical experience. A novel in which Virginia Woolf describes a walk through the streets of London can tell us more about early twentieth-century city life than any academic study can, he posited. Also, Connor’s notion of writing from “amid” resembles the Dutch philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit’s notion of “presence” as an alternative to representation.

I am puzzled, however, by the ways in which Connor proposes to write about historical experience from “amid”, rather than from a critical perspective. When Gail Kern Paster, for example, examines the early modern phenomenology of the passions, she explores the ways in which early modern men, women, children, and animals experienced their “being-in-the-world”. She examines early modern humoral tracts, plays, and emblem books to reconstruct this experience, and describes her findings in a clear and analytical way. How would Connor propose to write Paster’s books (or Bruce Smith’s The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, for that matter)? If they were to express wonder, or perhaps boredom, about the ways in which historical subjects experienced their bodies, is this writing from “amid” the subject? Or is it writing from amid the writer’s own experience? And, how do you attain this perspective from “amid” the experience if the experience is in the past, and can only be reconstructed through textual traces?

I may have read too analytically for Connor’s liking, and perhaps my desire for a methodology of cultural phenomenology is hopelessly outdated in his view, but I can say that my experience of his website was one of wonder, amazement and puzzlement, and certainly not one of boredom.

Visitors of the 1851 Great Exhibition marvelled at the biggest diamond in the world, a carriage drawn by kites, furniture made of coal, and a set of artificial teeth fitted with a swivel devise that allowed the user to yawn without displacing them.

BBC’s In Our Time this week discusses the 1851 Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace. Jeremy Black, Hermione Hobhouse and Clive Elmsley discuss questions such as:

How did the Exhibition crystallise a particular moment in early Victorian Britain? In what way did it capitalise on the dawn of mass travel and greater levels of international co-operation? How did fears of revolutionary Europe define the policing and organisation of the event? And how far, if at all, did the Great Exhibition go in blurring class distinctions?

Listen online or download the podcast at In Our Time.

I recently bought Pieter van Wesemael’s Architecture and Delight: A Socio-Historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon (1798-1851-1970), a book that I would like to give a little plug here for its layout as well as its contents. The book devotes attention to the architecture, urban planning, as well as the didacticism of World Exhibitions. Here is an appetizing snippet from the introduction:

[World exhibitions] played a role as an intermediary between high and low culture, between upper, middle and lower class, and between trade, industry, technology, science, and art on the one hand, and the lay person’s more direct world of experience on the other. In the rapidly changing world — in material, economic, and socio-cultural aspects — of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they made a fundamental contribution to the creation of a new consciousness of class or group, each with its own self-image and culture, and nourished the evolution of modern capitalistic, democratic society with its mass culture. [...] [They were] geared towards the broad predominantly conservative middle classes that had to be informed and convinced. It is precisely this facet — a small elite who created a modern identity and culture for the rising middle classes — that makes the phenomenon of world exhibitions so interesting in didactic terms.

I just discovered PhDweblogs.net, a site that lists weblogs written by PhD students from all over the world. There are a lot of blogs in the categories of language/culture and history/archaeology that I didn’t know (such as Blogademia, a blog on the academic study of blogs, or the blog of Glen Fuller, who writes a thesis on modified car-culture).

My other toy for the weekend is the Oxford English Dictionary Online — I just treated myself to a three-months individual subscription. We have the OED in the university library of course, but this is something else. I can now log in from the comfort of my living room, bedroom, or anywhere else I take my little laptop, checking on phrases such as “freatyng furies” or “chambering knights.”

In her wonderful introduction to Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (2001), Catherine Belsey reflects on the methodologies of cultural history. She makes a case for a practice of reading that foregrounds dissent, instead of a method of interpretation that seeks to connect meanings to form an internally consistent totality. Objecting, for example, to a reading of Shakespeare’s comedies that would seek to ‘explain’ a play by relating it to a medical text, she argues that one should not seek to connect two texts if this leads to an effacement of their differences in genre, occasion, and audience. She comments that:

Our world, we allow, is divided, full of debate, culturally diverse and intellectually stratified, but nostalgia still tempts us to imagine a previous culture as a consensual realm, in which the important meanings and values could be taken for granted as shared, despite distinctions of language, class or gender. This seductive account of the past seems to me fundamentally misguided, and nowhere more so than as an interpretation of the early modern period, where virtually every topic was matter for dispute, much of it passionate, some of it violent. [1]

This perhaps sounds like another new-historicist attack on Lovejoy’s and Tillyard’s idea of the Elizabethan World Picture and their all-too monolithic view of Elizabethan culture. But for Belsey, her emphasis on reading difference and dissidence also makes for a crucial difference with new historicist practice itself. One of the three points in which her practice of “reading at the level of the signifier” differs from the new historicism, is its attention to struggle and dissent. Stephen Greenblatt and his colleagues in Belsey’s view see cultural moments as more unified and homogeneous than she does in her reading. Belsey looks to the new historicism’s reliance on anthropological models (such as Clifford Geertz’s “thick description”) as an explanation for this tendency to homogenize the cultural moment of the past. Although one could argue that Greenblatt’s work, after “Invisible Bullets” and the critical discussion it elicited, has a keener eye for the possibilities of dissent, it is this attention to difference, to faultlines within a text as well as dissidence within culture, that I find very attractive in Belsey’s and other cultural materialists’ work. Whenever I hear people speak of “the dominant ideology” in the early modern period, I think of Belsey’s wise words on our perceptions of the past.

Belsey’s introduction also sprang to mind when I came across this snippet of Deleuze in Mark Currie’s Difference. In the quotation, I think Deleuze differentiates between the past and the former present, where the ‘past’ is only those elements of the past that we now focus on in our present, whereas the term ‘former present’ recognizes that the past was once a present in all its complexity:

It is futile to try to reconstitute the past from the presents between which it is trapped, either the present which it was or the one in relation to which it is now past. In effect, we are unable to believe that the past is constituted after it has been present, or because a new present appears. If a new present is required for the past to be constituted as past, then the former present would never pass and the new one would never arrive. No present would ever pass were it not past ‘at the same time’ as it is present; no past would ever be constituted unless it were first constituted ‘at the same time’ as it was present. This is the first paradox: the contemporaneity of the past with the present that is was. [2]

Although Deleuze thinks the past from a completely different angle, he is also concerned in this passage with the complexity of the ‘former present’, and our rendering of it in our concept of the ‘past’. Deleuze takes the argument one step further, however, and argues that we cannot even think the present in all its complexity, but need to think of the present as ‘past’ in order to grasp the concept.

[1] Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 16.

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (translated into English by P. Paton in 1994), cited in Mark Curry, Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

In the Dutch feminist magazine Opzij, sociologist and columnist Jolande Withuis this month writes about the gender of reading.

Jolande Withuis remarks that men who are depicted with books often do not read their books, but self-consciously look at us, or stare into the distance. We often know who they are, because their books are symbols of their learnedness, pen and paper are the paraphernalia of class and status. I have privately had this little theory of gendered representations of reading for years, and whenever I visit a museum, I test it against the paintings exhibited. I found that there are some paintings of men reading. Often, they are depictions of Saint Hieronymus in his study, or of men who are in a profession that involves reading. Women with books in paintings are often anonymous, and are engaged in the act of reading, absorbed in a book or letter. Withuis sees these reading women as emancipatory: a woman who reads, gains a view of another world; she discovers other possible ways of living. Also, a reading woman who is concentrated in her intimate personal sphere of reading, whether she sits in a private environment or in a busy public space, is not engaged in household chores or cooking — a reading woman is her own.

Pieter Janssens Elinga (1623-c. 1685), Reading Woman	Mary Cassatt, Young Woman Reading (1876)
Rogier van der Weyden, Portrait of a Man with Book, before 1437	Photo portrait of a man with book

This small selection of images confirms Withuis’ hypothesis, because I handpicked them from the internet. But while Googling for images of readers, I noticed something. In Google, a search for “woman reading”: renders 6170 results, while “man reading” leads to 5770 hits. There’s a slightly higher percentage of women reading marked as such on the internet. What about the ways in which these reading people are portrayed?

In order to avoid subjective selection, let’s consider only the first page of images of each search, selected by Google. In the “man reading” page, all twenty men are actually absorbed in reading — none of them is looking up at the photographer, painter, or sculptor. Seven of the twenty men are reading a newspaper, eight a book, two a letter, two a scroll, and one man is engrossed in a fax. Now you might object that a search for reading men will indeed render reading men, but the surprising thing is that results are different for a Google search on reading women.

In the “woman reading” page, two women are reading a letter, one woman a report and another a newspaper, while the others are reading books. Surprisingly after the search results of the men’s page, two of the twenty women are pictured with books, but are not reading. This woman on the website of Bath Spa University, for example, looks into the camera:

On another point, however, gender roles do seem to be confirmed in these images. Among the first page of reading men, only two men are reading in what is recognisable as a private environment — at a kitchen table and seated in a chair at home. The other men are all in public environments, such as a park, a café, a museum, or a hospital. Among the women reading, two are in the park, one is in a busy street, and the woman at Bath Spa University seems to be in a library. The other women are in more private places: either inside a house, in an undefined space, or in natural scenery. A sculpture of a reading woman adorns a space that is hard to qualify: is a tomb a public monument, or a most private place?

A small and utterly unrepresentative sample of reading men and women, then, renders more men actually involved in the act of reading than women. What happens if I were not to ask for images that portray people reading, but instead searched for men/women with books?

“Man with book” yields 166 results; “woman with book”, 432. Are they reading?

On the first results page of the “man with book” search, only eight out of twenty men are reading. The others are speaking from a lectern, looking at the camera or away from the book, and some have the book closed. Two of the twenty images feature neither man nor book.

On the first page of the “woman with book” search, even fewer people are reading: only five out of twenty women look into their books! I have to admit that this is partly caused by repeated appearances of Picasso’s woman with a book, who is not reading, but there are many others as well.

The results are intriguing. Are women on the internet less capable of creating a room of their own by intimate and concentrated acts of reading? Does the internet have a preference for women who look their viewers in the eye? Is this to do with a difference between the media of painting and photography (after all, Withuis speaks only of paintings)? Or are well-read women — like the student at Bath Spa University — simply conscious of their books as symbols of knowledge?

See also:

The University of Pennsylvania CFP-service as well as Renaissance Lit this morning brought news to my mailbox of an Renaissance Society of America call for papers on Dissecting Renaissance Anatomies, a session on early modern anatomy and performance.

The call reminded me of one of the strangest objects I encountered on my exploration of early modern cabinets of curiosities for yesterday’s Carnivalesque. In a beautifully designed virtual cabinet belonging to the Munich Kunstkammer Georg Laue, I came across this curious anatomical teaching model of a pregnant woman.

The ivory figure of a woman dates from 1680, and was made in the Nuremburg workshop of ivory turner Stephan Zick. Her arms can be moved, and the museum has here displayed her in a dramatic pose that would make interesting material for the RSA panel. Her belly and breasts can be lifted as a whole, to reveal strange-looking lungs her lungs (which can be removed to see the position of her heart and stomach [?]) and a uterus. The latter can be opened to see a tiny foetus nestled inside. A little red ribbon peeks out from under the baby, suggesting that it too, can be removed.

The woman comes in a wooden coffin, inlaid with ivory, and rendered with attention to detail. Her head rests on a square pillow decorated with lace, and the coffin itself stands on beautifully crafted tiny ivory knobs. The Kunstkammer comments that death is “consistently included in the representation as the precondition for anatomical study.” Well yes. But how did it feel for the early modern student of anatomy to carefully lever this woman from her coffin, tugging at the little loops at her head and feet while she sighed and raised her arm to her head?

Like many early modern anatomical representations, this teaching model combines elements of life and death. The woman is a lifeless but life-like doll that can be played with, whose limbs can be moved to suggest action. Her coffin is the first of a russian-doll-like series of lifeless objects that can be opened. A mise-en-abyme that leads from the end of life - the coffin - to the beginning of life - the baby inside the womb - the model mirrors the work of anatomical science, which cuts open lifeless bodies to discover the secrets of life.

Come in, close the door behind you. You have found my early modern Carnivalesque cabinet of curiosities. This little online Wunderkammer is an attempt to bring order to your explorations of the ever-widening world of history blogging. Only the choicest and quaintest articles have been brought together in this small collection of strange artefacts culled from the blogosphere, full of resonance and wonder.

Now, are you ready for the doors of the cabinet to open?

Anonymous, Cabinet of Curiosities (late seventeenth century)
Oil on canvas, Florence, Opificio delle Pietre Dure
Click on a window for the categories on the frame

Early Modern Women’s History
The top-left window of this cabinet, not built by any learned gentleman, looks out on the most fascinating items of early modern women’s history. For last month was Women’s History Month, and many bloggers put early modern women in the spotlight. Sharon at Early Modern Notes composed a comprehensive roundup of women’s history blogging ànd wrote a useful guide to researching early modern women online. Natalie Bennett reflects on how an Elizabethan woman was written out of history. If you are looking for the one object in this cabinet to evoke strong physical sensations, by the way, take a look at Natalie’s horrifying tale of early modern treatments of breast cancer. (Roy Booth’s fascinating tale of Titus Andronicus in Egham also comes heartily recommended in the horror category, though!)

Melchior del Darién writes about the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who thought of disguising herself as a man to attend university, and later entered a convent so that she could study. History Mike muses about the seventeenth-century ‘Blessed’ Takeri Tekakwitha, the first Native American to be beatified by the Catholic Church. Ellen Moody reports on a session on Women’s Autobiography in the Long Eighteenth Century and “Constructing Space and Identity in the Eighteenth Century Interior” at the Montreal ASECS, from which I learnt that early modern courtesans, too, created Wunderkammer.

In Houyhnhnm Land, Brandon Watson explains why we should read Lady Asham, Damaris Cudworth’s remarkable philosophical work Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (1705; available online), in which Lady Asham offers a practical plan for the better education of women, the better to complete the “Work of forming betimes the Minds of Children so as to dispose them to be hereafter Wise and Vertuous Men and Women” — a labour that “cannot be perform’d but by Mothers only.”

And over at Secondat, Jeff has written the last of a wonderful series of annotated entries from the diary of Lady Shelburne — you will find links to the previous nine posts in the sidebar. Jeff is still fascinated by the life of this aristocratic woman, and is writing a series of wrap-up posts, the first and the second of which are now online.

Early Modern Machines
The early modern blogosphere is teeming with interesting tidbits on machines! Expert on the subject is George Goodall of Facetation, who finds out that machines exist in Jacobean England! Did you know that Roger Cecil, Sir William Cecil’s son, was an avid collector of machines? George also has a post on the function of the Theatrum Machinarum, or book of machines, as a gift in the early modern period.

The Old Foodie reports on the presentation and testing of a recent French invention, the steam digester at the Royal Society in 1682. More early modern French machines at BibliOdyssey. Posthegemony explores early modern Spanish fortifications in South America.

Royalty
Do take a peek at this royal section in the cabinet, it contains some of the richest objects. Roy Booth at Early Modern Whale, for example, — one of my favourite weblogs and a virtual Wunderkammer of early modern advertising, ballads, broadsides and much more — analyzes a Royalist pamphlet that tells of the escape of the future Charles the Second from England in 1649. The prince and his servingman “pass (most implausibly) through London, visit (and weep at) the place of the execution of Charles’s father, take a boat from Queenhithe, and reach France.” What fascinates me in the post is its attention to crossovers between the ballad and the early modern drama. As in his post on Titus Andronicus in Egham, Roy Booth is sensitive to the ways in which the representational strategies of the pamphlet appropriate themes from the stage, be it from the genre of revenge tragedy, or, as here, from Shakespearean comedy. For this Royalist ballad is full of cross-dressing and disguise. In fact, “the gender switchings are harder to keep in mind than those in As You Like It.” Over at BibliOdyssey, Peacay has wonderful contemporary images of the coronation of James the Second from a festival book published in 1687.

Early modern reading
It is my pleasure in this part of the Easter Carnivalesque Wunderkammer to introduce another new blog: Blogging the Renaissance, written by Hieronimo, Truewit, Inkhorn, and Simplicius. Hieronimo reads an excerpt from The King’s Majesty’s declaration to his subjects concerning lawful sports to be used (1633), and wonders about the ways in which Jacobean Englishmen and women spent their Sundays. Simplicius read Stephen Greenblatt’s review of two recent Marlowe biographies, and hoists Greenblatt by his own petard.

In February, Misteraitch at Giornale Nuovo wrote about Tsar Peter Alexeyevich Romanov’s fascination for Devises et Emblemes Anciennes et Modernes, a French emblem book that he encountered during his stay in Amsterdam in 1697-98.

The Valve organised a discussion of Nancy Armstrong’s recent book How Novels Think, in which “Armstrong places the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel at a central position in both the history of thought and history in general, granting the novel power to create and regulate individualism as wide-spread social phenomenon.” With contributions by Lawrence La Riviere White, Miriam Burstein, John Holbo, Jason Jones, Scott Eric Kaufman, and Daniel Green.

At Lunettes Rouges, a piece on Rembrandt’s reading of the Bible on the occasion of an exhibition in the Institut Néerlandais in Paris.

Michelangelo could not yet have read Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus when he painted the Sistine Chapel, and yet his work seems influenced by ideas of heliocentrism, Alun reports in his The Michelangelo Code.

Early modern paratexts
On this shelf of the cabinet, you will find many interesting items concerned not with the texts of early modern books themselves, but with their illustrations, marginalia and title pages. Misteraitch at Giornale Nuovo, for example, explores the work of seventeenth-century Swiss engraver Matthæus Merian. Peacay at BibliOdyssey explores the phenomenon of the printer’s device. At Philobiblon, Natalie Bennett faced the naked truth in one of these printer’s devices from the sixteenth century, and wonders why she is naked. Here at Earmarks, I reviewed Kevin Sharpe’s Reading Revolutions, which analyses a seventeenth-century gentleman’s reading habits, drawing, among many other kinds of evidence, on annotations in the margins of his books.

Miscellaneaous
The bottom right part of the cabinet contains all the intriguing objects that defied classification, and is certainly worth gazing into for its variety. Appropriate for this time of year, Moyen Age writes of Jack o’ Lent, the puppet destroyed on Palm Sunday in the sixteenth century. It is uncertain whether Jack was a Reformation novelty, or a tradition that survived from the Middle Ages. And at Siris, Brandon gives us a guide to Holy Week. Not exclusively early modern, but very useful!

In the Diaries of a Lady of Quality, Miss Frances Williams Wynn tells an eighteenth-century ghost story.

Digital Medievalist reports on a National Gallery appeal to raise funds for the purchase of a portrait of John Donne.

History Mike examines money in Florence, and Sharon Howard looks at other kinds of filth in the early modern city.

At the retroblog Winter Evenings, the Rev. Vicesimus Knox (1752-1821) ponders the fallaciousness of history and concludes that “the very foundations, on which the splendid fabric of history is to be erected, are destitute of solidity.” And another retroblogger, Isaac D’Israeli (1766-1848), writes on the nature of government and urges that “in politics we must not be in a passion.”

And another thing, did you always think that that Kant was just another rationalist in the footsteps of Descartes? Well, you stand corrected by Hanno Kaiser.

The previous early modern edition of Carnivalesque was followed hot on the heels by the Old Bailey Symposium at the Head Beeb. Contributors drew on the newly available searchable online database of Old Bailey session papers, and wrote on topics such as women burglars, Irish aristocrats, and arson.

I will now close the doors, ladies and gentlemen, on this Carnivalesque cabinet. The collection would have been considerably smaller even, if it were not for Mistress of Misrule, Sharon Howard — thank you, Sharon, for all the wonderful objects you carefully deposited in the cabinet! Thank you also to those who sent in nominations, and lent me their writings for this virtual exhibition. And of course, one cannot choose a theme for one’s Carnival without Peacay having been there before you…

I leave you with the message that Carnivalesque is looking for a host for the next ancient/medieval issue in May. Vist the Carnivalesque homepage or mail sharon [at] earlymodernweb [dot] org [dot] uk if you’re interested. I can very much recommend it, it’s been a great experience!