Serendipities

Welcome to the 32nd , an early modern edition in the guise of a commonplace book:

A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement. (OED)

As many bloggers have argued (see a list of links at the very bottom of this post), the method of interactive reading produced by keeping a commonplace book is very similar to our modern ways of reading on the internet. Indeed, a blog is nothing more than:

Francis Bacon recommends the practice of keeping such a book. He writes: “I hold that the diligence, and pains in collecting common Places, is of great use in certainty and studying.”

I hope that the diligence and pains that went into bringing together the finest of recent blogging on the early modern period will profit many of you! Thanks to all who submitted, and thanks especially to Sharon for all her links and help.

Sharon at Early Modern Notes argues that there are many historians who need to become more savvy about how to make history digital, and offers some important online places to start. For researchers of early modern American history, the Online Education Database published an incredibly useful post with links to 250 killer libraries and databases: libraries and archives that focus mainly on localized, regional, and U.S. history, but it also includes larger collections, eText and eBook repositories, and a short list of directories to help you continue your research efforts.

For the illustrious Holzknecht Redivivus project at Blogging the Renaissance, Spurio wrote an enlightening piece on The Gentleman Usher, or “a fine taste of Chapman at his strangest” as well as one on William Heminge’s (yes, the son of…) The Fatal Contract, a play featuring female revengers disguised as black eunuchs.

Joseph Haughey ponders the subject of textual intervention and early modern publishing, and suggests that, since so many hands were involved in producing Shakespeare’s plays, we should not consider it a sin to intervene creatively in his plays today. (See also this earlier post on the implications of this idea for teaching Shakespeare). Also on Shakespeare, Far Explore presents a set of beautiful photos of the New Globe in Southwark that I would love to use in a lecture! And also on teaching, Bardiac writes on Marlowe’s Edward II and how to get students to think about a play as a theatrical practice.

At Slawkenburgius Tales, Greg Afinogenov looks at Sheridan’s preface to The Rivals from a Habermassian perspective. And at the Valve, Adam Roberts defends Droeshout’s portrait against those who despise it for its simplicity. Droeshout’s image, he posits (with theoretical support from the great Scott McCloud), is just “more real because more cartoony.”

Investigations of a Dog brings you a review of Mark Stoyle’s Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (2005), which looks at the role of Welsh and Cornish identities in the Civil War. Mercurius Politicus reviews an article on religious violence by Susan Juster in the online journal Common-Place “What’s “Sacred” about Violence in Early America?” I reviewed Sylvia Bowerbank’s Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (2005) and Daniel M. Gross’s The Secret History of Emotion (2006).

The Little Professor went to see the latest film on our favourite queen, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and didn’t really warm to it. Bardiac went, too — did she mention how slow the film was? In honour of the same film, Roy Booth offers a Petrarchan sonnet possibly given by Walter Raleigh to his Queen.

The Nonist presents a wonderful post on Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, or, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, dating from 1686: a theory on life on other planets addressed to an imaginary woman philosopher.

The Conventicle presents a list of grievances against Essex preachers drawn up by Puritan ministers in 1568. Most are accused of specific crimes such as drinking, popery, sleeping with their sister or maid, but perhaps the most intriguing person listed is Mr Glibberie, v. of Halesteed: “a verie ridiculous preacher.”

Roy at Early Modern Whale shows us what seventeenth-century Londoners did when the Thames froze over. In EEBO, he found a wonderful map of the iced-over Thames, with its temporary roads, shopping mall, and diversions (live cock-throwing among them). And if you would like to read more of Roy’s work, he proudly presents his (online and free) article on the flight of witches in EMLS.

Roy Booth also wrote some wonderful entries on duelling that I do not want to keep from you. He discovered a handwritten note that spells revenge in a duelling manual, and presents as “ephemera at its most priceless” a bill to advertise a duel to be fought at the Red Bull by two men who each represent different schools in the noble ‘Science of Defence’. Also, he writes about Joseph Swetnam (known to us all as the woman-hater) who, as it turns out, really does seem to know what he is talking about when he writes about duelling. If you do not have EEBO, you will be pleased to learn (as I was a couple of years ago) that Stuart Huntley made a facsimile of The Schoole of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defence available online.

Does this image look familiar? Gavin Robinson used to think of it as a cliché. When he looked closely at the image and pamphlet, it defied his expectations.

Something fishy going on at BibliOdyssey, and by that I certainly do not mean the publication of his very own book — congratulations, Peacay! This recent post is a must-see: a German physician’s cabinet of curiosities immortalized by a Polish baroque painter (if you read Spanish, see also this entry on the anatomical work of that very same physician at De Mal en Peor). BibliOdyssey also presented images of Polish Renaissance knights (and athletic putti), from the very first museum catalogue ever. Giornale Nuovo wrote an erudite and lavishly illustrated post about the printmaker Giorgio Ghisi.

Sadly, that post on Ghisi will go into history as one of misteraitch’s last posts, for he has decided to stop blogging. After five years of wonderful posts (and those famous book give-aways), I will miss his beautiful site, and I know I am not the only one (more goodbyes here, here, here, here, here, and in many, many more places in the blogosphere). Fortunately, the blog is still online for a while.

Thank you, misteraitch, and goodnight!

On blogs and commonplace books:

• The eighteenth century online: commonplace book or coffeehouse?
• Blog beginnings
• Blogs, definitions and commonplace books
• Commonplace books at Metafilter
• Notebooks and commonplace books
• Interactive reading in the early modern period
• The Book of Brome at the Beinecke Library online collections. Sorry, that link didn’t work. This is the search engine for the collection, if you search for “Brome”, it’s the first entry. The book of Brome is a fifteenth-century common-place book containing a religious play and poetry, legal forms, and local accounts.

In an earlier post I wrote about (and disagreed with) Neil Forsyth’s view of revenge as a universal human emotion. I think that, although the urge to retaliate may be found in many cultures, and reciprocity is seen as the basis of our social organization by sociobiologists like Matt Ridley, ways of thinking about revenge, the rhetoric and images of revenge, reasons for taking and ways of executing revenge are so much culturally and historically specific, that vindictiveness just cannot be seen as a universal emotion, because emotions are so culturally specific. I will write a longer post on this issue sometime, but I just found an ally in Daniel M. Gross’s The Secret History of Emotion (2006), a book in which early modern conceptions of the passions play a central role in the argument for cultural specificity rather than universality of the emotions.

The Secret History of Emotion pits itself against an essential biological (psycho-physiological) interpretation of the emotions by presenting a fascinating rhetorical history. One of Daniel Gross’s recurrent sparring partners in the book is Antonio Damasio, a neurobiologist and author of several best-selling books on emotions and the mind. His main objection to scientific analysis of the emotions is that it often reduces or neglects social phenomena in order to be able to conduct the experiment. Read the rest of this entry »

No teaching this week, so we escaped to the very southern tip of the Netherlands for some autumn hiking. Here are some impressions of the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness in Limburg (more on flickr).

No teaching also means that there will (finally) be some more activity here, climaxing in the early modern carnivalesque coming Sunday. To submit nominations use the handy submission form at Blog Carnival.

In the Netherlands women are underrepresented (to put it mildly) in the higher strata of academia. Of all full professors in my country, only 10 percent are women. No kidding.

According to this AAUP report, 24 percent of full professors in America were women in 2006. In a European context, 10 percent is also a low score.

Below is an overview of women on university boards, women occupying the position of dean, and female academic directors of research schools in 2006 (click on the link below for a pdf version of the chart).

WISER: more Women in Science, Education and Research, aims to improve matters with a positive approach during a two-day festival in Maastricht this week:

There are more than enough qualified women to take on key positions in science, education and research. If only those women and the academic and research institutions would recognise the opportunities for female talent. It is time to get WISER.

WISER is a two-day European festival for scientists, students, decision and policy makers, politicians, HR professionals and gender specialists. It aims to put female scientists in the spotlight and prime female academics to reach for the highest.

• Women in key positions in The Netherlands (the chart in PDF).

“In this book I am retelling, as best I can, some of the old ecological stories; they are well worth remembering as we tell our new stories and begin to theorize the potential and power of narrative to intervene in politics and culture.”

Sylvia Bowerbank’s Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (2005) is en example of ecological feminism. This is a particular kind of ecocriticism concerned with the question “how to theorize the difficult interconnections between women, nature, and language, and how to manifest in our daily lives a just and appropriate politics of nature”(2). Bowerbank realizes that this is a risky combination. When women speak for nature, do they not rehearse the stereotypes that associate women with nature, men with culture? Her book is therefore not a straightforward celebration of women’s writing about nature, but examines early modern women’s ideas about nature from a critical distance.

The book contains a rich store of ecological stories and intelligent analyses. I was intrigued by the chapter “Nature as Trickster: The Philosophical Laughter of Margaret Cavendish” (pp. 52-79), especially by the section that discusses Cavendish’s relation and reactions to seventeenth-century science.

The early modern period is pivotal in ecocriticism, since it is retrospectively seen as the time in which the medieval paradigm of nature was overthrown by the paradigm of modern science. Robert Boyle, for example, in his A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1685-86) debunked the idea of nature as a wise, independent being requiring respect and restraint. Instead, Boyle tried to establish a competing concept of nature as governed by a providential system of laws, the secrets of which could be discovered by humanity.

In her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666, 1668), Cavendish laughs at the pretensions of Baconian scientists.

I do not understand, first, what they mean by our power over Natural causes and effects … for Man is but a small part, and his powers are but particular actions of Nature, and therefore he cannot have a supream and absolute power. (67)

For Cavendish, to understand nature truly requires taking pleasure in her amazing agency. “Stimulating nature’s sly and strange generosity, [her poems are] swarming with odd ideas and fresh questions. According to Cavendish, new knowledge is more likely to be discovered by bold imagining than by repeatable experiments,” Bowerbank writes (69). While natural philosophers set rational man apart from nature, Cavendish rehabilitated the very idea of resemblances, correspondences and connections in nature (an idea that Gabriel Egan also rehabilitates from Tillyard in his Green Shakespeare).

The separation of man from nature permitted scientists to suspend moral judgement in their dealings with nature. Bowerbank describes contemporary reactions to Robert Boyle’s experiments involving small animals and a vacuum pump (see illustration), and shows how purely empirical observation was mingled with empathy — often gendered feminine — with the animal.

Bowerbank offers one of Cavendish’s observations of butterflies as a counter experiment to empirical research. Whereas the experiments conducted, among others, by Boyle interfere dramatically (and often deadly) in animal life, Cavendish found a cocoon and simply left it on her windowsill.

One morning I spi’d two Butter-flies playing about it; which knowing the window had been close shut all the while, and finding the Insect all empty, and only like a bare shell or skin, I supposed had been bred out of it; [...] And it is observable, that two Butterflies were produced out of one shell, which I supposed to be male and female. But this latter I will not certainly affirm, for I could not discern them with my eyes, except I had had some microscope, but a thousand to one I might have been also deceived by it: and had I opened this Insect, or shell, at first; it might perhaps have given those Butterflies an untimely death, or rather hinder’d their production. This is all I have observed of Butterflies. (71)

Cavendish does not desire to cut open the cocoon or observe the butterflies under a microscope, because the new knowledge that she would gain by so doing would interfere in the lives of the butterflies themselves. As Bowerbank puts it, Cavendish’s “style of natural philosophy is to ridicule such efforts and to imitate [in her texts] the wily ways of nature, in her shifts, her doublings, her tricks and contradictions” (73).

Bowerbank does not merely contrast Cavendish’s view of nature to the empirical view that survived into our time. She is also critical of her work, and is sometimes less pleased with Cavendish’s notion of  natural life. She signals that it lacks reflection on the consequences of using up nature’s bounty as (an aristocratic) consumer. When, in The Convent of Pleasure, nature’s gifts are figured as luxury goods such as Turkish rugs and perfume (”Wee’l Cloth our selves with softest Silk | And Linnen fine as white as milk,” I.ii), Bowerbank asks critically: Is this Cavendish’s notion of natural life? “It is assumed that the pleasures, reserved for happy ladies, will be within nature’s capacity to deliver.” This trust in nature’s bounty, from a modern perspective, is perhaps naive. Cavendish, although critical of empirical science, just did not think to ask how nature should be preserved and shared evenly.

I was sad to learn that Sylvia Bowerbank died of cancer in August 2005, a year after this book was published. Her analyses of these ‘old ecological stories’ live on, as critical and inspiring food for thought for the ecological movement.

Links:

• The book at Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Table of contents, abstracts from chapters and index at GoogleBooks.
• Review by Valerija Vendramin at EMLS (2007).
• Review by Kate McLuskie in The Modern Language Review (2007) (requires subscription).
• Review by Shana Cohen in Isis (2007) (requires subscription).
• Review by Eric Ash in the Journal of British Studies (2005) (requires subscription).
• Review by Shannon O’Dair in Environmental History (2005).
• My earlier review of another early modern ecocritical book: Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism.