Idols of the mind; or, what on earth does God look like?

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Jonathan Willis

Term has ended, I’m organising a big conference next week, and I also urgently need to start writing the paper I am giving at said conference; so what better time, I thought, to write a blog post on an entirely unrelated topic? Frankly, it was either this or finally write that book review I’ve been putting off for weeks…

This post is about God; or more specifically, about what God looks like; or, more specifically still, about how people may have thought about and/or visualised God in Reformation England. I’ve been thinking about this for some time, largely related to different aspects of my work on the ten commandments. First of all, the commandments as a whole derived much (let’s not beat around the bush, pretty much all) of their authority from the fact that they had been given by God himself. Exodus 19 describes how God came down upon mount Sinai in ‘thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount’. He ‘descended’ upon the mountain ‘in fire’ and delivered his commandments. Afterwards, Moses, Arron, Nadab, Abihu and seventy elders came up the mountain to see God, although only Moses himself was given leave to come near to God. Exodus 24:10 describes the supernatural encounter:

And they saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness.

Several chapters later, Exodus 31:18 describes another pivotal moment, the point at which the commandments were passed to Moses:

And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.

william-blake-god-writing-the-commandments-boards_i-G-59-5923-ZI3RG00Z

Blake’s vision of God, writing the Commandments

God’s presence in Exodus is suitably awe-inspiring and mysterious, cloaked as it is in fire, earthquakes, trumpets and smoke. But for the careful reader and listener there are some rather intriguing human details. Firstly, God spoke. Now we in the twenty-first century have seen and read enough works of science-fiction and fantasy fiction to imagine a booming voice emitting from nowhere, or perhaps beaming telepathically directly into our heads. But for most early moderns, surely a voice would have implied a mouth, a tongue, a head… Exodus 24:10 talks of a sapphire pavement under God’s feet, and perhaps most crucially, the ten commandments are described as having been written with the finger of God.There is a marvellous depiction of God doing precisely that, engraving stone tablets with his right index finger extended like some sort of divine welding torch, by the romantic poet and painter William Blake. But such a depiction would have been unthinkable in Reformation England, because of the great weight placed upon the commandments themselves, and in particular the first, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’, and the second. Exodus 20:4 stated quite clearly,

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Michaelangelo's God as shown creating Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

Michaelangelo’s God as shown creating Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

This is in large part a familiar story. Depictions of God the Father as a white-bearded old man (like the rather famous one above) were out in Protestant Reformation England, and so imaginative painters, printmakers and carvers resorted to figurative alternatives like the Hebrew ‘tetragrammaton’:

YHWH, or 'Yaweh', in Hebrew

YHWH, or ‘Yaweh’, in Hebrew

People recognised this as a symbolic depiction of God, the newest element of a longstanding visual language which recognised that rays of light and prominent doves could function as representations of the holy spirit, and that indeed Christ could be represented as a lamb, or by the ‘holy monogram’ IHS and other Christograms.

But people recognised the lamb and the holy name as symbols. They did not think that Christ was a sheep – the bible was rather insistent on the fact that he had been both God and man. So when people saw the tetragrammaton, or heard references to God’s voice, and feet, and fingers, what could they do but picture somebody in the form of a man, a man old enough to be the ‘father’ of the ‘son’ who had died for their sins? It is therefore easy to see an unresolved tension in the way in which most writers discussed the second commandment, with its absolute ban on images of the divine directly contradicted by the partial painting of a picture of God in words, through references to hands, feet, mouth, voice, and other physical elements of fleshy human bodies.

While most ministers and godly authors like Samuel Purchas and John Brinsley were happy to speak of a law ‘renued by the voice and finger of God on Mount Sinai’,[1] or of ‘the Ten Commandements written by the Lords owne finger’,[2] others recognised this inherent contradiction and were more careful. Calvin, in his sermons on Deuteronomy, explained that while God had chosen to write his law on stone tables with his own finger, we should not believe

that God hath anie hands: but that the holy scripture speaketh so by a resemblance as if it were saide, the lawe was note written or ingrauen by mans hand: but God approoued and ratified it by way of miracle.[3]

Not many people could maintain such a rigid division in their heads, however, and occasionally idols of the mind could be made partially manifest. I want to share just two examples today. The first, taken from a rare Elizabethan commandment board hanging in a Hampshire church, shows what is unmistakeably a divine hand, fully formed with four celestial fingers and a god-like thumb, handing the ten commandments out of the sky to a kneeling Moses.

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The second, knowledge of which I very gratefully owe to University of Birmingham PhD student Susan Orlik, is the baleful eye of God staring down at the occupants of an astonishing family pew in a Berkshire church, the pupil of which is inscribed with the words deus videt – God watches.

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If any monster readers have come across any interesting, unusual or incongruous representations or descriptions of, or references to, God, I’d be very interested to hear about them here!

[1] Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage (1613), p. 17.

[2] John Brinsley, The fourth part of the true watch containing prayers and teares for the churches (1624), p. 78.

[3] Jean Calvin, The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, trans. Arthur Golding (1583), p. 391.

What’s your poison? The History of Intoxicants

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Mark Hailwood

Regular readers of the monster will no doubt be aware from the content of many of my posts that I am a historian of drinking. This may sound like a rather niche or unusual subject for a historian to study, but I am certainly not alone in my interest in the history of intoxication – in fact it is a major growth area, especially in early modern history,[1] and you can now even get a job working specifically on ‘Intoxicants and Early Modernity: England c.1580-c.1740’ .

Why are historians so interested in intoxicants then?

Well, im9780679744382_p0_v1_s260x420portant changes in our relationship with intoxicating substances took place in the early modern period. In 1550 English men and women had a limited choice of substances they could turn to for a ‘psychoactive’ experience: ale for the poor, wine for the rich. In contrast, by 1750 ale and wine were joined by beer, gin, tobacco, tea, coffee, and chocolate, all of which were being mass consumed across the social scale.

This transformation in the range and quantity of intoxicants being ingested by the English population should not be seen simply as a footnote in our history: it was a historical development of wide-ranging significance that was intimately connected with major transformations in economics, politics, society and culture. Colonial expansion, the relationship between the state and the individual, gender roles and conventions, ideas about appropriate forms of behaviour or ‘manners’, class differences, and the role of public opinion in the political process, are all crucial aspects of English history in this period that cannot be understood without reference to the trade, regulation, and above all consumption, of intoxicants. Historians, including myself, are now arguing that we put intoxicants where they belong: at the centre of early modern English history.

liz So, with that in mind I thought I would offer a mini blog ‘carnival’ to draw attention to some recent posts that touch on aspects of the important history of intoxicants. I’ve said plenty on this blog about the history of drinking, so here are a few suggestions of other popular ‘poisons’ you might be interested in:

– Over at Early Modern Medicine, Jen Evans has been exploring the way people in the seventeenth-century thought about the health implications of new introductions such as coffee and tobacco, including some rather creative songs about the effect of tobacco on male virility.

– The history of tobacco has also been taken up in a recent blog over at History Today, which provides a useful introduction to the emergence and development of smoking habits, and reveals the rather surprising fact that tobacco’s initial success owed much to its perceived medicinal properties.

– And I also came across this interesting post recently which corrects a view I often get presented with: that people drank a lot of ale and beer in medieval and early modern England because they didn’t drink water, which was thought to be unsafe. According to Tim O’Neill, they did drink water – and ale and beer were more like an early version of energy drinks than an alternative to water.

So, pick your poison, and expect to hear more about the history of intoxicants as this field of study continues to expand.

[1] For a flavour of the recent work in this field check out the following: Phil Withington, ‘Intoxicants and Society in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal (2011), Mark Hailwood, ‘Sociability, Work and Labouring Identity in Seventeenth-Century England’, Cultural and Social History 8:1 (2011),  Alexandra Shepard, ‘Swil-bolls and tos-pots’: Drink Culture and Male Bonding in England, 1560–1640’ in Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter and Miri Rubin, eds., Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800 (2005),  and the essays in Adam Smyth (ed.), A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge, 2004).

Dead people’s stuff

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Brodie Waddell

What do historians study? Do we study historical events and past societies through analysis of extant artefacts? Or do we study dead people by looking at their stuff? Tim Hitchcock argues that we do the latter:

In recent years I find myself using the terms Stuff and Dead People in talks and titles more and more.  And as a historian I find myself conceptualising my work as being about Stuff inherited from Dead People.  Both expressions just sound right. … They form an attempt to de-centre the language of historical and social science authority that underpins the professional claims of academic historians as a whole.  By refusing to use the categories and languages of authority we inherited, I am self-consciously rejecting the systems that underpin the professional academic practise of history.

It’s worth reading the whole post, if only for his astute remarks about Kissinger’s questionable place amongst the living, but I want to emphasize an overlapping issue: jargon-busting.

In my reading, Tim is, amongst other things, arguing that historians should think critically about the strange dialects adopted by our scholarly tribes. Rather than relying on traditional technical labels or snazzy new terms borrowed from other fields, we should try to find alternatives.

Tillicoultry churchyard

Dead people

More importantly, to my mind, his specific suggestions are not latinate neologisms invented to bemuse colleagues and confuse students (e.g. Derrida’s différance). They are deliberately common English words: the sort of words that can be found both in the KJB and in a 21st-century pub chatter. This has at least two key advantages over the Derridean approach.

First, as Tim implies, using words that seem blunt or imprecise can force us to think differently about what it is we are actually trying to label. ‘Stuff’ is much less specific than ‘text’, ‘image’, ‘object’ or ‘landscape’, but that is exactly the point: we don’t study each of those things in isolation any more. I can see how this technique might be useful in my own research. Whilst investigating the economic situation in the 1690s, I’ve come to the conclusion these were simply ‘hard times’. This phrase neatly includes all of the economic problems of this decade – increasing fiscal demands, war-time trade disruption, liquidity crisis, food price inflation, etc. – and, at the same time, reminds us that many people experienced these problems as a general calamity, not as separate challenges to be dealt with independently.

Dead people - Collier_-_Vanitas_-_Still_Life

Stuff

Second, using words like these has the advantage of making us much more understandable. ‘Dead people’ is a phrase that makes sense to everyone, whereas terms such as ‘historical actors’ or ‘active historical agents’ are not quite as obvious. Historians seem to be less intoxicated by technical jargon than many of our fellow academics.1 Nonetheless, there is still plenty of needlessly abstract, obscure vocabulary that could be profitably chucked. Replacing some of our quasi-scientific jargon words with more ‘vulgar’ alternatives would make it much easier to have the sort of fruitful conversations with non-academics that we all claim to want.

These two potential benefits – challenging outdated thinking habits and opening up scholarly discussions – seem to me to be reason enough consider how you might be able to do this in your own work. Perhaps the study of ‘dead people’s stuff’ won’t catch on, but it’s a great excuse to think hard about the words we use.

Footnote

1 One need only dip into a typical book of literary criticism or sociology to realise that it would have been much more difficult for Sokal to persuade a historical journal to publish his balderdash than it was for him to convince Social Text.

Examining the question and questioning the exam

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Brodie Waddell

Tyler Cowen, a well-known blogger and economist at George Mason University, once tried a rather unusual approach to examining.

[He] walked into class the day of the final exam and said, “Here is the exam. Write your own questions. Write your own answers. Harder questions and better answers get more points.” Then he walked out.

The result, according to Cowen?

I would say that the variance of the test scores probably increased! I don’t recall if I ever did that again for a whole exam but most of my exams do that for at least one question.  It’s the question where you learn the most about the student.

With exam season now upon us, I’ve been mulling this over. I suspect the Birkbeck exam scrutiny panel wouldn’t like Cowen’s approach, but I think it could have real value. It would at least be a nice change from the usual drudgery of wading through 10 or 20 or even 50 answers to exactly the same question.

More to the point, it led me to think about some of the more unusual exam questions I’ve encountered over the years. The only one that strikes me as unconventional is one from Cambridge a few years ago for the early modern British social and economic history survey module:

Were any women and men practising witchcraft in early modern England?

Although it might not seem especially strange to a historian of the period, I suspect that laypeople would be alarmed to hear that Cambridge students were being examined on the existence of witches.

Do you have a favourite (or hated) history exam question?

[Update (15/05/13): Kate Beaton, creator of ‘Hark, a vagrant’, offers an Elizabeth I quiz and a 1066 quiz that include such key questions as ‘Whither the Armada?’ and ‘How much Conquering is too much Conquering?’]

A post written in the stars

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Laura Sangha

According to my horoscope, consulted on the website of a popular entertainment magazine, this will be a good week for me. With six planets in my sign, I’m ‘the one to watch!’. I might be feeling the pressure, but before the week is out, ‘luck will come’. Excellent news, I am sure you will agree. Look in most entertainment magazines and tabloid papers and you would hardly be surprised to find the similar revelations in the stars, tucked away somewhere between the week’s television and the latest suduko. You might be more interested to discover that, unlike wikipedia currently suggests, astrology did not gain broader consumer popularity through the influence of ‘regular mass media products’ in the twentieth century, but in fact had a ‘popular’ following many centuries before then.

The search for order and meaning in the sky is, of course, ancient. No one would deny that there is an obvious link between the sun and events on earth. As winter finally loosens its grip here in the UK you might be particularly aware of this right now. The northern hemisphere is slowly exposed to more direct sunlight because of the tilt of the earth’s axis, the days lengthen, the altitude of the sun changes, the sun feels hotter. As a result, animals change their behaviour, plants and trees burst into life, and Brits start donning shorts and having shivery picnics at the seaside.

A diagram of the heavens from a 1613 almanac.The evident link between the celestial bodies and terrestrial events was no less obvious to our forebears, and it led very naturally to an interest in the heavens. It was common to wonder how else the celestial bodies might influence life on earth. Lunar cycles were being recorded on cave walls as early as 25,000 years ago; the first organised system of astrology arose in the second millennium BC in Babylon; it was developed by the Greeks and Romans, and refined by Arabic practitioners. By the early modern period it was a very well established scholarly tradition, backed up by scriptural references: Jesus’ birth was of course marked by the appearance of a new star in the sky that the wise men followed to Bethlehem (Matthew 2:1-2), and at the beginning of the world ‘God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years’ (Genesis 1:14).

Thomas Blount gave a neat early modern definition in his 1656 Glossographia or a Dictionary (and note Blount’s qualification which preserves God’s omnipotence as well as man’s free will):

Astrology: Astrology is a Science which tels the Reasons of the Stars and Planets motions. Astrology doth promise by the motion and influence of Stars and Planets to foretel things to come, or it professeth to discover the influence and domination of the superior Globe over the inferior, and therefore may be tearmed a kind of natural divination, so long as it keeps it self in due limits, and arrogates not too much to its certainty; into which excess if it once break forth, it can then be no longer called natural Divination, but superstitious and wicked; for the Stars may incline, but not impose a necessity in particular things.

The characters of the xii signes... so that every man will understand them.

The characters of the xii signes… so that every man will understand them.

Natural astrology was concerned with the general character of planetary influences in such fields as agriculture and medicine; judicial astrology was the attempt to interpret these influences to make prediction and give advice (so tabloid stars are an example of this). Mastery of the science of astrology took skill and was intellectually demanding, and as a result, sixteenth-century astrology tended to be the domain of the learned and elite members of society. In seventeenth-century England however, this began to change, as a result of the emergence of handbooks which set out the basic rules of astrology and the rise of the ‘almanac’. Sorry wikipedia, but popular knowledge of the science was therefore probably greater in the Tudor and Stuart period than ever before or since.

The anatomy of a mans body, as the parts thereof are governed by the 12 celestial signs

The anatomy of a mans body, as the parts thereof are governed by the 12 celestial signs.

An almanac was an annual, short, cheap publication with a range of material in it. It fulfilled a variety of roles, offering religious, moral, practical as well as astrological advice. Usually the first section had a calendar and details of planetary motions and conjunctions. Along with the prognostications, there was often also an ‘Anatomy’ or ‘zodiacal man’, as well as information on local fairs, highways, the phases of the moon, feast days, medical and farming advice. Often almanacs had a secondary role as a notebook or diary (look at the front of your diary, mine still has ‘useful information’ including astronomical information), and therefore they were worth hanging on to, and many survive, luckily for us. Bernard Capp[1] has shown that the genre allowed astrology to take on a new social dimension. They served as handbooks that set out the basic rules to astrology in a clear and simple manner, for use by all sorts of people, from peers to serving-maids. Astrological terms passed into common usage: think ‘jovial’, ‘lunatic’, ‘mercurial’. And almanacs were really the starting point for this post – I was idling browsing a few from spring 1613, exactly 400 years ago, wondering what sort of things were going on back then, and I thought it would be an excellent idea to share some of that advice with monster readers, to set them up for the summer.[2] Enjoy!

WARNING: This stuff is a bit dated, for the most cutting edge advice you should probably turn to biodynamic gardening, where ‘gardeners plough, prepare, sow, plant, harvest and compost according to the phases of the moon and the constellations (signs) it passes through’.

1613 HISTORY: How many years is it since….

Frontispiece to John Woodhouse's alamanac for 1613.

Frontispiece to John Woodhouse’s alamanac for 1613.

  • The world began: 5562
  • Noah’s flood: 3906
  • Conquest of the Romans: 1664
  • Coming of the Saxons: 1163
  • Coming of the Danes: 774
  • Conquest of the Normans: 546
  • The Battle at Agincourt: 197
  • Printing first used: 153 [1460]
  • The first use of coaches in England: 58
  • Pauls Steeple burned with lightening: 52
  • The rebellion in the North: 44 [a reference to the 1569 Rebellion of the Northern Earls in reign of Elizabeth I]
  • The great snow: 34
  • The general earthquake: 33 [also known as the Dover Straits earthquake, 1580]
  • Tilburie Campe: 25 [a reference to the Spanish Armada, 1588]

PRACTICAL ADVICE:

What phase of the moon should I….

  • Cut hedges? Between the change and the full, from the end of Jan till the beginning of June
  • Geld cattle? In Aries, Libra and Sagittarius, the moon being past the full
  • ‘Dung land’ that weeds may not abound? In the old of the moon

How can I tell if there will be rain or foule weather?

If the sun is fiery at his rising. If he rise and a little after be covered with great black clouds. If the horns of the new moon are blunt. When bells are heard further than usual. When wainscot doors and wooden coverings open straighter than of custom. When swine and peacocks make a great noise. When birds be busy in washing themselves. Moles behaving busily. Cattle eating greedily, and licking their hooves.

What should I be doing in the outdoors at the moment?

Working outside? You'll want to know when it will be light then.

Working outside? You’ll want to know when it will be light then.

In April you should sow barley, hemp, and flax, and some of your garden seeds, as cowcumbers, citrons, melons and artichokes. Good housewives should now begin to be busy about their Dairies, and tanners to pill barke.

In May you should sow barley, set and sow tender herbs and seeds, set stills to work, stir land for wheat and rye, stop lopping trees, weed winter corn, teach hops to climb, but cut off the superfluous branches, and watch your bees.

More generally, cold will diminish and living creatures will begin to recover their strength lost over the winter. Soon the earth will put on her new yearly ornaments, beasts, fowls and birds will make harmony.

When and where can I go to a fayre?

There are too many to mention, but on 1 May try Leicester, Brickhill, Reading, Warwick, Maidstone, Lichfield and Stanstead. On the 3 May try Waltham Abbey, Cowbridge, Benbigh, Knighton. In Rogation week: Beverly, Engfield, Horsham. On Ascension Day: Kidderminster, Bishops-Stratford, Wigan, Burton, Bridgend.

MORAL ADVICE: What good deeds shall I do this season?

The deeds of hospitality would be useful: feed the hungry, cloth the naked, be good to the widow and the fatherless. Remember:

Hast thou 2 Loafs, 2 Coats, give one of each
To him that pines and starves (I thee beseech)
Alas! (Rich man) thou know’st not what thy
May come unto, when thou art dead and gone.
Farmers! give th’ poor some corn. Shepherds give
Some cloth the back, some fill the Belly full
Doctors, give Physick for mere Charity:
Millers, be sure ye grind their Corn toll-free.

HEALTH

April is a good month to have a spring clean – not only of your house, but also of your body. It is the fittest time of year to ease diseased bodies, and to restore by means of evacuation and blood letting. Remember with this simple rhyme:

Learn the most ausipcious times to let blood with this simple guide.

Learn the most auspicious times to let blood with this simple guide.

This month all things their strength renew,
by letting of blood, you shall not rue
The pores open and blood abounds,
or purging, also no harme redounds.

And finally, beware. The sicknesses of spring are melancholy, madness, the falling sickness, nosebleeds, coughs, itch, scabs, ulcers , gout, pain in the joints, and also, ‘some strange diseases’….

[1] Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press (London, 1979).

[2] The extracts are taking from the following almanacs: John Dade, A new almanacke and prognostication, 1613; John Johnson, An almanacke and prognostication for this yeere of our lord and sauiour Iesus Christ 1613; William Mathew, 1613 a new almanacke and prognostication, for the yeare of our Lord God; John Woodhouse, A plaine almanacke and prognostication, 1613; John Bucknall, The Shepherds Almanack, being a diary or register for the year 1676.

Carnivalesque 94: No bishop, no king

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Brodie Waddell

Welcome to the 94th edition of Carnivaleque! Today we will be introducing you to a wonderfully motley menagerie of historical blogs and bloggers.

Finding any overall unifying theme is impossible with a collection of this sort, but there are a few key subjects that emerged from the nominations, each of which receives a section below:

  • The historian as detective
  • Bodily functions
  • A venerable criminal enterprise
  • Places, spaces and sites
  • Thinking about the historian’s craft

I think it is particularly interesting what’s not in the links below, namely kings and queens and ‘great battles’, the traditional material for popular histories. Not that political history and military history are entirely absent, just that they are approached from a different direction than usual. Although there are a few of gentlemen and noblewomen as well as a famous scientist, the vast majority of the nominated posts are focused on people who would have been largely excluded from textbooks written fifty years ago. What should we make of this? Is old-fashioned ‘top down’ history dying off? Or is it just that the type of people who read this blog and pay attention to Carnivaleque are predisposed against reading yet another story about Henry VIII and his wives or Charles I and his parliaments? I’d be interested to hear what you think.

However, before wandering into the carnival below, take a look at this truly heart-warming short animation that tells the tale of ‘the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter, 1590’, a German werewolf. For more details, see the two posts at LOLManuscripts, but in the meantime, watch the video and be amazed.

Now, on with the show…

Continue reading →

Monstrous readers

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Brodie Waddell

In the wee hours of this morning, the Monster was viewed for the 10,000th time. Not a bad achievement for a blog dedicated to historical obscurities that only launched nine months ago. So, thanks to all of you for checking us out and thanks even more to our commenters who make posting so worthwhile!

Rather than fireworks, I thought it might be appropriate to celebrate by pulling back the curtain to reveal a few facts and statistics, following the example of Nick at Mercurius Politicus.

Since July 18th, 2012, we’ve had:

  • 53 posts
  • 205 comments
  • 10,004 views, around 40 per day
  • 74 different countries from which vistors have arrived
  • 260 views on a single day (September 2nd, thanks to a link to ‘A royal mistress’ from Two Nerdy History Girls)

We’ve received most of our readers via links from:

Perhaps most interesting are the search terms that have been used to find us. The most Young Sallypopular is, of course, ‘many-headed monster’. Interestingly, ‘archivist’ is in second place, perhaps thanks to the archival miscellany. Other unsurprising results include ‘what shall we do with a drunken sailor’, ‘civil war comic strip’ and ‘microhistory’. More unexpectedly, we also have a few readers who’ve found us by searching for ‘animated fireworks’, ‘hairy child’, ‘devil church’ and, most confusing of all, the nine clicks from ‘dirty mind of young sally’. I pity the poor saps who were looking for a local Satanist congregation or a 1973 ‘adult comedy’ only to find over-thought analysis of some early modern oddity.

Oh well, the more the merrier … Satanists and skin-flick fans, we welcome you!

Calling all bloggers and blog readers…

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Every six weeks or so the historical blogosphere hosts a ‘carnival’ where a single blog publishes a ‘Carnivalesque’ miscellany of links to recent posts from around the web. This particular carnival focuses on ancient, medieval and early modern blogging. Previous editions have been hosted by Sharon Howard of Early Modern Notes and Thony C. of The Renaissance Mathematicus.

The many-headed monster will be hosting the next edition on April 27th and we’re looking for nominations. We’ve already had a few come through, but would welcome many more. The Carnivalesque nominations procedure is as follows:

We welcome perspectives from a variety of fields, especially (but not only) history, literary studies, archaeology, art history, or philosophy. You can nominate your own writing and/or that of other bloggers, but please try not to nominate more than 1-2 posts by any author for any single edition of the carnival.

Nominated blogging may be ‘academic’ or ‘popular’, so long as it is based on facts and evidence. Writing that engages with the past to discuss present issues should include significant historical content and analysis, not merely polemic. All nominations are vetted by the host of the edition, whose decision is final.

Nominated posts should have been published within the last 2-3 months. The normal channel is to send an email to the host using the nomination form at this site. Individual hosts may provide additional options. Please ensure you include the full URL of the post you are nominating, and ideally the post title and blog name.

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An Easter larceny, 1691

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Brodie Waddell

I was browsing the Old Bailey Online for seasonal crimes, as one does, and came across this case from the Proceedings of 27 May 1691:

Rebekah Williams, Widow, was Tryed for Robbing Edward Veron , on Easter-day last, of Goods to a considerable value. Mr. Veron swore, That his Shop was broke open at Ipswich, and that the Prisoner offered several of the Goods to sale in London, at a Goldsmiths, where she was taken; but she proving her self a Married Woman, by vertue of the Covering she was Acquitted.

We have, in other words, a woman who allegedly participated in stealing from a shop on Easter, but escaped unpunished because she was married at the time.

Early Modern John recently described an Old Bailey case from around the same time as ‘both amazing and infuriating at the same time’ – and the case of Rebekah Williams undoubtedly falls into that same category. The record includes tantalising hints about the culture of the time, but also fails to explain the parts that seem to be most in need of explanation.

The first question is about the significance of the day of the crime. It is obvious why criminals might plan a break-in for ‘Easter-Day’ – presumably everyone else would be at church and the theft would be less likely to be detected. But what would the jurors think of such a crime? Would they be inclined to treat the accused more severely because the crime was both a theft and a profanation of the year’s holiest day? Would the prosecutor draw attention to this? Sadly, the record is entirely silent on this point.

The second issue is influence of Williams’ marital status. This seems to be a case of ‘feme covert’. As the OBO explains:

The legal principle of the feme covert, by which women could not be held responsible for crimes committed in the presence of their husbands (since they were presumed to be following their husbands’ commands) was not often applied, but it may have led juries to exonerate some married women, particularly when their husbands were convicted for the same crime.

The principle had a much more significant role in commerical affairs and inheritance than in criminal law, but it theoretically applied to cases of theft as well.1 But why, then, was Williams listed as a ‘widow’? How did she ‘prove’ her marriage? Why wasn’t her husband mentioned and, in fact, prosecuted? I’m inclined to imagine a scenario something like this … Williams and her husband robbed the shop in Ipswich, but only she was caught selling the goods in London. She admitted the crime but claimed that she was coerced by her husband, who – conveniently – died before the trial. But this is all merely speculation. Here too the record is silent.

In the end, what we are left with is a woman who seems to have committed a potentially capital crime on the most sacred day of the Christian calendar, and who walked away from the court unscathed.

Footnotes

1 For the significance of ‘feme covert’ in the economic sphere, see Joanne Bailey, ‘Favoured or oppressed? Married women, property and ‘coverture’ in England, 1660-1800′, Continuity and Change, 17:3 (2002), pp. 351-372 (ungated); and the work of Amy Erickson. For the role of gender in early modern crime, see Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds) Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (1994); Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (2003). The law of coverture is also described on Wikipedia.

Something for Good Friday (it would be Rood not to)…

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Jonathan Willis

Just a little something for Good Friday: I don’t know how many of you know the parish church of St Catherine, Ludham, Norfolk, but like so many of the county’s churches it has a solid medieval pedigree and is really worth a visit!

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I went there last summer (remember summer?!) on the trail of an early commandment board, and while I’m still not convinced that I found one there, I did come across something rather special. Ludham has one of those vast, flint-clad churches so characteristic of East Anglia, a result of huge wealth generated by a thriving local economy, and particularly the strength of the cloth trade. Anyway, one of the main attractions is its beautiful, intricate medieval painted screen:

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But more interesting I think, at least from an early modern perspective, is the contents of the chancel arch. Viewed from the nave, it contains a striking, early example of an Elizabethan Royal Arms, declaring Vivat Regina Elizabeta alongside the motto Non me pudet evangilium Christi, ‘Let me not be ashamed of the Gospel of Christ’.

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Arms like this are rare enough, and I’ve not come across any other examples with this particular motto, but on the reverse side, facing into the Chancel, is something quite spectacular: a rare survival from the Catholic restoration of the reign of Mary I, a painted Rood. Christ crucified in the centre is surmounted (I think) by the dove of the Holy Spirit, and flanked by (probably) Mary and John the Baptist, two other saints, and two crowned, winged figures who I think are unmistakably angels:

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Beyond that, the rest is speculation. We have very little to compare either example to, and it may be that Ludham was just an extremely compliant parish when it came to obeying the capricious religious policies of the Tudor monarchs. Perhaps this Rood was nothing special, just a rare example of the sort of stop-gap measure adopted by hundreds of churches across the country, and which the death of Mary prevented from achieving greater permanence. But (and this is surely the reformation historian inside me) it is also tempting to read a more polemical narrative into the actions of Ludham. Was their strident Elizabethan declaration not to be ashamed of the gospel in part a defence against charges of conservatism of the type embodied by their Marian Rood? Both Rood and Arms survive today purely by chance, hidden away until they were rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century. How fortunate for us that they do: now we just have to figure out what to make of them!