◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄Fragments

A conversation on witchcraft: history, religion, and persecution - including Ronald Hutton (fangirling).

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And on subversive women: Archiving Bengal’s Revolutionary Women:

[M]any women participated in the revolutionary movement, taking on roles that challenged colonial authority and social norms. The militants who joined underground networks, manufactured explosives, and participated in acts of political violence, however, remain largely absent from both public memory and archival records. When they do appear in colonial documents, they are often framed through their relationships to men: as daughters, wives, or associates, rather than as political actors in their own right.

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More on grassroots activism: Travelling activists, Radical Hospitality, and the Intimate History of Socialist Organising in Britain, c. 1880-1914.

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Women in perhaps unexpected occupations (though I knew a little a bit about this since an old mate of mine did some research on the topic back in the 80s): Women in the Private Asylum Business in Nineteenth-Century England.

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This association is already fairly well-known but a nuanced set of arguments about the complexity of how it plays out: Inequality and health: Lost in the mists of time?:

Rather than behaving like a toxin that produces a sudden spike in mortality after a fixed incubation period, inequality is more like a fog that gradually seeps into bodies, relationships, and institutions over time.

What the information in one scroll recording an C18th Chancery suit opened up concerning George Orwell's ancestors (Jamaica connection).

What I read

Finished Never Had It So Good, and while I am less whelmed than I was on first reading it 50 years ago (aaarrgh), and consider that as panoramic social novel of provincial life, does not quite reach the level of South Riding, yet, that is the comparison one thinks of. I also mark up Mr Jones in contrast to The Angry Young Men who were his contemporaries over a whole range of issues.

Finished Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore, which was fascinating, and very readable, but has not somehow inspired me to rush off and do a re-read.

Then thought I should really read Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017), for forthcoming in-person book group.

In hopes of a change from that - it's grim - read Marion Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close (Walsh Family, #5) (2012), a recent Kobo deal, which was itself not entirely the most cheerful read.

On the go

Amazon helpfully alerted me to Kindle-only publication of Alexis Hall, Never After, currently in progress, also not really bringing the delicious froth - opium-addicted Victorian rent-boy rescued from homelessness on the streets by clergyman (unexpected and unwanted 3rd son in aristo family, put him into the church) with his own backstory baggage.

Up next

There's a new Literary Review.

Also I had a mad binge on Kobo the other day, mostly Dick Francises which had come down to promotional prices, but I also finally succumbed to the most recent Edward St Aubyn which has been tempting me. The previous one was so much less gruesome than the Melrose sequence that perhaps this will be the change of pace I'm looking for?

A concatenation of things Relevant To My Research Interests (I guess), or, well, I feel I ought to keep up with this sort of thing....

Exiles of love?: uncovering lesbian voices in interwar Czechoslovakia, by someone I know, or at least, whose partner I know and whom I know by association.

Confining yet Convenient: Using Gender Norms to Defend Oneself in Cases of Rural Spousal Violence in Post-Independence Ireland: because that sort of thing could happen, using the system (see that book on 'economic divorce from deserting husbands' in late C19th England).

Review of Pious and Promiscuous: Life, Love and Family in Presbyterian Ulster, which is again, about how the system allows of certain flexibilities.

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How to piss off historians: Drought, Conflict and the Use of Historical Data and Methodologies in Interdisciplinary Palaeoclimatic Research:

Norman et al. argue that historical sources support their conclusions that drought contributed causally to the ‘barbarian conspiracy’ of 367CE and to other late Roman conflicts. Although historians have developed rigorous methodologies for effective analysis and interpretation of surviving texts, the authors outline no methodologies for dealing with the textual evidence. Further, there are issues with the historical ‘conflict’ and numismatic datasets and with their interpretation.... the textual evidence discussed by Norman et al. does not, and cannot, support the authors’ assertions.

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Is this not lovely news? posthumous work by Vonda McIntyre forthcoming from Aqueduct Press in May

This week's bread: a loaf of Marriages's Moulsham Strong Malted Seeded Bread Flour, turned out nicely.

Friday night supper: penne with Romano peppers chopped and sizzled in oil oil with chopped chorizo de navarra.

Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajarra method, 50:50% strong white/wholemeal spelt flour, Rayner's Barley Malt Extract, dried blueberries, turned particularly well.

Today's lunch: lemon sole fillets, which I cooked more or less thus, only with juice of half a lime which worked a lot better for making a paste; served with Ruby Gem potatoes roasted in goosefat (was going to do in beef dripping but it was way past its BBF), Bellaverde sweetstem broccoli garlic-roasted with chopped baby peppers (left over from last week) (other half of the lime squeezed over at the end), and spinach cooked according to Dharamjit Singh's recipe in Indian Cookery.

Because she is bringing us old bats into disrepute (we are more or less in the same age cohort), this is exactly the sort of thing that gets us dismissed, and it's quite clearly weaponised incompetence to get her son to run around buying stuff on the internet for her while she does not do due diligence over her headphones.
You be the judge: should my mum stop asking me to buy her new headphones?:

My son Henry is exaggerating terribly. I don’t lose headphones all the time. I simply put them away in different places and occasionally forget which place that was.
This happens to everyone, especially when you live in a house where things move about over time. I live on my own, in a large, eccentric home. I’m not a hoarder but I often forget where I put things. Henry will come over and find the headphones after I have lost them, and while I’m grateful to him for helping me find them and buying new ones, I could do without some of his lectures.
I’m 76; I don’t need to be told to “be more careful”. I just live my life how I want and sometimes I’m a bit scatty.

Mind you, also irksome is that thing when somebody prates on of 'in my day' and I think, not merely that I was there in that day and we had electric light and everything, they are, a little calculation suggests, actually somewhat younger and should not be going on like that.

This was something that flitted past me where someone was being driven bananas by her mother-in-law interfering with the baby and upsetting its routine and doing all those things annoying relatives do because they are not going to be kept up all night by agitated babby.... And there was sense that MiL was 'oh, these new-fangled notions' as if in her day it was Ye Wisdomme of Ye Village Cronez rather than paediatricians advising new mothers.

I will, as a historian of medicine, concede that ideas of How To Bring Up Baby have gone through changes, but suspect that 'if babby has got to sleep, let babby sleep in peace' has always been pretty central.

(I realise that there may yet come a time when in a miasmatic wasteland this crone of the tribe maunders on about the time in her day when they had vaccines and codliver oil....)

Yesterday partner and I went on an excursion to Rochester, as partner wanted to visit the cathedral and the castle, and I thought it would make a nice little trip - two trains an hour from St Pancras International. Also, it is not presently in the throes of having either of its twice-yearly Dickens Festivals, although there are quite a lot of manifestations of Charles D associations, from cafes called e.g. Tiny Tim's to plaques on buildings declaring that they are the originals of [some building in one or other of the novels].

The castle is Norman and there is quite a lot of it still standing. Realised that these days I am not so spritely about manouevring around rough-hewn spiral staircases and did not ascend all the way to the top of the tower. Apparently it is where Henry VIII met Anne of Cleves on her arrival in England (dooooomed! doooomed!). There were notices all over about the corpses of pigeons - these are preyed on by crows, the crows are a protected species, tough, pidges.

The cathedral is second oldest in England and has seen a lot of history, not to mention The Reformation, the Civil War and Commonwealth, Victorian church restoration, etc. There are some v kitsch early C19th funerary monuments. The crypt is v modernised and has a caff, a chapel to St Ithamar, first Saxon bishop of Rochester, and an exhibition of medieval manuscripts from the cathedral library (that survived the Henrician Reformation).

The high street is well worth strolling along, quite a number of picturesque ancient edifices, including Eastgate House and the Six Poor Travellers House.