Hello! This month has been a bit of a weird one. Again.
The deadline by which I need to apply for a student loan is rapidly approaching, which means I really have to focus on what I want to get out of this MA. I have to be certain that taking out a student loan for the second time in my life is absolutely positively definitely the right thing to do. Ten and a bit thousand pounds is a lot of money. (The actual course fees are £7,450, but the rest of the loan will go towards bus fares and books and the inevitable expenses of Going Out and Doing Stuff.)
I’ve been trying to condition the fibromyalgia to Going Out and Doing Stuff by increasing the hours I spend at Uni each week. For the past three weeks, The MERL have had lunchtime seminars on a Friday that have been loosely based around looking at Ladybird Books, about which they have a joint exhibition with Reading Museum. (It’s on until August, and definitely worth a look!)
The first Friday was looking at the relationship between language and text in one double-page spread of Three Blind Mice. Without wishing to be overly critical of the lecture, I think it’s fair to say that the hour’s experience left me utterly baffled. It certainly left me questioning whether I had the right kind of mindset to go back into academia, which wasn’t quite what I’d expected.
The second Friday was with Sue Walker, one of my former Typography lecturers, talking about the design of factual books for children. I found it absolutely fascinating, as the complexities of the design of factual books is one of the things that I was trained in as an undergrad. Sue talked about shifting styles of design in relation to both what was physically possible as print technologies progressed over the decades, and also in terms of cultural changes in the approach to children’s learning. This was very reassuring for me, as it turned out I hadn’t completely forgotten everything I learnt during my degree!
Yesterday’s third and final seminar was very much about looking directly at Ladybird books – specifically, “What To Look For In Autumn”. It was an absolutely action-packed hour, racing through slides and talking about the ways in which Tunnicliffe, the book’s artist, had depicted the interactions between nature and agriculture at the very end of the 1950s. Also on display were the wall banners from an exhibition that was on display back in 2012, when I worked at the museum. ‘What to Look For? Ladybird, Tunnicliffe, and the hunt for meaning‘ was a fascinating exhibition, focussing on just one single image from the Autumn book, and reading it critically from a number of different perspectives. As a member of the Visitor Services team at that time, it was interesting to see a very mixed reaction from the public to the exhibition. An awful lot of people went away disappointed, having seen the name “Ladybird” and assumed they were going to see a selection of nostalgic material from their childhood. By contrast, other folks really enjoyed it, saying that they’d never thought to look at “just a Ladybird book” in that kind of depth before.
The MERL’s next seminar series isn’t until the Autumn, by which time I will have already begun my MA, so I don’t know yet whether I’ll be able to attend. But these three lectures have got me started on a pattern of getting out of the house and being in an academic environment.
I actually spent most of yesterday in the Special Collections Reading Room (conveniently situated in the same building as The MERL), looking through some books from their open access reference library, and making a list of things I’d like to look at from deeper into the collections.
Next week I’m very excited to be looking at one late sixteenth century and one early seventeenth century book:
- Fiue Hundreth Pointes of Goode Husbandrie, Thomas Tusser, 1585
- The whole art and trade of husbandry : contained in four bookes, Conrad Heresbach, 1614
Sometimes I must admit it is quite tempting to think, “well, I can read the digital copies of these books online whenever I want to, so why bother going to an archive and wading through three hundred and ninety-six pages of hard-to-read blackletter printing in the flesh?”. But, here’s an opportunity to literally get my hands on a couple of four-hundred-year-old books! There’s no way on earth I’m going to pass that up. For a start, each individual copy of a book tells its own story in terms of the collection it belongs to, any annotations that might have been made to it, and any notes or letters that might be tucked inside. And in the case of the Tusser, all of the digitised copies are much later editions – 159 years later, in this case – and a lot of things can be edited in or out in 159 years!
I’ve requested these particular books because they’re slightly unusual in that they specifically address certain portions of their text towards women. During this period there was a clear demarcation between Husbandry, the looking after of the farm land and its crops and animals, and Housewiferie, the looking after of the gardens, poultry and household accounts. What these early printed books on the subject begin to do is to formalise which tasks belong to which people – but in the main, only the tasks belonging to the men are written up and published. (Hands up anyone who’s surprised…?) However, I did discover that Gerard’s Herball, the place where I started this journey, was a very popular book with Housewifes… which, in this context, means not simply “married women”, but rather women who looked after a house or an estate, as well as the people necessary to keep it running smoothly. Those people quite often lived on the property, or close by, and if they became sick the Housewife was expected to have sufficient knowledge to be able to prepare and administer their remedies. These books in particular don’t deal with the methods of preparing medicines, but they do contain lists of plants that the housewife would be expected to have on hand in her well-stocked garden. Gerard’s Herball does the rest.
My stumbling block at the moment is something that keeps being mentioned in just about every book I pick up on the subject, and that’s an enormous gap in knowledge. Not in people’s knowledge – but in the printed kind. Books are not only extremely expensive (396 printed pages, bound in leather!), but they also require their owner to be able to read. This is fine if you’re an educated person who’s managing the land on, for example, a monastery farm… but what if you’re not? What if you don’t have a Housewife to tell you what to grow or how to prepare your medicine? What if you can’t read a book, or write down your own notes? How do you know which plants to grow or gather, what remedies to prepare, and how do you pass that information on reliably? And more to the point, how do I find out, if I’m trying to research the knowledge of a not-especially-literate culture?
I do have a (very short) list of avenues to try, before I follow the lead of many other researchers and have to admit that the information that I’m looking for simply isn’t out there. I’m kind of hoping that if I can get some of this research under my belt before I start my course, the introductory Research Methods module will help me to spot any opportunities that I might have missed. Fingers crossed!