Category: history

PhD Vlog: Episode One

I’m continuing my experiments on YouTube with the first of what will hopefully turn into a series of PhD-related Vlogs – if I can get the technology working smoothly!

If you can’t be doing with videos, there is a transcription on YouTube of the closed captions, and I’ve also included an edited version below:

Hello! I’m Claire Smith, and welcome back to  Eternal Magpie. This is going to be my first PhD  “vlog”, if you want to call it that.

The  first thing I want to say is just that I’m really, really tired.

I should have followed  everybody’s advice and taken a break after finishing my MA dissertation, which was a very  intense process, and before starting my PhD.  For various reasons that didn’t happen, and I had a grand total of six days – all of which  were filled with admin – in between finishing my  dissertation and going back to campus and starting  the whole process of the PhD. So far I’m two weeks in, and the hardest part has in fact been the admin! So many things to fill in, so many websites not working, so many hoops to jump through to make sure that all of my information is correct and everything is in the right place, and that I can be in the right place at the right time. (Which I’ve already failed at, by missing an online seminar that I’d been planning to attend. Good start there, Claire.) Fingers crossed though, I think I’m nearly sorted out now, which is a relief.

To keep myself organised, I treated myself to a beautiful leather  handmade notebook cover from a company called HORD on Etsy. It’s hand-painted gold leather, it’s engraved with some of my favourite things (it’s got swords, which are always good), and on the  inside they can engrave something personalised for you. I’ve got a diary cover, also by HORD, which has my name on it. This one I’ve had engraved with the beginning of the title of my PhD thesis. It’s based on a quote from Gerard’s Herball where he says that certain benefits of medicines performed by witches and alchemists are just “drowsie dreames and illusions”, and that you shouldn’t trust them. So I can keep  that with me, it’s a removable cover, so when I fill up this notebook I can get a new one to pop inside, but I’ve always got the lovely cover with me. The stationery nerd in me is very, very pleased  with that! 

I’ve also had my first supervision meeting, and I think  it went well!

Again, a lot of admin, and making sure that I know what I’m doing in terms of training and professional development, which is something that the university is really hot on providing. There’s a huge training program for postgraduates, so I’ve signed up to a few  collections-based courses already, which happen throughout this term. Next term there’s a session on writing your literature review, which  I’m definitely going to go to, because my first two important tasks are literature review-related.

The first one is to set myself up with an annotated bibliography, which I’m going to do in EndNote, because I got used to using that throughout my MA. It has its issues, like any  piece of software, but most of the time it’s been really useful, not least  for making the referencing process a whole lot quicker. Once you’ve got it set up right in  EndNote you can just pop it into Word, and you’re done. Except when, right before your dissertation is due, it completely betrays you and refuses to format the references in the style that you’ve selected, which was extremely distressing, it’s really useful. You can put not only the details of the book into it, but there’s also a section for your own notes, so that’s going to be quite a good way of keeping everything in one place, staying organised, and also for having my own mini notes about each book. So, I’m going to set up my bibliography in EndNote; next term I’ll go and do the literature review training, and hopefully that will sort me out.

My other important task, which is the biggie, is basically to decide what I’m doing.

Frankly this is not something I’m good at, with any subject at all. I hate deciding what I’m doing. I like seeing where things take me, seeing where the research goes, following it down rabbit holes, and thinking, “oh I didn’t know that before, let’s compare this thing to that  thing, and oh how does this impact on that?” I am not good at deciding right at the beginning  what I’m doing.

That has to change now.  

I’m thinking about two tracks for my thesis at the moment. They’re both about early modern witches, so that’s a start, but my first track is: am I going to follow the folklore and magical thinking and superstition and cultural beliefs that were prevalent during the early modern period, and place witches and medicine into that, or am I going to follow the history of  medicine, and try and carve out a place for witches as legitimate medical practitioners in that sphere. That makes me slightly nervous, because the history of medicine is an  increasingly well studied area, there are a lot of really top-notch experts, and it makes me feel slightly nervous as a brand new researcher, just finding my way, trying to make a place in that. The folklore and superstition part of things is really appealing to me just because it’s a fascinatingly huge subject, and going  through the primary sources will be a really interesting way of seeing what people thought at the time, what people believed about witches, in material that has nothing to do with the witch trials. Obviously I’ll read up on the witch trials, but that’s not going to be my main focus of research.

My main focus is going to be: what did people think about witches? What were their fears about witches?  When a witch turns up in a book like a herbal, or an almanac, or a husbandry manual, what did people think witches were going to  do? How did they feel the need to protect themselves against witches? Why did they feel the need to withhold information from witches? What did they expect the difference in outcome to be between, for example, a nice middle class, upper class, gentlewoman, somebody further up the social hierarchy, using a herbal recipe, versus what would happen if a witch read  the same book, used the same ingredients, performed the same processes? How did they expect the witch  to use that same information in a different way? 

Again, I’m  very aware that I don’t have all of the background knowledge. Most of my knowledge at the moment is directly  from primary sources. It’s from reading primarily Gerard’s Herball, and a small group of husbandry manuals, so there’s a lot of secondary literature that I need to delve into. The first thing I’m doing about that is auditing a  second year undergraduate module which is about “Belief and Unbelief” in the early modern period, looking at the processes and the structures of the church; looking at lay people and what they believed at the time; and also the  importance of these beliefs to the the culture as a  whole, and to the processes of state. We’re only two weeks  in, and that’s already really, really interesting.  

The other thing I’m doing is going back to basics by re-reading Sir Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. It was published 50 years ago this year, so it’ll be a good starting point, and I can then add the following 50 years’ worth of scholarship on top of this foundation, and see where I’m at. What I really need to do is get stuck in – and also get stuck in to some primary sources, probably a couple that are available online. Certainly to begin with, it’s going to be much more convenient to start online, and really start thinking about what I actually want to do and which path I want to follow.

I’m very aware that I’m starting at the beginning, whichever direction I go in, and I’ve got a lot  of reading to do, a lot of learning to do, and a lot of sources to look at. But I’m ready to get stuck in. I’m excited about it, a little bit overwhelmed, but I think that’s normal at the beginning of any big project.

So, here we are, I’m good to go!

Botany on the brain

A little snapshot of my garden

While we’ve been stuck at home, we’ve been enjoying the opportunity to finally get on with some bits and pieces in the garden. One of those bits and pieces is digging out a flowerbed around the little hornbeam tree. I rescued it from the Sale section at the local garden centre when it was little more than a sad stick in a pot and, apart from not enjoying the recent heatwave, it’s now almost knee high which is very pleasing. Paul started clearing away the grass in that area on a day when I was at work, and I came home to find that he’d left a large ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolata) and some bedstraw because “they looked happy”. Bless him. But it definitely shows that plants are only weeds if you decide they are. If you’re happy and they’re happy, then there’s no problem!

However, it turns out that, when you’ve been hanging about with botanists for a couple of years, just knowing that “it’s a bedstraw of some kind” isn’t good enough.

Photos of the “mystery bedstraw” that I was trying to identify

Recently one of my neighbours has been clearing out her late partner’s books, and I took the opportunity to offer a new home to some botany and more general biology textbooks. Which is how, on Saturday afternoon, I found myself grovelling about on the lawn with copies of Stace and Rose, trying to figure out exactly which bedstraw I was looking at. Thankfully Stace comes with an expansive glossary, because frankly I had absolutely no idea what I was reading without a little help!

Help came, as it so often does, from Twitter, where professionals including Dr Jonathan Mitchley (Reading’s Associate Professor in Field Botany) identified it as being Hedge Bedstraw – specifically, Galium mollugo.

Turns out it’s edible (I tried a little bit – it just tastes… green), of interest medicinally for epilepsy and ‘hysteria’ (research ongoing) and, like other plants in the bedstraw family, it smells lovely as it dries. The vanilla-like scent is produced by coumarin – which is also what gives the plant its medicinal effects. As if that wasn’t enough, the roots can be used to make a red dye not unlike that of madder (Rubia tinctorum), and it can also be used in cheese making. (Two of its older common names are Curdwort and Cheese-renning.)

Because I now have my own facsimile copy of Gerard’s Herball (1633 edition – and yes, I’m still extremely excited about that!), it was easy to look up what Gerard (and Johnson) had to say about it.

Ladies Bedstraw with white floures, from Gerard’s Herball 1633
A digital copy, from which this image is cropped, is available from archive.org.

It’s listed as Gallium album, and named simply ‘Ladies Bedstraw with white floures’. The name Mollugo is also given, as is the comparison with Madder. According to Gerard:

The people in Cheshire, especially about Namptwich, where the best cheese is made, do use it in their Rennet, esteeming greatly of that cheese above other made without it.

A tiny bit of bias may be sneaking in here, as Gerard himself was from Nantwich!

Interestingly, Gerard also declares that,

We find nothing extant in the antient writers, of the vertues and faculties of the white kinds but are as herbes never had in use either for physicke or Surgerie.

Both quotations from Gerard (1633), pages 1126-8

Several uses are given for the yellow-flowered Lady’s Bedstraw (Galium verum), including an ointment for burns, and the staunching of blood. That seems unlikely, given that coumarin is an anticoagulant, but Gerard takes this piece of information directly from Dioscorides, which would certainly have given it authority.

Page 967 of the 1597 edition of Gerard’s Herball, depicting bedstraw and madder.
A digital copy, from which this image is reproduced, is available from archive.org.

(And while we’re questioning Gerard’s accuracy, on page 1128 of the 1633 edition, Thomas Johnson points out that Gerard had originally included an incorrect image in the 1597 edition, illustrating Gallium album minus of Tabern (TaVern?) instead of (sic) Gallium rubrum.)

I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with this information now that I have it… my daily medication is contraindicated with coumarins, so I won’t be making myself cups of bedstraw tea or eating bedstraw salad any time soon. Perhaps I could avail myself of some goat’s milk, and try to make cheese? This bedstraw rennet recipe, from Monica Wilde, looks easy enough for me to follow!

Medieval Medicine and Astrology

Way back in March (and doesn’t that seem like a lifetime ago?), I submitted an essay on Medieval Medicine and Astrology. The medieval period is a little earlier than I’m actually studying (I sat in on an undergraduate module, Because I Could), but I thought it would be a good idea to get a little bit of cultural background before diving straight into the early modern. I promised, at the time, that I would follow up the essay with a blog post or two about astrology and herbals, and then life intervened in the form of a global pandemic… and here we are. 

I’ll admit that this isn’t the blog post that I’d intended to write (perhaps I’ll get to that later), but reading through so many different books in preparation for writing the essay, I became fascinated by how the authors’ views of astrology had changed over time. In An Illustrated History of the Herbals*, published in the 1970s, Frank Anderson is rather scathing about the inclusion of astrology in medical texts. He considers it ‘remarkable’ that Hildegard of Bingen, for example, writes a book so strongly rooted in twelfth century science, when ‘all of her other works are of a mystical and theological nature’. Anderson does concede that her writing represents the work she carried out in the convent, and that ‘Her Physica, in addition to displaying the state of knowledge then existing about the natural world, gives us a reliable picture of how medicine was practiced by the clergy.’ While Hildegard of Bingen’s prognostications are largely based on observable lunar events rather than the full complexities of astronomy, her work still represents a close relationship between medical and metaphysical thought. 

An image of an astrological chart, from Thurneisser's Historia, 1578.

Anderson is similarly dismissive of the astrological diagrams found throughout Thurneisser’s 1578 Historia.** (I know, it’s not medieval, but, I couldn’t resist sneaking into the sixteenth century for a moment.) Anderson’s caption below this image of an astrological chart reads: 

‘Scattered throughout Thurneisser’s Historia are numerous horoscopes with their arcane symbols. … Its major purpose was to baffle the uninitiated.’  

But people with a medical training, who were the intended audience of Thurneisser’s book, would absolutely not have been ‘uninitiated’, nor would they have found the astrological symbols ‘arcane’. By the sixteenth century, astrological symbols were included in widely distributed texts, including almanacs and school books, so they wouldn’t have been particularly mysterious or secret during that time. 

The emphasis of Thurneisser’s Historia was on using astrology to determine not only when to administer a particular medicine, but also when to collect the plants, and when to best prepare the remedies. This is a feature of many herbals right through to the seventeenth century. Anderson considers that the Historia’s ‘botanical value, as well as its medical value, was absolutely nil.’ Apparently, ‘the Historia delights the eye while offering little but offense to the mind’. I have to say that I find this assessment spectacularly unfair! While Anderson’s mind may have been offended in 1977, simply writing off astrology as valueless completely fails to take into account the educational background of the medical writers of the period, as well as prevailing cultural beliefs. 

During the 1950s, Grattan and Singer*** were equally scathing about medieval medicine, describing the Middle Ages as a ‘thousand years of scientific degradation’, largely due to the teleological perception that few medical advances were made during this period. Singer in particular considered astrology firmly in the realms of magical, rather than scientific, thinking.  

Consequently, it’s important to understand that this absolutely wasn’t the case from the twelfth century onwards. In order to become a physician and formally practice medicine, you needed a University education. For the “Trivium”, you learnt Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic. These enabled you to study Latin, and to understand and discuss it critically and philosophically. Once you’d passed those subjects, you could go on to study the higher level “Quadrivium” – Mathematics, Geometry, Astronomy and Music. 

The terms astronomy and astrology were sometimes used interchangeably, but whereas astronomy was a quantifiable, observable science, astrology could be considered its practical cousin – how you applied the astronomy you’d learned. In order to become a physician, your education came with both astronomy and astrology built in. Accepted by many as a basic scientific principle, the planets were considered to have demonstrable effects upon the body. This meant that an understanding of astrology was vitally important to the practical application of medicine, and definitely not unenlightened superstition.

*Frank J. Anderson, An illustrated history of the herbals (New York; Guildford: Columbia University Press, 1977)  Astrological image from page 185.
A copy is viewable online from Archive.org.

**Leonard Thurneisser zum Thurn, Historia… (Berlin, 1578)
A copy is viewable online from Archive.org.
The illustration referenced by Anderson, shown above, is on page 57.

***J. H. G. Grattan and Charles Singer, Anglo-Saxon magic and medicine: illustrated specially from the semi-pagan text Lacnunga (London: Oxford University Press, 1952)

Norman Douglas Simpson’s Library

Click through to Twitter to read the entire thread…

Last Friday I tweeted a thread on behalf of the Herbarium, about some lovely books I’d found in the cabinets while I was searching for 17th century herbals. Those books turned out to be part of a large personal library that was split, on Simpson’s death, between Reading University Herbarium, Cambridge University Herbarium, the Natural History Museum, and Kew.

Twitter certainly seemed to enjoy having a little look at the books – and I’m now in conversation with the Curator of Cambridge University Herbarium about the possibility of going and having a look at some of the Simpson paperwork that’s in their collection.

I certainly wasn’t expecting that to happen, when I went rummaging (gently!) through the bookshelves!

Saviolo’s War Rapier

Funny, the things that keep you awake at night – or at least prevent you from having a nice relaxing lie-in on a Sunday morning.

Paul in a fencing stance, his right arm raised, sword going out of shot to the right.
Paul at Swords of Winter, 19th October 2019

Yesterday Paul went to an Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) event called Swords of Winter. It was hosted by By The Sword, and featured workshops taught by six expert fencers:

Emilia Skirmuntt: Tomahawk & Bowie knife
Anouk Post: Spadroon
Chloe Headdon: British Military Sabre
Maria Makarova: German Longsword
Chantal Lashmar: Rapier Biomechanics
Steph West: Saviolo’s War Rapier

I was supposed to be going too – and Paul even bought us each a tomahawk especially for the occasion – but sadly the fibromyalgia said no, and I also woke up with germs on the day, so I was glad I’d already given away my place to a friend.

Claire with a plastic training tomahawk
As you can see, I’m pretty excited about my new tomahawk!

Paul came home from the workshops VERY EXCITED, particularly about Steph West’s workshop on Saviolo’s War Rapier. It’s been a long standing joke at School of the Sword, where we train, that Paul’s sidesword is a little bit ridiculous. It’s too long, it’s too heavy… and it turns out that actually, it’s an almost perfect example of the kind of sword that could be used in Saviolo’s practice!

The title page from Vincentio Saviolo, His Practice, an Elizabethan fencing handbook translated into English in 1595.

By Vincentio Saviolo (author), John Wolfe (printer) – Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/z4yl4t

As soon as Paul came home, the first thing he did was to look up Saviolo’s fencing treatise – the first to be printed in England, by John Wolfe in 1595. The martial arts school The 1595 Club take Saviolo’s works as their primary inspiration, and they have a biography of Saviolo and a reproduction of his treatise on their website. While Paul was puzzling his way through the somewhat opaque descriptions of how to take on your partner with a rapier and dagger, I was peeping over his shoulder at the book itself.

By Vincentio Saviolo (author), John Wolfe (printer) – Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/z4yl4t

The first thing I noticed was that although the fencing illustrations are very fine, particularly when compared with manuals such as Marozzo’s 1536 Opera Nova, the drop capitals are all over the place! I haven’t been able to find a digitised copy of the complete book online (The Folger Shakespeare Library only have four images), so all I have here is screenshots from what looks like a scanned photocopy, which don’t do justice to the original.

The screenshots are all taken from the Raymond J. Lord Collection of Historical Combat Techniques and Fencing Manuals, at the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The first book has only a few ornaments and drop capitals. It also only has six images of the fencers, preferring instead to concentrate on lengthy descriptions of the various plays. All of the drop caps in the first book are of the kind featuring a surrounding embellishment with a gap in the centre, into which you then place your required letter. These are an excellent solution if you don’t want to buy a complete fount of fancy drop capitals. During this period both typefounding and printing in England were strictly controlled by both the Stationers’ Company and the Star Chamber. Types were often imported from the Netherlands and, particularly with decorative pieces, printers may have bought simply the letters that they needed, or the few that they could afford. Both of these pieces of ornamentation are used multiple times throughout both the first and the second books.

The second book shows a lot more variation. It has a combination of woodcut capitals and the same drop-in ones as the first book. The large ornament across the top of the page is also used multiple times throughout. Interestingly, the woodcut capitals are not all in the same style. Most are floral and from the same typeface, one includes a figure, and two are rectangular rather than square. I’d love to have a look at an original copy, or a high-resolution scan, so I could see the details properly.

John Wolfe, the printer, appears to have been something of an interesting character. From 1591, complaints were brought against him that he was re-printing a wide variety of books to which other printers owned the rights. He was working under the auspices of the Fishmongers’ Company (his father may have been a fishmonger), which meant that he was not bound by the rules of the Stationers’ Company regarding what he could and couldn’t print, and he strongly resisted all entreaties to join. He persisted in this, despite a period of imprisonment, until 1587 when a set of complicated circumstances saw him take up the position of acting beadle of the Stationers’ Company. Following this appointment he became particularly adept at prosecuting illicit printers, many of whom he had previously worked with.

Interestingly, by 1595 Wolfe was no longer running his own press, having moved largely into publishing. It seems likely that Saviolo’s treatise was actually printed by either Adam Islip (who printed all three editions of Gerard’s Herball) or John Windet, despite Wolfe’s name appearing on the title page.

The Elizabethan period is such a fascinating time in the history of English printing. I really need to dig out all of my undergrad Typography books and refresh my poor old memory!