Category: University

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!

New PhD, new YouTube channel, new blog posts?

eternal magpie YouTube channel trailer

I would apologise for largely abandoning this blog for the entire duration of my two-year MA, but honestly, I only had so much writing time and energy to go around, and all of it ended up going into my essays. But! The MA is now complete (I should find out how I did towards the end of the year), and just this week I’ve started my PhD!

As well as writing NINETY THOUSAND words about seventeenth century witches, as portrayed in herbals, almanacs, and husbandry manuals, one of my goals for the six-ish year duration of the PhD is to build up some skills in presenting my work to the public.

It takes a certain amount of effort to manage my chronic anxiety and extremely distractible brain at the best of times, and the thought of public speaking fills me with terror. But I do need to be able to present my work, and I will (eventually) need to survive my PhD viva, so I figured that it’s never too early to start practicing. Speaking to people I can’t see feels like a good place to start!

So far I don’t have a plan for this, I don’t have an upload schedule… nothing so organised. At some point I may well develop those things, but I’m not far enough into the research yet to really know how my time is going to balance out. I’m still working at the Cole Museum of Zoology and volunteering at the Herbarium, so even though my PhD is part time, I still need to be careful not to over-commit myself. (She says, as though that isn’t a lifelong habit that needs crushing into the ground.)

The first week of term has largely consisted of Admin Shenanigans, which I think are almost sorted out now. Fingers crossed. I’ve had a meeting with my supervisors, I’ve been to a couple of seminars, and I’ve only managed to triple-book myself for one very busy Thursday later in the term. What I haven’t done yet is ANY WORK, so Monday will be my first day of sitting down with my notes and having a Good Hard Think. I can’t wait!

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!

A Mole Cricket and a Secret Recipe

Click through to Twitter to read the entire thread!

Who knew sea squirts were so beautiful?

Click through to Twitter to read the rest of the thread!

New volunteers and a tiny little mole embryo

Click through to Twitter to read the rest of the thread!

Who knew DIY skills were so important in museums?

Click through to Twitter to read the rest of the thread!

Things are never as easy as they seem…

Click through to Twitter to read the rest of the thread!