Tag: 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!

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)

The Tudor Tailor – Missing Persons conference

The Tudor Tailor logo
Image copyright The Tudor Tailor

Well, this is something exciting that I’ve been meaning to blog about for ages – I’m going to the Tudor Tailor conference!

It’s not until next April, but I’m really looking forward to it, as it brings a number of my interests together into one place.

The conference is the occasion for the launch of their next book, The Typical Tudor, which examines not the court dress of previous books, but the clothes of the ordinary Tudor person. It also contains knitting patterns, which I’m very excited to see!

The focus of the conference is on the hunt for evidence, which is much more difficult when you’re talking about clothes that weren’t preserved for posterity in the way that court dress often was. The search for reliable sources around intangible history is really interesting to me, as it’s a difficulty that I’m facing in my research into early modern medicine. The Herbals exist, and we can trace who owned and used them… but what about the people who didn’t have access to the books? Those who couldn’t afford or couldn’t read them? I’m hoping that the conference will introduce me to different ways of looking for evidence, and how to distinguish what is most likely to be both reliable and broadly representative.

And of course, on a purely practical level, I can’t wait to get the book and start sewing! Despite having owned The Tudor Tailor for many years, I’ve never actually constructed a Tudor outfit. Everyday clothing is far more my style than court dress, so I’m really interested to see the patterns and decide what I’m going to make.

I’ve had an idea in the back of my mind for a couple of years to put together a period-correct outfit suitable for swordfighting in. We primarily study Manciolino and Marozzo, who both published treatises during the 1530s, so these patterns will be spot on.

Obviously I won’t be allowed to fight in Tudor clothing – not unless I build it in such a way that I can safely incorporate my modern protective sports kit. But I would definitely like to go through some of the exercises and flow drills, just to make the point that it would have been absolutely possible for a Tudor woman to be a fencer – if she’d had the opportunity.

The History of Underclothes

This is my new favourite book. Originally published in 1951 (the Dover edition above is from 1992), it’s a detailed history of underclothes (the clue is in the title!) from the medieval period to the 1930s. The information is collected from magazines and catalogues, as well as museums and the study of extant garments.

The tone of the writing, as you might expect, is rather dated, and reveals perhaps more than the authors intended about 1950s attitude towards underwear! But the descriptions are invaluable, and extremely detailed.

I only wish that the book had continued to write about one more decade. At the moment I’m interested to learn about underwear of the 1940s – specifically the Utility Clothing Scheme. There’s quite a bit of information out there about CC41 clothing, but I haven’t turned up much about the underwear. Was it included in the brand? Were people expected to just keep wearing the same old worn-out underpants? Did many people make their own? I’m still at the “googling vaguely” stage of research at the moment, so if anybody has any links that might be useful, please feel free to share!

REME Museum of Technology (Part 1)

This morning we paid an impromptu visit to the REME Museum of Technology at Arborfield. We wanted to go somewhere local, but that we’d never been to before, so this fit the bill perfectly. We were both surprised at how big the Museum was, and also how good the displays were. I have to say that we’d looked at the Museum’s website and pre-judged the place a little, so we were very pleasantly surprised when we arrived.

The main Museum building has lots of displays of different types of technology. There are lots of recordings to listen to, a slightly animatronic guard (who told us off for not having shiny boots!), and uniforms for the children to try on. It mostly looks at the period 1939-45, but there are much older objects in the small arms room, and some more recent developments too. We saw communications technology from the Falklands, and photographs of some current equipment being used in Afghanistan.

Medals

These medals made me pause, because I’m fairly certain they’re the same ones that my Grandad had. From left to right they’re The 1939-1945 Star, The Africa Star and The 1939-1945 War Medal. These three were awarded to a driver in Africa, which is pretty much all I know about my Grandad’s role during the Second World War. He drove lorries, and he went to Africa. Beyond that I don’t know anything, because he simply refused to talk about it. When we found my Grandad’s medals, they were still in their original brown cardboard box, ribbons folded, wrapped in paper. They were kept in a drawer in the dining room, underneath the tea towels.

"DANGER"

This little box (about 12cm/5″ square) is part of the food ration and contains, believe it or not, a tiny stove. The tablets warned against on the box are blocks of hexamine – like modern firelighters. I love the way that “DANGER“ has been emphasised with capitals, bold, quotation marks and underlining, just in case you’ve somehow missed the point.

I tried to take pictures of some other glorious examples of typography, but it was a little bit too dark. My favourite leaflet was a set of instructions for what to do if you should escape after having been taken prisoner. Seventeen pieces of advice, beginning with “Air your feet” and ending with “DO NOT GET FLUSTERED”. Not quite as snappy as “KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON”, but important advice nonetheless!

You can see more photos here.

    Seeing Smocks Everywhere…

    I was watching Cranford on the iPlayer, when I spotted Harry wearing a smock!

    I couldn’t get a clearer picture than this, but there’s a smocked panel front and back, and at both the shoulders and cuffs on the sleeves.

    Am I going to see smocks everywhere I look from now on?

    50 Years of Everyday Fashion

    This weekend we were idly looking at the magazines in the local shop, when Paul said, “I can’t believe you haven’t picked up this!”

    “This” turned out to be a magazine by Yours (the best-selling lifestyle magazine for the fifty-plus woman, apparently), called, “50 Years of Everyday Fashion: How the Women of Britain Created Glamour and Style on a Shoestring”.

    It has a glorious picture of Audrey Hepburn on the cover, it costs £4.99, and I heartily recommend it! It covers the period 1948 to 1997, and also has sections on men’s clothes, Royalty, and weddings.

    The thing which particularly interests me about this magazine is its “everyday fashion” approach. So many fashion magazines and books, whatever period they’re discussing, tend to only talk about the prominent designers of that time. Of course this is important, but it often bears very little relation to what was being sold on the high street, what women were making for themselves, and what kinds of clothes people were wearing to go about their everyday lives.

    There’s a whole chapter on making your own clothes, and it’s full of photographs of people wearing the most beautiful outfits. Some of the clothing made during wartime and post-war rationing is particularly noteworthy, because people had to be imaginative in the ways that they used fabrics and re-used old clothes. The magazine suggests that the rise of designer labels during the 1980s was one cause of home dressmaking going into decline, but cites the recent resurgence in the popularity of knitting as a hopeful sign that people might also regain enthusiasm in making their own clothes.

    I think that enthusiasm is already here – although I’m naturally somewhat biased on the subject!

    The TV show Project Runway, for example, has inspired a range of Simplicity sewing patterns. Books such as Rip It and Generation T are a drop in the ocean of books telling you how to make new clothes out of old ones, and there are dozens of online communities devoted to showing off clothes that you’ve made yourself.

    If I was going to recommend one book to anybody who wanted to learn how to make their own clothes, it would be the Reader’s Digest New Complete Guide to Sewing. I have the original 1978 edition, and it’s an absolute goldmine. Anything you could possibly want to know about making your own clothes, you’ll find it in there.

    If you’re more interested in reading about clothes than in making them yourself, then you might enjoy The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping. It’s little snippets from literature which give an insight into the ways that people used to shop, and it’s absolutely wonderful.

    Four vintage patterns…

    Look at what my Mum found, when she was clearing out some things from my Grandma’s house!

    None of the envelopes have dates on them, but the style of the illustrations and the style of the clothes suggests late 1950s/early 1960s.

    Even better – they’re in a size which I can modify to actually fit me! They’re sizes 18 and 20, which translates roughly to a modern size 14 and 16.

    Four vintage patterns

    IMG_4120 IMG_4121 IMG_4122 IMG_4123

    The dress that I’m most likely to make and wear is (surprise!) the Maudella a-line shift dress. I might leave out the hanging fabric for daily wear, but I do love the contrasting circles.

    In fact, I might even take that envelope with me the next time I go to the hairdresser. I love everything about that outfit.

    Oh dear, I am now fighting a terrible urge to make this dress from camouflage fabric, with elephants peeping through the holes! I’ve almost certainly got enough fabric left over from the elephant dress to do that…

    The Way We Wore.

    I’m reading the most fantastic book at the moment – The Way We Wore, by Robert Elms. It’s about one man, and the importance of his clothes as he grows up. It’s a social history, and a sartorial autobiography.

    Robert Elms is half a generation older than me, so some of the earlier parts of the book are quite difficult to understand, although I can still picture a lot of the clothes very precisely, thanks to seeing the few old photos of my Dad as a teenager, and having been pretty obsessed with the 1960s when I was a teenager myself. The 1970s seem to have been just as confusing for Elms as they were for me, although I was far too young to be thinking about clothes at that time.

    It was the 1980s that really did it for me. I was eight years old in 1981, the year that Philip Oakey of the Human League appeared on Top of the Pops with eyeliner, earrings and a pierced nipple. I’m absolutely certain that I noticed none of these things at the time, and was quite shocked when I saw that footage again recently and worked out how young I must have been when I saw it first. The 1980s were for New Romantics and Soft Cell and Nick Rhodes – always Nick Rhodes – never Simon Le Bon or Roger Taylor. Nick Rhodes, always Nick Rhodes, because he was the one with the feathered hair and the eyeliner. No wonder I ended up as a goth. I’d been looking for men in make-up since I was eight years old.

    Of course I was far too young to be a goth or a New Romantic at the age of eight, or even really to know what those things meant. I do remember having a Madonna phase, all leggings and hair bows, although it was never as pronounced as my sister’s, who had the lacy gloves and everything. I had braces and a too-big trilby with a turquoise band, purchased from Top Man. I can’t remember now what I attached the braces to. It can’t have been leggings, although my wardrobe was full of those, and I never had a pair of jeans so tight that they had to have a zip at the ankle or you couldn’t get your feet through. My friend Kerry broke her wrist getting into a pair.

    I remember the braces and the trilby, and the elasticated belts like a nurse, with a butterfly for the buckle. I remember a neon yellow skirt, worn with the most atrocious haircut on my fourteenth birthday. I remember going all the way to Tammy Girl in Hanley, and longing for the day when my skinny frame would be old enough to fit into grown-up Etam clothes instead. I remember my beloved Falmer Kittens. Jeans with a brand name, instead of from the catalogue! Jeans in a size nine! Jeans with tiny little dots woven directly into the fabric. I loved those jeans, and I wore them until they fell apart, and because ripped denim had become fashionable by then I wore them for a bit longer. I wore them with my favourite shirt, which did come from the catalogue, and it was plain white stiff heavy cotton, with black embroidery down the placket front. Perhaps I also wore the braces, and probably an old waistcoat from a charity shop, covered in badges. I’ve never owned a shirt of such good quality since. I wore it to parties and when it got older I wore it to college. I wore it with skirts and braces and hats. (Probably not all at once, but then it was the 1980s. It’s hard to be sure.)

    And shoes. Let’s not even get started on the subject of shoes. Confined to orthopaedic lace-ups during the early years, I remember very clearly being allowed my first pair of tan sandals for the summer, aged about nine. I went outside to play in them, and promptly ruined them by getting covered in tar. That summer was so hot that the road had melted, and my brand new sandals were spoiled.

    This was written as a stream of consciousness this morning. (Hence the over-long sentences and too many commas.) I’m sure it’s hugely out of order chronologically, but I was just writing down odd things as they occurred to me. I didn’t even mention the giant black and blue stripy jumper, or the lace-up tan stiletto heels, or the grey pixie boots, or the haircut that made me look like a boy, or my first pair of Doc Martens, which made my Mum laugh because they looked so much like the orthopaedic shoes I’d spent so long rebelling against. I’m sure you’ll get to hear about that some other time…