Minerva's Musings

The English Housewife

2009-07-12T21:19:00.005-06:00

Written by Gervaise Markham in 1615. A handbook for housewives containing "all the virtuous knowledges and actions both of the mind and body, which ought to be in any complete housewife." Markham reveals the "pretty and curious secrets" of preparing everything from simple foods to such elaborate meals as a "humble feast" - an undertaking which entails preparing "no less than two and thirty dishes, which is as much as can stand on one table." He instructs the housewife on brewing beer and caring for wine, growing flax and hemp for thread, and spinning and dyeing. As a housewife was also responsible for the health and "soundness of body" of her family, he includes advice on the prevention of everything from the plague to baldness and bad breath.

About GM:
Pudsey, a retainer on the Shrewsbury Worksop side, bit his thumb at Orme, a retainer on the Holles Haughton side; was called out with drawn rapier, was slain on the spot like fiery Tybalt, and never bit his thumb more. Orme, poor man, was tried for murder; but of course the Holleses and the Stanhopes could not let him be hanged; they made interest, they feed law-counsel,—they smuggled him away to Ireland, and he could not be hanged. Whereupon Gervase Markham, a passably loose-tongued, loose-living gentleman, sworn squire-of dames to the Dowager of Shrewsbury, took upon himself to say publicly, That John Holles was himself privy to Pudsey’s murder, “That John Holles himself, if justice were done——!”

Holles and Markham have a duel where GM is pierced in the genitals - he survives but is incapable of having sex. This is 1497 or some such.

English Renaissance

2009-07-11T09:45:00.019-06:00

The renaissance is generally considered to have started in Italy with a renewed interest in antiquity. (Dante used Virgil as his guide). Italian humanists visited Byzantium in order to learn Greek and to buy old manuscripts, saved from pillages, conflagrations, and devastation of the invaded country. Many Greek texts were brought from Constantinople. Europe was ransacked for copies of the long unused Latin classics and copyists multiplied them. With the fall of Constantinople eastern scholars moved to Rome and brought ideas and texts with them.

Some of these ideas migrated north although some say renaissance in Italy and England are unrelated. Clearly Henry VII and his mother Margaret Beaumont took inspiration from the new ideas about education and scholarship, particularly from Erasmus. Margaret met John Fisher in 1494. He was a friend and collaborator of Erasmus, who was to be her lifelong confidant, counselor, and companion. Fisher became the Bishop of Winchester, and Cancellor of Cambridge University.
Margaret translated Thomas A Kempis to English and founded two colleges at Cambridge - Jesus College in 1497, and St. John's College after her death in 1509, through a grant in her will.
She promoted the printing of books, and was a leading patron of the first English printer, William Caxton, and his successor. Finally, she belived in education for everybody

Scholars went to Italy to be educated and returned with new ideas. Thomas Linacre, for example, was hired by Henry upon his return from Italy around 1500, first as a tutor to his oldest son Arthur, and then as the King's personal physician. Linacre later became the first president of the Royal College of Physicians, which was incorporated in 1518. William Grocyn travelled to Italy to be educated, and on his return initiated the teaching of Greek at Oxford.

Two other important proponents of education in general and new kinds of learning in particular were Thomas More and John Colet. Colet traveled to Italy, where he became a fervent promoter of Platonism. More (1478-1535) was the son of a London lawyer. He studied Greek and Platonic philosophy at Oxford.

Henry VII surrounded himself with men who promoted the Renaissance's ``New Learning.'' The King himself was clearly fascinated by the political and cultural life of the main Italian states, and during his reign, the English court was a more interesting and cosmopolitan place, than it was to be in the time of his successor. Foreign scholars were likely to receive a warm welcome, and Henry was also the leading patron of English writers and poets.

Henry's interest in the arts was widely recognized, and a knowledge of the Classics was regarded as an avenue to royal favor, encouraging others to master the Renaissance learning. Erasmus reported in 1505, that London had eclipsed both Oxford and Cambridge, and had become the country's most important educational center, where ``there are ... five or six men who are accurate scholars in both tongues [Greek and Latin], such as I think even Italy itself does not at present possess.''

After studying in England, most of these scholars travelled to Italy, to master the new Platonic learning. Thomas Linacre, for example, was hired by Henry upon his return from Italy around 1500, first as a tutor to his oldest son Arthur, and then as the King's personal physician. Linacre later became the first president of the Royal College of Physicians, which was incorporated in 1518. William Grocyn travelled to Italy to be educated, and on his return initiated the teaching of Greek at Oxford.

One leading royal patron of education was Lady Margaret Beaufort, the King's mother. She has been described as ``more nearly the typical `man of the Renaissance' than her son,'' and that, even though her ``influence and endowments were ... religious rather than secular, they were outward looking and humanist, never scholastic.'' Lady Margaret was the only woman whose advice the King ever sought or heeded.

Margaret was only fourteen when her son Henry was born. She died in 1509, outliving her son by several months. As a child, she was taught reading, writing, and French. Her tutors remarked on her intelligence. She desired to learn Greek and Latin, but her mother refused to hire a tutor to educate her in the languages that were reserved for men who joined the clergy. As an adult, she completed an English translation of Thomas a@ag Kempis's {The Imitation of Christ,} which had been begun by William Atkinson, as well as translating another religious work.

Lady Margaret promoted the education of the entire population. She was a devout Christian, who championed the preaching of simple but eloquent sermons, which would uplift even the lowliest churchgoer. She promoted the printing of books, and was a leading patron of the first English printer, William Caxton, and his successor.

In 1494, Margaret met John Fisher, a friend and collaborator of Erasmus, who was to be her lifelong confidant, counselor, and companion. Fisher became the Bishop of Winchester, and Cancellor of Cambridge University. He encouraged Margaret to patronize projects that promoted the New Learning. As a result, she supported the founding of two colleges at Cambridge, Jesus College in 1497, and St. John's College after her death in 1509, through a grant in her will. St. John's, which opened in 1516, became the leading college at Cambridge for the next thirty years.

Another patron of education was Bishop Richard Fox, the man who played a key role in Henry VII's foreign policy. In 1517, Fox and Hugh Oldham, bishop of Exeter, founded Corpus Christi College, whose statutes set out in detail a humanist curriculum. Initially, Fox had wished to found a college to educate clergy in the New Learning, but ultimately, the college accepted students destined for secular employment.

Although Henry and his circle favored the New Learning, the universities remained dominated by medieval scholasticism. The efforts of Henry and his circle were ultimately successful, however, as they opened the door for a circle of scholars associated with Erasmus of Rotterdam to create a revolution in education, which led to the great flowering of culture and the English economy during the next hundred years.

The Erasmus Circle

The central figure in the circle that launched the English Renaissance was Erasmus of Rotterdam. Born to poor parents in Holland in 1467, Erasmus was educated by the Brotherhood of the Common Life, a teaching order modeled on a Kempis's {Imitation of Christ,} that took in poor, but promising children. Several of his teachers inspired him to take dedicate his life to the promotion of Platonist Classical learning.

Erasmus became the leading humanist thinker of his age, and his name was a household word throughout educated Europe. He published his first work, the {Adages,} in 1500. Works such as {In Praise of Folly} and {The Handbook of the Militant Christian} become enormously popular, precisely at the moment when printing was coming into vogue. His works spread far and wide, and played an important role in promoting literacy throughout Europe.

Among Erasmus's key collaborators in England were Thomas More (1478-1535) and John Colet (1467-1519). They were the nucleus of a small group of Classically educated scholars, formed during the reign of Henry VII, who dedicated themselves to creating a Renaissance that would usher in an age where society would be governed by reason. Colet was the son of a London mercer, who was Lord Mayor in 1486 and 1495. He traveled to Italy, where he became a fervent promoter of Platonism. More (1478-1535) was the son of a London lawyer. He studied Greek and Platonic philosophy at Oxford, and became a key leader of the English Renaissance during the reign of Henry VIII.

These scholars proceeded from the idea that, since man's nature was in the image of God, he could comprehend God's nature through reason. They rejected the stultifying, Aristotelian logic of the scholastics, whose commentaries dominated theology, and sought instead to reintroduce the writings of the early Church Fathers and the New Testament itself, in which they recognized an outlook coherent with Platonic philosophy.

Erasmus first traveled to England during the reign of Henry VII, in 1499. The circle around Erasmus, More, and Colet began to establish schools which became models for the transformation of the educational system. Around 1510, More set up a school in his home, where he taught his own and other children. In 1510, Henry VIII granted a license to establish St. Paul's school, which became the model for the reorganization of the English grammar schools throughout the country. When Erasmus turned down the job as the headmaster of the new school Colet asked William Lily, who had studied at Oxford and in Italy. Lily had also travelled to Rhodes to learn Greek. Erasmus did write the curriculum.
Lily, Colet, and Erasmus jointly collaborated in drafting a grammar textbook. By 1542, this text had been adopted as the official Latin Grammar used throughout the schools in England. Its use continued up through the Eighteenth century, and, in a modified form, in many schools even into the Twentieth.

- there WAS also something doing in England during Henry VIII (the first English Renaissance Monarch) and even more Elizabeth - but perhaps pushed more by political stability (possibly breaking with pope motivated people to find other authorities?). England less focused on visual art and more on literature, esp. drama.

Timing different? Italy 1400 - 1550, England 1485 - 1603 (or 1616)?

Religion:
Thomas More, Richard Hoooker

Science:

Politics:

Theater:
Shakespeare, Marlowe,

Poetry:
Roger Ascham, Edmund Spenser, Lady Mary Herbert, John Lyly, Wyatt, Surrey

Architecture:

Questions:
How to follow the trail of Boccacio, Dante, and others writing in the vernacular to Chaucer - and how does writing in the vernacular square with reading latin and greek texts? Is looking for pre-christian writing the common goal?
Are John Donne (1573-1631) and Ben Johnson (1573-1637) renaissance or later? And where the hell does Francis Bacon (1561-1621) fit?

Links at:
http://east_west_dialogue.tripod.com/europe/id5.html
http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/renaissanceinfo.htm

Thesaurus

2009-07-04T11:07:00.001-06:00

Examine

Explore

Consider

Study

Investigate

Inquire

Probe

Great Chain of Being

2009-07-01T08:02:00.004-06:00

One of the big ideas that remained in force from the classical period was the concept of the Great Chain of Being. Its major premise was that everything in the universe had its position in a divinely planned order, a hierarchy that looked like a vertical chain going from the most important and perfect - God - on top to the least important and imperfect - innanimate things like rocks - at the bottom.
came from ...

DETAILS
note that people thought all links had to be represented - the most perfect world contains the whole chain, and so imperfection is part of perfection ..
Literary ramifications - metaphors indicate something about status
political ramificiations - your social position is divinely ordained, obey or else
moral ramifications - upsetting the cart is a sin
Theological - the cause is more perfect than what it causes - there must be a cause for everything - the first cause can not be caused - hence God

Illustrations:

Bibliography:
E.M.W. Tillyard "The Elizabethan World Picture"
Arthur Lovejoy "The Great Chain of Being"

other sources
http://e.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chain_of_Being

http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/Tillyard01.html

Party Invites

2009-06-04T07:34:00.006-06:00

jim
kate
Ben
Kerri
Cameron
Jonathan
Kaitlyn
Gretchen

Harvest n Terry
Marge
Michelle Navarro
James K & Jessica
Blake & Gina
Megan & Kevin
Shazia Ali
Dallie Clark
Sunny deLamant
Nina Serebriank
Diana Gingo & Patrick
Stacy Donald
Jamie Wheeler
Andrea Leavey
Todd Camplin
Michelle Nickerson & Ben
Peter Park
Dan W & Susan
Linda Snow
Michael Wilson
Robert Nelsen

Susan (dental hygienist)
Cecelia
Dennis and Sharon
Heather & Michael
Lydia & Aline
Ann & Moira Brown
Will Young
James and Sarah
Harvest's grandmother Faye Willard
Rulonna
Billie Hughes (UTA)
Susan Hekman
Charles and Sherry Nussbaum
Grace Taylor

Invited but won't be here:
Inger, Michael, Klas
Annika, Tony ...
Rachel, Asa
Beth, Dale, Ethan, Dylan
Sherry & Herb
Jerry Soliday and Elke
Pam G
Pat M

Newtonianism and Pope and Descartes n stuff

2009-05-31T08:32:00.003-06:00

So, it appears that the worldviews of Descartes and Newton were fighting for power over the period. Not sure what belonged where, but generally I think the idea is a world that can be explained and a world that is less about god than man.

Newton: Math, experiment, mechanistic - but also with fluids and invisible gases, Gravity really was a big deal, and ideas about how things had density and pull
Descartes: Reason, induction, mechanistic with no invisible stuff

Pope epitaph on Newton ... "Nature and Nature's Law, lay hid in night / God said 'Let Newton be!' and all was light", Pope was also interested in gravity and gravitas - and he and Swift were unhappy with the dull pedantry of minor scientists. Fight between ancients and moderns and between prose and poetry writers. (See www.ourcivilization.com/smartboard/shop/hornecj/litsci.htm for more). So is wit and poetry an attempt to balance prosaic study of nature - art against science?

Books for women in public 18th culture class

2009-05-27T15:15:00.001-06:00

John Styles. The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven Yale University Press, 2007. Illustrations. xi + 432 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-12119-3.

Post-PhD blues

2009-05-15T20:35:00.002-06:00

http://www.english-blog.com/archives/2007/12/the_post_phd_blues.php

http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,37694.0.html

http://phdblue.blogspot.com/

http://anya.blogsome.com/2005/03/19/from-the-post-phd-blues-to-publication-bliss/

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_index.php?idx=119&d=1&w=5&e=333

Dissertation writing advice part II

2009-05-13T11:55:00.003-06:00

The dissertation doctor: has good stuff on the PROCESS.
http://www.dissertationdoctor.com/index.html

The dissertation journey - breaking down the pieces:
http://www.dissertationdoctor.com/journey.html

About the lit. review, why it is important and how to do it.
http://www.deakin.edu.au/library/findout/research/litrev.php

Procrastination

2009-05-13T11:43:00.003-06:00

Website:
http://procrastinus.com/

ABD websites:
These are sites helping people finish their doctoral dissertations.

Academic Research Group
American Psychological Association
Dissertation Doctor
Eddie's Anti-Procrastination Site

Tips:

Goal Setting

This is one of the most established ways of moving forward on your plans. Take any project you are presently procrastinating and break it down into individual steps. Each of these steps should have the following three aspects. First, they should be somewhat challenging though achievable for you. It is more satisfying to accomplish a challenge. Second, they should be proximal, that is you can achieve them fairly soon, preferable today or over the next few days. Third, they should be specific, that is you know exactly when you have accomplished them. If you can visualize in your mind what you should do, even better.

Stimulus Control

This method has also been well tested and is very successful. What you need is a single place that you do your work and nothing else. Essentially, you need an office, though many students have a favorite desk at a library. For stimulus control to work best, the office or desk should be free of any signs of temptation or easily available distractions that might pull you away (e.g., no games, no chit-chat, no web-surfing). If you need a break, that is fine, but make sure you have it someplace at least a few minutes distant, preferably outside of the building itself. If you are unwilling to take the time to get there, acknowledge that you likely don’t need the break.

Routines

Routines are difficult to get into but in the end, this is often our aim. Things are much easier to do when we get into a habit of them, whether it is work, exercise, or errands. If you schedule some of those tasks you are presently procrastinating upon so that they occur on a regular schedule, they become easier. Start your routine slowly, something to which you can easily commit. Eventually, like brushing your teeth, it will likely become something you just do, not taking much effort at all. At this point, you might add to your routine, again always keeping your overall level of effort at a moderate to low level. Importantly, when you fall off your routine, inevitable with sickness or the unexpected, get back on it as soon as possible. Your routine gets stronger every time your follow it. It also gets weaker every time you don’t.

Manuscript changes

2009-05-09T07:36:00.003-06:00

What I want to do:

Reread Bannet

Add Wollstonecraft - at least enough to figure 0ut where she fits

Explain why the biography is important and revise to fit. It is important because:
- the circumstances of their lives provides insight into what opportunities they had (the mentors, access to resources, etc)
- the circumstances of their lives is what positioned them to HAVE other choices than gender
- the private choices they made provide insight into the strategies they used and since I am claiming that individual women could play their hand differently, I should show what sort of players they were

- I say beyond gender for two reasons - one of them is that we need to look at men and women NOT from a gendered perspective, but allowing for these other strategies - ie people listed as "women" were also other things, the other is that men and women could choose similar strategies. So yes I should have male comparisons, but in a sense I am looking at one variable to see how relevant that variable is to certain situations - and that is just fine.

- If I AM to add men, who do I do: Pope for Lady Mary, Johnson for Montagu, Hume for Macaulay, and Adams or Gerry for Warren, then Burke and Wollstonecraft.

- More on virtue?

- The literary market, read Eisenstein and Guest (small change). Consider manuscript publication at the end of the 18thC - is it still a possibility and how do we understand the marketplace at that time?

Meanwhile in France???

job stuff

2009-05-01T09:13:00.001-06:00

Various links and info on jobs:

Negotiable items
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/careerprep/jobsearch/negotiable.html

Defense suggestions

2009-04-29T23:05:00.005-06:00

What I should look at:

PG - , Descartes p. 35, mentor/mentee relationships, how is a model different from the new categories I draw up here, Aristotle and the genres? and finally Pope and the Dunciad, did he really say what was wrong was gravity?

PM - Wollstonecraft, Bannet

DW - literary perspective, i.e. the persona of "author" that was not available to everyone, if looking at GENDER then you need to have male comparisons too (add a chapter on each guy?), also be more specific about textual analysis (e.g. p. 146 on the discussion of the curiously gendered gesture of Warren, saying how she should be excused as there were talented men who had failed also).

Consider the amount of biography and justify it.

Legislation that wasn't

2009-03-30T11:23:00.002-06:00

"Wrong dates, false attributions, and a lot of plain malarky get passed on from generation to generation as scholars plunder one another's footnotes." (From Robert Hume's Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism.)

Post on C18-L by Joel Berson:
2) Writer A quotes from the 1675 diary of a young girl in New England who comments on luxurious, fashionable dress that she had seen displayed in Boston -- 40 to 65 years earlier than other writers put the arrival of fancy clothing. A cites B, who did not document his source and who told me his notes were inaccessible. Fortunately the quoted passage turned up via Google, leading to "A Puritan Maiden's Diary", discovered by Adeline E. H. Slicer and published in _The New England Magazine_ in 1894. (I also found a third writer, C, citing the same passage.) Reading the diary, my ears began to tingle -- it did not sound 17th century even to my untrained ones. Should I accept and use the Puritan maiden's quotation as evidence of the beginnings of a consumer society in Boston in 1675? Fortunately, I also found Mary Beth Norton's "Getting to the Source: Hetty Shepard, Dorothy Dudley, and Other Fictional Colonial Women I Have Come to Know Altogether Too Well", in which she "demonstrates conclusively that it was in fact composed in the late nineteenth century by its nominal editor, Adeline E. Herbert Slicer" (from the abstract). Thus Norton saved me the considerable time and effort I might have spent in "vetting" the diary myself, and at least *I* have not picked it up and repeated it.

NaNoWriMo

2009-03-29T22:56:00.003-06:00

National Novel Writing Month - apparently there is this yearly novel writing competition - looks interesting and all, but I don't think I should get involved in writing a novel in a month in November. I should have other things to do. What is interesting is the page with tips on how to EDIT your work once you have a draft. Several people talk about their approach:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/nowwhat

The best three comments are from Chris Baty. He says:

1) It will take longer than you expect - and he gives a timeline. Very helpful.

2) Get someone to help you with the plot - get a 30 page or so storyboard and then get help with nailing that down. - I think the getting help is good, but I think the 30 page storyboard is even more helpful, since it gives an OUTLINE of the whole thing without all the pesky details. It gives you a frame to work from.

3) Do not polish the details of style until you have the plot down. What you polish may end up getting cut, and you end up futsing with details that will never matter. Once you know the plot and the characters - THEN you can make it pretty.

I want to add a fourth from my own experience. Use that 30 page storyboard as a base and start filling things in as you go. I made an outline that I kept expanding and expanding until first one and then a second and a third chapter emerged. At first I tried to write linearly, from page 1 to page 200, but that is really not how I process information. When I started seeing it as a puzzle where you have bits and pieces connected and they grow bigger and then one bit suddenly connects to another and you keep an eye out for all the edge pieces because when you have those in you have a frame for the whole thing. It has also been the case several times that I have a few paragraphs that stick together but really don't belong where I first stick them, so I move three paragraphs over to another part of a chapter (or in some cases to a different chapter) just like you do with the puzzle when you realize that those particular red pieces are not part of the nose but of the scarf in the other corner of the picture.

Dissertation writing advice

2009-02-22T03:03:00.004-06:00

These are the things that have worked for me:

Start with the primary sources as early as possible - they will lead you to the theory you need.

Having a general sense of the territory is good, but read the theory you need to answer specific questions rather than try to understand ALL of the debates just in case.

Start writing early - like right now. Get an outline up as FAST as possible so you have some place to put all your bits and pieces of writing.

Engage with the material EVERY day. You must keep it fresh in your head so you spend your off time thinking about the issues. You cannot think through things if you have to spend the first five hours remembering what the questions are.

Find your minimal block of time to be productive - for me it is three hours unless it is mechanics. I can do mechanics in shorter blocks, and try to leave them for those times, and the times when I desperately need something hands on to do that will distract me and still keep me feeling like I am moving forward.

Have a space where you do not have to put your stuff away - unpacking every time takes at least an hour. I have a writing space where I ONLY do dissertation work. I have all my books out, my laptop and music and room for tea. When I go there I know I am working on the dissertation, and so does everyone else. I get left alone. I can concentrate.

Do no think you will remember where you saw something , you will not. Find a way to write it down, preferably a place you can find the notes later.

Write notes that are explicit enough that you will understand your line of reasoning a month later. Write it to someone else - that is who you will be a month from now. You will not remember, so don't write something to jog your memory - write something that makes sense.

Possible publications

2009-02-22T02:22:00.002-06:00

Different Directions:

Top three:
AHR
Journal of British Studies
Eighteenth Century Studies

Representations - interdisciplinary, cutting edge
The Historian
Notes and Queries
Early Modern Women (1400 - 1700)

Titles on EM

2009-01-30T10:50:00.001-06:00

N. Clarke, Dr Johnson's women (2000) · N. Clarke, The rise and fall of the woman of letters (2004) · E. Eger, ‘Representing culture: “The nine living muses of Great Britain (1779)”’, Women, writing and public sphere, 1700–1830, ed. E. Eger and others (2001), 104–132 · E. Eger and L. Peltz, Brilliant women: 18th-century bluestockings (2008) · H. Guest, Small change: women, learning, patriotism, 1750–1810 (2000) · S. H. Myers, The bluestocking circle: women, friendship, and the life of the mind in eighteenth-century England (1990) · D. Hume, ‘Rise and progress of the arts and sciences’, Essays, moral, political and literary (1963) · G. Kelly, ed., Bluestocking feminism: writings of the bluestocking circle, 1738–1785, 6 vols. (1999) · N. Pohl and B. Schellenberg, eds., Reconsidering the bluestockings (2003)

Resource on Elizabeth Montagu

2009-01-19T00:32:00.000-06:00

http://www.moonstonerp.com/elizabeth_montagu.htm

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu - reactions

2009-01-19T00:31:00.000-06:00

In the February of this year, 1762, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had returned to England after many years of absence. In October of that same year, she died. Of her appearance on her return, Mrs. Montagu wrote as follows to her sister-in-law at Naples:

"February 16, 1762. You have lately returned to us from Italy a very extraordinary personage, Lady Mary Wortley. When Nature is at the trouble of making a very singular person, Time does right in respecting it. Medals are preserved when common coin is worn out; and, as great geniuses are rather matters of curiosity than of art, this lady seems reserved to be a wonder for more than our generation. She does not look older than when she went abroad, has more than the vivacity of fifteen, and a memory which, perhaps, is unique. Several people visited her out of curiosity, which she did not like. I visit her because her cousin and mine were cousin-germans. Though she has not any foolish partiality for her husband or his relations, I was very graciously received, and you may imagine entertained, by one who neither thinks, speaks, acts, nor dresses, like any body else. Her domestick is made up of all nations, and when you get into her drawing-room, you imagine you are in the first story of the Tower of Babel. An Hungarian servant takes your name at the door; he gives it to an Italian, who delivers it to a Frenchman; the Frenchman to a Swiss, and the Swiss to a Polander; so that, by the time you get to her ladyship's presence, you have changed your name five times, without the expense of an act of Parliament."

Female Solicitors

2009-01-16T02:12:00.003-06:00

A new imperial history : culture, identity, and modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840 / edited by Kathleen Wilson. Cambridge UP, 2004
page 36-37 talks about networks of women taking care of legal stuff

Prest, Wilfred. One Hawkins A Female Sollicitor: Women Lawyers in Augustan England. Huntington Library Quarterly 57 (1994) 353-8

yew

2009-01-14T11:54:00.002-06:00

so I was working away and thought of something I should put on my blog and logged on and saw the other blog updates and read them and now I cannot for the life of me remember what I wanted to post. Damned.

I know I want to find out if ALL public people, men and women, had a male gatekeeper (or gateopener)?

Oh oh - I remember - it was about how email and blogs are blurring the line between private and public and what looked like a linear development toward increased privacy has taken a different direction and the private era might just be a brief blip ... you can see that on stock price charts - how something that looks like a trend on a three month chart can be just a dip in a five year chart. A great example is Germany - when I grew up it was this nation that was one and then was split apart - of course then I learned that it had only been one nation for about seventy years and then of course the Germanies were united and kids growing up now think of east and west G as abberations.

Which leads to my next question - what did the eighteenth century look like to the nineteenth century?

Books for women in public 18th culture class

2008-11-29T22:15:00.001-06:00

Tim Hitchcock, “A New History From Below,” _History Workshop Journal_ 57, no. 1 (2004): 294-298.

For a more skeptical view of the "new history from below" see Nicholas Rogers, "London's Marginal Histories," _Labour/Le Travail_, 60 (Fall 2007): 217-234.

Tim Hitchcock, _Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London_ (London: Hambledon, 2004);

John Styles, _The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Gender class readings for October 27

2008-10-26T22:56:00.003-06:00

Friedan - her point was that the Feminine Mystique, creating this artificial and very narrow notion of Woman is what causes "the problem with no name".

Greer - intro to book "The Female Eunuch" written in 1970 - australian born writer, Professor of English and self-proclaimed marxist (or sometimes anarchist) - married for a short period of time. She wanted women to be wild and weird, reconnect to their own sexuality and taste their own blood (cf. the mirror to see your vagina movement).

Gilligan - written in 1979 - PhD in social psychology from Harvard, now works at NYU and Cambridge - married, no info on kids.

Wittig - article written in 1981 - French novelist and scholar - PhD in French Literature - taught and lived in the United States. Wanted to overcome gender - said woman only exists as the other half of man.

New class for GST/HIST

2008-08-17T22:44:00.006-06:00

Prostitutes, Politicians, and other Public Women in Eighteenth Century England.

London in 1700

Monsieur d'Eon is a woman

Mary Montagu's Embassy Letters

Georgiana,Duchess of Devonshire

Something on the Bluestockings

Something on religious women - Hanna More?

Moll King and other prostitutes

The coffee house book

Charlotte Charke

Karen Harvey on Sexuality

Vickery's Gentleman's Daughter

Evelina

Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings by Elizabeth Eger, Lucy Peltz 2008

The lives and letters of an eighteenth-century circle of acquaintance / Temma Berg 2006

Bluestocking feminism : writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738-1785 / general editor, Gary Kelly, volume editors, Elizabeth Eger ... [et al.]. 1999