Wonders and Marvels

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2009-08-02T10:35:00.002-05:00

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East of the Sun

2009-07-22T06:00:00.002-05:00

By Julia Clegson

My research for East of the Sun began when I was five years old and met a remarkable woman called Mrs. Smith Pearse. She was in her sixties and had just returned from twenty years of living in India.

Superficially, she was a classic Memsahib- the literal translation means wife of the Sahib, the master. She’d gone to India, aged eighteen, as a member of the Fishing Fleet, the slightly derogatory name given to the English girls who went to India for the social season in search of husbands.

I loved everything about her: the battered tweeds, the honking laugh, the wonderful stories about India: the snakes under the bath, the tiger hunts with Maharajahs, the three day treks on ponies up to Simla. I dressed up in tiny silk saris, spice-scented tunics and salwar kameeze, produced from her mother of pearl trunk.

Four years ago, I met her nephew. He had a box of tape recordings made by her. Listening to these tapes as an adult made me realize that the India that had given her pleasure had taken in equal measure. My childhood heroine spoke on the tapes of the agony of missing children sent home to be educated.

“It was the biggest decision we all had to make: husband or child.” Passionately fond of nursing- she’d served with distinction in France in 1917- in India, she was only allowed to run a few village clinics- working Memsahib were frowned on.

Other women of the Raj spoke to me of botched births in remote areas, of burying young children, of flies and heat and snakes, of runaway or workaholic husbands, of terrible homesickness.

Because the British suffer from post- colonial guilt the Memsahib is often portrayed in literature or films as a gin swilling, narrow-minded snob. Some, of course, deserve our contempt; many didn’t. It’s easy to forget how young and ill prepared and uneducated many of these women were.

East of the Sun is my raised glass to these women: to their friendships, their naiveté, to the men they loved, to the work they did, and for the price they paid in loving India.

Julia Clegson is the author of East of the Sun.

King Charles II: One Merry Monarch

2009-07-15T06:00:00.006-05:00

By Susan Holloway Scott

A great many important historical events occurred during the reign of Charles II (1660-1685), including the last outbreak of the plague and the Great Fire. But Charles himself is most remembered today for his love life, unique among English kings. Charles loved women, and women loved him. From high-born ladies to lowly milkmaids, women of every rank found him pretty near irresistible. It wasn’t just that he was king. Charles genuinely liked women, particularly clever, amusing women who could entertain them with their wit as well as in his bed, and they clearly returned the favor many times over.

No one knows the exact number of women Charles had sex with in his lifetime. It was not uncommon for him to call upon one mistress in the afternoon, visit his queen’s bed in the evening, frolic with another mistress after that, and then wind up the night at a brothel. The man famously required almost no sleep.

In addition to his wife and queen, Catherine of Braganza, Charles kept three main mistresses over the course of his reign: Barbara Villiers Palmer, Nell Gwyn, and Louise de Keroualle. These were the women rewarded with titles, houses, estates, incomes, and jewels, and political power. There were far more who only received the pleasure of the royal person, and perhaps a coin or two besides.

The greatest irony of Charles’s reign is that while he sired fourteen natural children (!) that he acknowledged with titles, his queen never bore him a legitimate son and heir. At his death in 1685, Charles’s crown passed to his incompetent brother James. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 followed soon after, and England never again had a ruler who was quite as merry as Charles, the “Merrie Monarch.”

Susan Holloway Scott is the author of The French Mistress: A Novel of the Duchess of Portsmouth & King Charles II. For more about her books, please visit her website at www.susanhollowayscott.com.

Here are a few of our favorite things...

2009-07-13T11:52:00.000-05:00

Who can identify the edifice above? Send along your most interesting bit of lesser-known (and documented) trivia about it or a personal story. For the person who sends the best story, we'll arrange for a copy of a Wonders & Marvels featured book to be sent your way.

In the meantime, a few websites that history geeks simply don't want to miss:

History News Network

American Historical Society Blog

The Historical Society Blog

Curious Expeditions

Bibliodyssey

For those who just can't get enough, check out this never-ending list of history blogs.
Who said folks aren't interested in history and the humanities anymore!

HNN history blogroll

Renaissance Nose Jobs

2009-07-11T09:09:00.004-05:00

By Holly Tucker

For your viewing pleasure: a classic illustration from Gaspare Tagliacozzi's De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem (1597, book 2).

Tagliacozzi shows autografting--grafts using the patient's own skin. In addition to the ravages of syphilis, nose jobs were needed to repair injuries in battle, but also after duels.

The question that I always get is: Did they work? The problem is that we do not have a lot a data on survival rates after such surgeries. We have a good number of case histories, but often there is more information about the specifics of the surgery--rather than the post-op outcomes.

I can say that it's important to remember that antisepsis and anesthesia were 19th-century discoveries. This means that surgery had an even more complex set of potential complications than it does today. Like most of the early-modern folks, I would certainly not line up to get a nose job or breast enhancement surgery just for the heck of it. Come to think of it...I wouldn't do that now anyway!

For more on all of this, I recommend Sander Gilman's excellent Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Gilman is on the faculty at Emory and a top cultural historian.

Image courtesy of: Lilly Library, Medical Collections.

Henry Hudson's Lost Voyage

2009-07-07T10:25:00.011-05:00

By Peter C. Mancall

On April 17, 1610, the English sea captain Henry Hudson maneuvered his small ship called Discovery out of St. Katherine’s dock in London toward the Northwest Passage, the water route Europeans believed connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. On board were twenty-two men and two boys, one of whom was Hudson’s seventeen-year old son.

In the late summer of 1610 the captain guided the Discovery into modern Hudson Bay. He decided to spend the winter in Canadian waters even though he knew the ship would become trapped in ice. At some point during the bitterly cold months, some crew members decided they had suffered enough. When June came and the bay thawed, rebels put Hudson, his son, and seven loyal or ill men on a small boat (known as a shallop) and set them adrift. According to the survivors, the mutineers soon met a just fate when a group of Inuit killed four of them. A fifth rebel died, apparently of malnutrition, as the boat sailed homeward.

Sixteen months after its initial departure the Discovery, its decks stained with blood, returned to London with seven men and one boy. The survivors blamed the mutiny on the five men who had since died, but lingering suspicions about the captain’s fate prompted the High Court of Admiralty to investigate further. The suspects could not be charged with mutiny, because there was no such crime in England yet. The sailors had not committed treason because private financiers, rather than the King, owned the ship. The court charged four of the survivors with murder for purportedly exposing those on the shallop. But the accused were exonerated, probably because the court lacked evidence to prove that they had caused Hudson’s demise.

The bodies of Hudson and his last companions have never been found. No one was ever punished for the crime.

Peter C. Mancall is the author of Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson.

Was There a Scientific Revolution?

2009-07-06T05:30:00.000-05:00

History has often been marked contrasts, "before's," and "after's." BC/AD, Medieval/Renaissance, pre-industrial/post-industrial, post-9/11...

The 17th and 18th centuries are linked, of course, to a big break: the Scientific Revolution. Big S, big R. Of course, some Very Big changes--big V, big B--took place in the early-modern era. Copernicus's heliocentrism (image above) for one. But the question is: was it a specific moment of Revolution...or more of progressive sea-change in world view?

Scholars have spilled gallons of ink exploring this question: Michel Foucault, Frances Yates, Alexandre Koyre, Raymond Williams, just to name the few who come immediately to mind. And still more gallon have been spilled by the vociferous responses their works have elicited.

But what are your thoughts? Be sure to leave a comment!

Here at Wonders & Marvels, one of our favorite quotes comes from Steven Shapin's The Scientific Revolution.

"There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution," he writes, "and this is a book about it."

Magic and Medicine in Harry Potter

2009-07-04T16:20:00.007-05:00

Do Mandrakes Really Scream? This was a question that the National Library of Medicine posed in their magnificent "Magic and Medicine in Harry Potter" exhibit awhile back. The exhibition takes a close look at the facts, fictions, and legends in references to the healing arts in Harry Potter. Very nicely done.

By the way, if you haven't yet explored the NLM's online exhibitions, you really should! Among the many highlights, is the "Dream Anatomies" exhibition. A visually stunning and informative look into early anatomy and dissection.

Another NLM favorite for us here at Wonders & Marvels is the "Turning the Pages" project. Where else can you flip through a copy of Conrad Gesner's Historiae animalium while stretched out on your couch, laptop in hand? The image quality is extraordinary.

And to answer the question about whether mandrakes scream...first-hand experience suggests they don't. We tried it out at a local nature preserve, where mandrakes grow freely in the lush hills of the south. Darn!

Image: Gerarde, "Mandrake Root" (1636) from another impressive online collection of images, hosted by the University of Colorado: The World of Gloriana: Books and Manuscripts from the Age of Elizabeth I.

Holy Foreskin!

2009-07-01T20:03:00.007-05:00

By David Farley

When I first heard about the Holy Foreskin, I thought—like a lot of people—it was a joke, either the title of a foreskin fetish magazine or something straight from the mind of a perverted Batman fan. I’d majored in history—focusing on the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe—and I had a particular interest in the saints and their relics. Yet, in the research I’d done for papers as an undergraduate and grad student, this once-rapturous remain had never come up. Which intrigued me because once I started doing a bit of research—blew a bit of dust off the documents, so to speak—I found out there was a lot of relatively buried material about the history of Jesus’ foreskin.

After moving to the village of Calcata, 30 miles of Rome, the last place the Holy Foreskin had been seen, I wasn’t sure if broaching the topic of the missing relic would be taboo. But, much to my surprise, pretty much everyone wanted to share their knowledge on the history of the relic and their theories on what happened to it. Everyone except the priest, under whose watch it disappeared. (I eventually did get him to talk, but you’ll have to read the book to find out what happened.) Then I talked my way into the Vatican Library and, after enough digging around, unearthed some centuries-old papal-approved booklets about the history of this miraculous membrane. All the documents—complete with an impratur that stated papal approval—put the Calcata foreskin at the center of attention, but they always dedicated some discussion to the other Holy Foreskins that were floating around Europe (though mostly in France) during the Middle Ages (most of the other foreskin relics were lost during the Reformation and French Revolution).

But the publications on the relic abruptly stopped after the 19th century. The reason? In 1900, Pope Leo XIII issued a decree stating that anyone who spoke of or wrote about the relic would face excommunication. I was officially intrigued. How did a relic go from being a major pilgrim magnet to being banned by the church centuries later? Factor in the mysterious disappearance of the relic from Calcata in 1983 and we’ve got a genuine historical mystery on our hands.

David Farley is author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town.To learn more about David and his book, visit www.dfarley.com

Image: Calcata, Holy Foreskin Niche, courtesy of the author

Telling Time in Early Europe

2009-06-28T07:41:00.001-05:00

What time is it, you say? If you were living before the 18th century, you would not look at your wrist watch. No, you'd slip a portable sundial out of your pocket. The more complex sundials could also be converted to moon dials that indicated the time according to the amount of moonlight expected on a clear, starry night.

Although town squares began constructing clocks beginning somewhere in the 14th century, sundials remained in the picture well into the 18th century. Mechanical clocks were exorbitantly expensive and could be found only in the most noble of homes. And they were notoriously unreliable--telling time only within an hour, give or take. They also needed to be reset frequently. Of course, with the help of a sundial.

A well crafted sundial was the mark of good birth and high culture. One of the most famous sundial makers of the late seventeenth century was the Englishman Michael Butterfield, who set up shop along the riverbanks of Paris. His top-of-line sundials were made of silver, not brass, and were engraved with beautifully elaborate designs.

Sundial preferences were also gendered. Men went for larger sundials of about 2 1/2 inches nested in a silver box, that itself was nested in a brass exterior box. Women reached instead for daintier, 1 inch models in gold cases that could be slipped more easily in a purse.

Now I'm not a specialist of time telling in the early-modern period. Hardly! Much of what you have here is a distillation of Sara Schechner's outstanding article: "The Material Culture of Astronomy in Daily Life: Sundials, Science, and Social Change" (Journal for the History of Astronomy, 2001, 189-222). Well worth the read!

And for anyone near Chicago and interested in time keeping, a visit to the Adler Planetarium is well worth the trip. Their historical collections are remarkable. Any readers out there with a big checkbook? Take a peek at the sundial collections here. Feel free to ship one to me!

Image courtesy of the National Maritime Museum. For more information on the sundial above, click here.

What's For Dinner? Porpoise anyone?

2009-06-26T16:18:00.008-05:00

Time once again for this week's Marvelous Link...

From the BBC via the University of Manchester Library comes this short video and write-up on medieval cookery.

The Forme of Cury was published around 1420--and is now available online. My favorite quote in the interview was: "These aren't like a modern cookery book. This doesn't give you precise quantities or time. But great for experimenting."

From what I've read in the The Good Wife's Guide: A Medieval Household Book, I'll take a pass on whipping up some good medieval eats.

As tasty as that porpoise stew recipe sounds, it's just too hard to find fresh porpoise at my local Kroger (Publix, Dominicks, Harris Teeter, Piggly Wiggly, whatever).

So about the image: Porpoises are close enough to Dolphins for this Midwestern girl. Dolphins make me think of the French word dauphin. Dauphin makes me think that they called the heir apparent to the French throne, le Dauphin. And this makes me think of Louis le Grand Dauphin (above), who was Louis XIV's eldest son (1661-1711). See, there's always a 17th century connection... (Plus it's the weekend and 150 degrees here, that would make anyone a little punchy!)

Literary Travels

2009-06-23T12:16:00.006-05:00

By Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon

A century before we traveled to Brontë Country in northern England, Virginia Woolf embarked on her own literary pilgrimage to the heather-strewn Yorkshire Moors, once home to literary sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne. In a newspaper essay, Woolf noted that her excitement upon approaching “had in it an element of suspense,” as though she were to meet a long-separated friend. We felt the same emotion while touring the parsonage where the three sisters spent most of their short lives, and while rambling along the moors most famously depicted by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights.

When researching our book Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West, we were surprised to discover that literary travel is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Readers descended on Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1800s, hoping to catch a glimpse of Louisa May Alcott, the publicity-shy author of Little Women. Nathaniel Hawthorne visited Sir Walter Scott’s castle, Abbotsford, in the Scottish border country, and noted that the worn cuffs of the author’s old green coat on display in the study provoked a feeling that he was nearby. Writerly pals Henry James and Edith Wharton pilgrimaged to the French château of their literary idol, George Sand—and fittingly, modern-day bibliophiles can visit homes that once belonged to the globetrotting duo.

James’ red-brick house in the English countryside contrasts modestly with Wharton’s lavish Berkshire Mountains estate, The Mount, where her love of travel is on full display. She designed the centerpiece, a 42-room mansion, using classic European design principles, along with French- and Italianate-style gardens. Perhaps recalling their travels, James described The Mount as “a delicate French château mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.”

Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon are the authors of Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West.

C-Sections Before Anesthesia

2009-06-21T21:48:00.004-05:00

By Holly Tucker

C-sections were the surgery of very last resort and rarely performed until the mid-to-late eighteenth century. While they were not common, this does not mean that the procedure did not take up good-sized sections of obstetrics texts. In fact, the more difficult and horrific the procedure...the more often you'll get to read about it in early manuals.

You have here an inventory of the tools required for a caesarean section in the very early eighteenth century. This is taken from Pierre Dionis's Course on Surgical Operations [Cours d'Operation de Chirurgie], published in 1708.

Dionis (pronounced Dee-oh-nees) was an innovator in surgical instruction and ushered in a new emphasis on formal training of surgeons. He began his professional life as a surgical and anatomical demonstrator at the Jardin du Roi--now the Paris Jardin des Plantes. Open-air dissections were performed at the gardens and usually drew a large crowd of spectators.

Dionis later became a court surgeon. He documents the work he did at court and describes the demonstrations that he performed at the request of Queen Maria Theresa (Louis XIV's wife). One that sticks in my mind is the dissection that he did following the death of a pregnant woman. The Queen requested that he give her a lesson on the anatomy of the womb and specifically demanded that he bring in specimens from the newly dissected corpse.

More on early c-sections

More on the history of anesthesia

Stephanie Snow on anesthesia's dark side

Image: Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine, London

Wonders on the Web

2009-06-19T15:45:00.004-05:00

By Holly Tucker

Lots of great finds this week on the internet...so, now without delay, here are some highlights for your reading pleasure.

History of Anesthesia
The use of anesthesia in medical procedures is an ultra-modern phenomenon--at least by my measure as someone who works in 16th to 18th century medicine.

Anesthesia did not come into being much before the mid-19th century. The Boston Globe had a great article this week on The Day that Pain Died, the story of the first use of ether in surgery (October 16, 1846).

You might also take a peek at Stephanie Snow's article here on Wonders & Marvels about Anesthesia's Dark Side. The advent of anesthesia was a boon for pain management--and for criminal acts...

History of Bookbinding
I will admit it openly and freely: I am a certified bibliophile. And I'm not alone.

The Telegraph published a fascinating article about the history of bookmaking and a couple of exhibits well worth attending. (Alas, if only I didn't live an ocean away...)

But, by far, my favorite weblink of the week has to be this one. I have found who shares my 17th-century book fetishes!

Daily Life in 17th Century England: 17th Century Book Bindings

I want her job...no, I want her library!

Image: Ernest Board, "The First Use of Ether in Dental Surgery, 1846" (ca. 1920). Courtesy of the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine

History Resources

2009-06-16T06:15:00.005-05:00

By Holly Tucker

As someone who works in early history, I often get asked where I find my books and information.

Things have changed dramatically since my grad school days when you had to pay a reference librarian to run an online database search. To my delight, I've been finding more and more 17th-century texts online at specialized collections. This doesn't replace the thrill of the hunt in person. And I don't think that I could go too long without getting dusty in the archives, like I did just recently in Rome and in Paris.

Plus some places are just too amazing to miss.

But for those of us who are stuck to their computer chairs and can't venture out to exotic locales...let me recommend some of my favorite resources for history research in the earlier periods.

I have spoken to a number of friends who are writers outside of academe. I understand deeply the frustration of not having access to many of the resources that are available to college and university faculty. But do know that if you happen to live near a college, it is often possible to get research privileges there. You may or may not be able to check out books--but you will definitely be able to access the databases. And more and more, so much of what you'll need can be found online.

For databases, my first stops are always:

1. Historical Abstracts
2. History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
3. Modern Language Association (MLA) bibliography
4. Cambridge Histories

For full-text online resources, the choices have become plentiful in the past few years. Here are few of my favorites. Please do share others in the comments!

Open access collections include:

1. The Bibliotheque Nationale in France. Their Gallica collection is ever-expanding and its breadth often stunning. I have found books there that are so esoteric (a 17th-century treatise on snakebites, anyone)--but when you need them, it's always a treat to find them there.

2. Digital Book Index, supported by the National Union Catalogue (which catalogues holdings in libraries across the U.S.)

3. The British Library's "turning the pages" project

4. Project Gutenburg

Two subscription-based collections have saved my research skin when I needed something FAST:

EARLY ENGLISH BOOKS ONLINE (pre-1700)

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY COLLECTIONS ONLINE (1701-1800)

Finally, I have two research crushes...

The first is the Bibliotheque interuniversitaire de Medicine (Paris), which is home to the archives of the University of Paris Medical School. The librarians there, including Mme Molitor and Mme Lambert, have been extraordinarily helpful in my quest to find needles in haystacks. The new reproduction service (OED) is very efficient and not exorbitantly expensive--which is a nice change from the status quo when it comes to French library reproductions.

The second is the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine. Again, a great staff of incredibly knowledgeable librarians and bibliophiles. I've had the pleasure of working there twice during extended research trips. In fact, I couldn't have written my first book or be writing this latest book without the Wellcome. And truly, it's image collection is a marvel to behold.

Greedy for more library goodies? Take a peek at "Resources for Inquiring Minds" and "Cabinet of Images" in the side links.

Image: Catalogue card for Ambroise Pare, 16th century surgeon. BIUM

Hendrik Cesars and the Tragedies of Race in South Africa

2009-06-15T12:32:00.004-05:00

By Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully

When we began researching our biography of Sara Baartman we thought we knew what we would find. Two white men brought Sara Baartman to 19th-century London, where she was put on show in Piccadilly. Every study, every bit of popular knowledge representing Sara Baartman's life as the "Hottentot Venus," had said so.

Newspapers in London at the time described Hendrik Cesars as a colonist. The extraordinary efforts to return Baartman's remains, beginning soon after South Africa's first democratic elections and ending in her state funeral in 2002, had represented her life as that of a black woman taken advantage of by white men. President Thabo Mbeki has said as much in his eulogy, extending his comments to a denunciation of Western science, indeed the entire Enlightenment.

We would discover, however, that Cesars was, in the racial categorization of the Cape, a "free black." His descendants were slaves, brought forcibly to South Africa to work on the farms and in the city. Cesars's wife also descended from slaves. The couples' life in a poor section of Cape Town remained indelibly marked by slavery. Laws prohibited them from wearing fancy clothes. They had to apply for permission to leave the area. And they were barred from many of the economic opportunities "free burghers" enjoyed. One of the men responsible for Sara Baartman's exploitation was, himself, subjected to prejudice.

South Africans, and indeed most of the modern world, can only see others for the color of their skin. Modern racism and its many legacies seems to have forever shaped how one speak of others, our very apprehensions of past and present. This is not how the world always was. Hendrik Cesars's complexion was "white", even as he was known by others in the Cape as "free black." This is why when Cesars traveled
to England Londoners saw him as a white man, a colonial settler, a mean, violent master. They could not see him for what he was, could not understand his humanity even as they criticized his actions, the decisions he made. And this is how it remains, regrettably, today.

Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully are authors of Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography.

Midwives and Witches

2009-06-14T07:27:00.000-05:00

by Bronwyn Backstrom (Vanderbilt University)

The ideas of witches and witchcraft have been around for centuries and were hot topics. Witches were typically identified as older single women of lower class. Throughout history, there has been a stereotype that only women, specifically midwives and other women-healers, were witches. Women were targets because of the tradition of misogyny; women's participation in folk-healing; and changes in the awareness of female nature, their family and economic roles, and ideas of women's social behavior.

Female witches were accused of three main things: female sexuality (this included every sexual crime against men), organization, and having magical powers (both good and bad) that affected one's health. Witchcraft was considered to go against the Catholic Church. It was considered a threat to God's holy order because it was not based on scripture or religion. In addition, all witchcraft was considered based off of carnal lust, or strong sexual desires, with evil spirits.

The Malleus Maleficarum, meaning "Hammer of Witches," was written in 1484 by two reverends: Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. This book contains everything one needs to know about witches and witchcraft at the time, from what defines a witch and how they become one, to the sentences they would receive because of their participation in witchcraft. It also contains information on witch-midwives.

According to Malleus Maleficarum, witch-midwives were considered the most wicked and dangerous witches, who inflicted the greatest injuries. This is because they dealt with the health of others and had easy access to newborn children, who were used in offerings for the evil spirits. Witch-midwives were accused of causing miscarriages; however, if they allowed a child to be born, they would allegedly either feast on the child or offer it to the evil spirits, allowing the witches to infect the child and turn it into a witch.

The evil spirits called the witch-midwives to offer them newborn children for several reasons. One was for their pride. Another was to disguise the act of infidelity as a virtue. By associating children with the evil spirits, the witches drew in more innocent people, making it easier for them to turn into witches. Finally, they used the children to fill their ranks. When the evil spirits infected children at an early age, turning them to witches, they could set them aside to be used in the future as needed.

There was a decline in accusations against women as witches between the 17th and 18th centuries because of the increase in male midwives. Men began to replace women, resulting in fewer women in the field who could be accused of witchcraft.

Image: Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum, 1669. (Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London.)

References:

Brauner, Sigrid. Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Old Westbury: Feminist Press, 1973.

Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum. Trans. Reverend Montague Summers. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2007.

Interview: Katherine Howe

2009-06-12T17:04:00.008-05:00

Katherine Howe, the author of Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, was adventurous enough to do our first Author Interview for Wonders & Marvels.

Katherine and I had a chance to touch bases this week about her thoughts on the book and why the study of history should matter.

My favorite quote from the interview: "It's unfair to accuse people of being crazy just because they happened to live in the past."

Absolutely. The study of past lives demands a deep level of respect as well as a willingness to enter into a world that may not be at all like our own. It means trying to understand and inhabit the cultural, political, and economic logic of the time--as well as its inconsistencies.

It means listening to the dominant, as well as the silenced, voices. And to do this requires patience, aptitude for meticulous research, and a willingness to share with others (both inside and outside academe) the things that we have seen in our journeys to the past.

What are your thoughts about all of this?

Looking forward to your comments on this first interview. And as Katherine said, she would love to respond to any questions you might have. We'll forward them to her without delay.

Note as well that Harvard University Bookstore will be hosting a book signing with Katherine on June 23 at 7pm.

Friday Marvels

2009-06-12T11:09:00.022-05:00

Two articles caught our attention this week. The first was this story about a “17th-century Urine Filled Witch Bottle.”

Apparently, according to the latest issue of British Archeology (and as reported by MSNBC), “this spell device, often meant to attract and trap negative energy, was particularly common from the 16th to the 17th centuries, so the discovery provides a unique insight into witchcraft beliefs of that period.” Looks like we’re not the only ones fascinated with witches!

And from the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine London comes some thoughtful reflections on a painting by the 19th century Solomon Hart depicting an encounter between Galileo and Milton (Galileo and Jewish Emancipation).

If you haven’t subscribed to the Wellcome’s blog, be sure to do so. The Wellcome Library is a simply magnificent collection for anyone interested in the History of Medicine or early cultural history. For the cooks among us, they also have a great collection of 16th and 17th century cookbooks.

Heads up: there’s a new book out called Galileo Goes to Jail with top-notch articles by many of the most renowned historians of science today. Be sure to have a look.

Image: Courtesy of MSNBC

Our Marvelous New Editorial Assistant

2009-06-11T18:59:00.008-05:00

Please give a warm hello to Jennie S., our new Editorial Assistant for Wonders and Marvels. Jennie is finishing up a degree in Art History and will soon be headed off to Italy to sniff out the wonders for us there.

What drew you to art history?

I fell in love with art history when I was 16. I spent a summer in Florence, Italy studying Italian language and the city's vast history of art. It didn't take long before I was head over heels for this city. It seemed like every turn I took led me to another beautiful Cathedral, or a piazza filled with statues and fountains. To say the least, it was one incredible summer. When I got to college and had to decide what my focus might be, the choice was pretty clear--my heart had settled on art history years ago. I'm ecstatic to be returning to Italy to study this Fall.

Who are your favorite artists or compositions?

I have many among the Renaissance art I studied--Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, and Fra Angelico's Annunciation, to name a few. However, I consider Degas to be my favorite artist of all time. I know, I juxtapose. But I have always loved his dancers and find him brilliant in the way he captures their movement and spirit.

And in the W&M spirit, what's the your favorite wacky history story?

Well, in the spirit of witch week here at W&M, I'd definitely have to say the Salem Witch trials. Such off the wall accusations about innocent people, but done with a chilling passion and conviction. I've read Arthur Miller's The Crucible over ten times and each time Abigail seems more villainous and the Proctor's fate more tragic, but I am hauntingly enthralled nonetheless. In my art history studies I've learned many more wild history tales, but that's fodder for another post. So stay tuned!

Jennie S. can be contacted at:
editorial.assistant [at] wondersandmarvels.org

Be sure to let her know what you'd love to see here at Wonders and Marvels!

In the meantime, be sure to take a look at some of our favorite witch tales from

Katherine Howe, author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

Kathleen Kent, author of The Heretic's Daughter

Thomas Robisheaux, author of The Last Witch of Lagenburg

And the Salem Witch Trials Documentary and Transcription Project

Image: Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (detail) Uffizi Gallery, 1482.

Heads Up

2009-06-08T18:35:00.015-05:00

Big changes are afoot at Wonders and Marvels! We've hired two new Editorial Assistants as well as an amazing web designer to spiff things up around here.

In the meantime, there is a possibility, however small, that Wonders and Marvels may go dim, for short sojourns.

Please be patient. Good things come to those who wait, or so we've heard!

Can Witch Trials Be Reasonable?

2009-06-07T15:48:00.008-05:00

By Katherine Howe

No matter how many Salem books appear, the question of New England witchcraft never seems to be exhausted. It forces us to confront the fragility of some of Americans' dearest assumptions about ourselves: that we are tolerant, that we value the socially marginalized, that we are rational and can be persuaded by reasoned argument. Salem means that we can't take our toleration for granted. Instead, we hunt for justification. Usually we point to “hysteria,” as though living in the past, according to a past set of beliefs, automatically makes one crazy.

But it is not so. They weren't crazy at all.

In 1690s New England, Salem was only the most extreme example of an otherwise common legal problem. We don't bother to legislate against imaginary threats, after all. The Salem participants – accusers, accused, judges, jury, theologians, the lieutenant governor – all lived in a religious system which assumed witchcraft to be real. The Salem episode was unusual for its breadth and longevity, facts not lost on observers at that time. But for people who believed themselves to occupy still-new lands “that were once the Devil's territories,” the presence of Satan working through earthly interlocutors was a credible, and terrifying, threat. Looked at from this perspective, the Salem trials resemble the most rational response available to a community struggling to free itself from the ravages of evil incarnate.

The idea of witch-hunting as rational, however, might be too chilling to contemplate. A mere decade after the panic ended, several participants began to regret their role in the trials; Samuel Sewall, a judge, and Ann Putnam, an afflicted girl, both made humble public apologies for their participation in what they now felt was a miscarriage of justice. The speed with which Salem was reconsidered, even in the colonial world, is itself reassuring – even they thought they were being crazy! Phew.

And yet, for the first many months of 1691/92, inquiry into the presence of witches in Essex County was anything but crazy. In fact, it was imperative, given the cultural and religious structures in place in that community at that time. One wonders what other assumptions, imperative in our own time, will be hysterical in another?

Spread the Wonder, email this to a friend

Katherine Howe is author of The Physick Book Deliverance Dane, just published by Voice (Hyperion).

Question of the Week

2009-06-07T14:58:00.003-05:00

Ok folks, it's Witch Week here. We're needing your thoughts on this one:

Are you a good witch or a bad witch? If you could cast any spell, what would it be?

For the witchly readers among us, we're always looking for great titles about magic! So bring it on...

And speaking of magic, Katherine Howe's Physick Book of Deliverance Dane is among our top reads right now. Be sure to take a peek at her post on Wonders & Marvels: Can Witch Trials be Reasonable?

Spread the Wonder, email this to a friend

History as Mirror

2009-06-04T12:18:00.001-05:00

By Edith B. Gelles

There are parallels between Presidents Adams and Obama, ways in which our current president can take comfort and, perhaps, learn lessons from this long gone predecessor. Strange as this coupling may appear, there are overarching similarities between them that should offer lessons from history for the new president.

Unlikely though real, both Adams and Obama come to their ideological commitment from similar backgrounds, common experiences that fundamentally shaped their thinking. First, both were “outsiders.” No need rehearse the President’s background that has brought a deep cultural shift in this country. But, as John Adams liked to say about himself: he was a duck among swans. The most popular and influential politicians of his age and four of the first five presidents hailed from the South.

Second, both John Adams and Barack Obama were trained in and practiced law. Training for the bar produces a method of thinking. It is a discipline that is learned and forms an automatic means of responding to problems. But neither Adams nor Obama was comfortable with the practice of law and each found a way out of its standard professional performance. “O that I was a soldier,” moaned Adams at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, but since he lacked the background to become a general, he became a politician. Mr. Obama came to politics via community organizing.

Religion created for both men not just a lifelong belief system, but a moral code and ethical approach that became part of their natures. In fact, Mr. Obama’s now more conservative religious stance conforms in many ways to John Adams’s then liberal religious approach: belief in God, in a hereafter, and the preciousness of the individual life. Moreover, their religion taught them that the divine spark in a person mandates devotion to public service, and service implied the duty to make the world a better place than they found it.

History provides a mirror, not just for us ordinary citizens to understand our own era by seeing it in context with the past with its similarities and differences, but for our leaders in their quest for solutions to their daunting challenges. President John Adams, by his example, provides some perspective to his distant successor President Barack Obama.

Edith B. Gelles is Senior Scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She is author of Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage (William Morrow).

Question of the Week

2009-06-02T17:34:00.004-05:00

We're still trying to work out the kinks on the Question of the Week feature. By George, I think we're close! So please indulge a duplicate post--and if you haven't left YOUR two cents, then why not do it now?

If you could witness any historical event, which one would it be?

[Image: Jacques-Louis David, "Coronation of Napoleon"']

Medieval Women's Magazines

2009-06-01T08:22:00.000-05:00

The Toronto Star published an interesting article last week on the discovery of what looks to be one of the earliest examples of a woman's magazine. No glossy images of waif-life models in heavy makeup in the Middle Ages, apparently.

Head here for the full article. A nod is due to Slate's new Double X website (http://http://www.doublex.com/) for the lead.

Inquiring Minds

2009-05-31T16:20:00.010-05:00

Wonders & Marvels has been around now for about 9 months and has developed a strong and devoted following of readers who have plenty to say.

Take a look at the "Question of the Week" feature over there on your left. This week's question:

"If you could witness any historical event, what would it be?"

Just click on the link, and it will take you to our new discussion page. Here's the place to share thoughts/ideas/questions with other history/bookish/historical fiction folks.

And while we're at it, can anyone suggest a good image for this post? I'm afraid my clever creative juices have run dry on this hot weekend afternoon.

Can't wait to get the discussion going!!

The Good Wife's Guide

2009-05-31T12:41:00.000-05:00

Macy Halford posted a great review of The Good Wife's Guide on the New Yorker's Book Bench website. Translated by Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose, The Good Wife's Guide is a fourteenth-century instruction book for a young bride, written by her husband. It's a primer on the fine art of male dominence.

The dinner menu the husband offers up goes to prove that real men did not eat quiche in the Middle Ages. Green eel soup or black hare stew, anyone?

As the 17th century specialist that I am, the book reminded me--of course--of Moliere's Arnolphe in The School for Wives. The wiley Arnolphe offers up a list of "maxims" for his young bride, whom he plucked from a convent. Of course, in the great Moliere tradition, the canny Agnes ends up showing what a nut job her husband really is.

Maxim 1. The woman who intends to be married ought to remember, that the man who takes her, takes her only for himself, notwithstanding the vast numbers of admirers which other women have in these our days.

Maxim 2. She ought to consult her husband about her dress; it being for him along should she take care of her beauty, and regardless whether other people think her handsome or not.

Maxim 3. She must lay aside the practice of ogling, and must use no paints, pomatums, beauty washes, nor the numberless ingredients that are made use of to set off the complexion. These are always mortal poisons to honour, and the pains bestowed to appear beautiful are seldom for the husband's sake.

Maxim 4. When she goes abroad, she ought, as honour requires, to prevent the wounds her eyes might give, by concealing them under her hood: for she should study to please her husband, and no one else.

Maxim 5. Decency prohibits her from receiving any friends whatever, except such as come to see her husband: those people of gallantry that have no business but with the wife, are very disagreeable to the husband.

There are five more maxims. But you get the point...oh, the things history has done to quiet women.

You might want to head over to a post on Silence and the Scold's Bridle. Miranda Garno Nesler offers some details about the muzzles that were used to restrain women's speech in the Renaissance.

Wendy Moore also explores 18th Century Domestic Violence.

More things change, the more they stay the same. Regrettably.

The Blue Hour

2009-05-29T04:49:00.000-05:00

By Lilian Pizzichini

Once I had got to the end of my book - a biography of the writer Jean Rhys - and I had killed off the main protagonist, I felt intense relief. It had taken me five years to get to this point. Rhys was 78 when she died, and at certain points during the five years it took to write her life, I thought she would never die. Towards the end of her life, my impression was that she felt the same. But, she kept saying, she had to earn her death. I think it is safe to say that she did, and that, like her, I experienced a sense of joy in that moment. A few days later it occurred to me that not once in the 80,000-odd words I had written had I mentioned why I had called the book, “the blue hour."

L’Heure Bleue is the name of her favourite perfume, and it was what first attracted me to her. In fact, I was wearing it long before I wrote the book. In the summer of 1912 the French parfumier Jacques Guerlain concocted a scent from musk and rose de Bulgarie with a single note of jasmine. He intended his new scent, which he called L’Heure Bleue, to evoke dusk in the city, a time when the well-groomed Parisienne prepares for the evening.

For Jean Rhys, the blue hour was also the hour when the underdog she saw herself as being during the day turned into a wolf. Dogs hunt best during twilight. Underneath our mannered surface lurks a predator. Jean Rhys was always concerned with what lay beneath the top notes. In Quartet, her first novel, set in Paris, a young, female character, smarter and bolder than her heroine, is wearing L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain. Rhys’s heroine absorbs the woman’s scent as though by breathing it in she could capture her rival’s self-possession.

Its hints of pastry and almonds make L’Heure Bleue a melancholic fragrance, as if in mourning for a time passed by. The curves of the Art Nouveau bottle, the stopper in the form of a hollowed-out heart, allude to the romance of the years leading to the First World War. The story Jean Rhys tells in Quartet describes the last days and weeks of a relationship, the loss of love and safety, and, implicitly, the death of old Europe. L’Heure Bleue, as I have said, was her favourite perfume, and The Blue Hour is an attempt to re-capture her life. Another thing that occurred to me on finishing this book was that Jean Rhys died on my birthday, 14th May 1979. I was 14, and I almost feel as though I was carrying her torch long before I came to write her story.

Lilian Pizzichini is author of The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys.

Wide Saragasso Sea

2009-05-27T05:14:00.001-05:00

It has been years and years since I've read Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. It is haunting, strangely monstrous and beautiful all at once. In a word, unforgettable.

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few months ago, critic Carlin Romano reminds of why Rhys should be rediscovered over and over again.

Lilian Pizzichini's biography shows clearly how Rhys' unflinching study of life's brutal realities parallels an equally turbulent and heartbreaking odyssey. Pizzichini will be here on Thursday to talk about her experience of writing The Blue Hour.

For more about The Blue Hour and Jean Rhys do have a peek at these:

Telegraph (review)

The Independent: Jean Rhys, Prostitution, Alcoholism, and the Mad Woman in the Attic

Thomas Edison at the Eiffel Tower

2009-05-23T16:14:00.005-05:00

By Jill Jonnes

On August 14, 1889, Thomas Edison's third day in France, he and his entourage arrived at the Paris Exposition Universelle at 9 a.m. to ascend the world's tallest structure. "Like everyone else I've come to see the Eiffel Tower," the Wizard of Menlo Park declared. When Parisians had first seen Gustave Eiffel's design for his 1,000-foot tower, they hurled no end of insults and lawsuits, denouncing his winning entry for the fair's centerpiece as "a black and gigantic factory chimney, crushing [all] beneath its barbarous mass," a dangerous and hideous "scaffold" even "America would not have."

But by late summer of 1889 when Le Grand Edison arrived to experience this monumental wrought-iron wonder, even Eiffel's worst critics had conceded the tower's originality and grace. The few hold-outs consoled themselves that the tower would mar their beautiful city only for twenty years, when Eiffel would have to dismantle it.

From the day the tower opened to the public on May 15, 1889, it was mobbed. The Prince and Princess of Wales, the Shah of Persia, Lily Langtry, Annie Oakley, a shepherd on stilts, minor royalty of every stripe, politicians, scientists, artists, tourists from the farthest corners of the globe, everyone had to ascend La Tour Eiffel. On the cool August morning when Edison ascended, the famous inventor's party emerged from the elevator to find an unlikely group of fellow American sightseers: Chief Rocky Bear and several dozen Sioux Indians from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, one of the great sensations of that World's Fair summer. The Indians, their long hair entwined with feathers, rushed over, whooping a welcoming chant to a startled Edison, who gathered his wits to ask how was Chief Sitting Bull?

Gustave Eiffel, away at a spa in Evian, missed Edison's first visit. Subsequently, Eiffel hosted a festive champagne luncheon on the tower for the American inventor, his wife Mina, daughter Dot, and a few French engineers. Afterwards, all repaired to Eiffel's private apartment atop the tower, where Edison demonstrated his new improved talking phonograph, one of the other huge sensations of the fair. Eiffel, who had spotted Charles Gounod dining at a nearby table in the Café Brebant, invited the composer of Faust to join them. High above Paris, Gounod serenaded Edison and played the piano until late into the evening.

Edison was one of the most famous men of his day and he was full of enthusiasm for Gustave Eiffel and his tower. So from the moment I learned of their meeting, I anticipated finding a photo of the two men together. At the Eiffel Archives at the Museé d'Orsay in Paris, I worked my way through the many boxes of century-old photos and charming souvenir menus, but found no such image. Was it possible that Edison and Eiffel, two celebrated men who so admired one another, never posed for a photo together? Especially since there was a photo of Edison posing with Adolphe Salles, Eiffel's son-in-law and partner in their global bridge-building business. Had the Eiffel family perhaps chosen not to pass the photo along when they gave Gustave's papers to the archives? Just one of those little puzzlements.

Sadly, I had no better luck at the vast and wondrous Edison Archives at Rutgers University or at the National Park Service's Edison Historic site at West Orange. They had no photographs at all of Thomas Edison at the Paris World's Fair of 1889, one of the high points of his professional career. And so, I settled for next best, the great inventor with his talking phonograph in 1892.

Jill Jonnes is author of Eiffel's Tower: And the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count, and Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels as well as numerous other best-selling books.

Spring in Paris

2009-05-20T21:34:00.010-05:00

This will be one of the last travelogue posts, I promise. While I was digging around the archives in Paris, I had a constant companion: "Spring" the duck.

We picked the cute little rubber duckie up in Rome last fall. Spring found her way into my travel bag on this most recent trip to the French capitol. She visited the libraries, but she also tagged along with a friend who was traveling with me. Oh the places she went. And oh, the delight my daughter had in seeing the fun her duck had.

I snapped several pictures of Spring with other children. Being bilingual has its advantages. It was easy to ask parents to allow me to take their child's picture with my daughter's duck. But part of me is just wondering if they could sense that I was a parent missing her child. That can be expressed even without speaking.

What a sight I must have been standing in front of Notre Dame with a camera trying to find Spring's most photogenic angle! But my favorite by far is the one I snapped from the terrasse of the apartment my friend and I rented in the 5th arrondissement, on a quiet street right across from the Cluny museum. See photo above, as well as the photo-shopped picture below. Courtesy of my quirky friend, a graphic designer. That duck has friends in high places!

The Motor Bandits

2009-05-15T21:00:00.006-05:00

By Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler

On the night of December 13, 1911, three men stole an automobile from the home of a family in the wealthy Paris suburb of Boulogne-sur-Seine. The car was a Delaunay-Belleville, France’s finest make: the czar of Russia was said to own twenty. The three men were to use it to become, for a time, the most wanted criminals in Europe.

A week later, that same car sat idling on the Rue Ordener in Montmartre. At the wheel was Jules Bonnot (police mug shot above), a former racing-car driver who had embraced anarchism and turned to crime as a protest against society. His two cohorts, Raymond Caillemin and Octave Garnier, stepped out of the car when they saw a man with a briefcase approaching.

The briefcase, they knew, was filled with cash and securities being messengered to a bank. Though the two gunmen drew pistols, the messenger surprisingly resisted, and Garnier shot the man twice through the chest before he released his hold on the case.

The gunshots attracted attention and people ran to help. As his accomplices slid into the back seat, Bonnot gunned the motor of the Delaunay-Belleville, made a hairpin turn and sped back down the street. Finding other vehicles in his way, he simply drove onto the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians in his wake. Within seconds, the car was out of sight.

In the annals of crime, this was a singular moment: for the first time, bandits had used what became known as a getaway car to escape from the scene of a crime. French newspapers gave Bonnot the nickname “the Demon Chauffeur” as the gang staged robbery after robbery in the same ruthless fashion.

Bonnot once coolly walked into a newspaper office to correct a story that had been written about him. He admitted that the police would triumph eventually, but he vowed not to be taken alive.

So it was. On April 27, Bonnot’s hideout, a two-story house in the countryside, was surrounded by sixteen members of the French Sûreté. Resisting calls for surrender, Bonnot demonstrated that he had stockpiled plenty of weapons and ammunition. The chief of the Sûreté forces called on the local militia, who brought artillery.

When word of the battle spread, more than ten thousand civilians gathered, as well as a motion-picture newsreel team. Spotlights were set up as the siege lasted into the night. When the building was destroyed by dynamite, Bonnot’s body was discovered inside, next to a final testament he had written in his own blood. His gravesite had to be kept secret to prevent admirers from turning it into a shrine.

Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler are authors of The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (Little Brown).

Parisian Detective Work

2009-05-11T17:02:00.007-05:00

By Holly Tucker

Wonders and Marvels has been a little quiet this past week. But life has actually been not quiet at all!

I just returned from a whirlwind research trip to Paris. Mission: to delve into the mysteries of a stash of 400 year-old documents in the archives of the French Academy of Sciences. The picture above will you a sense of why I left the library with more than a little dust on me.

My archival sleuth work will figure prominently in the book that I'm finishing up. So stay tuned!

In the meantime, a few highlights:

Over the course of just of few days, I dug gently around in cartons and cartons of manuscripts and corrected page proofs from the 17th century.

I stood awkwardly in front of an equally old building in the busy Marais quarter, waiting for someone to let me in. I wanted desperately to have a chance to where one of my historical guys lived, and did some of the crazy experiments I describe in the book. I lucked out when a mail person showed up. And lost my pride once again as I begged and pleaded to have a look around. (It worked!)

I visited the Paris Observatory, which was built by another fascinating historical figure that I bring back to life in the book. And then, what the heck, I sat quietly in an anatomical amphitheatre in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

My French surgeons learned their craft in these two-storied dissection halls. I spent a good twenty minutes, sitting right in the very spot where the dissection table would have stood, soaking it all in.

I didn't have to beg to get in, but I did get many odd looks from the workers of the Paris Human Resources department who inhabit this small historical building now.

Que la vie est belle!

The Color of Pirating

2009-04-30T03:38:00.002-05:00

By Peter T. Leeson

Eighteenth-century pirate features, from skull-emblazed flags to wooden legs, pervade popular culture. One important pirate feature that doesn’t appear in most pop-culture treatments, however, is the fact that upward of a quarter of the average early 18^th-century pirate crew was black.

Historical evidence on the free vs. slave status of black pirates is conflicting. Because of this it’s tempting to conclude that pirates, who were no more racially enlightened than their legitimate contemporaries, typically treated blacks as their legitimate contemporaries did: they enslaved them.

But as I argue in my new book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, this conclusion may be mistaken. Although some black pirates were slaves, it’s probable that many, and perhaps even most, black pirates were not. To be sure, pirates were as prejudiced as their legitimate contemporaries. But unlike in legitimate society, in pirate society, prejudiced thinking didn’t necessarily mean prejudiced policy.

The reason for this is straightforward: pirates were profit seekers. They cared more about gold and silver than they cared about black and white. And granting blacks their freedom was often more profitable than enslaving them.

A pirate crew’s benefit of enslaving a sailor was the additional booty the slave’s wage-less labor brought it. But the crew’s cost of enslaving a sailor could be much higher. If the slave escaped and informed the authorities on his pirate captors, or together with other conscripts succeeded in overthrowing his enslavers and delivered them to the law, the pirates faced the unpleasant prospect of hanging and thus the end of their roguish lives. Since the cost of enslaving a sailor often exceeded the benefit, in many cases, granting black sailors their freedom was simply good business.

Pirate profit seeking, not progressivism, prodded some sea scoundrels to practice racial tolerance. But this doesn’t diminish the tolerance they showed. In their pursuit of self-interest these pirates were led, as if by an “invisible hook,” in some ways reminiscent of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” to treat black sailors as equals.

Peter T. Leeson is author of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton University Press). Image courtesy of the author.

Book of the Week: The Invisible Hook

2009-04-28T21:45:00.004-05:00

Now here's a question that I had never given much thought about: What were the economic conditions for the pirating industry in the 17th century? But what a fascinating question it is!

Peter Leeson's book is very intriguing--and wickedly clever. Who knew that pirates had elaborate systems of what we'd call "constitutional democracy" and "worker's compensation" today? For Leeson, it's all about measured responses to market forces.

To get a better sense of his argument, take a look at these articles or walk the plank mates!

The Pirates' Code (The New Yorker)

Everyone in Favor say Yargh! (Boston Globe)

More to come in the next post. Be sure to sign up for a chance at a free copy. Just click the book cover to your left.

Ahoy!

[Image courtesy of author]

Medical Curiosities, Authorial Resources

2009-04-23T04:01:00.001-05:00

By Kirsten Menger-Anderson

Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain began as a short story about phrenology. I was fascinated by the odd idea of determining personality from the bumps in our heads, and intrigued by the diagrams of crisscrossed heads containing "brain organs" ranging from poetic talent to the tendency to murder. What other (now discredited) medical ideas have we held, I began to wonder. And so began my journey through 350 years of medical history.

Early in my research, I discovered the work of Jan Bondeson. His Buried Alive, which tells vivid tales of tobacco-smoke enemas and coffins fitted out with bell towers, inspired a story about a boy who may or may not be dead. Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, an entertaining survey of medical oddities, led to several additional stories that draw from the colorful histories Bondeson tells--tales involving spontaneous combustion and short hirsute women. Past medical techniques and the contemporaneous debates about life, death, and the soul took hold of my imagination. When I came across a review for Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer, I immediately ordered the book.

Soul Made Flesh, which opens in 1662 Oxford, where the "stink of cured fish hanging in fishmongers' stalls mixes with the soft smell of bread in the bakeries," is a history of our search to understand the human brain and the soul--work that inspired the opening story of my collection. From Zimmer, I learned about theories concerning the soul and its relationship to the human body, and how Galen's anatomy, which was accepted well into the seventeenth century, was based on studies of "lower" animals: the brain of a cow, the uterus of a dog, the kidneys of a pig.

I discovered curative radium in Bob McCoy's book Quack! Tales of Medical Fraud. I read about Mesmerism in an essay by Dylan Morgan; I followed the evolution of New York City in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace's amazing book Gotham. The sciences that drive the characters in Doctor Olaf are the ones I learned about as I researched the book. Only I have the benefit of intervening centuries to see that many of the practices and theories are ill-advised. My characters believe in them.

Image: Skull inscribed for phrenological demonstration. 19th century. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

Book of the Week: Dr. Olaf von Schuler's Brain

2009-04-21T05:50:00.001-05:00

Is it possible to have found a fiction writer who shares such wonder at early medicine's marvels? Does Kirsten Menger-Andersen earn an honorary place among medical historians for translating our odd truths about medical beliefs and practices into breath-taking and respectful prose? Answer: YES.

Doctor Olaf von Schuler's Brain is simply gorgeous. Menger-Andersen moves us from early-modern Europe to modern day New York with subtly and historical appreciation of the fine details that bring these moments together--and that make each uniquely different.

For more, here's a review from the New York Times. Stay tuned on Thursday for a post from author herself.

In the meantime, just click on the book cover to your left for a chance to win a copy.

Image: Provided by author

Food for Thought

2009-04-18T05:29:00.002-05:00

Here's a tidbit for any Wonders and Marvels readers out there who may be thinking about starting a family.

Until the late seventeenth century, Galenic notions of the body as a complex system of fluids (humors) dominated. In the sport of baby-making, the end goal was to mix male and female "seed" in just the right quantity and quality to make a boy. So this meant that the hotter the better.

Men were considered hot and dry in humoralist models. So, if the seed mix was hot, a boy would be born.

So, here are a few seventeenth-century tips for all of you out there. If you want a girl, stick with those cold foods like fruit and lettuce. If you want a boy, head straight for foods that early-modern physicians classified as hot: wine, meat, arugula.

I'm not so sure about the recipe for dried stag testicles, though. If it works for you, let us know. Early doctors recommend that you sprinkle them liberally onto your food.

Imagine this: "Excuse me, Sire. But could pass the salt and testicles?"

For more eclectic musings on embryology, childbirth, chastity belts, brothel madams, you name it...
take a peek here.

The Other Vanderbilt

2009-04-16T08:21:00.002-05:00

By T.J. Stiles

In the nineteenth century, there was a man who towered over the American economy, ruthless in business yet true to his word, a physical powerhouse who hated needless chatter. His name was Cornelius Vanderbilt.

There was also a man who lurked in gambling saloons, skipping out on his debts and wheedling money out of celebrities, an epileptic full of self-important bombast. His name was also Cornelius Vanderbilt. Or, to be precise, Cornelius J. Vanderbilt, the second son of that other Cornelius.

The first Vanderbilt—known as the Commodore—was one of the most powerful business tycoons in American history. But the qualities that brought him such success make him a tough subject for the biographer. He was fierce, unrelenting, and kept his mouth shut about his affairs, let alone his feelings.

Lucky for us—if unlucky for him—he had a son who was his polar opposite, who pulled out a chain of ever-changing emotions. Corneil (as Cornelius J. was called) was addicted to gambling. He issued promissory notes he never intended to pay, pledged his allowance from his father to creditors, and even pawned his wife’s jewelry. He had a knack for convincing famous men to give him money. Horace Greeley became his patron, lending tens of thousands of dollars. Greeley even pestered Abraham Lincoln to grant Corneil favors (unsuccessfully).

Corneil violated everything in his father’s code of conduct, but the Commodore still loved his son. “Stubborn inconsistency” is how Sophia, Corneil’s mother, described Vanderbilt’s attitude toward Corneil. “He said that if Cornelius J. had a little more sense he might be fit for business; if a little less, he could be put into a lunatic asylum out of harm’s way, where he sometimes thought he properly belonged,” recalled Bishop Holland McTyeire, the founder of Vanderbilt University. “Poor unfortunate boy,” said the Commodore on his deathbed. “You make good resolutions but are not able to keep them from here to Broadway”—two blocks away.

The Commodore died on January 4, 1877, and left behind the largest fortune the Untied States had ever seen. Just five years later, on April 2, 1882, Corneil put a revolver to his temple and shot himself, dying bankrupt.

Image: Cover of Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, showing Vanderbilt's personal physician, Dr. Jared Linsly, testifying on the first day of the trial over Cornelius' will. He left about 95% of his estate to his oldest son, William and one of his daughters sued to break the will. Corneil joined in the lawsuit at one point. William won, but he doubled his siblings' stake in the inheritance. (New York Public Library)

T.J. Stiles is author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Book of the Week: The First Tycoon

2009-04-13T12:28:00.004-05:00

By Holly Tucker

In the spring of 1873, a seventy-nine year old Cornelius Vanderbilt made a $1 million dollar gift to allow the Bishop Holland McTyeire to establish a university just outside of Nashville, Tennessee.

Vanderbilt University now consistently ranks among the top twenty universities in the United States. As a faculty member at Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt's legacy is quietly woven into my daily life. But I have to admit that I didn't know much about the university's namesake other than the basics.

T.J. Stiles' new book The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt is a masterful biography of a deeply complicated and, at times, volatile character. I know that you'll find T.J.'s upcoming guest post on the ruthless Commodore's complicated family life as fascinating as I have. As his son Corneil's travails remind us, life as a child of Vanderbilt could not have been easy.

(Image: Vanderbilt University. Kirkland Hall, which still stands--minus the right tower--on campus and serves as the central administration building.)

Galileo Goes to Jail

2009-04-11T07:05:00.002-05:00

By Holly Tucker

There are some books that are just too good not to mention. Galileo Goes To Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion, edited by Ronald L. Numbers, is one of them.

Just out from Harvard University Press, Galileo tackles some of the enduring legends in the history of science. To wit:

*That the Medieval Christian Suppressed the Growth of Science

*That the Medieval Church Prohibited Human Dissection

*That Galileo was Imprisoned and Tortured for Advocating Copernicanism

*That Rene Descartes Originated the Mind-Body Distinction

*That Evolution Destroyed Darwin's Faith in Christianity--until He Reconverted on His Deathbed

*That Creationism is a Uniquely American Phenomenon

The book debunks 25 myths in all--and the short chapters are written by top scholars in the history of science, medicine, and religion. This is one of those brilliant books that appeals to folks outside of the halls of academe, while also showcasing the talent within it.

For folks trying to separate fact from fiction, Galileo Goes to Jail is one very enjoyable and informative read.

Revolutionary Tidbits

2009-04-09T19:45:00.000-05:00

David Andress offered up his thoughts on one of history's busiest years: 1789.

Of course, 1789 makes me think of the French Revolution, which also makes me think of guillotines. And this offers up a good excuse to repost a favorite, though gory, tidbit on the art of dying... (thanks, Kris!)

by Kris Waldherr

Of the many méthodes de la mort presented in my book Doomed Queens, it's beheading which generates the most buzz. After all, thanks to Henry VIII and his infamous wives, it's a rare person who hasn't seen Hollywood footage of one of his queens losing her head. These cinematic scenes are usually acted with a trembling lower lip, defiant last statement, then cue birds flying away (no doubt symbolizing the flight of the soul to heaven).

Beheading has been utilized worldwide since ancient times. It's considered a quick and effective way to end a life, provided the executioner is skilled. In the case of Mary Stuart, it took three blows to sever her head. During Henry's era, the condemned were usually blindfolded after they made a pious last statement that included forgiveness of the executioner and praise for the monarch. Next, they placed their necks upon the block; in the case of women, sometimes someone held their hair to the front, to steady them for the blow to come. Though an ax was traditionally used, Henry sent for a French swordsman to execute Anne in 1536; it was rumored that he was so skilled that she would feel no pain. Anne quipped, "He shall not have much trouble, for I have a little neck." The queen was killed with a single sword stroke while kneeling upright mid-prayer.

The much-married king did not splurge for the French swordsman in 1542 for Catherine Howard, his fifth queen but second conjugal beheading; she was dispatched in the usual way. The story goes that poor little Queen Kitty was so nervous about her upcoming date with death that she requested the block to be brought to her. She spent the night before her execution rehearsing how to place her head on the block. Presumably these efforts left her exhausted; her legs gave way as she climbed the scaffold and she had to be helped up.

As for Marie Antoinette, she was beheaded with a guillotine in 1793, which was a la mode in France due to the efforts of Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. The good doctor submitted a modest proposal in 1789 to an assembly evaluating changes to the French penal code. Within it, Guillotin made the audacious suggestion that all men be treated equal when executed—that is, without pain and without torture. He wrote, "In all cases where the law imposes the death penalty on an accused person, the punishment shall be the same. . . . The criminal shall be decapitated; this will be done solely by means of a simple mechanism." Contrary to popular belief, Guillotin was not a fetishist fascinated by executions; he was a lapsed Jesuit who hoped that a more humane method would lead to the abolition of the death penalty. Nor did he design the "simple mechanism" that bore his name. Variations of the guillotine have been around since the fourteenth century. After nearly two years of debate, the Assembly approved his measure in time for the Reign of Terror's communal bloodletting.

Did the guillotine really render its victims a painless, swift death? The jury is out on that, since no one can tell us. However, one story suggests that consciousness did not immediately cease after the blade fell. Charlotte Corday, the infamous murderess of Marat, was recorded to have blushed with "unequivocal indignation" after her severed head was slapped by her jubilant executioner. That written, a neuropsychologist recently informed me that it was likely that individual consciousness would end within four seconds, in response to the severing of the aorta during decapitation. More probably, Charlotte's famed blush was in reaction to the slap itself. Since the guillotine operates so quickly, her blood would be caught still circulating toward her brain, leaving her skin responsive to physical force after consciousness ceased—unless that was one really fast slapper.

Kris Waldherr is the author of Doomed Queens: Royal Women Who Met Bad Ends From Cleopatra to Princess Di from Broadway Books.

Book of the Week: 1789

2009-04-07T21:32:00.008-05:00

By David Andress

The year 1789 is so packed with significant events that one of the main problems I had in writing my book (1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age) was deciding how much I could squeeze in.

Clearly the French Revolution is the iconic episode automatically associated with the date, but before I started work on this project I hadn't realized how intimately it was connected to the effectively parallel process of drafting and enacting the US Constitution. And parallels and coincidences run in other directions too - who would have known that George III of England was celebrating his recovery from madness with a service at St Paul's Cathedral in London at almost literally the same moment that George Washington was being rowed across the Hudson to his new capital, New York, and acclaimed with new words to the tune of 'God Save the King'?

But though the story of 1789 is one of celebrations and struggles for rights and freedoms, it also has a much darker side. We remember the famous mutiny on the Bounty - brewing even as Washington stepped ashore in Manhattan – for the mutineers' resistance to the tyranny of Captain Bligh. But how many realize that the mutineers' idea of a South Seas paradise included kidnapping and enslaving Tahitian men and women to serve them, in the fields and in their beds?

These and other fascinating stories fill the year, from the rampages of settlers on the Ohio frontier to the rise of abolitionism in England, alongside empire-building in India, and the first hesitant attempts to communicate with Aboriginal Australians – by kidnapping one and forcing him to learn English.

Overall, writing this book has been a reminder of how complex the lessons of history can be. When we tell stories of our heroes and our villains, we risk losing sight of how much of both kinds of quality – of sacrifice and greed, justice and exploitation, generosity and contempt – is always bound up in the deeds of real people struggling to build the future.

David Andress is author of 1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age (Basic Books).
Image: The Execution of Louis XVI (Helman 1793)

Chubby Cherubs

2009-04-02T20:11:00.007-05:00

By Holly Tucker

Kids, I've told you a million times...Quit Dissecting the Dog!

I came across this image quite by accident today in the extraordinary Wellcome Library image collection. I've been working on some descriptions of early-modern dissections for my book manuscript--and was having a hard time putting into words the tools that anatomists used in their work: their size, shape, and use. Often when I'm stuck, I dip into my favorite arsenals of images to reawaken my creative juices.

It was only after I had flipped through a good hundred images or so that I realized: I'm too jaded. What an odd life it is when you can scan illustrations that are hundreds of years old and think "seen that," "been there," "done that" as you hit enter.

And then, just when I was thinking that nothing surprises me anymore: the putti magically appeared.

Putti (putto in the singular) are what those portly little babies are called. While they are regular features in Renaissance religious art, they show up from time to time as well in later scientific, and especially, medical illustrations.

One of my putti favorites has to be the frontispiece to Regnier de Graaf's De mulierum organis generationi inservientibus (1672), which announced the discovery of the human egg. (Spermatazoa were discovered in 1677--see post on Little Men in Sperm and The Chicken or the Egg).

The putti in the bottom left-hand portion of the illustration have just dissected a hare. They have put its ovaries on a tray and are looking at it close-up through a telescope-like device. Behind them stands a statuesque figure who holds a hand-drawn image of the female reproductive system.

But for as much as the Regnier image is eye-catching (and figures prominently on the cover of one of my books), I have to say that this new set of putti amuse and mesmerize me while also creeping me out in no small measure.

Related posts:

Gross Anatomy

Realism in Dissection

Dissection of Syphilis Patients

Anatomy of a Teaching Gig

Image: Etching by Bernard Picart, 1729. Wellcome Library, London.

Decoding the Heavens

2009-03-31T21:30:00.010-05:00

By Jo Marchant

In autumn 1900, Captain Dimitrios Kontos and his crew of sponge divers were sailing home from their summer diving grounds off Tunisia. They were heading for the island of Symi in the eastern Mediterranean, but were blown off course by a storm and sheltered by a barren islet called Antikythera.

After the storm’s retreat, they discovered on the seabed a spectacular shipwreck . A Roman ship from the first century BC, it was carrying stolen Greek treasures, including statues, armour and jewellery.

The divers salvaged the wreck for the Greek government, and the artefacts were taken to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Among the haul was a lump of rock no one unnoticed at first. Then it cracked open, revealing gearwheels, inscriptions, and dials. This “Antikythera mechanism” turned out to be the most stunning scientific artefact we have from antiquity. Nothing close to its complexity appears again for more than a thousand years.

For much of the last century this mysterious machine was largely ignored by mainstream historians. But thanks to a succession of men who devoted their lives to decoding the device (see video), its secrets have finally been revealed. It was a clockwork computer for calculating the varying movements of the Sun, Moon and planets, and even predicting future eclipses.

I first heard about the Antikythera mechanism in summer 2006. A paper revealing its workings was due to appear in the science journal Nature, where I was on staff as an editor. The story grabbed me immediately, and I travelled to Athens to see the remains of the mechanism, and meet those who had studied it.

In my new book, Decoding the Heavens, I describe the 100-year quest to understand the device. But along the way I became intrigued by the bigger tale, of where this unexpected technology came from and where it went for a thousand years. I was stunned to discover that the expertise embodied in the device was not lost. Traces were passed to the Islamic world, and back to Medieval Europe, where this ancient knowledge triggered much of the technology that shapes our lives today.

Jo Marchant in the author of Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets, published by Da Capo Press

Let's Drink Like a Pope!

2009-03-26T04:06:00.003-05:00

By Roger Collins

Not long after his death in 1342 Benedict XII had his life written by a French monk, who took the precaution of remaining anonymous, as what he had to say about the pope was not flattering. 'Hard', 'mean', 'hating friars' and thinking all of his cardinals were liars, were just some of the accusations made. Our author also said that Benedict drank so much wine that he gave rise to the popular toast Bibamus papaliter, or 'Let's drink like a pope'!

This was not the first time that this particular pope had received a bad press. Before he was unanimously elected in 1334, he had been bishop of Pamiers, near Toulouse in south-western France, and there had led the inquisition in its investigation of Cathars or Albigensians in his diocese, most notably in the village of Montaillou. His detailed records of these interrogations, partly preserved in his own notebook now in the Vatican Library, provided the material for the famous French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie to reconstruct so much of the life and thought-world of that community in his book Montaillou of 1975.

Unsurprisingly, some of those who appeared before Bishop Jacques Fournier, as he then was, felt he was 'the spirit of evil', and 'a demon infesting the land.' One of them wished he 'would fall into a precipice.' For historians today, however, Benedict XII is a an austere reformer, who resisted the temptation to reward his own relatives in the way so many of his immediate predecessors and successors did, and who tried to impose higher standards of conduct in the Church; for example reproving the 'infinite' number of Spanish priests said to be living openly with their mistresses. Other contemporary authors, who shared his ideals, reported sadness at his death and miracles at his tomb. But his successor, who became Clement VI, was far more generally popular, as he quickly showed that his nature lived up to his name.

Roger Collins is author of KEEPERS OF THE KEYS OF HEAVEN: A History of the Papacy (Basic Books).

Image: Pope Leo X, courtesy of Basic Books

Book of the Week: Keepers of the Keys of Heaven

2009-03-24T07:55:00.007-05:00

By Holly Tucker

Here is an assignment that would send deep panic through my writerly self: Please write, in 500 pages or less, a history of Popes from the beginning to the present day.

Roger Collins has risen to the task magnificently! Written with clarity and verve, Keeps of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy is an approachable and deeply satisfying read on the big History (big H) of Popes that is interwoven with lots of intriguing behind-the-scenes history (little h).

For example, who knew that a woman named Donna Olimpia was the first and only woman ever permitted to address the secret-shrouded conclave following the death of Pope Innocent X, in 1655?

Donna Olimpia was the pope's sister-in-law and had been rumored to be his mistress. She was a formidable business woman who shepherded the family fortune, while also making time to take over the licensing of brothels in Rome. Brothels, it seems, were regulated by the papal administration until Olimpia made the case that this was an activity completely unbecoming of God's church. Makes sense.

My guess is that there was also a little bit of financial incentive for her work. In fact, as Collins explains, the licenses that appeared over the doorways of houses of ill-repute soon bore her family arms. Thus giving her then nickname of La Pimpessa.

Ever curious, I have an email out to my colleagues who teach Italian for the full 17th century vocabularies of Italian Madams. I'm so curious about the play on words between Pimpessa and Papessa--which were, it seems, Olimpia's nicknames.

Professor Collins will also be here on Thursday to talk about Popes and booze. Amen.

And for those of you who can't get enough of Church trivia, you might take a peek at this gem about the Virgin's fertility belt.

Sacred Relic or Heavenly Accessory

Miracles of Prato

Magic Squares

2009-03-21T02:48:00.003-05:00

By Ian Stewart

According to a Chinese myth, the Emperor Yu, who lived in the third millenium BC, came across a sacred turtle in a tributary of the Yellow River, with strange markings on its shell. These markings are now known as the Lo Shu ("Lo river writing").

The markings are numbers, and they form a square pattern:

4 9 2
3 5 7
8 1 6

Here every row, every colum and every diagonal adds to the same number, 15. A number square with these properties is said to be magic, and the number concerned is its magic constant. Usually the square is made from successive whole numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, but sometimes this condition is relaxed.

In 1514 the artist Albrecht Durer produced an engraving "Melancholia," containing a 4x4 square. The middle numbers in the bottom row are 15-14, the date of the work. This square contains the numbers

16 3 2 13
5 10 11 8
9 6 7 12
4 15 14 1

and has magic constant 34.

Using consecutive whole numbers 1, 2, 3,...., and counting rotations and reflections of a given square as being the same, there are precisely:

. 1 magic square size 3 x 3
. 880 magic squares of size 4 x 4
. 275,305, 224 magic squares size 5 x 5

The number of 6 x 6 magic squares is unknown, but has been estimated by statistical methods to be about 1.77 x 10 (19)

From the book Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities by Ian Stewart. Excerpted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2009.

Historical Footprints

2009-03-19T03:51:00.004-05:00

by Martha A. Sandweiss

In Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, I unravel the hidden life of Clarence King, the celebrated western American explorer, who crossed the color line from white to black to marry the woman he loved. For thirteen years, from his marriage in 1888 until his death in 1901, King lived a secret double life as a black Pullman porter named James Todd. His prominent white friends never knew that King had an African-American wife and five mixed-race children. And Ada Copeland, the woman he married, had no idea of her husband’s true identity. Not until King lay dying in 1901, did he disclose his true identity to his wife.

King sought to ensure that no paper trail of his secret life would exist. But most families in late nineteenth-century America left behind some trace in the historical records, and this one was no exception.

The federal census records proved essential to my search. Historians of a certain age will recall the tedium of scrolling through endless microfilm reels of census data. Now the data is digitized and searchable. One can track characters across time. Minor characters spring instantly to life. Broad hypotheses are easily checked. I could quickly calculate, for example, how many Georgia-born African Americans lived in Manhattan in 1880. Not very many. I could then infer that Copeland had exercised a rare sort of ambition in moving north from her native state.

My students initially find census records uninteresting. But they soon see their potential. They can figure out who lived in a particular neighborhood, imagine the languages that would be heard on the street or think about the work places where people spent their days. They can ask hard questions about family structure, gender, and literacy. In short, they can make these historical records speak to individual life stories as well as to larger themes of American history.

Years ago, I approached an academic library to request that they subscribe to Ancestry.com, the best and most easily navigated of the proprietary digitized census sites. We don’t buy resources for genealogists, they said. I quickly showed them what academic historians might do with these resources and won them over. Now the librarians are among the database’s biggest fans, and I incorporate census research assignments into many of my undergraduate courses. Students initially get hooked by finding the trace of a grandparent. But they quickly discover that they can become real historical sleuths, as well, able to recover forgotten bits of the past.

Image: Wallace King, Ada and Clarence's son (right) in the family's home, 1950s. Courtesy of Patricia Chacon.

Book of the Week: PASSING STRANGE

2009-03-17T20:21:00.007-05:00

By Holly Tucker

Wonders & Marvels most often profiles history and historical fiction on pre-1800 topics. But Martha A. Sandweiss' Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Decption Across the Color Line is just too good to pass up. And it's always a treat to help spread the word about well-written books by fellow academics. (Sandweiss is a Professor of History at Princeton.)

Passing Strange tells the story of Clarence King who is best known for his work as a geologist and writer. But King had a secret--a big one. In order to marry the woman he loved, he lived a double life as a black man. Sandweiss' book presents King's work, love, and life, in the context of racial politics from the late 19th century into the 1960s. An extraordinary story told by a writer with a keen historical eye and deep respect for her subjects.

The New York Times ran not just one, but two reviews of the book. And if you're still not convinced, you might take a peek at a third in the Washington Post, by Annette-Gordon Reed. If the reviewer's name sounds familiar, it is. Reed is author of The Hemingses of Monticello.

Image: Clarence King, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Department of the Interior

Childbirth as a Spectator Sport

2009-03-15T21:04:00.006-05:00

By Catherine Delors

At Versailles, not only the Queen, but princesses of the royal blood were required to give birth in public. Why? To prevent any substitution of the infant in case he was destined to reign. I say “he” by design, because France’s unwritten constitution prevented women to step unto the throne in their own right, though they could, and often did govern the Kingdom as Regents.

In the case of Marie-Antoinette, her first laying-in was all the more eagerly awaited that she had been married for eight years without presenting her husband with an heir. For a Queen, this was a glaring failure. Her sister-in-law, the Comtesse d’Artois, married to the King’s youngest brother, had already been delivered of two healthy little boys. Marie-Antoinette had attended the deliveries, as required by the etiquette, and deeply felt the political and personal humiliation of her own childlessness.

Now at long last she herself was pregnant. The stakes could not be higher: if the child were stillborn, or a girl, the heir to the throne would remain the Comte de Provence, another brother of Louis XVI. The Comte de Provence was cunning, ambitious, and probably the most dangerous enemy of the royal couple. Every year that passed without Marie-Antoinette giving birth to a Dauphin brought him closer to the throne (to which he would eventually ascend, decades later, under the name of Louis XVIII.)

Let us listen to what Madame Campan, First Chambermaid to Marie-Antoinette, tells us in her irreplaceable Memoirs: “The Queen’s laying-in approached; Te Deums were sung and prayers offered up in all the cathedrals. On December 11, 1778, the royal family, the Princes of the royal blood, and the Great Officers of State spent the night in the rooms adjoining the Queen's Bedchamber.” This, by the way, was days ahead of time because the child would not be born until the 19th of December.

Finally, before noon, it became certain that the birth was imminent. “The etiquette,” continues Madame Campan, “allowing all persons indiscriminately to enter at the moment of the delivery of a queen was observed with such exaggeration that when the obstetrician said aloud: “The Queen is going to give birth!” the persons who poured into the chamber were so numerous that the rush nearly killed the Queen. During the night the King had taken the precaution to have the enormous tapestry screens which surrounded Her Majesty’s bed secured with cords; but for this they certainly would have been thrown down upon her. It was impossible to move about the chamber, which was filled with so motley a crowd that one might have fancied himself in some place of public amusement. Two chimney-sweeps climbed upon the furniture for a better sight of the Queen.”

Marie-Antoinette fainted. Was it simply pain? The body heat created by the crowd packed in the bechamber? The feeling of being exposed to strange eyes in a circus scene? Or the pressure to give birth to a boy? Apparently Marie-Antoinette and her friend the Princesse de Lamballe, Head of the Queen’s Household and member of the royal family, had agreed on a sign the Princesse would make to inform Marie-Antoinette of the child’s gender as soon as it became apparent. Normally that announcement would have been made more formally minutes later, and Marie-Antoinette wanted to know right away. And the child turned out to be a girl! Maybe the disappointment was enough to make the Queen lose consciousness.

The obstetrician decided that the patient needed to be bled (indeed what patient wasn’t in need of a good bloodletting in the 18th century?). More sensibly by modern standards, he called for the windows to be opened wide.

The King sprung to action. The windows had been stopped up (Versailles has always been notoriously drafty) and he rushed to force them open. Let us not forget that Louis XVI was a man of unusual height and strength.

The Court’s head surgeon then seized his lancet and bled the Queen. Whether thanks to his ministrations or more likely the rush of fresh air in the stifling room, she opened her eyes. At this moment the Princesse de Lamballe, who was much given to what was then called “nervous spasms,” added to the general confusion by fainting herself. She had to be carried through the crowd “in a state of insensibility.” Only then was it deemed necessary to empty the room of all idle onlookers. “The valets,” writes Madame Campan, “dragged out by the collar such inconsiderate persons as would not leave the room.”

“This cruel custom,” continues Madame Campan, “was abolished afterwards. The Princes of the family, the Princes of the blood, the Chancellor, and the ministers are surely sufficient to attest the legitimacy of a prince.”

Certainly it was an improvement, but that still left a few dozen people to attend every royal birth...

Catherine Delors is author of Mistress of the Revolution. She also keeps a fascinating blog on all things royal during the eighteenth century.

Alchemy's Secrets

2009-03-14T10:14:00.002-05:00

By Holly Tucker

Natural philosophers and alchemists everywhere should head over to Yale's Beinecke library to explore their latest exhibit.

Book of Secrets: Alchemy and the European Imagination, 1500-2000

From the exhibit guide and online blog, all beautifully done:

"European readers were familiar with alchemical motifs and literature, even when they did not believe in alchemy or were actively critical of its practitioners. Ben Jonson, so knowledgeably mocking of alchemical practitioners and processes in The Alchemist, was only one of many satirical commentators on alchemy. In Areopagitica, his famous polemic against censorship, the poet John Milton uses alchemical allusions scathingly, arguing that “I am of those who beleeve, it will be a harder alchymy then Lullius ever knew, to sublimat any good use out of such an invention [i.e., book licensing].” This was no passing flirtation with alchemical imagery, but the mining of a metaphor which Milton knew would be familiar to his readers in its many complexities: the science of alchemy, its authorities such as Raymond Lull, and the tenuous state of alchemy’s premise that its practitioners could transform base metal into sublime material. Alchemy, as Milton knew, occupied a place in the cultural economy, circulated by poets and authors in the coinage of verse, satire, literary defense, and attack."

Image: Yale University, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Collections

18th Century Domestic Violence

2009-03-12T03:25:00.002-05:00

By Wendy Moore

Wife-beating was both widely tolerated and sanctioned by law in 18th-century England. Yet the ordeal suffered by Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore, at the hands of her husband so shocked Georgian sensibilities that she not only won landmark legal battles but her husband was banished to prison.

Marital violence is as old as marriage itself. In Georgian England, husbands were legally entitled to strike their wives in order to ‘correct’ their conduct so long as moderation was the watchword. One judge, Francis Buller, even went so far as to specify that a husband could beat his wife with a stick so long as it was no thicker than his thumb, earning himself the nickname ‘Judge Thumb’ in satirical prints for his wisdom.

But even when domestic abuse far exceeded such nice distinctions, wives enjoyed little recourse to the law. The torment endured by Mary Eleanor Bowes was among the most extreme.

A wealthy young widow, Mary was tricked in 1777 into marrying an Irish fortune-hunter, Andrew Robinson Stoney, who faked a duel to win her hand. Squandering her wealth, Stoney – who changed his name to Bowes – beat Mary with sticks, whips and candlesticks, tore out her hair, burned her face and threatened her with knives.

Terrified for her life, after eight years of torture Mary fled the marital home and embarked on audacious legal suits to win a divorce, reclaim her fortune and obtain custody of her children. Her divorce case in the church courts on grounds of adultery and cruelty, backed by courageous eye-witness accounts from servants, was one of only a handful of successful cases initiated by women when first resolved in 1786.

But her ordeal was far from over. Horrified that he might lose his fortune, her husband kidnapped Mary from a London street in a desperate bid to force her to rescind her case. Dragging her across snow-covered moors, Bowes threatened Mary with a pistol and with rape. Eventually rescued after eight days, Mary went on to win her divorce through two appeal stages as well as reclaiming her property and her children, while Bowes spent the rest of his life in jail for what The Times described as ‘a detail of barbarity that shocks humanity and outrages civilisation’.

When Mary died, in 1800, she asked for the blindfolded figure of Justice to stand guard at her tomb. But it would be nearly another century before women earned even minimal protection against abusive husbands.

Further reading
Wendy Moore, Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore (Crown, 2009).
Jennifer Ramkalawon, Love and Marriage (British Museum Press, 2009).
Elizabeth Foyster, Marital Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Image: "Judge Thumb or, Patent Sticks for Family Correction: Warranted Lawful!" (1782) Courtesy of the British Museum.

Book of the Week: Wedlock

2009-03-09T03:30:00.004-05:00

By Holly Tucker

This week's Book of the Week is Wendy Moore's WEDLOCK: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore.

I have to concur with the praise it received in a recent UK review: "This splendid book, well researched and richly detailed, is as gripping as a novel." Review in the Telegraph

Writing is a challenge, no doubt about it. But writing smart nonfiction and crafting it in ways that make it a page turner is incredibly difficult. WEDLOCK rises to the challenge marvelously. Wendy's work does not disappoint.

On top of it, Mary Eleanor Bowes is such a fascinating character. She was a target for strong opinion during her day. In the illustration above, she is shown suckling kittens on the grounds that she was allegedly more fond of her cats than her sons. The cartoon was almost certainly commissioned by her estranged husband, Andrew Robinson Bowes. Now that's a complicated marriage alright!

I also highly recommend Wendy's first book: The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery.

Sacred Relic or Heavenly Accessory?

2009-03-05T03:27:00.003-06:00

By Laurie Albanese and Laura Morowitz

Since the beginning of time women have understood the importance of a well-chosen accessory. Think Cleopatra’s asp, Jackie Kennedy’s pearls, Coco Channel’s hat. Even the Mother of God, it seems, was not immune to the accessory’s allure.

Indeed, the Sacred Belt of the Blessed Virgin may be the only fashion accessory in history to have been venerated by Pope John Paul II, housed in a locked chapel in Italy, and stolen under threat of death. This simple gold and green woven silk sash has inspired frescoes, altarpieces, poetry and prose, and countless prayers. Lovely as they are, it’s hard to imagine Candace Bushnell’s Manolo Blahniks arousing similar decades of devotion from the likes of Saint Francis, Saint Bernard, or Maria de’Medici, all of whom communed with the relic.

Purportedly passed from the Blessed Mother to Saint (“Doubting”) Thomas at the moment of her assumption, the Sacred Belt is ascribed with the miraculous properties of aiding conception, gestation, and protecting women in childbirth. Since the 13th Century the belt has been housed in Prato, Italy, where it was carefully guarded by a merchant who brought it from Jerusalem as part of his wife’s dowry. The man slept with the belt under his pillow, but after his death it was passed to the safe keep of the church. When it was ‘miraculously’ recovered after a theft in 1312, a gated chapel was built in Santo Stefano Cathedral , where the belt remains under lock and key surrounded by colorful frescos depicting its illustrious history.

Today, as it has for centuries, the Sacred Belt draws hundreds of visitors to the small Tuscan city of Prato each September 8th to celebrate the Feast of the Blessed Virgin. It is on this date in 1456 that bad-boy Renaissance painter Fra Filippo Lippi is reported to have snatched the novice Lucrezia Buti from the streets of Prato, and taken her to live in his workshop. This scandal, along with the legend of the Sacred Belt, play an important part in our novel, The Miracles of Prato.

About the authors:
Laurie [Lico] Albanese’s books include Blue Suburbia: Almost a Memoir, Lynelle By the Sea, and The Miracles of Prato , co-written with Laura Morowitz. She has written for The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Mothering magazine, and many other periodicals. She is the recipient of a New Jersey State Council in the Arts Fellowship in Fiction Writing, and a Catherine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship. Visit her website at www.laurielicoalbanese.com.

Laura Morowitz is Professor of Art History at Wagner College in New York. She is the author of numerous articles, reviews and publications on European and American art, and on popular culture. Her pieces have appeared in The Art Bulletin, The Oxford Art Review, The Art Journal, The Journal of the History of Collecting and The Journal of Popular Film and Television. The Miracles of Prato is her first novel.

About the image

The Knife Man

2009-03-04T03:09:00.001-06:00

By Holly Tucker

Coming up next week is a guest post from Wendy Hunter, who will be talking about 18th century domestic violence, in conjunction with her new book Wedlock. I came across Wendy's fabulous work about a year ago, when I read her The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery.

THE KNIFE MAN is a biography of the 18th century John Hunter, who is often referred to as the "Father of Surgery." The book has been praised far and wide for its spot-on presentations of what early dissection classrooms and surgical theaters would have been like several hundred years ago. I, for one, will never be able to visit Covent Garden in London again without scanning the buildings in search of the exact space where the Hunter brothers performed their countless dissections. Wendy's chilling chapter on the negotiations that happened in prisons with family members of the soon to be hanged is well worth the read.

As regular Wonders and Marvels readers know, the website's pages are frequently home to inquiries about early surgery. If your nerves are steadied and you're not prone to queasiness, head over to the surgery articles grouped HERE.

And for those who can't get enough of this gory stuff, may I also recommend:

Dream Anatomy, an online exhibit at the National Library of Medicine

Morbid Anatomy, a magnificent and smart website on historical anatomies

Book of the Week: The Miracles of Prato

2009-03-02T09:40:00.007-06:00

By Holly Tucker

What would happen if a painter-monk fell in love with a young novitiate? And what happens when an art historian pairs up with a novelist? Answer--The Miracles of Prato: A Novel.

The page-turning novel opens with a birth, a scandal--and then leads the reader into the dark corners of convent life during the Renaissance. It's a beautiful book built on the equally spell-binding paintings by one of Italy's masters, Fra Filippo Lippi.

The authors will come by on Thursday to talk a bit about the Sacred Belt of the Virgin. A topic right up our alley, given how fascinated we are by love, sex and childbirth here at Wonders and Marvels.

In the meantime, you may wish to study up on your art history with a couple of great articles from the New York Times--one of which describes the research that the authors did in Italy so they could be sure to have their details right.

Eternal Objects of Desire (Fra Filippo Lippi exhibit, Art Review, Roberta Smith)

In Tuscany, the Revealing of a Forbidden Love (Laurie Lico Albanese)

And for those of you who love book trailers, take a look here.

Image: Fra Filippo Lippi, "The Virgin with the Sacra Cintola" (1450s). Museo Civico, Prato.

Alphabet Soup

2009-03-01T22:19:00.002-06:00

Geoffroy Tory was a French Renaissance humanist who is best known as a theorist of--yes--roman capital letters. His Champfleury (1529) spells out how letters should be formed and introduces accents, the bane of all beginning learners of French. For the curious, accents did not appear consistently in French until well until the late 17th and early 18th century.

When I am not teaching, I am often hard at work putting my own letters on the page. Fortunately, I usually write my articles and books in English so I don't have to worry about circumflexes, grave or acute accents, and cedillas!

A few resources continued to be wonderfully inspirational as I put my writing time in. Highly recommended!

Dr. Wicked's Write or Die: A dream come true for the masochist writer (hey, wait, aren't most writers masochist anyway?) A great way to get your word quota in on days when inspiration is flagging.

Paul J. Silvia's How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing This small book is a well of common sense. Just get your derriere in the chair and stop making excuses! I always end up giving my copy away to a writing friend, so I bought 10 copies in my last Amazon order.

Joan Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: I wish that I had known about this book when I was doing my Ph.D. But it still has a lot of great suggestions for the post-doctoral among us.

And then there's Elizabeth Gilbert's interview on TED about why we should shake the notion of creative genius as an internal force. Quotable quote: "The hell with it, I'm going to keep writing anyway, because that's my job. And I would like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job."

Finally, there are my marvelous beta-readers. I have two primary ones who read and reread every word I write plus two or three more who read the smoother drafts. And somehow, in the process, some magical things happen.

What are your writing resources? I'm always looking for new inspiration!

Murder in a 17th Century German Village

2009-03-01T22:06:00.005-06:00

By Tom Robisheaux, Ph.D. (History, Duke University)

From start to finish The Last Witch of Langenburg is high drama full of surprises. Where the pictures we have of most women accused of witchcraft give us only sketchy views of their lives The Last Witch of Langenburg offers a rich picture of a woman and family whose struggles became the pivot of one of the last small witch panics in Europe. The story reveals the terror of witchcraft as the offer of a gift triggered a panic that quickly spread throughout the village and out to the surrounding area.

The tale of Anna Elisabeth Schmieg—the last woman prosecuted for witchcraft in this region of the German lands—does not offer comfortable clichés about witchcraft and witch trials, however. The story unfolds from the vantage point of all of those touched by the events: village women, farmers and workers, surgeons, physicians, petty government officials, the territory’s chief minister, a prince struggling to return the land to order after a long war, as well as prominent university jurists and physicians drawn into the drama. Here witchcraft is shown to mean many things to many different people. Along the way we learn how seemingly disconnected things—Shrove cakes, medical autopsies, poison, mandrake roots, legal reform, torture, secrets between a mother and daughter, and the threat of a distant war—all come together to reveal a cosmic drama of good against evil. This is a story of what it was like to experience witchcraft.

[To read reviews of Tom Robisheaux's latest, click here. By the way, the image above depicts an early-modern imagination of a Witches Sabbath. Look carefully and you'll be able to find the demonic bat-like figure that the publisher used for the book! HT]

Book of the Week: The Last Witch of Lagenburg

2009-02-22T20:17:00.014-06:00

By Holly Tucker

We're certainly on a Witch Kick lately...so imagine my delight when I came across this new title by Thomas Robisheaux, a professor at Duke.

The Last Witch of Lagenburg: Murder in a German Village hit the stores last week and has already met with rave reviews.

Kathleen Kent, author of The Heretic's Daughter and recent guest here at Wonders & Marvels, offers up this glowing assessment:

“A fascinating study of an accused witch, combining detailed historical research with the timeless and tragic story of an outspoken woman brought to a horrific end through superstitious dread. Professor Robisheaux brings the pacing and emotional pitch of a novel to an impressive recounting of trial documentation.”

Booklist gave it thumbs up (or should that be brooms up?) with praise that would make any historian blush:

"By 1672, Count Heinrich Friedrich of Langenburg had restored order and prosperity to his southwest German domain, which had been ravaged by the Thirty Years’ War. But a threat arose when a healthy young mother died suddenly, and suspicions fell on Anna Schmieg, a miller’s wife. Capitalizing on the meticulous record of Schmieg’s case, historian Robisheaux not only re-creates who Anna Schmieg was but also explores the confluence of social, legal, and religious streams that put her life in jeopardy. In literary terms, Robisheaux writes a courtroom drama that will hook readers and secure their attention until the last page....With an incisive ability to view matters through the participants’ eyes, Robisheaux vividly brings this historical incident to life."

Take one historian, mix up a good tale from the 17th century, throw in a witch, a little murder, a court case, and a writerly spell or two...and you have our Book of the Week pick.

Image: "The Stone Operation, or the Witch of Malleghem" After Pieter Bruegel the Elder (circa 1525-1569) by Pieter van der Heyden (circa 1530 - after 1569). Courtesy of Christie's.

They Weren't Green, But Were the Giants Jolly?

2009-02-21T05:05:00.000-06:00

By Holly Tucker

On January 21 1742, the minutes of the English Royal Society reported that:

"Daniel Cajanus a Finlander about thirty two years of age was brought into the Society as a Sight and an instance of one of a gigantic Size of human body.

He stood by one of the Pillars [at Crane Court] & his Height was marked, which measured seven feet four inches and a quarter, and the heels of his shoes were about an inch....The Man said his father was 6 1/2 feet in height, and his Mother six feet three inches and that he was brother to one of the name name shew'd for a sight in London some years ago. His servant affirmed that his usual mean was about 4 1/2 pound of meat.

But as some of the Society were of opinion that this Man was the very same person with the other formerly shown in London; there being a great resemblance in their Feature, tho' this seemed more proportionally made: the Revd. Dr. Pearce, who happen'd to be one of the tallest Gentlemen in the meeting, said he had some reason to think otherwise. For that he had observed he could not reach higher than the other man's forehead, yet he could reach about an inch above the forehead of this man."

This all leaves me to wonder the average height of NBA basketball players. And what a marvel they would be for these early members of the Royal Society!

And, apparently, WE can marvel at Cajanus's skeletal remains from the waist down at Leiden University's Museum of Anatomy and Embryology in Holland--where the bones are said to be on display...

Image: portrait of giant and dwarf, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (German, late 17th Century)

References: John H. Appleby, "Human Curiosities and the Royal Society, 1688-1751" Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 50 (1996): 13-27

Another favorite resource for marvels:

Lorraine Daston & Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750 (New York: Zone, 1998).