Category Archives: history

Healthcare was largely a woman’s province in the early modern period. Diseases were fought and injuries treated at the home and it was women’s work to know how to treat all sorts of these problems. That’s why, when you venture into manuscript collections of the period, you’ll find a serious gender divide in what readers collected in their commonplace books.

A commonplace book was a collection of texts and tidbits appealing to its owner. I’ve studied many commonplace books over the years, men’s and women’s. Most of the men’s collections included witty epigrams and learned passages taken from longer works of scholarship. Women’s commonplace books are almost always very practical collections. We might call many of these “recipe books” although the recipes within weren’t always food for the table. Instead, they were recipes for the medicines these women would prepare and use to treat people in their household.

In 1639, Katherine Packer collected “Very Good medicines for Severall deseases wounds and sores both new and olde”. These weren’t evidence of idle curiosity as Packer’s next line indicated. Instead, these recipes were tried through “carefull practice.”

Here’s one example I transcribed a few years back:

To make childrens teeth grow with little paine hang about the necke anoules tooth that the child may red the goomes . . . when you make the first pape for the childe the mother must milke therein a little of her milke & let the childe eate * the teeth will grow wthout paine. Probatum est

Probatum est – “It has been proven”. Packer had either herself enjoyed success with this cure for a child’s teething pain or known someone who had done so. Fascinating, no?

Examine some of Packer’s medical manuscript thanks to the fabulous Folger Digital Image Collection (This is Folger MS Va 387 if you’re interested).

It’s the weekend (well, almost) and except for marking, two chapters to write and many others to edit, I’m free! Well, let’s not forget the normal household and personal chores. But close enough, eh?

I’m dangling a reward in front of my eyes for when I hit the next marking milestone: reading Alan Taylor’s The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels and Indian Allies. I picked up the book on the recommendation of a former colleague, Dr. Andrew Smith, who blogged about Taylor’s book in December.

After all, we’re celebrating the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 this year: shouldn’t I get back to a topic I haven’t touched since Professor Million’s Indiana History class that I took as an undergrad?

I’m two chapters in and quite hooked, but I’ve sworn to hold off reading the rest until I get more marking done. It’s a thick book (about 450 pages of text with another 150 of apparatus) and will take hours to digest. What’s slowed me down is that it’s in a volume that’s heavy enough so I can’t just drop it in my purse and haul it everywhere (I tend to pleasure read in fits and starts when I’m on the go with my busy family).

Another busman’s holiday, I suppose: I grew up not far from the site of Prophets-town and the Battle of Tippecanoe. Tecumseh was a household name but there’s already so much in Taylor’s story that I’m learning anew, particularly Canadian history elements but also some useful perspectives from my European interests. Even if I don’t often teach the modern topics (and my research interests stay mostly before 1750) this book is shaping up as a valuable read!

Let’s see if I can get the two sets of tutorial responses marked early enough this weekend that I can get back to this fun book.

I’ve been re-reading Jocelin of Brakelond’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds (also available in an out-of-copyright edition at the Internet Medieval Sourcebook), preparatory to leading my seminar students in a discussion of the work. This will be the fourth time I’ve read the book (twice in the last four months, alone).

Every time I re-read a book, I discover new elements or rediscover new aspects to deepen my understanding. Some are wonderful tidbits to crow over and collect for my mental memory-book. Others are realizations to ponder. It’s not so far-fetched to say that old books are old friends but sometimes they’re not all that familiar.

Much as I love the humble and human level of story-telling in Jocelin’s account of his Abbey’s high-flying leader, Samson, and the community’s role in the Angevin world, it’s not entirely an easy read. Bringing the book to my senior seminar the other week, I asked them to unravel some of anti-Semitism in the chronicle. My last review before teaching had made that element stand out all the more to me. I elucidated the context of stories such as “Little Sir Hugh” for them so they understood how some of the references you could easily gloss over in Jocelin were part of the virulent and hateful attitude. They agreed with me that it was a disturbing reality check in their otherwise comfortable chronicle reading.

Thinking all of this through makes my smile dim as I put Jocelin back on the bookshelf beside my desk. I still admire the book but I don’t know how much I can enjoy it even if I enjoy teaching it all the more for using the Chronicle as a way to approach such an important subject. It’s a useful book but I’m struck, anew, by how the past is not a place I’d have wanted to inhabit more than my own time.

Have you ever had to negotiate this same unsettling realization in your reading or teaching?

Extra bonus: Steeleye Span performing “Little Sir Hugh”

My department is seeking a historian of science (or an extremely capable scholar of western intellectual history) to administer a distance education course this summer (May-July) and next fall/winter (September-April) in the history of science that surveys the field from antiquity through the twentieth century.

HIST 3905 History of Science (A study of the rise of science in relation to the development of Western society) has been prepared with an excellent, comprehensive course manual that students will read along with the assigned textbooks: Ede, A. and Cormack, L. B., A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility (2004), Larson, E. J., Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (2006). The course structure has been set but it will still require someone who’s familiar with the field to administer successfully and to assess student assignments.

HIST 3905 is offered via our Envision program and is conducted online.

Interested applicants should send to the Department Chair, Dr. Sara Burke, a letter of application, a current curriculum vitae, a current teaching dossier and any relevant supporting documentation.

Department of History
Laurentian University
935 Ramsey Lake Road
Sudbury, Ontario
P3E 2C6

Consult the Laurentian University 2011-14 Collective Agreement (for rates of pay) and see the terms of the last posting here. The closing date is now 6 March, 2012.

Please circulate widely!

(An outtake from my latest pop culture and history project.)

From soon after her birth in 1819, it was clear that Victoria would inherit the English throne. The childbed death of her cousin, Princess Charlotte, left a succession of aging men to sit the British throne, none of them with sons who could inherit. Young Victoria was raised away from the limelight of the royal court in her mother’s isolated household within Kensington Palace. Seemingly innocent of her destiny until she was provided with a genealogical chart that showed she was next in line to the throne, the young princess solemnly promised her governess, “I will be good.”

When she took the throne not seven years later, Victoria did just that: setting a model of virtuous conduct that endeared her to a nation. But it was clear that some in the country were nervous about the accession. At the outset of her reign, The Guardian expressed reservations about her youth and character.

The accession of our young queen is a circumstance full of hope and promise. Humanly speaking, it is perhaps desirable that the event should have been postponed a few years, that her character might have become more fixed, and her acquaintance with the world and with those branches of knowledge which are peculiarly appropriate to her situation and her duties, more enlarged. But it has been ordained otherwise, and, we have no doubt, ordained for the best. From all that we have read and heard, her majesty’s conduct hitherto seems to have been marked by great propriety both of feeling and demeanour.

Speaking of William IV, Victoria’s immediate predecessor, The Guardian elaborated on the question of personal conduct:

It is often said that the public has no concern with the private lives of princes. We are not of that opinion. For whilst we would neither seek to create nor to gratify a prurient appetite for scandal, in relation to a subject with respect to which that appetite is so easily excited as the vices or follies of the great, we do feel that it is a circumstance which strongly conduces to the welfare and interest of a nation, when the monarch, instead of being an insulated and selfish voluptuary, is known to be constant and unostentatious in the fulfilment of domestic duties, and the natural display of tender and virtuous affections. – The Guardian, 24 June, 1837

While William and Adelaide were a contented couple on the throne, William’s past wasn’t always so flawless. This report completely overlooks his long liasion with Mrs. Jordan by which the happy couple had ten illegitimate children that preceded his late-in-life marriage to Adelaide. But it’s clear from both the reservations about Victoria and the happy recollection of William that some in the country were concerned with the new queen’s prospects. Would she hew more to the model of her late uncle William in ensuring that her time on the throne was a period of relative sobriety with a royal focus on good government or would her reign be touched by scandal and discord as had coloured the monarchy of her other uncle, George IV?

Victoria was fortunate in that she was old enough upon her accession to rule in her own right, without her domineering mother (and her mother’s ambitious aide, John Conroy) to exert their influence. Alison Plowden suggests that her beloved governess, Louisa Lehzen was the key. To this I’d also add the broader cultural context of childhood and the Georgian concepts of virtue which filtered into Victoria’s schoolroom (consult Lynne Vallone’s nuanced study for some excellent examples).

Of course, the next expectation that Victoria had to fulfill was marriage and securing the succession. Since Charlotte’s childbirth death, the royal succession was extremely fragile. Victoria married a dashing young prince, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, with whom she appeared to be deeply in love. While marriage was clearly desirable, opposition arose to their union mostly in the grumblings among some Englishmen at the prospect of yet another foreign consort, in the model of Princess Charlotte’s widower enriching himself from England’s industrial plenty.

Victoria’s marriage was not simply for the benefit of the state. Her personal investment in the relationship was both the touchstone of Victorian ideals of domesticity but also a danger sign for the stability of the monarchy. Victoria and Albert enjoyed over twenty years of marriage before tragedy intervened when he fell ill with typhoid fever. Albert`s death in 1861 was a difficult blow for the queen. Even with their nine children and a nation to lead, Victoria found it hard to carry on. The devastated queen withdrew from public life for a decade and this act of mourning alienated her from many of her subjects. In 1864, someone anonymously affixed a satirical poster to the gates of Buckingham Palace, offering the property “to be let or sold in consequence of the late occupant`s declining business”. Victoria finally returned to public life in 1871 but never gave up the black mourning dress worn to remember her beloved Albert. Inspiring a ten-year withdrawal, the virtuous conduct of the genuinely grief-stricken widow was not what the pundits and wags would have wanted, but Victoria was clearly her own woman in this and in other ways.

References:

Alison Plowden. The Young Victoria. (New York: Stein and Day, 1983).

“The Accession of Queen Victoria.” The Guardian. 24 June, 1837. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1837/jun/24/monarchy.fromthearchive Accessed 17 January, 2012.

Lynne Vallone. Becoming Victoria.. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).