bunnyjadwiga

( Cut for dated, racist language )


Federal Attorney Charles E. Boles, in a legal memo for the U.S. Post Office during WWI, on the black paper's reportings of lynchings.

*shudder*

Read Byzantine history.
No matter how apocalyptic your idea of what is going on in the world right now is, Byzantine history will likely beat it all hollow.
Actually, I didn't *read* Byzantine history, I listened to a lectures-on-CD version.

Having this sort of thing in the back of your head as a references for what "Slow Grind" and "Fast Crash" apocalyptic failure-of-civilization scenarios really are like is very handy.

From Xrefer blog:

Armistice Day anniversary marked by launch of Great War Archive
Oxford University is marking the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day by launching two new, free to access websites, thanks to funding from the JISC Digitisation Programme. These resources will allow educators, scholars and the public to view previously unseen memorabilia and poetry from World War I. The Great War Archive and the First World War Poetry Archive bring together 13,500 digital images of items mainly of rare primary source material.
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/

So, I'm reading 1491 by Charles Mann... I got started because they are doing a First Year Seminar with it (Title: "Archaeology and Sustainability") which I did the library session for.
Last night, my dreams were interrupted, repeatedly, by the words Naugasett and Massachusett (the New England tribes) floating through them.

So, when I came in this morning I looked up the story of Tisquantum again. (Did you know that the practice of burying fish with the hills of corn hasn't been documented in any local tribe, and that he probably picked the idea up from spending time in England?) Unfortunately, it appears he and his compatriots were originally kidnapped and taken to Spain in 1605.

There goes my plan to convince someone to adopt a Pauxtet alternate persona... *sigh*

Yes, I do wish some serious people would research personas from American tribes that had serious kidnapping incidents before 1600-- there appear to have been quite a few. Tisquantum himself appears to have travelled more in Europe than many English or Frenchmen of his age.

After reading Witches & neighbors : the social and cultural context of European witchcraft by Robin Briggs, I became convinced that accusations of witchcraft are the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment equivalent of civil damage/malpractice suits...

*sigh* Get it right, people: it was the Jews they massacred for not catching illnesses (and sometimes they substituted any handy local groups of foreigners if they couldn't get Jews or hated the foreigners more). Making people sick, ruining their crops, or curing people when they were beyond human help, THAT was supposed to be witchcraft. (I wonder if they had any wrongful life type witchcraft persecutions...)

Public record of the labor and delivery of a Iberian woman, 1490:
http://www.the-orb.net/birthrecord.html

So, I'm re-reading Gaudy Night, by Sayers, and running into questions of 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth...'.

In Gaudy Night, there is a long discussion among the members of Shrewsbury scholars about the morality of suppressing a fact, and of the person who sees the fact suppressed and lets it go.

"Well, that's true, of course. Nothing could possibly excuse deliberate falsification."
"There's no sense in deliberate falsification, anyhow," said the Bursar. "What could anybody gain by it?"
"It has been done," said Miss Hillyard, "frequently. To get the better of an argument. Or out of ambition."
"Ambition to be what?" cried Miss Lydgate. "What satisfaction could one possibly get out of a reputation one knew one didn't deserve? It would be horrible."

Of course, there are many things where depending on how one states the facts, and which facts one states, one can make totally opposing arguments. Some of them have been touched on lightly by certain discussions-- even among the sane people who do believe in the Holocaust, for instance, there are wildly varying constructions of what it was about and even the way things happened, and why, and what we need to do to keep it from ever happening again.

Right now, though, I'm looking at something less fraught. One of the blogs I read, a post-peak-oil one (and the peak oil movement puzzles me specifically because of the issues and indicators they choose to focus on), just posted something about the end of the economy, etc. as we know it. The writer cites two other sites for some facts to bolster her argument. But... following her references, I find that they don't say exactly what she has made them say. Using your 'economic incentive" to 'pay utility bills' is not the same as 'paying past-due utility bills'. It may indeed be true that 50% of 'recent' homebuyers now have no or negative equity in their homes-- if you define 'recent' as 'in the last 3 years'. Did the writer do this on purpose? Or is this just the way she reads the news? Should I say something? Should I stop reading her blog? I don't know.

The same is true of other questions. Even in my own writing. I've recently written about medieval hygiene. Trying to explode the 'dirty' stereotype, I may well have overstated my case, and possibly even my evidence. But if I don't lay out the evidence as I know it, I'm complicit in the surpression of facts. If I don't argue the thesis of John Riddle in Eve's Herbs by saying "there's plenty of evidence that lots of this stuff isn't very effective, and that people really were obsessed with regular menstruation" I feel like I'm complicit in the misrepresentation of history. But am I actually supporting the suppression of truth? I don't know.

Someone was referred to me because I know a bunch about historical use of herbs. She's doing a paper on the Egyptian herbals, and was splashing about in search of narrowing her topic.
So, I thought I'd post my most useful responses here, in case someone else is doing the same thing.
The text she's working with is
Lise Manniche, An Ancient Egyptian Herbal,* which is generally considered a nice solid summary.
I suggested that she check out:
Guido Majno, The healing hand : man and wound in the ancient world which anyone interested in pre-modern medicine will find enlightening if somewhat disgusting (hint: there is good pus and bad pus.)
R.J. Forbes, Studies in Ancient Technology a nine-volume set that includes all sorts of information on Greek, Roman, and Egyptian technologies from engineering to perfume.
There is also the terrible Wallis Budge and his Divine Origin of the Craft of the Herbalist but I'd only use that to suggest alleyways to pursue in more reputable sources.
If I had access to it, which I don't now, I'd also suggest Dioscordies, De Materia Medica. There's a English translation from 1655 reprinted under the title The Greek herbal of Dioscorides.

Another text her instructor thought would be helpful is:
John F. Nunn, Ancient Egyptian medicine

Another fascinating book, with lovely pictures and some text from parchments, is:
James P. Allen, The art of medicine in ancient Egypt.

Manniche also wrote Sacred Luxuries: Fragrance, Aromatherapy, and Cosmetics in Ancient Egypt which was well-recieved.

p. 188-190

Elizabeth I of England, educated as a humanist princess, was a perfect exemplar of this new Italian civility...Elizabeth was known to be fussy about her health-- she hated being ill. She preserved her health and lived to old age by apparently following a sensible humanist health regimen; she ate and drank abstemiously, took plenty of exercise, and undoubtedly owned a copy of Sir Thomas Elyot's hugely successful Castel of Helth (1539; five editions by 1560), dedicated to her father's chief minister Thomas Cromwell. She always travelled with her bed and hip bath, and had bathing facilities in all of her palaces, including a sweat bath-- her 'warm box' or 'warm nest' -- inherited from her father at Richmond, her favorite palace. At Richmond she also installed a prototype of the water closet, the invention of her godson "Boy Jack," Sir John Harington (translator of the Salerno Regimen). At Whitehall, Elizabeth also had a hot room with a ceramic tiled stove, as well as a large bath and grooming suite, both inherited from her father, in which to spend time with her intimate companions. This suite was effectively her Cabinet of the Morning. It contained her bedroom, and next to it a 'a fine bathroom... [where] the water pours from oyster shells and different kinds of rock'. Next to the bathroom was a room with an organ 'on which two people can play duets, also a large chest completely covered in silk, and a clock which plays times by striking a bell'. Next to this was a room 'where the Queen keeps her books'. Indeed royal baths were so a la mode that a bathhouse was specially built for Mary, Queen of Scots, at Holyrood Palace in the late 1560s; so there is no reason to think that Queen Elizabeth I did not thoroughly enjoy her monthly bath 'whether she needed it or no' (probably at the time of the menses) and was certainly likely to have taken them more often than that, when returning to Richmond or Whitehall after a long cold journey or a dusty ride on a hot afternoon.

In any case she would have known all about baths, being well versed in the 'arts of adornment' and having a passionate interest in Italian cosmetics.

Things to point out: if Elizabeth suffered from retention of water (edema, dropsy, etc) as she is sometimes claimed to have done, her doctors might have either limited her baths for humorally reasons, or prescribed sweat baths for the same reasons. Retention of water may in fact have been a family problem, plaguing her sister Mary and perhaps even her father in his old age.

In addition, the 'whether she needed it or no' may well NOT have been a comment on her cleanliness, as modern people have usually read it, but a comment on baths for her health, so that she was accustomed to have a bath regularly even without a health prescription...

There's a nasty little quote going around the internet, attributed to Ferdinand Magellan. Now, I have no problem with people complaining about christianity or the church for things they actually did. But the problem with this quote is that it alleges that Magellan said the Church told him the earth was flat. I have never been able to find any source of this quote, because the Church did NOT believe the Earth was flat in his time. *

I finally tracked down a source for this quote, because someone else found it:
http://www.churchoffreethought.org/cgi-bin/contray/contray.cgi?DATA=&ID=000011010&GROUP=048

It's not in the words of Magellan. It's in the words of Robert Green Ingersoll, a freethinker, who first used this alleged quote from Magellan, in an 1873 text called Individuality:
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/individuality.html

What's even more curious about this is the text that follows his made-up quote:

The trouble with most people is, they bow to what is called authority; they have a certain reverence for the old because it is old. They think a man is better for being dead, especially if he has been dead a long time. They think the fathers of their nation were the greatest and best of all mankind. All these things they implicitly believe because it is popular and patriotic, and because they were told so when they were very small, and remember distinctly of hearing mother read it out of a book. It is hard to over-estimate the influence of early training in the direction of superstition.

Yup. He's absolutely right. He's managed to put words in the mouth of a guy that was dead over 300 years when he wrote, and because they are both dead, everyone believes that it actually happened.

* while somewhat apologistic, Jeffrey Burton Russell's Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians lays out the evidence on this point very well.