Houyhnhnm Land

Up; and to the office, where all the morning, and at noon comes Creed to dine with me. After dinner, he and I and my wife to the Bear- Garden, to see a prize fought there. But, coming too soon, I left them there and went on to White Hall, and there did some business with the Lords of the Treasury; and here do hear, by Tom Killigrew and Mr. Progers, that for certain news is come of Harman's having spoiled nineteen of twenty-two French ships, somewhere about the Barbadoes, I think they said; but wherever it is, it is a good service, and very welcome. Here I fell in talk with Tom Killigrew about musick, and he tells me that he will bring me to the best musick in England (of which, indeed, he is master), and that is two Italians and Mrs. Yates, who, he says, is come to sing the Italian manner as well as ever he heard any: says that Knepp won't take pains enough, but that she understands her part so well upon the stage, that no man or woman in the House do the like. Thence I by water to the Bear-Garden, where now the yard was full of people, and those most of them seamen, striving by force to get in, that I was afeard to be seen among them, but got into the ale-house, and so by a back-way was put into the bull-house, where I stood a good while all alone among the bulls, and was afeard I was among the bears, too; but by and by the door opened, and I got into the common pit; and there, with my cloak about my face, I stood and saw the prize fought, till one of them, a shoemaker, was so cut in both his wrists that he could not fight any longer, and then they broke off: his enemy was a butcher. The sport very good, and various humours to be seen among the rabble that is there. Thence carried Creed to White Hall, and there my wife and I took coach and home, and both of us to Sir W. Batten's, to invite them to dinner on Wednesday next, having a whole buck come from Hampton Court, by the warrant which Sir Stephen Fox did give me. And so home to supper and to bed, after a little playing on the flageolet with my wife, who do outdo therein whatever I expected of her.

This new book series provides a forum for studies that consider the material forms of texts as part of an investigation into early modern culture. The editors invite proposals of a multi- or interdisciplinary nature, and particularly welcome proposals that combine archival research with an attention to the theoretical models that might illuminate the reading, [...]

The “canon wars” of the 1980s and 90s may seem a distant memory, yet literary canonicity continues to be a vexed and embattled concept. While the list of texts considered canonical for the medieval and early modern periods is constantly growing, the canon by nature is exclusive and omits a large number of important, interesting, [...]

A 1702 translation of François Massialot's Cuisinier royal et bourgeois of 1691, is now available hand bound, 18thC style with marbled boards and 1/4 leather binding, by Paul McClintock, Common Hands Studio, for $100.00. Please contact Paul for shipping details and payment.

Massialot's book was reissued and updated often in French during the 18thC, but only once in English. The book is full of savories and sweets, liqueurs and confitures, instructions for table settings and menues for fat days and lean (fasting meals according to the church's calendar). Reenactors, living historians, museums and lovers of food and great books will find a remarkable treat in this lovely volume. Paul's work is magnificent--you won't be disappointed!

The Court and Country Cook: Giving New and Plain Directions How to Order all manner of ENTERTAINMENTS. A 480 page volume, presented to the BINDERY by Mrs. Carolyn Smith - Kizer. Additional copies will be bound in a 1/4 calf with marbled boards and may be had at the Crown and Book. Please inquire. fromcommonhands@yahoo.com

History of Science departments have a record of abject failure when it comes to maintaining a thriving presence in online discussion.  University of Pennsylvania’s Logan Lounge was a pioneering departmental effort, but soon sank into posting semesterly updates of upcoming colloquia, and, after 2008, stopped doing even that.  The University of Minnesota program has also given it a go, but never got things going very well (I expect more from my hometown Golden Gophers!).  University College London apparently could not secure state funding and the support of local workers for the construction and maintenance of its STS Observatory.  The University of Oklahoma’s Hydra journal died quietly soon after creating a site with professional-looking graphics.  Ostensibly having an entire department dedicated to the task of maintaining a blog should make it easier for everyone — I know I wish I had more backup! — but this is apparently not so.  Tragedy of the commons, or something, I guess.

Libraries, archives, and museums have a much more impressive record.  Oregon State’s Pauling Blog continues to amaze me in its ability to churn out quality material on a single person week after week.  The Copenhagen Medical Museion keeps a steady hand on the wheel of its discussions of material culture and public presentation in the biomedical domain.  The Wellcome Library blog is excellent, and the Royal Society is off to a good start as well.  My employers, for lack of planning, did not fare so well.

Now there is blogging fever at the University of Toronto.  Three students have started blogs: Jai Virdi, Aaron Sidney Wright, and Jonathan Turner.  In addition, there is a new group blog, The Bubble Chamber, which aims to address a broader audience about matters of public interest.  EWP wishes this new cauldron of effort well, but will observe that keeping a consistent blog requires either a deep well of subject matter to make public, or a willingness to grow in one’s ideas with time.  History of Science scholarship encourages us to think that, by our capacity as people dedicated to the study of science and technology, we have the additional capacity to see-and-commentate at will, and that this ensures both good historiography and our value to the public sphere.  A line of dead blogs (and declining blogs that will remain nameless) suggests we think we have more ideas than we really have.  (Also: no whining about work loads — blogging should always augment your work, not distract you from it.  Blogs should maintain an individualized pace and format appropriate to that task.)  Toronto: the spotlight is on you.

(Lord's day). Up, and walked to St. James's; but there I find Sir W. Coventry gone from his chamber, and Mr. Wren not yet come thither. But I up to the Duke of York, and there, after being ready, my Lord Bruncker and I had an audience, and thence with my Lord Bruncker to White Hall, and he told me, in discourse, how that, though it is true that Sir W. Coventry did long since propose to the Duke of York the leaving his service, as being unable to fulfill it, as he should do, now he hath so much public business, and that the Duke of York did bid him to say nothing of it, but that he would take time to please himself in another to come in his place; yet the Duke's doing it at this time, declaring that he hath found out another, and this one of the Chancellor's servants, he cannot but think was done with some displeasure, and that it could not well be otherwise, that the Duke of York should keep one in that place, that had so eminently opposed him in the defence of his father-in-law, nor could the Duchesse ever endure the sight of him, to be sure. But he thinks that the Duke of York and he are parted upon clear terms of friendship. He tells me he do believe that my Lady Castlemayne is compounding with the King for a pension, and to leave the Court; but that her demands are mighty high: but he believes the King is resolved, and so do every body else I speak with, to do all possible to please the Parliament; and he do declare that he will deliver every body up to them to give an account of their actions: and that last Friday, it seems, there was an Act of Council passed, to put out all Papists in office, and to keep out any from coming in. I went to the King's Chapel to the closet, and there I hear Cresset sing a tenor part along with the Church musick very handsomely, but so loud that people did laugh at him, as a thing done for ostentation. Here I met Sir G. Downing, who would speak with me, and first to inquire what I paid for my kid's leather gloves I had on my hand, and shewed me others on his, as handsome, as good in all points, cost him but 12d. a pair, and mine me 2s. He told me he had been seven years finding out a man that could dress English sheepskin as it should be -- and, indeed, it is now as good, in all respects, as kid, and he says will save 100,000l. a-year, that goes out to France for kid's skins. Thus he labours very worthily to advance our own trade, but do it with mighty vanity and talking. But then he told me of our base condition, in the treaty with Holland and France, about our prisoners, that whereas before we did clear one another's prisoners, man for man, and we upon the publication of the peace did release all our's, 300 at Leith, and others in other places for nothing, the Dutch do keep theirs, and will not discharge them with[out] paying their debts according to the Treaty. That his instruments in Holland, writing to our Embassadors about this to Bredagh, they answer them that they do not know of any thing that they have done therein, but left it just as it was before. To which, when they answer, that by the treaty their Lordships had [not] bound our countrymen to pay their debts in prison, they answer they cannot help it, and we must get them off as cheap as we can. On this score, they demand 1100l. for Sir G. Ascue, and 5000l. for the one province of Zealand, for the prisoners that we have therein. He says that this is a piece of shame that never any nation committed, and that our very Lords here of the Council, when he related this matter to them, did not remember that they had agreed to this article; and swears that all their articles are alike, as the giving away Polleroon, and Surinam, and Nova Scotia, which hath a river 300 miles up the country, with copper mines more than Swedeland, and Newcastle coals, the only place in America that hath coals that we know of; and that Cromwell did value those places, and would for ever have made much of them; but we have given them away for nothing, besides a debt to the King of Denmarke. But, which is most of all, they have discharged those very particular demands of merchants of the Guinny Company and others, which he, when he was there, had adjusted with the Dutch, and come to an agreement in writing, and they undertaken to satisfy, and that this was done in black and white under their hands; and yet we have forgiven all these, and not so much as sent to Sir G. Downing to know what he had done, or to confer with him about any one point of the treaty, but signed to what they would have, and we here signed to whatever in grosse was brought over by Mr. Coventry. And [Sir G. Downing] tells me, just in these words, "My Lord Chancellor had a mind to keep himself from being questioned by clapping up a peace upon any terms." When I answered that there was other privy-councillors to be advised with besides him, and that, therefore, this whole peace could not be laid to his charge, he answered that nobody durst say any thing at the council-table but himself, and that the King was as much afeard of saying any thing there as the meanest privy-councillor; and says more, that at this day the King, in familiar talk, do call the Chancellor "the insolent man," and says that he would not let him speak himself in Council: which is very high, and do shew that the Chancellor is like to be in a bad state, unless he can defend himself better than people think. And yet Creed tells me that he do hear that my Lord Cornbury do say that his father do long for the coming of the Parliament, in order to his own vindication, more than any one of his enemies. And here it comes into my head to set down what Mr. Rawlinson, whom I met in Fenchurch Street on Friday last, looking over his ruines there, told me, that he was told by one of my Lord Chancellor's gentlemen lately (-------- byname), that a grant coming to him to be sealed, wherein the King hath given her [Lady Castlemaine], or somebody by her means, a place which he did not like well of, he did stop the grant; saying, that he thought this woman would sell everything shortly: which she hearing of, she sent to let him know that she had disposed of this place, and did not doubt, in a little time, to dispose of his. This Rawlinson do tell me my Lord Chancellor's own gentleman did tell him himself. Thence, meeting Creed, I with him to the Parke, there to walk a little, and to the Queen's Chapel and there hear their musique, which I liked in itself pretty well as to the composition, but their voices are very harsh and rough that I thought it was some instruments they had that made them sound so. So to White Hall, and saw the King and Queen at dinner; and observed (which I never did before), the formality, but it is but a formality, of putting a bit of bread wiped upon each dish into the mouth of every man that brings a dish; but it should be in the sauce. Here were some Russes come to see the King at dinner: among others, the interpreter, a comely Englishman, in the Envoy's own clothes; which the Envoy, it seems, in vanity did send to show his fine clothes upon this man's back, which is one, it seems, of a comelier presence than himself: and yet it is said that none of their clothes are their own, but taken out of the King's own Wardrobe; and which they dare not bring back dirty or spotted, but clean, or are in danger of being beaten, as they say: insomuch that, Sir Charles Cotterell says, when they are to have an audience they never venture to put on their clothes till he appears to come to fetch them; and, as soon as ever they come home, put them off again. I to Sir G. Carteret's to dinner; where Mr. Cofferer Ashburnham; who told a good story of a prisoner's being condemned at Salisbury for a small matter. While he was on the bench with his father-in-law, judge Richardson, and while they were considering to transport him to save his life, the fellow flung a great stone at the judge, that missed him, but broke through the wainscoat. Upon this, he had his hand cut off, and was hanged presently! Here was a gentleman, one Sheres, one come lately from my Lord Sandwich, with an express; but, Lord! I was almost ashamed to see him, lest he should know that I have not yet wrote one letter to my Lord since his going. I had no discourse with him, but after dinner Sir G. Carteret and I to talk about some business of his, and so I to Mrs. Martin, where was Mrs. Burroughs, and also fine Mrs. Noble, my partner in the christening of Martin's child, did come to see it, and there we sat and talked an hour, and then all broke up and I by coach home, and there find Mr. Pelling and Howe, and we to sing and good musique till late, and then to supper, and Howe lay at my house, and so after supper to bed with much content, only my mind a little troubled at my late breach of vowes, which however I will pay my forfeits, though the badness of my eyes, making me unfit to read or write long, is my excuse, and do put me upon other pleasures and employment which I should refrain from in observation of my vowes.

Sobel's final objection to ontological arguments is that, even if they are sound, their conclusion does not mean that God exists. That is, according to Sobel, a necessarily existing 'being than which none greater can be conceived' or 'being with all perfections' or 'being with all positive properties' would not be God. His argument for this is rather confusing and depends (1) on a controversial modal intuition, and (2) on an odd definition of 'worshipfulness'. As far as I can tell, the argument goes like this: it is clear (so Sobel claims) that such properties as consciousness, knowledge, power, love,...

Lewi Izaak Finkielsztejn (b. 1843; d. unknown, but after 1897) with his second wife, Szejna Rasza Snipinska.  Lewi is my great-great-great-grandfather; that's his daughter in my sidebar.  The photo was taken in Lewi's birthplace, Lomza, Poland. 

Up, and to the office, where all the morning. At noon home to dinner, where Goodgroome was teaching my wife, and dined with us, and I did tell him of my intention to learn to trill, which he will not promise I shall obtain, but he will do what can be done, and I am resolved to learn. All the afternoon at the office, and towards night out by coach with my wife, she to the 'Change, and I to see the price of a copper cisterne for the table, which is very pretty, and they demand 6l. or 7l. for one; but I will have one. Then called my wife at the 'Change, and bought a nightgown for my wife: cost but 24s., and so out to Mile End to drink, and so home to the office to end my letters, and so home to supper and to bed.

A few months ago, I bemoaned the blizzard of photocopies settling in file drawers, piling up in odd corners, and drifting across the floor.  The situation, I gathered, called not for a snowblower, but for a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500.  Flash forward to last week, when two important things arrived: a new computer (the old one, already marked for replacement, developed Worrying Symptoms of Imminent BSOD) and the aforementioned scanner.  Thanks to eBay, the scanner did not produce other Worrying Symptoms--namely, Worrying Symptoms of Imminent Pocketbook Meltdown. 

So, I've been scanning.  This involves pushing one illuminated button, helpfully marked "Scan."  (You can't expect academics to pick up on such things by themselves.) Well, that and removing staples.  Some thoughts:

• Speed.  The scanner is as fast as advertised.  I've scanned at least one hundred and fifty articles--in other words, nearly one thousand pages--since Friday, without being chained to my desk. 
• Curse you, humidity! As anyone who has cussed out their department photocopier knows all too well, humidity does aggravating things to paper, which in turn does aggravating things to the automatic feeder mechanism.  The ScanSnap is equally suspect to humidity-induced discombobulation.
• Got creases? The scanner handles creased, battered, bumped, and otherwise bolluxed paper with reasonable equanimity.  
• Direct line.  It's good that the scanner handles creased etc. paper well, because if you don't perfectly align the document in the feeder, Paper Jams of Rage occur.  And then your uncreased paper will be, well, creased.
• Size.  I've found that the scanner can handle pages of different size within the same document, although I gather from reviews that not everyone has had that experience.
• Mark TWAIN.  Or, rather, the lack thereof.  As several people on the Amazon page point out, there's no TWAIN driver, which means that you can't just add newly scanned pages to an old PDF.  This will be cause for irritation if you want to update old files with new scans.    However, there's a workaround for documents that run over fifty pages.  
• Got IFilter? If you're running Windows 7 (*waves*), you can't search PDFs via the Windows search box, even if you have the right TIFF setting.  (You can work around this by searching directly in Acrobat.)  This may cause a great disturbance in the Force.  It doesn't help that Adobe Acrobat does not yet have a Windows 7 filter in place, for reasons that are clear...to nobody, really.    After I bewailed this discovery on Facebook, a friend pointed me in the direction of Foxit, which does have the Windows 7 filter.  Available for free, no less. 

Just a quick note to say that I will now be doing some new entries, as well as some cross-posting and re-posting from EWP at the new Whewell’s Ghost blog, which has been set up by John Lynch, evolvingthoughts.net’s John Wilkins, and Rebekah Higgit of the National Maritime Museum in London.  It is meant as a clearing-house for high-quality posts on history and philosophy of science, and already seems to be dwarfing readership here after about one day on the internet.

Hosts needed for early modern editions from November 2010 onwards!

In every scholar's life, there comes a time when he or she finishes reading a book, looks off into the distance (or, at least, into the computer screen), and, in a state of advanced perplexity, asks one unanswerable question:

"Who could have possibly thought that this was a good idea?"

The otherwise-unknown Madame Brendlah's Tales of a Jewess (1838) is that kind of novel.  In fact, given that it was never finished--only the first volume exists--the Victorian reading public may also have been asking itself that question.  Montagu Frank Modder comments, with some irony, that the novel is "[n]o doubt a well-intentioned volume," but concludes that "[t]he execution is both weak and egotistical."1  In theory, Tales of a Jewess is about the conversion of a young Jewish woman to Christianity, partly due to the carelessness of her family: they schlepped her off to a Christian boarding school.  Our heroine, Judith, yearns "to see my beloved mother and brothers put from them the bigotry of Jews, and become in spirit, tolerant Christians" (106).  Tales of a Jewess does, in fact, demonstrate some "tolerance" : the novel's most devoutly Christian character is the family's African servant, Joseph--Judith herself scorns a potential suitor who is a "slave dealer" (6)--and we also encounter a virtuous, wronged woman of partly Indian descent.    Nevertheless, in a case of truly spectacular self-deconstruction, this brief for "tolerant Christians" comes in the middle of what is quite possibly the most anti-Semitic novel I've read since Gwendolen--except that, unlike Gwendolen, this is supposed to be an evangelical conversion novel.  Tales of a Jewess drops a passing allusion to the blood libel in the preface, repeating it again towards the novel's conclusion ("She has often heard her brothers exclaim, that they would sooner have stabbed her to the heart, and drunk her blood, than that she should have married a Goyer" [vii]).  Judith's idea of a practical joke runs to tricking a rabbi into eating meat basted in pork juices, a story she's sure that her ideal Christian beloved Hartford will "enjoy" (56).  Other examples of "fun" (ahem) include "accidentally" helping another rabbi to fish cooked in butter, thereby making it impossible for him to eat the meat served for the main course, and exploiting the prohibition against travel on the Sabbath by trapping several Jews on an island without any food.  Characters tell stories celebrating Jewish skills in such matters as theft and blackmail; Judith's own father, a Catholic convert to Judaism, gleefully describes the time he attempted an assignation with a nun, despite being married at the time.  The principal rabbi is a villain out to destroy Judith by any means possible.  Judith's Jewish bosom buddy, Ellen, turns out to be a viper in disguise.  Only Judith's mother appears to have much in the way of redeeming virtues, and even she condemns Judith for converting to Christianity.  Beyond the...charms...of the various Jewish characters, the novel also introduces a number of familiar anti-Semitic topoi, including the child persecuted for owning a New Testament, the rote and insincere nature of Jewish religious practices, and the underlying abusiveness of the Jewish family (a "disordering of authority and gender"2).  

Even considered purely as a novel, Tales of a Jewess is remarkably inept.  Brendlah structures the plot as a series of inset narratives: after the plot inches ahead for a few moments, a character stops and tells a story.  Rinse, repeat. For some reason, a number of these stories are about Napoleon, with whom Judith's father served; it's never clear why, although I'm guessing that Mme. Brendlah was trying to kill two potential literary markets with one stone.    One of the first inset narratives, by Judith's mother, is never actually finished, despite her promise to do so (perhaps Mme. Brendlah just forgot, or perhaps she meant it for one of the following volumes).  Judith's father speaks with a pronounced accent, except when he inexplicably drops it for an entire chapter.  And, in an unintentionally hilarious moment, Judith and the young lady from India share a spontaneous, sentimental moment of "mutual confidence," in which Judith "told her all her history" (168)--a fine example of TMI, to be sure, after what appears to be about five minutes' acquaintance.    

Nevertheless, there are some points of interest here.  Unlike the cheap fiction of the late 1840s and later, Tales of a Jewess evinces an almost raucous interest in errant sexuality that sometimes characterizes other religious novels of this period. (We also get an open discussion of circumcision, to which Judith objects.)  When the novel isn't thwacking us over the head with its anti-Semitism, it's dwelling intensely on the threat of uncontrolled eroticism.  Judith's mother hints strongly that her marriage to a supposed convert to Judaism has not been happy (and certainly the husband's tales hint at a certain lack of fidelity), while Judith's brother Emanuel trifles with the feelings of a Christian girl.  More seriously, a young woman is betrayed by her fiance and her twin sister, bears an illegitimate child, and goes insane, ultimately leading to her impending death, an attempted infanticide, and the suicides of both fiance and sister; Judith's brother Adolphus engages in an illicit interfaith relationship with Judith's friend Bertha that results in a "still-born son" (21) and Bertha's own death; another one of Judith's friends, Isabel, gets herself entangled in a love affair with a soldier that, combined with some other personal traumas, provokes her into committing suicide (the reader will, by now, have noted a certain trend); Judith encounters a young man, Thomas, who accidentally kills his pregnant sister and then murders her lover; and a madman turns out to have murdered his own wife, the better to wed another woman.  Even Judith's young visitor from India is a woman betrayed by an Englishman who turns out to be a bigamist.  (There's enough death by sex here to make one wonder if this is actually a modern slasher film in Victorian disguise.) In all of these instances, lust--or even love--unregulated by Christian faith results in suffering at best, death and damnation at worst.  The after-effects of desire wreck both individuals and their families, spiraling out from supposedly private romances. The universe of Tales of a Jewess is, in fact, an intensely sexual one, in which the chaotic force of the erotic (leading, as it keeps doing, to death and despair) affects even the most apparently virtuous of beings, like Bertha.  This world, suggests Nadia Valman, is "chaotic and uninterpretable," largely because man's fallen desires render it so.3 After all, Bertha's and Isabel's Christianity fails to halt their inexorable collapse.  But woman's Christian faith alone is useless; without any reform of the novel's many lustful males, womanly devotion proves a weak shield.  In that sense, the novel rejects the theories of female "influence" that were growing increasingly popular at about this time: far from redeeming the corruptions of male public and private life, here female virtue simply implodes under the weight of mutual desire. 

Judith's decision to elope with William Hartford, then, albeit with Joseph's approval, was probably meant to set up some kind of disaster in the second volume.  Notably, the narrator condemns the decision, arguing that "rashness of action" (199) was one of the less positive aspects of Judith's character.  This sinful decision, says the narrator, will irrevocably separate Judith from her mother: "Merciful Father! forgive the transgression of the child, in disobeying so good a parent" (199).  Judith turns out to be a terrible reader of all the inset narratives the novel has inflicted upon us so far.  Although her romance plot with William Hartford inverts her mother's--instead of the man converting to Judaism, the woman has converted to Christianity--she nevertheless indulges in the same rejection of authority that characterizes just about every one of the novel's tragic mini-romances.  Judith chooses pleasure over the suffering of self-denial, and therefore may have put herself on the road to doom.  After all, remarks the narrator, "Should the reader ask, had she no other happiness? The reply is, Yes! But, after being caressed, beloved, and universally admired, to be scorned, despised, and forbidden ever again to enter the presence of her family, was a trial, which nothing but a firm reliance in her new religion could enable her to sustain" (204-5).  Judith's decision to elope suggests that this "firm reliance" has, instead, given way, insofar as she has chosen earthly "happiness" over the "other happiness" (i.e., faith in salvation through Christ) promised by her newfound beliefs.   Her true faith, that is, lies in the salvific power of romance with her one true beloved--even though the novel keeps insisting that all romance plots run into a dead end (quite literally).   At this phase of the novel's development, in other words, it's not altogether clear that her much vaunted conversion has actually worked. 

1 Montagu Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England to the End of the Nineteenth Century (1939; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1944), 413. 

2 Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 66.  I discuss such attempts to render Jewish and Catholic families pathological in “Protestants against the Jewish and Catholic Family, c. 1829-1860,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003): 333-57.

3 Valman, 68. 

Susan Blow | philosopher | first US kindergarten | Hegelian

Honored Women - International list of women deserving public honor

By some minor miracle my proposal for the SHARP 2010 conference – this year’s theme: Book Culture from Below – was accepted, so I’m off to Helsinki next week. Still can’t quite believe it’s actually happening, but needless to say I’m really excited. I’m particularly looking forward to the two panel discussions on conceptualising book history from below and on fairy tales in popular print. My hotel has wi-fi, apparently, so I will try to do a post at the end of every day about what’s gone on.

My own paper is called ‘To Have No Newes Is Good Newes’: Newsbooks and Readers during the Early English Commonwealth, 1649–1650′ and is part of the Friday morning session, if any readers of this blog are there and at a sufficiently loose end to sit through it. Failing that, if anyone’s going and wants to meet up for coffee at some point then let me know!

Filed under: Uncategorized

By way of follow-up to yesterday’s post about pro- and anti-Cromwellian manuscript poems, here is a short manuscript libel about John Lilburne which I came across today. It was doing the rounds in the summer of 1658, but I suspect it may date back to the late 1640s. Bonus marks to the author for managing to combine both anagram and acrostic, two favorite devices of the seventeenth-century pamphleteer:

The anagram of John Lilburne
O J burne in hell

If a bold traitour gainst his god & King
Of money may have share, John Lilburne bring.
He kicks gainst King, gainst parish, gainst prophett too
No mischiefe under heaven that he’ll not doe,
Laws sacred, national, and most humane
Illegall are, if Jack (the Jew) complaine
Lend mee your aid, you limners that can paint
Brittaine’s white devils, or his black grime saint
Vaine, Mildmay, Bradshaw, Martin, and Jack Pim,
(Rouges most compleat) punies unto him.
None but himselfe, himselfe can parallell.
Expect thus by him, O J burne in hell.

The image is an anonymous engraving commemorating Lilburne’s acquittal in 1649: AN514450001, © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Filed under: britain, england, seventeenth century

In mid-May 1653, a man pulled up at the Royal Exchange in a carriage, got out, and fixed a portrait of Oliver Cromwell onto the wall. The picture was titled ‘It is I’, and along with Cromwell’s coat of arms had this poetic inscription:

Ascend three thrones great Captain and Divine
By the will of Go (o Lion) for they are thine.
Come priest of God, bring oyle, bring robes, & gold
Bring crownes and sceptres, itts now high time, unfold
Your cloistered baggs, your state chests, lest the rod
Of steele & iron of the King of God
Chastise you all its wrath, then kneel and pray
To Oliver the torch of Zion starre of day.
Then shout O merchants, Citty and Gentry sing.
Let all men bare-head cry, God save the King.

Eighteenth-century sources say that the portrait was quickly taken down and taken to the Lord Mayor, who in turn took it to Cromwell. They claim that the Lord Mayor was apparently worried about Cromwell’s reaction, but that Cromwell laughed it off and told him not to worry about such trifles.

Whether or not Cromwell’s reaction is a true story, the portrait itself was undoubtedly real. Despite the relatively small number of people who would have seen the portrait before it was taken down, it managed to reach a much wider audience. The verses were copied down and circulated in manuscript: variations of the poem survive in the Clarendon, Folger, Rawlinson, Tanner and Harleian manuscript collections, and in George Thomason’s collection of manuscript ephemera (which is where the version above is taken from). It also prompted a satirical response in the form of another manuscript poem, including these verses:

Antichrists three Crownes, for they are thyne
To which we wish thee three Headds like Cerberus grim
For thou art fiend enough to be like him.
Ansd to each Head a face took, wish we thee,
For thou hast Nose enough for them all three.

My image is an engraving of Oliver Cromwell by Richard Gaywood after Pierre Lombart and Robert Walker, published by Peter Stent in the late 1650s: AN403221001, © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Filed under: art, britain, england, london, seventeenth century Tagged: 1653, cromwell, manuscript, poem, royal exchange

This should be of interest to many users of the Old Bailey Proceedings, especially teachers and researchers: you can now use the ‘one-click’ function in Zotero to bookmark documents on the site – when browsing, you’ll see the Zotero icons appear in the browser address bar. It definitely works for single trials, full sessions and [...]

Knowledge is of little use, when confined to mere speculation: But when speculative truths are reduced to practice, when theories, grounded upon experiments, are applied to the common purposes of life; and when, by these, agriculture is improved, trade enlarged, the arts of living made more easy and comfortable, and, of course, the increase and happiness of mankind promoted; knowledge then becomes really useful.