epershand

We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe:

In his groundbreaking documentary, We Were Here, Kuwornu shares the diverse African presence in Renaissance Europe that he found: princes, ambassadors, saints, artists, scholars, and knights—all revealed through art from the period.

This is an older piece but I don't think I've posted it before: Taking Photos of the First Women’s Liberation Conference

***

Q&A: Bidding farewell to the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust:

The Shropshire site, which comprises 10 museums and 35 listed heritage buildings, is transferring to the custodianship of the National Trust on 2 March after a challenging period that saw it grapple with severe flooding and falling visitor numbers.
Supported by a £9m government investment, it is hoped the takeover will secure the site’s long-term future and enable it to benefit from the National Trust’s high profile and visitor expertise.

Ultraprocessed food: whaddya know, It's All More Complicated.... People want to avoid ultra-processed foods. But experts struggle to define them - not all are junk foods.

***

Sixty years on, a Star Trek writer is still creating strange new worlds: Diane Duane’s early days writing fan fiction have led to a remarkable career as a novelist, comic writer and screen writer.

This seems somehow to link on to earlier posts this week - a lot of my memories of childhood reading/being read to are associated with episodes of illness!

Posted in a group on Facebook: 'A book you read as a child yet still think about today'.

WOT.

Just So Many.

The various classic works of children's literature that have become culturally embedded in references and allusions - the Alice books, the Pooh books, The Wind in the Willows, the Jungle Books, The Secret Garden, Little Women et seq, the Katy books -

Ones that are perhaps not quite so iconic? like the Little Grey Rabbit books.

A whole mass of girls' school stories and pony books. A fair amount of Enid Blyton though I'm not sure I think about any specifics there.

Various anthologies and collections - some stories still remembered - classic fairytales, myths, etc.

Plus things like Pears Cyclopaedia and The Weekend Book

And I do, in fact think about things like, the attitude towards The Scholarship Girl in The Making of Mara in what is actually the unposh, girls' day school, to which her father sends snobbish Mara. (Only this week when thinking about educational privilege....)

Plus, I will mention yet again being absolutely traumatised by Marie of Roumania's The Lily of Life.

I've posted occasionally about Maria Sibylla Merian, this sounds like an interesting book on her and her art.

***

The funding to save the area surrounding the Cerne Giant for the National Trust has been raised: any further donations will go to habitat creation and increasing access.

***

Exhibition: North Staffordshire Miners’ Wives Action Group Archive (formed in response to the 1984 miners’ strike,members have been actively campaigning for over 40 years).

***

Martyrdom, Misrepresentation and the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ (I was at uni with a Loveless descendant). And I discovered that the Internet Archive has a recording of the BBC Home Service broadcast of Miles Malleson and H Brook's Six Men of Dorset.

***

More rather horrifying reports coming out about the surrogacy industry: Embryo couriers, student egg donors and cut-price surrogates. Journalist Alev Scott investigates northern Cyprus’s booming baby business — where Brits head for cheap treatment, gender selection and lax legislation.

***

Researching Love Letters:

The National Archives is hosting the exhibition 'Love Letters', exploring 500 years of expressions of love. This exhibition captures the voices of paupers and monarchs, reflecting friendships, romance, and more. But why does love appear in government documents?

Recovering “Lesbian” Voices in the Middle Ages: Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Germanic Mystics.

***

The Rohonc Codex: Hungary’s Mysterious Manuscript That No One Can Read

***

Yay: Senate House Library secures future of priceless LGBTQ+ collection with support from the Heritage Fund

Boo: County Durham WWI ledger bought at car boot sale for £20 set to sell for over £1k at auction: The museum-quality register lists the names of 900 men who signed up in just three days in December 1915

What I read

Finished Eleven Hours to Murder and went on to Death by the Dozen, which combine the cozy antics of Cat Caliban and her posse with mysteries tending to be rooted in past historical events in and around Cincinnatti. And Cat is after all pursuing a career as a PI, rather than taking up some quirky midlife career and just stumbling over bodies. And her partner is a retired cop who used to work in Juvie, not homicide. So counter to a lot of the recurrent tropes....

Then I realised, oops, that next meeting of in-person book group appears to be next Sunday - though I have not received any further notification since exchange of emails after the last meeting - so I have been reading Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (2023), which is blurbed as 'genre-bending', meaning it does things I am not that on board with, i.e. the writer's personal stuff/odyssey and b) fictionalising bits as narrative. Though I am marking it up somewhat for her realisation that her Great Hero G Orwell was A Horror. I daresay a lot of his trouble with being basically incapable in managing matters and practicalities was down to class and educational background but you'd have thought he might have cottoned on to some of that? rather than blithely eating up the whole of their butter ration? (fairly minor in the overall marital picture).

On the go

Read a bit more in I Am a Woman but still feeling a bit bogged down, even if Laura has finally had a night of sapphic passion.

Elizabeth George, A Slowly Dying Cause (Inspector Lynley Book 22) (2025). Fortunately this was a Kobo deal. Phoning it in. Also getting rather bogged down. 20% in and only just getting a sight of Lynley, let alone Havers. Includes great chunks of autobiographical reminiscence from the corpse.

Have also made some progress on volume for review.

Up next

Have apparently manifested, in place where I would never have thought to look for it, GB Stern, The Woman in the Hall (1939), which I had been fruitlessly looking for elsewhere, with a notion of maybe recommending for book group, as has recently been reissued for the first time since 1939 by British Library Women Writers.

'I'm so glad I didn't die with the measles when I was little!'

Thinking a bit further about that education meme and the line You were in relatively good physical and mental health.

Well, on the one hand, I had my vaccinations for smallpox, diphtheria and whooping cough all in order at a young age.

I did, however, get measles, chickenpox and mumps once I started school and they were going around. And in those days if you had an infectious disease you were obliged to stay off school for a designated quarantine period (and return your library books to the Public Health Department for fumigation).

I think scarlet fever was still around though rare, and I have a vague recollection of some child at the school actually dying from it?

Polio vaccination only came in when I was 7 or 8.

I suffered from severe tonsillitis until they removed them when I was 6, I am not at all sure, in the light of present thinking on the subject, that this was necessary, but it was very common.

In less dramatic health interventions, I mention the free codliver oil, orange juice and milk bestowed by a munificent government.

I am a little surprised, in retrospect, that my short sight wasn't picked up through testing at school, but in fact my mother noticed me squinting at things and took me for an eye-test.

I feel that I had fair amounts of time off from school being ill one way and another (besides the aforementioned epidemic diseases and operation) - not to mention the appendectomy and its after-effects when I was at uni - but that this didn't have any major adverse impact.

At the grammar school I was tagged for remedial exercises to do with the way I walked (on the outsides of my feet?): am not sure this had any effect whatsoever.

My migraines were not identified as such.

Period pains were after the way of womanhood, pretty much.

On the whole, relatively good health. A certain amount of mental stress, especially at uni.

And I'm not at all sure it's culture-neutral, hmmmm?

Okay, I had parents who had books in the house and read to me and once I could read took me to the local library to get tickets for the children's department.

No children's museums that I recall but visiting the rather dull local one attached to the public library, and visits to local sites of historical interest.

My primary school was not, I think, particularly distinguished - suspect that the year there were a whole four of us passed the 11+ was Memorable - but there were some good teachers.

I don't know how one calibrates into all this my mother knowing the teacher of Infants 1 and asking her about whether I could go to school once I had turned 5 (having an autumn birthday) and her saying, oh, send her along, on account of my mother thinking I was entirely ready.

And then the Head saying I should do the 11+ technically a year early - (which was not a given, people did get kept back)

Going to a fairly academically-intense girls' grammar school, where I did get the odd spot of class-hassle, I realise in retrospect (including from horrid Mrs B of the really weird ideas about sex), where I was marked out as university material and my parents exhorted to keep me on the sixth form -

Which they were entirely happy to do.

So yes, I was I suppose supported on my academic journey. But some of that was external factors, like the existence of that extinct phoenix, full student grants.

Books and screens: Everyone is panicking about the death of reading usefully points out that panic and woezery over reading/not-reading/what they're reading etc etc is far from a new phenomenon:

We have been here before. Not just once, but repeatedly, in a pattern so consistent it reveals something essential about how cultural elites respond to changes in how knowledge moves through society.
In the late 19th century, more than a million boys’ periodicals were sold per week in Britain. These ‘penny dreadfuls’ offered sensational stories of crime, horror and adventure that critics condemned as morally corrupting and intellectually shallow. By the 1850s, there were up to 100 publishers of this penny fiction. Victorian commentators wrung their hands over the degradation of youth, the death of serious thought, the impossibility of competing with such lurid entertainment.
But walk backwards through history, and the pattern repeats with eerie precision. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, novel-reading itself was the existential threat. The terms used were identical to today’s moral panic: ‘reading epidemic’, ‘reading mania’, ‘reading rage’, ‘reading fever’, ‘reading lust’, ‘insidious contagion’. The journal Sylph worried in 1796 that women ‘of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels … the depravity is universal.’
....
In 1941, the American paediatrician Mary Preston claimed that more than half of the children she studied were ‘severely addicted’ to radio and movie crime dramas, consumed ‘much as a chronic alcoholic does drink’. The psychiatrist Fredric Wertham testified before US Congress that, as he put it in his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), comics cause ‘chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction’, calling them more dangerous than Hitler. Thirteen American states passed restrictive laws. The comics historian Carol Tilley later exposed the flaws in Wertham’s research, but by then the damage was done.

Moving on: on another prickly paw, I am not sure I am entirely on board with this model of reading as equivalent to going to the gym or other self-improving activity, and committing to reading X number of books per year (even if I look at the numbers given and sneer slightly): ‘Last year I read 137 books’: could setting targets help you put down your phone and pick up a book?:

As reading is increasingly tracked and performed online, there is a growing sense that a solitary pleasure is being reshaped by the logic of metrics and visibility. In a culture that counts steps, optimises sleep and gamifies meditation, the pressure to quantify reading may say less about books than about a wider urge to turn even our leisure into something measurable and, ultimately, competitive.

Also at the sense that the books are being picked for Reasons - maybe I'm being unfair.

Also, perhaps, this is a where you are in the life-cycle thing: because in my 20s or so I was reading things I thought I ought to read/have read even if I was also reading things for enjoyment, and I am now in my sere and withered about, is this going to be pleasurable? (I suspect chomping through 1000 romances as research is not all that much fun?)