A textbook for adults, for the dutiful reader who intends to visit Japan soon, or wants to fill gaps in their education. After a lot of difficulty finA textbook for adults, for the dutiful reader who intends to visit Japan soon, or wants to fill gaps in their education. After a lot of difficulty finding any books about Japanese history in English for a general audience—especially ones including the medieval period, not just 1850 on—I settled on this, which does indeed provide an overview of all of it from prehistoric times. And it basically did what I wanted—I now know the Heians from the Tokugawas, who the shoguns were and what the Meiji “Restoration” was—though I didn’t enjoy a minute of it; it’s as bland and dry and stripped-down as any textbook I ever read in grade school, all the reasons I never enjoyed history as a kid. As an adult who’s now read a lot of popular history and enjoys the subject, I know there must be fascinating stories behind these brief statements:
“Then [Yoshimitsu] persuaded the Southern emperor to abdicate in favor of the Northern, solving at a stroke the issue of the Northern and Southern courts.”
“One day, ten years after the war had started, the Yamana side put down their weapons and went home. The following day, the Hosokawa did the same.”
“Six months later, Emperor Kōmei died of smallpox, almost certainly murder.”
Sadly, we don’t get them here. Being the “shortest” history only leaves room for names and basics of major historical events and the broadest generalizations, no intriguing detail or fun or surprising stories or any analysis on the author’s part. I’d happily have read a book twice as long that included all that stuff—while short, this one is too boring to read fast anyway! But in fairness, it’s probably not trying to be engaging, and if you’re looking for a comprehensive overview from prehistory right up to 2023, this book provides it....more
I picked this up anticipating a fun and informative read mixing science and history, and man, was I disappointed. Kept reading hoping it would get betI picked this up anticipating a fun and informative read mixing science and history, and man, was I disappointed. Kept reading hoping it would get better, and my advice to anyone else finding themselves less than enamored is: don’t, because it doesn’t.
The best part of this book is the opening, which shares some cool factoids about the moon with promise of more to come: stuff like the moon’s rocks being sharper because it has no wind, the optical illusions resulting from its lack of atmosphere, the fact that up close it’s actually somewhat colorful (see a former astronaut’s artwork here). Various organisms have not just circadian rhythms but internal lunar clocks as well. The science part was most interesting to me because I knew least about it, but often poorly explained—the math parts really needed diagrams, along with more detail—but instead Boyle spends time hammering obvious points. Like after pointing out that the moon has no life, not even bacteria in the soil, she feels the need to go on to specify that it has no birds in the sky, and even “no culture, except the one we brought.” I think that goes without saying…?
This was a harbinger of things to come however, as the book is basically an impressionistic mash of stuff that’s interesting to the author, who clearly has a lot of feelings about everything moon-related (for some reason she capitalizes Moon throughout). But it did not translate itself well to this reader, and I was left without even a clear or complete narrative of things like the moon missions. Her history picks and chooses from all your standard western civ stuff: archaeological finds in Bronze Age Europe (the author finds historically ancient but biologically modern humans tracking the moon mind-blowing, for reasons not quite clear to me), a little bit of ancient Mesopotamia (which was interesting, mostly the kings consolidating power through priestesses who were at least legally speaking their daughters), the usual on the ancient Greeks and the early modern European astronomers. She spends a few pages at the end talking about Native Americans, mostly making excuses for why she didn’t visit their sites despite living in the U.S., and didn’t learn anything when she did. Asia is acknowledged in passing to exist, Africa barely gets that.
Boyle also loves to give the moon credit for everything, inflating it to the point that her valid points can be lost. Early calendars were often lunar? “The Moon is responsible for the beginning of time.” Further, “[t]he Moon’s time-setting abilities meant humans could use it to plan, which meant they could invent.” Not just technological inventions, either: elsewhere she speculates that “the people of Mesopotamia invented religion” (moon-worship, of course), imagining that the moon first proved useful and only then evolved into an object of worship. (I don’t think this is how prehistoric people worked; religion is always present. Boyle provides no support for the idea that the Mesopotamians “invented” it.) It gets credit for teaching people to think too: “lunar symbolism likely enabled humans to understand, or at least to relate to, the otherwise mysterious concepts of becoming, birth, vanishing, death, resurrection, renewal, and eternity.” (Because the sun, the seasons, and plant, animal and human life don’t also show this, or are apparently harder to relate to than the moon? Given Boyle’s comments about considering “the perspective of the Moon” on mineral exploitation, maybe she does relate to it that strongly, but I don’t think this perspective is widely held.)
Anyway, assorted other things annoyed me, like the generalizations that swing wildly from assuming “people in the ancient world knew X” because some thinker in the ancient world wrote down X (with no way of knowing what people in general knew), on the one hand, to telling us that only “literate white men who owned property” were even aware of the Enlightenment, which is patently absurd. For one thing, knowledge was generally greater in cities, where fewer people owned property; for another, lots of women were involved, from those who ran the great salons of Paris where these conversations happened, to those who made discoveries in their own right—one of whom was actually profiled at length in the very book the author cited at the beginning of the same paragraph!
It makes you wonder to what extent Boyle even read the books she cites, especially when, also on that page, she has a footnote recommending a bunch of the most well-known science fiction books, with wildly off-base descriptions. The Dispossessed: “allegorical treatment of a big, beautiful wall dividing cultures.” (What? This is neither an allegory nor a book about a wall, and the closest it comes to including one is an unremarkable waist-high fence around a shuttle launch area. It’s a novel exploring different political and social systems on different satellites.) The Broken Earth trilogy: “frank treatment of climate-driven mass migration and segregation based on race and homosexuality.” (All right, I’ve only read the first, but this is an oppressed mages story, as an allegory for race and perhaps homosexuality, but does not feature segregation based on either. Also I’m not sure “climate-driven mass migration” quite describes “small number of survivors fleeing geo-magical apocalypse” but anyway.) While this is a footnote, I have to wonder if Boyle’s understanding of her scientific and historical sources was equally skewed.
At any rate, clearly this book annoyed me a lot, and generally wasted my time. A disappointment....more
As with How to Be a Victorian, this is a highly informative and readable work of social history—the author has clearly done real research, as well as As with How to Be a Victorian, this is a highly informative and readable work of social history—the author has clearly done real research, as well as experimenting with and reenacting much of this herself. It’s well-written and thoughtful, with sound analysis, and I learned a lot. Here are some fun facts:
- Rushes strewn on floors: I always pictured this like fallen leaves on a sidewalk but no, we’re talking mats of rushes inches thick. The author found that at six inches the floors were comfortable for sleeping on, a plus since many people in the Tudor era did. Which had its perks: chimneys weren’t a thing in England yet (outside of castles), and central hearths meant houses were full of smoke which just slowly filtered out through the thatch. The cleanest air was on the floor. (Wouldn’t it feel like walking on gym mats all the time though?)
- Beds: the most coveted possession of the era was a big, four-poster, covered, canopied bed. It kept warmth in and (since everyone shared rooms) prying eyes out.
- Sumptuary laws dictated the type of clothing people could wear, down to the maximum cost per yard for materials. This was justified by concern about people pretending to be of a higher class than they were. Hard to enforce legally, though there was social pressure as well (servants often inherited their masters’ clothes but couldn’t appropriately wear them, so sold them on through the lively used clothing industry). Even physical stances and gaits were associated with particular social classes, and some had to be learned from childhood to pull them off.
- Because people were generally up at dawn and often didn’t eat breakfast, “dinner,” the big meal of the day, happened as early as 10 a.m.
- Tudors knew very well that teens tend to behave better for other people than their parents, which was part of the reason so many young men went into apprenticeships, involving service contracts to a craftsman for 7 years or more. Unsurprisingly given the length of time involved, 2/3 of apprenticeships were not completed. Young orphans were also sent into apprenticeships, creating potential for useful skill-building but also abuse.
- Marriage was expected for men just as much as for women: to occupy public office or take on an apprentice, man had to be married (the wife would also sign the apprenticeship contract and be responsible for moral instruction).
- Ovens: these were domed structures built on a pillar, larger outside than in. You built up the fire till it was hot enough (you had to know your oven; Goodman judged hers by the shape of the heat around it), then pulled the fire out, put the food in, stuck the wooden door in place, and put a flour and water paste around the door to hold it on—all as quickly as possible to avoid losing heat. If you did it right, you could get three rounds of food requiring increasingly lower temperatures before the oven cooled. If this sounds like a lot—well, most people didn’t have their own ovens, and many prepared dishes and them brought them to a baker.
- Tudor bread was also different: heavier, tastier and more filling, which is good since for many people it was their whole meal. If you want to read about all the different wheats that existed, and how to catch your own wild yeast if you don’t have a friend who can give you some, you will just have to read the book.
- Almost all food was seasonal, not just fruits and vegetables. Hens didn’t lay in winter (we induce this through artificial lighting) and cows only gave milk from spring to late September. Pork comes from young pigs and was a late spring meat, while bacon and ham come from adult pigs slaughtered at a different time. Bread was year-round though! (Just don’t grind your grain till you’re close to ready to use it, as it will spoil.)
- Ploughing happened year-round (except for August), not just to prepare the ground but as a method of weed control, drainage and fertilization too. Keeping a plough on track is heavy work and this was the quintessential job for adult men.
- Dairymaids apparently understood hygiene better than doctors did even hundreds of years later—while it wasn’t clear why, dairy products definitely spoiled if the dairy wasn’t kept scrupulously clean.
- Archery on Sundays was a government-mandated sport, to keep the population prepared for war—there doesn’t seem to have been any enforcement, but it also wasn’t necessary, because for men it was a fun social activity.
- Ale was the traditional drink, often replacing water, but beer arrived and made inroads in England during this period. It kept better than ale (which only lasted a few days to a couple weeks depending on the temperature), which suited large-scale enterprises well.
- Blood sports like bull-baiting were considered the best method of slaughtering older animals because of the theory of the four humors, which posited that getting an animal riled up right before it died would tenderize the meat.
- Both men and women were intended to enjoy sex, which was considered an essential aspect of marriage—but only marriage. Illegitimacy rates were low, with most of the judgment falling on unmarried women, who in a rural society with strict gender roles were unable to support themselves alone and thus depended on the parish. This in turn affected local tax rates, giving the community an incentive to prevent illegitimate births. (On the positive side, this incentive meant parishes also engaged in what today we would call vocational rehabilitation, getting families set up with work so they could support themselves.)
- Homosexuality was seen as an activity rather than an identity (and because all sexual deviance was lumped together, was thus to be expected from anyone engaging in adultery, rape, incest, “bestiality” which could be used to mean heterosexual anal sex, etc.). It was only really discussed as between men, where it was harshly condemned but hardly ever prosecuted—possibly because the harshness of the penalties made accusations serious business, or maybe because it was described in such wild terms (even werewolves were tied into this somehow) that people didn’t really connect it to their neighbors.
Clearly, a lot in here of interest! It’s notably shorter than Goodman’s book on the Victorians, perhaps due to more limited sources, but I’d have liked more: religion for instance is mentioned only in passing despite the religious upheaval of the period; likewise, there are various references to the justice system, which I wanted to know much more about. Much of what we know of people’s possessions comes from probate inventories, and I at least wanted to know what happened to this property when people died, but also what getting into trouble looked like, etc. This is more interesting to me than the long section on clothing at the beginning, though that section is quite informative for the interested. (Once you read this book you’ll know how to make and care for a Tudor ruff, should you choose to. Get your starch ready.) I’d also have liked to see some endnotes rather than just a general biography. That said, overall a great read, both entertaining and informative. ...more
Read about 50 pages of this, including the introduction, by which point I hated it. The primary issue is that I was hoping for an owner’s manual for lRead about 50 pages of this, including the introduction, by which point I hated it. The primary issue is that I was hoping for an owner’s manual for living in a female body, basically the medical tidbits from Eve expanded into a book, and this is absolutely not that. Instead it appears to be a history of outrages in the last couple hundred years of women’s medical care. For instance, the first chapter, “Skin,” does not discuss the skin as an organ at all—what it does, how to best care for it, whether there are any pertinent differences between men and women and the types of skin problems that each have. Actually it’s a history of plastic surgery and how it’s terrible that male plastic surgeons (this specialty is really disproportionately male as it turns out) are imposing their own beauty standards on female patients, but also terrible when male doctors conclude women don’t need it. (To be fair, medical providers and service providers in general imposing their ideas of what people should need or want is a problem, but framing it exclusively as a gender issue obscures that point.)
The other issue is that the book just seems sloppy. It starts with misinformation about the early modern witch trials and some wild generalizations about the history of women in medicine. Then a 19th century woman whose skeleton is in a museum is introduced as being from Norfolk, Virginia, until three pages later she was apparently from New Orleans (this error is especially ironic given that it occurs in the midst of outrage about people looking at the skeleton without knowing who she was—carelessness toward the three known facts about her hardly helps that cause!).
And then, references aren’t included in the book at all. You have to go to the author’s website and download them. From a casual perusal they look as legitimate as usual for popular nonfiction, but I don’t think anybody wants to be putting down their book and picking up their device whenever they want to see a reference (I certainly don’t, not to mention I was reading it on a plane). This choice suggests that either the author or the publisher assumes the audience for this book wouldn’t care to look at them, which is a bad look.
Overall, a definite disappointment and not at all what I was looking for. ...more
Read through page 149, over the course of 2.5 weeks. Unfortunately, this was just too much a textbook for me: dry, without any apparent narrative or tRead through page 149, over the course of 2.5 weeks. Unfortunately, this was just too much a textbook for me: dry, without any apparent narrative or thesis connecting all the facts, generalities, and names the author throws at the reader—which left me not retaining much. Perhaps it’s meant for people who already have some knowledge of Japanese history, to complicate the picture. Unfortunately the dearth of Japanese histories for the general reader meant I checked this one out from my local university library as a first attempt, although it mostly focuses on the 20th century, not my primary era of interest. If you’ve read any better, please do let me know....more
A well-researched and ultimately engaging group biography, and work of popular history, featuring four English women writers from the Renaissance. I fA well-researched and ultimately engaging group biography, and work of popular history, featuring four English women writers from the Renaissance. I found the first third a bit of a slog—early chapters focus on Mary Sidney, by far the least interesting of the bunch, and I still don’t know why Targoff begins with a chapter on Elizabeth I’s funeral—but happily, it got much more engaging after that, discussing the interesting lives and truly feminist works of some other notable women.
The subjects, in order of appearance:
Mary Sidney: A countess who began her literary career by editing and expanding her dead brother’s works, then branched out into her own loose translations, in verse, of the Psalms. She took the unusual step of actually publishing these—almost more unusual for the nobility than for a woman. Otherwise her life comes across as conventional, though she managed to enjoy some good fun in old age, and I thought Targoff was stretching a bit to relate Sidney’s translations to her life experiences.
Aemilia Lanyer: Anything but conventional, this is the only non-aristocrat of the bunch, a woman from a musical immigrant family who had a colorful life, including being a powerful nobleman’s mistress, getting pregnant with his child and (standard procedure for the time) being married off to one of his musicians as a result. She later possibly dabbled in high-end prostitution (at least according to her astrologer, whose advances she rebuffed), taught girls’ education, and wound up publishing poems, including a Biblical retelling from the perspective of Pontius Pilate’s wife, making the case for women’s liberation on the grounds that crucifying Jesus was way worse than eating an apple so really men have no moral leg to stand on in claiming authority over women. Talk about radical! Her book was published, with about a dozen dedications to educated and powerful women from whom she hoped for patronage (apparently in vain), but seemingly got no attention. She was rediscovered in the 1970s under the mistaken impression that she was Shakespeare’s mistress, on since-debunked evidence.
Elizabeth Cary: This is another great story: a girl born into wealth, who seems to have been a child prodigy and received a well-rounded education that even involved successfully intervening on behalf of the accused at a witchcraft trial, at the age of 10. She was still married off for money to a husband she worked hard to please, including producing a whole passel of kids, but later separated from him upon converting to Catholicism. This led to court cases and extended fights over money, the kids, and their religion, including smuggling two of them out of a castle in the middle of the night. She also wrote feminist Biblical retellings, most notably a play about Herod’s wife Mariam, as well as histories and theological translations. Again her work seems to have passed without note, to be discovered in the 19th century by Catholic scholars interested in her championing of that cause. Four of her daughters, who became nuns in France, took the unusual step of writing her biography, which gives an intimate look into her life.
Anne Clifford: An extremely wealthy duchess, and not a creative writer, but the author of extensive diaries, memoirs, and family histories, resulting in an unusually well-documented life for a non-royal woman of the time. She engaged in a 40-year legal battle to gain ownership of her father’s estates (left to his brother in contravention of a law specific to these lands, requiring them to go to the children—the reason being that women couldn’t inherit titles and her father wanted to keep title and lands together). This is an interesting and dramatic story, as Clifford and her mother both devoted their lives to this cause, including arranging both her marriages to men positioned to assist. She was probably insufferable in real life (imagine someone who has a band to play her off every time she leaves an estate), but perhaps that’s the level of self-assurance needed for a woman of the time to defy the king, which she did.
At any rate, an interesting book about forgotten but mostly fascinating figures. Sometimes the book detours into a more general history of the times beyond what’s strictly necessary for context, in ways that should be interesting for those interested in Renaissance British politics and culture. Sometimes I wanted more context, though: there’s a lot about guardianships here, as anyone under 21 needed a legal guardian (at least if they were wealthy or titled?), which in the case of orphaned heirs, the king auctioned off to the highest bidder. And people would bid high, because then you could marry the heir off to your own kid, and keep their property in your family. Anne Clifford’s first wedding was hasty for this reason: both were 19 years old and his father on his deathbed. From the events described in the book though, guardianships don’t seem to be applied consistently, or perhaps I was just surprised to see widowed mothers holding them despite having no legal power vis-à-vis living husbands. To be fair, widows in early England were the only women with independent legal status generally.
At any rate, the prose is just slightly drier than ideal for me, but still very readable. My only other complaint is about the citation style, which makes it hard to find anything (why do some nonfiction publishers do these chapter-by-chapter summaries of sources rather than referencing specific claims by page number? Ugh), but mostly Targoff makes her sources clear in the text. Worth a read for those interested in early women writers....more
This turned out to be excellent. A readable, engaging and well-researched work of 19th century British social history, by an author who also engages iThis turned out to be excellent. A readable, engaging and well-researched work of 19th century British social history, by an author who also engages in extensive reenactment and so has tried these things (the clothes, the grooming, the food, the work) herself, reporting back with some fascinating findings.
The organization did cause me doubt early on: it’s loosely structured by time of day (beginning with getting up and talking about heating of homes, moving on to dressing where we talk about clothes, then going to work and talking about transportation and workplace safety...), which means the entire first 150 pages are devoting to clothing, grooming and hygiene. While Goodman’s in-depth research and personal experiments keep these sections alive, they nonetheless exceeded my interest and made me wonder how anyone not a historical novelist or reenactor could have stuck with it! Happily, when we finally arrive at breakfast, Goodman pivots to discussing the extensive hunger in the Victorian world, and from there on out it’s a broader social history. Kept my attention and I learned a lot, despite having read a decent amount about the period already.
Some interesting tidbits:
- Victorian homes just weren’t heated much—even by the wealthy, unless someone was sick. Workplaces and schools weren’t either, explaining stories like ink freezing in inkwells.
- This is perhaps related to the Victorian obsession with ventilation. They not only believed smelly miasmas caused disease, they also thought closed rooms would give you carbon dioxide poisoning—so you’d better sleep with those windows open, even in winter. This fascinates me—first because, amusingly, I can’t actually explain why we don’t all asphyxiate at night, and second because it’s such a great example of how societies adopt bugbears and refuse to be reasoned out of them (a modern American equivalent might be obsessive supervision of children due to overwrought kidnapping fears. Victorian reformers thought about poor families sleeping together in closed rooms the way some people today think about children playing unsupervised).
- At any rate, based on the author’s experience, heavy Victorian clothing and carb-heavy, relatively unseasoned Victorian food both make a lot more sense when you’re doing manual labor in a mostly-unheated home during an English winter. And you can in fact do said manual labor in a corset as long as you don’t lace it too tightly, as fashionable young women were wont to do.
- Most Victorians, however did not have enough food, and for most people it was monotonous (southern English laborers might eat nothing but bread and beer day after day. The temperance movement then got the beer replaced with tea, which lacks beer’s nutritional value). Workhouse and prison rations were actually below the necessary for survival, causing people to slowly waste away. But even children from upper-class families didn’t always get enough, as hunger was thought to improve moral character, especially in girls.
- Food adulteration was a common problem, especially among staples bought by the poor: for instance, milk might be watered down and colored with chalk. Between toxic adulterants and completely unbalanced diets (including for babies) it’s hard to see how anyone survived—skeletal remains show malnutrition to be a major problem.
- Medicine could be toxic or dangerous too, and this was the era of giving opium to babies to keep them quiet. Goodman posits that a baby of the era was best off born to an lower-middle-class or upper-working-class family: well-off enough that the mother didn’t have to work, but not so wealthy that she was delegating child care (likely to a poor young girl), and with enough money for food but not enough to indulge much in medications.
- The period was also the height of non-home-based child labor, as children as young as 7 or 8 could be employed full-time in factories or mines. It was bad enough that the Victorians did finally start to regulate this (ultimately also arriving at some regulation of adult labor too—at least by the end of the period they had Saturday afternoons). Of course, part of the problem was that all this hard labor as a child caused people’s bodies to give out early, so by the time the kids were old enough (by Victorian standards) to work, their father might be failing.
- On a less depressing note, some Victorian hygiene and grooming practices are surprisingly similar to today’s (cold cream + powder = foundation, more or less), while others are surprisingly different. It actually is true that they mostly didn’t bathe—though they founded some public bathing facilities, these began mostly as laundry facilities and turned into recreational swimming pools—but they certainly washed: standing up in their bedrooms with a basin, soap and towel, washing just one part of the body at a time, was a standard morning ritual. The author recommends this as an eco-friendly way of staying clean and notes that even just dry toweling can keep body odor down surprisingly well.
- Girls’ education focused more on sewing than any other single subject, but rather than dismissing this as a travesty, Goodman delves into the extraordinary knowledge and skills the average woman had in this era—even better than many professionals today. Patterns in magazines offered almost no instruction, with the assumption that their readers could look at a picture and figure it all out, as indeed they could.
At any rate, this is a strong choice for those interested in social history and the day-to-day realities of a different time. My only other complaint is the lack of citations, though the author often does make her sources clear in the text. In the end, while especially recommended for the historical novelists and reenactors among you, the book has plenty to offer the average armchair historian too. A good complement to Inside the Victorian Home—that one focuses exclusively on the middle class, while this one does a strong job relating the lives of the lower classes as well. I’d love to see books of this caliber focusing on other countries too....more
Read through page 35, and quit mostly due to sweeping inaccuracies. The style also wasn’t quite working for me: it jumps around a lot, and Ghosh will Read through page 35, and quit mostly due to sweeping inaccuracies. The style also wasn’t quite working for me: it jumps around a lot, and Ghosh will throw out some bold statement like “we fail to understand the agency of plants in the course of human history” and then just…. move on. If you’re going to claim plants have their own plans for us, in a nonfiction work, you’d better explain yourself!
But the biggest problem was carelessness, and what’s the point of reading nonfiction you can’t trust? In this case, my breaking point was his claim that in fact, surgery before anesthesia was no biggie: “The answer, of course, is that then, as now, you would have been given a strong dose of some opioid.”
Ghosh provides no source for this beyond his own assumptions, presumably because he hasn’t actually read up on the history of surgery. As it happens, I have, and while it’s true opium was used on occasion—as was alcohol—this was by no means any sort of universal norm, nor available everywhere (Ghosh posits that any medieval peasant who needed a tooth pulled would have had it to hand), nor a substitute for anesthesia. If you dare, check out this detailed firsthand account of a mastectomy in 1811 (the letter is dated 1812 because, as the author explains at the end, the whole episode was so traumatic she couldn’t speak or write about it for several months).
For those who chose not to subject themselves to that, the patient—English writer Fanny Burney—is definitely fully conscious for the whole thing, and no opioids are mentioned, unless perhaps included in the “wine cordial” she drinks, which in any case seems as effective as you would expect drinking a glass of wine before having a body part cut off to be. This is typical of descriptions of surgery at the time. And note that by Burney’s time, the opium trade was booming, overseas products were widely available in Europe, and Burney herself was a privileged woman, even a one-time lady-in-waiting to the Queen of England. No, Ghosh, we have not “repressed” memories of opium solving everything; surgery before the mid-19th century was such a nightmare that it would be the event itself you’d need to repress!
As I am not wasting any more time on imaginative “nonfiction” I can’t trust, it’s back to the library with this one....more
I read something over 150 pages of this, though not all of it consecutive. And it’s not a bad book. If you’re interested in a scholarly, minutely detaI read something over 150 pages of this, though not all of it consecutive. And it’s not a bad book. If you’re interested in a scholarly, minutely detailed account of the lives of early Mormons between 1835-1870, check it out. For me, sadly, my casual interest didn’t hold up to the density of the book, and it seemed to focus far more on the details of Mormon life in general and the lives of the most thorough of surviving diarists (often male) than on plural marriage or women’s rights specifically. I even tried skipping around a little bit to try to get the gist, or reach the sections that interested me most, but as it’s organized as a very long and detailed narrative, rather than topically, that doesn’t work well here.
Also, Ulrich is a serious scholar—I really appreciated her prizewinning A Midwife's Tale, and recently learned she’s the one who coined the phrase “well-behaved women rarely make history”—but she is also Mormon herself. And the text comes across as… not preaching, by any means, but very sympathetic to the early Mormons. I wound up wondering about its slant, and not knowing enough of the subject myself to be able to identify it makes me leery.
Finally, I hate hate hate deckle edge pages in general, but especially in big, dense history books where I always want to be flipping back and forth. She’d refer to the color inserts and I could barely find them in this mess, let alone easily locate previous half-remembered sections, etc. Ugh....more
I went into this book knowing it was mismarketed and that it’s really about a team of French scientists—and their Spanish minders—on an expedition to I went into this book knowing it was mismarketed and that it’s really about a team of French scientists—and their Spanish minders—on an expedition to what is now Ecuador, in the 1730s and 40s, rather than the rainforest trek of the wealthy local woman who married an expedition assistant. (Said rainforest trek occupies 50 pages at the end.) That was fine with me: I love Enlightenment science history. And this is decent Enlightenment science history, but not the best I’ve read.
Basically, a team of three high-profile French scientists and several assistants traveled to the Spanish colonies to measure a degree of latitude at the equator, in order to resolve a raging argument about the exact shape of the Earth (namely, whether it’s more flattened at the equator or the poles). The whole expedition wound up taking a decade, between the difficulties of going and returning, and the many difficulties of taking the measurements. The scientists wound up dividing into two separate parties because they couldn’t stand each other, got embroiled in local politics—one of their assistants was killed by a mob in a small town; to be fair he was an arrogant Frenchman, and the mob was provoked—but did ultimately do quite a lot of useful research, much of it not even on the subject they’d come to study. In true Enlightenment fashion, they studied everything from the local plants to Quechua grammar.
In the end the academicians went home and the assistants mostly got stranded in the colony for lack of money to pay their passage. One, Jean Godin, married Isabel Gramesón, the 13-year-old daughter of a prominent colonial family, traveled from Ecuador through Brazil to French Guiana “to prepare the way” and then spent 20 years trying to get her out too. This was not because anyone wanted to stop her, but due to the incredible slowness of communication and inhospitable terrain, combined with diplomatic complications, plus the inexplicable unwillingness of everyone involved to consider literally any other route besides trekking through the entire Amazon. (I remained confused the entire book about why they couldn’t go out the way they came in, by taking ship from Guayaquil to Panama, crossing the isthmus by land and then sailing home from the Caribbean.) You think the couple of months’ delay in communication between Britain and its North American colonies was bad? When Jean Godin’s father died, his siblings wrote him a letter in Ecuador asking him to come home immediately and he got it eight years later! When a ship finally went up the Amazon to fetch Isabel, its entire crew waited four years at the meeting point for her to show up. Talk about patience and dedication to the job.
All that said, the focus of the book is maybe a little too diffuse, or the author’s writing just not the most incisive. It touches on a lot of interesting topics, from the lives of those involved to the science to the culture of colonial Peru (as the whole area was known at the time), but doesn’t go in-depth on any of them. I’d have liked a little more explanation of the mathematics, and a little less Eurocentrism. Also, while Isabel’s journey was certainly harrowing, I wouldn’t call her a heroine—her survival is admirable, but she undertook the journey at the behest and with the assistance of her male relatives, and the worst of it resulted from her and her brothers’ unwillingness to brave the canoe.
In the end, a fine choice if you’re particularly interested in Enlightenment science history, but if you’re new to the subject, try The Age of Wonder or The Knife Man first. Or, if you want the story of an Enlightenment-era European woman’s adventures in South America, I highly recommend Chrysalis, about a 17th century Dutch scientist and artist who traveled to Suriname on her own initiative....more
A long, chatty, imaginative but sloppy work of popular science by a non-scientist. This one combines a handful of important facts to know about your bA long, chatty, imaginative but sloppy work of popular science by a non-scientist. This one combines a handful of important facts to know about your body and a call to end the exclusion of women from medical testing; with speculation about the role of women and the female body in evolutionary history, which though hypothetical is at least fun to think about, and a useful counter to equally hypothetical male-centered assumptions; and with its own weird assumptions, bad facts and unnecessary personal asides. The pages do turn quickly, but in the end it’s more entertainment (if this is your thing) than education.
But to break it down. First, a few important or cool facts:
- The introduction is probably the most important chapter, calling attention to how much medical research (on humans and even on animals) includes exclusively male subjects… or if females are included, there’s no analysis of sex differences. The problem is that women are not small men. So for instance, prescriptions of pain meds will be inadequate because women’s livers process drugs more quickly. Even heart attacks look different in women—in fact, while women have fewer heart attacks than men, we’re more likely to die of them because they go unrecognized. I hope the introduction will be influential because this is a serious problem.
- It turns out even women’s fat is different. Fat deposits around the body are differently constituted, and women’s hips, butts and thighs store specific fatty acids used to make baby brains and retinas. You can’t get enough just during pregnancy, so your body starts hoarding them in puberty. What if you get a liposuction and then get pregnant? No one knows!
- A mother’s body actually communicates with the baby’s body through nursing. The nipple takes in and analyzes baby saliva, then adjusts the formula of the milk accordingly—for instance, with immune system boosters for a sick child. This communication can also have negative results: for instance, a very stressed mother can transmit that cortisol to the baby.
- Also, women who haven’t given birth and even men can lactate, though usually not much and usually requiring medication (and it doesn’t always work). Yes, there is a culture where men engage in so much childcare they’ve even been known to breastfeed!
Some evolutionary arguments I had doubts about:
- Breasts: why do we have them? You don’t need all that just to feed a baby. Bohannon argues that it’s probably not sexual selection because women have such a wide variety of breast sizes, all of which are functional for nursing. This seems to me like a good argument for why it is sexual selection, because if it’s only aesthetic rather than a survival or reproductive need, there’s more wiggle room.
- Menopause: why do we have it? Turns out, we’re one of only two species that do (the other being orcas); others reproduce till they die, sometimes much older than us. (Chimps and elephants can give birth in their 60s!) Bohannon posits that our bodies were once programmed to die around the time we now have menopause, but having some old people around was good for the community, so our bodies evolved to live longer but somehow women’s reproductive systems got left behind. I’m afraid I don’t follow this one either.
- Rape: how common was it among our ancestors? Bohannon argues not that common, because we don’t have twisty vaginas or spiked penises or cervixes that can be closed off to sperm, which some rape-prone species have evolved to facilitate or fight back against rape. This doesn’t seem very convincing: first because our bodies have indeed evolved mechanisms to protect us from injury during rape (this is why many women experience physiological arousal even though they’re definitely not into it), and second because, as Bohannon herself points out, we already have a much harder time conceiving than most species. A mallard duck’s “trapdoor” vagina means she has only a 2% chance of conceiving from rape, which is a big difference if you’re a species that normally only needs to mate once per cycle, but humans average only a 5% chance of pregnancy from any single encounter, and that’s when you’re young. Plus, Bohannon also argues that humans likely developed gynecology among our earliest tools—thus, evolved to get rid of unwanted pregnancies by intentionally aborting them, rather than our bodies doing it for us like other species. So we do in fact have adaptations to protect us, however imperfect, at least from dying. She also weirdly distinguishes “forcible rape” from “coercion” among chimps, with the former being not that common. I don’t follow that argument at all: “forcible rape” being uncommon among chimps tells us what, exactly, about all rape among humans?
- Brains: I was unimpressed with this chapter all around (except for the bit about how female sex hormones apparently help keep swelling down after a traumatic brain injury, resulting in better recovery, and potentially being developed into medication for everybody—that was cool). Bohannon falls into the trap of assuming that whatever we see around us must be biological rather than cultural, and while she does at least mention that differences among members of the same sex are far greater than differences between group averages, she still spills a lot of ink on those averages. She discusses differences in average test scores without even mentioning (until later) stereotype threat, and how these differences can be culturally programmed: even being reminded of a stereotype before a test alters scores to better fit the stereotype, so what does a lifetime in that cultural stew do to you? (You can read more about it in this excellent book.) She doesn’t consider whether girls’ average math scores might be depressed by a society that stereotypes math as a boy thing; whether young girls might have better verbal skills than boys because caretakers talk to and encourage them more; whether there might be societal reasons that men commit suicide more often than women. Despite the fact that the last has an enormous, 17%-of-the-planet-sized exception: in China women kill themselves more. She doesn’t even mention that.
- Sexism: Bohannon argues that sexism—including internalized sexism—is also hardwired, using as evidence the fact that many women (including apparently herself) are harsher on women than men: for instance, blaming the single woman rather than the married man for an affair. Perhaps because I don’t share her reaction on that point, this argument seems awfully weak, and again, Bohannon overlooks psychological and sociological explanations. Certainly having a common set of rules helps bind a community together, but just assuming your own cultural detritus is written into the genes of all humans is absurd.
Other stuff that was just weird or wrong:
- The bit about how men are faster but women have more endurance, illustrated by the fact that men beat women by 18% in a 5k, 11% in a marathon, but at 195 miles, women outrun men. How many people have ever run 195 miles in a go? Are they representative? Also, at the more common distances are we talking average runners or average winners?
- “There actually aren’t that many female prostitutes at work these days. By the most generous estimates, sex workers constitute only 0.6 percent of the U.S. population.” That’s… actually an enormous number if you ask me. A google search seems to bear it out, with an estimated total of 1-2 million sex workers in the U.S., 20% male and 80% female. So this footnote is perhaps accurate but in fact did more than anything else I’ve seen to convince me that sex work is a serious issue today.
- Then there’s the suggestion that “the latest numbers estimate that as many as 20 percent of humans are homosexual,” also so wildly huge that I went looking. Her citation is to an article I’m unable to access, but which claims nothing so grand in its abstract, instead stating that asking questions about sexuality in a veiled way makes people 65% more likely to report “nonheterosexual identity” and 59% more likely to report “same sex experiences.” The numbers I am able to find show a range of 4-8% by state of Americans identifying as “LGBT,” and the B is doing a lot of work there. Young people are far more likely to report an LGBT identity, but when you look at the breakdown, the increase is entirely in the fact that the numbers identifying as bisexual have shot up (with gays and lesbians holding steady at 3-4%, but 12% now calling themselves bi, thus leading to a spike in LGBT-identified people overall). Sexuality is fluid and often situational, so I’m not surprised a study digging for any indicia of “nonheterosexuality”—thus including people who are even a little bit bi—would hit 20% or even higher. But Bohannon calls all those people “homosexual,” i.e., gay or lesbian, and that’s flat wrong. Also, this statement is in service of the argument that we evolved this way to have extra childless adults to lend a hand in babysitting, which seems unconvincing given that plenty of adults are infertile without being gay, and that attraction as a cultural prerequisite for conception is by no means universal.
- Sadly, sloppiness with facts seems to be a pattern, even just with stuff I’m able to verify: take also the claim that “some say” that the Black Death killing 1/3 of the European population “[is] why Europe went through the Dark Ages, while the Islamic empires managed to flourish.” There is no source for this, presumably because even the most amateur of historians would immediately recognize it for hogwash: the Black Death struck Europe in the 1340’s, already in the late Middle Ages (which historians also no longer call the Dark Ages, but anyway), at which point the Islamic golden age—begun several centuries before—was by most accounts already over.
And I’ve barely scratched the surface. This is a long book, made longer with personal anecdotes and pop culture references and imaginary recreations of ancient life and virtue signaling the author’s trans inclusivity without offering much in the way of science, on how hormones begun at different times of life affect the body, etc. I did find the speculation about evolution relatively interesting, and I hope the author’s points about the absence of women from medical research will help jumpstart some necessary work. But a book that needs this much fact-checking, and full of this much questionable speculation, can’t be taken seriously....more
An entertaining and educational work, from a scholar of ancient history whose work always comes across to me like lectures from “the fun professor”: sAn entertaining and educational work, from a scholar of ancient history whose work always comes across to me like lectures from “the fun professor”: someone deeply versed in scholarship but with a delivery that is hip, irreverent, and opinionated. The British title is “A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women” and that’s more representative of its contents, though less allusive, than the American one, “A Rome Of One’s Own” (although over a third of the book is set before Rome became an empire). The chapters each focus on a different woman (or two) and a different period in history, so for me, something to read a chapter at a time rather than blow through all at once.
Happily, I learned a fair bit about Roman history from this. The women profiled are diverse, and other than Boudicca (because no one can resist writing about Boudicca) were ones I hadn’t heard of before. The book moves from examination of the roles of women in Rome’s foundation myths; to the formerly enslaved woman who wound up giving information that brought down the cult of Dionysus, all in an effort to save her boyfriend from his malicious mom; to a businesswoman in Pompei, officers’ wives at the forts along Hadrian’s Wall, a highborn court poet, an early Christian martyr. There are women at the peak of political power, too: I especially enjoyed reading about Augustus’s daughter Julia Caesar, whose restricted upbringing ultimately turned into rebellion, and Julia Maesa, a Syrian woman whose sister married an officer who later became emperor, and who then fought successfully to get her two successive grandsons on the throne. There were some real Machiavellian moves there, but she seems to have been popular, and I’d love to read a novel about her if anybody could write a good one.
In the end, I definitely enjoyed this and found it well worth reading, as well as sometimes humorous. Too much of this author’s voice would probably begin to grate, but in small doses it is excellent, and a great way to learn more about Roman history....more
This book is about an important topic, and as the author is a history professor, I imagine she knows a great deal about it. After reading the book, I This book is about an important topic, and as the author is a history professor, I imagine she knows a great deal about it. After reading the book, I am left imagining, however, because good luck gleaning information from it.
The book suffers from a lack of organization on any level: paragraphs, chapters, the book as a whole. I was left with little sense of what the author was trying to say other than that Africa and Europe have a history together, nor was the focus of individual chapters particularly clear, as they leap around in time, place and subject with no transitions.
While the book is sold as a rebuttal to the notion that people of African descent living in Europe are a relatively new phenomenon, kicking off with World Wars I and II, it actually does little to rebut that or even focus on it much. Out of seven chapters, the first two are sort of about that, though also with non-sequiturs like the Roman-governed Egyptians’ war with Nubia, cited as an example of European/African contact. Then it jumps straight from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on European overseas empires and the slave trade, Chapter 5 on the period around the world wars, and Chapters 6 and 7 are all about 21st century activism.
But the biggest problem is with the writing itself; I wouldn’t even call it academic—there’s a bit of jargon, but not much—so much as clunky, confusing and at times incoherent. Here are some examples:
Dutch ambiguity was further evidenced by the debate about slavery and education to which Capitein contributed in some degree. Capetein arrived in Middelburg in 1728. He then travelled with Van Gogh to The Hague, where Van Gogh had a house. Two years after his arrival, Van Gogh sent him to German-born minister [sic] of the Reformed Church, Johann Philipp Manger. Manger’s impression on the boy was important. In the 1730s the Republic was at its height in terms of trade and culture. The Dutch, Capitein amongst them, were proud of its achievements. Through Capitein’s writings, one learns that The Hague and the whole of the country were a source of regional and national esteem. Manger’s position as a vocal protector of immigrants and a tolerant Christian provided access to a more balanced and outward-looking perspective that greatly influenced the young Capetein. Under Manger’s tutelage, Capitein learnt French and was encouraged to consider university. In 1735, at nearly eighteen years old, he was baptized. He joined the University of Leiden two years later. (72)
It’s as if the author put all the sentences into a blender and slapped them down in the order they came out—and at no point is the debate about slavery and education addressed, despite being the apparent thesis sentence of the paragraph. Or see this one, about France:
The number of legal cases involving black people led the authorities to suggest that a special unit should be set up. In 1777 the Police des Noirs, or ‘police for black people’, was created. Soon after, it became compulsory for black people to carry a cartouche (an identification card). Between 1777 and 1789, in Paris only, 765 people were registered. The aim of the Police des Noirs was to limit the number of black people in the country. It was not named a ‘police for enslaved people’, so the assumption by then was that all black bodies were enslaved. Masters who had enslaved domestic servants in their service had to register them or risk paying a heavy fine. Enslaved people were to stay in detention centres for the duration of their master’s stay. The costs would be the master’s responsibility. (84-85)
This paragraph appears to discuss two totally different regimes—one under which black people in France had to be registered and carry identification cards at all times and were heavily policed, and another under which they were interned (in regular jails, a subsequent paragraph explains). At no point is this abrupt transition addressed: did one system replace the other? Did one apply to some people while the other applied to others? Who knows! Not the reader of this book!
I was similarly confused by this one, about the French West African colony at Saint Louis:
The mariage a la mode du pays was legally recognized. When the European husband died or left the country and it was confirmed that he would never come back, the woman could remarry. These women had the support of their communities if they then wanted to start anew and have children within a second or third union. The children born from the marriages had their father’s name and could enjoy the benefits of his wealth. However, these unions were not recognized by European laws, meaning that the father’s European assets could not go to his African children. In 1830, the law changed, stating that European African children in Senegal could no longer inherit their father’s property. However, a French Royal Ordinance of the same year stated that children born before 1830 were still allowed to inherit their father’s property in Saint Louis. (108)
So, basically, the law didn’t allow mixed-race children to inherit their European father’s property (despite “enjoying his wealth” in some unspecified way), and then the law changed so they super-duper couldn’t inherit it?
Or take this one, about a Cameroonian prince:
Alexander led a life of leisure in many ways. He married Andrea when he was nineteen years old. She was seventeen. Their first child, a son, was born in 1920 and their daughter was born a year later. Alexander travelled to Cameroon in 1919 and returned the same year. He went back there again in 1922, but by then the couple had grown apart. Andrea had been allowed to move to Germany and Alexander never saw her. He allegedly refused to provide for her unless she relinquished custody of their children, so she had to work to provide for them. It was only after the Second World War that Alexander was reunited with his daughter. His relationship with his son, Jose Emmanuel Manga Bell, remained contentious. Alexander shot his son while he was on a visit to Cameroon in 1947. The circumstances of the death remain unclear. Alexander and Emmanuel were African Europeans who were caught between both identities at a time when colonial rule was shifting from German to British and French powers. (140)
What a bizarre paragraph: the opening sentence has nothing to do with the rest of it (nothing here suggests a life of leisure), buried midway through there’s a surprise filicide, given no more narrative weight than the mundane biographical details, and then it wraps up on such an anodyne statement one assumes it to be true, but which is in no way supported by the information given.
Likewise, some assertions really needed more explanation, such as:
Despite Bailey’s strict definition of the term, we have seen over the last few years that certain forms of discrimination against black and dual-heritage women have common features. The vile media attacks against the Duchess of Sussex held similarities to those encountered by supermodel Iman. Both were deemed too far away from either blackness or whiteness. Iman famously confronted the editor-in-chief of the black US magazine Essence when she stated that Iman was ‘a white woman dipped in chocolate’ in 1976. Both women have been criticized for having either not enough or too much of certain attributes. Nonetheless, class is an element that needs to be part of the discussion. Iman and Markle have had access to a kind of wealth that many underprivileged dark-skinned black women can only dream of. They have both held professional posts based on their physical attributes as well as expertise and achievement in their fields. (178)
Like much of this book, this paragraph seems aimed at people already familiar with the situations described. As someone who does not follow royal gossip and has never heard of Iman, this “certain attributes” talk was opaque to me, as was the claim that both women “held professional posts based on their physical attributes” (?).
Or:
As Félix Germain and Silyane Larcher have noted, black French citizens are often referred to as people issus de l’immigration (‘from an immigrant background’) ‘as if white French citizens were not also issus de l’immigration’, with the implication that ‘whites are natives, but people of African descent are not’. (190)
We’re talking about France here, not the U.S.—I’m going to need some explanation for why this proposition is wrong.
Or:
For example, a report on stop and search police practices in Spain corroborates word of mouth stories about the relationship of the Spanish police with minority ethnic communities. The harrowing reports demonstrate that stop and search for no valid reason is widely accepted by the majority group. In fact, it is one of many ways the police force shows that it values white bodies above all else. The report found that, according to the police, racial profiling reassures the majority group even when there is no evidence of danger. Yet the practice also propagates the idea that there must be a need to profile specific communities. In 2015, the last year that police data about stop and search in Spain is available, 6,550,422 police identifications were conducted. To put things in perspective, the report argues, this needs to be compared with 1.2 million stop and searches conducted in England and Wales in 2011-12. Police impunity in public spaces has rendered these places unsafe for most minority ethnic groups in Spain. (196)
Maybe this brain glitch is unique to me but formatting those numbers that way had my brain so convinced that the England/Wales count was double the Spain count that I could not for the life of me figure out why this made Spain look bad even upon several readings (thanks to the commenter who pointed it out!). If the goal is to provide perspective, maybe compare the per capita stop-and-searches in each country, and express them in the same style? (Also, while we’re on the topic of this paragraph: did the Spanish police actually admit they were searching minorities solely to reassure white people and if so, why is that buried in weaselly language in the middle of the paragraph?)
Part of me felt like I should give this book a second star, because it’s an important topic and I was pleased that it ranged over Western Europe as a whole rather than centering England, as British writers usually do. And if much of the book reads like the literature review portion of someone’s thesis, at least there is good information buried in there somewhere? But then I reached the bit stating that Treyvon Martin was killed by a “neighborhood manager” (221), when in fact George Zimmerman was just a neighborhood watch volunteer, with no authority over the neighborhood or the residents. And when the facts you know are wrong, it’s hard to trust the rest of them....more
Kind of embarrassing to introduce your book by talking about how you wanted to write a history that reads like an airport thriller when yours in fact Kind of embarrassing to introduce your book by talking about how you wanted to write a history that reads like an airport thriller when yours in fact reads like a textbook.
Also like a textbook, it feels very... traditional, in all the worst ways. Oral histories are dismissed even after being vindicated by archaeology. When the author exercises his imagination by envisioning the first group of Melanesians to arrive on Flores Island, that imagination turns out to be populated exclusively by men.
Wow, this was disappointing. I’d been seeking a readable, secular history of the Catholic Church for years, and while this is readable, secular and a Wow, this was disappointing. I’d been seeking a readable, secular history of the Catholic Church for years, and while this is readable, secular and a history, it has almost nothing else going for it. It’s an endless series of summaries of the political careers of popes, lacking a thesis, analysis or context, and with a very British Empire ethos.
In fairness, I don’t think it was even intended as a history of the church; it’s about the popes and only the popes, stringing together hundreds of summaries of papacies like endless beads. It zips through the first 500 years of Christianity in 25 pages, understandably since the leaders in Rome didn’t even claim to be popes for the first 400 (and learning that Peter was not in fact Bishop of Rome, and it’s only legends that have him even visiting, was interesting). It gets through the year 1000 by page 92. After that it has something to say about the reign of every single pope through Benedict XVI.
I use the word “reign” deliberately, as the behavior of the popes, up through losing their territory in the Papal States in the unification of Italy in 1870, seems little different from that of secular princes. It’s a distasteful chronicle of popes allying themselves with various kings against other kings, going to war for territory, and transparently using excommunication and interdict as political weapons against their enemies, or even just petty rivals. Not to mention assorted sexual misconduct and using the papacy to enrich their own families.
But this political behavior appears to be the only aspect of the papacy to interest the author. Throughout the Middle Ages, for instance, the book is laser-focused on the papacy’s diplomatic relations, particularly with the Holy Roman Empire, and all of the many occasions on which the succession was disputed and claimants fought each other for the papacy. Some of the more modern sections go on for pages describing wars in Europe while barely mentioning the popes. In other words, this book is very much your standard political/military/diplomatic history. There’s almost no attention to social and cultural context, and very little to religion. Major threads in the history of the church—for instance, clerical celibacy, reform movements—appear only when a pope does something notable in relation to them, but are otherwise ignored, leaving no sense of their development in the broader picture.
And perhaps because so much time is covered, and the author is trying to stuff in details of so many papacies, there’s no real context provided for anything. I wound up with the sense that the author subscribed heavily to the Great Man theory of history, and perhaps wasn’t able to identify and follow broader trends, or causes and consequences, instead needing to understand everything through the actions of individuals.
All this is perhaps unsurprising given Norwich’s background, born in 1929 and a British Viscount (and yes, the book was published in 2011. I hope I’m this productive in my 80s). In other words, he was educated in the British Empire, and you can tell. There’s a tendency to prize manliness over morality: the primary axis upon which he judges popes is courage or firmness, used synonymously with “moral fortitude,” to mean sticking tenaciously to one’s position in the face of opposition, without regard to whether one is in the wrong. The book appears to sympathize with the popes in their battles for territory and control, praising for instance the decision of a pope to put all Rome under interdict in retaliation for the citizens’ support of a church reformer: this was, apparently, “an act of breathtaking courage.” (By the pope, not the reformer, though you can guess which winds up hanged.) The Romans’ desire for self-government and overall disenchantment with the popes—only natural given their proximity to papal behavior—are treated harshly. Meanwhile there’s a striking variety of dated assumptions: everyone’s death (and these popes dropped like flies) is attributed to shame, exhaustion or despair from their most recent setback. Attila the Hun “like all his race, was incorrigibly superstitious”—how did this get past an editor in 2011?
Also, one is left with some questions about the author’s research: claiming that the Gospel of Luke was written before Mark, for instance, or that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed on the same day (they died 9 months apart). As always, I have to wonder what else was wrong that I didn’t catch.
In the end I did finish this—admittedly with some skimming in the middle—because I was interested in the topic, but didn’t learn nearly as much as I’d hoped. Too many names that run together, without analysis of the most important issues; too much focus on the political history to the exclusion of everything else. I’d still like to find a history of the Catholic Church for the general reader, but one focused on the institution rather than individual popes, by an author with a handle on its religious as well as its political role, and with much more critical analysis....more
Read through page 52. Unfortunately the author’s (or translator’s) style did not work for me. It jumps around a lot, offering random details without tRead through page 52. Unfortunately the author’s (or translator’s) style did not work for me. It jumps around a lot, offering random details without the larger context of his subjects’ lives, in disruptively short segments, all while treating his subjects like characters in a novel, purporting to write their internal monologues.
Also, I didn’t need an explanation for why one would write about these four women—they’re each quite a big deal and also led interesting lives (amusingly, I knew of all of them, had previously read two with a third on my TBR, while I don’t think I’d even heard of more than one of the male philosophers featured in his previous book). Nor even for writing a group biography despite their apparently not knowing each other—they were at least contemporaries and provide for interesting contrasts. But I think I did need an explanation for why that group biography should focus exclusively on a single decade, from 1933-1943, when three of the four were only just getting started in their careers by the end of it. The book treats this era as complete unto itself and offers no context or explanation; it begins not with an introduction to its thesis or even its subjects’ early lives, but a flash-forward to 1943 before returning to 1933. But (except for Weil, who was dying) why should we care what they were doing in 1943 specifically? Their lives did not unfold in lockstep so why is the book organized as if they did?
Admittedly I am no great lover of philosophy, but I do love historical biographies and just quickly found myself dreading this one....more
A worthwhile book that isn’t quite what I was expecting. From the title, I expected this to be a “myths about the Bible” book, perhaps premis3.5 stars
A worthwhile book that isn’t quite what I was expecting. From the title, I expected this to be a “myths about the Bible” book, perhaps premised on translation issues. But the author, besides being a renowned scholar, is a college professor, and this book reads very much like an undergraduate class, of the sort that’s much more interested in hammering home the “themes” and big picture of the subject area than focusing on the details. And if this book were a course, it would not be titled “History of the New Testament” but something more like “Introduction to Textual Criticism.”
That said, it is interesting in unexpected ways. The author was once a Biblical literalist, until realizing that, well, which version of the New Testament is the correct one? This turns out to be a fraught question, because we don’t have originals of anything. Nothing written on paper survives 2000 years (unless perhaps stored in the Egyptian desert), so what we have are copies (often copies of copies of copies of copies….), made by scribes, i.e., humans. Today it’s hard to get our heads around how much time and effort went into producing a single copy of a book before the printing press: every copy had to be written out by hand, one word at a time. (Does some cultural memory of this remain, in our tendency to treat books as precious even when they’re cheap?) In the ancient world, this was done by a small class of professional scribes (some of whom could actually barely write!), literate slaves in rich households, or occasionally educated people who really wanted to disseminate something. Anything not copied, meanwhile, would be lost, as well as the originals the copies were made from.
And discrepancies inevitably crept in. Some were inadvertent errors: my favorite is the guy who copied out a genealogy beginning with God, which he apparently didn’t realize was in two columns, because he stuck God somewhere in the middle as the son of some other guy! (Talk about asleep at the wheel—but then, how long could you stay focused while copying begats? Maybe he realized halfway through and just hoped no one would notice?) Others were “corrections” to the text—things the scribes thought must have been wrong, perhaps because they struggled to make sense of them or the text felt incomplete otherwise. For instance, in a story from Mark, Jesus went from being described as angry to compassionate; the last twelve verses of Mark (everything after the women fled the empty tomb) were apparently a later addition; a woman described in one of the epistles as an important apostle was retconned as a man.
Still others were quite deliberate changes, to “clarify” the text or emphasize a theological or social point that a later writer wanted to make: the prohibition on women speaking in church was probably a later addition not attributable to Paul (since Paul had previously said they needed to cover their heads while doing so); likewise there were alterations to be more anti-Semitic, or to stress aspects of Jesus that other factions disagreed about (for instance, to clarify that he really was human, to remove the line “Today I have begotten you” from Luke’s version of his baptism to foreclose the interpretation that he only became Son of God at that moment, etc.). In fairness to these scribes, the “canon” didn’t exist yet (this dates to about 367 C.E., so hundreds of years after these books were first written), so scribes likely had a very different understanding of the nature of their texts than Biblical literalists today. And the biggest changes happened in those early centuries, before Christianity became institutionalized.
But the author overall seems interested in exploring why changes were made and what they say about both the original texts and the later scribes, rather than using the discrepancies to point fingers. I and probably everyone else was disappointed to learn that the “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” story is not original, but the author theorizes that it was an oral tradition about Jesus that just didn’t happen to be written down till later.
At any rate, the book makes no attempt to be comprehensive in covering even the most important alterations to the originals (it wouldn’t be possible to cover all of them because there are more variations among texts than words in the New Testament). Instead it focuses primarily on the historical context and how textual scholars analyze manuscripts. Specifics come into play as examples illustrating the principles.
If slightly on the dry side, the book is readable for a general audience, obviously the work of a careful scholar, and it’s interesting stuff that will change how you think about ancient documents, including of course the New Testament. That said, despite the title you won’t find much here about the ways Jesus is actually misquoted: namely the fact that he spoke Aramaic while the New Testament was written in Greek (so we actually have none of his original words), plus the decades that passed before the Gospels were written down.
I do have some interest in reading other work by this author, but ideally one with more meat and less heavy on the themes....more
Read through page 110 and maybe I’ll return to it someday, but right now I’m not feeling it. It’s long and slightly dense and the deckle edge pages doRead through page 110 and maybe I’ll return to it someday, but right now I’m not feeling it. It’s long and slightly dense and the deckle edge pages don’t help. Mostly it’s a detailed play-by-play of 17th century English politics, and there are certainly interesting tidbits although it’s not my era of greatest interest. But then there are paragraphs like this:
Beyond London, a postal system was created to connect the country and an attempt was made to standardize the grammar taught in schools. [King Charles I] tried to discourage people from taking tobacco, because it led them to drink and to the “depraving of their manners.” He issued a proclamation ordering the enforcement of the 1624 statute against swearing (although at least one individual had to be prosecuted because he said he didn’t care a fart for it). He went after those who depopulated the land through enclosures, with rather overblown claims made that some 2,000 farms had reopened, even while Charles himself allowed enclosures on his own estates. He also tried, as his father had, to get the landed elites to leave London and to tend to their affairs in the country. Unlike his father, though, he backed proclamations with actual enforcement, and in the process caused some irritation. Simonds D’Ewes, peeved at having to leave Islington for the sticks, complained that the policy “took away men’s liberties at one blow,” though he was being rather dramatic. Some, indeed, took a more positive view. A report in 1632 claimed that in the countryside “more chimneys are likely to smoke this Christmas than have been seen many years before.” In the bleak winter, the presence of landed families in their country homes was supposed to bring warm hospitality to their poorer neighbors.
Which leaves out all the detail that would make this most interesting! How did this 17th century postal system work? What were the discrepancies in grammar being taught and how did they go about deciding the winner? What did the king do to try to make people stop taking tobacco, let alone to force all these rich people to change their residences? (And is it really that dramatic to complain about loss of liberty when someone else is dictating where you live? We are talking privileged people who likely restricted the liberties of those beneath them far more severely, but it’s not a mandate many of us today would think much of either.) Was the 1632 report the product of a different faction of landowners who supported the country living edict, or the government? What kind of punishments were visited upon people who swore, or who enclosed land? These are the details that really make history fascinating to me, and I wasn’t getting them here....more
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