On the 9 August Sara and I launched our new book Maladies & Medicine: exploring health and healing 1540-1740 at Loughborough University London. Attendees battled a classic British Summer downpour and train stations full to the brim with Athletics spectators to share a glass of wine and some cake with us.

The launch followed a spread in The I newspaper talking about diseases that are no longer with us.

The book is currently available from Pen & Sword books, and from Amazon as either a paper back or on kindle/ebook.

A few months ago I received an exciting email asking if I would like to be involved in Inside Versailles with the awesome hosts Greg Jenner and Kate Williams. We talked all things aphrodisiacs – as this season has featured several including satyrion, Spanish fly and some more mysterious love potions.

If you missed it you can catch up on IPlayer for the next couple of days.

I am very pleased to announce that the edited collection I put together with Ciara Meehan is now available. To celebrate we are offering the chance to win a copy of the collection.

To be in with a chance follow this link

https://perceptionsofpregnancy.com/2017/01/23/win/

The book includes a fantastic selection of chapters covering issues of emotions, consumerism, violence, and literary representations. For more details here are the abstracts.

Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

This multi-disciplinary collection brings together work by scholars from Britain, America and Canada on the popular, personal and institutional histories of pregnancy. It follows the process of reproduction from conception and contraception, to birth and parenthood. The contributors explore several key themes: narratives of pregnancy and birth, the patient-consumer, and literary representations of childbearing. This book explores how these issues have been constructed, represented and experienced in a range of geographical locations from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Crossing the boundary between the pre-modern and modern worlds, the chapters reveal the continuities, similarities and differences in understanding a process that is often, in the popular mind-set, considered to be fundamental and unchanging.

BREEDING A LITTLE STRANGER: MANAGING UNCERTAINTY IN PREGNANCY IN LATER GEORGIAN ENGLAND Joanne Begiato

Pregnancy was a routine, often regular experience for women across their child-bearing years in the long eighteenth century, since the majority of women wed in their mid-twenties and bore children until the menopause. Pregnancy was limited only by fertility, health, and sexual abstinence before the ‘fertility transition. As such pregnancy from its earliest stages to birth was a topic consistently discussed in family correspondence and diaries among the literate social ranks.’ Although individual circumstances were often different, one common theme emerges across these relatively mundane commentaries on pregnancy, a pervasive sense of apprehension. This chapter surveys the language used to describe pregnancy and the unborn child in order to learn more about the bodily and emotional experience of pregnancy in late Georgian England.

“BOUND TO BE A TROUBLESOME TIME”: CANADIAN PERCEPTIONS OF PREGNANCY, PARTURITION, AND PAIN, C. 1867-1920 Whitney Wood

The introduction, acceptance, and growing popularity of obstetric anaesthesia in Canada went hand in hand with changing conceptualisations of both pregnancy and birth. By the turn of the twentieth century, labour and delivery were overwhelmingly seen as pathological states, increasingly requiring medical management. Discussions surrounding the role of ‘birth pangs’ or labour pain in the birthing process, as both a diagnostic tool, and as a feature of labour requiring increasing attention, treatment, and control at the hands of overwhelmingly male physicians, were at the heart of this shift. This chapter offers an analysis of both professional and popular medical discourses with the aim of situating first person narratives within the broader contexts of these changes, in order to highlight Canadian perceptions of pregnancy during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.

FAMILIES, VULNERABILITY AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE DURING THE IRISH REVOLUTION Justin Dolan Stover

During the Irish Revolution, individuals increasingly recognised that joining nationalist groups, membership of the Sinn Féin political party, interest in Irish language revival, or active (or suspected) service in the IRA, implicated others. These considerations were not merely peripheral; anxiety over the safety of non-combatants within one’s family and community, and a desire to reduce collateral damage are frequent and central themes of the independence narrative. Such anxiety could also be placed within the context of fatherly concern more broadly.  Moreover, as terror became a common feature the conflict throughout 1920 so, too, did the fear of sexual violence. This chapter explores the experiences of parents and their children, women and violation of bodies and intimate space, and the vulnerability and emotional anxiety experienced during this turbulent period.

AUDIBLE BIRTH, LISTENING WOMEN: STORYTELLING THE LABOURING BODY ON MUMSNET Anija Dokter

What do women perceive when they hear birth? This question is complex. Web 2.0 has offered mothers the opportunity to participate in the accumulation of text, audio and visual data about motherhood, and the women on Mumsnet provide a plethora of rich sonic descriptions. This chapter is part summary and part collaborative critique, an arts-inspired exploration of thousands of Mumsnet threads woven into a unique narrative fabric. The women-authored materials on Mumsnet contain many perspectives and complex social analyses, which can be contextualised by broader feminist critiques of the gender power relations at the core of families and medical institutions. In doing so, this chapter locates women’s intellectual work in non-elite women-authored literature.

FEMININE VALUE AND REPRODUCTION IN ROWLEY’S THE BIRTH OF MERLIN Daisy Murray

Recent scholarship reveals an emerging interest in the female characters in The Birth of Merlin. This shifting scholarly interest seems warranted in relation to a play which positions reproduction as a main concern through both its title and its plot. This chapter will demonstrate how the female characters raise issues related to reproduction and, through doing so, both interrogate the power afforded to women in their generative potential and explore how women can function productively in relation to the larger patriarchal condition of the kingdom. Analysing the play alongside contemporary discussions of pregnancy and childbirth will highlight how this depiction of womanhood participates within a larger cultural dialogue which values women because of their generative function, yet equally resists an elevation of the female because of this role.

“PREGNANT WOMEN GAZE AT THE PRECIOUS THING THEIR SOULS ARE SET ON”: PERCEPTIONS OF THE PREGNANT BODY IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE Sara Read

The performance of pregnancy is a trope that is well-used in dramatic works. Pregnant characters are used to explore issues such as infidelity, concealed pregnancy, female duplicity, and unmarried pregnancy, for example. The chapter seeks to build on existing work that seeks to gain the most full understanding of a theatrical text by comparing it with other texts in a similar field. The focus will be on the ways that pregnancy was presented in works which were not primarily designed for the public stage, such as a privately commissioned playlet, along with prose and poetic works, in order to evaluate the extent to which contextual reading reveals in more depth themes prevalent in dramatic works and how far the themes overlap within these genres too.

BABIES WITHOUT HUSBANDS: UNMARRIED PREGNANCY IN 1960S BRITISH FICTION Fran Bigman

This chapter considers the persistent stigma of unmarried motherhood as an example of the limitations of the so-called permissive society. It examines the depiction of pregnancy out of wedlock in Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room (1960) and Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1965), arguing that these novels suggest an uneven pattern of liberalisation rather than a blanket shift to a ‘permissive society.’ In exploring taboo sexual topics, they both participate in a turn to gritty realism that characterises British fiction of the late 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s. While many examples are written by, and feature, male working-class authors from the North of England, Banks’s and Drabble’s novels, with their stories of middle-class women living in London, provide a different regional, classed, and gendered perspective on life in 1960s Britain.

THE BIRTH OF THE PREGNANT PATIENT-CONSUMER? PAYMENT, PATERNALISM  
AND MATERNITY HOSPITALS IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLAND George Campbell Gosling

From the First World War separating women opting for a hospital birth into different institutions according to class was slowly becoming a thing of the past. Nonetheless, payment and admission systems served to maintain a notable degree of separation between and within institutions. Where ability to pay is often assumed to offer an escape route from social convention, the experience of securing a hospital birth in pre-NHS England suggests otherwise. By taking an institutional perspective of maternity hospitals in Bristol, Liverpool and London, we find traditional and paternalistic attitudes towards pregnant women of different classes and marital status inscribed onto the money paid. This chapter argues that the act of paying the maternity hospital served to mitigate and mediate the rise of universalism on the juddering road towards the welfare state.

“CLOSER TOGETHER”: DUREX CONDOMS AND CONTRACEPTIVE CONSUMERISM IN 1970S BRITAIN Ben Mechen

Durex’s “Closer Encounters” campaign, displayed on billboards across Britain in 1979, marked a significant moment of transition for the Durex brand. Not only was it one of the company’s highest visibility campaigns to date, but it was also one of its first to so completely foreground a message about the pleasures and sensations that condoms enabled rather than the unplanned pregnancies they helped prevent. What facilitated this transition? This chapter argues that, in terms of both the campaign’s scale and visibility, and the particular claims about condoms and their sexual function it expressed, “Closer Encounters” signaled the culmination of two interlinked processes, analysis of which provides insights into how heterosexual relationships, the gendered division of contraceptive responsibilities and meanings of “good” sex have been reconceived in postwar Britain.

Recently I was lucky enough to be on Soho Radio’s Science Mixtape. If you want to hear some gross details about early modern medicine and some awesome tunes chosen by me, then you can catch up with the podcast

I have written a book tackling these themes with Sara Read, it will be available summer 2017! Watch this space.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 20 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

A foreign man with an extremely long bushy beard requesting a shave. Credit: Wellcome Library London

On Saturday 28 November Alun Withey and I hosted Framing the Face: New Perspectives of the History of Facial Hair, a one day conference funded by the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Exeter. Alun has just begun a three year Wellcome Trust funded project on facial hair and I have been working on a history of men’s sexual health in the seventeenth century that has (surprisingly) led to lots of facial hair related material. We thus wanted to bring together scholars working across temporal and geographic boundaries to see what conversations would emerge.

Ελληνικά: Hercule Poirot via Wikimedia Commons

The day started with a fantastic interdisciplinary panel exploring the role of moustaches on canvas, stage, and screen. Art historian Victoria Alonso Cabezas examined the representation of young male painters in nineteenth-century Spanish art. We saw that several paintings included shadows of potential facial hair indicating the artist’s entrance in adult manhood. Victoria also showed how some Spanish artists introduced facial hair into their self-representations following involvement in the military or more usually following marriage. Het Philips then considered the role of moustaches as a marker of ‘creepy’ objectionable masculinity in television and film. Moustachioed characters in Trainspotting and Orange is the New Black, for example, display excessively violent, and often sexually violent, forms of masculinity that Het suggested masks the moral failing of more ‘normal’ male characters. The enjoyment of these masculinities in popular culture is, she argues, rather disconcerting. But having this immediately visually obvious character creates a trope to be subverted, where ‘normal’ men are revealed to be even more morally dubious than the moustache wearing villains. The panel was completed by makeup artist Helen Casey who explored three case studies where moustaches have been central to the creation of a male character: Charlie Chaplin’s tramp clown, Groucho Marx’s stage persona and David Suchet’s Hercule Poirot. Chaplin made a conscious choice to reject the traditional painted on stubble of tramp clowns played into his desire to have everything about the persona be a contradiction –the tramp clown who is actually a gentleman down on his luck. Poirot’s moustache, meanwhile, portrays everything about the character in one clear visual signifier; he is a man that is precise, clean, fussy and isolated.

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn

The speakers in the second panel looked at facial hair more broadly and crossed gender lines. Emily Cock questioned the ways in which early modern literature utilised the beard as a key characteristic of a bawd. These one-time prostitutes turned madams were inversions of all that was sexually attractive. They were not though described as having full beards but were endowed with prickly hairs upon their chins. This facial hair excluded them from the realms of the feminine but did not bestow masculinity. Ellie Rycroft also took us into the world of early modern England examining the lifecycle of boy players and the roles they played on the stage. Beards, as she pointed out, did not suddenly appear but grew over time. Young male actors slipped through social categories and may have had to employ false beards to play adult men. However, as Rycroft noted, in the seventeenth century concern about false beards perhaps meant companies of players moved towards using actors with their real facial hair at its different stages of development. While young and beardless these boys played roles like the page, a bawdy role, which unnerved society by connecting youth to criminality. The growth of facial hair moved youths into the role of gallant or soldier. The extravagance and impermanence of Gallants, who shaved their beards, represented a real threat to society, whilst soldiers, whose martial masculinity was repeatedly asserted through excessive beard growth, suggested the wildness and disorder of unbridled masculine activity. The final paper in the paper was delivered by Hanna Weibye who described the complex representational qualities of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s beard. The nineteenth-century creator of a gymnastic movement in Germany, she argued, perhaps used his beard to signify his sense of difference to the ruling class of German bourgeoisie. While they were clean shaven or wore neat short beards, Jahn’s rather long beard associated him with artisans and a nostalgic Germanic past. His beard was a memorial to his patriotic youth movement that the government refused to support. It was sign of his constancy, loyalty to the state and the fact that he was alienated from his own time.

From the representational qualities of beards the conference moved on to think about choice and consumerism. John Gagné revealed the intriguing example of Italian beards around 1500. After charting the rise and fall of facial hair in the Roman epochs, he explored the beard wearing of Francesco Gonzaga, who was unusual amongst European princes for wearing a beard. This coincided with Gonzaga’s fight against the French, and under French rule Milanese men were ordered to shave off their beards within three days. Their choice was thus nominally removed from them by a French government who feared that beards were connected to wickedness and sin and that false beards allowed for the disguise of men who had committed crime. Enforced shaving was an indignity to the Milanese who sought diplomatic redress and wore their beards as a sign of mourning for their city, and their defiance of their French overlords. Moving into the nineteenth-century Justin Bengry delved into the world of shaving adverts and showed how shaving companies sought to instill anxieties about disease and the vulnerability of the masculine body into their potential customers. Concerns that could of course be eased and abated by the use of the ‘right’ shaving products. Adverts both showed the man at home as model of domestic patriarchal bliss, and showed men in the rugged outdoors, escaping the confines of domesticity. Bengry argued that adverts invoked domestic, imperial, modern and traditional tropes to tie their products to extant and new identities. They created tensions in masculinity – showing men that it was fragile, defensive and at risk – in order to encourage men’s consumer choices. Christopher Oldston-Moore concluded the speakers’ sessions by taking a longue durée approach to understanding choices and trends in facial hair fashion. He suggested that there have been four relatively brief periods of ‘bearded’ history in a western tradition dominated by clean shaven faces. These beard wearing eras were provoked, he argued, by shifts in the foundation of masculine authority towards the ‘naturalness’ of the male body.

The day concluded with a plenary paper by Margaret Pelling that took us on a tour through early modern portraiture and the self-presentation of hair and facial hair. Pelling pointed out that the body and clothing have tended to be considered by historians separately from hair and facial hair. Heads, she noted, have received a lot of scholarly attention because they force themselves on our notice. Yet sexuality and sex, which have often been considered, might not be the best ways to think about the history of the beard: Shylock’s beard, for example, was central to his identity but this was not simply about his masculinity. Hair after all was visible and alterable and could be shaped to show ritual, religious and social status. Beards and hair were not covered by sumptuary laws that, although not rigidly enforced, suggested that appropriate ways to manifest these outward signs of status through clothing. This is intriguing given that the head and hands were the most exposed and vulnerable parts of the body. Facial hair could be used as a screen to hide the face, but is easily distorted by emotive movements meaning that in many contexts it exaggerates rather than hides the face and emotions. Another way to read the wearing of facial hair in this era, Pelling offered, is to think about the static nature of the court which might have given rise to boredom and the growing of facial hair to provide a diversion. Alternatively, older men in particular were prone to wear facial hair, which might have acted as a compensation for male pattern baldness. Pelling’s paper summarized a key theme of the day which is that there are many ways to think about and understand beards and facial hair in the past. And importantly points out that there is much ground still to be covered.

This week I have been up to the record office in Stafford to read volume one of Richard Wilkes’ journal. This is a great resource for early eighteenth-century medical and social history. Wilkes likes to record special medical cases he has been involved in, in a nice amount of detail, but as he went on to write a history of the county he also records local family histories, interesting news stories, and scandals. I found one such story particularly fascinating, Wilkes recorded that a young man living with his uncle lost his mind and attacked, and killed, the maid with a razor. He also attacked his uncle who narrowly escaped before slitting his own throat. The man and maid were subsequently buried together (I’m not sure how she would have felt about that).1

I finished reading through the diary and had some time to spare so I turned, as I always do, to reading a seventeenth-century recipe book that was housed in the collection of the Stafford Estate, attributed to the Jerningham Family, of Costessey, Norfolk.2 The book was very interesting as it functioned both as a space to record recipes but also as a compiled index of references to the authors’ collection of medical texts. The book was organised with a separate condition or illness on each page and, usually two, distinct hands recorded useful remedies and notes about effective remedies that could be found in Culpeper’s Dispensatory, William Salmon’s Dispensatory, Daniel Sennert’s medical texts and Lazarus Riverius’ medical text.

Now as we might expect, I was particularly excited when I discovered that the authors had included in their transcriptions from such texts remedies for priapism (continual painful erection), conception, barrenness and, most exciting, lust.

This is only the second time I have found recipes for aphrodisiacs listed explicitly, and separated from barrenness and conception, in a domestic recipe collection. The first I have written about on the recipes blog was a brief note that ‘Sotherne wood being laid under ye beeds [sic] head, doth provoke venery.’ There are obviously hundreds I haven’t read yet so I’m hopeful there are others but it always makes me happy to find a new reference – even if it is too late to be included in the book.

Courtesy of Pixabay

The author of this particular section explained that Rocket was a good aphrodisiac. Indeed rocket was often described as an aphrodisiac in this era for its heating qualities. They then went on to note that a better aphrodisiac was Balsamum ed Venereum from Salm. Disp. They offered no further details about what was in this wonderous compound. So on my return I couldn’t resist looking up what it was. In the 1702 edition of William Salmon’s translation of the London Dispensatry on page 746 I found ‘Balsamum Venereum, sam provoking Lust’

The compound is packed full of well know early modern aphrodisiacs including the rather dangerous Cantharides – which I have written about elsewhere – oil of ants, oil of cloves, oil of nutmegs, mace, as well as musk, and civet. Salmon writes of it that ‘ It excites Lust anointing the parts of Generation.‘

The author finished their transcription by repeating the word vide. ‘See’ [?] times. Who knows if the author ever made use of the recipe but they were clearly interested in it. I might no longer be researching aphrodisiacs as my main interest but these references continue to capture my interest and spark the ultimate question I had of did people make and use these substances, and if so what were their motivations.

_______________

1. Staffordshire Record Office, 5350, Dr Wilkes’ Journal.
2. Staffordshire Record Office, D641/3/H/3/1. Jerningham Family, of Costessey, Norfolk. 17th c. Recipe Book.
3. British Library Ms Sloane 556: Medical Receipts Written by Anthony Lewis; From a Book Owned by Lady Marquee Dorset, 1606. fol. 31 r.

This year’s RSA meeting took place in the beautiful city of Berlin at Humboldt University. This was my first visit to Germany and, of course, the city and I was immediately struck by how friendly and welcoming everyone was. My taxi driver had some free time and so she kindly took me on a tour of some of the city’s famous sites before delivering me safely to the towering Park Inn hotel on the famous Alexanderplatz.

During the conference I attended a range of interesting panels and papers. I started with a panel given by the ‘Domestic Devotions’ project at the university of Cambridge. Maya Corry kicked off proceedings with an investigation of the images produced and intended to help infant boys develop their piety. Corry explained how these images often featured the infant Christ as a mirror to the infant boys who viewed them, and tapped into children’s innate tendency to seek out sensual pleasure and gratification. They were thus markedly different from the devotional images produced for adult women, for example, which focused on the sufferings Christ had endured. Having focused on the role of images in devotion Katie Tycz then explored the ways in which pregnant women utilised ‘breivi’ to protect themselves from harm in labour. ‘Breivi’ she explained were small pouches worn on the body that might contain some herbs but mainly featured holy inscriptions designed to access divine power and grace. They were prayers designed to protect the body that gained further potency through their contact with the body. Finally Deborah Howard considered whether widows in this era developed their own distinctive forms of domestic devotion. A new revelation to me in this paper was the idea that in various parts of Europe widows who remarried were expected to leave their children with the family of their deceased husband. This meant that in certain cases they were configured as cruel and unfeeling. They were also encouraged therefore to remain chaste, celibate, and living in the family home until their children were grown. Through three case studies Howard revealed that widows experiences of devotion were varied and reflected their personal circumstance. This was in contradiction with the advice of the Church who recommended a strict and austere widowhood. This paper beautifully illuminated the ways in which devotion was malleable throughout the life-cycle and was adapted and moulded to fit particular moments of crisis and change.

I moved from devotion and piety to plants and herbals. Dominic Olarin gave a splendid paper investigating the use of impressions to create accurate renderings of plants in the sixteenth century. Leaves from various plants were coated in ink-like materials and then pressed onto a page leaving a clear impression of their outlines and venous systems. Olarin revealed some interesting features of this method though, highlighting that in some cases one leaf would be repressed in order to ‘create’ the image of a plant. Where necessary roots might be pressed but their shape and size, like flowers, meant that these were often painted in after the initial impression. In the second paper in this panel Sefy Hendler revealed that Bronzino Nano’s painting of Morgante, a dwarf from the court of Cosimo in the 1550s, known to show Cosimo’s fondness for hunting small birds with owls, also contains numerous depictions of plants. These plants not only reflected the area in which Cosimo was influential but emphasised Morgante’s physical condition. They metaphorically highlighted Morgante’s contradictory situation as a marvel, monster and beautiful creature. Overall the panel emphasised the need to consider representations of plants across a range of genres, herbals and paintings to understand the meanings they were laden with in early modern society.

I particularly enjoyed tucking into torte while polishing my own paper

Sticking in my areas of interest I also attended a panel on sexual crime in the renaissance. This opened with a fascinating paper by Leah DeVun who revealed the ways in which Lanfranco of Milan and other surgeons approached the difficult question of hermaphrodites bodies. She eloquently explained that in looking at these ambiguous bodies surgeons struggled to understand where sex was in the body. In response surgeons focused not just on the physical shape of the genitals but on their receptiveness to the genitals of others. For Lanfranco excessive female growth was disgusting and a problem because it impeded penile access, and thus inhibited ‘normative’ heterosexual intercourse. This combined with the fear that excessive protuberances stimulated women’s lusts and prompted them to have sex with other women. Attitudes towards hermaphrodites in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, she suggested, became more stringent and it was expected that someone of this nature would choose an active or passive role and stick rigidly within it. To avoid illicit sex they should not use both. In reflection of this surgery adopted a language of naturalness, where they framed their inherently unnatural interventions in the body as a means of restoring nature and the naturally intended body. Surgical discussions of hermaphrodites were not just about sex and gender but were intrinsically bound to discussions about sexuality.

Perhaps my favourite panel of the conference explored the fashion for codpieces in the renaissance. Gaylord Brouhot, in a lavishly illustrated talk, explained the ways in which the codpiece inherently implied stability and peace by highlighting the sexual vigour of European princes. These men, as their codpieces showed, were clearly capable for propagating heirs and maintaining stable dynastic lines. They were thus more exaggerated and were emphasised in portraits produced in troubled times. Codpieces, he argued, used the rhetoric of the anatomical body and its sexuality to show social power and enhance dignity. The upright shape of the codpiece reflected the straightness of body, kingliness of behaviour, and rightness of judgement of the princes of Europe. Victoria Miller, from Cambridge University, then explored the way in which the codpiece gradually diminished over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the same moment that the peasecod belly came into fashion. The visual focus thus moved from being directed at the genitals themselves to the area just above. However, the new peasecod belly still pointed to the all-important male parts, and was itself a sign of virility and sexuality. Shelling peas, she noted, was a euphemism for copulation and the peasecod was another name for the testicles. Thus even though the actual focus of attention shifted the overall message remained the same. The only difference was that the peasecod belly was also thought to signify wealth and status as its billowing shape emphasised that its wearer was wealthy and could afford to eat voluminous amounts of food, which then created a suitable paunch.

In addition to these papers I also attended an excellent panel on pain and medicine, in which Paolo Savoia convincingly argued that masculinity was a central feature of sixteenth century discussion of the pain associated with plastic surgery. Cowardly men, he explained, were thought to be unsuitable candidates for such procedures. The inability to grin and bear it was a sign of being ignoble. Moreover, surgeons played on this framework to suggest to their potential patients that it necessary to forebear such pain in order to restore the perfection of the face, which was crucial for daily interactions and the maintenance of status.

A close contender for my favourite panel was one about chronicles in early modern Europe. I am not that familiar with this genre but a paper from my doctoral supervisor Alexandra Walsham was enough to tempt me in, and the panel did not disappoint. I learnt a vast amount about an intriguing genre of texts and the ways in which they were used and manipulated by authors and readers. Walsham emphasised that they can be read for snippets of personal memory and self-identification in the same way as diaries. They had a polyvocal quality when produced in the lay and civic realm. In particular looking at the silences and omissions can reveal a lot about what events people wanted associated with their own lives and memories that would be passed down through the generations. The panel was concluded by Judith Pollmann who showed us the delightful drawing of a pig eating a baby, and who revealed the motivations of those keeping and producing such texts. She showed how chronicles were particularly used to record disasters, violence and disruptions to daily life. They were used to record continuity and to try to understand the present and predict the future. They were thus multifunctional and multi-authored documents. Rather than declining over time, she argued, they gradually adapted to the new era of print culture. Now material contained in printed books no longer needed to be included for posterity and instead snippets of interesting and relevant news might be collected and sorted.

My final note shall be on my favourite paper, which was I think given the touch competition, John Gallagher’s paper on language, education and travel in the seventeenth century. In a vivid and engaging paper Gallagher showed how young men travelling to Europe immersed themselves in local life in order to learn the language. They listened to beggars, gathered news from nuns and observed local customs in swearing, eating and drinking. Their method of learning a language was thus based in the everyday as well as in attending universities and church sermons. Gallagher evoked such a clear image of young men travelling that it was hard not to reflect on how poor my own language skills were in this new land. Perhaps next time I come to Germany I will have to spend more time listening and learning from the everyday.

An article by myself and Sara Read exploring men’s emotional and medical responses to miscarriage in early modern England is now available in the Journal of Family History.

Abstract:

Reproduction and childbirth in the early modern era have sometimes been represented as a uniquely feminine experience. Similarly, studies of domestic medicine have in the past overlooked the role that men played in domestic health care practices. This article builds on recent work that resituates men within both of these discourses by considering the ways in which men understood, discussed, and responded to the threat and occurrence of miscarriage in the women they knew. It considers a range of medical literature, spiritual diaries, and letters to illustrate that men were a central feature of many women’s experiences of miscarriage.