Unus non scit

Recently borrowed The Romans: From Village to Empire (Mary T. Boatwright, Daniel J. Gargola & Richard A. Talbert: Oxford Press). There is, of course, a pretty full plate of stuff to talk about where the Romans are concerned, especially if you start at a point before it was a real city, as is the case here.

One interesting topic involves the Romans themselves writing history:

Roman historians only rarely undertook what a modern historian might recognize as research. Undoubtedly, Romans of a later age had access to information regarding earlier centuries that was, in modern terms, reliable. Some documents did survive, although later Romans found them difficult to decipher and interpret...

However, few Roman historians seem to have consulted the old texts directly. Instead, they relied on interpretations of them (not always accurate) encountered in the work of earlier writers.

The history of Rome by the time it had reached its imperial phase was already quite long. Long enough for the Latin language to mutate and evolve. We understand Shakespeare because actors have worked to keep him contemporary and he's been quoted by thousands of other authors, but dropped in a sixteenth century English village we'd scarcely understand a word. anyone was speaking. Later Roman historians had a similar problem, running into a Latin that was already archaic. Not too surprising that they chose to copy what had already been written. Especially since originality wasn't really what was selling. (Is it ever?)

The trio

I just today finished reading Leanda de Lisle's The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, a book about Ladies Jane, Katherine, and Mary Grey. It covers many of the same events as Allison Weir's The Children of Henry VIII, which I also read not too long ago. One difference is that Weir's book was focused on the Tudors proper. It was primarily about Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth. Lady Jane Grey was its fourth subject, as she undeniably had an effect on the aforementioned monarchs. Weir didn't really say anything of substance about Katherine or Mary, while de Lisle does.

Jane can still fairly be called the first among equals in this book's telling, exactly because she was the shortest lived of the sisters, or rather because of the reasons she died so young. She's a troubling figure in some ways. She was serious, humble given her social position, an avid reader. She was also, by any objective standard, a religious zealot. Her vision of Protestantism was markedly similar to what the Cromwells would promote the better part of a century later. Elizabeth I was no sweetheart, but she did bring some kind of religious equilibrium to England during her reign. It's hard to imagine Jane doing the same.

Even given more attention than I've seen them get before, it's harder to get a read on Katherine and Mary. Lady Katherine Grey could have potentially become queen if Elizabeth's bout of smallpox in 1562 had gone worse for her. And at that point it was pretty much Katherine's only hope for freedom. What kind of queen would she have been? Unlike her older sister she hadn't made any big political or theological statements. She loved her husband Edward (like bunnies, I tell you), she loved her two baby sons, and she loved dogs and monkeys. As queen she might have deferred to Edward, but even he was more of an upper class striver than an aspiring ruler.

Then there's Mary. Like Katherine, she had married without Elizabeth's knowledge or permission, and was punished for it. An odd match, as she was a borderline dwarf and husband Thomas Keyes was a borderline giant, but they seem to have clicked on some level. While she was at the top of the succession chart after Katherine's death, she plainly had no great interest in usurping the throne. Elizabeth eventually realized this and freed her. Sadly it wasn't too much later that she was struck down by the plague.

The book is a triumph for de Lisle. She makes her mostly lesser-known historical figures come to life.

Like clockwork

One aspect of modernization is the increased interest in measuring time. While there's always been day and night, the four seasons, etc., a precise account of the time of day wasn't always a priority. Now we measure fractions of seconds. 

This transition isn't an unmixed blessing, but one has to appreciate the craftsmanship that has gone into clockmaking. The clock in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Strasbourg (not Paris) is one example. The numerals are brightly done, and it comes with an astrolabe.

There's a legend that the clockmaker was blinded when his work was done to keep him from creating an equally stunning clock for someone else. The author of this article notes that the same story has attached itself to almost every European clock of note. Well, I can see why.

Tudor Jeep Wrangler

One of the books I'm currently reading is The Children of Henry VIII by Alison Weir. Weir is a meticulous researcher, and she really nails the soap opera aspect of royal history. 

One thing that many people don't realize is that Henry considered himself a Catholic his entire life. And at one time he'd had an honored place in the Church. He wasn't trying to split England from Rome so much as he was holding out for a better deal from a more amenable Pope. The first ultra-Protestant monarch was his son Edward VI, who started reigning as a literal child and had a boy's inhuman level of commitment. He was followed by Catholic traditionalist Mary and Elizabeth, who nudged the modern Anglican Church into being.

Edward was the son of Henry and Jane Seymour. The Seymours were a colorful bunch. Edward Seymour (well, this particular Edward Seymour) was Lord Protector for the young king, and a truly harried bureaucrat. The Lord Protector's younger brother, Thomas, emerges as the villain of the early chapters. Whether this is a fair assessment of the man, one could ask, but he certainly seems like a great role for hammy stage actors. Marrying Henry's widow Catherine Parr made him the young Elizabeth's stepfather and...let's just say he wasn't exactly an all-star stepfather.

Switches

Until recently I always assumed that Queen Victoria had been the daughter of George IV.  It seems like the obvious conclusion. But I was wrong. George was her Uncle. Her father was aristocrat Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn. 

Not exactly a commoner by birth, but at the same time reigning over Britain wasn't in her plan for most of the time leading up to her reign. She had to catch up and become a queen that Britain would take seriously. So it's definitely a British story.

The sixteenth century, man

Check out Lady Katherine Grey. Her older sister, Lady Jane Grey, was the Nine Days' Queen. Which is to say she spent nine days as the apparent new monarch before being executed by Mary Tudor. Among other things that's a setback for the family. Mary's half-sister Elizabeth, however, considered Katherine a potential heir to the throne after her. Except then Katherine went and secretly married Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford when Elizabeth wanted to marry her off to the Earl of Arran (which would have been a stupid move for reasons I won't go into here.) So Katherine and Edward's marriage is annulled against both their wishes and Katherine spends the rest of her short life in the Tower of London.

And yet things still could have turned out differently. If Elizabeth had succumbed to her nasty case of smallpox Katherine, even as a jailbird, would have still been a viable choice to replace her, being a Protestant at a pivotal time for the new Church. A dramatic turnaround, but such things did happen. 

Another odd twist is that a couple of generations later something very similar happened to Lady Arbella Stuart, except that Arbella never got the chance to have any children with her husband. That husband being Katherine's grandson, William, Earl of Somerset. Another might-have-been.

And now? Now the maximum level of drama in the Royal Family is set by Harry writing a tell-all book which was read only by people who were going to goof on it. It's just not the same.

Plus ça change

Karen Lucic's 1991 book Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine contains some fascinating material on both sides of the title: the precisionist artist and the preoccupations of his time. 

His time was the early decades of the twentieth century, and the standardization of industrial production was having an effect in many areas of society. On Henry Ford Lucic has this to say:

Ford also embraced the emerging mechanistic attitude towards humanity; he even conceived of the body as consisting of interchangeable parts. "There is every reason to believe that we should be able to renew our human bodies in the same manner as we renew a defect in a boiler," he stated. He freely admitted that the principles of mass production limited personal freedom in the labour force and even claimed that most workers welcomed such a situation. "The average worker, I am sorry to say, wants a job in which he does not have to put forth much physical exertion - above all, he wants a job in which he does not have to think."

Is it a surprise that a titan of industry such as Ford held views that in a later era could be characterized as transhumanist? At least in part they could be. And maybe this shouldn't be a surprise. Technologists frequently seem to yearn for a human/machine marriage. In any case, he seems like he would be able to get rich now as well.

The work of Sheeler holds a lot of interest as well. The fact that he very rarely put human figures in is paintings makes him an ambivalent witness to his times.

One state over

 Kate was lucky, as far as servants go. Her master and mistress were wealthy., and she lived a comfortable life working for them. The last thing she would want would be to jeopardize her job with them and be cast out on the streets for some bizarre ailment she'd become afflicted with that couldn't be explained. Rather than risk losing her job and the life she'd grown accustomed to, and realizing that the attacks were increasing in intensity and frequency and could no longer be hidden, Kate may have consciously chosen to blame it on a couple of women she knew her masters didn't get along with. Or maybe she truly believed she was bewitched; it didn't take much to make one believe such a thing in those days. At any rate, Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough were brought to trial, and the entire community became involved in the outcome.

Preceding is a passage from Haunted Connecticut: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Constitution State.

The Stamford Witch Trials of 1692 have very much been overshadowed by those occurring in Salem, Massachusetts to the north in the same year. In terms of inherent drama, this is understandable. Still, the Connecticut trials were pretty fascinating in themselves. What distinguishes them is the relatively happy ending that resulted. Innocent people were accused and convicted, but they weren't put to death. In fact the people of Stanford, or at least enough of them to make a difference, seem to have concluded that this system of accusation and punishment was no longer right for the society they wanted to build. Witch trials were discontinued.

Polarity

My current nonfiction read―and it's a pretty hefty one―is Jared Diamond's Collapse. Subtitled "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", the book details a number of failed societies, some of which weren't entirely at fault, or could be forgiven for not seeing what was coming.

The case of Norse Greenland is an interesting one. The settlement of Iceland, despite some turnarounds, was basically successful, in that most of Iceland's current population is descended from Medieval Norse, probably Norwegians. Not so, Greenland. Settlers did arrive from mainland Scandinavia, and they had ideas. But the subarctic climate and rocky soil didn't support their farming economy at all. In this and other ways they tried to keep going as if they were still in Europe, but they weren't. Inuit settlers actually got there later but their methods of hunting and their innovative kayaks gave them the advantage.

William Vollman's novel The Ice Shirt is a fictionalized account of this history. I read it a while ago. It's pretty vivid. 

Man on a one way trip

In recent decades, the figure of Christopher Columbus has come in for a lot of scrutiny, especially as regards his relations with the native peoples of the Americas. What few understand is just how much worse he could have been if given the opportunity.

Working from an ancient Christian calculation that the world, from Creation to Judgment, would survive for 7,000 years, he concluded that "there are lacking about one hundred and fifty-five years for the completion of the seven thousand at which time the world will come to an end." Signing his name as Christoferens―Christ-bearer―Columbus saw his expedition as just a part of a final crusade that would destroy the Muslim empire and usher in the Day of Judgment. By sailing west, he planned to open China and the Orient to Catholic missionaries, who would seal off the Muslim empire of Gog from its rear.

That's a brief passage from Martin Ballard's The End-Timers: Three Thousand Years of Waiting for Judgment Day. The belief that we are in or near the End Times can make Christians and other religious people abandon their faith's morals, and indeed all ethics. Catholic St. Augustine and Protestant Jonathan Edwards both pushed back against apocalyptic thinking, perhaps for this very reason. They were moralists whether you agree with their lessons or not.

Every rule has its exception and no doubt some end timers are and have been ethical. Columbus wasn't really an exception, though.

Cutthroat

From Bedside Book of Bad Girls: Outlaw Women of the American West by Michael Rutter

Sheriff Watson interviewed the vigilantes, all six of whom admitted to the lynching. Perhaps they thought it wouldn't be a problem; hanging a male rustler, after all, was something the law often forgave. The six cattlemen were, moreover, respected ranchers and businessmen, members of the powerful Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA). What they didn't realize, though, was that hanging a woman - no matter what her crime - was almost unthinkable to most in the West. Each of the vigilantes was required to post a $5,000 bond, a hefty sum in that day.

For context, the woman hanged was small but successful rancher Ellen Watson, posthumously known as "Cattle Katie." Her husband Jim Averell was killed as well.

This was a lynching through and through. The cattlemen accused Watson and Averell of cattle rustling. She vehemently denied it. No evidence was presented either way. It's hard to tell if her rivals even believed their own accusations or if this was a thinly veiled power play on their part. If the latter, it was even more morally bankrupt than it sounds.

To make things worse, they got away with it. Thanks to witnesses being intimidated, none in the group were ever convicted. If this incident proved anything, it wasn't anything good.

Giant steps

A book I'm reading now is American Goliath, by Harvey Jacobs. It's inspired by the Cardiff giant, a hoax meant to prove that America was actually the Biblical birthplace of humanity. As supporting evidence, though the connection isn't obvious, a statue was produced which was meant to be a fossilized giant. Again, this is a true story. The book is fictionalized, though. Jacobs was a science fiction writer, and there's an undercurrent of fantasy throughout and many tall tale moments. Still, the whole thing was so over the top to begin with that it can be hard to tell where reality ends and embellishment begins. America had at least been metaphorically considered as a new Israel since before the War for Independence, which probably didn't hurt in finding some believers.

And that's Cardiff, New York. Cardiff, Wales has its own share of bizarre incidents, I'm sure, but this isn't among them.

Emperorical evidence

I'm reading a book now about Joshua A. Norton also known as Emperor Norton I, whom I've found an interesting subject for awhile. First encountered him as a character in an issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics and wasn't sure if he was real at first.

He was, although he got fictionalized quite a bit, serving as the model for the Dauphin in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. English by birth, Jewish by extraction, and raised largely in South Africa, he was for a time a successful businessman in San Francisco. Then, to cut a long story short, he wasn't. It was after he lost all his money that he started embracing his entirely (but not to him) unofficial role as Emperor of the United States and issuing his proclamations. Some of these are silly and/or obnoxious, but some were prescient. He seems to have been a little ahead of the curve on slavery. This is the time when Twain got to know about him, as a writer for the Chronicle.

How important is delusion to keeping up your morale. Eliot said "Go go go said the bird/Humankind cannot bear very much reality." Norton certainly didn't seem very capable of bearing his.  But how many of have room to criticize?

Written by the winners and the close runner-ups

Recently I've been reading Marc J. Seifer's Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla. Tesla, of course, has become a posthumous cult icon, and his appearances in various types of fiction... well, see for yourself. And i'm not immune. There's a fascinating story there.

Reading about him I see that he was indeed a brilliant man and inventor and a seemingly tireless worker. A mixture of unlikely odd jobs and skillful gambling - especially pool - paid his way through engineering school. From then on he had more ideas than really anyone knew what to do with.

He was also a great self-promoter who knew how to use the exoticism of his Serbian/Croatian background to his advantage. If television had become a mass medium during his lifetime he would have been on one talk show or another every day of the week.

Tesla is the perfect subject for romanticization through books and movies. Thomas Edison, though he suffered some reversals, is too much of an establishment figure. Someone like William E. Sawyer, a prolific inventor who died young well before the twentieth century started, is too obscure, his story too depressing. Nikola Tesla is Goldilocks' just right. Even those who root for the underdog, as a rule, don't choose the lowest ones.

Couples night

Here's an interesting review of the history of marriage. Or you could say "histories", as it's rather non-linear.

The relatively recent trend of state-recognized marriage has nothing to do with the idea of marriage as “natural” union under God and human nature. As Columbia University history professor Steven Mintz puts it: “Whenever people talk about traditional marriage or traditional families, historians throw up their hands. We say, ‘When and where?’” There is no such thing as “traditional marriage.” Different societies in different times have had very different marriage traditions.

But historically, until the Protestant Reformation, most European states didn’t recognize the marriages of anyone without assets—about 85 percent of the population. God may have created Adam and Eve, but the state only cared about ownership of the Garden of Eden.

In a lot of these instances the church - whatever church that might be - took up the slack for the majority of marriages. But the role of religious institutions hasn't been consistent either. So the idea of whether and how our ancestors were wed is complex and in some cases subjective.

Why hasn't there been a Cookie Monster cover?

The young are always depraved, always monsters. History shows it to be true. And there is always a frantic search to find out just why this is. The old hysteria about "Louie Louie" is a case in point.

Once concerned parents began to report their outrage about this allegedly "obscene" song to the FBI, the Bureau made the mistake of expending all their effort in proving it true rather than investigating the rumor itself. It was as if a frightened mother had written to J. Edgar Hoover concerning a story she'd heard about a maniac with a hook being on the loose, and Hoover responded by sending out field agents to investigate whether or not a criminal with a missing hand had recently escaped from a psychiatric hospital. The FBI didn't try to find out where these dirty lyric sheets were coming from; instead, they spent two and a half years analyzing "Louie Louie" played at a variety of speeds and interrogating nearly everyone connected with the song, including Paul Revere and the Raiders, Richard Berry, the Kingsmen, and even record company executives. One person they never, ever talked to was the one person who indisputably knew what words had been sung on the Kingsmen's recording: singer Jack Ely. (Ely had been fired from the band well before "Louie, Louie" hit it big, a fact the remaining Kingsmen were not anxious to publicize.) After thirty-one months of trying to unravel the mysteries of "Louie Louie," the FBI could conclude only that they were "unable to interpret any of the wording in the record."

Need it be said? If the new Leonardo DiCaprio as Hoover movie doesn't explore this incident, it must be considered a failure.

It doesn't pay to be too ahead of the times

From An Empire of Plants: People and Plants That Have Changed the World by Toby & Will Musgrave, a funny story. Or not, if you were directly involved with it.

Europeans firs made the acquaintance of tobacco on 12 October 1492 when, after 71 days at sea, Christopher Columbus first sighted the coast of America. He named the island where he landed San Salfvador, and here, according to his logbook, the indigenous people 'brought fruit, wooden spears, and certaind dried leaves which gave off a distinct fragrance'. The gifts were accepted, the fruit eaten, but the yellowish leaves were tossed overboard. Columbus sailed on, arriving off the Cuban coast on 28 October, where two conquistadors, Rodriguo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, were sent inland to scout. The natives they encountered wrapped dried tobacco leaves in palm or maize 'in the manner of a musket formed of paper', and after lighting one end, they commenced 'drinking' the smoke through the other. Rodriguo took a hesitant puff and became the first European to smoke tobacco. Columbus returned to Spain with some dried tobacco leaves, and Rodriguo, who by now was a confirmed smoker, took his habit back to his home town, where he unwisely lit up in public. So frightened were his neighbors b the smoke billowing up from his nose and mouth that he was imprisoned by the holy inquisitors, only to discover upon his release several years later that smoking had become a national habit.

Yeah, just imagine Rodriguo getting out of prison, and being told, "Hey, you know that crazy thing the inquisitors nailed you for? Everybody does it now, completely free of legal consequences. Have a nice rest of your life.

I imagine there was smoke coming out of him at that point, no tobacco needed.