From the Archives: Daughters of Chivalry
I’m getting closer to having enough bandwidth to write new posts, honest. In the meantime, here’s one of my favorites from 2019.
In Daughters of Chivalry: The Forgotten Princesses of King Edward Longshanks, historian Kelcey Wilson-Lee tells the stories of the five daughters of Edward I of England and his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, who survived into adulthood: Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth.
I’ve got to say the book has a shaky start. Wilson-Lee sets up a questionable and unnecessary straw woman in her introduction: a “popular” vision of medieval princesses as powerless and passive that she describes as built on “an empire of fairy stories, Hollywood films, theme parks and cheaply produced ball gowns.” Personally, I’m not sure anyone believes in the powerless princesses she describes–not the little girls who wear those ball gowns with attitude* and certainly not anyone who would chose to read a book titled Daughters of Chivalry. Maybe that version of princesses existed once upon a time, but my own memory of fairy tales includes a fair number of princesses who used every ounce of power they held to control who they married–something only one of the real-life medieval princesses in Daughters of Chivalry managed to control.
That quibble aside, Daughters of Chivalry is an excellent book.
Like even the most elite medieval women, Wilson-Lee’s princesses left a spotty trail in the historical record, most often appearing in official chronicles in the context of their relationship with one of the men in their lives. She fleshes out the picture of their lives using a variety of sources—most notably the account records for the various royal households**—plus a certain amount of informed speculation.
Wilson-Lee uses her sources to good effect. She creates portraits of five clearly defined individuals. Joanna, for instance, frequently defied her father and took full advantage of the opportunities accorded to a young, wealthy widow in medieval society. Mary, who entered the convent of Amesbury at the age of six, had a taste for luxury and a gambling habit at odds with her vow of poverty. She also places the sisters within the larger context of royal women in the late medieval period, exploring questions of education, marriages (political and otherwise), widowhood, property, travel, and the role of royal women as political intercessors. Like the women she describes, Wilson-Lee never loses sight of the fact that what power these women enjoyed was derived from their relationship to the king, but she fully explores the nature of that power and how they used it.
*A year or two ago, I saw a little girl stomping through the aisles of my local grocery store wearing hiking books with a princess gown and carrying a sword. I’m pretty sure she didn’t share Wilson-Lee’s “popular” vision of princesses.
**The nature of her sources means there is a lot of description of real-life princess dresses. This is not a complaint. Just an observation.
Back in March, I celebrated Women’s History Month here in the Margins with a series of mini-interviews with people who are involved in creating and studying women’s history. A lot of you seemed to enjoy it. (I know I did.) So I’m thinking about doing it again in 2020. If there is someone you think would be a good fit, let me know.
From the Archives: The Fabric of Civilization
Another post from the past. This time from 2021. (I promise. New posts will be coming soon.)
Two sentences early in Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World caught my imagination:
“What we usually call the Stone Age could just as easily be called the String Age. The two prehistoric technologies were literally intertwined.”
I was predisposed to enjoy the book, which combines two of my favorite things—history and textiles—in a big picture exploration of commerce, technology, and civilization itself. But with those two sentences I was hooked. And I remained hooked for the entire book. If I had been reading in a hard copy instead of an e-galley, I would have put lots of exclamation marks in the margins and stuffed it full of sticky notes.
The Fabric of Civilization is a story of innovation, or more accurately a series of stories. Postrel convincingly argues that textiles have played a central role in the histories of technology, commerce, and civilization itself. She describes innovations in the creation of textiles, from the game-changing discovery of string in the Stone Age to current efforts to engineer “smart textiles.”* She explains the fundamental principles of spinning and weaving, and the unexpected relationship between weaving and binary code.** She considers how changes in textile manufacturing shaped the larger world, including the textile mills that sparked the Industrial Revolution and the search for better dyes that created the modern chemical industry. She looks at the development of information technologies as a result of long-distance textile trades: business letters in ancient Assyria, regular mail service in medieval Italy, double-entry bookkeeping in Renaissance Italy and the roots of modern banking in the need for international credit arrangements in the early modern era.
Postrel is writing history on a global scale, but she never loses sight of the people in her story. A woman weaver in ancient Assyria responding to changing market demands, the teenaged Niccolo Machiavelli*** mastering the “new math” of Hindu-Arabic numerals, paleoanthropologists attempting to reproduce prehistoric fibers, and modern textile chemists and engineers all play a role.
Combining exhaustive research with an accessible writing style, The Fabric of Civilization will appeal to both fans of micro-histories and to textile junkies interested in the history of their passion.
*I doubt that I’ll be an early adopter.
**She describes weavers as “visually trained people with strong number skills.” This was reinforced in my research for a piece on Afghan war rugs for MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. When one scholar asked an Afghan weaver how she translated images into rug patterns she said: “I don’t see it as a picture. I see it as numbers and I make it a song.” But I digress.
***I assume that most of you recognize the name Machiavelli, or at least the term machiavellian. A minor fifteenth century Italian diplomat, he is best known as the author of The Prince, a work of political philosophy that argues princes must see things as they are and take action accordingly, rather than act based on ideal principles.
From the Archives: When Paris Went Dark
Another post from the past, this time from 2014.
When Nazi troops marched into Paris in June, 1940, the city surrendered without firing a shot.*
In When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 , historian Ronald C. Rosbottom explores face-to-face interactions between occupiers and occupied, the effect of the Occupation on daily life in Paris, its psychological and emotional impact on Parisians and its legacy of guilt and myth.
Drawing from official records, memoirs, interviews and ephemera, Rosbottom tells a story that is more complicated than simple opposition between courage and collaboration, though he offers examples of both. He discusses the fine line between survival and collaboration, the distinction between individual acts of resistance and the Resistance, and how occupiers and occupied utilized the hide-and-seek possibilities of Parisian apartment buildings. He considers the act of waiting in line both as an illustration of the difficulties of everyday life and as a replacement for forbidden political gatherings. Above all, he describes the Occupation as gradual constriction of Parisian life within ever-narrowing boundaries.
Rosbottom does not limit his discussion to the Parisian perspective. Some of the most interesting sections of When Paris Went Dark deal with the German experience in the city, a complex mixture of tourism, conquest, envy and isolation. His account of Hitler’s early-morning tour of the capital soon after its surrender is particularly illuminating about the Nazi Party’s ambivalence toward cities in general and Paris in particular.
When Paris Went Dark is an important and readable addition to the social history of World War II.
*I will admit with only the slightest embarrassment that when I think “Nazi occupation of Paris” the images that come to mind are straight out of Casablanca. That will probably never change. Because putting pictures in our heads–accurate or not–is one of the things great art does.