Histories of the Unexpected: How Everything Has a History
480
Histories of the Unexpected: How Everything Has a History
480eBook
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Overview
'History as you've never seen it before.' Dan Snow
'A wonderful, eclectic and entertaining history of everything, full of fascinating, surprising stories.' Suzannah Lipscomb
Did you know that the history of the beard is connected to the Crimean War; that the history of paperclips is all about the Stasi; and that the history of bubbles is all about the French Revolution? And who knew that Heinrich Himmler, Tutankhamun and the history of needlework are linked to napalm and Victorian orphans?
In Histories of the Unexpected, Sam Willis and James Daybell lead us on a journey of discovery that tackles some of the greatest historical themes - from the Tudors to the Second World War, from the Roman Empire to the Victorians - but via entirely unexpected subjects.
By taking this revolutionary approach, they not only present a new way of thinking about the past, but also reveal the everyday world around us as never before.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786494153 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Atlantic Books |
| Publication date: | 10/04/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Dr Sam Willis is one of the country's best-known historians. His work takes him on adventures all over the world. He has made twelve TV series for the BBC and National Geographic, including The Silk Road, and has written fourteen books, most recently The Struggle for Sea Power: The Royal Navy vs the World, 1775-1782 and The Spanish Armada, a Ladybird Expert Book.
James Daybell is Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Plymouth and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has written eight books and has appeared in a number of historical BBC TV documentaries.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE HAND
The history of the hand is all about ... time travel, medieval magic, cave painting, royal power, intimacy and grief.
Knock, knock ...
Knock, knock ...
What are your hands doing? Ours are knocking on the door of your brain. They are waking you up. They are starting a conversation. They are starting this conversation – by typing. Yours, presumably, are holding a book or tablet. But how many different ways have you used your hands today? And how many more different ways will you use them before tomorrow? You have presumably got dressed, washed, prepared food, fed yourself, picked up or put down an enormous variety of objects, communicated to yourself by touching or communicated to others by writing, typing or gesturing. Maybe you have shaken hands, waved goodbye, raised your fist in anger or delivered a thumbs-up or 'OK' sign to broker friendship.
Such gestures from the past survive in the present day in a number of forms, but perhaps most powerfully in prehistoric art dating from as far back as 40,000 years ago.
CAVE PAINTING
Hand stencils are a common visual form of prehistoric art. They have been discovered across sites in France, Spain, Africa, Australia, Argentina and Borneo (which are thought to be by far the oldest examples c.40,000 years ago). They were created either by blowing or spraying paint made from charcoal or a pigment called red ochre over the hand, thus creating a type of hand shadow – the most common type of images that survive – or by covering the hand in paint to create a print.
In our evolutionary past the hand was significant because the opposable thumb, fine motor skills and the manual use of tools was a distinctly human characteristic that distinguished Homo sapiens from animals. Hands had significance in prehistory in other practical ways: digits for counting, or the hand's span as a rough and ready way of measuring; the height of horses was also measured in hands. It is no surprise, then, that hands were one of the commonest forms of visual expression in our most ancient history. The compulsion to create art, moreover, is one of the few but crucial things that define us as human, along with the ability to think and plan for the future and also (and here is the historian writing) the ability to remember and learn from the past. These hand stencils, therefore, are not just part of the history of art but evidence for the evolution of the modern human mind; they are a chapter of the very earliest history of Homo sapiens.
The creation of these images is believed to hold some form of magical or ritual significance and we know that, in some locations, the prints would have been extremely uncomfortable for a person to make on their own, and that other prints would have been impossible to make without help. In these single hand prints, therefore, is some of the earliest evidence of human teamwork. In some locations there are so many hand prints in one place that the artwork would have taken both planning and considerable time. They also show a surprising variety of hand shapes, sizes and patterns. Intriguingly, many have been shown with apparently amputated digits. The belief that the images were accurately depicting hands with missing fingers has now been consigned to the past. Our modern understanding focuses on the way that the hand can be manipulated by bending fingers inwards or downwards – in much the same way as it is for shadow puppetry – to make the hand shadow appear unusual.
This in turn suggests that the fingers were somehow significant in ancient communication. Researchers have even tackled the question of who left these prints and it remains uncertain. Recent work has suggested that three-quarters of the surviving Neolithic hand prints from eight cave sites in France and Spain were likely to have been made by women. This research was itself based on the work of a British biologist who discovered that men and women can be identified by the relative lengths of their index and ring fingers.
A HISTORICAL CLUE
This raises the interesting question of the hand as a historical signpost. Not only can hands be 'read' in history for gender, but also in other, simpler ways for differences in age, race and class related to hand size and the colour and condition of the hand's skin. Workers' hands, for example, are often marked by the signs of manual labour, with calluses or fingers lopped off, an indication of the dangers of work, especially among factory operatives. These might be compared to the pampered hands of the pianist or the history professor, or the clerk's hands stained with ink. One Victorian clerk, Benjamin Orchard, wrote bitterly of his lot in 1871:
We aren't real men. We don't do men's work. Pen-drivers – miserable little pen-drivers – fellows in black coats, with inky fingers and shiny seats on their trousers – that's what we are. Think of crossing t's and dotting i's all day long. No wonder bricklayers and omnibus drivers have contempt for us. We haven't even health.
Inky figures were, for the Victorian clerk, a marker of occupation, a stain on their hands that signified their Bob Cratchit-like, lowly place within society.
Hands could be physically distorted, mutilated through agricultural accident or otherwise broken and shapeless through torture. The breaking of hands was one of the techniques of the torturer's trade. In his Latin autobiography the Jesuit priest John Gerard describes his imprisonment in late Elizabethan England, and the torture that he underwent because of his involvement in the networks that surrounded the Gunpowder Plot. His hands were so badly mangled that, at first, he was not able to hold a pen:
I could scarcely feel I had anything between my fingers. My sense of touch did not revive for five months, and then not completely. Right up to the time of my escape, which was after six months, I always had a certain numbness in my fingers.
With broken hands, therefore, he was barely able to write, a clear intention of the torturers: writing was one of the key ways in which imprisoned Jesuits communicated, in secret letters and invisible ink, with the outside world.
Not only could your hands betray you to a historian but also to the law. The 'criminal hand' itself might even be missing – cut off in punishment – or burned as a public branding of criminality. It was a public sign from which it was very difficult to escape. In Tudor England a criminal could escape a death sentence by claiming 'benefit of clergy', in other words saying that they were a member of the Church (a defence that required someone simply to read from a Bible), and they would then be burned on the thumb so that they could not use this legal loophole a second time. When the sixteenth-century English wastrel and serial womanizer Anthony Bourne sent a Frenchman to murder his wife Elizabeth by stabbing her with a dagger, the would-be killer (for the act of violence failed) was identified as a criminal by dint of his being 'burned in the hand'.
Hands are also fascinating for the historian because they age over time – they are a historical document in their own right, as they become marked by signs of ageing, by liver spots, blemishes and wrinkles, and their skin loses its elasticity. One of the most beautiful observations of this is in a painting by the American artist Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) called The Writing Master (1882) [see fig. 1]. It is the most magnificent observation of a man who has dedicated his life to his hands by a man who has also dedicated his life to his hands, but in a different way. For this artist's father, Benjamin Eakins (1818–99), was a calligrapher and teacher of penmanship. Notice how the light falls so beautifully on the hands of this venerable, professional man at his work. If you were lucky enough to shake Benjamin's hand you would find it cool and soft, like silk.
Here Eakins holds a pen with which he is communicating, but hands have long been an important way of communicating in their own right, and many of the gestures with which we are now familiar – the handshake, the thumbs-up, the V-sign, the salute, the high five, the fist bump – are all embedded with symbolism. Others in history, such as the biting of one's thumb or the flicking of the chin, are less well known and have meanings in distinct contexts that we are still discovering.
GRIEF
Exeter Cathedral Founded in 1050 in Exeter in the south-west of England and rebuilt in the Gothic style between 1258 and 1400. Notable features include the carvings on the west front, the longest uninterrupted vaulted ceiling in England and an astronomical clock.
Consider the pulling of one's beard. On the west front of Exeter Cathedral in Devon is one of the great architectural features of medieval England. Begun in 1340 and not finished for 130 years, this screen of well over 100 carvings marked the end of a great phase in the building's history when the Norman cathedral (founded in 1133) was rebuilt in the Gothic style. Statues inhabit niches on three rows and all are surrounded by detailed and exquisite carvings of plants, animals and angels. The entire screen covers almost a third of the cathedral's west front. Originally the image screen would have been entirely coloured; what we see now, though still impressive, is but a shadow of the building's former glory – one of the casualties of the Reformation.
All of the medieval statues were carved from local limestone, a perfect material for working but also one which suffers from erosion. A good number of the statues have lost many of their characteristics, but one stands out from all of the others for the quality of its execution as well as the rather odd gesture that it depicts. Here is a man, immediately to the side of the west door, hunched over and pulling at his beard. To our eyes it seems peculiar but in the medieval period we know that this particular gesture was associated with grief. One of the most vivid depictions comes from the eighth-century epic poem The Song of Roland, which describes the Emperor Charlemagne coming across the body of his nephew on a battlefield. His reaction was both violent and very public. Surrounded by soldiers 'weeping violently' the emperor 'pulls at his white beard and tears his hair with both hands'.
Charlemagne (742–814) Otherwise known as Charles the Great, during his reign Charlemagne united most of Europe. He was king of the Franks (from 768), the Lombards (from 774) and, from 800, the Holy Roman emperor.
The meaning of these statues in Exeter remains something of a mystery and the identity of each is still debated. There are definitely depictions of apostles, prophets and evangelists and also the kings of Judah. The old man stroking a beard is certainly a king, identified by his crown and royal bearing, and if you are looking for an English king whose entire reign and subsequent reputation was defined by grief, you need look no further than Henry I (1068–1135), whose only son died in a shipwreck in 1120, plunging England into a long and bloody civil war. Accounts say that, on hearing the news, he collapsed with grief. And he never smiled again. It is likely that the statue is of this most miserable of English kings.
This beard-pulling gesture is personal, emotional and instinctive, and it is part of a history of gesture that includes any kind of body movement, from standing, walking and sitting, to kissing, hat-tipping and bowing. The moving human body itself is an unexpectedly valuable historical text.
ROYAL POWER
Within this history, the hand has also played an important part in ceremonies, such as the joining of hands in marriage, or the lifting up of hands in oath taking. One particularly interesting example of this is the 'royal touch', a ceremonial laying-on of hands to cure disease, and in particular a nasty skin complaint known as scrofula. Linked to tuberculosis, scrofula was a disease that caused great lesions on the neck, which resulted from an infection of the lymph nodes. In more advanced cases the masses on the neck would swell and rupture, leaving what was essentially a festering open wound. With the decline of tuberculosis in the second half of the twentieth century, scrofula became less common. Throughout the Middle Ages in England and France it was believed that the royal touch – the laying-on of hands by the sovereign – could cure disease. This supposed ability to cure what became sometime known as the 'king's evil' was connected to the divine right of kings, and popular superstitious belief in the quasi-magical power of medieval monarchy. Anglo-French kings were able to harness popular beliefs to legitimize their rule, with charisma working alongside military and fiscal might to buttress their position.
The earliest mentions of the miraculous healing attributes of the royal touch occur as early as the eleventh century, with supplicants often offered 'the royal coin' by members of the monarch's inner circle, which may have guaranteed an audience at this display of supernatural powers. This practice continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and beyond, with Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) reputedly laying hands on more than 1,000 of her subjects on a single occasion. The flamboyant French king, Louis XIV (1638–1715), while averse to the practice of touching the infected, saw more than 1,700 sufferers in one day, while the recently restored English monarch Charles II (1630–85) is thought to have touched upwards of 100,000 of his people in these healing rituals, even though they were frowned upon by the Church as a backward superstitious practice. The proximity that it allowed ordinary people to royal personages perhaps survives today in the crowd-pleasing public perambulations by the British royal family or in their regular garden parties.
INTIMACY
The historical significance of the hand is also all about the significance and meaning of the bare or naked hand – as opposed to a hand encased in a glove. The protocols of when it was acceptable to reveal one's hand were influenced by customs of politeness. As a general rule subordinates would go bare-handed in the presence of their social superiors, and women were more likely to be allowed to cover their hands than men. In seventeenth-century England it was customary to have bare hands in the presence of royalty, or when in church, or when at court. It was also deemed good manners to have bare hands when eating or when shaking hands, the bare hand being seen as intimate and friendly unless it was unbearably cold. In seventeenth-century Polish society a subordinate would kiss the hand of a superior. The polite thing to do was for the recipient of the kiss to proffer a bare hand; failure to do so expressed displeasure, as in the case of Ladislaus IV Vasa (1595–1648) who in 1644 held out a gloved hand to one of the burghers of Cracow to kiss, a gesture of the utmost royal disapproval. Bare hands, in short, were a mark of respect.
Historical hands were also 'gendered' – which is to say that men's and women's hands were viewed as being different. Women's fair hands were idealized as sensual representations of female beauty. In his sixteenth-century conduct manual, the Italian courtier and writer Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) addresses the subject of women's hands:
It is the same with the hands; which, if they are delicate and beautiful, and occasionally left bare when there is need to use them, and not in order to display their beauty, they leave a very great desire to see more of them, and especially if covered with gloves again; for whomever covers them seems to have little care or thought whether they be seen or not, and to have them thus beautiful more by nature than by any effort or pains.
In popular wedding practices in premodern England it was traditional for the bride to go bare-handed, which was symbolic of purity and intimacy, while the bridegroom's hands could be covered. The eroticism of the intertwining of men's and women's hands – of the act of holding hands – is explored in Romeo and Juliet (Act I, Scene v) when Romeo, taking Juliet's hand, considers
If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Here Juliet's 'sacred feminine' hand is contrasted with Romeo's profane and rough male hand – which raises the very important question of what happens when you cover up a hand, and the unexpectedly fascinating history of gloves ...
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Histories of the Unexpected"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Sam Willis & James Daybell.
Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
1. The Hand,
2. Gloves,
3. Perfume,
4. The Bubble,
5. Shadows,
6. Beards,
7. Clouds,
8. Dust,
9. Clocks,
10. Needlework,
11. The Itch,
12. Holes,
13. The Bed,
14. Dreams,
15. Hair,
16. The Paper Clip,
17. Letters,
18. Boxes,
19. Courage,
20. Mountains,
21. Chimneys,
22. Tears,
23. Lions,
24. Rubbish,
25. Snow,
26. Cats,
27. The Smile,
28. The Scar,
29. The Lean,
30. The Signature,
Selected Further Reading,
Illustration Credits,
Index,