I decided to put an astrologer/mathematician character into A STRANGER IN THE LAND, but fairly quickly came up against one little problem: I knew nothI decided to put an astrologer/mathematician character into A STRANGER IN THE LAND, but fairly quickly came up against one little problem: I knew nothing about astrology, either in terms of its history or how it was done in the 13th century. In quick succession, therefore, I crunched through a couple of books: one on medieval mathematics and astronomy (THE LIGHT AGES) and this one, on the history of astrology. Both covered much similar ground, cementing the trickier mathematical concepts in my head, but there was enough difference to make both of them essential reads.
The main thing to grasp is that before the scientific revolution, there was no meaningful distinction between astronomy, astrology, and mathematics. They were interlinked disciplines practiced by the same people and all aimed at the same result: the successful and increasingly accurate pinpointing of the positions of the stars and the planets in relation to each other. The motivation for all the incredibly sophisticated arithmetic necessary to make these calculations, of course, was astrology, which medievals used in an attempt to predict weather, geopolitical events, natural disasters, and the causes and treatment of illnesses. And while at least one court astrologer had to agree with his critics that the position of the planets seemed to have no meaningful correlation to events on earth, in what other way was a medieval mathematician going to support himself?
As I said in my review of THE LAST STARGAZERS, the stars by virtue of their distance from Earth are uniquely difficult to exploit, and the main way that humans have sought to do so is via astrology: seeing the stars as a means to wield power over one's political and natural environment. It is one of the great paradoxes, perhaps even a miracle, of history that it was the centuries of dedicated hard scientific/mathematical study done in service to astrology that ultimately developed astronomy and mathematics into disciplines that could relegate astrology to the status of a pseudoscience and usher in the scientific revolution. I'd been very vaguely aware of this since reading a biography of Johannes Kepler for children, struggling even then with the paradox that men like Kepler, Brahe, and Copernicus were all firm believers in what today we call astrology even as they revolutionised our understanding of the universe. Today, it blows my mind that centuries of dedicated faith in the influences of the planets on the earth could have been uprooted by their own adherents, whose dedication to the truth of what their studies were teaching them ultimately proved stronger than their desire to read the heavens and master their fates on earth.
Medieval mathematician-astrologers were not, however, superstitious ignoramuses. They weren't developing whole sophisticated branches of arithmetic, as well as magnificently designed and highly accurate instruments for measuring and calculating the positions of stars and planets, while being drooling idiots. As Boxer points out, citing one economist's quip that "the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable":
Day in and day out, astrologers struggled to interpret the meanings of complex mathematical models centuries before the statistical tools were developed to assess whether those models meant anything at all. Hundreds of years from now, will our own age be similarly mocked, or perhaps pitied, for our feeble attempts to predict the future?
Boxer's final chapter is illuminating in how it distinguishes the historical discipline of astrology, which led directly to the scientific revolution, from modern newspaper horoscopes, deeply influenced by Carl Jung who seemed to believe that "nobody can become a competent pscyhoanalist without first becoming an expert astrologer":
I very much doubt that this is a widely held opinion among professional therapists today. Yet the converse opinion - that every good astrologer must also be a good pscyhoanalyst - is pretty much the default among modern astrologers and their clients alike. A classical astrologer was, first and foremost, a human calculator, one whose most important qualification was his ability to solve long and tedious mathematical equations. By contrast, the modern astrologer is billed as a full-fledged spiritual guide...
There are two major shifts in perspective that accompanied this shift in astrology from a mathematical discipline to a New Age spiritual practice. First, classical astrology had been quite clear that it had far more to do with the fates of nations and princes than with the daily lives of individuals. The idea that I, the descendent of furriers, journalists, and housewives, could open a newspaper and find pleasantly vague predictions based on my sun sign would have seemed pretty preposterous to, say, Claudius Ptolemy. Second, and more importantly, a classical astrologer lived in a world in which planetary influences were a broadly accepted fact. He may not have had much faith in his own ability to identify and predict those influences, but as a rule he believed that he was working with something identifiable and predictable, if he could only refine the mathematics to a certain point. In this sense, it's not surprising that this discipline would lead to the scientific revolution. By contrast, today's astrology came about largely as a reaction against the idea of a sterile, mechanistic, materialistic universe. Today's astrology girlies - in my experience, at least - don't consult their stars out of a blind faith in pseudoscience; rather, they want to believe that the cosmos is a rich place and full of life, and even if they remain agnostic about astrology, it remains a rich aesthetic that can be drawn upon in defiance of materialism. In that, they have much in common with CS Lewis (if PLANET NARNIA is any indication).
Boxer's book is chatty and conversational. Not just a history, it takes advantage of his background as a statistician to examine the claims of astrology and show how the human pattern-finding impulse that seeks correlations between events on earth and heavenly bodies could have been so mistaken for so long. He writes with a certain amount of coyness that I found offputting - "There's no statistical correlation between your birth horoscope and your profession, but tee hee! the motto of this professional organisation is an astrological reference, so who can say but the stars have an influence on our professions after all!" - but I guess he was worried about walking the line between the hard-line materialists among his professional colleagues and the serious astrological believers who might be the readership of his book. In the end, the history and the maths checks out, and the coyness does not overwhelm the balanced discussion of what, precisely, can be proved and disproved about astrology....more
Medieval science was not trying to understand the workings of a coldly mechanistic natural world but a living cosmos endowed by God. Even when, as we Medieval science was not trying to understand the workings of a coldly mechanistic natural world but a living cosmos endowed by God. Even when, as we have seen, they saw the universe functioning as a predictable machine, they were less interested in how it worked than why. We may casually say that science explains ‘why’ nature is the way it is, but we often confuse ‘how?’ for ‘why?’ As any parent of a four-year-old knows, beyond every ‘why?’ lies another one. Medieval people hoped to follow that trail of ‘why?’s back to the mysteries of Creation, and mankind’s place in it. We don’t think of ourselves as backward, even though we – like the medievals – are well aware that there are questions we haven’t yet answered. And we would not like future generations to belittle us for failing to answer those we hadn’t – we couldn’t possibly have – posed.
This book was on my radar for a while, but I wondered whether it would cover a lot of the same ground as James Hannam's GOD'S PHILOSOPHERS, a high-level overview of the way medieval natural philosophers laid the foundations for the modern scientific method. This book turned out to be quite a different beast, however.
I was prompted to start reading in the course of drafting my current novel, which has a character using an astrolabe, and it turned out that several of the most helpful videos and blog posts on the topic were by Seb Falk, the author. In THE LIGHT AGES, Falk doesn't so much trace the roots of the modern scientific method in medieval natural philosophy; so much as tell the story of one very obscure monk, mathematician, astronomer and instrument-maker, using what few facts of his life are known, to show a picture of medieval education, mathematics, astronomy, timekeeping, medicine, travel by compass, and more in the fourteenth and surrounding centuries. But the central theme of the book is medieval mathematics: how it was done, why it was done, and how closely connected it was to the twin practices of what we now know today as astronomy and astrology. I'll be honest, much of the mathematics in this book drifted right over my head. I absolutely would have failed at medieval trigonometry, but that's hardly news!
Falk tells his story with engaging enthusiasm, especially in the audiobook, and when he wasn't avidly describing trigonometry, it was a really fun read. The more so as I had just finished Barbara Tuchman's 1978 history of the fourteenth century, A DISTANT MIRROR, in which she paints a picture of a century full of despair and horrors. By comparison, Falk's fourteenth century is a time of boundless curiosity, sophisticated educational systems, and immense technological strides - in fact, an age of light.
It's really only in the introduction and the epilogue that Falk ties his wander through the natural philosophy of the fourteenth century together with some commentary about what we today can learn from the story of one long-forgotten medieval inventor, but they alone are well worth the price of the book. Medievals lived in a world when faith was the motivation for science and although it's hard to tell from this book whether Falk is a believer himself or not, his contention is one that echoes thoughts I've long had myself: that science impoverishes itself when it cuts itself off from any larger worldview or questions about the "why"s of the universe and our place in it....more
This book could be the most important history text you've never read. It's written to be popular and readable by the layperson, but that doesn't make This book could be the most important history text you've never read. It's written to be popular and readable by the layperson, but that doesn't make it historically lightweight. While I didn't always agree with the author's commentary, I came to the book after approximately ten years of intermittent study of the history of the Middle Eastern Middle Ages, so I have the background to assure you that the history in this book thoroughly checks out. (The one small thing I disagreed with in terms of history was that I think Linda Northrup, the pre-eminent authority on the history of the 13th century Bahri Mamluk sultanate, would have challenged the assertion that the crusader states at the end of the 13th century posed a meaningful military threat to the Mamluk sultanate, even in alliance with the Mongol Il-Khan of Baghdad - the threat was more an economic one, posed by the Italian trading empire of Genoa).
While I had glimpses of the picture before, I had never read an overarching history of the vast, now-vanished church that flourished across the Asian continent (as well as the northern parts of Africa) in the early and high middle ages. I had never read the details of how that church was snuffed out through long periods of low-level repression punctuated by fierce bursts of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced conversions. I did not know that there were two main periods in which this took place: First was the fourteenth century, in which worsening climate conditions, famines, and the Black Death incited horrific violence as religious minorities across the known world were scapegoated, so that Christians in the Levant, the Middle East and Asia suffered similar pogroms as experienced by the European Jewish communities. Second, much later, were the genocides and ethnic cleansing of Armenians, Assyrians, and other deeply rooted Christian communities across the region in the early twentieth century. Today the mental image many people have of Asia is one in which Christianity has no role, nor has ever had a meaningful role, a perfect example of how the victors write the history books. Many people still understand the appropriation of Christian spaces such as Hagia Sophia (and thousands of other former churches), but how many understand that this has happened to people, too? The pioneering physician and polymath Ibn Butlan, for instance, is sorted into "Islamic medicine" by Wikipedia despite the fact that he, and many others like him, were actually indigenous Christians.
Reading this book convinced me that the loss of this history is a tragedy for two reasons. On the one hand, it is a tragedy because the long perseverance and suffering of oppressed minorities should be remembered wherever we find them; we should not merely listen to the victors. On the other hand, it is a tragedy because in losing that history, the worldwide Christian church has lost something supremely valuable: the concept of a fruitful, vigorous, and thriving church that nevertheless retains minority status. Christianity, Jenkins argues, has only very recently in history become a European faith. And European Christianity and its successors in Australia and America have always been, to some extent or another, allied with political power. We have never not had political influence, and as we move into a century in which that political influence seems to be fading, we're seeing in the rise of "Christian" nationalism a desperate grasp to preserve that political influence at the cost of everything else, even the central tenets of the faith. The history shows that the churches of Asia were largely uprooted, yes. But the history also shows vast centuries of the Asian churches flourishing, growing, and achieving remarkable feats of scholarship and culture, not only despite, but perhaps because of their minority status. As a Coptic lady told me a few of weeks ago during a discussion of her people's history, a lack of power can also mean an absence of corruption.
There's far too much in this book to encapsulate in a short review, but this is one that will stick with me and that I will be recommending eagerly to others interested in the histories either of the faith or the region. While I did not agree with the author on everything, I really valued this book for how fair and even-handed it was, neither downplaying the traumatic end of the Asian churches, nor ignoring the long centuries of coexistence and collaboration in which they thrived for so long. I will absolutely be reading more books from this author!
It's taken me absolutely forever to read this, partly because of life circumstances, but also partly because this book wasn't quite my cup of tea. I wIt's taken me absolutely forever to read this, partly because of life circumstances, but also partly because this book wasn't quite my cup of tea. I wanted to read it this year because I'm working on a novel set in 1290 on the eve of the 14th century, a period when medieval society suffered intense and unremitting social, ecclesiastical, ideological, ecological, and humanitarian disaster - (I saw a social media post a few months back handwringing about how "the human race right now is suffering trauma unprecedented in the history of the species" and I wanted to beat them over the head with this book. Like, we are SO LUCKY that the pandemic of our times was COVID-19. Call me when you've tried to live through the Black Death AND the Hundred Years' War AND Tamerlane's conquests. Where was I?) - that's right, intense and unremitting disaster; and I thought it might enrich my storytelling to know where history was headed over the next 200 years or so.
All the same, this was a tough read for me. Tuchman tells her story with verve and humour, mind you, as befits a Pultizer Prize winner, and we cover a magnificent sweep of events and locales; she avoids the common pitfall of the English-speaking historian, always remaining focused on the kingdom of France, as befits the cultural centre of Western Europe at the time. However, there are three reasons the book didn't hit for me. First of all, I'm simply not very interested in the fourteenth century. While history is often very dark, a century that saw the global population slashed by up to half and the remainder become thoroughly brutalised and cynical is less appealing than most. Second, Tuchman comes from a generation of historians that, compared to historians today, tended to be constantly looking down their noses, and laughing up their sleeves, at the people they were writing about, and that did get on my nerves a bit; her tone when writing about women was often derogatory, too. Third and finally, the discipline of history has marched on since the book was published in 1978, and even though my period of expertise ends in around 1309, I was able to put my finger on a number of assertions that have since been challenged or proved entirely false. In the end I have to agree with Norman F Cantor's assessment of the work: while helpful as an introduction to the period, it is also somewhat fanciful.
In amidst the horrors of the century, a few rays of light shine through. The Black Death wiped out the servile class, for example, and the Hundred Years' War destroyed peasant livelihoods while taxing them to oblivion; but in doing so, they paved the way for a society in which common labourers were more conscious of their value - and of their rights, which they expressed in uncompromising language as well as concerted uprisings. By the end of the book, it is hard not to see Joan of Arc in a positively miraculous light: it is nearly incredible that an age of religious crisis and trauma could still have produced a person of such confident and selfless devotion, and the resuscitation of the failing French nobility at the hands of a person who symbolised everything they most despised - a woman and a peasant - seems like an act of supreme Divine irony....more
I'd heard often of Nellie Bly, the American journalist who in 1887 got herself locked up in a New York lunatic asylum in order to expose the shocking I'd heard often of Nellie Bly, the American journalist who in 1887 got herself locked up in a New York lunatic asylum in order to expose the shocking conditions in which women, including several perfectly sane (such as the author herself) were held. Since it's necessary for me to learn a little bit about the experience of mentally ill women in the late nineteenth century, I decided to actually read the account Bly wrote about her experience.
Nearly 150 years later, this was a shocking read. I went in knowing that apparently conditions were ghastly, with bad food and sadistic nurses who beat the inmates. I didn't expect a story that read almost like a parody of nineteenth century attitudes to women and the poor. Again and again, Bly was confronted with male doctors who relied less on her own behaviour and account of herself to diagnose her as "a hopeless case" than they did on the opinions of other male authority figures; or who decided (based on no evidence at all) that her feigned symptoms must have been the result of some romantic disaster. Again and again, Bly remonstrated with nurses and doctors about the ghastly conditions (cold, insufficient clothing and inedible food) only to be told, “People on charity should not expect anything and should not complain.”
Reading this book, I once again found myself coming up against the perennial problem of writing historical fiction set in the nineteenth century: which is that if you simply stick close to the actual historical record, nobody will believe you and reviewers will make fun of you....more
Massive, magisterial, detailed, surprising, endlessly thought-provoking. The most glaring fault in the book is its treatment of the few women it deignMassive, magisterial, detailed, surprising, endlessly thought-provoking. The most glaring fault in the book is its treatment of the few women it deigns to recognise with uniform contempt as hysterical, irrational, and swayed by family and domestic considerations. Similarly, the author often seems to uncritically accept Russian imperial self-image and aspirations, and brush off the desires of subject peoples for self-determination. Apart from that, this is a sweeping, epic picture of the Russian Revolution, covering three decades and every level of society, from daily life in the village commune to the political rivalries of Lenin's declining years, without ever becoming dull or bogged down in detail.
Some valuable quotes from the conclusion:
Gorky's view of the Russian Revolution denied that the people had been betrayed by it. Their revolutionary tragedy lay in the legacies of their own cultural backwardness rather than the evil of some 'alien' Bolsheviks. They were not the victims of the revolution but protagonists in its tragedy. This may be a painful lesson for the Russian people to learn at the end of the twentieth century. Seventy years of Communist oppression might well be thought to have earned them the right to see themselves as victims. But Russia's prospects as a democratic nation depend to a large extent on how far the Russians are able to confront their own recent history; and this must entail the recognition that, however much the people were oppressed by it, the Soviet system grew up in Russian soil. It was the weakness of Russia's democratic culture which enabled Bolshevism to take root. This was the legacy of Russian history, of centuries of serfdom and autocratic rule, that had kept the common people powerless and passive. 'And the people remained silent' was a Russian proverb — and it describes much of Russian history. To be sure, this was a people's tragedy but it was a tragedy which they helped to make. The Russian people were trapped by the tyranny of their own history.
...
The state, however big, cannot make people equal or better human beings. All it can do is to treat its citizens equally, and strive to ensure that their free activities are directed towards the general good.
...
[E]ven more worrying, authoritarian nationalism has begun to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Communism, and in a way has reinvented it, not just in the sense that today's nationalists are, for the most part, reformed Communists, but also in the sense that their violent rhetoric, with its calls for discipline and order, its angry condemnation of the inequalities produced by the growth of capitalism, and its xenophobic rejection of the West, is itself adapted from the Bolshevik tradition. ...more
Since Miss Dark and her crew are currently visiting Imperial Russia, I decided to read this biography of Mathilde Kschessinska, queen of the Russian bSince Miss Dark and her crew are currently visiting Imperial Russia, I decided to read this biography of Mathilde Kschessinska, queen of the Russian ballet at the turn of the twentieth century and most famous these days as the one-time mistress of Nicholas II, before he married Alexandra. This biography was not the most fascinating reading as it refrained from diving too deep into commentary on Kschessinska's life - a life which neverthess was full of dizzying highs and awful lows. "Little K" climbed the ladder of the Maryinsky Theatre with boundless ambition, ruthlessly exploited her relationship with Nicholas long after it was over, was the mistress of at least three Romanov princes in quick succession, parleyed this success into astonishing wealth and a brilliant dancing career - suppressing the careers of goodness knows how many more talented dancers in the process - most likely made a small fortune in profiteering during World War I, lost it all in the Revolution and had to flee on foot over the Caucasus, before spending the final half of her long life working herself like a dog as a dancing-mistress in Paris to support an extensive family of impoverished Russian emigres. Bad Girl Makes Good, to wildly simplify things. I learned a lot about the imperial Russian ballet system, though not as much as I'd like, and came away with perhaps more questions than ever. It's tempting to wonder whether "Little K" ever wished she'd lived a life of blameless and prosperous obscurity rather than soaring too close to the sun, before plummeting so disastrously to earth. But I don't think she did, and moreover, a life of blameless obscurity did not save millions of Eastern Europeans at this time from horrific deaths. I still really wished we'd heard more about the WAR PROFITEERING though. ...more
I'd already read Abraham Eraly's book LAST SPRING on the Mughal Empire's apogee from Babur to Aurangzeb; and William Dalrymple's THE LAST MUGHAL on thI'd already read Abraham Eraly's book LAST SPRING on the Mughal Empire's apogee from Babur to Aurangzeb; and William Dalrymple's THE LAST MUGHAL on the first Indian war for independence, aka the Sepoy Rebellion. THE ANARCHY filled in the gap between these two books, largely focused upon the eighteenth century in India, as the Mughal Empire disintegrated and was taken over by multiple small successor states, thereby becoming rich pickings for the feuding English and French. As I've come to expect from Mughal history, this book was a rich and often dramatic tapestry, with brilliantly written military history punctuated by intense and vivid moments of interpersonal conflict: Shah Alam's early strife with a teenaged evil vizier; a Bengali prince's death by oddly accurate lightning strike or possibly at the hands of a vengeful concubine (take your pick); the gallant last stand of Tippu Sultan, or the gaudy horrors of Ghulam Qadir's revenge upon the Mughal court - because the tale of the EIC's rise to an empire, with a standing army twice the size of the British government's, is not just a tale of imperial agency but also the tale of Indian agency.
And of course there are the English vultures who systematically looted an entire subcontinent, some in the name of empire but most simply in the name of a board of merchants in Leadenhall Street. Parts of the book, especially the 1770 famine in Bengal, reminded me of Stalin's manmade famines in the Soviet Union and especially the Holodomor in Ukraine: in both cases, an unscrupulous ruler systematically stripped a rich and fertile province of its food, resulting in widespread starvation. When capitalism and communism result in such similar effects, you might pardon me for feeling so extremely sceptical about both of them.
But the British Raj in India was achieved in what strikes me as a peculiarly British manner. England has been described often as "a nation of shopkeepers" and it was one of its most notable characteristics in the 19th century that even its royalty affected a purposefully bourgeois flavour compared to the more militaristic, autocratic regimes in, say, Russia and Germany. Miranda Carter (in her very fine book The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One) pointed out how while the German aristocracy and royalties legitimated their status through the projection of militaristic, masculinist power, the British upper classes did so through the projection of strict middle-class morality (in public, that is: in practice, it meant rank hypocrisy). This book helped to explain how a nation which always prided itself upon its liberal democratic government, its freedom of the press, and its strictly mercantile ambitions, managed to bloodily acquire an empire of millions. Throughout the period of the EIC's aggressive expansion - first under Clive, then Hastings, then Cornwallis, and finally Wellesley - Britain clutched its pearls and tutted at the atrocities being committed by its most brazen, aggressive, and greedy corporate creation. Periodically, it asked questions in Parliament and even impeached people. But it always retained a plausible deniability as regarded the Company, because the Company was not Britain. It was merely the financial engine which made Britain a world power. If atrocities were committed and millions starved - well, that was the fault of a few greedy nabobs rather than something for which the nation as a whole should feel responsible. When, eighty-seven long years after the great Bengal famine, Britain finally got around to ending the EIC for good and formed the British Raj to administer the subcontinent as a possession of the Crown, it could pat itself on the back for rescuing India from the venal ambitions of those nasty nabobs. And so, I take it, virtue was satisfied....more
On the one hand, this book was a fascinating set of glimpses at the medieval history of Africa from approximately the Islamic coAbsolutely delightful!
On the one hand, this book was a fascinating set of glimpses at the medieval history of Africa from approximately the Islamic conquests of the seventh century to the arrival of Portugese explorers in the fifteenth. These bite sized essays don't claim to tell you everything there is to know about Berber North Africa; the cross-Saharan trade in salt, gold, and slaves; the Christian kingdoms of Nubia and Ethiopia; the Islamic Sahelian empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, and others. But, they do offer fleeting and vivid glimpses which, being layered on top of each other like a patchwork made out of travellers' tales, archaeological fragments, and scholarly conjecture, gradually form a larger picture.
The effect is strangely, beautifully literary for such an academic book. Partway through I finally put my finger upon what, precisely, THE GOLDEN RHINOCEROS reminded me of: Jorge Luis Borges' LABYRINTHS. I see you looking at me funny: what could a volume of short speculative fiction by a South American magical realist author possibly have in common with an academic history text? But viewed as literary works, the two are closely akin. Both are short, pithy, vivid snatches of much larger stories, originally written with erudite flair in Romance languages, each of them the most fleeting glimpse of a long-vanished, half-imaginary world of often breathtaking sophistication and splendour.
As such, THE GOLDEN RHINOCEROS is one of those rare works: an academic-level literary text with serious literary appeal. As of May 2023, it's still free with your Audible subscription. It's short and fascinating and I thoroughly recommend it....more
I first heard about Arcangela Tarabotti while studying up on Renaissance Venice for THE CITY BEYOND THE GLASS: the tl;dr is that Arcangela (b.1604) liI first heard about Arcangela Tarabotti while studying up on Renaissance Venice for THE CITY BEYOND THE GLASS: the tl;dr is that Arcangela (b.1604) lived at a time when up to 80% of Venetian noblewomen were forcibly placed in convents so that their family fortunes would not be "wasted" on endowing them for marriage. Arcangela was one of these, and she was in a white-hot fury because of it.
Both male and female were born free, bearing with them, like a precious gift from God, the priceless bounty of free choice. If in God’s eyes woman is not less privileged than you with respect to her physical or spiritual qualities, why do you wish her to seem created with such great inequality, you enemies of the truth, proclaiming her to be subject to your impulsive, mad whims? In short, woman is deserving of less respect than you only when you have reduced her to this state by your scheming.
PATERNAL TYRANNY is partly about the injustice and trauma of this experience, but Tarabotti takes aim more broadly at misogyny in early modern Europe. The result is quite an experience. Tarabotti wields logic (well of course women aren't as sensible as men, if they're kept ignorant and sequestered) as well as scripture (actually, the Bible places all the blame for the Fall on Adam, not on Eve) with razor-sharp precision to dismantle the patriarchy of her time. And not just of her own time, but ours: as hard as I've worked to dismantle some of the religiously-justified misogynist thinking I used to accept unthinkingly, with all the help given by the many women who've trod this path before me, Tarabotti still pushed at my thinking. For instance, one major turning-point for me was the realisation that limiting women to certain callings is a tacit assumption that women are incapable of hearing from the Holy Spirit in terms of discerning a vocation. Tarabotti, however, goes even further, linking the diversity of creation to the glory of God and both with individual female calling:
Why, then, do you defy the works of the Most Just One by decreeing that many women should live all together, alike in dress, dwelling place, food, and conduct, when the Lord of Lords makes it a miracle of His infinite wisdom for all things He created to be different? Why do you want to bend to your whim contrasting wills created so by nature? It is nothing less than wanting to change and correct the deeds of a Creator who cannot err.
PATERNAL TYRANNY does not speak explicitly about Tarabotti's own experience and how it affected her, but reading between the lines it's possible to glean hints of spiritual abuse and moral injury. She speaks with feeling of being told it was God's will to take monastic vows when she felt no calling, and other passages illumine the guilt she must have felt at being a bad nun as she struggled to accept her fate. Imprisoning a young woman in a convent against her will, Tarabotti argues, is tantamount to sending her directly to Hell - since it forces her into a "marriage" to a bridegroom she can never be fully committed to. As a Protestant with certain objections to the Catholic idea of nuns as being brides of Christ, I of course don't see eye to eye with Tarabotti on this, but I don't need to in order to realise what brutal injury this must have caused to her own and many other consciences.
Despite this and other differences of opinion with Tarabotti (her insistence that women are naturally modest and chaste would be one of the others), PATERNAL TYRANNY was a fascinating and enlightening work. I honestly did not expect to find a 17th century nun raised in a society like that making such bold and sophisticated arguments for the equality of women, to the point of arguing that women should become lawyers and judges. Most of all, however, I find myself in awe of the strength and hopefulness Tarabotti's faith, which survived under all the abuse and trauma she must have suffered, and even learned to see hope and encouragement in Scripture which must have been so often used against her. It was a privilege to meet her in this book....more
DOMINION is a book I've wanted to read for ages, since it came highly recommended and the same author's book MILLENNIUM had been a very good read on aDOMINION is a book I've wanted to read for ages, since it came highly recommended and the same author's book MILLENNIUM had been a very good read on a period of medieval history I'm fairly familiar with.
DOMINION is less a history of Christianity than it is an argument that there is something exceptional about Christianity and its related traditions: that whether we realise it or not, Christianity is the ultimate origin of ideas such as progress, humanism and human rights, secularism, and the special status of minorities and the underprivileged. It's a very difficult book to review, partly because it covers so much ground and partly because, while there are things in it that I enthusiastically agreed with and loved, there is also much that I argued with, especially in the first half. I don't, for instance, fully agree with Holland's take on the Apostle Paul's relation to the Old Testament law.
Many of what I would identify as the book's flaws stem from the fact that Holland is not a believer, but on the other hand I think this makes the book more compelling. Although he acknowledges that he cannot possibly, in a world and from a background so deeply shaped by Christianity, adopt a standpoint of neutrality, Holland attempts to depict his subject impartially - both the crimes of Christians, as well as the ideals of Christianity itself and the powerful influence they have had upon the world for good. In this, Holland seems to me the anti-Jordan Peterson. Both are unbelievers who promote a certain idea of Christianity, but where Peterson values Christanity for what it shares with other myths, many of which prioritise the powerful and the regressive (see: Homer's ILIAD and ODYSSEY, with their overt worship of the divine paternal), Holland values Christianity for what he sees as its uniqueness, with its care for the weak and underprivileged as being the most important of those distinctives.
I don't know if many unbelievers have read this book, but I hope a lot of Christians do. In a landscape where many of the loudest voices on both sides of what, for lack of a better term, I'll call the "culture wars" are currently insisting that to be Christian means to be conservative, imperialist, unfeeling, and obstinately on the side of the entrenched powerful, Holland argues that nevertheless revolution/reformation in defence of the victim is the most venerable of Christian traditions. As long and complex and ugly as our history has been, I hope this book will encourage fellow Christians, as it did me: that it acts as a reminder, not just of the best traditions of our faith, but also of just how far the world has already grown for the better because of it....more
I often find it best to learn about the history of a region from someone who lived there and understands it, which is why when I decided to give myselI often find it best to learn about the history of a region from someone who lived there and understands it, which is why when I decided to give myself a crash course on the history of Afghanistan, this was one of the books I picked out. For the most part, Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-American expatriate, does a fantastic job of providing this indigenous viewpoint and communicating it for an American audience. Sometimes he's a little US-centric in his perspective, but that's to be expected. Additionally, don't come to this book for a history of the region from the beginning - this is by design the history of the statehood of modern Afghanistan, beginning in the eighteenth century and skimming pretty quickly over the nineteenth before it REALLY gets going in the twentieth. So, if you want to a more detailed history of the region in those early years you should try Peter Hopkirk's THE GREAT GAME, while if you're interested in the brutal, blood-soaked, frost-bitten, trauma-inducing epic of the First Afghan War you can get THAT in horrifying detail from William Dalrymple's RETURN OF A KING.
Or, if you don't want nightmares, you can read GAMES WITHOUT RULES.
There's a small number of popular history authors who write with the flair, humour, and instinct for drama of a born raconteur. Tamim Ansary is one of them. His book is never dull, and if you're the sort of person who's likely to laugh, cry, or shriek while reading, try not to read this one on public transport. GAMES WITHOUT RULES isn't just a supremely entertaining work of non-fiction, however: it's genuinely informative and insightful. Modern Afghanistan, Ansary argues, is born from two interlocking games. One of those is the Great Game whereby Afghanistan - as the gateway to South-East Asia - becomes the buffer state between hostile empires and the graveyard to so far, three of them, to say nothing of literal millions of Afghans. But there's another game being played in Afghanistan, the one whereby the urban modernisers and the rural conservatives struggle for the soul of the nation, and it is this game, Ansary argues, that foreigners ignore to their peril:
The concatenation of forces pervading and surrounding Afghanistan has given rise to competing visions for the nation’s identity. Every foreign force that comes crashing in thinks it’s intervening in “a country,” but it’s actually taking sides in an ongoing contest among Afghans about what this country is. Every foreign intervention founders therefore on the same rock. Routinely, the foreign power puts a proxy on the throne and tries to govern the country through him. But the very authority given to this proxy, because it comes from foreigners, weakens his authority among the traditional forces of old Afghanistan. ...
Foreign interventions in Afghanistan don’t just undermine the designated proxy but the authority of Kabul within Afghanistan. The erosion of central authority releases the country’s propensity to fragment, and so in the end the foreign power finds itself facing a burgeoning chaos that saps its resources, leaving little time or strength for carrying out the original intentions of the intervention, whatever those were. The problem is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed.
The history of Afghanistan, in this view, is the history of the attempts of multiple strongmen, idealists, revolutionaries and reactionaries to weld the country into a unified state - too often, it seems, via naked repression. The book, which ends in 2012, barely ten years before the Americans' ignominious retreat, nevertheless provides context to explain the Taliban's resurgence which has led to its recent victory. Nevertheless, although the recent history of Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in 1979 is a grim one, following the systematic obliteration of Afghan civil society during the Soviet occupation, Ansary ends the book on a surprising note of hope: "The great powers have a stake in making Afghanistan more governable, but the only people who can achieve this happy result are Afghans." And, Ansary thinks, even under the Taliban this will be possible:
[C]onfoundingly enough, the constant threat of Great Power interventions make the centralizing power in Kabul outward-looking and oriented toward membership in the modern world. If “the Taliban” succeed in taking over, you can be sure they will develop this same outward-looking orientation and attraction to some version of modernity very shortly. ...
The real question for the United States, then, is not how America can forge true democracy in Afghanistan or end corruption in Afghanistan or change the status of Afghan women: those questions are for Afghans to settle, and Afghans will settle them if left to their own devices. The real question for the United States is how to liberate Afghanistan from the United States—and all other outside powers.
It's clear that the Taliban's reconquest is a tragedy for modern Afghanistan. But Tamim Ansary leaves us with hope that this is a tragedy that will one day be overcome. May it be so....more
Published on the eve of Ukraine's definitive step away from Russia towards Europe in the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, this short, concise, academic stuPublished on the eve of Ukraine's definitive step away from Russia towards Europe in the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, this short, concise, academic study contains a shockingly prescient warning.
If Ukraine were to opt for deeper integration into the European Union, a Georgian scenario could not be excluded, in which the Kremlin could provoke riots in Eastern Ukraine or the Crimea, where many Russian passport holders live. This would offer Russia a pretext for intervening in Ukraine in order “to protect its nationals” and dismember the country. Unfortunately, such a scenario cannot be excluded.
But this book isn't about Ukraine - at least, not until the conclusion, which is when van Herpen predicts that "Everything suggests that Ukraine will be next to bear the brunt of the Russian pressure". Part 1 of the book is a study of Russian imperialism as a historical phenomenon from the times of the tsars up till Vladimir Putin, arguing that for many Russians including the present ruling elite, the country is still by definition an empire. Part 2 tracks the many ways in which Putin has consolidated power in Russia - via the United Russia party and its fake opposition parties, via the Nashi, a tidy new Russian variant of the Hitler Youth, and also via Putin's own Cossack praetorian guard, together with more plays stolen from fascist rulebooks of the past - all under the banner of a resurgent and expansionist Russian nationalism. Finally, Part 3 discusses the Second Chechen War and the 2008 invasion of Georgia in the context of Putin's imperialist ambitions, before going on in the conclusion to predict precisely how and why Putin would next be going after Ukraine. This in fact happened within weeks of the book's publication.
In 1992 Brzezinski warned: “The crucial issue here...is the future stability and independence of Ukraine.” In 2012—twenty years later—in his book Strategic Vision, Brzezinski repeated this warning, writing: “It cannot be stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
I read this because I wanted to get up to date on Putin's foreign policy especially as regarded the Chechen and Georgian wars. I wasn't expecting the clear and concise evidence that modern Russia is an aggressive expansionist imperialist state driven by ultranationalist ideology, but the book makes a watertight case. It was the fate of Chechnya, however, that was most heartbreaking. All the terrible things Russia is doing right now in Ukraine to massive international outcry were done first in Chechnya, killing hundreds of thousands of people, wiping out 15-20% of the Chechen population, or approximately 10 civilians to every Chechen figher killed; and the world stayed silent because Putin was able to spin the war as a crusade against Islamist terrorism. Ironically, the acts of terror that enabled Putin to declare war on Chechnya in 1999 may very well have been provocations carried out by the FSB to ensure their man got elected as president.
This books makes an excellent chaser to Catherine Belton's PUTIN'S PEOPLE which adds more to the picture by tracing Putin's early life and rise to power and his use of soft power, as opposed to the wars this book focuses on. ...more
Fantastic introduction to everyday life in Tudor England. Just as great as the same author's HOW TO BE A VICTORIAN.Fantastic introduction to everyday life in Tudor England. Just as great as the same author's HOW TO BE A VICTORIAN....more
December 1991. Russian president Boris Yeltsin goes to Belarus to help save the Soviet Union, where he is greeted warmly by the Belarusian Speaker of December 1991. Russian president Boris Yeltsin goes to Belarus to help save the Soviet Union, where he is greeted warmly by the Belarusian Speaker of Parliament, Stanislau Shushkevich:
Shushkevich did his best to smooth over the jarring effect of Yeltsin's "goodwill gift" presented to the Belarusian parliament earlier that day. It was a seventeenth-century tsarist charter to the Belarusian city of Orsha, taking it under Russian protection. What Yeltsin and his advisors regarded as an instance of Russo-Belarusian friendship to be emulated in the future was perceived by the democratic opposition in the Belarusian parliament as a symbol of Russian imperialism. Yeltsin's gift was met with shouts of "Shame!"
This is just one of the many telling historical details in Ukrainian academic Serhii Plokhy's study of the dissolution of the USSR between August and December 1991, which he pitches justly as the dissolution (I would say the partial dissolution) of the last classical European empire. When I realised the book dealt with such a limited time period, I was a little worried I might not have the context to understand what was going on. In 1991 I was alive, but only just. I certainly had no understanding of geopolitics. Happily, my worries were baseless. Plokhy gets you up to speed in the first few chapters and then follows a tight cast of characters - Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Bush I and Kravchuk - through the tumultuous events of those months, telling a story that at times reads like a thriller.
Plokhy's thesis - which is surely more well-founded, and less self-absorbed than the American boast to have "won the Cold War" is that the independence declaration of Ukraine was the decisive blow that caused the USSR to disintegrate.
Yeltsin and his advisers felt much more affinity with the Union than is usually allowed for in commentary about them. Not even the most radical of Yeltsin's advisers had the dissolution of the USSR on their original agenda... Neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin imagined a viable Union without Ukraine. It was the second Soviet republic after Russia in population and economic contribution to the Union coffers. The Russian leadership, which was already skeptical about bearing the costs of empire, could be persuaded to do so only together with Ukraine. Besides, as Yeltsin told George Bush on more than one occasion, without the Slavic Ukraine, Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Central Asian republics, most of which, with the notable exception of Kazakhstan, relied on massive subsidies from the Union centre.
One particularly horrifying detail that ought to give us a good deal of perspective on current 2022 events is how Yeltsin himself - a far better democrat than Vladimir Putin ever has been, although that admittedly does not require a very high bar - responded to the prospect of the USSR's dissolution:
Many of Yeltsin's advisers regarded the Commonwealth [of Independent States, the body created to link the republics when the USSR was dissolved] not as an instrument of divorce but rather as a means of Russian control over the post-Soviet space. They believed that Russia needed to free itself from the burden of supporting a traditional empire, but in twenty years, once it recovered from its systematic and political problems, the republics would come back to Russia of their own free will.
But this was obviously wishful thinking, of the same sort that could contribute to the massive depopulation of Belarus in WWII and the poisoning of one-fifth of its agricultural land in 1986 and then have the nerve to present its parliament with a memento of their imperialist subjection. Some of the republics did return - notably Belarus, once it became a dictatorship. Others would need to be forced back to the fold, like Georgia. And then, of course, Ukraine, first and boldest, would demand special treatment...
Vladimir Putin referred to the dissolution of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," and this book makes it perfectly clear why he might blame Ukraine above all the other former Soviet republics for that event. But of course it isn't a catastrophe: it's a eucatastrophe. As I've dug into recent Russian history this year, the one event I keep coming back to in sheer wonder is the fall of the USSR. The century, and the region, that saw one brutal regime after another; the slaughter of millions by hunger, bullets, and war; the deportation or enslavement of whole populations; also experienced one staggering, improbable, largely bloodless moment of freedom and hope.
Things have gotten bad again since. Amidst the former communist states, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, and Azerbaijan are once again ruled by dictators. Ukrainians are fighting for their lives and Armenians face a dark future. But the USSR will never rise again, and it fell in the most unlikely way imaginable. And the fact that Providence intervened in this way should give all of us hope. ...more
It's very impressive how much historical detail is packed into this book, given how easy it was to read - this is partly a factor of the prose, which It's very impressive how much historical detail is packed into this book, given how easy it was to read - this is partly a factor of the prose, which is witty and conversational, and partly a factor of the layout, which makes plentiful use of illustrations, sidebars and insets: giving the same information in bricks of text would make the whole book much, much drier reading.
I mainly wanted to read this as an introduction to American high society of the 1890s and a history of Anglo-American relations of the period, and it worked. I also gleaned a wealth of VERY helpful information on London high society of the period.
Probably the most interesting historical takeaway is the difference between how American women and Englishwomen were expected to behave. While English girls were brought up to very sheltered lives, American girls tended to live far more freely, were often better educated and were much more comfortable around men, to whom they'd had far more exposure. On the other hand, an American woman never expected to have anything to do with finance or politics once she married, whereas Englishwomen were welcomed by their husbands into a far more equal partnership where they would be able to act as political hostesses or diplomatic envoys. This made perfect sense to me because that's precisely how we see English wives behaving in Anthony Trollope's novels, especially the Palliser series. On the other hand, it also suggests an American origin for the ubiquitous historical-fiction trope of the fiancee patronisingly telling his intended bride that he doesn't mean for her to worry her pretty head about things like politics or finance. So this is a warning - if I see any more Americans writing English people this way I WILL point and shout. ...more
It took me an unconscionable time to read this - partly due to my own fatigue, but also partly because this is just an extremely dry book, even for anIt took me an unconscionable time to read this - partly due to my own fatigue, but also partly because this is just an extremely dry book, even for an academic history. It would be best read by someone with an existing familiarity with Nubian and Ethiopian history, which I didn't have. However, I knew enough about Crusader history to be endlessly fascinated: the book discusses the geopolitical links between the Christian African kingdoms of Nubia and Abyssinia (both known at different times as "Ethiopia"), the origins of the Prester John myth, and the constant worry in Muslim-regime Egypt that the crusaders to the north and the Nubians to the south might form an alliance against them.
The Latins were very much looking for allies against Syria and Egypt, and Nubian Dotawo was the main focus of their Africa yearnings. The threat of such an alliance was both perceived and (especially in the 1170s) real, and influenced Egyptian policy. Nubian sources are so scarce that we don't know to what extent Nubians really wanted such an alliance, or even to what extent Nubia really did decline beneath Mamluk power projection around the turn of the 14th century, though Europeans definitely got the impression they had declined. From this point, Latins transferred their hopes to Abyssinia. It's unclear why Abyssinia rebranded itself as Ethiopia, taking on what had formerly been the Nubian identity/role, but this certainly benefited them internationally.
From the perspective of crusader studies, the most stunning revelation in this book - in addition to evidence for the presence of Black trade, religious, and other communities in the Holy Land during the crusades - is a re-evaluation of Reynald of Chatillon's 1183 Red Sea raid as, perhaps not merely a razzia to discredit Saladin along pilgrimage routes to Mecca, but possibly a genuine attempt to bypass Egypt and establish trade in gold directly with Nubia via their port at Aidhab. While unfortunately there may never be sufficient evidence to say for sure whether this was one of the Leper King's motives in arranging this expedition, it's an absolutely intriguing suggestion from Simmons which helps to show the real geopolitical importance of Nubia to the broader world of the middle ages....more
Suzannah Rowntree
>
Books:
history
(127)
Loading...
