The Case of Mistress Mary Hampson

From the Daily Mail comes a harrowing tale of marital abuse from the 17th century:

A pamphlet detailing the beatings, threats and intimidation endured by a Yorkshire housewife more than 300 years ago has been uncovered by academics at the University of Huddersfield.

In the work, which dates from 1684 (A Plain and Compendious Relation of the Case of Mrs. Mary Hampson, as it Now is: And Formerly Printed for the Satisfaction of a Private Friend, But Now is Set Forth by Her Relief), a woman named Mary Hampson lists the catalogue of abuse she suffered at the hands of her overbearing and violent husband.

Although Mrs Hampson eventually escaped her abusive spouse, she first endured being beaten and starved and a violent incident involving a gun - all of which is detailed the 1684 pamphlet.

In her new book, The Case of Mistress Mary Hampson, academic Dr Jessica Malay includes the full text of the 1684 pamphlet plus extensive extra material, which examines the episode in depth and rounds out the story of Mary, who died in 1698, after a few short, final years of relative peace and prosperity.

For more on the story see:

University of Huddersfield: A shocking, often violent saga of marital abuse

Stanford University Press: The Case of Mistress Mary Hampson
Huddersfield Daily Examiner: University of Huddersfield expert uncovers domestic abuse story - from 1684

Georgia Newsday: Story of 17th century battered wife uncovered in 1684 pamphlet

Empress Dowager Cixi

Bel Mooney's review of Jung Chang's "Empress Dowager Cixi" from the Mail Online:

She was a version of Margaret Thatcher, in a different age, an alien culture. From humble origins yet a natural leader, she used a powerful mixture of intelligence and natural charm to get her way, fighting a single-minded path to the top.

Autocratic and determined, she would let few things or people stand in the way of her ambition to change history.

The lady knew how to manipulate men who were weaker - which was most, even in a male-dominated culture. Powerful rivals held no terror for her, and heaven help those who made her their enemy.

Depending on whether you’re a detractor or an admirer, she was ruthless or tough-minded, devious or shrewd, cruel or simply pragmatic according to the standards of the age. Nobody can argue that this stateswoman made a significant mark on history, yet history’s jury is still out.

Was she an innovator or a despot? The answer is almost certainly - both.

Other Links:

Extract of Jung's book as featured on The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10324161/An-extract-from-Wild-Swans-author-Jung-Changs-new-book-Empress-Dowager-Cixi.html

Interview with Jung Chang featured on the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10314619/Jung-Chang-interview-why-Im-still-banned-in-China.html

Article on Cixi featured in the Smithsonian Magazine: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/da-cixi.html

Books & Reviews

It seems today every man and his dog has a blog reviewing books - some are professional reviewers, many are amatuers.  Many blog / review on a regular basis - others infrequently.  I would tend to lump myself in the latter of the two categories - an infrequent amatuer.  I don't get paid to review, I don't actively seek out works to review (I have on a couple of topics that have interested me), and I don't often post a review on every book I have read (I just don't have the time!). I have been approached to review books - some just don't interest me so I don't accept - occasionally one will spark my interest and I will accept.  Trouble is, once publishers (mainly located in UK and USA) realise that I am located in Australia, they quickly lose interest - like we don't read down under!

Anyway, I have posted a few reviews of books I have read here on this blog, Women of History, but now I will post mainly on my other blog, Melisende's Library (and also on Goodreads).

Melisende's Library will feature articles on authors I like, reviews of books I have read, posts on books / collections I own or on books or all things book-related that interest me.  To this end, I am going to collate those reviews I have posted here and send them over to the Library.  

You may find my taste rather eclectic - my favourite genre is history (and the women who have featured) but it is not limited to any particular time or country; however, having developed a passion for reading at an early age, I have gone through reading "phases" - eg: crime, mystery, historical fiction, biography, fantasy, sci-fi, series.  I have probably covered a lot of genres and my own personal Library reflects this.

I also have a passion for collecting books - okay I might be a bit OCD in this area - I collect (or hoard) books - can't throw away anything, even from childhood.  New or old books; printed or e-books; the good, the bad, the ugly - I have them all - and have read about 50% of what I actually own (like I said, not enough time!).

Hope you might spare a few moments and drop into the Library.

The Daylight Gate

From the Guardian:

Pendle: a place synonymous with witches and Britain's most notorious diabolism trials. The candle-passing parlour game says, if it dies in your hand, you've a forfeit to give. If you're going to write a book about famous witches, it had better fly.

Winterson's novella is set in 1612, during the feverishly paranoid reign of James I. It describes the plight of a group of paupers, mostly women, accused of evil practices and tried at the August assizes. In the previous decade, the gunpowder plot almost did away with the king. Heresy is his obsession. Author of the instructive Daemonologi, he is, as Pendle's local magistrate puts it, "a meddler". In this fraught climate disfigured elderly ladies aren't safe, alchemists can be arrested for creating mechanical beetles, and Catholics are thumb-screwed. "It suits the times to degrade the hoc est corpus of the Catholic mass into satanic hocus pocus," notes William Shakespeare, who features briefly, and not preposterously, in Winterson's book.

Abandoned Women

From the Daily Record:

THEY are the women history has chosen to forget – the 2500 Scots banished to Tasmania for the pettiest of crimes.

Today, for the first time, we can reveal the stories Scotland was too ashamed to tell – and celebrate the women cruelly sentenced to exile on the other side of the world.

Not only did these formidable females survive the treacherous journey and years of servitude, many went on to become model citizens once free and the mothers of a new nation.

In her new book, Abandoned Women, historian Lucy Frost remembers these long-forgotten women. More than 12,500 British convicts were banished to Van Diemen’s Land – Tasmania – between 1803 and 1853. A fifth were Scots women.

Review - Calling Invisible Women

Review of "Calling Invisible Women" by Ben Steelman at Star News Online:

Ever since H.G. Wells' 1897 novel, the notion of invisibility has been like catnip for writers and filmmakers.

Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" used invisibility as a metaphor for discrimination and for white America's blindness. H.F. Saint, in "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" (1987), used invisibility to probe the yuppie lifestyle. "Hollow Man," the 2000 Paul Verhoeven film starring Kevin Bacon, seemed to posit that invisibility might prompt an otherwise normal man to become a serial rapist.

But what about the Invisible Woman? Except for Marvel Comics, which promoted the Fantastic Four's "Invisible Girl" to adult status some years back, the idea hasn't been kicked around that much.

So Tennessee author Jeanne Ray is almost plowing virgin soil with her new novel "Calling Invisible Women" – and she's harvesting a bumper crop.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, "Calling Invisible Women" takes the perspective of a woman of a certain age – specifically, 54-year-old Clover Hobart, a sometime garden columnist for her hometown paper in Ohio.

Anonymous in Their Own Names

From We-enews:

Edward L. Bernays, Heywood Broun and Harold Ross have long been lauded as media innovators, their accomplishments chronicled in hundreds of articles and books. With very few exceptions, though, writers have failed to recognize a fundamental reason for the success of these three remarkable media ventures: each man had an uncredited collaborator.

"Anonymous in Their Own Names" consists of separate but intertwined biographies of these three women whose work was invisible in their own time and has remained invisible to countless authors who have detailed their husbands' accomplishments but could not "see" the crucial contributions of their wives.

Their invisibility is ironic given that they were feminists who kept their birth names when they married as a sign of their equality with their husbands and repeatedly battled the government and societal norms to continue using their names.

Still, they carried out their most important work anonymously--masked by their husbands' fame, which they helped create.

From the Publisher - Vanderbilt University Press:

Anonymous in Their Own Names recounts the lives of three women who, while working as their husbands' uncredited professional partners, had a profound and enduring impact on the media in the first half of the twentieth century. With her husband, Edward L. Bernays, Doris E. Fleischman helped found and form the field of public relations. Ruth Hale helped her husband, Heywood Broun, become one of the most popular and influential newspaper columnists of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1925 Jane Grant and her husband, Harold Ross, started the New Yorker magazine.

Yet these women's achievements have been invisible to countless authors who have written about their husbands. This invisibility is especially ironic given that all three were feminists who kept their birth names when they married as a sign of their equality with their husbands, then battled the government and societal norms to retain their names. Hale and Grant so believed in this cause that in 1921 they founded the Lucy Stone League to help other women keep their names, and Grant and Fleischman revived the league in 1950. This was the same year Grant and her second husband, William Harris, founded White Flower Farm, pioneering at that time and today one of the country's most celebrated commercial nurseries.

Despite strikingly different personalities, the three women were friends and lived in overlapping, immensely stimulating New York City circles. Susan Henry explores their pivotal roles in their husbands' extraordinary success and much more, including their problematic marriages and their strategies for overcoming barriers that thwarted many of their contemporaries.

Women From the Ankle Down

From the Wall Street Journal:

Rachelle Bergstein's "Women From the Ankle Down" traces this quest through the lives of American women over the past 100 years. Ms. Bergstein, a first-time author and self-described shoe obsessive, claims that if you look at the shoes women wore—or aspired to wear—you'll understand who they were. In an effort to prove this, she takes us on a zigzagging tour through well-trodden history.

The start of the 20th century, Ms. Bergstein tells us, was a sad time for both women and their footwear. Most shoes were still stitched by hand, so there were just a few styles, mostly in black, brown and white. Cobblers had only recently started using different patterns for left and right feet. Only the very rich owned more than a few pair. A poor woman could expect to wear the same two shoes all of her adult life.

Book: The Origins of Sex

From the Guardian:

We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.

Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition.

Review: Pope Joan (Lawrence Durrell)

This work by Lawrence Durrell is a 1954 translation of the Greek Papissa Joanna of Emmannuel Royidis which was written in 1886.  As such, the review is really covering the original work and is not a critique of Durrell's translation of the original work.

Joanna’s story begins with her humble antecedents – the daughter of an unnamed English monk (who is never named) and a buxom Saxon goose girl called Judith. Her father-monk is inspired to leave England and preach in the land of the great Charles (whom I am presuming to be Charlemagne), which he did as a wandering missionary for eight years until his “every hope of paternity” was cruelly removed. Whether through miraculously conception or rape, Joanna was born sometime in the year 818. And eight years later, following the passing of Joanna’s mother and a curious incident with a bare-breasted Abbess, Joanna’s father once more embarks on the missionary trail, this time with Joanna to accompany him.

You can read more of my review at Medievalists.net

A Quiet Revolution

Review by Abbas Jaffer is Associate Editor of Altmuslimah:

The question of what Muslim women’s veiling means in America is a highly politicized, often antagonistic debate on television and in the public sphere. Provocative coverage has appeared innumerable times, including a NPR feature as well as a New York Times piece earlier this year. Altmuslimah has also published a number of articles, including “The politics of fashion,” and a series about women who have chosen to take off the veil (Part 1, Part 2). More recent journalistic and academic discussions have certainly been more nuanced and multifaceted than they previously were.

Leila Ahmed’s A Quiet Revolution is both an important and thought-provoking look at the rising visibility of veiling amongst Muslim women. What lies within is a history of the veil and its political meanings from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Ahmed consciously confronts some of her own preconceptions about what this phenomenon means, how wearing hijab rose to prominence amongst Muslim women in mid-century Egypt, and the ways in which this movement traveled and developed in the United States.

Instead of finding a history of modern veiling that reconciled with her previous thought, Leila Ahmed readily admits complicating her view upon undertaking research for this book.

Love in the time of Mughals

From the Sunday Pioneer:

Mughal history, as we know it, is all about how the Muslim rulers won over vast tracts of land and established kingdoms that promoted art, literature and culture. They ruled with an iron fist, battled palace intrigues and mercilessly suppressed opposition. Some like Aurangzeb were religious despots, while others like Akbar were liberal enough to even promote a new brand of all-inclusive religious structure — Din-e-Elahi.

While the Mughal empire was largely male-dominated, there were flashes of female dominance, even if at subaltern levels. But while they have been dealt with by some classic and even modern-day historians, few have attempted to tackle the subject of sexuality among the Mughal society’s influential women. Perhaps, it is because authors have considered the issue as peripheral to the larger story. Nevertheless, it is an important gender perspective, more so as it deals with a society where women were behind veils and their affairs were rarely discussed. This book provides a fresh and scholarly insight into the private lives of Mughal women, without being voyeuristic.

Review: 21 Days with the Mistress of King Midas

From PRLog:

Love and Bliss will find it's way into your heart and soul as you follow along the path of ancient wisdom and lighthearted fun, leaping for joy for the Mistress, who comes to the rescue of a fallen King. In the latest book by Dr. Marcia Ann Mims Coppertino, "21 Days with the Mistress of King Midas" weaves the story of how a common prostitute shares her modest abode and heart with a stranger whom she recognizes as great, but who has lost his way and his kingdom, and how she transforms him for his return to victory, strength and valor in the 21 days alloted her.

Working with a vivid imagination and the love for "women of mystery" Dr. Coppertino states that she wanted to bring due justice to the personality of women who are unsung heroines, and to showcase the fact that people from all walks of life can be used to come to the aid of another, with kindness and helpfulness. The Mistress character, according to Dr. Coppertino, sought a way to re-develop and re-tool a man who came from a different walk and status in life, but who in fact shared three common traits all possess: A need for caring and sharing, shelter from the storms of life and help to attain triumph over seeming unsurmountable odds! Dr. Coppertino says "no one is immune from the trials and pitfalls in life" and that biblically speaking, two are better than one, in all cases and under all circumstances.

Book: Queens and Empresses

Back in November I was given the opportunity to read the lastest tome from Mark Hichens entitled "Queens and Empresses".

From the Press Release: "History is brought to life through the colourful stories of eleven queens and empresses. Their lives were often tempestuous and tragic, ending in execution, suicide, divorce or abdication. Some were child brides, pawns in political games, and most had unfaithful husbands."

My Review of: Queens and Empresses

Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman

From the Telegraph:

The role of the mistress is as old as love and matrimony, but harder to define than either. Elizabeth Abbott, a Canadian academic whose previous books include a history of celibacy, has taken up the challenge in Mistresses: a History of the Other Woman.

Abbott writes that it was while researching her book on celibacy that “I came to realise that mistressdom is, in fact, an institution parallel and complementary to marriage. Though many people assume that adultery undermines marriage,” she notes, “many others believe that, paradoxically, it shores marriage up.” The material, in short, could hardly be richer or more complex.

In 13 chapters, beginning with illicit love in the ancient world and concluding with the changing role of the mistress after the sexual revolution of the Sixties, Abbott considers the careers of mistresses in a variety of different eras and cultures.

Edith Cavell by Diane Souhami

Review in the Financial Times:

The British nurse Edith Cavell worked as part of a Belgian resistance network during the first world war, operating from the training school she had been recruited to set up in Brussels in 1907. The Germans had turned her school into a Red Cross hospital, where she and her nurses treated German soldiers as well as French, Belgian and British. Cavell was asked to help injured British soldiers by resistance leaders who were members of the Belgian aristocracy. She hid soldiers in the hospital, and provided false papers, guides and safe houses en route to Holland.

The school, however, came under increasing scrutiny and suspicion until Cavell and several of her colleagues were arrested. She was tricked into making a false confession; a hasty trial followed, conducted in German, culminating in the death sentence. A series of diplomatic blunders and a lethargic response on the part of the US ambassador in Brussels were insufficient to divert proceedings and Cavell, along with her colleague Philippe Baucq, were executed at dawn on October 12 1915 at the national rifle range outside Brussels.

Review: The Last Duel

The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France by Eric Jager

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The story of the Last Duel focuses on the last "legalised" duel to be held in medieval France in which one man seeks justice through trial by combat.

The two protagonists are a knight and a squire. First, these are misleading titles. Both are military men of comparable age; both men were - in the few years prior to the duel - of the rank of squire. One man was knighted on the field of battle - the other on the field of justice - therefore at the time of the duel both men were of equal rank. The title of squire or "escuier" was ascribed to a "battle hardened veteran" rather than the romanticised vision of a youth attending to his master. Though squire did serve their superiors, the context, in this case, as with the title of knight, is purely a military one.

Now to the protagonists themselves. There was a long period of friendship between the two, which slowly dissolved as one received preference over the other; and one felt that he was more deserving of preferment than the other. Tensions finally boil over when one man accuses the other of rape and violence against his wife, culminating in the long drawn-out process of having the case examined and pondered before (to the delight of all), the duel to the death is granted.

Jager goes to great lengths to fill in the background information on those involved and to enlighten the reader on the intracies of medieval French politics and law. In bringing the suit forward, the women herself, if her testimony proves false, faces a most grusesome end - to be burnt alive - and her champion, certain death. There is no half measures - at the end of the day, someone will die.

I have been wanting to read this book for some time since it was recommended to me about four years ago. And I highly recommend it myself.

View all my reviews

Courting Diaster: Leanda de Lisle Reviews

From the Literary Review:

Henry VIII boasted to ambassadors of his vivacious eighteen-month-old daughter Mary, 'this child never cries'. The affectionate father was at the same time also a loving husband to Mary's mother, Catherine of Aragon. When that changed so did the child, and there were tears aplenty, as well as a legacy of blood and fire.

Giles Tremlett's book is the first full-length biography of Catherine in forty years. Tremlett lives in Spain, where he works as a journalist for The Guardian, and had immediate access to Spanish sources. He paints an engaging portrait of Catherine's early life in Granada before she was packed off to England to marry Arthur Tudor.

Dreamers of a New Day: Women who Invented the Twentieth Century

From the Scotsman:

AS Shelia Rowbotham points out towards the end of this excellent account of the contributions made by working-class and middle-class women, radicals and anarchists, mothers and singletons in Britain and America, much of the rights women take for granted today were won by those "who were not at the centre of power, nor were they engaged in heroic acts or glitzed with glamour". As a consequence, most of them have been forgotten.

When Rowbotham writes that, by the 1930s, there seemed to be a "hostility among young women to 'feminism'"; that feminist reformers struggled over how to balance careers with being mothers; that they complained of unequal pay for equal work, we are reminded that there are still so many rights to be fought for, still so many issues to be debated. It is thanks to women like Margaret Macmillan, who fought for school clinics and meals for schoolchildren, or Dora Russell, who campaigned for sex education, or Clementina Black, who spent her life campaigning for the rights of women workers, and who was active on the Women's Industrial Council, that my generation of women can lead the kinds of lives we do. We are not reminded of that fact nearly often enough. Rowbotham's book is that nudge in the ribs we all need.

Jane Whorwood - The King's Smuggler

John Fox has written an extraordinary work on one of the most remarkable women of the English Civil War.

Few co-conspirators from Wartime were alive to notice Jane’s death. Poverty and isolation reduced her to childlike pleading with a king who either did not know, or preferred to forget that his father had once importuned her in a similar isolation. In the summer of her death the great and the good – the second Earl of Clarendon and Archbishop Sancroft – began to enquire about Jane’s and others’ role in Charles I’s final years. By then, Dugdale’s sources and memory were suspect or failing, most witnesses were dead, Jane was stilled and no one asked again for many years.

My Review of Jane Whorwood - King's Smuggler - a book you must add to your "TBR List" immediately!