Early Modern Europe Archives - Page 2 of 3

The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England 1660-1770, by Adrian Wilson (1995)

Adrian Wilson writes an interesting chronicle of man-midwifery’s emergence in England. His research is based on an exhaustive analysis of manuscripts, newspapers, and the memoirs of surgeons, physicians, and midwives. He not only explains the rise of men in an otherwise female-dominated field, but explores the practice of traditional midwifery. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, childbirth, from labor to the lying-in chamber (a darkened room where the mother rested for one month after delivery) was an exclusively female space. With few exceptions, male surgeons only intervened to extract a possibly dead baby in order to save a mother’s life. They achieved this operation through the use of hooked instruments, such as the crotchet and forceps, which mutilated the baby. While midwives delivered living babies, male practitioners brought forth dead ones. By the mid-1740s, surgeons increasingly used the forceps and vectis to achieve successful births. The male sphere, thus, moved from traditional obstetric surgery to the new “man-midwifery.” The need for instruction on the forceps’ effective use soon resulted in the emergence of lying-in hospitals that increasingly gave men access to normal births.

The establishment of a “lying-in-fund” induced poor mothers to submit themselves as teaching specimens to man-midwives. By 1750s, the lying-in hospitals became a permanent feature of England’s hospital system. Its hierarchy elevated the man-midwife over the midwife. By the nineteenth century, man-midwives assumed a new name, obstetricians, and received “onset summons” in lieu of midwives. Gradually, midwives learned the use of the forceps in order to match their male rivals. In 1902, after a protracted struggle, midwives gained professional status and normal deliveries returned to their realm.

1811 Thomas Rowlandson cartoon lampooning England’s male midwives (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France)

The loophole in Wilson’s impressive text lies in his conclusion that women’s choices spurred the rise of man-midwifery. He neglects the fact that women were merely reacting to a new development that offered more positive results in cases of difficult births. Lying-in hospitals offered few options for poor women as man-midwives already dominated these facilities from their early years. Wilson’s conclusion also undermines the power of newspapers and other publications in constructing social behaviors. From the 1740s, midwives were criticized for failing to summon the man-midwife and his forceps at the onset of labor. These public criticisms by prominent man-midwives influenced collective attitudes. Thus, understanding the rise of man-midwifery requires looking beyond women’s choices to broader developments in society. Nonetheless, Wilson’s book offers a fascinating read for anyone interested in the evolution of midwifery and reproductive health.

An Emotional Database: The New Archive (No. 8)

By Henry Wiencek

One of the core values of studying history is objectivity: an ability to weigh evidence, read documents and then dispassionately judge the actions of our ancestors. But let’s be honest, it’s impossible to study the past without feeling something. Confusion, fascination, excitement—this is what motivates historians to spend their days poring over obscure manuscripts.

Is it possible that emotions actually help to produce better history? Sweden’s Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library of medical arts thinks so. So when readers navigate its stunning online archive of medical, zoological and biological documents from the 15^th-20^th-century world, “Emotion” is literally a search option. In addition to place and topic, users can select a set of documents based on the feelings they evoke.

And each category seems very appropriately titled. “Beautiful” cues a stunning collage of images from across time and space: a 17^th-century Dutch anatomical display of the human skeleton, an early modern Italian etching of mythical beasts, and one Viennese botanist’s exquisite rendering of a strawberry. True to form, “Scary” turns toward the macabre, with gruesome surgical photographs of American Civil War amputees, a 16^th-century doctor’s guide to battle wounds and a European naturalist’s perturbing bat exhibit. “Fascinating” lies somewhere in between. There are photographs of French psychiatry patients gawking at the camera as they’re examined, sublime—yet slightly unsettling—medical lithographs of the human form, and even a 19^th-century physician’s guide to the miracle of life. Depending on your mood, you can also peruse the Artistic, the Colorful, the Instructive, the Marvelous, the Remarkable and the Strange.

The Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library of medical arts is a strange, colorful and captivating resource for scholars and the general public, especially those interested in the history of science, medicine and its visual portrayals. But its unorthodox design openly challenges the assumption that historians ought to leave their emotions at the archive door. Instead, it asks users to take a risk—to forgo the comforts of traditional categories and experiment. And perhaps most importantly, the site acknowledges that our own emotional reactions are of historical significance. By declaring 17^th-century medical drawings to be “strange,” we reveal our own modern biases—arrogance, even—about the past. This is a subversive new form of research in which emotions do not distort historical understanding, but actually enable more of it.

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How does the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary relate to the present crisis in the Ukraine?

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Photo Credits:

Screenshot of Wunderkammer’s “Fascinating” gallery (Image courtesy of the Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library)

Anatomical plate from Traité complet de l’Anatomie de l’Homme, 1867–1871. Found in Wunderkammer’s “Fascinating” section (Image courtesy of the Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library)

Portrait of a psychiatric patient from Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, 1876. Found in Wunderkammer’s “Fascinating” section (Image courtesy of the Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library)

A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552-1610, by R. Po-chia Hsia (2010)

by Shery Chanis

Hsia’s book on Matteo Ricci expands the traditional narratives of the Age of Expansion and transforms our understanding of them. Beyond the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, early modern Europeans, Jesuits among them, also ventured to Asia. Published on the four-hundredth anniversary of Matteo Ricci’s death, Ronnie Hsia’s biography of the Jesuit also marks part of a larger effort to commemorate one of the most important figures in the history of Christianity in China. In addition, this book shows a shift in focus to China by Hsia, who has produced an abundance of works on German social and cultural history during the Reformation era.

Hsia departs from other Ricci biographies with a more down-to-earth and rounded portrayal of the Jesuit missionary. Rather than claiming Ricci to be a saint or a pioneer cultural accommodationist who allowed Chinese converts to continue certain Chinese rituals, Hsia examines the context in which Ricci operated in two new ways. First, Hsia includes many other Jesuits in his book, illustrating that Ricci was part of a greater effort of the China Mission. Hsia discusses many Chinese figures along Ricci’s path, some of whom helped the Jesuit mission, some debated with the Jesuit, some were converted, and some collaborated with Ricci on various works. Second, Hsia discusses Ricci’s emotions at various stages of his mission. Although Ricci was highly successful in China, Hsia shows that he also experienced melancholy and sadness in his tenure in China.

After a creative prologue about Ricci’s death and burial, Hsia outlines Ricci’s life, from his birth in Macerata, Italy to his burial in Beijing, China. Hsia traces Ricci’s education and training in Europe and his journey to Asia before settling in China. Hsia devotes a chapter to each Chinese city where Ricci lived – Macao, Zhaoqing, Shaozhou, Nanchang, Nanjing, and Beijing –to illustrate Ricci’s northward movement within the Chinese empire moving towards the capital, his ultimate goal. Hsia follows this with a discussion of The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, which he argues is Ricci’s most important work. Hsia concludes his book with an Epilogue, witha brief historiography of works on Ricci in the four centuries since his death, from Nicholas Trigault to Jonathan Spence to Chinese scholars including Lin Jinshui and Sun Shangyang.

Detail from the China section of Matteo Ricci’s 1602 map, the “Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography” (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Hsia’s innovative approach continues with his attention to Michele Ruggieri, Ricci’s fellow Italian Jesuit and partner at the beginning of the Jesuit mission in China. Not only does Hsia devote an entire chapter to Ruggieri, he also includes a legal case against Ruggieri in his appendix. Hsia’s inclusion of Ruggieri, who is usually seen only in Ricci’s shadow, helps expand our knowledge of the Jesuit mission in China.

Hsia’s increasing focus on China in his scholarship is also reflected in his incorporation of many Chinese sources in his book. In addition to Ricci’s extant letters and published works, Hsia includes such Chinese materials as local gazetteers, tax records, poems, and letters. This offering of a more balanced perspective between Europe and China makes his focus and methodology less Eurocentric, which is also a strength of this book. Hsia’s inclusion of photographs he has taken in some of the cities Ricci had lived also serves as a great addition to the book.

ILLUSTRATION DEPICTS JESUIT FATHER MATTEO RICCI

Matteo Ricci in the traditional garb of a Chinese literatus (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Hsia’s micro-historical approach of focusing on one Jesuit does not provide a full account of the Jesuit mission in China which can be viewed as a weakness of the book. In addition, the book title might be somewhat misleading, since Hsia is interested in not only Ricci in Beijing, the Forbidden City, but also in other places. Nonetheless, Hsia has provided an intriguing account of an important figure in the Jesuit China mission who was also part of the larger narrative of the Age of Expansion.

Parenting in Hard Times: Child Abandonment in Early Modern Europe

by Julie Hardwick

Look at any firehouse in Austin and you will see a yellow sign on the exterior marked “Safe Baby Site.” These signs date from 1999 when a rash of discoveries of dead newborns in and around Houston, led Texas to pass a “safe haven” law. Anyone who abandoned a baby younger than sixty days at a designated “safe” spot, where the newborn would quickly be found and receive appropriate care, was promised amnesty from prosecution. All 50 states subsequently passed similar laws.

The practice of child abandonment and efforts to manage it have a long history and I recently encountered a series of surviving artifacts from about 250 years ago that provide us with a rare window into the abandoned and the abandoners. In France, as in other European countries, the frequency of abandonment led to the development of institutional responses to protect the children with the establishment of foundling hospitals in towns and cities across Europe. Contrary to what we might expect from modern laws which envisage child abandonment as a crisis response by a teenage single mother with a newborn, children were abandoned in early modern Europe at all ages by parents who were married and by various extended kin as well as by young single mothers.

Reminders of these municipal refuges survive today in the landscape of modern cities, like Coram’s Fields in London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood, site of the original London Foundling Hospital and today home to a wonderful playground interlude for any travelling family as well as for local children.

In the archives of the city of Lyon, home of one of France’s largest foundling hospitals from the mid-sixteenth century, records survive for each child admitted, often with a record of the circumstances of the abandonment (where, at what time, and a careful description of what the child was wearing) as well as any note left with the child. Many notes were written on scraps of paper apparently just torn from whatever might be to hand, others were written on playing cards, a few on saints cards. Some parents were smooth writers and some had barely functional literacy. They were written by fathers and by mothers.

Each one of these scribbled notes tells a capsule story that offers us a tangible connection with a long ago moment of family crisis. They briefly allow us to see the decision to abandon a child from the parents’ perspective. These are decisions working people faced with economic desperation and religious sensibility.

About 10 pm one evening, a cook found a young child of about 4 in the square in front of the city’s cathedral. She was wearing two skirts, a shirt and coverlet and black shoes. The cook found a note “on the child” that said under a small hand drawn cross, “Josette Pellotieux It’s necessity that makes me expose her She is only four I beg you to have someone take care of her She is called Josette Pellotieux.” The cook duly took Josette to the foundling hospital where the admissions clerk recorded that the note “appeared to have been written in a woman’s hand.” Josette’s mother was probably a textile worker, the most common job for women in Lyons where textile manufacturing dominated the economy. She was probably a widow, like many women who abandoned their children, unable to make ends meet without the income of two adults.

What did the future hold for Josette? She may have stayed in the hospital until she was 16, before being placed as a servant like many children. Perhaps she died there as mortality rates were exceptionally high in these institutions. She may have been retrieved by her mother later when resources allowed. One widow, Jeanne Gachet, abandoned two children in 1757 after the death of her husband, a shoemaker, at a time when she was so ill that she was unable to work as a silk spinner and feared she would die.. She retrieved Pierre first in 1760 and Genevieve two years later, promising in each instance to raise them as good Catholics, teach them to read and write, and to raise them so that they could earn a living. A shoemaker-cousin, a family friend, and a textile producer who Jeanne had been working for at the time of the babies’ abandonment attended the return of Genevieve to her mother.

Some parents wrote their notes on playing cards and we can wonder whether they were making specific statements in such choices. Did parents mean to indicate they were gambling that their child would be better off in the care of an institution than in their care?

The most telling and touching of all of these artifacts for me is a pink ribbon attached carefully to a baby’s wrist and embroidered with the message: “I am going away but remain close.” Likely embroidered by the baby’s mother with the fine skills of Lyonnais textile workers, this tiny memento gives us a material connection to a world of terrible choices and elided emotions.

Photo Credits:

A note written for Jeanne Masson, aged one day, 21 April 1725 (Image courtesy of Archives Municipales de Lyon HCL Charité G288)

The note found on Josette Pellotieux by a Lyon cook (Image courtesy of Archives Municipales de Lyon HCL Charité G288)

An embroidered pink ribbon bearing the phrase, “I am going away but remain close.” (Image courtesy of HCL Hotel-Dieu G85)

***

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Julie Hardwick examines the daily life of Early Modern French families

Brian Levack on Possession and Exorcism

By Brian Levack

Ever since the beginning of Christianity, the belief has existed that demons can enter the bodies of human beings and take control of their physical movements and mental faculties. Those people who reportedly have experienced such possessions, known as demoniacs, have displayed a wide variety of symptoms, including convulsions, rigidity of the limbs, and vomiting extraneous substances such as pins, nails, or stones. A few demoniacs were reported to have levitated. The possessed also reportedly conversed in languages of which they had no previous knowledge, spoke in deep voices that were different from their normal voices, displayed contempt for sacred objects, uttered blasphemies, went into trances, and foresaw the future. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period of the Reformation, there was an “epidemic” of such possessions. Some of them were group possessions in which many people in small communities, such as convents and orphanages, displayed the same symptoms.

The challenge for historians is to make sense of this bizarre, pathological behavior. For most people living at the time, the afflictions experienced by demoniacs made perfect sense, since they believed that the Devil or one of his demonic subordinates had the power to enter people’s bodies against their will. Others, however, including many who believed in the existence of the Devil, posed alternative rational, natural explanations why these demoniacs acted the way they did. The most common “rational” explanation of what was “really happening” to the possessed was that they were either physically or mentally ill: either epileptics or victims of hysteria. In the view of most modern psychiatrists, demoniacs were simply experiencing some sort of disorder, such as dissociative identity disorder, commonly known as multiple personality syndrome. Another rational explanation was that demoniacs were faking their possessions so that they could engage in anti-social or anti-religious behavior without being prosecuted for a criminal or religious offense. They were able to do so because demoniacs were not legally or morally responsible for anything done or said while possessed, since the Devil was believed to have forced them to speak or act.

The only human being who could be held responsible for causing a possession was a witch who commanded the Devil to enter the body of another person. Many of the cases of witchcraft in the Reformation era began when demoniacs accused a person of causing their possession by means of witchcraft.

Medical and other rational explanations of possession can contribute to an explanation of some possession cases, but they cannot account for all the symptoms displayed by demoniacs, especially those that reflected the religious views of the possessed. The key to understanding this phenomenon is to recognize that all demoniacs, either consciously or unconsciously, were following scripts that were encoded in their religious cultures. They were, in a sense, performers in a sacred drama. Demoniacs learned their scripts from observing other demoniacs or by reading the many published narratives of other possessions or by hearing sermons that related the details of famous possessions. Some of them acquired knowledge of possession scripts from their exorcists, who suggested things they might say or do while in the state of possession. Nuns in convents often imitated the symptoms of those who had already exhibited some of the signs of possession. In the most famous case of possession in seventeenth-century Europe, the nuns in a convent at Loudun in France, after witnessing the convulsions and sexual gestures of the Mother Superior, Jeanne des Anges, began to act in a similar manner. This group possession resulted in a mass exorcism, and it led to the execution of a parish priest, Urbain Grandier, in 1634 for having caused their possession by means of witchcraft.

The scripts followed by Catholic and Protestant demoniacs and by the exorcists who tried to dispossess them were different. Catholic demoniacs, for example, were repulsed by the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, which is the most distinctive feature of Catholic sacramental culture. Protestant demoniacs on the other hand often reacted violently to hearing or even seeing a copy of the Bible, which was the foundation of Protestant faith. Catholic exorcists appealed to the Virgin Mary and other saints to help them expel the invasive demons, whereas Protestants, who emphasized the sovereignty of God to whom individuals prayed directly, left that task to God alone. Catholic demoniacs, especially young Catholic women, tended to display unconventional or prohibited sexual behavior during their possessions, whereas Protestants, who did not believe in a hierarchy of moral offenses, exhibited a wide range of sinful activities, including disobedience and playing cards. In more general terms, Catholics emphasized the innocence of demoniacs, whereas Protestants stressed their sinfulness. This helps explain why there were far more Catholic than Protestant demoniacs, since admitting one’s guilt might lead to the assumption that they were predestined to eternal damnation.

The incidence of demonic possession declined notably in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the late twentieth century the number of reported cases increased dramatically. Celebrity exorcists in Italy, Poland, and Latin America have been in large part responsible for this increase. The demoniacs who have flocked to these exorcists have not, however, displayed many of the classic symptoms of possession. They have not, for example vomited pins or blasphemed. In most cases they were plagued by medical or psychological problems and have sought the assistance of exorcists who promised to cure them. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remain “The Golden Age” of demonic possession.

How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century, by Tonio Andrade (2008)

by Shery Chanis

Focusing on seventeenth-century Taiwan, the island east of mainland China populated by aborigines who specialized in deer hunting, Tonio Andrade seeks to explore the theme of early modern colonization in a much larger context as part of his greater effort of analyzing global history. According to Andrade, Taiwan, neighboring China, Japan, the Philippines (controlled by Spain), was part of a colonial trade network and soon a focus of contention between the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Japanese and the Chinese.

Employing a variety of sources including travel and missionary accounts from Europeans, official records and correspondence from the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and documents from the Chinese, Andrade discusses the early modern colonization of Taiwan, known as Ilha Hermosa by the Portuguese, La Isla Hermosa by the Spanish, or Formosa by the Dutch. Spain strategically established a colony in northern Taiwan while the Dutch established theirs in the south in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

1640 Dutch map of “Formosa,” the colonial term for Taiwan (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Fort Zeelandia, the Dutch East India Company’s Taiwanese headquarters (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

After Spain’s decreasing interest in Taiwan and their defeat by the Dutch gave it control of the island, the VOC corrected the Spanish mistake of not making their colony self-sufficient by developing an interesting strategy which Andrade calls “co-colonization”. Having determined that it would be too costly to send Dutch to Taiwan, the VOC introduced various incentives including free land, tax exemptions and property rights to attract Chinese from the nearby Fujian province in China to immigrate to Taiwan. The plantation of sugar and rice soon became lucrative business not only for the immigrants but also the VOC. In the process, the VOC also developed a lord-vassal relationship with the aborigines and gained control over the native population. Andrade argues that this co-colonization strategy was a key difference between the Spanish and the Dutch in their colonization efforts in Taiwan. This period of co-colonization between the Dutch and the Chinese was successful so long as the interests of both parties were met. Towards the end of the century, however, the VOC’s tax increase lost the support of the Chinese immigrants, ultimately leading to rebellions from many Chinese settlers and to the Dutch defeat by Zheng Chenggong, the Ming loyalist of great military power.

Dutch sketch of a native “Formosan” circa 1650 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

1661 Dutch engraving of Chinese soldiers in Taiwan (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Andrade’s study of the colonization of Taiwan demonstrates the connections between Europe and Asia, which helps to illustrate a larger picture of early modern colonization beyond the Atlantic world. The multiple European and Asian colonizing powers in Taiwan also highlighted the intricate network of colonization in terms of not only military power but also trading relations and migration patterns. Interestingly, Andrade does not include any maps or other supplementary illustrations in the original/English version of his work, but he does so in the Chinese translation. Even more thought-provoking is the book title of the Chinese version. Instead of How Taiwan Became Chinese, the Chinese title is How Formosa Became Taiwan Prefecture, carrying a much more Sinocentric undertone. Nonetheless, Andrade’s book is a fascinating study on early modern global relations.

Exorcism

by Brian Levack

As I was searching for illustrations for my forthcoming book, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West, I came across a reproduction of a detail of the painting shown here. The painting depicts a young woman being exorcized by a Benedictine monk, who has placed his stole—the garment worn by priests when they were saying Mass or administering the sacraments—around the woman’s neck. The many demons that the monk is exorcizing are shown flying toward the window.

The caption in the German encyclopedia where I found this image identified it only as a panel painting of 1512. After corresponding with the distinguished art historian Charles Zika, I learned about the provenance of the painting and the story behind the scene it depicts. The painting, which was done by an unknown artist from the Danube School in the early sixteenth century, is one of six panel paintings on an altar in the shrine at Zell in the Duchy of Styria. The shrine was named Mariazell because it was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Many demoniacs, i.e. individuals believed to be possessed by demons, either went to the shrine or were brought there to be exorcized. The woman in this painting was brought there in chains in 1370 after she had stabbed her mother, father, and infant to death. Their bodies are shown on the floor to the left of the possessed woman.

Demoniacs exhibited a wide variety of afflictions, including severe fits and seizures, the vomiting of alien objects, temporary blindness and deafness, and bodily contortions that they were incapable of performing under normal circumstances. Demoniacs also claimed that demons tormented them from within, causing them unbearable pain. A demonic assault of this sort had supposedly led this woman to kill the members of her family. Under normal circumstances the woman would have been tried and executed for murder, but it was widely believed at the time that she was possessed by demons, and demoniacs were not morally or legally responsible for their behavior while possessed. The reason for this lack of culpability was that demons reputedly invaded the body of the demoniac and assumed control of its physical movements and mental faculties, including the will. Some physicians in medieval and early modern Europe argued that demoniacs were in fact mentally ill, having fallen victim to one of the three classic psychosomatic illnesses of epilepsy, melancholy, or hysteria. Today, psychiatrists often make similar diagnoses of what others believe to be demonic possessions. There is no evidence that fourteenth-century physicians made such a diagnosis in this woman’s case.

On the wall to the right is a picture of the Virgin Mary, the patron saint of the shrine, to whom Catholic exorcists often appealed to intercede with Christ to expel the demons. The rays emitting from the picture indicate that her intercession was responsible for the deliverance of this woman from demonic control. The man and woman beneath the picture are witnessing the exorcism. Catholics believed that exorcisms were miracles; hence the altar came to be known as the Small Mariazell Miracle Altar. The altar is now located in the Old Gallery of the Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria.

Painting reproduced with permission from the Universalmuseum Joanneum

The Second World War by Antony Beevor (2012)

by Dolph Briscoe IV

Acclaimed British historian Antony Beevor’s recently published The Second World War is a masterful account of the worst conflict in human history, when truly the entire world became engulfed in the flames of war. Having written previously on various aspects of the era, Beevor’s work attempts to synthesize his prior research into a detailed narrative of World War II.

Consisting of over 800 pages, The Second World War is primarily a military and diplomatic history of the war. Beevor provides a brief introduction discussing Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and creation of the Nazi totalitarian state in Germany, as well as Japan’s invasion of China, in the 1930s. The book covers the entire course of World War II, beginning with Nazi Germany’s preparations during 1939 for invading Poland and concluding with American use of atomic bombs to force Japan to surrender. Beevor skillfully describes the military strategies employed by both the Allied and the Axis Powers during the war. He focuses on the particular generals from each country, such as Rommel of Nazi Germany, Zhukov and Chuikov of the Soviet Union, Montgomery of Great Britain, and Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Patton of the United States, contemplating how their individual personalities affected their planning and the course of the war. The author gracefully moves his story from one sphere of the war to another, whether it be Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, China, or the Pacific islands.Hitler attending a Nazi rally (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The leaders of the great powers serve as the major actors in The Second World War. Beevor especially gives much attention to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, and fittingly so, as the vicious battles between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were of central importance in World War II. The author vividly depicts how both dictators possessed excessive vanity and extreme paranoia. Such characteristics contributed to creating brutal totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union. Hitler and Stalin bitterly hated each other, and their mutual loathing influenced the course of the war, according to Beevor. Hitler became obsessed with conquering Stalingrad, believing that the loss of his namesake city would humiliate the Soviet leader. This proved disastrous for the German armies. After Hitler’s suicide at the war’s end, Stalin ordered his men to find his corpse and bring it to the Soviet Union as a final punishment for the Nazi leader. Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt also receive much attention from the author. Churchill possessed dogged determination to ensure Great Britain’s survival, even in the darkest hours of the war. Roosevelt’s pragmatism and moderation helped keep the Allied Powers focused on winning World War II, especially when Churchill and Stalin clashed on matters of military strategy and postwar Europe. Beevor also examines their often complicated relationship with allies Chiang Kai-shek of China and Charles de Gaulle of France, and illustrates the significance of the Emperor to the Japanese people.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin pose for photographs during the Yalta Conference. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)Representatives from the Allied countries meet in Tehran in December 1943. Standing outside the Russian Embassy, left to right: unidentified British officer, General George C. Marshall, Chief of staff of USA, shaking hands with Sir Archibald Clark Keer, British Ambassador to the USSR, Harry Hopkins, Marshal Stalin’s interpreter, Marshal Josef Stalin, Foreign minister Molotov, General Voroshilov. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Stalingrad ablaze (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The author vividly depicts the unprecedented violence and cruelty of World War II. Soldiers fought to sheer exhaustion in harsh climates. Civilians in China, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Germany suffered from widespread rape, looting, and murder at the hands of enemy armies. Hundreds of thousands of people became refugees and prisoners of war. Starvation affected millions around the world. Bombing raids devastated cities and countryside. Atomic bombs destroyed two Japanese cities and radiation caused lasting health problems for many people in Japan. Stalin’s paranoia led to vicious purges of both real and imagined enemies. And most infamously, Hitler and Nazi Germany conducted genocide against Jews in Europe. Beevor fully describes this horror, discussing concentration camps, sickening medical experiments performed on Jews, and how virulent anti-Semitism and propaganda caused most Germans to ignore these crimes against humanity perpetrated around them. Beevor’s accounts of the brutalities of World War II, especially the Holocaust, reminds readers how hatred can lead to sadism and true evil.

A bombed Hiroshima (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Aerial view of Nagasaki before the Allied bombing (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Aerial view of Nagasaki after the Allied bombing (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Antony Beevor’s The Second World War is a most welcome addition to the vast historiography on World War II. With great skill Beevor narrates the military and diplomatic events of this war while also examining the terrible human suffering of these years. Readers interested in World War II, military history, and international relations will benefit from reading this fine book about the most consequential event of the twentieth century.

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The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe, by Glynis Ridley (2010)

by Laurie Wood

In late 1774 or early 1775, a woman named Jeanne Baret became the first woman to have circumnavigated the globe, landing in France after nearly a decade of global travel that took her from provincial France to places like Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, and Mauritius. Her story, a fellow traveler noted, should “be included in a history of famous women.”

Jeanne Baret had been born in the town of Autun in 1740 to a father was a day laborer, so she grew up poor in a rural area where her family would have worked for the local landlords in the fields. In this environment, Baret became an herb woman, an expert at identifying, gathering, and preparing useful plants to cure illnesses. Her work led her to meet Philibert Commerson, a naturalist, who relied on her expertise for his own projects and who took her to Paris as his aide and mistress. Baret’s story is fraught with intrigue and deception. She accompanied Commerson around the world on the famous expedition of Antoine de Bougainville, but only by disguising herself as a man. Commerson and Baret collaborated on this endeavor: Commerson left behind a misleading will that named Baret as Commerson’s heir if he died to conceal their journey together.

In the late eighteenth century, the French government sent many naturalists like Commerson to the South America, Madagascar, and Indonesia in search of spices and useful plants to be cultivated by enslaved Africans working on plantations in their overseas colonies. Sugar and coffee had already been established as cash crops in colonies like Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), so a new wave of explorers and scientists sought other plants to replicate these successes. In the Indian Ocean, French botanists and colonial leaders sought to transplant spices from the East Indies onto their own colonies of Mauritius and Réunion, undercutting the Dutch spice trade. Baret’s expeditions were part of a global scientific endeavor designed to cultivate profitable commodities like pepper and coffee in order to strengthen the French imperial economy. However, Baret’s story also shows that this wider project was carried out by individuals who applied local knowledge and experience, gleaned from days spent in French fields and forests, to new and uncertain environments many miles away from home.

Several journals by members of the Bougainville expedition have survived. They described a variety of supporting characters: the conniving surgeon Vivès (Commerson’s rival and Baret’s possible rapist), the androgynous Prince of Nassau-Siegen, clad in a velvet robe and high-heeled slippers, and Aotourou, the Tahitian who publicly acknowledged Baret as a woman and later accompanied Bougainville back to France. The author of this book about Baret, Glynis Ridley, notes a surprising lack of information about Baret in these journals. The Étoile’s close quarters and long voyage make it difficult to imagine that Baret’s secret could have been kept for long, but only one journalist, the antagonistic surgeon Vivès, mentioned her before the landing in Tahiti.

Philibert Commerson

In places where the historical trail is broken, Ridley provides plausible speculations. Why did Jeanne Baret sign up to go on the expedition? Without Commerson’s support, Baret lacked a home and an income (she worked as his housekeeper officially). Who first recognized Jeanne Baret as a woman? The official story was that the Tahitian chief Aotourou identified her as a cross-dresser, though Vivès’s diary makes it clear that several crew members suspected that she was a woman much sooner. Most likely, some people realized that Jean was, in fact, Jeanne, but knew that to expose her would invite a violent assault on her. Bougainville determinedly relegated Baret’s discovery to a page, refusing to acknowledge it as more than a passing incident, but Ridley insists that she was gang raped by crew members on the island of New Ireland in the South Pacific in 1768.

Antoine de Bougainville

Like other early modern French women, Jeanne Baret lived in a society in which men wielded considerable power and women were frequently excluded from historical records. Capable as a botanist, but most likely illiterate, Baret’s story has been preserved through the testimony of men like Commerson and Bougainville who wrote about her alongside journal entries about navigation and botany, though she did leave one manuscript list of medicinal plants behind. Though Baret’s discoveries were noted by the designation of a genus named Baretia, it was later renamed so that now only plants discovered by Commerson remain acknowledged by taxonomy. To understand Baret’s life thus requires readers to follow the complicated and treacherous path she took herself and that Ridley has painstakingly reconstructed.

http://lesamisdebougainville.wifeo.com/images/l/lab/La-Boudeuse-Fregate-2.jpg

Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s frigate

Ridley excels at linking together historical evidence to tell Baret’s story through the imagined eyes of Jeanne Baret. The travel journals of Vivès, Commerson, and others are supplemented with information about the geography and politics of the places and people Baret encountered. Ridley weaves together a narrative of Baret’s journey with fascinating tidbits about scientific discoveries like beaked dolphins and the Bougainvillea—a plant that Ridley argues was, in fact, discovered by Baret herself. Fans of travel literature and science writing will appreciate this story, for the description and detail of Baret’s experiences in places like Rio de Janeiro and Tahiti, as well as the many plants and animals she encountered. Readers interested in the history of women will likewise appreciate the way Baret’s story illuminates the opportunities and challenges faced by European women in the eighteenth century.

Photo credits:

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Yarico’s Story

by Jessica Wolcott Luther

The original story of Yarico is from Richard Ligon’s 1657, A True and Exact History of Barbados:

This Indian dwelling neer the Sea-coast, upon the Main, an English ship put in to a Bay, and sent some of her men a shoar, to try what victualls or water they could finde, for in some distresse they were:

But the Indians perceiving them to go up so far into the Country, as they were sure they could not make a safe retreat, intercepted them in their return, and fell upon them, chasing them into a Wood, and being dispersed there, some were taken, and some kill’d:

but a young man amongst them stragling from the rest, was met by this Indian Maid, who upon the first sight fell in love with him, and hid him close from her Countrymen (the Indians) in a Cave, and there fed him, till they could safely go down to the shoar, where the ship lay at anchor, expecting the return of their friends.

But at last, seeing them upon the shoar, sent the long-Boat for them, took them aboard, and brought them away. But the youth, when he came ashoar in the Barbadoes, forgot the kindnesse of the poor maid, that had ventured her life for his safety, and sold her for a slave, who was as free born as he: And so poor Yarico for her love, lost her liberty.

Ligon’s work was the only comprehensive text published about the English Caribbean throughout the entire seventeenth century. His text was widely read and often quoted. There is no indication from Ligon’s text if his account of Yarico is based on actual people or simply an allegory for how the English treated the native Carib people on Barbados.

Richard Steele, an author and editor of the daily publication The Spectator, picked up the story in 1711 (issue 11 on March 13, 1711). He expanded and elaborated it into the version that became popular during the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.

In his version, he names the Englishman Inkle and describes him as a 20-year-old who was schooled by his father early in life in the “love of gain.” The ship, on its way to Barbados, came under some distress and “put into a Creek on the Main in America, in search of provisions.” There, he met Yarico.

They appeared mutually agreeable to each other. If the European was highly charmed with the Limbs, Features, and wild Graces of the Naked American; the American was no less taken with the Dress, Complexion, and Shape of an European, covered from Head to Foot. The Indian grew immediately enamoured of him, and consequently solicitous for his Preservation.

She hid him and cared for him. “In this manner did the Lovers pass away their Time, till they had learn’d a Language of their own.” They lived this way for a few months. Then Yarico, instructed by Inkle, flagged down a shipped on the coast. When they found out it was traveling to Barbados, Inkle was ecstatic.

It ends thusly:

To be short, Mr. Thomas Inkle, now coming into English territories, began seriously to reflect upon his loss of Time, and to weigh with himself how many Days Interest of his Mony he had lost during his stay with Yarico. This Thought made the Young Man very pensive, and careful what Account he should be able to give his Friends of his Voyage. Upon which considerations, the prudent and frugal young Man sold Yarico to a Barbadian merchant; notwithstanding that the poor Girl, to incline him to commiserate her Condition, told him that she was with Child be him: But he only made use of that Information, to rise in his Demands upon the Purchaser.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, at least 60 versions of the story were published and there were a number of translations (according to Frank Felsenstein). It was made into an opera, a play, rendered in the form of a poem, and was retold many, many times.

While we will never know the veracity of this particular story about this particular indigenous woman (though it’s fair to say that Steele’s additions were fictitious), it does tell us a lot about how the British thought about hierarchy, gender, and the fraught relationship between the British and the people that they enslaved. Yarico shows that from some of the earliest decades of English settlement, there was an uneasiness about the exploitation of other people and the easy slippage between “free” and “enslaved.”

Also, it draws attention specifically to the plight of enslaved women. Yarico’s tale shows how complicated personal relationships were (and are) in a society were power is so unequally distributed. One cannot doubt that there would have been many an enslaved African or indigenous woman sold into slavery by men who had shown them affection, even love. Steele’s version in particular lays bare the almost unimaginable reality in the life of an enslaved woman: her dual role of producer and re-producer, her value was as much in her ability to do the work of a male slave as in the ability of her body to reproduce the next generation of slaves.

You may also enjoy:

Zach Doleshal’s podcast interview with Jessica Luther

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