There's Beauty in the Bellow

We watched the BBC's Tudor Monastery Farm with the unstoppable Ruth Goodman several months ago. We've watched the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube but something about Tudor Monastery Farm -- maybe because of William T. Cavanaugh's lectures -- has stuck. Maybe because Ruth, Peter, and Tom explain the techniques of our forebears in more detail than the gentleman on Primitive Technology. Tudor Monastery Farm (such a mouthful!) challenges what we mean by Primitive. "Primitive" encompasses a vast range for us on this side of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Cave men living in caves to Roman aqueducts and Gothic Cathedrals. If you mean simple tools, well maybe yes, all those things are primitive. If you mean ignorant, most certainly not. The Medievals may not have understood the human body as seen under a microscope. But they most certainly knew what boiling water, salt, and sunlight could do. They wasted nothing. If their tools were simple, the...

I'm reading Richard B Sewall's biography of Emily Dickinson and I have particularly enjoyed the attention that he gives to her education. Dickinson may not have had a multitude surrounding her telling her that she could be anything she wanted but she was far better educated than most people today. Regardless of whether her father, Edward Dickinson (Sewell disputes this), cut a foreboding figure, he believed that his daughters ought to receive an education. He doesn't appear to be particularly unique in this matter. Emily attended Holyoke with her cousin. Sewall offers no hints that the young women at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke were a controversial presence. Emily had several textbooks written by women -- and not on embroidery either. On botany . Science . Emily and the headmistress of Holyoke College, Mary Lyon, probably received a more rigorous education in a shorter period of time than we, for all our 16+ years of schooling. When Mary Lyon died (only a few mo...

History is the people's discipline—the only academic subject that demands no special professional training. Some of my favorite history books are by lawyers, journalists, scientists and nuns. To write well about history you do not need a Ph.D., just a few rare but accessible qualities: insatiable curiosity, critical intellect, disciplined imagination, indefatigability in the pursuit of truth and a slightly weird vocation for trying to get to know dead people by studying the sources they have left us. . . . . . . . . . I suspect, however, that the very virtues of my discipline are responsible for the vices of the writers who abuse it. Because history is the people's discipline, books about it are relatively salable—invitingly so, to indolent cupidity. History's accessibility to non-specialists makes it seem dangerously, delusively easy. From " Faulty Navigators ," a review and entertaining rant on four (inadequate) books on Columbus by Felipe Fernández-Armesto...