I've been trying to figure out how big of a problem deer posed to farmers in 5th and early 6th century England, this week. The results of my research are frustrating many of my preconceptions, which is great (I love when I have an idea that I know is right, and the sources flat-out tell me I'm an idiot - it restores my faith in the importance of research).

I'm most interested in tree farming. In the early Anglo-Saxon period, tree saplings were used for all sorts of things: the walls of wattle-and-daub houses, baskets, even spear shafts (which were often cut from custom-grown straight saplings instead of being trimmed down from a full-grown tree plank like modern dowels are).

The easiest way to produce a high quanitity of straight, useful saplings and withies is to coppice: to carefully chop a tree down to ground level, which the tree responds to by sending up dozens of new shoots which, because the tree is really freaked out and doesn't want to die, grow much more rapidly (as much as 10x in some species) than normal saplings would. Done right, copicing can get you useful shoots for weaving baskets and house walls in a few years. It's also a really efficient way to grow firewood rapidly, if you don't have a massive forest to exploit.

We don't know for sure the people were coppicing in the early Anglo-Saxon period, but the quantity of saplings they were using suggests it was very likely.

But my question is this: I know that deer love eating new shoots on trees. It's their default food when they can get it, and all evidence points to their being healthy red and roe deer populations in England in the early Anglo-Saxon period. Coppice stands have got to be deer magnets: they're full of fresh, new shoots. And a herd of deer could easily wipe out a year's crop. So what kept deer from eating all the coppices?

The obvious answer is, you have to hunt the deer. I thought this was very clever, because the larger argument I'm trying to make is about male warrior society, and especially the role of spears. If managing deer populations is necessary for keeping a roof over your head (or, at least, walls on the sides of your buildings), bands of men with weapons can be completely reinterpreted as hunting clubs, fulfilling a really essential social role. It's an important missing piece of the puzzle, and helps explain why images of hunting are so important in late antique art, and why imagery of wild beasts like wolves are all over early Anglo-Saxon warriors' art: hunting was a crucial part of their identity.

And then I looked at the evidence, and was very startled to find that the bone assemblages from 5-7th century England show almost zero evidence for the consumption of wild animals. We have a ton (almost literally) of bone surviving from this period, most of it from trash heaps in settlements. The vast majority is from cattle, sheep, and pigs, and shows clear evidence of butchery (you can still see the cut marks on the bones). You also see the occasional cat and dog (who would have lived in the farm and, once dead, were sometimes thrown into the rubbish heap, though there are also many cases of dogs being buried with more ceremony and care), and some horse (some of which was eaten). But less than 1% of the bones come from wild animals. And most of the deer bones found are antlers (which can be picked up in the woods after they've been shed); there is almost no evidence for deer being butchered and eaten.

So early Anglo-Saxons either butchered deer in the woods, bringing none of the bones home with them (which would be unusual but interesting, since it would be a stark difference from the way they consumed the rest of their meat). Or they didn't hunt. At all, basically.

After the 7th century, you do see more evidence of hunting, and this has developed into aristocratic hobby of game parks and legal restrictions that we all know about from Robin Hood (you can't shoot the deer, they're the king's!) by the late 10th or early 11th century.

But before that, there's simply no good evidence for hunting as a regular part of people's lives, even among the elite, for about 200 years.

So how did they keep the deer away from their young trees (and their other crops - red and roe deer will also eat wheat if it's on the menu)?

The answer was, perhaps, there in the piles of bone that did survive: all Anglo-Saxon settlements had dogs (biggish dogs). And, if you know deer and dogs, you'll understand what an effective deterent that might well have been. Instead of culling the deer herds to keep them away from their fields and copses, did the early Anglo-Saxons chase them away with packs of what were basically tamed wolves?

If you want to read more about early Anglo-Saxon hunting, look up basically anything by Naomi Sykes, but especially her overview of the zooarch evidence in the Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, or her fascinating study of Deer, Land, Knives, and Halls

A bit late for this, but oh well. Here's my reading list of stuff I've either read this week or am planning to read within the next month, half of them are articles and most of them you can find on, eg, the Medievalist website.

The stuff which isn't to do with my current subject but is to do with Capital punishment: Rape In Medieval England: A Historical and Sociological Study, John Marshall Carter. This is REALLY interesting. For anyone interested in gender history, women's history, sexual history, legal history etc etc, this is for you.

The laws of Salian Franks, Katherine Fischer Drew (which sounds interesting but haven't got round to yet).

Law and Society in Early Medieval Europe: Studies in Legal History (legal history tells you so, so much about the society it's in and yet people seem to think it's all dry dusty court documents and a ton of executions. I'd say this was too Western European centric for the title to be correct, though).

Germanic Kinship Structure: Studies in Law and Society in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (kinship is such an important part of law systems around the world, from early Germanic law to the pre colonial gacaca courts of Rwanda, but this was honestly one of the best studies I've read on it, I'd reccomend it for anyone, interested in legal history or kinship structures or not- the history of kinship in Germanic cultures has had an undeniable effect on Western Europe).

The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, Frederick L. Attenborough is something I want to read but haven't had the time yet. And although it's not my area of research, it would be useful providing historical context for English laws, I suppose...and it looks interesting. Just need to read it, I suppose.

Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, James Brundage. This one was super interesting. How does Medieval Europe deal with sexual crimes? What is a sexual crime? was a sexual crime considered worse than a non sexual crime? How would a victim extract compensation or recompense- through fines, revenge through eg execution, or through marrying the rapist to ensure honour? This was why I was mainly reading it but it is about far, far more than sexual crimes in the legal system, expanding into how sex was seen across Medieval Europe, how the views changed between cultures and between the massive time frame that is the start and end of Medieval Europe, etc etc.

Criminal Judgement Through the Ages: From a Divine Judgement to Modern German Legislation. I want to read this. I'm really getting into Germanic legal and criminal history, and it's got so much written about it, which is lucky.

Ceremonial execution and public rewards: some historical scenes on New Kingdom private stelae, by Alan R. Schulman. Got it saved on my reading list. Don't know anything about Ancient Egypt, so it should be interesting.

On the sacral origin of the Germanic death penalties, by Folke Ström. The title is pretty self explanatory, there's nothing much to say about it.

The stuff I read or need to get on and read, which is to do with my research: The London hanged: crime and civil society in the eighteenth century, by Peter Linebaugh. (Not read. Need to).

Honour and violence, by Anton Blok. Wherever you look in historical law, honour is usually a massive part of the legal system. Restoring and defending honour, dishonouring criminals, honour killings and family feuds, honour is everywhere. The idea of honour meant rape survivors marrying their rapists by court order (and often, apparently, willingly). The idea of honour has led to countless murders and deaths, it's been responsible for changing execution styles and so on.

The justice and the mare’s ale: law and disorder in seventeenth-century England, by Alan Macfarlane and Sarah Harrison. (Not read, need to).

Criminality and narrative in eighteenth-century England: beyond the law, by Hal Gladfelder. How criminals and criminality are seen in societies will have a massive effect on the legal system of course. In eighteenth century England, the narrative surrounding criminality and crime is very interesting. Are criminals evil sinners? Are they victims who can be saved through religion? What is criminality? How do you depict a criminal in a story, what makes a criminal a criminal? The answer to the last question might just be 'breaking the law', in eighteenth century England, a criminal would have a certain shape of chin and maybe watery eyes etc etc which help define him as a criminal, and are part of the ways English society created their narrative of criminality. It's highly relevant for a time when some members of society see anyone wearing a hijab as a potential terrorist...

And the stuff which isn't connected at all: I've reread Courtesans and Fishcakes which is a fun read and really interesting. I'm also starting on The Historical Figure of Jesus, by EP Sanders which isn't as fun a read tbh thanks to writing style, but is definitely interesting.

Hi, undergrad here, i do have a bunch of requests for good sources for some of my modules and research

For those knowledgeable in Chinese history, could anyone recommend a source on Chinese women during the Han dynasty?

For those who have some knowledge of medicine and disease, is there a good book on the history of Scurvy? I keep seeing references on the internet that we constantly forgot what the cure was, but best i can do is an unsourced wiki paragraph.

Lastly, for those who have some expertise in environmental history, i was thinking of using Ian Morris' Why the West Rules - For Now (which i've read) and Crobsy's Biological Imperialism (which i'm going to) as a basis for comparing the historiography of environmental history. Are they decent books,or could i do with better sources?

#The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds by Martha Feldman, 2015

I finished this waaay back in June, but this review took forever to write, I could never quite put my feelings down correctly. This is the first overview-level book on the castrati to come out since Patrick Barbier’s French Histoire des Castrats in 1989, which was translated into English in 1997, and that’s kinda a sweeping pop-history fun-bag of opera anecdotes, so they’re not really comparable. So, what this is, absolutely, is the first modern academic book about the castrati that is not a biography of a single castrato. And that’s pretty incredible, and completely testimony to how far musicology has come since then. Celebrate this book simply for its existence! However, the book's’ uniqueness also means I had the weird knowledge before reading that no matter what the quality is like, I’m probably going to be shuffling unsuspecting people off with this book as a must-read for the next 25 years or so, lacking any academic miracles. So let’s take a look at what every student of the castrati is going to be citing for the next quarter century.

The book is organized into three sections: “Reproduction,” “Voice,” and “Half-light,” which would be more conventionally titled something like Birth, Voice, and Death, as they cover first the cultural situation that created the castrato, then an excellent working summary of what forensic reconstructions we can do of the castrato voice, and finally the denouement of the castrato phenomenon in the 19th century. A perfectly sensible structure for an overview and introduction to the castrato in Western music, and it works.

Overall, this book is primarily focused on the castrato as an object, not as a person. You will not get to know any particular castrato in this book, except maybe Filippo Balatri, whose claim to fame is being the only castrato to write an autobiography, which she quotes generously. The castrati you meet in this book are misty figures, who exist only on an abstract plane of gender and social role, in generalities about castrati and their inevitable contractions, just names washing over you in a mass. Sometimes a good history book can make you look right through time to meet a fellow human’s eyes, to see their joy, pain, and life; to maybe to see a piece their story in your own; and to leave with their name forever etched upon the ventricles of your heart. Or something less silly, you know what I mean. This is not that kind of book. It’s highly successful as an academic introduction to the castrati, ranging from masculinities theories to vocal theories to literary theories, but if you’re looking at it as possibly the only book someone may ever read about them, it’s sad that it’s so impersonal. On a doing-history level I almost prefer Barbier, who makes the castrati a bit silly but at least flesh and blood beings, not mannequins.

Unfortunately, Feldman still has the same problem from her earlier works holding her back from writing a perfect mic-drop academic book: her writing is really bad. Unnecessarily bad. And ironically, it’s actually covering up some very good history.

On a macro-level, Feldman’s writing has always struck me as a bit too cute. “Cute” in that particular negative sense of the word that people don’t use much any more, like “don’t get cute with the IRS, you’ll get audited.” She names her chapters things like “Cold Man, Money Man, Big Man Too” and “The Man Who Pretended to Be Who He Was” when she could just as easily name them slightly more useful things like “Denouncing Castration: Romantic Understandings of the Male Body” and “Cultural Significance of Origin Myths of the Castrati.”

The good news is that Feldman’s writing has I think actually gotten better in general, having read her last book. In the first section of The Castrato she gets downright lucid and you can read that part pretty easily. The bad news is it’s still terrible: the other two sections of the book were a tossed word-salad punishment and I had to slog through it at a dogged pace of about 10 pages a day. Here’s an actual sentence she actually put in the book:

The sound I hope is coming into focus, through manmade and highly variable, nevertheless produced some physiological constants, transhistorical in kind even if culturally contingent because much varied across the population.

This sentence fascinated me more than it should have. It stirred so many feelings inside me, and then so many questions, starting with what. Is editing dead? What happened to the subject after the first clause? What is “transhistorical?” Has anyone really been far as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

But does this sentence at least make sense in context you may rightly ask? No, that is the start of a subsection, the chapter-end summary of her analysis of the castrato voice, which had until that point had been relatively straight-forward. That sentence is an opening salvo, a shot across the bow, warning that the (ab)use of English that's about to follow is not for the faint-hearted. Behold this sentence. Drink it in.

Annnnnyway. Enough bagging on the bad writing, even though it’s always fun to do that.

For the actual history: it is actually pretty close to perfect, once you dig through the alphabet soup marshes to find it. There’s a couple of places where I would disagree with her analysis, though that’s fine of course. The largest one is that I find her analysis of the “Death of the Castrati” right before the 19th century is too dependant on traditional notions of Romantic sensibilities, and her dismissal of John Rosselli’s claim that the end of the castrati is tied primarily to economic recovery in Italy, in favor of her own idea which is that it is tied to the death of patronage systems and patriarchal social systems, is too hasty and not well-supported. You can’t write off Rosselli without very extensive effort, Rosselli was a trememndous ranging mind who only by divine providence fell into academia in later life, and even if you choose to ignore his opera-economics work, with one article he established himself as the father of modern academic castrology. You must respek knuckles to Rosselli. But there’s little things like that, nothing technically wrong, just differences of academic interpretation.

A good book for sure, and very groundbreaking, but recommended with reservations. Feldman is brilliant, an astonishing mind, earns her fellowship and then some, and I’d like to pay her to think for me.... but I wouldn’t let her write the copy for the back of a Cinnamon Toast Crunch box.

I wasn't planning on writing anything today but /u/caffarelli's reviews and notes on writing style got me thinking.

I'd recently been flicking back through the latest volume (6, published last year) of RW Davies' mammoth Industrialisation of Soviet Russia series for some data. This is an effort that stretches back to 1980 and is the spiritual successor to EH Carr's magisterial History of Soviet Russia, which Davies also worked on. Over the decades the field has seen plenty of controversies and shifts but Davies has kept plugging away at providing detailed breakdowns of the Soviet economy on an almost quarter-by-quarter basis. Want to know anything about Soviet industry or agriculture from 1929 to (eventually) 1939? He's is your man.

As you can probably tell, I'm a fan. There are important limitations to this 'needlework' approach but in a field that often thrives on controversy, Davies is a reassuring presence. His latest work is no exception: The Years of Progress covers the 'three good years' of the 2FYP, 1934-36. It's an impressive work of research, particularly for an author who recently turned 90.

Anyways. The point is that these are dense economic works for specialists. But Davies writes well, in that very functional style that was popular in 20th C Britain. I'd never recommend one of these books to someone as an introduction but the challenge is primarily digesting the nuances and information presented. Once you're au fait with that you can step through them fairly quickly. Or maybe I'm just used to the jargon.

Regardless, one of Davies' most endearing (and frustrating) traits is his absolute refusal to play to narrative conventions. He'll start a book, work through the topics/periods he wants to cover and then stop. For example, the conclusions to Years of Progress ends with the below:

This did not of course mean that the central authorities paid little attention to the role of costs and prices. A determined effort was made throughout these years to reduce costs and, except for the drastic changes due to the abolition of food rationing in 1934-35, cost reductions and productivity increases were a major aspect of these years, a striking contrast to developments in the early 1930s.

That's it. No sappy sign-off, no thoughts turning to the future, no claim to relevance today. Just a comment on prices to be followed by 40 pages of economic tables and another 12 of glossary. (The latter being invaluable if you want to tell the difference between, say, Narkomoboronprom, Narkompishcheprom and Narkomtyazhprom.) And that's where the next volume (fingers crossed) will pick up.

Maybe it's just me but I find that bluntness comforting, even as it hints at the work's limitations.

I've had the good fortune to discover that a book has been released which may provide a good foundation for the work I'm starting to do now. It deals with the philosophy and practice of geography in the context of German colonialism: Carsten Gräber, Die Erforschung der Kolonien: Expeditionen und koloniale Wissenkultur deutscher Geographen, 1884-1919 (Bielefeld: Transcript-verlag, 2015). It's apparently a release of his Dec 2012 doctoral thesis in history and sociology at Konstanz, but I did not know of it before. This will be reading while I am on an airplane to southern Africa, though I am skimming through it now. Hopefully it is merely enlightening and helpful as I prepare to plunder the collections at Berlin-Lichterfelde and Frankfurt-am-Main, and not actually stealing all the thunder.

Other than that, I'm busy collecting my preparations for the big trip. The new tripod arrived for the camera, which should be light enough to cart around although I doubt it will leave South Africa as I travel regionally. It's a Manfrotto 190PRO x4 with the 90-degree rotating vertical arm and a nice tilt/pan head, but I also bought an extension bar so I can get the camera up higher and use the new macro lens on maps and sketches. If I can, I'll take a picture of the set-up--though I might try to set it up before I go, too, just to test everything together instead of individually. Being an academic with documented qualifications means I can actually set up this apparatus in archives and use it, which is great. Lots of spare batteries and some unobtrusive, soft side lighting will I hope do the rest.

[Edit: After next week, I may prepare posts for this section talking about research experiences for the week--I will be on a far-ranging expedition (possibly multinational) in a part of the world where historians often find it difficult to get access and orient themselves. So it will be less reading, more research, in some very strange places--observatories, garden sheds, unlit basements, you name it.]