Soooo I’ve lately been engaged in some hard-core rivet-counting, which is, as far as it is possible, to find and record every darn castrato that ever sang a note in Europe. To catch them is my real test, to index them my cause, a.k.a., My pokemans: let me show you them.

Back in Sept 2014 I shared my 2014 summer project which was making a basic dataset on castrati and messing around with it to look for evidence for and against some of the received wisdom about the castrati, mainly 1) the rate of adoption of the phenomenon 2) the time and rate of decline of the castrati, and 3) their geographic origins. Basically since then I have been stumbling around in a daze, for I can no longer support anything I once took as historical fact about them. Data: fun for the whole family!

So I’ve kept picking at this thing off and on since I posted that, unsurprisingly it long ago ceased to be a summer project and started becoming more of a lifestyle choice. I’ve scoured the bowels of published Hofkapelle payment registers and cathedral choir listings, I’ve cross-checked indices of opera libretti and musical academy membership rosters, I’ve plunged the depths of the prosopography research experience, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Occasionally I get stuck and think, surely I won’t find any more castrati, I’ve found all the recorded ones available in published sources, but there is an odd snowball effect to this dictionary-building, where when you find one solid pocket of leads it tends to point you to 3 or 4 more, a hydra-head of sources… Buuuut in a year and a few months my dataset has swollen from about 300 to about 700 dudes now. And I am decidedly not yet at the end of the road.

So at the 700 mark, how have my observations from Sept 2014 held up? Not bad so far!

Shitty graph of birthdates + inferred date of castration

The 1640 castration-boom is still there, and the steep drop off in castration after 1770 still holds, but is a little less steep as I’ve found a few more men likely castrated around 1780s. Early and late castrati remain the toughest to research, early ones tend to hide in plain sight among falsettists, late ones tend to hide under euphemisms, or even trickier, silence. (The addition of all the 19th century castrati of the Sistine Choir was probably the only solid data I’m likely to get for that.) I highlighted the 1800 peak because these boys would have been castrated in the time of Napoleon in Italy, which is usually cited as a stop point in musical castration because it was against Napoleonic legal code… clearly not so much.

One strange thing I’m finding is that this graph isn’t smoothing out too well, even after I’ve more than doubled the data points, and I had just kinda assumed it would. This may indicate some problems in my data collection method, which is not at all systematic, and I’m just not collecting a fair sample of castrati… OR, considering how the biggest peaks seem to have survived scaling from 300 to 700 castrati, I may have hit on something with this, and musical castration may have gone through a couple of vogues and recessions in its lifetime, which is something that has not been discussed in the literature. I’m not sure yet.

On to geography… In my 700 Club (which is much better than that other 700 Club) I know the hometown of slightly more than half of them, about 360.

In addition to a basic all-time map of castrati I split the maps into 3 time periods:

• early (everyone born through the decade of 1640) castrati
• “full flower” castrati (born 1650-1750)
• late castrati (everybody post 1750)

For the purpose of seeing if there were any interesting shifts over time. Which there were!

One, Naples has definitely been unfairly maligned in history as No. 1 Castrato Town, when in fact, it boasts less hometown castrati than many other cities. The Florence-Pistoia area emerges as the real castration hotbed, in fact, do not go to Pistoia, it is/was not even a large city, I do not know if something was in the water there or what but good god damn.

Two, early castrati were the most geographically diverse, with the most examples of the “rare” non-Italian castrati, while the full flower period tightened the reigns on that and made the castrato a unique Italian export product. The late period shows the most evidence for the usual conception of castrati coming from the south and Rome area. As most of our explicit primary sources on musical castration (like Charles Burney) are from the late period, this makes some sense.

Anyway. That’s what’s up with my pokemans.

Any environmental/animal historians around? I've talked before about some of the unique aspects of the whaling histories, from the non-traditional authors (most recent whaling scholarship has originated from the minds of scientists, rather than traditional historical academia) to viewing sources from a non-human angle (matching up the human sources, things like ship logs and written works on whale-human interaction, with what we biologically know about whales).

I'm curious as to how one 'does history' with these not so standard problems and solutions. Is there a prevalent historiography that tackles histories of animals, the environment, and how humanity has interacted with these?

Alright, time for a personal plug. My name is Joshua Justice. I co-host a history new(ish) podcast called Beyond Footnotes. Every other Friday myself and host Ryan Wisnor interview different professors, grad students and other historians (mostly at Portland State, but we have upcoming guests from other universities) about the subjects of their research. We're about 7 episodes in and I think improving with every show. You can listen live by heading to KPSU.org on Fridays at 2pm PST or you can stream/download the episodes from our Soundcloud page.

Note: Yes, I did run promoting this by the mods and got the okay.

Since I was not able to participate in the counter-demonstration against the right-wing extremist ball in Vienna tonight, have a historically themed song about 1848 in Vienna

I saw this article from Smithsonian Magazine stating that the Babylonians (or at least a Babylonian) were using a form of geometry/pre-calculus several centuries before anyone thought they were used. Kind of interesting even if I hardly understand it.

And this image from the article gives me a lot more respect for the people who decipher and read cuneiform.

EDIT: Just found the original article in Science.

So there's a reddit meetup in my area tomorrow, but I don't feel like going; I don't feel particularly up to it, and I'd rather curl up at home while ensuring the supremacy of the Venetian Empire over the lesser peoples.

On the other hand, my parents are positively bristling with "son, when will you put our minds at ease and get married?" speeche every time I drop by.

Wat do?

Uuurgh, I didn't manage to get much work done on my dissertation over the last week, but as I mention in my latest blog entry, I'm not too discouraged...I had a lot of stuff distracting me (the least serious would be my fridge not working; my family has been trying and trying to get people to come and fix it but no luck D: ) so I could barely write anything. What I did manage to do, though, was outlines for a couple of chapters, so I'm not wholly displeased, next week things should go much better :D

Recently I saw the new Leo DiCaprio movie The Revenant. In the movie at a certain point Leo (or Leo's character) finally makes his way back to this little tiny fort set up on the edge of nowhere for the fur trappers. In this scene they show a log cabin with glass pane windows. My question is how are these windows possible at this location? Glass breaks easy, so I can't imagine it was transported from the east cost. It's made from melting sand and these guys were essentially in the middle of the woods. Was this a real thing, or is this just a hollywood historical misstep? Thanks to anyone who has any info! I know it's an odd question.

Can anyone recommend a good biography on Rasputin?

how much(percentage) of the general population transitioned to factories over farming during the "Industrial Revolution", thanks :D