Today:
Saturday Reading and Research will focus on exactly that: the history you have been reading this week and the research you've been working on. It's also the prime thread for requesting books on a particular subject. As with all our weekly features, this thread will be lightly moderated.
So, encountered a recent biography of Stalin that revealed all about his addiction to ragtime piano? Delved into a horrendous piece of presentist and sexist psycho-evolutionary mumbo-jumbo and want to tell us about how bad it was? Need help finding the right book to give the historian in your family? Then this is the thread for you!
Research this week involved digging through musty old pulp fanzines for information on Virginia "Nanek" Anderson - who, despite living in a remote Wisconsin town during the Great Depression managed to correspond with some of the great pulp writers of the 40s. She's also one of the first female poets of the Cthulhu Mythos. More in my blog post "Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1942) by Virginia Anderson and "The Woods of Averoigne" (1934) by Grace Stillwell
I'm hiding from all sports this weekend by burying myself in the amazing essays and artwork contained in the V&A's At Home In Renaissance Italy collection. Some writers whose work on Renaissance Italian material culture I've already enjoyed and a whole lot of stuff that's both fabulous and new to me. (I especially love the section on childhood and education -- one of the things that first sparked my interest in this subreddit was a thread that mentioned children pretending to preside over the Mass as a form of pious play/preparation for a priestly vocation in adulthood and Patricia Fortini Brown talks about just that, complete with play-pretend vestments!) It's a massive coffee-table-book-type tome and I think I need to own it. If you're an artist or just interested in domestic visuals it's also a visual feast in the weirdest ways.
I'm also reading about medieval and Early Modern witchcraft, in particular the figure of the male witch and texts that aren't Malleus Maleficarum, and about depictions of Italian-ness in Early Modern English drama -- Italian otherness and cruelty in Merchant of Venice/Othello, Italian incest and lycanthropy in Duchess of Malfi.
Does anybody have any recs for reading about lycanthropy as understood or depicted in a particular historical time and place? Whether we're talking Universal horror, 12th century bisexual French shapeshifters, or speculation about the Beast of Gévaudan, I'm on board.
So, in an update to my comment last week about Smith being much kinder to Ward than Platt, it turns out there was a massive 'except...' that I had missed. Basically, both give him the same motive – money. The only difference is that Smith rates his military capabilities more highly, and even then with the caveat that he got massive amounts of British help.