This week, I have two responses to deleted threads on the docket -- one a partial repost of a much earlier question by /u/thoriginal and one simply deleted. Let's get down to business!

I give unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture.

(Or, if you prefer: I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture. That's right, wief.)

This one sentence with its mention of William Shakespeare's second-best bed is the smoking gun, indeed the holy grail of Shakespeare studies -- or is it? It's certainly one of the recurring controversies of scholarship about the poet's life.

William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582; he was 18, she was 26 (or was she?) and evidently three months pregnant. The couple would have three children together: two daughters who survived Shakespeare, Susanna and Judith, and one son, Hamnet, who predeceased him in 1596. Shakespeare's last will and testament, the so-called Stratford will, was written and subsequently revised in 1616. You can read its text here.

The text of Shakespeare's will is more or less formulaic -- the bulk of his property went to his daughters, and a portion of money and clothes went to his sister and nephews. Judith receives a "broad silver and gilt bowl", one of his friend's nephews receives a sword, and Anne Hathaway receives Shakespeare's second-best bed along with its "furniture" -- accoutrements like bed hangings and linens. A number of Shakespeare's theater friends were given sums of money with which to purchase rings, evidently mourning rings in Shakespeare's honor. The lack of other references to Anne in Shakespeare's will isn't necessarily sinister, but neither is it totally unremarkable; many of Shakespeare's contemporaries took pains to explicitly outline the provisions for their surviving spouses in their wills, rather than admitting the chance that their widows might have to resort to litigation to find out what the customary one-third of their spouse's property actually netted them. If Anne is otherwise absent from both the historical record and from Shakespeare's will, what are we to make of the mention of her? There are two main camps here:

#The second-best bed was a gesture of contempt toward Anne

This take seems to be one of the earliest interpretations of this detail -- the interpretation that Shakespeare leaving Anne his second-best bed was a deliberate gesture of contempt. Edmond Malone framed it this way in the 1780s, several decades after the will was "discovered" but well before the text of the will itself was widely available to the public, and his words would be echoed and repeated for the next two centuries:

His wife had not wholly escaped his memory; he had forgot her, -- he had recollected her, -- but so recollected her as more strongly to mark how little he esteemed her; he had already (as it is vulgarly expressed) cut her off, not indeed with a shilling, but with an old bed.

In this interpretation, the second-best bed is a sign of deep resentment -- not only is it conspicuously small and humble, but it's only the second-best bed. Shakespeare didn't even esteem his wife highly enough to give her the first-best bed. Did Shakespeare resent Anne? Had he been pressed into a shotgun wedding to a woman he didn't particularly like or respect? Biographers like Stephen Greenblatt have entertained this idea as part of a more negative view of Anne Hathaway -- Anne isn't memorialized in the sonnets and she hardly distinguishes herself in the historical record as a vivacious real-life heroine. With so little to recommend her, and evidence of a hasty marriage on the books, it's relatively easy for Shakespeare biographers and Shakespeare enthusiasts to imagine Anne herself as a disappointing mate, incompatible with her husband's genius. This sometimes tips over into fairly transparent misogyny in the characterization of Hathaway as a predatory skank, an ageing village bicycle tricking Will into marriage. Women, am I right, fellas? We straight-up don't know enough about Anne Hathaway to say whether she was ugly or pretty, foolish or smart, outgoing and promiscuous or shy and chaste, or how she and Will met and courted. We know that the Hathaway and Shakespeare families knew each other well enough that Will's father paid off some of Anne's father's debts, but not much else. Any assertions about her personality or dispositions are conjecture. Malone may have seen himself first and foremost as correcting a misreading from earlier in the century, when Shakespeare's will was first under examination -- in which "second-best bed" was transcribed from secretary hand as "brown best bed" -- but his commentary staked out one of the main positions in the bed controversy by taking the bed itself as a remarkably poor offering. Katherine Duncan-Jones rates the bequest of the bed in Ungentle Shakespeare as not only a slighting afterthought, perhaps added only at the urging of Judith, but proof of a marital separation. Stephen Greenblatt, among others, have speculated that the deliberate bequest of a single item might even have been a gesture intended to alienate Anne from any other inheritance she might have tried to claim as a widow. Regardless of the hows and whys, for biographers in this camp the second-best bed is a "final, deliberate insult" (quoth John J. Ross in "Shakespeare's Chancre") directed at Anne Hathaway after decades of unhappy marriage.

On the flipside…

#The second-best bed was a gesture of affection toward Anne

The opposing camp subscribe to a general school of thought laid out by Malone's contemporary and rival George Steevens -- those who adhere to the belief that rather than being a personal slight, Will's bequest of the second-best bed might better be understood as a sign of his good will toward his wife. The second-best bed and its accompanying furniture might have been an heirloom, otherwise destined for a less intimate relative but reserved for Anne as a special sign of favor, or furthermore it might have been Will and Anne's marriage bed -- the bed in which they themselves slept, while the best bed in the house was reserved for the use of guests. (The marriage-bed theory itself was floated by Malone as a counter to the more pessimistic reading he'd presented.) This reading strikes me as equally speculative, but much more charitable -- it allows that the long separations in the Shakespeare marriage and its somewhat hasty beginnings might not have forged a relationship that was completely void of affection, at least toward the end. The idea of Shakespeare pausing to slam his wife one last time at the end of his life -- "gentle Shakespeare", whose romantic disposition and sensitivity toward women were believed to show through in his plays -- didn't sit well with many commentators as early as the 1840s, and objections to it turn up in the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1841 and in Daniel Wilson's dialogue on Anne Hathaway in 1872. Variations on the marriage-bed theory multiplied from there. The more modern take on the Shakespeare-Hathaway marriage that might allow for this fondness (an angle presented by biographers like Jonathan Bate and Peter Ackroyd) characterizes Shakespeare not necessarily as a tender-hearted friend to women who stumbled into the great passion of his life but a shrewd man who married an equally shrewd woman. Or perhaps, as René Weis entertains, the bed had been Anne's to begin with, and she had brought it with her from her childhood home at Hewlands Farm. William was merely returning his wife's property to her possession in anticipation of her changed living arrangements as a widow. Schoenbaum mentions in his Compact Documentary Life of Shakespeare that the reason for depriving one's widow of a certain bed might be sentiment of a somewhat different kind -- a distaste for the thought of one's widow marrying again and consummating that love on the same bed as her first marriage.

This reading of the second-best bed is somewhat more charitable toward both Will and Anne -- it was sufficient to tickle the fancy of no less a critic than Germaine Greer in her Shakespeare's Wife. The poet Carol Ann Duffy reframes the second-best bed in her sonnet "Anne Hathaway" as the site of Anne and Will's romance -- I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head / as he held me upon that next best bed. Even if one takes Shakespeare's sonnets and assorted anecdotes about his sex life in the theater ("William the Conqueror came before Richard III!") as strict fact and evidence of philandering, infidelity doesn't necessarily erase the possibility of spousal affection toward the end of his life, and if Shakespeare were truly displeased with his wife, he needn't have left her anything at all -- indeed, if it were the resentment of several decades festering ever since he knocked her up back in the crazy '80s, he could have explicitly written her out of her customary portion in his will. If all he did to snub her was bequeath Anne his second-best bed, their marriage couldn't have been in that rocky of straits, could it?

...could it?

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And now for something completely different -- this was a response to a question by a user who subsequently deleted their post, so I missed my chance to tag them in it, but hopefully it's still useful.

#How accurate is the depiction of child brothels in 1890s New York in TNT'S The Alienist?

[Content warnings: discussion of child sexual abuse, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, violence toward sex workers, and historical sex work. Also, mild spoilers.]

A number of the establishments depicted in the show -- Columbia Hall, a.k.a. Paresis Hall, where victim Giorgio worked and where John Moore is assaulted, the Golden Rule Pleasure Club where victim Ali ibn-Ghazi worked, and the Slide, where Joseph works -- are both real historical establishments, clustering around Greenwich Village and the Bowery. The Bowery was in effect the center of gay nightlife in the New York of the 1890s, as well as a hotspot for heterosexual vice, and the activities that took place in these establishments are relatively well-documented as a result of the remarks made by anti-vice crusaders of the 1890s. These three existed alongside establishments such as Little Bucks, the Black Rabbit, Manilla Hall, and the Palm Club; these "resorts" hosted drinking and dancing and facilitated commercial sex, like other establishments, but they hosted crossdressing performers and "fairies" alongside women. All these resorts had different headlining entertainments (the Black Rabbit had live sex shows, the Slide's waiters sang "filthy ditties" in falsetto) but they were grouped together by virtue of the presence of fairies -- sometimes wearing men's clothing with makeup, sometimes wearing dresses -- and the opportunity for sexual assignations between persons of the same sex.

The aspect of these establishments that's most central to The Alienist (the sexual exploitation of children) overshadows the other functions of such establishments -- their role as quasi-legitimate gathering-places for adults. Like-minded individuals could find each other, socialize, and meet with potential hook-ups at these establishments without necessarily being up to anything nefarious -- some of the fairies who frequented these establishments identified proudly with what they did there. One of the first transgender people to publish an autobiography, Jennie June, eventually formed a group of self-identified androgynes who met in Paresis Hall. (In this respect the show improves somewhat on the book in at least acknowledging that people who voluntarily identify themselves with something other than their culturally-prescribed sex role also exist, rather than women's clothing being exclusively the uniform of non-voluntary exploitation or sexual deviance, but the novel was published in 1994 and the show premiered in 2018; public attitudes about gender have changed quite a bit in the interim.) Nevertheless, sexual commerce took place in these locations and it could involve boys younger than sixteen years old. These Bowery beer gardens and dives couldn't be further in tone from the establishments in better parts of town with higher price points -- where girl employees only slightly older than the boys of The Alienist served patrons glasses of champagne, not beer, and in between working hours smoked pipes and worked on their sewing. If you wanted to find an establishment where sexual commerce could take place, whatever race/gender/social class you were looking for, there were dozens of guidebooks to direct you there. Mentions of establishments that facilitated same-sex sexual commerce were scarce due to contemporary prejudices. One contemporary book, Vices of a Big City, described the Slide as

the lowest and most disgusting place. The place is filled nightly with from one hundred to three hundred people most of whom are males, but are unworthy the name of men. They are effeminate, degraded, and addicted to vices which are inhuman and unnatural.

Like many books documenting New York's urban nightlife in this era, Vices of a Big City was written with a tongue-in-cheek pretext of advocating social reform -- listing the attractions of brothels, beer gardens, and saloons in exhaustive detail so that the informed visitor could thereby avoid them -- but establishments catering to heterosexuals don't garner the same harshness embodied in this passage. The Slide's reputation preceded it even without guidebooks -- its character was documented in newspapers like the New York Evening World, which called the Slide "morally the lowest [dive] in New York" and a "festering plague sore", essentially making its goings-on a byword for depravity and pursuing accounts of its notorious goings-on even after its relocation from Bleecker Street to Bond Street in 1893. You'll note that for all these mentions of immoral character, nocturnal orgies, and all-around depravity, neither the author of Vices nor the Evening World out-and-out says "there are child prostitutes in these places" -- if this was known to take place in these establishments, it was only a secondary aspect of moral opprobrium after the general presence of sexual degenerates.

But not all dives were drinking establishments first and meeting-places second; the Golden Rule was a basement brothel with divided cubicles for sex rather than upstairs rooms to which couples could retire. The depiction of the Golden Rule in the novel and series clearly draws from the account of social reformer Charles Parkhurst:

So I led the way to the "Golden Rule Pleasure Club." This dive was then situated in West Third street, in a four-story brick house. We entered the resort through the basement door, and as we did so a "buzzer," or automatic alarm, gave the proprietors of the house information that we were in the place. The proprietress, a woman known as "Scotch Ann," greeted us. She was quite a pretty woman, tall, black-haired and of graceful form.

"Good evening," she said smilingly. "Won't you come in?"

The basement was fitted up into little rooms, by means of cheap partitions, which ran to the top of the ceiling from the floor. Each room contained a table and a couple of chairs, for the use of customers of the vile den. In each room sat a youth, whose face was painted, eye-brows blackened, and whose airs were those of a young girl. Each person talked in a high falsetto voice, and called the others by women's names.

Compare this to an equivalent scene from Caleb Carr's novel:

We would need an abundant reservoir of that particular emotion during our visit to the Golden Rule Pleasure Club, a pestilential little hole that could not have had a more sadly ironic name. Paresis Hall at least had the advantages of being aboveground and fairly roomy; the Golden Rule was housed in a dank, cramped basement that had been divided into small “rooms” by shoddy partitions, where any one client’s activities were made known to everyone in the place by sound if not by sight. Run by a large, repulsive woman called Scotch Ann, the Golden Rule offered only effeminate young boys who painted themselves, spoke in falsetto voices, and called each other by women’s names, leaving the other variations on male homosexual behavior to joints like Ellison’s. [i.e. Paresis Hall]

Carr drew from period sources like Parkhurst's work in his depiction of Bowery dives, but some of his conclusions are more 1990 than 1890 -- in his writing he echoes both late-19th-century reformers' obsessions with desperate poverty and vulnerable childhood and modern late-20th-century understandings of criminal psychology, the situation of vagrant children, and why serial killers target sex workers. The television show tweaks the novel's depiction of sexuality, gender, and transgender issues, but it likewise reflects what writers and viewers expect to see in depictions of 19th and early 20th century dives and brothels in shows like The Knick, Penny Dreadful, Boardwalk Empire, Ripper Street, Copper, and Deadwood, as well as on film. If we don't see much of the other side of these dives, the side that was accommodating and hospitable to marginalized patrons relative to more respectable establishments, that reflects the show's focus not on nascent LGBT nightlife but on violent sex crimes. I'd say this is an omission; it skews the depiction of these dives considerably toward their worst elements, and if anything it makes child prostitution appear somewhat more centralized than it was in Gilded Age New York. Both the novel and the television show conflate (to a degree) dives and brothels, and the presence of "fairies" of all ages in places like Paresis Hall with the presence of child sex workers in places like the Golden Rule -- there was certainly overlap, but the two groups weren't interchangeable. There were fully adult fairies capable of making their own sexual decisions who might have little or nothing to do with their junior relatives at places like the Golden Rule, as well as sexually exploited boys who appeared no different in dress and mannerisms than their peers.

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History of early medieval reliquaries and their materials

“Why can the dead do such great things?” asked Augustine of Hippo, the Doctor of the Church who was greatly influential on medieval religious thought, in his De Civitate Dei. By the early fifth century AD, the original Christian traditions of remembrance of the martyrs of Roman persecution had morphed into a cult of their mortal remains. During the time of emperor Constantine, Christian basilicas had been built over the burial places of martyrs, creating a physical, accessible space, usually lavishly decorated, around the bones of the saints, for the faithful to pray to them and to receive healing as the result of the supernatural powers attributed to the dead. Over time, the tomb shrines of Late Antiquity, massive in size and built of stone, morphed into smaller containers, more portable and accessible, what were later going to be called reliquaries.

The lavish decoration of many reliquaries served many essential functions. At a time when most people lived every day in a world where brilliant colors were rare, bejeweled reliquaries displaying silver, gold and colorful enamels, were bound to amaze and impress. The precious and flashy materials used in reliquaries gave the message that the object was special and worthy of devotion, even when the artist’s workmanship was not matching the value of the materials. We have examples of reliquaries studded with precious stones, where the stones have been carefully shaped as oval cabochons, but in many reliquaries that is not the case. For example, the Enger Purse Reliquary includes two Roman cameos as part of its precious stones. Some of the stones are poorly shaped and mounted in an uneven direction.The stones can be rough, uneven, and generally not as beautiful as they could be. The material, in this case the precious stones, was more important than its look.

The opulence of the reliquary also testified to the significance and authenticity of the relic that they contained. Reliquaries would hide the relic from profane sight, and protect the viewer from the repulsiveness of human remains. At the same time, the act of encasing the relic into a “shining garment” showed the importance of the saint and of the saint’s power or virtus.

In medieval hagiography, the saints were typically presented as emitting a fragrant scent and a radiant light, and the light reflected by the gold and the gems of the reliquary was considered to be an enhancement of the saint’s own radiance. The reflected light was also an important part of the experience of the faithful in the presence of the reliquary, eliciting wonder, helping in meditating and venerating, causing sensory wonders and perhaps even the experience of visions. The materials honored the saints, conveyed the holiness of their relics and assisted the viewer in experiencing the presence of the saint.

In the medieval world, relics themselves were considered precious, more valuable than gold. The inscription on the rear of the ninth century paliotto on the altar in St Ambrogio in Milan, which is in itself a reliquary containing the bones of the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius, states it clearly: “The beneficent shrine shines forth, lovely with its glittering panoply of metal and dressed with gems. But more potent than all its gold is the treasure with which it is endowed by virtue of the holy bones within.” (The inscription runs along the outer border and along the sides of the rear door.) The gold, silver and precious stones adorning a reliquary formed a beautiful shell appropriate for the saints’ status in heaven and their heroic Christian life and death on Earth. But the truly valuable part of the reliquary was its content and their virtus.

The medieval idea of a relic, a physical object, as conduits towards a metaphysical realm was not limited to the connection between the relics of the martyrs and the power of heaven. Cameos from the Roman world were sometime incorporated on the surface of reliquaries in prominent places, equal or greater in status to other gemstones. Roman spolia were often precious stones in and of themselves, but they were not simply recycled rare objects. They formed a connection through time to the days of the martyrs of the early Christian church. In some cases the pagan iconography on those objects could be reinterpreted in a Christian context, but that was not always the case. The symbolic connection given by the spolia was what mattered. For example, the first century AD aquamarine intaglio of Flavia Julia that was used on the top of the reliquary Ecrin de Charlemagne was a rare and precious stone and could also have been interpreted as an image of the Virgin Mary, but its connection to the Roman world of the early Church was certainly a reason for its use.

Relics and reliquaries played a variety of important roles in medieval culture and society, even outside a religious context. For example, people relied on the power of the physical relic to guarantee the enforcement of peace treaties and commercial contracts, and sometime an important agreement could not be completed without both sides bringing several saints along. The portability of the reliquary made this possible. The supernatural power of the relic to witness a transaction even extended outside the realm of saints, as we have extant examples of wax seal impressions affixed on early medieval charters that were made into a form of secular relic by embedding beard hair from the person that the seal belonged to – in that period usually a king – or through the placement of bite marks on the wax of the seal. In the medieval mindset, the power of the physical object made of parts left behind by the saint or by the king, transformed that object into an active, powerful avatar.

Reliquaries would need to be carried in processions, and could be transported as talismans in battle. Cross-shaped reliquaries could have a socket to insert a staff to lift it and make it more visible during a procession. Many sarcophagus-shaped reliquaries would have eyelets for a cord or a chain that allowed the reliquary to be carried around the neck. Portable reliquaries could also be hidden in case of an emergency. Portability was an essential characteristic of most reliquaries.

Relics and reliquaries were also important elements of status for the churches that contained them. Important relics, especially those associated with Christ, such as the relics of the True Cross, were especially important in establishing a claim for a church seeking a bishopric or for a local ruler seeking more prominence by acquiring an important relic and commissioning a reliquary for it. Some reliquaries had inscriptions that asked for prayers for the donor and sometime for the artist, making the votive function of the reliquary very clear.

While many reliquaries are shaped like a box, reminiscent of a sarcophagus, some were shaped in a way to represent visually the relic that they contained, and represent it as an object powerful and sacred. We have the example of the sixth century cross of the emperor Justin II, the Crux Vaticana, where a small fragment of the relic of the True Cross was enclosed in a processional cross, and several reliquaries shaped like body parts: arms, feet and often the head or the bust of the saint. The experience of a connection between the faithful and the saint through the reliquary would have been especially strong when the reliquary itself was in the shape of a statue of the saint, for example the ninth century reliquary statue of Sainte Foy in Conques, a church on the pilgrimage path to Santiago. The pilgrim would look at the saint, and the saint would essentially look back.

People would travel on pilgrimage, more often to a local sanctuary, rarely to one of the great pilgrimage destinations, Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela. Their effort was rewarded by the visual contact with the spiritual world through the relics and the reliquaries along the way and at their destination. They would return to their towns and the tales of miracles would have been prominent in the stories they would tell to their friends and family, as well as the memorable visual elements of their travel, of which reliquaries would have been an important part. The opulent look of reliquaries studded with gems and shimmering of gold and silver was an important element of this visual experience.

Pilgrims would not just bring back memories of the saints and their “beautiful skin”, they would bring back holy water, oil, perhaps sand, in portable ampulles (often mass-produced and made of tin, glass or other inexpensive materials) decorated with iconography related to the saint or the church, that could be worn around the neck. An example are the Monza Ampullae, probably Syrian, from the 7th century AD

The form and decoration of reliquaries were essential elements of its function. The use of gold and gems, including Roman spolia, was not simply a way to display the wealth of the person commissioning its creation. It was an important element of the experience of connection between the faithful and the saint, and an essential aspect of the theological justification for the cult of the relics. The portability of the reliquaries allowed for a more convenient mode of access to the virtus of the saint, in a way that a fresco or a mosaic image of the same saint in the same church could not provide.

Domingo Gonsales walked on the moon in the late 1620s. From an island in the Atlantic, the Spanish merchant-adventurer had watched geese take wing and shrink into the horizon. Where did they go when the changing of seasons drove them away? Exhausting all the illogical possibilities that came to him, Gonsales reasoned they went to the moon. It must be the moon. He couldn’t let the thought sit idle; it was far too promising. Gonsales built himself a harness, tethered twenty-five geese to it, and took to the sky. He was sure to test his contraption, and when it proved safe after a period of island hopping, he directed his feathered friends upward and away from the grasp of this terraqueous globe. He piloted the birdcraft for twelve days, the moon growing ever larger in front of him. Finally, it resolved into a forested landscape where giants dwelled. Shortly after landing, Gonsales encountered these giants:

[…] I saw myself surrounded with a strange kind of People both in Feature, Manners, and Apparel; their Stature was very different, but they were generally twice as high as ours; their Shape and Countenance pleasant, and their Habit hardly to be describe ; for I never saw either Cloth, Silk, nor other Stuff, like that whereof their Cloths were made; neither can I possibly relate their Colour, they being in a manner all cloathed alike; it was neither Black, White, Yellow, Red nor Blue, nor any Colour composed of these: If you ask what was it then? I must tell you, it was a Colour never seen in our earthly World, and so neither to be described nor conceived by us; for as it is hard to make a Man born blind understand the Difference between Green and Blue, so neither can I decypher this Moon-colour, as having no Affinity with any I ever beheld; I can only say it was the most glorious and delightful that can be imagined, neither was any Thing more pleasant to me during my Stay there.

Gonsales had found himself in the type of predicament that early modern readers had grown quite familiar with by the time this account was published. He had traversed a vast emptiness to a land none of his peers had explored. When he landed, he found himself hungry on foreign shores, surrounded by an alien people. His reaction was to cross himself and call out to Jesu Maria. Just as Gonsales and his readers might have expected, the giants fell to their knees the moment ”Jesu” left his lips.

This tale of a 17th century Giant Leap for Mankind is given to us by Francis Godwin, bishop of Hereford. The adventures of Domingo Gonsales are not meant to serve as a schematic for spacecraft. It is not a call-to-arms to launch an early modern space program. Godwin is not expressing any desire to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth. It’s satire, and it isn’t unique to the period. So, what did he and others like him want to say? And why the moon?

Godwin’s cosmic travelogue was published at a time when ethnographies of distant peoples were being voraciously consumed by the public, when Christ was being landed on faraway beaches, and when the movements of the planets and the landscape of the moon were being observed for the first time through the telescope.

By the time the first decade of the 17th century was drawing to a close, a number of Europe’s natural philosophers had glass aimed toward the heavens. In July of 1609 Thomas Harriot made the first recorded observations of the moon through a telescope. His sketch, and the much improved one that followed at the end of 1610, was roughly drawn. Harriot was capturing what he believed were continents and oceans. He was attempting to map the spatial relationships between the dark and light patches. Harriot’s background in charting unknown shores was well-established by 1610. In 1585 and 1586, he had sailed across the Atlantic and brought back not only an account of the people who lived there, but maps of the land itself. To map a land, to give names to places, was a step toward possessing it. In the early 17th century, the idea that to inhabit and “improve” upon a land was to own it had taken shape. As John Donne stated in a sermon to the Virginia Company in 1622, “In the Law of Nature, and Nations, A Land neuer inhabited by any, or vtterly derelicted, and immemorially abandoned by the former Inhabitants, becomes theirs that will possesse it.” These are the precursors of the 19th century idea of terra nullius.

Just as the imperial motivations of mapping the moon should not be thrown out, neither should the early modern scientific reasons. Harriot’s 1610 map of the moon was not the first. He was beaten to that distinction by another English astronomer, William Gilbert. Even compared to Harriot’s map, Gilbert’s representation is crude. Nonetheless, Gilbert’s observations mark an incredible move forward in astronomy. Gilbert’s map may have been illustrated to assist other astronomers in confirming whether or not “[the Moon] does not revolve at all (as was argued by Aristotle, and accepted) or whether it turns itself to either side…” He is talking about lunar libration. In his own notes, Harriot observes this effect, though there is a chance he does not realize it. Harriot’s notes read, “1611 Decemb. 14th. ho 8 ½ mane I noted that the darker partes of 28, 26 were nearer the edge then is described.” From this, Ewan Whitaker draws the conclusion that, “Harriot was thus the first to observe the Moon’s libration in latitude, although whether or not he considered this a true movement or just an effect of inaccurate drawing is not known.”

Neither Gilbert nor Harriot would come to enjoy the same fame for their studies of the moon as Galileo. Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, published in March 1610, made a bit of a splash. At the time of his own observations Harriot’s patron, Syon Park, was languishing in the Tower of London. Harriot’s map wasn’t published until 1965, and even then it was critiqued for lacking the topographical detail of Galileo’s. Gilbert’s Selenographia was published posthumously and read by a small handful (Thomas Harriot and Francis Bacon among them). It is extremely unlikely that Galileo ever read Gilbert’s musings on libration.

Mapping the moon gave a vague sense of the landscape, but what were those telescopes unable to see? Were there Selenites? Did they build cities? Did they have government? And most importantly to men like Francis Godwin, did they know God?

Gonsales’s giants bent the knee to Jesu Maria. Were any actual moon people to exist, would they do the same? Were they obligated to do the same? As I’ve already stated, though Godwin didn’t expect a man to fly to the moon with geese, someday someone just might get there. Godwin’s contemporary, John Wilkins, expected that perhaps his posterity would find a way. The century had shown that new worlds could open up to the English, though not without difficulties. It was incumbent upon them to bring their religion to any inhabitants of those places. The non-existent moon giants might have been satirical, but they represented a deadly serious thought-experiment in the plurality of worlds and the soteriology of distant peoples. I’ve written before on how the English viewed the societies and people they encountered in North America in the late 16th and early 17th century. Bringing Christ to them always ranked high on their list of priorities. Would the people on the moon be among God’s first creation? Would they be the descendants of Adam, laboring under the burden of Original Sin? Could they be saved?

If there were inhabitants of the moon, or of Saturn or Jupiter, what damage could this do to mankind’s relationship with God? While drawing his maps, William Gilbert thought also of this, and thought of it in a way that made clear that he thought humanity was only one creation among God’s inexhaustible supply. It’s a beautiful piece of writing.

What great share enjoy we of those fathomless fountains of heat and light, those many glorious suns send out? Yet we must be (by our own account) the only creatures of excellency, for whom all these things were made? So might the spider, nested in the roof of the Grand Seignior's Seraglio, say of herself, all that magnificent and stately structure set out and embellished with all antiquity and mosaic work was only built for her to hang up her webs and toils to take flies. We the glorious ants of this earth magnify ourselves upon this molehill here, to be the great and sole end of the world's workmanship, whilst we consider not how little and nothing we are of it.

Further reading:

Cressy, David. "Early modern space travel and the English man in the moon." The American Historical Review 111, no. 4 (2006): 961-982.

Whitaker, Ewen A. Mapping and naming the moon: a history of lunar cartography and nomenclature. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Pumfrey, Stephen. "Harriot's maps of the moon: new interpretations." Notes and Records (2009): rsnr-2008.

Week 29

The history of the Italian socialist movement is not only the history of the first Italian mass party – in fact the first party displaying the recognizable structures of a modern (perhaps it would be better to say XX Century) political formation: a direction board, a secretary, a political program approved through an assembly, subscriptions and cards. It is also a history of fracturing, of currents, of internal contrasts of both personalities and ideology.

This measure of internal fluidity can be taken as evidence of the internal active life of the party – a party that needed to dialogue “dialectically” with its basis, and to find a general balance between groups that were expressions of the same geographical and cultural division that affected the Italian nation as a whole. That socialism was often perceived in the south as a “Milanese” thing (at least until the early XX century); that the Genoa, Milan and Turin groups displayed some tendency to evolve in the sense of a personal feud; that contrast existed between the socialist of the factories and those of the land. A complex of relations and patterns that needed to be solved by the party's machinery; in a way that – despite the occasional backwardness – one must repeat, was remarkably ahead of the other political forces.

From time to time, the centrifugal forces that stirred the materials of the party led to a burst of energy that could not be absorbed. Like a small solar flare a new splinter rose to soon vanish in the cold space of the Italian political system. The inability of those splinters to establish a consensus basin that went beyond the personal authority of the figure behind the scission, beyond the regional or even local connections of that figure's group, resulted in their ultimate disappearance and the re-absorption, if not of the leaders, of the basin within the main socialist forces.

This pattern will prove essentially true until the Congress of Livorno of 1921, that gave birth to the Communist Party of Italy. The difficult existence of which would nonetheless prove much more fruitful and lasting than any of the other formations leaving the socialist root.

One of this failed attempts was the creation of the Unione Socialista Italiana – an organization of the left wing interventionism, or of the right wing socialism, as you like – during the first half of 1918, under initiative of Alceste De Ambris.

To give an idea of the political impact of the Italian Socialist Union, F. Leoni's “History of the Italian political parties” spends two lines on the USI: “the first experience of national socialism [not that one] that accepted at the same time both the idea of class fight and the concept of nation-motherland”.

As frequently happens, when a political formation is not especially successful, information on its trajectory is not easy to come by, nor in large amount. But the USI's brief experience offers a bit of insight into a more complex matter – and one that has been written about in a larger, larger amount – the relations between Mussolini and the socialist area in the months leading up to the foundation of the fascist movement.

The issue has been discussed many times and, while I don't think it warrants that much attention, it is nonetheless one that will return – at least thanks to its historiographical relative weight. De Felice especially has been subject to some criticism in later years for his persistence in seeing connections between socialism and Mussolini's not well defined ideological platform (as Mussolini himself said about the founding of the Milanese Fascio in 1919, at the time “there was no specific doctrinaire plan in [his] spirit […] fascism was not brought to life by a doctrine studied beforehand; it was born out of a longing for action and it came to be action”). De Felice's analysis needs though some context: first the observation that the “official socialist” narrative had in the 1950-60s a tendency to paint Mussolini as a socialist impostor – a man posing as a socialist while being in fact a reactionary, a wolf in a sheepskin. This oversimplified view does not agree with evidence nor mates well with Mussolini's character; which explains why De Felice^1 perhaps overemphasizes here and there the “socialist Mussolini” over the “nationalist Mussolini”. It is true – as R. Vivarelli observed – that Mussolini had by 1917 adopted by and large the nationalist program (and much more than other former socialists on issues like the settling of the Adriatic matter with Yugoslavia – there Mussolini's claim extending almost to the whole Dalmatia coast notably clashed with men like Bissolati who sought a conciliation with the Slavs on the basis of the principle of nationality) but it is also noteworthy that he wasn't the only one among the ex-socialists who had found the “national idea” along the way.

Still, the difficulty to establish the political mind of Mussolini during the last weeks of the Great War is apparent – and the conclusion that his mind wasn't clear (or that the issue would not have mattered that much to him) is somewhat a legitimate if convenient one.

As for De Felice, (in Mussolini's mind) fascism would be the revolutionary position, of Marxist origin, in the form it had to take after taking into account the results of the criticism of abstract Marxism done in Italy during the 1880-1900 [from Spaventa to Croce], of which actualism could be considered the philosophical product. Of course, such a definition would not address but the form, which in itself is not enough to explain its practical realization. The latter, obviously, would not have taken place without a series of historical events: the world war, the way the Italian intervention took place, Caporetto, the transfiguration of the battle of Vittorio Veneto into the myth of the mutilated victory, the Russian revolution, the red biennium of 1919-21, etc.

Under this point of view [fascism] must be seen as alternative to Leninism […] but the term alternative could be taken under two extremes: that of absolute opposite or that of actual and true realization. [It is in the latter sense] that Mussolini conceived fascism; and here lays the difference between fascism and nazism. Around 1920, two men contested to each other the claim of being the true revolutionary: Lenin and Mussolini. And in this claim, one must admit, Mussolini was sincere. […] The observation that fascism failed as a revolution does not equate with the statement that it should be considered a reactionary movement, nor justifies the judgments according to which Mussolini would have deliberately deceived since the beginnings, making use of a revolutionary language as a disguise.

This “alternative” feel of the early days fascism is – in a way – more “contemporary true” than “actually true”. Meaning that it is closer to the way various figures of the socialist-nationalist galaxy understood the political nature of the possible future revolution in the years leading to the possible future revolution. Examples of this sort of understanding are provided for instance by the triangular relations between De Ambris, the poet and shortly regent of Fiume Gabriele D'Annunzio and the powerful secretary of the Sea Workers Federation Giuseppe Giulietti.

How many broadside cannons did the HMS Victory have?