In the spirit of this weeks theme, I am more than happy to talk whaling history recommendations, book reviews, and other source material to the best of my knowledge. In the meantime:

Trying Leviathan by D. Graham Burnett

New York City in 1818 saw a peculiar case come to court, Maurice v. Judd, the case that is the focal event surrounding D. Graham Burnett’s Trying Leviathan. In the wake of the young Republic, New York City maintained a law requiring inspection and certification of fish oil before sale, at pain of financial penalty. Samuel Judd had purchased three barrels of whale oil without going through the inspections, for which inspector James Maurice imposed a $75 penalty. Judd protested that the regulation could not be applied to whale oil, as whales were not fish.

Burnett uses the subsequent trial case to evaluate the status of the whale in the various minds of early American society. In doing so, he devotes specific chapters to the principal houses of thought that informed cetological understanding: those of the learned academic scientists, the active whaling community, those holding commercial interest in whale product, and the public at large. Burnett does an admirable job at presenting these viewpoints in their total complexity. While it’s obvious that different groups had differing views of the whale’s place in the kingdom of animals, what’s more revelatory is that these groups might have differing views between their constituents. Whalers had a lot more to say about the whale as an animal than might be assumed, and philosophers and scientists of precedent and contemporary merit might not come to the same conclusions on what a whale and a fish really meant. In this case study, the greater questions of science and authority come to light. Who knew what a whale really was? Who had the professional or social currency to speak about the great creatures that were both quarry and king of their watery realm? What implications does it provide to how the early American citizens might have viewed themselves in their relationship with the natural world? Trying Leviathan does much to discuss these, and more, issues at stake in determining if the whale is a fish.

Burnett provides exhaustive sources, and his legwork is evident in the equally exhaustive footnotes that do much to provide historical or cultural background to some of the glossed over or “assumed” portions of information regarding whales and whaling in the early 19th Century. Additionally, Burnett is careful not to polemicize Maurice v. Judd where it might be easy to do so. The temptation to use the case as an example of the progressive march of science or the struggle of Enlightenment vs. Ignorance is obvious. Samuel Latham Mitchell, in his star status for the position of a whale as a mammal, can easily be portrayed the martyr of his craft. In contrast, the comparisons of William Sampson, the chief prosecutor for whales being fish, with men like William Jennings Bryan are equally “low hanging fruit”.

Burnett does well to present this peculiar case as an example of the usefulness of science and its role in the public and political domain. Even if it is apparent to us now that the whale is not a fish, the long-held belief to the contrary does not necessarily equate to any nefarious or evil intent. Rather, as Trying Leviathan shows, it is part of our ever-evolving perception of the natural world and our relationship with it, informed by our cultural, spiritual, and material experiences within it.

The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King, by Stuart Ellis-Gorman.

I've been meaning to review this book for a couple of months now, but work has kept me so drained that I've never managed it. Fortunately, thanks to a very mild case of COVID I finally have a chance to sit down and write up a review.

Crossbows are probably one of the least well understood weapons of the Middle Ages, at least in English language scholarship. Anglo-centric narratives and mythmaking about the Hundred Years' War is in large part to blame for this, as scholars have focused a lot on the longbow and English archers as reasons why England performed so well. This is made it easy for them to adhere to very old scholarship, primarily by Ralph Payne-Gallwey, without needed to update his views - which owe an awful lot to 19th century French and English conceptions of the longbow and crossbow - much.

It would be fair to say that the only significant "new" English language works published in the last three decades are W.F. Patterson's posthumously published notes (A Guide to the Crossbow) and Mike Loades' The Crossbow. Two older non-English works have also been translated into English - Josef Alm's European Crossbows: A Survey and Jean Liebel's Springalds and Great Crossbows. With the exception of Loades' book for Osprey, all of these books are hard to come by and relatively expensive, putting them out of reach of most amateurs and even many scholars, who may not have even heard of them.

This is where The Medieval Crossbow comes in. Ellis-Gorman completed his PhD thesis on medieval crossbows, and has now produced a very useful introduction to the subject. As he says in the acknowledgement section, it's the kind of book he wishes he'd been able to read when he first began his thesis, and I heartily agree. Although there are some sections that could be expanded or included - and may have in the original drafts, as the author has some included some cut material on his blog - The Medieval Crossbow serves as a wonderful introduction to the current scholarship on medieval crossbows, including and summarising much information that is hard for the average reader to come by.

The book is divided into two parts, with the first part (60 pages) focusing on the physical and artistic aspects of crossbows and the second part (just under 100 pages) focusing on the history of the crossbow and its use, both military and civilian. Although the chapters and sections are brief, the author manages to pack them full of relevant information and, where appropriate, summaries of academic debates on particular issues. I'm particularly glad that he included a section the physics of crossbows and explained why high draw weights don't really equal immense power, as well as a look at where crossbows spread as a result of contact with the European or Islamic worlds.

If there is one thing that I wish Ellis-Gorman had added, it's a chapter on mounted crossbowmen. Although not a particularly well studied or well known topic in English language scholarship, mounted crossbowmen were important in Central Europe and some Southern European regions. they fought from horseback as well as on foot, but very little has been written about them in a way that's accessible to the average reader.

Although there might not be much that is entirely new, the book is wonderfully balanced in its scholarship and provides a much needed scholarly introduction to the study of crossbows. If anyone is looking for an introduction to what a crossbow was, how it was used and what it meant to medieval Europeans, I can't recommend it enough.

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