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Eight myths about Fair Rosamund

Most of what we hear and read about twelfth-century hottie Rosamund Clifford, aka “Fair Rosamund,” just wasn’t so. True, she was Henry II’s mistress. But that’s about it. Like so many other medieval myths, Rosamund’s legendary life and death are a later invention. Herewith, the best of (untrue) Rosamund:

Myth 1:   She went to school at, lived at, had assignations with the king at, retired to, died at, or in any way hung out at Godstow Abbey.

Sadly, Rosamund never entered Godstow until she was a fair corpse. She died around the year 1176, in the midst of her affair with the king, and was buried at Godstow, probably because her mother was already buried there. Contrary to what you will read in various places, there is no evidence that the king paid for her tomb. Her tomb was placed in the front of the high altar, and the king did show particular favor to the monastery because of it. Fifteen years later, Bishop Hugh of Lincoln made the nuns move the tomb out of the church because it was inappropriate for a “whore” to be buried there.

Myth 2:   She and Henry went drinking at the Trout. Or the Perch.

I read this about the pubs near Godstow in a student handbook when I was doing my postgraduate work at Oxford, and I wanted to believe it. So did visiting relatives. Alas, not true. See number 2 above: no hanging out at Godstow. But my visitors and I did enjoy some pleasant pints at both the aforementioned hostelries.

Myth 3:   She lived in a maze at Woodstock.

Of course this is a later embellishment, related to the next two myths. But a fairly elaborate pleasure garden does seem to have been incorporated into the royal residence at Woodstock in this period, adjacent to a room that just a generation later was known as “Rosamund’s Chamber.” So the maze story may have evolved from a real trysting place in a complex garden.

Myth 4:   The queen found her in the maze by means of a silken thread.

See previous myth. But there is, just barely, a silken thread in Rosamund’s true story. After her burial at Godstow, King Henry wanted a special relationship with her burial place, so the nunnery’s patron deeded his patronal rights in Godstow to the king. In the ceremony he used a silk cloth that was later described as “a silken thread.”

Queen Eleanor & Fair Rosamund by Evelyn de Morgan. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Myth 5:   She was murdered by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The earliest version of this story, from the fourteenth century, has Eleanor stabbing Rosamund; in Renaissance versions the queen makes Rosamund choose between stabbing and poison. Interestingly, even the Victorians made a sympathetic victim of poor Rosamund (the fornicating mistress) and turned Eleanor (the wronged wife) into a murderous monster. Needless to say, there’s no truth to the murder stories, which arose long after Rosamund died.

Myth 6:   She was the mother of Henry II’s illegitimate son Geoffrey Plantagenet, archbishop of York, and/or his illegitimate son William Longespee, earl of Salisbury.

Rosamund was too young to be Geoffrey’s mother, who was apparently a woman named Ikeni. William Longespee was the son of Ida de Tosny.

Myth 7:   Latin bell inscriptions all over England make reference to her.

These inscriptions read, “I who am struck am called Maria [or Katherine], the rose of the world.” Rosamund was a rare, possibly unique, name for a woman in twelfth-century England, but the phrases rosa munda (pure rose) and rosa mundi (rose of the world) were epithets for the Virgin Mary. It’s likely that Rosamund Clifford was named (creatively and, as it turned out, ironically) in honor of the Virgin, and that the bell inscriptions came from the same general cultural source.

Myth 8:   Roses were spread over her tomb.

No, just a silken pall and candles, as far as we know. It’s possible, however, that the Gallica rose ‘Rosa Mundi’ was named for her, as her legend grew in the later Middle Ages. Perhaps the rose, like the bells, was named for the Virgin Mary, but the name of the rose is one bit of Rosamund lore that seems plausible.

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Life’s uncertain voyage

Uncertainty is everywhere. There can hardly be a person alive who has not experienced it at some time. Indeed, as Shakespeare indicates in his play The Tempest (Act I) we are all submitted to “life’s uncertain voyage.” We may well find ourselves asking “What shall I do?” or “How should I react?”, familiar questions as we continue our voyage.

This common factor in human experience is heightened when the circumstances involve serious illness, whether for the patient or for those who care for them. Living with uncertainty affects all at the bedside. The patient longs for normality and yearns for safety. The family has to face unexpected disruption bringing new routines, responsibilities, and many new people into their lives. A whole new world seems to open up. A client once said, “It is like having a new job” referring to all the new things she had learnt following her husband’s terminal diagnosis.

The professional or volunteer carer, too, has to adjust to uncertainty. The progression of the disease is endlessly variable. There are no certainties in medicine, only likelihoods. This may place the carer under pressure to say something that will give patients and their families a sense of having a handle on their life, regardless of the seriousness of the condition. There are also the practical issues, often difficult and complex, about, for instance, discharge arrangements and future support. Working alongside the families, the carer must hold an appropriate balance between hope for the future alongside a realism about what is or could be involved.

Challenges and choices in life-threatening illnesses create a spectrum of strong feelings among those experiencing them. The patient may well ask “Will I ever be well again? What are they going to do to me? Can I cope with the noise and bustle of a hospital ward? Why has this happened to me?” Fear, anger, grief and helplessness are all present in some degree. Even time itself seems to drag amidst the pain and weakness, loss of ability and responsibility. The notion of self-worth can be seriously challenged. The present and the future may look bleak and insecure as compared with “normal” life. Many of the same feelings will be felt also by families, including anxiety about whether they will be able to cope with the new circumstances and the inevitable increase in financial costs.

Fagus Sylvatica by Jean-Pol Grandmont. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The radical changes in circumstances can promote the reasonable question “Why me or us?” Disease is often understood to be a form of judgement, and where the patient has done their best, and in their own view, lived a “good life,” the question arises out of what is felt to be an unjust judgement and cruel sentence. People can feel rewarded, unjustly, by the disease, even if in some ways they have unconsciously contributed to its onset by excessive working, smoking, or drinking. The disease can also arise out of the environment in which the patient lives, or their genetic make-up, over which they have no control. The illness therefore becomes an unfair threat and obstruction in the mind of those involved whether as a patient or family member.

Major disease can not only radically change a person’s circumstances, but also their judgement, attitude, and mood. They can be changed as people. Medical experience can be overwhelming, distorting judgements and decisions, undermining relationships, and creating a deep sense of vulnerability. “Why me?” becomes a cry from the heart; a cry for help; a cry out of hopelessness. But it need not be.

We are all vulnerable. There is a fault in creation, just as there is wonder and genius. Both facets can be seen within scientific fact as well as religious and moral recognition. Disease can be judged as part of nature just as death is part of life. Such reality challenges the patient just as it does the doctor and researcher.

Such natural faults need to be accepted and worked with. They confront but they also inspire. Our uncertain voyage can involve major illness and its concomitants. A constructive but very difficult response can be to accept, remain positive and be grateful to those who are helping by their skills, support, and encouragement. Disease and disorder are part of the underbelly of creation of which we are all a part. “Why me?” can be changed to “Why not me?” The change in the question can bring about change in outlook and peace.

As Shakespeare reminds us of “life’s uncertain voyage”, we wrestle with uncertainty. Often, we hope, we may find resources which help us along the road. Close supportive relationships, a commitment to an ideal or an allegiance to a faith which inspires, even those quiet times of reflection and self-realization can prove invaluable. They all have a part to play in helping us to cope with the unknown. Self-confidence or lack of it can be instrumental in how we manage uncertainty, but neither can assure us that our thoughts and actions are right. Subsequent experience is often the only measure of that.

We can learn from experience — we can learn to live life fully, whatever the circumstances, even when we are uncertain as to what they may be or lead to. We will never know everything, and perhaps it requires a sense of peace to live with such uncertainty — a tough challenge, but one with a great reward.

Heading Image: Snowstorm by William Turner. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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What commuters know about knowing

If your morning commute involves crowded public transportation, you definitely want to find yourself standing next to someone who is saying something like, “I know he’s stabbed people, but has he ever killed one?” . It’s of course best to enjoy moments like this in the wild, but I am not above patrolling Overheard in London for its little gems (“Shall I give you a ring when my penguins are available?”), or, on an especially desperate day, going all the way back to the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English, a treasury of oddly informative conversations (many secretly recorded) from the 1960s and 1970s. Speaker 1: “When I worked on the railways these many years ago, I was working the claims department, at Pretona Station Warmington as office boy for a short time, and one noticed that the tremendous number of claims against the railway companies were people whose fingers had been caught in doors as the porters had slammed them.” Speaker 2: “Really. Oh my goodness.” (Speaker 1 then reports that the railway found it cheaper to pay claims for lost fingers than to install safety trim on the doors.)

Photo by CGPGrey and Alex Tenenbaum. Image supplied with permission by Jennifer Nagel.

If you ever need a good cover story for your eavesdropping, you are welcome to use mine: as an epistemologist, I study the line that divides knowing from merely thinking that something is the case, a line we are constantly marking in everyday conversation. There it was, in the first quotation: “I know he’s stabbed people.” How, exactly was this known, one wonders, and why was knowledge of this fact reported? There’s no shortage of data: knowledge, as it turns out, is reported heavily. In spoken English (as measured most authoritatively, by the 450-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English), ‘know’ and ‘think’ figure as the sixth and seventh most commonly used verbs, muscling out what might seem to be more obvious contenders like ‘get’ and ‘make’. Spoken English is deeply invested in knowing, easily outshining other genres on this score. In academic writing, for example, ‘know’ and ‘think’ are only the 17th and 22nd-most popular verbs, well behind the scholar’s pallid friends ‘should’ and ‘could’. To be fair, some of the conversational traffic in ‘know’ is coming from fixed phrases, like — you know — invitations to conversational partners to make some inference, or — I know — indications that you are accepting what conversational partners are saying. But even after we strip out those formulaic uses, the database’s randomly sampled conversations remain thickly larded with genuine references to knowing and thinking. Meanwhile, similar results are found in the 100-million-word British National Corpus; this is not just an American thing.

Kanye West performing at Lollapalooza on April 3, 2011 in Santiago, Chile. Photo by rodrigoferrari. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It’s perhaps a basic human thing: conversations naturally slide towards the social. When we are not using language to do something artificial (like academic writing), we relate topics to ourselves. Field research in English pubs, cafeterias, and trains convinced British psychologist Robin Dunbar that most of our casual conversation time is taken up with ‘social topics’: personal relationships, personal experiences, and social plans. Anthropologist John Haviland apparently found similar patterns among the Zinacantan people in the remote highlands of Mexico. We talk about what people think, like, and want, constantly linking conversational topics back to human perspectives and feelings.

There’s an extreme philosophical theory about this tendency, advanced in Ancient Greece by Protagoras, and in our day by the best-known living American philosopher, Kanye West. Protagoras’s ideas reach us only in fragments transmitted through the reports of others, so I’ll give you Kanye’s formulation, transmitted through Twitter: “Feelings are the only facts”. Against the notion that the realm of the subjective is unreal, this theory maintains that reality can never be anything other than subjective. Here (as elsewhere) Kanye goes too far. The mental state verbs we use to link conversational topics back to humanity fall into two families, with interestingly different levels of subjectivity, divided along a line which has to do with the status of claims as fact. The first family is labeled factive, and includes such expressions as realizes, notices, is aware that, and sees that; the mother of all factive verbs is knows (and according to Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson, knowledge is what unites the whole factive family). Non-factives make up the second family, whose members include thinks, suspects, believes and is sure. Factive verbs, rather predictably, properly attach themselves only to facts: you can know that Jack has stabbed someone only if he really has. Non-factive verbs are less informative: Jane might think that Edwin is following her even if he isn’t. In saying that Jane suspects Edwin has been stabbing people, I leave it an open question whether her suspicions are right: I report her feelings while remaining neutral on the relevant facts. Even when they mark strong degrees of subjective conviction — “Edwin is sure that Jane likes him” — non-factive expressions do not, unfortunately for Edwin in this case, necessarily attach themselves to facts. Feelings and facts can come apart.

Factives like ‘know’, meanwhile, allow us to report facts and feelings together at a single stroke. If I say that Lucy knows that the train is delayed, I’m simultaneously sharing news about the train and about Lucy’s attitude. Sometimes we use factives to reveal our attitudes to facts already known to the audience (“I know what you did last summer”), but most conversational uses of factives are bringing fresh facts into the picture. That last finding is from the work of linguist Jennifer Spenader, whose analysis of the dialogue about railway claims pulled me into the London-Lund Corpus in the first place (my goodness, so many fresh facts with those factives). Spenader and I both struggle with some deep theoretical problems about the line between knowing and thinking, but it nevertheless remains a line whose basic significance can be felt instinctively and without special training, even in casual conversation. No, wait, we have more than a feeling for this. We know something about it.

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Understanding Immigration Detention

As the British government holds its first public inquiry into the conditions and nature of immigration detention, it is a good time to take stock of what we know about these controversial institutions. Unlike prisons, about which there is a lengthy and robust tradition of critical academic scholarship, academics have written surprisingly little about everyday life in immigra­tion removal centres (IRCs). Details can be gleaned from parliamentary debates, governmental and non-governmental organiza­tions, and the occasional media report. Researchers also interview former detainees in the community. First-hand accounts can be found on websites, particularly those critical of detention. For the most part, however, academic debate over the purpose, justification, impact, and nature of detention (and its corollary, deportation) has developed independently from sustained engagement with the lived experience of those within these institutions.

Map created by Mary Bosworth

There are a number of reasons for the state of academic research in this field. On the one hand, immigra­tion removal centres are relatively recent institutions and so, there is no reason to expect a similar scale of research. Unlike prisons, which in some form or another have been around for centuries, the first institution to house foreign arrivals denied permission to land who were appealing their immigration case, Harmondsworth Immigration Detention Unit, opened near Heathrow airport on the site of today’s IRC Colnbrook in 1970. From that point first slowly and then, under the premiership of Tony Blair, more rapidly, the UK government began to establish the national system we have today. Today’s immigration estate, in other words, largely dates to the past 15 years.

It is not just that immigra­tion removal centres are relatively recent, but also that the numbers held under Immigration Act powers are low; 3,000 women and men on any given day are confined in 10 immigration removal centres (IRCs) scattered throughout the country. This figure starts to swell if we include the 1,000 or so who remain in prison post-sentence (or who are sent there from IRCs), held under immigration act powers, and the small number of families in the ‘pre-departure accommodation’ at Cedars. Another hundred or so sit in short term holding facilities at ports and airports within the UK and across the channel in Calais and Dunkirk. Still more are held in police cells, hospitals and Home Office reporting centres, and a few hundred have recently been placed in HMP The Verne. In comparison to other forms of custody as well as to the estimates of the sum of undocumented migrants in the community, these figures may be easily overlooked.

Exterior of IRC Yarl’s Wood (Credit: S Turnbull)

Complicating matters, immigra­tion removal centres do not fall all that easily into any particular discipline. While scholars in migration studies, political science, geography, and anthropology have been studying issues to do with migration control and citizenship for some time, those fields are not particularly familiar with custodial institutions. At the same time, in my own field of criminology, we have been slow to include IRCs, since, despite many overlaps and intersections, they do not fall within the criminal justice system.

Finally, of course, there is the highly politicized nature of these sites. Governments around the world have been reluctant to allow in researchers, a short-sighted policy decision that contributes to widespread concerns over their conditions and legitimacy. Managed via the terms of confidential commercial contracts with private custodial firms and the prison service, IRCs are, indeed, difficult sites to penetrate.

Once within their walls, the challenges do not stop. Wherever they are held, detainees are drawn from across the globe. Although in the UK they tend to congregate from former British colonies and thus most speak some English, few are entirely fluent. Cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity is breathtaking, making communication difficult. Most people are distressed, with some estimates placing rates of depression at above 80%. The population is also highly fluid; while a small proportion get ‘stuck’ in the system, staying for 6-months and longer, the majority remain for less than two months. Some are held for only a matter of days. The lack of an upper limit to detention – which has been heavily criticized in the recent Parliamentary hearings – makes it difficult not only for detainees and staff to plan their days, but, more prosaically, for researchers to interview and understand. Plans to meet up fall through, and those who agree to participate may be removed or released. Others who remain become progressively more anxious, and may, as a result, drop out of the study.

Bedroom at IRC Campsfield House (Credit: S Turnbull)

Researchers need to be aware both of the political limits surrounding their work, and of the vulnerabilities of those whom they interview. Many within these institutions, from detainees to all levels and all kinds of staff, express considerable reservation about the system. There are a lot of problems. There are also some examples of good practice, many attempts at compassion, some moments of shared humanity.

Going inside illuminates parts of detention that we sim­ply cannot otherwise see, filling in gaps in our knowledge. It challenges easy assumptions about the exercise of power, its effect, effectiveness, and legitimacy, by considering how such matters are made concrete in every­day interactions and experiences. First hand accounts remind us of our shared humanity and, in so doing, provide an important counter to the powerful rhetoric of securitization and criminalization that characterizes border control. Testimonies are moving. They reveal similarities and shared aspirations as well as differences of opinion. They are messy and confusing. They might also provide the basis for more creative thinking, a goal that I believe everyone involved in detention would welcome.

Headline image credit: Art and Craft room at IRC Colnbrook, Mary Bosworth

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10 ways to survive being a psychology student

How do you survive as a psychology student? It might be a daunting prospect, but we here at OUP are here to give you a helping hand through three years of cognitive overload. Here are our top tips:

1. Do some essential reading before you start your degree! Psychology is a very broad subject, so build some strong foundations with a wide reading base, especially if you’re new to the subject. Check out our Essential Book List to get you started (and recommendations welcome in the comments below).

2. Stay up-to-date with current affairs. Psychology is a continually evolving subject, with new ideas and perspectives emerging all the time. Read blogs, journals, and magazines; watch TED talks; listen to podcasts; and scan newspapers for psychology-themed stories.

3. Always keep your eyes and ears open. University is your chance to learn beyond the classroom. Pay attention to life – just watching your favourite TV programme can give you an insight into how a theoretical concept might actually work. Use everyday events and interactions to deepen your understanding of psychological ideas.

4. Learn from everyone around you. Psychology asks questions about how we as humans think – so go and think together with some other humans! Compare and contrast different ideas and approaches, and make the most of group learning or other opportunities, like taking part in other people’s surveys or experiments. Joining your university psychology society is a great way to learn from your peers and to balance work with play.

Business Student. Photo by Reidaroo CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

5. Learn how to study independently. This is your chance to learn what you want, not what you have to. You will have much greater academic freedom than ever before. Wherever you choose to study, you will have to take on your own independent research, and if you see yourself building a career in psychology, then independent investigation is crucial.

6. Hone your note-taking / diagram-making skills. On your laptop, tablet, smartphone — or with paper and pens — you’ll be writing a lot of notes over the course of your degree. Referencing and formatting might not seem like the most exciting aspects of your degree, but good preparation and organisation will make them more bearable (and quicker!). Get to know how best you learn, remember and process information.

7. Get enough sleep. Sitting up late staring at textbooks and computer screens is easy, but it’s not the healthiest habit to get into. Studying well is less about the number of hours you put in, than how effectively you spend those hours. Keep up a balanced diet, stay hydrated, do regular exercise, and find someone to talk to if you’re feeling stressed.

8. Don’t be afraid to admit to your own weaknesses. Psychology is a demanding subject, and questions are more common than neat answers.

9. Try to enjoy your studies. There are many ideas to explore, from behaviour to dreams, memory to psychoanalysis. Keep looking at different topics that interest you to stay motivated. When it does get too much, don’t be afraid to step back and take a break.

10. Finally, remember what psychology is about. You can get lost in surveys and experiments, theories and concepts, but try to always keep in mind what drew you to psychology in the first place. In studying psychology you’re taking part in a great tradition of questioning how the human mind works and behaves – be proud of that.

Heading Image: Student. Photo by CollegeDegrees360, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr

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The Oxford DNB at 10: new research opportunities in the humanities

September 2014 marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Over the next month a series of blog posts consider aspects of the ODNB’s online evolution in the decade since 2004. Here the literary historian, David Hill Radcliffe, considers how the ODNB online is shaping new research in the humanities.

The publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in September 2004 was a milestone in the history of scholarship, not least for crossing from print to digital publication. Prior to this moment a small army of biographers, myself among them, had worked almost entirely from paper sources, including the stately volumes of the first, Victorian ‘DNB’ and its 20th-century print supplement volumes. But the Oxford DNB of 2004 was conceived from the outset as a database and published online as web pages, not paper pages reproduced in facsimile. In doing away with the page image as a means of structuring digital information, the online ODNB made an important step which scholarly monographs and articles might do well to emulate.

Database design has seen dramatic changes since 2004—shifting from the relational model of columns and rows, to semi-structured data used with XML technologies, to the unstructured forms used for linking data across repositories. The implications of these developments for the future of the ODNB remain to be seen, but there is every reason to believe that its content will be increasingly accessed in ways other than the format of the traditional biographical essay. Essays are not going away, of course. But they will be supplemented by the arrays of tables, charts, maps, and graphs made possible by linked data. Indeed, the ODNB has been moving in this direction since 2004 with the addition of thousands of curated links between individuals (recorded in biographical essays) and the social hierarchies and networks to which they belonged (presented in thematic list and group entries)—and then on to content by or about a person held in archives, museums or galleries worldwide.

Online the ODNB offers scholars the opportunity to select, group, and parse information not just at the level of the article, but also in more detailed ways—and this is where computational matters get interesting. I currently use the ODNB online as a resource for a digital prosopography attached to a collection of documents called ‘Lord Byron and his Times’, tracking relationships among more than 12,000 Byron-contemporaries mentioned in nineteenth-century letters and memoirs; of these people a remarkable 5000 have entries in the ODNB. The traditional object of prosopography was to collect small amounts of information about large numbers of persons, using patterns to draw inferences about slenderly documented lives. But when computation is involved, a prosopography can be used with linked data to parse large amounts of information about large numbers of persons. As a result, one can attend to particularities, treating individuals as members of a group or social network without reducing them to the uniformity of a class identity. Digital prosopography thus returns us to something like the nineteenth-century liberalism that inspired Sir Leslie Stephen’s original DNB (1885-1900).

The key to finding patterns in large collections of lives and documents, the evolution of technology suggests, is to atomize the data. As a writer of biographies I would select from documentary sources, collecting the facts of a life, and translating them into the form of an ODNB essay. Creating a record in a prosopography involves a similar kind of abstraction: working from (say) an ODNB entry, I abstract facts from the prose, encoding names and titles and dates in a semi-structured XML template that can then be used to query my archive, comprising data from previous ODNB abstractions and other sources. For instance: ‘find relationships among persons who corresponded with Byron (or Harrow School classmates, or persons born in Nottinghamshire, etc.) mentioned in the Quarterly Review.’ An XML prosopography is but a step towards recasting the information as flexible, concise, and extensible semantic data.

ODNB, online. Image courtesy of the ODNB editorial team.

While human readers can easily distinguish the character-string ‘Oxford’ as referring to the place, the university, or the press, this is a challenge for computation—like distinguishing ‘Byron’ the poet from ‘Byron’ the admiral. One can attack this problem by using algorithms to compare adjacent strings, or one can encode strings by hand to disambiguate them, or use a combination of both. Digital ODNB essays are good candidates for semantic analysis since their structure is predictable and they are dense with significant names of persons, places, events, and relationships that can be used for data-linking. One translates character-strings into semantic references, groups the references into relationships, and expresses the relationships in machine-readable form.

A popular model for parsing semantic data is via ‘triples’: statements in the form subject / property / object, which describe a relationship between the subject and the object: the tree / is in / the quad. It is powerful because it can describe anything, and its statements can be yoked together to create new statements. For example: ‘Lord Byron wrote Childe Harold’, and ‘John Murray published Childe Harold’ are both triples. Once the three components are translated into semantically disambiguated machine-readable URIs (Uniquely Referring Identifiers), computation can infer that ‘John Murray published Lord Byron.’

Now imagine the contents of the ODNB expressed not as 60,000 biographical essays but as several billion such statements. In fact, this is far from unthinkable, given the nature of the material and progress being made in information technology. The result is a wonderful back-to-the-future moment with Leslie Stephen’s Victorian DNB wedded to Charles Babbage’s calculating machine: the simplicity of the triple and the power of finding relations embedded within them. Will the fantasies of positivist historians finally be realized? Not likely; while computation is good at questions of ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘when’, it is not so good at ‘why’ and ‘how’. Biographers and historians are unlikely to find themselves out of a job anytime soon. On the contrary, once works like the ODNB are rendered machine-readable and cross-query-able, scholars will find more work on their hands than they know what to do with.

So the publication of the ODNB online in September 2004 will be fondly remembered as a liminal moment when humanities scholarship crossed from paper to digital. The labour of centuries of research was carried across that important threshold, recast in a medium enabling new kinds of investigation the likes of which—ten years on—we are only beginning to contemplate.

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Kissing from a strictly etymological point of view

Like every other custom in life, kissing has been studied from the historical, cultural, anthropological, and linguistic point of view. Most people care more for the thing than for the word, but mine is an etymological blog, so don’t expect a disquisition on the erotic aspects of kissing, even though a few lines below will lead us in that direction. Did the ancient Indo-Europeans, the semi-mythic people who lived no one knows exactly when and where kiss? And if they did, what was their method of performing this “gesture”? Did they rub one another’s nose, the way many people do? Did they kiss their children before putting them to their nomadic beds? Did they kiss goodbye to lost objects, blow a kiss to a friend, or kiss the hand of the woman whose affections they hoped to gain? Alas, we will never know. Even a common Indo-European word for “head” does not exist, and if there is no head, how does one kiss in a truly Proto-Indo-European way? Our records, beginning with Ancient Egypt, the Old Testament, and Vedic texts are quite old but not old enough.

In 1897 Kristoffer Nyrop (1858-1931), a distinguished student of Romance linguistics and semantic change, wrote a book called Kysset og dets historie (The Kiss and Its History; being a nineteenth-century Dane, he stuck to the reactionary habit of writing his works in Danish, but the book was translated into English almost immediately and is still available.) The 190-page study reads like a novel. A week after its publication, all the copies were sold out, and Nyrop was asked to prepare a second edition and do so in a wild hurry, to be ready for Christmas sales. As could be expected, he complied. Regrettably, he said nothing about the origin of the word. Yet the literature on the etymology of kiss is huge.

As usual, I’ll begin with Germanic. The ancestors of the Modern Germans, Dutch, Frisians, Scandinavians, and English had almost the same word for “kiss,” approximately koss (coss). Part of the New Testament in Gothic has come down to us. Gothic is a Germanic language, recorded in the fourth century, and the word for the verb kiss in it is kukjan. As early as 1861, Dutch dialectal kukken surfaced in a scholarly work, and somewhat later an almost identical East Frisian form was set in linguistic circulation. It became clear that at one time Germanic speakers had two forms—one with -ss-, the other with -kk-. Their relation has never been explained to everybody’s satisfaction.

Solomon in The Song of Songs mentions passionate kisses on the mouth, and Judas must also have kissed Jesus on the mouth. At least, such was the general perception in the Middle Ages (for example, this is how Giotto and Fra Angelico, but more explicitly Giotto, represented the scene), so the Hebrews and the Romans kissed as we do, and Wulfila, the translator of the Gothic Bible, probably had a similar image before his eyes while working with the Greek text. So the speakers of the Germanic languages called “kiss” a kuss- (the vowels might differ slightly) or a kukk-.

Whenever the ritual of kissing came into being, some kisses were used to show respect and in other situations served a purpose comparable to shaking hands (think of a handshake sealing a bargain). Kissing the foot of a king or the Pope belongs here too. Dutch zoenen has the root of a verb meaning “reconcile” (a cognate of German versöhnen). Consequently, people kissed to mark the end of hostilities. Later the Dutch verb broadened its meaning and began to denote any kiss. Something similar happened in Russian, in which the verb for “kiss” is akin to the adjective for “whole”: tselovat’ (stress on the last syllable), from tsel. A kiss must have been a gesture signifying “be healthy, gesundheit.” Another Dutch verb for “kiss” (this time, dialectal), with a close analog in dialectal German, is poenen ~ puunen and seems to have meant “push, plunge, thrust; come into contact.” Here the emphasis was obviously on the movement in the direction of another person. Then there is Engl. smack, believed to be sound-imitative: apparently, when one kisses someone, smack is heard. Onomatopoeia is always hard to prove, but compare Russian chmok, which means exactly the same as smack. Latin savium, of obscure origin, designated an erotic kiss, while osculum goes back to the word for “mouth” (os). Neither is sound-imitative.

Klimt’s The Kiss

Where then does Old Germanic kuss- ~ kukk- belong? Many researchers have suggested that it is sound-imitative, like smack. Perhaps we really hear or think we hear smack, chmok, kuss, and kukk when we kiss. However, even an onomatopoeic word can have a protoform. Reconstructing any protoform is pure algebra. For example, the Gothic for come is qiman (pronounced as kwiman). Its indisputable Latin cognate is venire. To make the two belong together, we should posit an ancestor beginning with gw-. In Latin, g was lost, and in Germanic it yielded k, according to the law of the consonant shift (b, d, g to p, t, k). Did the ancestors of Latin speakers ever say gwenire? Most likely, they did.

In the same way, kiss was tentatively connected with Latin gustare “to taste,” on the assumption that at one time the sought-for form began with gw-. Although this suggestion can be found in one of the best Germanic etymological dictionaries, it now has few, if any, supporters. More instructive is the fact that the Hittite for “kiss” was kuwaszi, and it resembles Sanskrit ṡvaṡiti “to blow; snort” (k- and s- alternate according to a certain rule, while u and w are variants of the same phonetic entity). Add to them Greek kuneo “kiss,” in whose conjugation -s- appears with great regularity: the future was kuso and the aorist ekusa, earlier ekussa. On the basis of this evidence, several authoritative modern dictionaries posit a Proto-Indo-European form of kiss. Can we imagine that three or so thousand years ago there was a common verb for kiss that has come down to our time? Possibly, if “kiss” designated something very common and important, that is, if, for example, it existed as a religious term, something like “worship an idol by touching the image with one’s lips.”

Other hypotheses also exist. Kiss was compared with the verb for “speak,” from which English has the antiquated preterit quoth; Engl. choose and chew; Swedish kuk “penis,” Low (= Northern) German kukkuk “whore; vulva,” Irish bel “lip,” and especially often with Latin basium “kiss” (noun) ~ basiare “kiss” (verb), recognizable today from its cognates: French baiser, Italian baciare, and Spanish besar. All those conjectures should probably be dismissed as unprofitable. The origin of basiare is unknown, and nothing good ever comes from explaining one obscure word by referring it to another equally obscure one.

We are left with two choices. Perhaps there indeed once existed a proto-verb for kiss sounding approximately like it, but who kissed whom or what and in what way remains undiscovered. Or, while kissing, different people heard a sound that resembles either kuss or kukk. Neither solution inspires too much confidence, but, in any case, the long consonant (-ss and -kk) points to the affective nature of the verb. Perhaps an ancient expressive verb belonging to the religious sphere had near universal currency, with Hittite, Sanskrit, and Germanic still having its reflexes. If so, the main question will be about the application of that verb. The sex-related look-alikes (“penis,” “vulva,” and the rest) should, almost certainly, be ascribed to coincidence.

To prevent the Indo-European imagination from running wild, one should remember that alongside kiss, Engl. buss exists. Although it sounds like Middle Engl. bass (the same meaning), bass could not become buss, and it is anybody’s guess whether bass is of French or Latin origin. Swedish dialectal puss corresponds to German Bavarian buss, which is remembered because Luther used it. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Lithuanian, Persian, Turkic, and Hindu have almost identical forms (Spanish is sometimes said to have borrowed its word from Arabic), while Scottish Gaelic and Welsh bus means “lip; mouth.” Even Engl. ba “to kiss” has been recorded. This array of b-words seems to tip the scale toward the onomatopoeic solution, the more so because, to pronounce b, we have to open the lips. For millennia people have kussed (no pun intended), kossed, kissed, kukked, bassed, and bussed, to show affection and respect, to conclude peace, and just for the fun of it, without paying too much attention to origins. This is not giving a kiss of death to etymological research: it is rather a warning that some things are hard to investigate.

Nowadays the question where does a certain sentence occur? has lost its edge. Google will immediately provide the answer. So find out who wrote: “‘A gentleman insulted me today’, she said, ‘he hugged me around the waist and kissed me’.” Then read, laugh, and weep with the heroine.

Image credits: (1) “The prince awakened Sleeping Beauty.” From Kinder und Hausmarchen, von Jakob L. und Wilhelm K. Grimm; illus. von Hermann Vogel. Dritte Auflage), 1893. NYPL Digital Gallery. Digital ID: 1698628. New York Public Library (2) The Kiss. Gustav Klimt. 1907-1908. Austrian Gallery Belvedere. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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A role model for black feminism: Harriet Ross Tubman

Harriet Ross Tubman’s heroic rescue effort on behalf of slaves before and during the Civil War was a lifetime fight against social injustice and oppression.

Most people are aware of her role as what historian John Hope Franklin considered the greatest conductor for the Underground Railroad. However, her rescue effort also included her work as a cook, nurse, scout, spy, and soldier for the Union Army. As a nurse, she cared for black soldiers by working with Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, who was in charge of front line hospitals. Over 700 slaves were rescued in the Tubman-led raid against the Confederates at the Combahee River in South Carolina. She became the only woman in U.S. history to plan and lead both white and black soldiers in such a military coup.

It is the latter activity which caused black feminists in Roxbury, Massachusetts to organize themselves during the seventies as the Combahee River Collective. When Tubman died, she was given a military burial with honors. It is also Tubman’s work as an abolitionist, advocate for women’s suffrage, and care for the elderly that informs black feminist thought. It is only fitting that we remember the life of this prominent nineteenth century militant social reformer on the 165th anniversary of her escape from slavery on 17 September 1849.

The Runaway

Tubman was born into slavery around 1820 to Benjamin and Harriet Ross and given the name Araminta. She later took her mother’s name, Harriet. As a slave child, she worked in the household first and then was assigned to work in the fields. Her early years as a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland were traumatic and she was sickly. An overseer threw an object that accidentally hit Tubman in the head. The head injury she sustained caused her to have seizures and blackouts all of her life. She even had visions and this combined with her religiosity caused her to believe that she was called by God to lead slaves to freedom. It is believed that her work in the fields gave her the physical stamina to make her rescues. She was married in 1844 to John Tubman, a free black man, but her anxiety about being sold caused her to run away to Philadelphia and leave John behind. Runaways were rare among slave women, but prevalent among slave men.

Harriet Tubman by H. Seymour Squyer, 1848 – 18 Dec 1905 (National Portrait Gallery). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. The Abolitionist

Between 1846 and 1860, Tubman successfully rescued close to 300 family members and other slaves. She became part of a network of prominent abolitionists who created escape havens for passage from the South to Northern cities and then on to Canada. The recent award winning film, Twelve Years a Slave reminds us that even free blacks were subject to being turned in as a runaway after passage of The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Tubman was bothered by this new law and was eager to go directly to Canada where she herself resided for a time. She made anywhere from 11 to 19 rescue trips. The exact count is unclear because such records were notkept in this clandestine social movement. Maryland plantation owners put a $40,000 bounty on Tubman’s head. She was never caught and she never lost a passenger. Like Patrick Henry, her motto was give me liberty or give me death. She carried a pistol with her and threatened to shoot any slave who tried to turn back. The exodus from slavery was so successful that the slaves she led to freedom called her Moses. She was such a master of disguise and subterfuge that these skills were used after she joined the Union Army. It has also been reported that the skills she developed were so useful to the military that her scouting and spy strategies were taught at West Point. She purchased a home in Auburn, New York where she resided after the Civil War. Her husband, John Tubman, died after the war, and she married Nelson Davis, another Civil War veteran. From her home in Auburn, she continued to help former slaves.

The Social Reformer

Historian Gerda Lerner once described Tubman as a revolutionist who continued her organizing activities in later life. Tubman supported women’s suffrage, gave speeches at organizing events for both black and white women, and was involved in the organizing efforts of the National Federation of Afro-American Women. After a three decade delay, Tubman was given $20 a month by the government for her military service. Tubman lived in poverty, but her mutual aid activities continued. She used her pension and money from fundraising activities to provide continued aid to freed slaves and military families. She died in 1913 in the home she established for the elderly and poor, the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Colored People, now a National Historic Monument.

Harriet Ross Tubman escaped from slavery, but remembered those she left behind. She was truly an historic champion for civil rights and social justice.

Heading image: Underground Railway Map. Compiled from “The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom” by Willbur H. Siebert Wilbur H. Siebert, The Macmillan Company, 1898. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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World Water Monitoring Day 2014

World Water Monitoring Day is an annual celebration reaching out to the global community to build awareness and increase involvement in the protection of water resources around the world. The hope is that individuals will feel motivated and empowered to investigate basic water monitoring in their local area. Championed by the Water Environment Federation, a broader challenge has arisen out of the awareness day, celebrated on September 18th each year. Simple water testing kits are available, and individuals are encouraged to go out and test the quality of local waterways.

Water monitoring can refer to anything from the suitability for drinking from a particular water source, to taking more responsibility for our own consumption of water as an energy source, to the technology needed for alternative energies. Discover more about water issues from around the world using the map below.

Image credit: Ocean beach at low tide against the sun, by Brocken Inaglory. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Scots wha play: an English Shakespikedian Scottish independence referendum mashup

THE DATE: 18 September 2014, Fateful Day of Scotland’s Independence Referendum

THE PLACE: A Sceptred Isle

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

Alexander the Great, First Minister of Scotland

Daveheart, Prime Minister of the Britons

Assorted Other Ministers, Attendant Lords, Lordlings, Politicos, and Camp Followers

Three Witches

A Botnet of Midges

The Internet (A Sprite)

A Helicopter

Dame Scotia

St George of Osborne

Boris de Balliol, Mayor of Londres

UKIP (An Acronym)

Chorus

ACT I: A Blasted Heath.

Enter THREE WITCHES



When shall we three meet again,

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

When the referendum’s done,

When the battle’s lost and won.

That will be when Salmond’s gone.

Where the place?

Hampstead Heath.

Better Together unto death!

Is that your phone?

Daveheart calls: anon! –

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

Hover through the plebs and filthy air.

[WITCHES vanish.]

ACT II: The Scottish Camp (Voters at Dawn)

Enter a SMALL FOLKS’ CHORUS, Botnet Midges,

Who flap their wings, and then commence this chant:

See here assembled in the Scottish Camp

The Thane of Yes, Lord Naw-Naw, Doctor Spin.

Old folk forget; yet all shall be forgot,

But we’ll remember, with advantages,

This Referendum Day. Then shall that name

And date, familiar as our household words –

Alex the Great, the eighteenth of September –

And many, many here who cast their votes,

A true sorority, a band of brothers,

Long be remembered — long as “Auld Lang Syne” –

For she or he who votes along with me

Shall be my sibling; be they curt or harsh

This day shall gentle their condition:

Scots students down in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed, they were not here,

Casting their votes in this our referendum.

ACT III: On Arthur’s Seat, a Mount Olympus

Near the Scots’ Parliament at Holyrood

Proud Edward Milibrand, Daveheart, Nicholas Clegg,

And Anthony a Blair perch on the crags

With English Exiles. Now Lord Devomax speaks:

Stands England where it did? Alas, poor country,

Almost afraid to know itself, a stateless

Nation, post-imperial, undevolved;

Still sadly lacking its own Parliament,

It commandeers to deal with its affairs

The British Parliament, whose time it wastes

With talk of what pertains to England only,

And so abuses that quaint institution

As if it were its own, not for these islands

Set in a silver sea from Sark to Shetland.

[Exit, pursued by A. BLAIR]

ACT IV: The Archipelago (High Noon)

Enter THE INTERNET, A Sprite, who sings:

Full fathom five Westminster lies;

Democracy begins to fade;

Stout, undevolved, John Bull still eyes

Imperial power so long mislaid;

England must suffer a sea-change

Into something small and strange,

MPs hourly clang Big Ben:

DING-DONG!

Come, John Bull, and toll Big Ben.

ACT V: South London: top floor of the Shard

Boris de Balliol, St George of Osborne,

Attendant Lords, and Chorus Bankerorum,

Et Nympharum Tamesis et Parliamentorum

Sheet lightnings flash offstage while clashing cymbals

Crescendo in a thunderous night’s farrage.

ST GEORGE: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!

Ye exit polls and hurricanoes spout!

Come, Boris, here’s the place. Stand still.

How fearful

And dizzy ’tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!

The crows and choughs, that wing the midway air

Seem gross as bankers’ apps: here from this Shard

See floors of smug short-sellers, dreadful traders

Inside a giant gherkin, and the City

Fraternity of inegalite

Spread out around us while its denizens

Appear like lice.

ATTENDANT LORDS: Scotia and Boris, hail!

BORIS: O Bella, Bella Caledonia,

Hic Boris Maior, Londinii Imperator,

Ego –

Fanfare of hautboys, bagpipes, and a tucket.

ST GEORGE: A tucket!

BORIS:                             Tempus fugit.

CHORUS:                                                    Fuckaduckit!

Pipers, desist! Your music from this height

Has calmed the storm, and, blithely, while we wait

For the result to come from Holyrood,

So charms the ear that, clad in English tartans –

The Hunting Cholmondesley, the Royal Agincourt,

And chic crisscrosses of the National Trust –

Our city here, ravished by this fair sound

Of tweeted pibroch, YouTubed from the Shard

To Wapping, Westminster, and Heathrow’s tarmac,

While gazing up from bingo and Big Macs,

Brooding upon our disunited kingdom,

Stands all agog to hear Dame Scotia speak.

Scotia descends, ex machina helecopteris

HELICOPTER: Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

SCOTIA: O England, England, your tight cabinet’s

Sly Oxbridge public-schoolboy millionaires

Fight while your country sinks beneath their yoke;

It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash

Is added to those wounds: new Europhiles

Repulsed, the world repelled; England whose riots

Failed to stop students’ fees for your own folk

Or to contain their escalating cost.

Sad, catastrophic, calculating drones

Miscalculating loans, kicking the arts,

England betrayed by Scoto-Anglish Blair

Into wrong wars and then to Gordon Brown,

Jowled lord of loss and light-touch regulation.

O England, England! Rise and be a nation

United under your own Parliament!

Methinks I am a prophet now inspired

And thus, inspiring, do foretell of you:

Your Europhobia must not endure,

For violent fires must soon burn out themselves;

Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short.

Learn from the Scots: plant windfarms, make yourself

A Saudi Arabia of tidal power,

Though not of gender; learn, too, from the French,

There is no need to stay a sceptred isle,

Scuffed other Eden, demi-paradise;

No fortress, built by UKIP for themselves,

Against infection in their Brussels wars;

Be happy as a nation on an island

That’s not England’s alone, a little world,

This precious stone set in a silver sea,

Which serves to link it now with all the globe,

Or as the front door to a happy home,

Be, still, the envy of less happier lands,

And set up soon an English Parliament,

Maybe in London, Britain’s other eye,

Maybe in Yorkshire, so you may become

A better friend to Scotland whose folk love

This blessed plot, this earth, and independence.

She zooms northwards.

Heading image: Macbeth by John Martin (1789–1854). Scottish National Gallery. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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