On Pepys, the giving of gifts, reflexivity and writers
Work was slow taking off today because my own slowness is infectious. I had a lovely time with a friend who dropped in this morning and we went to the library. This is good. What isn’t so good is that my week was so… interesting that I gave up after lunch and went back to bed. I don’t hurt nearly as much and I can now think again. Which is a shame, for it means I have to deal with two aspects of the problem that is Pepys.
The first aspect is the amount of gift-giving he documents. I think that this is just an element of the early modern economy: people gave Pepys gifts because of his role (socially, politically, economically) as well as for the reasons we assume that people give gifts today. In other words, gifts were an aspect of finances. This is not so unexpected – Australia is unusual in not tipping and in seldom using favours to oil wheels. My problem is that I don’t know where this stops and where the social starts. There may not be a boundary at all. The problem with no boundary is that the practice of gift-giving and recompense (the price is a gold coin, offered after the event with no strings attached) for small favours done is it makes it almost impossible to see how women fitted in. I rather suspect that one way women were disempowered was by being excluded from this aspect of the economy except in certain circumstances. Actresses were part of it, mistresses were, and prostitutes were, but where did housewives and estate owners and businesswomen and servants fit? This is my first problem.
The second Pepysian problem relates to my ongoing work on how writers see history. I didn’t realise that variety of questions that Gillian-the-historian poses the texts she reads. Somewhere in the last thirty years I put some of my reflexivity away, for safekeeping. Now that I’ve taken it out of storage, I find that some writers ask the same level questions I do, but that most don’t.
What I need to find out is whether the type of questions writers ask of primary sources changes according to genre. I don’t need to measure the research of writers against the research of historians, but against the research of other writers. And it’s not a simple theoretical structure (the way we’re taught to conceive of research as undergraduates) but a complex one. I’m certain now that our use of certain notions as writers (“I’m working on the research for this novel.” “I’m deep in reading primary sources.”) hides more disparate uses of sources and decisions and quite different understandings of the past than they demonstrate similarities between writers. And I’m beginning to think that this, too, may be genre-linked and that only a very, very small minority of fiction writers make reflexive and aware decisions concerning the nature of the research they’re undertaking.
Later on today I’ll post a recipe. Right now I’m still puzzling over Pepys.
The first aspect is the amount of gift-giving he documents. I think that this is just an element of the early modern economy: people gave Pepys gifts because of his role (socially, politically, economically) as well as for the reasons we assume that people give gifts today. In other words, gifts were an aspect of finances. This is not so unexpected – Australia is unusual in not tipping and in seldom using favours to oil wheels. My problem is that I don’t know where this stops and where the social starts. There may not be a boundary at all. The problem with no boundary is that the practice of gift-giving and recompense (the price is a gold coin, offered after the event with no strings attached) for small favours done is it makes it almost impossible to see how women fitted in. I rather suspect that one way women were disempowered was by being excluded from this aspect of the economy except in certain circumstances. Actresses were part of it, mistresses were, and prostitutes were, but where did housewives and estate owners and businesswomen and servants fit? This is my first problem.
The second Pepysian problem relates to my ongoing work on how writers see history. I didn’t realise that variety of questions that Gillian-the-historian poses the texts she reads. Somewhere in the last thirty years I put some of my reflexivity away, for safekeeping. Now that I’ve taken it out of storage, I find that some writers ask the same level questions I do, but that most don’t.
What I need to find out is whether the type of questions writers ask of primary sources changes according to genre. I don’t need to measure the research of writers against the research of historians, but against the research of other writers. And it’s not a simple theoretical structure (the way we’re taught to conceive of research as undergraduates) but a complex one. I’m certain now that our use of certain notions as writers (“I’m working on the research for this novel.” “I’m deep in reading primary sources.”) hides more disparate uses of sources and decisions and quite different understandings of the past than they demonstrate similarities between writers. And I’m beginning to think that this, too, may be genre-linked and that only a very, very small minority of fiction writers make reflexive and aware decisions concerning the nature of the research they’re undertaking.
Later on today I’ll post a recipe. Right now I’m still puzzling over Pepys.
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