Horror and Gore in Children’s Histories May 31, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite, Contemporary
***Dedicated to a suffering Little Miss B***
Beachombing’s eldest daughter (4) has recently begun to appreciate her nation’s past. This would be fascinating in itself. But it has become a haunting replay of Beach’s own childhood because Beach (good historian that he is) saved his own childhood reads and is now sharing them with Little Miss B. Beach has been particularly interested by the pictures that he remembers from his infancy and those he has quite forgotten. Naturally the remembered images tend to include pain or anticipated pain and all the sluiced up horror that goes with that. Who can forget ‘the page’ that you as a child tried to turn over without looking or that you only looked at with parents present? Well, here are a few from Beachcombing’s catalogue of terrors. Above is Joan ”the maid” Arc as she is turned into base elements and cooking fat and here follows the most chilling of them all: the princes in the tower about to be suffocated by ‘the shaggy shadow’.
The jousting toys are a stroke of genius.
From the little seen so far of 2012 history books for the very young there has been a period of sanitation since Beach last sat on a potty. Difficult but memorable scenes are becoming rarer. The images included here are taken from Ladybird’s Kings and Queens of England (1968). It would be interesting to see whether any of this horror and gore survives in the modern edition. Beach wonders whether any of his readers had any ghastly perhaps even inappropriate images from children’s history books of twenty or forty or sixty years ago? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
And have we gone too far in cleaning up the past? Beach, who is a great believer in the Roald Dahl school of childhood noted with a thrill that the pictures that most interested Little Miss B were precisely those that had most interested Beach himself a generation or two ago. The questions were probably the same too. Is he good? Is he bad? What will happen next? What is the black hood for? Why didn’t anyone help the little children? Daddy, what’s he wiping off his sword?
Beach’s daughter – a free spirit – was particularly bemused by a page of slavers with a long row of African tribespeople being marched towards a boat (flying the Stars and Stripes!). The very concept of slavery confused her. She also noted the man in the water in this shipwreck image below and was incredulous at his lack of armbands.
Coincidentally as Beach was writing this an email arrived from Larry (for which many thanks) linking to the image from a nineteenth-century German book on children’s bad habits. The images are beyond belief. But Beach, who had that book too as a child, always found it amusing rather than frightening. Whereas some of the simple images above lurked in the cracks between his nightmares.
Two Thousand Infants Sold to Russia for Human Sacrifice May 30, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Prehistoric
***Dedicated to Wade who sent the relevant passage in***
The custom of burying infant children in the foundations of new buildings was well established in prehistoric, ancient and even (gulp) medieval times. The bigger and more important a building the more likely it was to a have a tot dropped in the cement. It is pretty ghastly but there you are… Humans are pretty ghastly: no news there.
The custom while not universal seems to have been used through much of Euro-Asia-Africa and large parts of the Americas. Presumably the dried cats in walls that Beach has publicised with a certain abandon in the past are an updated version of this? A sacrifice to ‘ground’ the building and assuage the gods of earthquakes, floods and other misfortunes.
Beach has come across infant burial reports from all over the world and from many different time periods. However, yesterday he ran across this extraordinary piece about the nineteenth-century China to Russia railway.
As the Siberian Railway approached the northern boundaries of the Chinese Empire and surveys were made for its extension through Manchuria to the sea, great excitement was produced in Pekin (sic) by the rumor that the Russian minister had applied to the Empress of China for two thousand children to be buried in the roadbed under the rails in order to strengthen it. Some years ago, in rebuilding a large bridge, which had been swept away several times by inundations in the Yarkand, eight children, purchased from poor people at a high price, were immured alive in the foundations. As the new bridge was firmly reconstructed out of excellent materials, it has hitherto withstood the force of the strongest floods, a result which the Chinese attribute, not to the solid masonry, but to the propitiation of the river god by an offering of infants.
The ‘rumor’ can probably be brushed gently to one side, though it says a lot about nineteenth-century China that such a rumour could grow to maturity: or is this just Russians barbarizing the Chinese with tall tales?
More difficult to deal with is the whole question of the bridge in Yarkand. Beach would bet a substantial amount of money that eight children were not bought from their parents and that they were not built into the bridge. But tradition, depravity and superstition – a particularly hellish threesome - are such that he would not bet his house (which has he hopes not skeletal remains in the foundations).
Can anyone add anything to the tradition of the children in the Yarkand bridge? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
(Apologies for all those unanswered emails but Little Miss B been very ill the last four days and this has coincided with a period of manic work chez Mrs B.)
Dare-Nots May 29, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary
***A Pietro***
Beach fluttered around the edges of an Italian project a few years ago that affected him profoundly. A series of interviews were collected from families who had suffered violence at the hands of the partisans at the end of the Second World War. The vast majority of these partisans, particularly in Emiglia-Romagna and Tuscany, had been Communist and in 1944 they were acting under the (thankfully mistaken) belief that the revolution was a sure thing. As the Germans retreated, some Communist groups, particularly in the Apennines and immediately to the north in the ‘Triangle of Death’ took to liquidating any enemies of the proletariat that they could lay their hands on. Priests, shopkeepers, those who attended mass… There was a long list and many had had either nothing to do with Fascism or had had only (like most Italian adults) nominal membership.
The great curiosity was that the interviews were, again and again, with children. This being the 2000s not actual children, of course, but men and women who had been children or at best teens at the time. Those others in the family who had lived through those events – typically a knock on the door in the early evening and ten men outside with firearms – had tried to speak but had been ignored in the 1950s, 1960s and beyond and had died before their memories became interesting. Post-war Italy had been just too delicate a place to air anti-communist, let alone anti-partisan sentiments. It is only in the last fifteen years that the media and popular books have begun to cover partisan atrocities; atrocities that by some (controversial) estimates claimed the lives of more Italians in Italy than the Germans. (If you include Italian deaths outside Italy – Cephalonia, Auschwitz etc - then Germany rushes into first place.)
All this got Beach thinking about ‘history-that-dare-not-speak-its-name’. Two readers (thanks to Invisible and James W) sent in this extraordinary article on another twentieth-century dare-not (to coin a phrase), the Great Famine in China (1958-1962) when perhaps forty million (the population of Spain or Poland) died of hunger due to the failures of collective agriculture. The USSR had Khrushchev who spoke out against Stalin and criticisms of Uncle Joe became possible already in the 1950s; in fact, they became, this being the Soviet Union, practically de rigeur. But in China there was never a convincing break with the Maoist past and hunger and death stayed out of textbooks and out of bar talk. The problem is that if evidence is not collected now – the link details one attempt - it will very soon be too late. Those adults who survived are elderly and their memory is already tottering. As in Italy, we’ll be relying on ‘children’…
There, of course, must be dozens of dare-nots in our modern history books: horrific events that cannot be discussed until years later (if at all). Any notable examples? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
The three characteristics: (i) trauma, (ii) a political climate that does not allow discussion of said trauma and (iii) a lack of easy methods to publicise that trauma. On this subject will dare-nots even be possible in the internet age? As to the pre-modern period there is a case to be made that pretty much every unpleasant event was a dare not. It is depressing to think of the suffering and of what has been lost.
Seventeenth-century English Dragons May 28, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
Beachcombing recently highlighted the case of a giant serpent in nineteenth-century Devon, a snake that was as thick as a thigh. Beach had assumed that this was a one off, but now he is wondering as he found a second reference to go with it. This one comes from a pamphlet with a straight-to-the-point title: The Flying Serpent or Strange News out of Essex. This was published in 1669 and tells how a beast that was spotted at Lodge Farm, Henham-on-the-Mount was
‘8 or 9 foot long, the smallest part of him about the bigness of a Man’s leg, on the middle as big as a Mans Thigh, his eyes were very large and piercing, about the bigness of a Sheep’s eye, in his mouth he had two rows of Teeth which appeared to their sight very white and sharp, and on his back h e had two wings indifferent large but not proportionable to the rest of his body, they judging them not to be above two hand fulls long, and w hen spreaded, not to extend from the top of one wing to the utmost end of the other above two foot at the most, and therefore altogether too weak to carry such an unwieldly body.
A flightless dragon then?! All this makes Beach wonder if (in imaginary terms) the Devonian snake was actually the last traces of belief in wyrms in those parts in the early eighteenth century.
Back to the Henham beast though. One writer, Alison Barnes, has gone on record with (she believes) the true identity of this beast. Crocodile? Salamander? Mutant adder? Well, actually none of the above. AB has argued that it was a practical joke. She claims that the author of the pamphlet, was also the author of the hoax: see further her ‘Ingenious William Winstanley: Poet, Journalist, Bookseller, Historian and Novelist of Saffron Walden and Quendon 1628-1698’. AB argues, in fact, that all the ‘solid witnesses’ were Winstanley’s friends and implies that lots of paper mache was employed.
So dragons were truly extinct by the seventeenth century in Britain? Well, yes and no. In 1614 another text was published whose title will speak for itself. True and Wonderfull: A Discourse relating a strange and monstrous Serpent (or Dragon) lately discovered, and yet living, to the great annoyance and divers slaughters both of men and cattell, by his strong and violent Poyson: in Sussex, two miles from Horsam, in a woode called St. Leonards Forrest, and thirtie miles from London, this present month of August, 1614. With the true generation of Serpents.
Who needs annotated bibliographies when you have a hundred word titles? A description of the ‘dragon’ follows.
He is of countenance very proud, and at the sight or hearing of men or cattel, will raise his necke upright, and seem to listen and look about, with great arrogancy. There are likewise on either side of him discovered, two great bunches so big as a large footeball, and (as some thinke) will in time grow to wings
He was eight or nine feet in length and his middle part (the thickest) was, reportedly, like the axle tree of a cart.
What on earth is happening here? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
The Wandering Jew in Burnley May 27, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval, Modern
Today it is the turn of the Wandering Jew.
For those who have never met him WJ refused to help Christ (as he was carrying his cross) or made fun of Jesus as he hung between the thieves. This proved a bad idea. WJ now meanders cursed around the globe and will do so until the end of time in penance for his oversight. The WJ legend in some senses institutionalises European anti-Semitism: it was a medieval, perhaps a thirteenth-century creation. But it is difficult not to feel sympathy for this extraordinary individual doomed to ‘walk the earth’ like Caine. And so an anti-semitic rant actually becomes a bridge to understanding and shared humanity.
Most modern studies claim that by the nineteenth-century belief in the Wandering Jew had become purely symbolic. What then to make of this news report from that very century.
We are informed that a new race of religionists have lately risen in this locality (Burnley), who pretend to have more extensive acquaintance with the ‘mysteries of the kingdom’ that any of their predecessors. They assert with much gravity that in the darkest shades of night they are permitted to hold converse with departed spirits, and for this purpose it is their custom to meet together, and hear a sweet response from heaven. The latest intelligence they have received from the invisible world is to the effect that the Wandering Jew is in some part of Lancashire, and that he will shortly pass through Burnley, when he will make a call at a certain house and communicate such important information relative to a subject that is as yet entirely ‘unknown to mortal mind’, as will ‘astonish the natives’. Really we may inquire, what will come next?
Beach doesn’t want to set up today’s post as a Borges short story, but he found this clipping at the bottom of a pile of newspapers while preparing his tax documentation. A note says that it came from the Blackburn Times but neglects to give the date: woops… If anyone can dictate the words to any blanks here then Beach would love to fill them in. drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
In the meantime Beachcombing might note that Blackburn is something of a rival to Burnley. Was this a bit of garden green slander then or some honest to God non-conformism gone very very wrong. For what it is worth Beach’s money is on the second. As a Yorkshireman Beach, in fact, can share the intelligence that folk across the border in Lancs (Blackburn, Burnley etc) are a LITTLE strange.
Cellini and the Salamander May 26, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval, Modern
***Dedicated to Michael F who sent this in***
We last saw Benvenuto Cellini (obit 1571) imprinted on a French/Spanish/Scottish canon. Fourteen months on, here is a little doodle from Cellini’s infancy, judging by his autobiography the happiest years of his chaotic life.
When I was about five years old [c. 1505] my father happened to be in a basement-chamber of our house [in Florence], where they had been working, and where a good fire of oak-logs was still burning; he had an instrument in his hand and was playing and singing alone before the fire. The weather was very cold. Happening to look into the fire he spied in the middle of those most burning flames a little creature like a lizard, that was sporting in the core of intensest coals. Becoming instantly aware of what the thing was, he had my sister and me called, and pointing it out to us children, gave me a great box on the ears which caused me to howl and weep with all my might. Then he pacified me good-humouredly and spoke as follows. ‘My dear little boy, I am not striking you for any wrong that you have done, but only to make you remember that that lizard which you see in the fire is a salamander, a creature which has never been seen by anyone of whom we have credible information.’ So saying he kissed me and gave me some pieces of money.
Innella età di cinque anni in circa, essendo mio padre in una nostra celletta, innella quale si era fatto bucato ed era rimasto un buon fuoco di querciuoli, Giovanni con una viola in braccio sonava e cantava soletto intorno a quel fuoco. Era molto freddo: guardando innel fuoco, accaso vidde in mezzo a quelle piú ardente fiamme uno animaletto come una lucertola, il quale si gioiva in quelle piú vigorose fiamme. Subito avedutosi di quel che gli era, fece chiamare la mia sorella e me, e mostratolo a noi bambini, a me diede una gran ceffata, per la quali io molto dirottamente mi missi a piagnere. Lui piacevolmente rachetatomi, mi disse cosí: – Figliolin mio caro, io non ti do per male che tu abbia fatto, ma solo perché tu ti ricordi che quella lucertola che tu vedi innel fuoco, si è una salamandra, quali non s’è veduta mai piú per altri, di chi ci sia notizia vera – e cosí mi baciò e mi dette certi quattrini.
It is a cute story and one with perhaps special significance for our author. Cellini, after all, would become famous through fire, he was first and foremost a goldsmith: was this creature even his totem? As to the identity of the salamander, the renaissance saw growing belief in elementals and salamandre were the spirits of flame. Almost as curious is the strange parental technique of causing pain to induce pleasant memories.
Any other historical pre-theosophy reports of salamanders: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
The Talking Dog and King’s Fellow May 25, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
Horror upon horrors, today is tax day in the Beachcombing household. Somewhere in this study there are the various documents that justify Beach’s fiscal probity and he must now find them. The next twelve hours will be the most tedious of the year. Forgive then a small post as Beach plunges into the piles of paper. Here is a cute passage from R.W.Evans quoted by Jennifer Westwood in her wonderful Albion. Evans has been asked to gather evidence to settle two bets. (It goes without saying that Beach would far rather be doing this).
The first [bet] was as to whether so-and-so had ever been a fellow of King’s College; my researches disclosed that he had in fact once been an assistant teacher in an elementary school in King’s Road Chelsea. The second was as to a remarkable dog owned by a long-defunct classical fellow of another college; the beast had been taught to speak Latin and conversed in the most agreeable fashion with any superior person who would open the conversation by enquiring after the animal’s health. My researches showed that there was such a classical fellow attended in his old age by a servant called Airedale, who had picked up a few tags of dog-latin which, for the price of half-a-pint of beer he would recite.
Beach has long concentrated on ‘cobblers’, myth-making in history. However, he asks himself now how many of these misunderstandings are based on linguistic stupidities like this: ‘the disease of language’ of good old Max Müller. He would be extremely grateful for any extra examples, drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com and, reader, PLEASE have a better day than Beach is about to have…
The Problem with Sea Apes May 24, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite, Contemporary, Modern
***Dedicated to Andy the Mad Monk and Invisible***
Beach has, since the early days of this site, shown a persistent interest in mermaids. It would be outrageous then to pass by the important new documentary coming out (or has it already aired?) on Animal Planet. The following is borrowed from Wikipedia (courtesy of the inestimable Invisible).
Mermaids: The Body Found is a two hour Animal Planet… The fictional film tells the story of a scientific team’s investigative efforts to uncover the source behind mysterious underwater recordings and an unidentified marine body. Two former National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists tell their story on camera for the first time. After investigating mass strandings of whales, the team claimed to have recorded mysterious underwater noises coming from an unknown source. This sound resembled a sound previously recorded in 1997, called the ‘bloop’. They also claimed to have recovered 30% of the remains of an unknown creature from inside a great white shark which was said to possess attributes of the human body. They alleged that the marine creature had hands, not fins, and the hip structure of an upright animal. These findings, along with many others led the team to determine that this unknown animal was very closely related to humans, possibly a mermaid.
So a mockumentary has been created to entertain and to offer the latest theory on mermaids. And what is this theory? This time Beach borrows from part of a Fox News report (courtesy of Andy). Note how there is absolutely no mention here of the fictional content unless the word ‘compelling’ (as in ‘the punters don’t do simple facts’) is supposed to cover that!
In the two-hour CGI Special Mermaids: The Body Found, Animal Planet dives deep into the idea that mermaids may have been real, and, even better – related to humans! ‘It’s a very radical theory on human evolution, but we have approached an age-old myth and really chased its origins,’ Animal Planet honcho Charlie Foley told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. ‘It has been compiled in a way that is very compelling, making us think that mermaids might not just be mythical creatures.’ The show unravels mysterious underwater sound recordings and presents a bone-chilling argument for the Aquatic Ape Theory, which suggests that during the transition from apes to hominid, some humans went through an aquatic stage. This stage is argued to have resulted in ‘aquatic ape-like’ creatures. ‘There are striking differences between us and other primates, yet [there are] many features we share with marine mammals, like the webbing between our fingers, which other primates don’t have, a layer of subcutaneous fat, and a loss of body hair,’ Foley explained. ‘We also have an instinctive ability to swim, and control over breath. Humans can hold breath up to 20 minutes, longer than any other terrestrial animal.’ Mermaids: The Body Found ponders the concept that coastal flooding millions of years ago turned some of our ancestors inland, while another group branched off into the deep water out of necessity and for food.
Beach has already highlighted sea apes. In fact, he dug up, to the best of his knowledge, the earliest reference to the concept that dates back to the eighteenth century. And this is where the problems begin… Readers might want to flag up problem concerning biology, which Beachcombing is, sadly, not qualified to do: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com However, Beachcombing would like to stick his oar into the epistemology of sea-bourne monkeys.
If you want to explain the unicorn then it makes sense to look for a now extinct creature. After all, people no longer see unicorns (with very few exceptions) and those sightings there are usually involve travelers far from home confronted by unusual but known animals. If there was a unicorn-like animal ten thousand years ago then it is possible that this animal got trapped in an early phase of human myth and that it was passed down to us from there.
However, the problem with explaining mermaids in this way is that sightings continue into the present. There are dozens of sightings, for example, from the Hebrides (Scotland) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beach can only see three ways forward in relation to the sea-ape theory.
(i) There is a small population of sea apes that survived (or survives) on and off the British coast and yet no body or photograph has ever turned up.
(ii) The mermaids that are seen cannot be explained as physical entities. Here you can give a psychological, a theosophist or a ‘pagan’ explanation, but sea apes are out.
(iii) By some bizarre mechanism presently beyond our understanding the sea ape, which has not lived on the Scottish coast for a thousand or ten thousand years, entered ‘collective memory’ and has reappeared in the imagination of locals: go to (ii) above but with sea apes ‘in’.
Beach just might be able to conceive, against all his better judgement, that in the wild backwoods of New Zealand or in the expanses of the Rocky Mountains there are giant flightless birds or unknown hominids. But if anyone finds a sea ape community on the coast of Scotland, he’ll eat a tonne of boiled sweets. He has never seen (pace Jungians) any proof for ancestral memory. And so he would plump for number (ii), as he would for fairies.
In fact, forget sea apes, mermaids seem to be sea fairies. And in many ways the sea ape theory is to mermaids what the late nineteenth century pygmy theory was to the fey.
People sometimes see things that are not physically present: whether they are truly external or not Beach will happily leave to the philosophers. What is absolutely terrifying about this is that if our perception can play these kinds of tricks on us (or ‘pull back the veils of creation’ if you prefer) can our senses be trusted under any circumstances? On just that subject, looking forward to the documentary…
***
25 May 2012: Wade writes in ‘Your sea ape post instantly reminded me of the aquatic ape theory, first proposed by a German pathologist, Max Westenhofer, in 1942, then proposed again British marine biologist, Alister Hardy, in 1960. It has since been championed by Elaine Morgan, a Welsh writer (per Wikipedia). I saw a special on this years ago. It is a fascinating idea. My impression is that most anthropologists have either actively hated or completely ignored the theory as pseudo-science. Here are two links: Elaine Morgan’s and an anthropologist’s view that examines the controversial theory and yields the sceptical response. Thanks Wade!
The Devil in Disney May 23, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite
A book was recently sent anonymously to Beachcombing named The Dark Side of Disney: Utterly Unauthorised Tips, Tricks and Scams for you WDW Vacation (Leonard Kinsey). Beach cannot really write a review of said work; as he is not an expert in the field. He has very vague memories of Disney World from a childhood visit and most of that involves students dressed as Disney characters with terrifying rictus smiles. But as strangehistory celebrates the curious this seems the place to signal to readers that a piece of extended writing exists that ‘shines a light into the roachy shadows of Walt Disney World. With 33 years of experience storming the gates of the Magic Castle, Leonard Kinsey has explored every possible option for a low-cost Disney vacation ranging from the immoral to the downright illegal. Packed with all the tips that Disney was hoping you wouldn’t discover, like free parking and bottomless beverage scams, this book also teaches you how to get free airline drink tickets and bar/pool hop around the high end Disney resorts like Hollywood glitterati.’
Beach, of course, felt morally obliged to hurl the book into the bin when he read this, but was just too intrigued. He decided, in fact, to give the contents a go and things got worse/better from there. And after seeing such titles as ‘How to Find Someone to Have Sex With’, ‘Front of the Line With a Wheelchair’ and ‘Top 5 Best and Worst Places to Get High’ there was no stopping him. Beachcombing has lived a sheltered life as far as sex, wheelchairs and ‘getting high’ (whatever that means) are concerned. But he was fascinated to flick through this pages of thieving wisdom that might have come out of a Victorian rookery, applied strangely to the sterilised, pat world of Brother Bear and the Seven Dwarfs.
The best part of the book is, at least for Beach, the interview with urban explorer Shane Perez and the description of his ‘trip to Discovery Island, Walt Disney World’s long-abandoned nature park. Discovery Island, located in the heart of Bay Lake, was left to rot years ago when the opening of Animal Kingdom effectively rendered the previously well maintained zoo obsolete. Instead of bulldozing the property, Disney simply decided to leave it as-is and let nature take its course, turning it into an overgrown urban ruin that was an irresistible destination for Shane and his fellow Urban Explorers.’ Memories here of illegal climbing in Cambridge. A highlight within a highlight was Shane and his adventurers bumping into some vultures on Discovery Island…
Mickey above is clearly not the cover, but then the real thing would get us black listed by google!
Beach is always on the look out for unusual books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com This one shocked but did not disappoint him.
The Postures: A Missing Erotic Classic May 22, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
Beachcombing has often celebrated in this place lost books and burning libraries. Today he wants to celebrate a book that while not lost (it can be found in a modern edition on the top shelves of academic institutions around the world) got through to us by the skin of its erotic teeth. Beach refers, of course, to I modi (the postures): an opusculus best avoided by those with back problems.
I modi included a series of sixteen possible and borderline impossible positions in coitus: dressed up, this was the renaissance, in the rags of classical myths. (‘Yes, that’s Pandora giving head” etc). These images had been originally drawn by Giulio Romano who was, legend claims, so frustrated that the Vatican had not paid his bills that he drew them on the walls of the Hall of Constantine. From there Marcantonio Raimondi engraved the ‘positions’ and, in 1524, an edition was brought out. This edition may have been limited but one copy fell into the grubby little hands of the Italian poet Pietro Aretino who wrote a number of sonnets around the theme. A second edition then appeared in 1527 that included Aretino’s non-too gentle works.
The Pope, Clement VII (obit 1534), struck back. The Papal police rushed through the capital confiscating every copy and while Aretino’s poems survived the book disappeared from view: full credit to the papal security forces, getting rid of two editions is quite an achievement. A very few fragments survive in the British museum: where there are only the faces divorced of sexual activity (see the image above). There are rumours too that an edition was brought out at All Souls (Oxford) in the seventeenth century where it almost got several dons expelled: might this have come from the same book, later ripped up as it travelled archive-wards?
Apart from these BM fragments not a single copy of the original survives but by good fortune a pirated copy was brought out in Venice (Europe’s publishing capital at this date) in 1527. The fine original engravings were reproduced with blurred or missed details and, horrors!, one of the postures was missing. The lovers of Europe gnashed their collective teeth. But at least a shadow of the original survives and it was that which was brought to the university presses in 1988 with a commentary by Lynne Lawner. In the stacks of academic libraries ‘bald heads forgetful of their sins’ breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Beach is always on the look out for lost or almost lost books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
***
23 May 2012: Angel W from robertstephenhawker writes ‘Hope this isn’t too lowbrow but I’m rather fond of Sarah Dunant’s novel In the Company of the Courtesan and the name Aretino rang a bell. Dunant structures her story (which begins in 1527) around a surviving copy of ‘Giulio’s Positions’ with Marcantonio’s original engravings and with ‘The Licentious Sonnets’ attached. If you haven’t come across it already and like that kind of thing it’s an entertaining romp, better than The Birth of Venus which I seem to remember receiving more attention.’ Thanks Angela!
