From BookBrowse:

In Courtney Summers’ I’m the Girl, much of the plot focuses on the mysterious, imposing Aspera resort. Part of what gives Aspera its exotic and vaguely menacing atmosphere is the fact that its luxurious interiors are heavily decorated with deer antlers (the book’s endpapers also contain images of antlers). For Matthew Hayes, the owner of Aspera, these trophies—and the game hunting they represent—symbolize power and virility. Aspera’s interior design also participates in a centuries-old tradition of decorating with the antlers and horns of animals.

Chandeliers made from deer antlers date back to 15th-century castles and manor homes of European nobility, a rustic yet powerful contrast to the perhaps more obvious luxury of fixtures made from gold. Elaborate decorative pieces constructed of antlers or horns were markers of wealth and prestige, as opposed to purely functional antler hooks or hangers one might find in humbler homes. These pieces were extravagantly designed and included trophy horns and antlers not only from deer, elk and boar, but also chamois and ibex. In Germany, a type of chandelier called a Lusterweibchen experienced a period of popularity in the 16th century. These fanciful fixtures combined antlers with carved figurines, primarily of women and mythological figures, including mermaids and dragons. Several of these historic pieces have made their way to museum collections, including the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

During the 19th century, Queen Victoria had a “Horn Room” at her Isle of Wight residence, Osborne House, where the designs of chandeliers, footstools, tables and chairs incorporated antlers and horns. After London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 set off a craze for the style, commercial manufacturers began marketing ready-made antler décor to upper-middle-class families. Manufacturers’ catalogs from this period show listings for chairs and other furniture made from antlers and horns. Entrepreneur Friedrich Wenzel brought the horn furniture craze with him when he emigrated from Bohemia to Texas, where he utilized the horns of longhorn cattle to translate a European tradition to the American West.

Link to the rest at BookBrowse

In PG’s brief online scamper into the online trophy horn world, he discovered that there appear to be a lot of replicas of actual horns made out of wood, plastic, or similar materials that never had any contact with a living animal, wild or tame. He doesn’t know if a set of plastic elk antlers will pass muster with a committed vegan, however.

From The Poetry Foundation:

Forget the Emily Dickinson you think you know, that hermetic author of bedeviling sense, “So Anthracite, to live – // For some – an Ampler Zero -.” Say goodbye to the Belle and Recluse of Amherst, Mythic Emily, and every other epithet that scholars, biographers, and critics have coined to stoke the public’s fascination with a human sphinx. Behold, instead, a woman who baked—a lot—for friends, family, and neighbors; who lamented that she didn’t receive any valentines at school (“I have not quite done hoping for one”); who was very often funny and used a prodigious number of exclamation points in letters to her family (“Your welcome letter found me all engaged in the history of Sulphuric Acid!!!!!”); and who, until age 35, traveled and visited friends, before poor health made traveling impossible. Toward the end of her life, in 1884, she sent 86 letters to 34 recipients: the majority express thanks, others include a gift of flowers or food, and a handful convey condolences or congratulations. Her supposed withdrawal from the world—and readers’ continued interest with such a narrative—has an apocryphal dimension we must be willing to forego in order to see and hear the poet clearly, perhaps for the first time.

Edited by the scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2024) promises to be the definitive edition of the poet’s 1,304 letters, expanded, revised, and annotated for the first time in more than 60 years. At least 80 letters have been discovered or re-edited since Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward published their edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson in 1958. As Miller and Mitchell make plain, “Editorial standards have changed dramatically. And Dickinson scholarship has exploded. Scholars were still debating the significance of Dickinson’s oeuvre in the 1950s, but her position in the pantheon of great writers is now secure.” In other words, there has never been a better time to revisit and restore the author’s charismatic, sensitive, and characteristically brilliant prose.

The new book’s extensive and considered introductory essay establishes Miller and Mitchell’s modus operandi, and carefully outlines the ways this version distinguishes itself from its predecessors. Among the editors’ contributions to Dickinson scholarship is a painstaking effort to correct the chronology of the letters that Johnson and Ward previously published. Even poems dated by R.W. Franklin, the leading scholar of Dickinson’s manuscripts, are identified only by year, or season and year. As Miller and Mitchell explain, “A collection of letters that proceeds chronologically, however, requires greater precision than a year to establish a likely sequence of correspondence. Our redating, together with our annotation, indicates that Dickinson was writing in response to local and world events and to the visits of her friends, and we attempt to recreate that sequence of response.”

To undertake this delicate work, Miller and Mitchell set out on an investigation of poetic observation, relying on Dickinson’s own attention to the natural world:

Because Dickinson wrote so often about plants, birds, bees, and other insects, we attend to the typical New England season of bloom for arbutus, apple blossoms, or roses, and to migratory patterns. … Much of her correspondence was occasional. Even if a poem was composed months or years earlier, her sending it to a particular person is likely to respond to something immediate—whether a weather event or event in a correspondent’s life or in the world. In assigning a placement or date to the letters, we consider their sequential relationship to known occasions. We also consider them holistically, in relation to the narrative of relationships illuminated by other letters.

Relying on a local record of weather patterns in Amherst (not available to Johnson and Ward) and the Williston Seminary catalogue, the editors were able to assign, for instance, the precise date of October 14, 1844 to a letter previously dated “Autumn 1844.”

Along the way, Miller and Mitchell provide invaluable contextual annotations and restore material that previous transcribers omitted—“even where the omissions themselves seem innocuous,” as they write. We learn that hundreds of Dickinson’s letters were destroyed, which was customary in the 19th century after a person died. But Mabel Loomis Todd, co-editor of two volumes of Dickinson’s poems, had the foresight to begin collecting letters in the early 1890s, preventing the further loss of these precious artifacts. Among the newly included letters are two to Elizabeth Seelye, whose husband Julius was inaugurated as president of Amherst College in 1877 (the family noted having burned 75 Dickinson poems they received, an act of shocking sacrilege to modern readers) and another to Ellen Dickinson, the wife of Emily’s cousin, who reports having destroyed “a considerable number” of Dickinson’s poems. This edition expeditiously illustrates the race against the ravages of negligence and time that such scholarship requires.

The larger consequence of these efforts is to show, once and for all, that Dickinson was never isolated from the world, but rather sensitively engaged with local and national events. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a distinguished family with a wide social circle, she was an active member of her community, comfortable initiating correspondence with even famous individuals of her time—among them the Civil War colonel, abolitionist, author, and advocate of women’s rights Thomas Wentworth Higginson, with whom she shared a lifelong friendship. Her reluctance to see visitors as she grew older—but not to bake them gingerbread or correspond with them—can be explained at least in part by the time she spent caring for ill family members or navigating her own poor health. She was socially adept and flexible, naturally modulating in her correspondences, easily and willingly engaging with people from all social classes. Her letters to family members buzz with local and personal news. An 1850 letter to Abiah Root, a close friend Dickinson met at Mount Holyoke, captures the poet’s playfulness:

The circumstances under which I write you this morning are at once glorious, afflicting, and beneficial, glorious in ends, afflicting in means, and beneficial I trust in both. Twin loaves of bread have just been born into the world under my auspices, fine children, the image of their mother, and here my dear friend is the glory.

Dickinson’s older brother, Austin, especially relied on her to be kept abreast of happenings at home whenever he was away. “While she may not have seen some of these correspondents, or seen them only rarely, Dickinson understood friendship and repeatedly showed herself to be a loving friend,” Miller and Mitchell write.

She is also frequently funny, capable of making quick, wry assessments alongside her casual profundity. When Dickinson was 10 years old, her father Edward was forced to sell part of the Dickinson homestead out of financial necessity, moving the family to a smaller house on West Street where they would stay for 15 years. Edward repurchased the house in 1855, whereupon 25-year-old Emily commented in a letter to her friend Elizabeth Holland: “They say that ‘home is where the heart is.’ I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings.” A later letter to Holland concludes with her typical warmth and tenderness, “Pardon my sanity Mrs. Holland, in a world insane, and love me if you will, for I had rather be loved than to be called a King in Earth, or a Lord in Heaven.” Dickinson’s life as a poet was shaped by these mundanities and everyday upheavals, as well as by larger historical undercurrents, which she sensed with stunning perspicacity. In spring 1861, she sent a letter-poem to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson that, portentously, alluded to the forthcoming Civil War:

A slash of Blue –
A sweep of Gray –
Some scarlet patches on the way,
Compose an evening sky –
A little Purple – slipped between –
Some Ruby Trowsers hurried on –
A Wave of Gold –
A Bank of Day –
This just makes out the morning sky!

But it’s this edition’s underlying scope that will truly win over the poet’s admirers. “Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet,” the introduction begins. 

Link to the rest at The Poetry Foundation

From History Today:

In December 1871 the Prince of Wales lay dangerously ill with typhoid, the disease that had killed his father. Taking advantage of modern technology, the Archbishop of Canterbury despatched telegraph messages around the country ordering special prayers to be read for his recovery. As if by miracle, the patient began to feel better on exactly the tenth anniversary of Prince Albert’s death – but when Queen Victoria staged a grand thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey the nation’s leading scientists declined to attend.

This episode crystallised longstanding antagonisms into hostilities that lasted decades. The first shot was fired by Sir Henry Thompson, an eminent surgeon who suggested conducting a five-year experiment in a hospital ward to determine whether an orchestrated programme of collective praying would reduce mortality rates. In what became known as the Prayer Gauge Debate, incensed Christians protested that prayer was a religious experience, not a mathematical instrument for measuring God’s power; conversely, scientists scoffed at the concept of divine intervention in a world ruled by unchanging laws. This confrontation was a tussle for power – not so much about arriving at a particular answer, but about determining who had the social authority to decide what the right answer should be. Responsibilities gradually separated into two distinct realms, the natural and the spiritual, each with its own rulers.

. . . .

In 1912 Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin), a 12-year-old schoolgirl, decided to carry out her own heavenly research. She had still been in a pram when she saw her first meteorite flashing across the skies and announced that she would become an astronomer. Frustrated by the limited syllabus of her Catholic school, she divided her examinations into two groups, praying for success in one but not the other. After her highest marks fell in the control set that had not benefited from her pleas for divine inspiration, she concluded that ‘the only legitimate request to God is for courage’ and began treating the tiny attic laboratory as her private chapel where she could worship the beauty of nature. ‘Science is my religion’, she later told her mother. Braving the fury of her teachers, she insisted on studying scientific and mathematical topics until the principal lost patience, expelling her rebellious pupil with an extraordinarily inappropriate judgement: ‘You are prostituting your gifts.’

Despite this inauspicious start, by her mid-20s Payne had singlehandedly resolved one of science’s pressing debates: what are the stars made of? Her unanticipated answer to this question overturned accepted orthodoxy – and once again she found herself stymied by established authorities. Even among scientists, those supposedly objective arbiters, not everybody had the right to pronounce the truth. 

Even as a small child, Payne resented being a girl brought up in a man’s world. Her bitterness intensified once she arrived at Cambridge, a privilege she obtained only by undertaking an intensive course of self-tuition to win a scholarship. During lectures she was obliged to sit by herself in the front row and brazen out the derisive foot stamping from male students behind her; in laboratory sessions, professors barked out instructions for women to remove their corsets in case they contained steel reinforcements that would disturb magnetic experiments. More positively, a few world-famous figures – such as the atomic pioneer Ernest Rutherford and the Astronomer Royal, Arthur Eddington, who led the experiments confirming General Relativity – paid her special attention, recognising that she was an exceptionally gifted undergraduate.

By the time of the final examinations Payne had already published an original research paper and taken over Newnham College’s small observatory, restoring its neglected equipment by fishing a chrysalis out of the clockwork. Even so, like all female graduates without rich relatives, she contemplated a future with just two options: marriage or teaching. The only possibility of pursuing an academic career lay in emigrating to America – so when Harlow Shapley, Director of the Harvard College Observatory, gave a lecture in London, she marched up to him afterwards and invited herself over. After he politely (if unthinkingly) agreed that she could work for him, she set about raising enough money to get there.

Payne’s escape across the Atlantic proved a turning-point for astronomy as well as her own career. Over the previous 40 years, Harvard had compiled an enormous number of photographic plates recording detailed observations of stars. Most unusually, they had employed women – known as ‘computers’ – to analyse these vast data sets, many of them working at home or on a part-time basis, all of them paid at very low rates for their meticulous, skilled work. Their main contribution had been to group the stars according to characteristics such as colour and size. They were stellar botanists, wrote Payne, who classified the celestial flora into separate categories.

Shapley invited Payne to continue this crucial work, but she had other plans. Trained as a physicist, she wanted to investigate what happened inside the stars by applying the very latest theories. Fortunately for her, this desire to pursue original research meshed well with Shapley’s own ambitions to expand his domain, and he persuaded Payne to pursue a PhD. As she joked with a close friend – the two women called themselves the ‘Heavenly Twins’ – their ‘Dear Director’ was determined to convert his ‘Dear Little Observatory’ into a ‘Great Institution.’ 

Physics was being overturned by relativity and quantum mechanics, and Payne seized the opportunity to test drive the recent theory of an Indian astronomer, Meghnad Saha. By introducing this state-of-the-art mathematical analysis, she revolutionised Harvard astronomy. The Observatory’s plates carried thousands of photographic images generated by a spectrometer, a more sophisticated equivalent of glass prisms that spread out sunlight into a rainbow spectrum of colours. Each photograph displayed the range of colours emitted by a star, and also carried valuable additional information encoded in dark lines superimposed upon the pattern. A line’s position among the colours revealed a particular element, while its intensity was related to two further quantities – the element’s abundance in a star and its temperature. As Saha put it, elements could be identified by their spectral fingerprints.

Payne became absorbed in her research, assigning herself a gruelling programme of measurement, mathematics and interpretation. Emerging exhausted two years later, she wrote up her results ‘in a kind of ecstasy’. Working in close proximity, Shapley and Payne became engaged in a symbiotic but unequal relationship: whereas he welcomed her role in fulfilling his dreams of academic grandeur, she elevated her ‘Dear Director’ to an almost godlike status. ‘I worshipped Dr Shapley’, she recalled later, acknowledging her jealousy when he bestowed his enthusiasm on others. Reciprocally, Shapley told a colleague that she ‘is one of the most outstanding astrophysicists of America, of any and all sexes’ – but insisted on not being quoted.

At Shapley’s bidding, Payne took the unusual step of converting her PhD thesis into a book, Stellar Atmospheres (1925). It sold 600 copies, a bestseller by academic standards. Her research gave numerical precision to previous assumptions about the structure of the stars. But there were two glaring exceptions – her estimates for hydrogen and helium were way out of line. Time and again, she went over her calculations searching for a slip, but repeatedly arrived at the same answers. In particular, her calculations showed that there was a million times more hydrogen in the sun than anticipated. If she was right, standard explanations about the formation of the solar system would have to be rejected. According to orthodox views, the sun and its planets had gradually condensed out from a swirling cloud of gas and dust, which implied that their compositions would be broadly similar. Accepting Payne’s conclusions would entail abandoning the principle of uniformity that was deeply ingrained in scientific thought. 

As part of the academic vetting procedure, Payne’s research had to be approved by Henry Norris Russell, director of the Observatory at Princeton and notorious for falling asleep during his own lectures. As a major defender of the uniformity thesis, Russell was appalled by the consequences of Payne’s research. On his orders, Shapley persuaded Payne to denounce her figures as spurious. Acting against her better instincts, she noted that the hydrogen and helium levels she had deduced were ‘improbably high … almost certainly not real’. 

This manipulation became darker still. Adopting a very different methodology, Russell continued to explore the composition of the stars. Four years later he produced his own book, announcing that the sun consisted of 98 per cent helium and hydrogen. Buried at the end was a small acknowledgement of a ‘gratifying agreement’ with Payne’s results. Until recently, this startling discovery was routinely attributed to him rather than to Payne.

To the end of her life, Payne blamed herself for giving in ‘to Authority when I believed I was right’.

Link to the rest at History Today

From The Wall Street Journal:

Somewhere around 1549, an English priest introduced love into marriage. Sort of. Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury during Henry VIII’s break with Rome, was the author and compiler of the English Book of Common Prayer, whose marriage rite—containing that familiar “love, cherishe, and to obey” and “til death us departe”—is the basis of the civil formula common to much of the contemporary English-speaking world. In codifying the marriage rite for what would be the new, independent Church of England, Cranmer preserved much of the medieval world’s earlier traditions about what husbands and wives were to swear to one another. But to these he added the promises “to love and to cherishe” (and, to the bride’s portion, more unsettlingly, to obey).

The mention of love itself was not new to English marriage customs. But the centrality of it to the vow, argues the novelist and philosopher Cheryl Mendelson in her fascinating and morally serious “Vows: The Modern Genius of an Ancient Rite,” represented a new potential for marital intimacy: one in which free choice, romantic affection and robust social commitment all contributed to the establishment of what Ms. Mendelson calls a “two-person, erotically charged society.” Cranmer’s vision of marriage, the author writes, offered English citizens a “quiet reservoir of freedom and equality, encouraging individualism and free choice.”

But the individualism and free choice Ms. Mendelson explores—and sometimes argues for—look very different from the autonomy, independence and self-actualization valorized in contemporary American culture: The institution of marriage—and the dour commitments that any institution entails—is as outmoded as Cranmer’s spelling. American marriage rates have dropped by 60% since the 1970s, while alternative forms of romantic partnership, like polyamory, are now so ubiquitous as to border on the cliché. Today, Ms. Mendelson reminds us, “self-written vows are as common as traditional ones” because couples “have doubts about the traditional ones, especially the promises to love, to be faithful, and to stay together until death. Unsure whether they can or will or even want to do those things, they eschew promising in favor of wishing, hoping, for trying to do them.”

Yet there is something to those old-school words—and something, too, Ms. Mendelson argues convincingly, to the ideals behind them: that we find our fullest, and most flourishing, selves in the interplay of affective freedom and binding commitment. To vow, to commit ourselves for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer or even for uglier or prettier—as the translation of one 15th-century English rite Ms. Mendelson examines would have it—is to accept that the choice to give up some of our power to choose is not only desirable, but foundational to being a human being. At its best, marriage is both about the freedom to marry for love, and about the fostering of that love as something whose reality is independent from our day-to-day emotions.

Part of that reality, Ms. Mendelson suggests, is social. Vows, promises, rituals, rites—these are ways that we have historically fostered the connection between our words and actions; a connection, Ms. Mendelson reminds us, that was all the more vital in eras when reading and writing (let alone contracts) were possible only for a select few. Binding ourselves publicly—and taking that binding seriously—is, for Ms. Mendelson, the foundation not only of having a successful marriage but of belonging to a successful community.

“Vows” is many books in one—and, impressively, all of them are successful. As an academic analysis of the development of medieval and early modern English wedding customs and their significance on our cultural understanding of modern-day marriage, it is at once illuminating and readable. Ms. Mendelson’s prose is crisp without ever being simplistic. She brings us along seamlessly, from a close reading of Anglo-Saxon vows of fealty between vassals and lords—a potential early model for the first English marital vows—to the rather puritanical 1789 decision in America to remove the husband’s traditional promise to “worship” his wife with his body, to the free love ideals of the 19th and 20th centuries, in which figures like the British philosopher Bertrand Russell begin to make the by-now-ubiquitous case that making love obligatory through marriage “is the surest way to cause you to hate him or her.”

. . . .

“Vows” is most successful when it is most ambitious, arguing not only for the use of historic marriage vows but for the ideology underpinning them, in which free choice and binding commitment make possible a love that is both private and public, legitimized by those witnesses who promise to support the marriage as well as its foundations. The book’s best passages make so compelling a case for old-school marriage—albeit between parties of any gender identity and orientation—that they ought to be required reading for anyone considering embarking upon matrimony.

At times the author’s optimism, seemingly bolstered by her second marriage, can seem quixotic. The idea that adherence to one’s vows can virtually guarantee a successful marriage at times falls too neatly into the category of “easier said than done.”

Ms. Mendelson is no knee-jerk reactionary, however. She is honest about marriage’s oppressive potential, particularly—historically—for women. Among the most entertaining sections in “Vows” is a close reading of a set of medieval church records, known as the Sarum Missals, from the area around Salisbury, England. The rites documented there include the promise of the woman—but not the man—to be “bonere” (pleasant), “buxum” (submissive) and to give good “borde”—to be, in other words, a good housekeeper.

Yet, Ms. Mendelson suggests, the traditionally feminine ideals of service and obedience in a marriage should be expanded to all parties, rather than dispensed with altogether. Self-sacrifice and the commitment to focus our energies on the well-being of another rather than our own selves are ideals we need more of, regardless of our gender identity. In the end, it is within those ideals, rather than the individualistic pursuit of erotic pleasure or social fulfillment, that we can find the truth about what it means to love.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

As PG has mentioned before, he has been happily married to Mrs. PG for over 50 years and regards their marriage as the most important and rewarding act he has ever taken.