Hidden Histories

November 1, 2026 ~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ 2 Comments

Hidden in archives accumulating over centuries, in famous cities and obscure towns, are the lives, thoughts, and feelings of ordinary people lost to history. Lost, until a curious researcher unearths them, often by chance when they are looking for something else. Out from the dusty scrolls, the bundled letters, voluminous trial transcripts, dry tax records and inventories, come the voices of people long forgotten.

This is my favorite kind of history book, pioneered in the twentieth century by the French Annales school. Instead of great leaders, politics, diplomacy, and battles they focused on the common people. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie was the first to explore mentalities, how the people of the past viewed the world around them. His 1975 book Montaillou is a landmark work, considered a classic of both history and anthropology. I include it in this list as one of the most memorable books in my lifetime of reading.

The Burdens of Sister Margaret by Craig Harline

Harline was researching a seventeenth century bishop of Leuven in Flanders when he came upon a cache of letters that told an extraordinary story about life in a Franciscan Grey Sisters convent. The letters reveal the story of Margaret Smulders, a nun who accused a chaplain of sexually harassing her and in turn was accused of being possessed by demons. She spent years exiled to a room above the convent gatehouse writing voluminous letters to the bishop pleading her case and spreading gossip about her fellow nuns. Among Sister Margaret’s complaints was that the nuns spent too much time cooking waffles to give to the influential people of the town instead of praying. The bishop also received letters from the other nuns detailing their complaints against Margaret. From this stew of gossip and innuendo Harline reveals an intimate portrait of the daily life and trials of one convent.

The Burgermeister’s Daughter by Steven Ozment

The sixteenth century archives in the German city of Schwabisch Hall are stuffed with records of a thirty year legal battle between Anna Buschler and her father, a prominent local official. From these and surviving love letters Ozment brings to life a feisty woman who defied the social and gender expectations of her time. Beautiful and flirtatious, young Anna shocked her father and neighbors by carrying on simultaneous love affairs, one with a member of royalty. When her father threw her out she sued him for abandonment. He responded by capturing her and keeping her chained to a table for six months. She escaped and added an accusation of abuse to her legal challenge. Maturity did not calm her down; she led a life of romantic drama and bitter legal struggle to claim her inheritance. This is a story of one woman that reveals a whole world.

The Cardinal’s Hat by Mary Hollingsworth

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The Tin Men & AI

September 27, 2026 ~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ Leave a comment

Perhaps the tech gurus who, by their own account, have brought us to the brink of human extinction should have read a novel published in 1965 before they recklessly rushed ahead with AI development. The Tin Men is the first novel by Michael Frayn who went on to a prolific career as a novelist and playwright. He is one of my favorite authors and this is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. I reread it recently and found it just as funny as the first time, though now there is a dark foreshadowing that wasn’t discernible back in the 1960″s.

The Tin Men is set in the fictional William Morris Institute of Automation Research. Here a motley crew of scientists and their bureaucratic overlords think up ways to put a cumbersome new invention, the computer, to some practical use. As Michael Frayn explains in his introduction to a new edition:

Computers – the tin men of my title – were beginning to make their importance felt, if only by their ponderous size and cost. They were produced, mostly by IBM, for a small elite of academic and commercial users, and they were as imposing in their way as the great steam engines that had ushered in an earlier technological revolution.

The book was written in the era of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers and shares the same satirical, irreverent, and absurdist outlook. Thus we have a researcher spending his days feeding typical newspaper headline phrases into his machine, which regurgitates them in random combinations. No need for a human headline writer. Another muses on teaching a computer to write pornographic novels; after all there are only so many variables to program. Perhaps computers can even do our praying for us. Prayer is so tedious and time-consuming, surely automated prayer would be just as pleasing to the Almighty.

But the heart of the story is the work of the Ethics Department. Led by the obsessive Macintosh they are investigating to what extent computers can be programmed to follow codes of ethical behavior. Macintosh’s pet project is Samaritan. The scenes in his laboratory, which holds an enormous water tank, stuck in my mind vividly for all the fifty plus years since I first read it.

‘Launch her,’ called Macintosh. A crane on the gantry swung a raft out over the water and started to lower it. On the raft, gazing at each other sombrely, sat Macintosh’s Principal Research Assistant, Sinson, wearing an inflated yellow life-jacket, and his ethical machine, Samaritan II. A great echoing silence fell over the tank. Macintosh had concentrated all his department’s efforts on the Samaritan programme. The simplest and purest form of the ethical situation, as he saw it, was the one in which two people were aboard a raft which would support only one of them.

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Poets in the Asylum

August 30, 2026 ~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ 3 Comments

Epping Forest is a lovely, dark and deep 6,000 acre woodland in Essex near where I grew up. It is all that remains of a 60,000 acre ancient forest steeped in history and legend. Some of the gnarled beeches and oaks date to Anglo-Saxon times and the forest hides the traces of two Iron Age forts. In Medieval times it was a favorite hunting ground for England’s kings. To this day the sight of a white stag is said to be an omen of death. Queen Elizabeth I’s hunting lodge still stands at the edge of the forest, but 18th century highwayman Dick Turpin’s secret hideaway cave is still a secret. Among the ghosts said to haunt the forest is Queen Boudica, who fought a battle against the Romans nearby, and Kate of the Hollow, a poor servant girl seduced by the Lord of the Manor who of course had to drown herself and her baby in a woodland pond. Another pond where young lovers died in a suicide pact is said to lure unsuspecting walkers to their deaths. The forest has more than earned its title the scariest woodland in England. In modern times it is a favorite place for London area murderers to bury the bodies. In the 1960’s the notorious East End gangsters the Kray twins regularly used it as a dumping ground for their sins.

In my youth I thought of the towns surrounding the forest, Epping, Waltham Abbey, and Chingford, as places where the posh people lived. For picnics and hikes we favored Hainault, a much smaller remnant of the ancient forest that was a short bus ride away. I did not realize then that Hainault is so small because it fell victim to the Enclosure Movement in the nineteenth century. Epping itself was spared because attempts at enclosure sparked a mass protest movement. Legislation protecting the area passed in 1878 and Queen Victoria declared it The People’s Forest.

It was in the nineteenth century that one of Epping’s most curious histories unfolded, the story of a Victorian mental institution where the lives of two poets briefly converged.

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The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat

June 7, 2026 ~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ 1 Comment

For my series On My Bookshelf I pick the book in my library with the weirdest title.

I could have titled this Pamphlets in Early Modern England or Post-Reformation Pamphlets, but like the author of the book I went with the more intriguing title, click bait you could say. Peter Lake doesn’t get around to explaining the odd title till page 584 of a 731 page book. I promise I won’t make you wait that long.

I confess I bought the book impulsively because of the title and a quick glance inside telling me it is about pamphlets, the early modern equivalent of today’s tabloids and sensational news websites. I shared an interest in historical pamphlets with my late brother Paul (Frank Key) who began creating little pamphlets as a child. His first published works were pamphlets printed by Malice Aforethought Press, a project he started with university friends. One of the eccentric characters he created for his imaginary world of Hooting Yard is Dobson, a prolific out-of-print pamphleteer.

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The Library of Lost…?

April 30, 2026 ~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ Leave a comment

The word “Library” jumped out at me of course. Then the word “Lost.” But lost what? The next word of the title was obscured by the library label. Intrigued, I pulled the oversized book from the new nonfiction shelf of my local library. Immediately I knew I would check it out. The missing word was “Maps.” The Library of Lost Maps by James Cheshire with the enigmatic subtitle An archive of a world in progress. That was full of promise. I’ve always loved old maps. I have a collection of books of old maps, framed prints of old maps, and a few originals. I even chose an image from the 1606 Hondius map of Virginia and Florida for my website logo.

Geography professor James Cheshire’s book is about his discovery of a forgotten archive of old maps in the basement of University College London. Here he describes his first visit as he followed the scent of aging paper swirling around the basement:

I followed this distinctive aroma as it took me to the right of the dingy lecture theatre I’d taught in many times, past the damp of a leaky water fountain and on into an unpromising corridor. On I went until I reached a scruffy turquoise door with the words “Map Room” affixed to it. I pushed at the handle, and, to my amazement, entered an Aladdin’s cave of cartographic treasures.

Inside he found 440 wooden drawers and tens of glass-fronted cabinets holding thousands of maps and hundreds of atlases left virtually untouched since the retirement of curator Anne Oxenham twenty years before. It was once a busy room with university professors and students using the maps for their lectures and assignments. Now digital maps have replaced them and paper map archives the world over have fallen silent.

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Rewilding England

March 27, 2026March 27, 2026 ~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ Leave a comment

This is my favorite landscape, the English Lake District. To me it’s the epitome of a natural landscape, wild and rugged,. with no sign of human interference. I recently learned it is anything but. The landscape as we know it today is the result of thousands of years of human activity, and of the sheep introduced by humans free grazing on the fells, cropping all the vegetation short.

According to the Rewilding Britain organization, it would look like this after fifty years of rewilding:

The fells of a rewilded Lake District would be covered in deciduous trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers. There would be a richer diversity of wildlife, animals and birds not seen there for centuries.

I learned this by reading a work of fiction, Anna Hope’s Albion. The cover suggests a conventional English family saga or an Austen-inspired novel of manners. But according to the jacket blurb it is a “nuanced family saga of inheritance and accountability that shakes the country house novel to its foundations.” It begins conventionally enough with the Brooke family gathering for the funeral of their father Philip. Eldest daughter Frannie is inheriting the estate which has been in the family since the eighteenth century. The original landscape was designed by the (real) garden designer Humphrey Repton, a leading proponent of the natural parkland style. Of course this style was not “natural” at all. It can be seen in the famous Gainsborough portrait Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, the young couple’s status confirmed by the sweeping parkland that takes up most of the picture.

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My Favorite Reading of 2025

December 31, 2025 ~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ 1 Comment

Best Books of the Year lists are everywhere as the year winds down and book lovers start anticipating the new releases of 2026. Here is my list of favorites from 2025.

Poetry

Collected Poems by Wendy Cope

I had never heard of Wendy Cope until I read a review of this collection and learned that she is celebrated in England for her wit and accessible style. Lauded by the literary world and also a bestseller, she writes of the joys, heartbreaks, and mundane moments of ordinary life. One of her poems, The Orange, went viral on TikTok gaining her a new generation of fans. It affirms the value of small pleasures to keep us going in a complicated world. I particularly enjoyed her gentle satires of pompous literati and her parodies of famous poets. She resisted being named Poet Laureate, even writing an irreverent satire of the “state occasion” verse required. Here is a taste of her sly wit, the poem The South Bank Poetry Library, London in its entirety:

This is a pleasant library. I’d enjoy every minute
But for the danger of meeting other poets in it.

Fiction

Bog Queen by Anna North

Seamus Heaney’s Bog Poems inspired the title of this tale of two women separated by two thousand years. Agnes is a forensic anthropologist called in to investigate a body found by peat diggers in a bog in northern England. At first the body is thought to be a missing local woman, but Agnes immediately recognizes that the wear pattern on the teeth indicates a much older origin. Perfectly preserved by the mossy bog environment, the woman is from the Iron Age, the early days of Roman Britain. In alternating chapters we follow the Druid priestess’s account of her journey to the Roman capital of Camulodunum and Agnes’s investigation into the cause of her death. A stab wound is ruled out because there are signs of healing. In the Druid’s narrative we learn of the violent encounter with a rival clan that caused the wound and how it was treated. Agnes’s work is complicated by a conflict with environmentalists who want to stop both the peat diggers and the archeological dig. The bog itself is a living character, speaking out at intervals to comment on human affairs and its sacred role in receiving the bodies of the dead. Enriched by the author’s research into Iron Age life and a lyrical writing style, this is a captivating read.

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The Tudor Autopen

November 23, 2025November 23, 2025 ~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ 1 Comment

On 30th December 1546 King Henry VIII lay dying, bloated beyond recognition and in excruciating pain from a festering wound on his leg, the result of a jousting accident years before. When his councillors brought him the final revision of his will he was too weak to hold a pen. So the document was signed using the dry stamp, a Tudor version of the autopen which has become so controversial recently. The dry stamp was a mechanism screwed onto paper to make an impression of the king’s signature, which was then inked over by one of his officials. Henry had authorized the use of this device in 1545 as his infirmities grew more severe.

Our current autopen issue is just another of the baseless scandals “trumped” up by President Trump and his acolytes to serve his interests. If autopen signatures on the pardons issued by President Biden can be declared invalid, then Trump is free to charge all his enemies with imaginary crimes. In fact many presidents as far back as Thomas Jefferson, including Trump himself, have used some type of autopen to sign official documents. Jefferson called his Polygraph Machine “the finest invention of the present age.” Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and many other presidents routinely used an autopen. The question of its legality was definitively answered during the George W. Bush presidency in a 2005 memo from the Office of Legal Counsel. The challenge to Biden’s autopen signatures is unlikely to change history. But the case of Henry VIII’s will was of far more consequence for the history of the English monarchy.

Henry’s complicated marital history and mercurial temperament had necessitated passing three different Succession Acts during his reign. The first two disinherited his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, declaring them illegitimate because his marriages to their mothers Catherine of Aragon and Ann Boleyn were invalidated, by divorce and treason respectively. The third Succession Act of 1543 named Edward, his longed for son by third wife Jane Seymour, as his heir. Mary and Elizabeth were declared legitimate after all and reinstated to the succession order if Edward died childless. If all three should die childless, an unlikely outcome that would actually come to pass, then the succession should follow Henry’s last will. The act included the fateful language that the succession order in his will would be valid if “signed with his most gracious hand.”

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Beyond Blue and White

October 10, 2025October 10, 2025 ~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ 3 Comments

The first thing I want to say about this new addition to my bookshelf is that I absolutely adore the cover. I don’t believe in judging a book by its cover, but I do judge book covers. I follow the Best Book Covers of the Year lists and pass my own judgements on the latest design hits and misses. When will the cliche of the “young woman seen from behind” covers be over? The current fashion is for splashes of garish color and odd images designed to shock or defy explanation. In contrast this cover is an inspired fusion of subject and image. The perfect Delft blue color, of course, and the woman-shaped shard of Delftware have an instant visual appeal and tell the story of the book’s contents – the revelation that many of the famous Delft potteries of the 17th and 18th centuries were owned and managed by women.

Genevieve Wheeler Brown is a decorative art advisor who stumbled on this story by chance when she was asked to appraise a large collection of Delftware stored in the New York headquarters of a women’s art organization. When she stepped into the room, untouched for decades, she was amazed to find a superb collection of over seventy-five blue and white Delftware objects, an overwhelming display of beauty and craftsmanship in a myriad shapes and sizes. This treasure, she learned, had been acquired in the Gilded Age when a fashion for collecting Delftware had obsessed wealthy New York socialites. Brown soon became obsessed herself with researching the history of Delftware.

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Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell

September 5, 2025September 8, 2025 ~ dispatchesfromtheformernewworld ~ 1 Comment

I first read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte when I was a teenager, newly enraptured by the Bronte sisters’ novels and the romantic bleakness of the Yorkshire moors. I remember the spell cast by the opening chapter as Gaskell takes us on her journey to visit Charlotte in Haworth. It is as though the reader is her companion on the Leeds and Bradford railway line to Keighley, then by carriage four miles to Haworth, past farms and workmen’s cottages and up the steep hill to the church, the parsonage, and the graveyard “terribly full of upright tombstones.” Gaskell, herself a novelist, paints an evocative picture of the landscape and atmosphere. We hear the horses’ hooves slipping on the paving stones of the steep street and breathe the “dim and lightless” air full of smoke from the clustered chimneys. I hadn’t read many biographies before and had expected it to start with Charlotte’s birth. I was so impressed with this way of leading the reader first into the world of the subject that my young self decided all biographies should be like this, that Elizabeth Gaskell had set the standard by which all others should be judged. It was one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life.

On publication in 1857, two years after Charlotte’s death, the Life was an immediate bestseller and has remained in print ever since, considered a classic of biography. What I did not know until recently, when I read a new book on the subject, is that on first publication Gaskell’s Life faced a storm of controversy causing major problems for the author and publisher.

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