Mysterious intarsia panels from Urbino…

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Here’s another historical mystery from my favourite neck of the woods (the Quattrocento), and involving the amazing trompe-l’oeuil wooden intarsia (decorative inlays) in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, something I’ve wanted to visit for years.

Basically, when Federico da Montefeltro was decorating his new palace, he commissioned a wonderful set of intarsia, mainly destined for his studiolo (study room). When not furiously waging war, he loved Greek literature and the liberal arts, and the designs chosen reflect this: scenes with 3D platonic solids, an astrolabe, an armillary sphere, musical instruments, animals (such as squirrels), etc. You can see some of these in this “Procrastinating in Pittsburgh” blog post (and in this one too): the amount of technique that was required to execute these small marvels is frankly incredible.

Other Quattrocento palaces commissioned similar intarsia works, such as this perspective view of a cittern (lute-like instrument) and sand-timer from the Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio (from 1479-1482).

But what I didn’t know was that there was also a set of three cityscapes done in this same intarsia style: one is in Urbino, one in Baltimore, one in Berlin. These have been attributed to Luciano Laurana, but this is hard to be sure about.

What do they depict? Jockusch concluded (in a 1993 dissertation) that while some intarsia panels depicting real scenery did exist (one of Monte Oliveto near Siena, the other of the Colosseum in Rome), the rest – including these three – were all very probably imaginary.

OK, so what were they for? According to a 2007 study by Macerata University geography professor Giorgio Mangani, these were probably memory aids (the “architectural mnemonic” in the Ars Memoria, as discussed by Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, etc).

I haven’t yet seen Mangani’s study, but his conclusion seems a bit of a stretch to me. This article (part of Kim Veltman’s 2004 work here) notes plenty of other views: Krautheimer (1948) thought the Baltimore and Urbino panels represented tragedy and comedy, though Sanpaolesi (1949) disagreed; while Battisti (1960) speculated that they might instead be visualizations of ancient cities.

It’s a mystery – or is it? Do these three idealized cityscapes actually need to be for anything, any more than the squirrel or the astrolabe or the sand-timer? Perhaps Mangani is right and that someone used or appropriated them for their own personal mnemotechnical odyssey, but that seems a little after-the-event.

My personal preference in this instance is, in broadly the same vein as Charles Hope’s skepticism about claims of Neoplatonism in art, that these are just perspectival grandstanding, 3d technique for its own sake. If there is an art history link to these cityscapes, it might well turn out to be to Antonio Averlino’s ideal city Sforzinda: but even this I’m not really holding my breath for.

More on Dan Burisch…

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A month ago, I posted up a blog entry about Dan Burisch’s claimed decryption of the Voynich Manuscript, which a surprisingly large number of people have since read (my blog entry, not the decryption). Burisch claimed that an alien called “#3-15” held by the secret organization known as “Majestic” (presumably an updated version of Majestic-12) had decrypted the VMs, and that its plaintext turned out to be a message from the far future placed in the hands of Roger Bacon 700 years ago about the amazing inventions Dan Burisch has yet to make in the near future: but that whole decryption has been placed in “File 21” somewhere in Europe, and you can’t see it, sorry.

As odd arguments go, this is a thing of curious beauty. Let’s see: an alien (who you’ll never meet) held by the (alleged) modern inheritors of a secret organization (most of whose founding documents appear to have been forged) has decrypted a (probably 15th century) cipher document, revealing that it was written down in (a mangled & ciphered) Hebrew by Roger Bacon (in the 13th century), to whom the actual content was passed from the far future, and which concerned the (yet-to-happen-but-surely-must-be-soon) inventions and discoveries made by Dr Dan Burisch, except that you can’t see the decryption apart from four (frankly rather wobbly) words. Fantastic or fantastical? You decide.

Putting on my historical hat… if (like me) you read papers on Antonio Averlino’s libro architettonico, you often run into very similar problems trying to parse what is being said. Though Averlino’s libro is on one level a kind of encrypted autobiography, it simultaneously functions both as an allegorical novel and as an historical-novel-within-a-novel. Which is to say that readers constantly have to decide what is real, what is imagined, and what is contructed. Would a modern librarian place such a book in fiction or non-fiction?

Of course, Averlino was not crossing those kind of artificial boundaries, because they had not yet been drawn up. Early Renaissance thought was very fluid, very undifferentiated: perhaps the humanistic conceit of trying to gain eternal fama (fame) through their works made sense because the rigid scientific constructions of time we now rely upon had not yet been put in place – perhaps the distant past and remote future somehow felt closer then than they do these days.

In those terms, maybe Dan Burisch’s conception of time is so, errm, alien to us in that it is, rather like Averlino’s, quite undifferentiated and continuous in a vaguely pre-scientific way: a kind of sci-fi reprise of the early Renaissance mind. Perhaps Burisch somehow experiences past and future events all overlapping and concertinaed together, like a kind of strange temporal synaesthesia. Or perhaps he’s just mad, who knows?

Anyway, we have an update on the story. According to a message apparently from Dan Burisch forwarded yesterday to The Golden Thread BBS, “the policy of the Eagles Team [is now] not to comment on the contents of the Voynich Manuscript“, because “it contains such dangerous information, going to prison or being executed would be preferable to disclosing it“. Furthermore, “When I said to you [Fran?] the annotations to Folio 21 [“File 21”?] were not dangerous, I meant it in the context of you seeing it. I never intended you to post it. I apologize to you for the miscommunication, and to the public about the cryptic nature of this post. With this, that is the way it must FOREVER stand.” Which presumably means he won’t post anything more on the subject of the VMs: a shame, as I’d like to know what it said.

The Internet is a strange place: these days, you can tell people think something is interesting not when you find a hundred banal blog entries pointing to it, but rather when you discover that it has been appropriated as a plot element in several online alternate-reality role-playing games. In those terms, the whole Dan Burisch saga to me most resembles neither a conspiracy nor a pathology, but instead a kind of fat-rulebook sci-fi RPG played out between a small group of dungeon masters and the opposing team, “the public”. Roll that octahedral die one more time, baby…

UPDATE: Yet more on Dan Burisch…

"Is this feeling an eternal flame?"

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A quick pop-cultural aside: the song “Eternal Flame” was written by hugely successful American songwriter Billy Steinberg with Tom Kelly and Susanna Hoffs (of The Bangles). The inspiration for the song came from an eternal flame seen by Bangles’ bass-player Michael Steele burning at Gracelands in Elvis Presley’s memory, as well as from one at a Palm Springs synagague Steinberg had seen when very young. Though “Eternal Flame” was produced by Simon Cowell, I won’t hold that against it. 🙂

But historically, claims of actual eternal flames go back a very long way: in my book, I mentioned briefly that many in the Renaissance believed a “perpetual light” burned in the Temple of Vesta in Ancient Rome. Leon Battista Alberti’s 1450 book “Momus” mentions (though admittedly in a fictional context) a “perpetual flame, tending itself even though no material is laid under it and no liquid poured over it“, Giovanni Battista Della Porta documented many attempts at reproducing eternal flames in his Natural Magic in XX Books, while in his libro architettonico Antonio Averlino described a continuously-burning candle he saw in Sant Maria in Bagno. Another related story concerns Abbot Trithemius, who allegedly sold two “unquenchable eternall lights” to Emperor Maximilian I for 6000 crowns.

I thought this was one of those things for which there was unlikely to be any significant literature: I’d collected all the pieces together from scattered footnotes. However, recently I was inspired by Archer Quinn’s, ummm, perpetual ranting to properly read through Kevin Kilty’s well-known page on perpetual motion. All good stuff: and he even mentions eternal flames!

Kilty, who seems to have derived his information on this subject from Arthur Ord-Hume’s 1977 book “Perpetual Motion: history of an obsession“, mentions that:-

“Fortunio Liceti (1577-1657) made a lifelong study of these lamps, so many of which were supposedly found in old tombs, vaults and temples. Ord-Hume spends several pages examining ways to explain the observation of perpetual lamps. This is giving too much serious attention to a fantasy. It is likely that no one ever observed any such lamp.”

(Though I should of course point out that Averlino claimed to have observed an eternal flame). Fascinating! I was not aware of Fortunio Liceti‘s connection with eternal flames, and so rushed to buy Ord-Hume’s book as quickly as I could. I shall continue this thread when it arrives…

The Florentine Renaissance & evolution…

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OK, I’ll admit it: people who talk about the Renaissance as a coherent historical phenomenon get on my nerves. There were numerous strands of thought at the time, all vying for the oxygen of attention, all trying to supplant medieval scholasticism: but arguably the two biggest new kids on the block circa 1400 were Renaissance humanism (think of Petrarch, etc) and Renaissance inventorship (think of Brunelleschi). While the former grew out of philology and a theoretical reverence for Classical texts, the latter emerged from the empirical world of clock-making.

Lynn Thorndike was happy enough (in his “Science & Thought in the XVth Century”) to point out that these two major strands were very often at odds with each other: but it should also be noted that the intersection between the two was far from empty. In fact, you might well look at the architects Leon Battista Alberti and Antonio Averlino – both born near Florence near to 1400 – as examples of “Renaissance Men” in the purest sense, in that they exemplified both strands at the same time.

The mystery of the Italian Renaissance (as described by Burckhardt and the generation of gung-ho pro-humanistic historians that followed him) is this: why did it emerge at such a narrow time (circa 1400) and place (Florence)?

For a long time, the dominant view has basically been that this was a random event, just one of those things that happen from time to time. However, some modern writers have begun to speculate whether a particular freak event or a subtle change in diet or eating habits might perhaps been the real “cause” of the Italian Renaissance.

For me, I would be unsurprised if insomnia turned out to be a key: Alberti writes, in his 1441 “On the Tranquillity of the Soul”, of “the agitation of his soul”at night, and how he can relieve this by trying to devise amazing machines for lifting and carrying weights. I wonder if an entire generation of Florentines suffered from a kind of intellectual insomnia, perhaps as a result of effectively becoming hyperthyroid from ingesting a particularly iodine-rich salt being brought into the city?

Or might the Florentines have simply become addicted to the sugar confections that had not long before suddenly filled the city’s apothecaries and markets? Might the Renaissance have simply been a metabolic balancing act as people tried to compensate for a giant communal sugar rush?

But there’s another possibility. If you were looking for a statistical explanation why a particular population produced more geniuses (while the overall bell-curve distribution probably remained intact), there would be two obvious candidates to consider – either (a) the mean IQ got shifted up (i.e. everyone somehow got smarter) , or (b) the variance increased dramatically (i.e. more extreme cases appeared at both ends of the scale).

This set me wondering: as I understand it, one of the problems often put forward with Darwinian evolution is that the natural rate of mutations is too low to support the amount of random change needed. So could it be that stable contexts inhibit mutations (i.e. encourage low adaptation rates), while troubled contexts somehow encourage mutations (i.e. encourage high adaptation rates)?

Interestingly, one medieval obsession presents itself here: that of whether “monsters” (freaks of nature) were signs (de-monstr-ations) of something greater happening in the world. Perhaps “monsters” in the human population were (and possibly still are?) literally a sign that the variance of the population is high.

Thinking about all this, it suddenly then became clear to me why low sperm counts make evolutionary sense: if a body is in significant physical difficulties, it makes no sense for it to try to reproduce offspring that are the same as it, as they would likely experience the same difficulties in the next generation. Instead, perhaps the body deliberately produces crippled, damaged sperm to try to encourage mutations that might be better adapted to the changing physical context. Otherwise, why would the body ever want to deliberately produce poor sperm or eggs? Perhaps the current medical view of “healthy” sperm is somehow clouded by an anti-mutation bias of some sort.

My prediction here is that that there will turn out to be reproductive mechanisms by which (a) healthy eggs repel damaged sperm and (b) damaged eggs discourage healthy sperm: leaving the two pivotal cases of (healthy eggs + healthy sperm) => low mutation rate (low variance, well-adapted to environment), and (damaged eggs + damaged sperm) => high mutation rate (high variance, poorly-adapted to environment).

But there’s a timing issue. Whereas sperm production is essentially a “just-in-time” process, women’s eggs are produced all in one go, and so form a lagging indicator to environmental adaptation (i.e. egg health in reproduction gives an indication of environmental fit 15-25 years earlier). So, could it be that, when looking for the source of the Renaissance circa 1400, we should instead look for a traumatic event in Florence circa 1380 that significantly affected women’s reproductive health, causing a change in the population’s IQ variance?

I really don’t know (this is a blog, not an article in Nature): but it is tempting to speculate whether it was simply coincidence that the Florentine Renaissance began two generations after the plague had ravaged Florence in 1348 (Boccaccio famously wrote about it). Might children born after the plague have stirred the Florentine gene-pool up in just the right way to set the Renaissance in motion a generation later?

Research breakthrough…

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Not long ago, I mentioned here that I had made a fist-punching-in-the-air breakthrough in my research, and promised to describe it more fully at a later date. Well, that later date has (thanks to a torrent of two gently chiding emails chivvying me along) now arrived: here’s what I found.

Regular Voynich News readers will by now be aware that I’ve spent a long time this year slowly trawling through various volumes of Lynn Thorndike’s vast “History of Magic & Experimental Science”. Given that I believe the Voynich Manuscript is an enciphered book of proto-scientific secrets rooted in Italian Quattrocento culture, Thorndike’s general focus on Italian scientific documents of the 14th (Volume III) and 15th (Volume IV) centuries is pretty much spot on. This approach has turned up a whole set of research leads to follow up over the next few weeks and months… so far so good.

But I also (sad completist I sometimes tend to be) picked up a copy of Thorndike’s rather less-well-known “Science & Thought In The Fifteenth Century” (1929, Columbia University Press): in which I found something pleasantly unexpected. But I’ll fill in all the background first…

Once upon a time (oh, in 2006), I wrote & published a book called “The Curse of the Voynich“, which described how I concluded from my meticulous codicological study that Quattrocento Florentine architect Antonio Averlino (better known as “Filarete”) was probably both the author and the encipherer of the Voynich Manuscript. Part of the textual evidence revolved around a set of “small works” to which Averlino alluded in his larger libro architettonico, and which I suspected were at least in part enciphered in the VMs. However, art historians have long disagreed about whether these other works actually existed, or whether they were just added in for spice to amuse Averlino’s (hoped-for) ducal audience: as far as anyone, there has long been no external evidence either way.

But then on p.219 of Thorndike’s “Science & Thought”, in chapter XII which is largely devoted to Giovanni Michele Alberto of Carrara’s “De constitutione mundi“, I found the following:

Antonio Averlino Filarete (1410-1470), who is commonly thought of as an architect and sculptor, is listed by John Michael Albert [i.e. Giovanni Michele Alberto da Carrara] among writers on plants as having treated that subject “elegantly in the vernacular tongue”. [94]

Thorndike’s footnote 94 then says:

Ibid. [MS Ashburnham 198], fol.78r: “Sed et Antonius Averlinus Philaretus lingua vernacula scripsit eleganter.” The work of Filarete on architecture was first printed only in 1890 (W. von Oettingen). In it he alludes to his work on agriculture, which is probably what John Michael Albert has in mind. See M. Lazzaroni and A Munoz, “Filarete, scultore e architetto del sec. XV”, 1908, p.281.

Somehow this whole mention appears to have gone unnoticed by all recent writers on Filarete: yet its existence would seem to strongly tip the balance of probability towards the likelihood that he did actually write his “other little works”. Hence why finding it was so rewarding (for me, at least).

Incidentally, MS Ashburnham 198 (one of the 11,000 manuscripts held by the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence) was dedicated to Boniface, marquis of Montferrat: and so was probably written between 1483 (when Bonifazio Palaeologo became marquis) and 1488 (when Alberto was given the title Count Palatine by Frederick III) or 1490 (when Alberto is thought to have died).

I then wondered where Alberto might have seen Filarete’s herbal manuscript. Alberto was born in Bergamo, trained in Padua, returned to Bergamo, and practised medicine at Rovato, Brescia, Chiari: and for a time was private physician to Roberto di Sanseverino, as well as Prior of the College of Physicians in Bergamo. I’d therefore guess that Alberto probably saw Filarete’s work (and perhaps even had a copy made of it) while in Bergamo, where he spent most of his life, only 50km or so from Milan where Filarete was working: or he may even have met Filarete, who is believed to have designed the plans for Bergamo Cathedral circa 1459, and who doubtless visited Bergamo on several occasions.

It would be amazing if Filarete’s elegant vernacular work on plants (or even just its incipit) could be identified: and so I started, emboldened by the archival research content of Day Three of the Warwick/Warburg Course, to think about where I might search (and for what, and for how long).

Identifying herbals from purely written descriptions is not unprecedented. In Thorndike’s “History of Magic & Experimental Science” Vol.IV (p.599), he describes Pandolphus Collenucius of Pesaro learning about herbs in Venice: “There in the street of the spice-dealers in a shop having as its sign the head of an Ethiopian he had consulted an herbal in which the plants were represented so carefully and artfully that you would have thought they grew on its pages.” In a footnote, Thorndike notes that Valentinelli (1872) “has shown that this was the De Simplicibus of Benedetto Rinio, with pictures of the plants by the Venetian painter, Andrea Amadio. The MS is now S. Marco VI, 59 (Valentinelli, XIII, 10).” All the same, we really don’t yet have enough to work with in the present case.

Where did Alberto’s belongings go after his death? Sergio Toresella tells me that Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750) wrote: “I understand that this Alberti was an humanist that wrote a lot of comedies and poetry but I do not know were his belongings went after his death.” So at least I’m not the first to ask!

But all is not lost: the Biblioteca Angelo Mai in Bergamo has a good collection of his letters and notes, and many manuscripts from his personal library (and so with his initials and coat of arms added to them). The library’s bibliographical description of its various humanistic documents taken from Kristeller’s Iter Italicum and Iter Supplementum is here. But, as Sergio points out, none looks particularly promising, with the possibly exception of MA 184-186 folio 8v “Ex experimentis et secretis magistri Guelmi” (though this too seems fairly unlikely).

There are some books on Alberto’s work. For instance, a 20th century academic called Giovanni Giraldi seems to have spent his life editing and publishing papers on him in obscure journals, many of which are reproduced in his 1967 book “Opera poetica, philosophica, rhetorica, theologica” (Novara: Istituto Geografico de Agostini): although none appears to be for sale online (boo), WorldCat lists 5 or 6 copies, one in the Warburg Institute (hooray!)

For Alberto’s life, there is “Giovanni Michele Alberto Carrara” by Ercole Vittorio Ferrario and Gian Camillo Donadi (1964), for which WorldCat lists just one copy (boo)… in the Wellcome Institute Library in London, just around the corner from the British Library (phew!). I’ve been meaning to go there for a while, partly to take a picture of its necromantic painting depicting John Dee (but that’s another story).

Interestingly, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana makes a log of everyone who examines each of its manuscripts available on its website. Of the ten people listed for MS Ashburnham 198, there is someone from the Warburg Institute (in Hamburg!) in 1930, Patrick McGurk from the Warburg (in London) in 1953, Federici Vescalini Graziella in 1987, John Monfasani in 1995, and Ulrich Pfisterer in 1998, though I don’t yet know if Ulrich (who has written papers on Filarete) was or is aware of the mention on f78r: I’ll ask him, see what he says…

As far as the Voynich Manuscript goes, there’s always the tiny possibility that multispectral imaging of its very first page might just (if Alberto just happened to end up owning it) reveal a faint contact transfer from Alberto’s coat of arms and initials. But I’m more interested in seeing if the incipit is anywhere to be found: that would be far more useful for trying to break its cipher.

All of which may not seem like much to get hugely excited about, but it is a step forward (though admittedly only at the glacial pace normal for Voynich research). *sigh*

Thorndike has the answer…

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For me, Voynich research is one of those things that grind slowly onwards for long periods of time, punctuated by occasional testosteronal fist-clenching-in-the-air moments of elation, a bit like a prisoner being unexpectedly set free. OK, I know it’s a bit cliched: but I do it anyway.

For “The Curse of the Voynich“, I forensically examined the manuscript itself, travelled to all the places, critically read all the secondary sources, and from all that reconstructed the story as best I could. In short, I’d done an OK job: but though readers told me they liked it, it hadn’t set the world on fire. Though it ticked all the right boxes, it was obvious I had to go away and try harder. But what could I do better?

At first, I bought a pile of books on the history of cryptography, such as David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers”: all fascinating, but the question I’m trying to answer – “at the Quattrocento birth of mathematical cryptography, what kind of cryptography died?” – only features marginally (if at all) in the generally rather positivistic accounts presented there.

And then I realised what I had been missing. Sure, I had read plenty on Quattrocento individuals such as Filarete, Alberti, Brunelleschi, Taccola: but there was one gigantic motherlode of information which most historians seem to pay lip service to (rather than have to set aside several months to read): Lynn Thorndike’s epic multi-volume “History of Magic and Experimental Science”.

I therefore bought volumes III and IV (for the 14th and 15th centuries) and have now reached halfway through the latter. What continually amazes me is the amount of ground Thorndike covered that has apparently not been touched by anyone since: though there is a large literature tree cascading off it, it is very deep in places and non-existent in others.

From what I have read, I am now quite sure that virtually all of the Voynich Manuscript’s roots will turn out to be directly traceable from the late 14th and early 15th century: which means that we might in time be able to reconstruct or predict plaintexts for some sections. But these are still very early days in this ultra-long-term research programme. *sigh*

However, the good news is that I also bought a copy of “Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century” by Lynn Thorndike: and one obscure page from that gave me precisely the clenching-both-fists-in-the-air-YESSSSS-moment I mentioned at the start. The details are too convoluted to go through here, but trust me, it’s a peach.

Review of "Shopping in the Renaissance"…

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Once upon a time, history was a really hard subject to enjoy: a dreary rollcall of [macho/loser] kings and [powerful/scheming] queens, endlessly (a) conspiring against other, (b) fighting expensive wars where both sides tended to lose, and/or (c) endlessly frittering extorted tax money on self-glorifying monuments masquerading as high culture.

Then along came a new generation of “social historians”, who despised the superficial cheesiness of relying on historical records left by the victors, and wanted instead to read “history from below“. To do this, they sought out “authentic” (i.e. non-propagandized) documents to try to give a voice to ordinary people through the centuries and so reconstruct histories of the mundane, the plebeian – the salt rather than the spice.

Of course, each of these two kinds of history is no more or less a lie than the other. For all the self-aggrandizement and posturing implicit in ‘Big Man’ history, the truth of any matter will normally find a way of squeezing through the cracks in the text, particularly with the big-brain close readings of the modern linguistic turn to help it on its way. And even supposedly non-propagandistic items such as wills, inventories and account books are subject to understatement in the age-old “sport” of tax evasion. And so attempts to reduce history to a totalising big picture (whether from above or from below) simply don’t work: historians cannot avoid having to “sweat the small stuff“, because the answer all too often lies in simply getting the details right.

It is in the tension between these two extrema that I look at Evelyn Welch’s “Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400-1600” (2005, Yale University Press). When I was researching my own book on Filarete, her “Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan” (1995, also Yale University Press) was permanently by my elbow, always at the ready to prevent me becoming entrapped by the sticky bubble of historical propaganda inflated around the Sforza court by Cicco Simonetta (and all too readily accepted as fact by older historians): so I had high hopes for her “Shopping”.

On the one hand, Welch’s book is a slab of social history par excellence, teasing out numerous otherwise marginal strands of ordinary life in the early Renaissance – street-sellers, auctions, lotteries, indulgences, fairs, shoes, shopping hours, pawnshops, feast days, credit, charlatans, and so forth. Yet on the other, Chapter Nine (“Shopping with Isabella d’Este”) is from the diametric opposite end of the social scale, an account of the elitist shopping habits of someone who would have been aghast to find out she had been born 350 years too soon for haute couture. After 240 textured pages of closely observed text riffing on various social historical shopping themes (richly illustrated with wonderful images of the ordinary), I felt somehow betrayed by the abrupt switch: a (quite literally) materialist snob like Isabella d’Este had no right to be there.

As is typical with horizontal historical studies, if you stick with them long enough you’ll find a prize to return home with: in my (Voynichological) case, pp.151-158 contained splendid descriptions and images of apothecaries’ shops, many including the kind of albarelli I put so much time into researching six years ago. A very pleasant surprise!

The one thing I found irritating about the text itself was the jarring style used for the incipits and desinits in each chapter. Rather than using the elegant yet spare historical prose of the chapter bodies themselves, these chatter with the abstracted, vacuous tokens of contemporary sociology-speak: space, surveillance, visibility, environment, transience, consumption, embedded, relations, networks, production. It is as if these were written by another hand, perhaps one attempting to weave together the threads of a decade’s-worth of individual papers into a tangibly coherent theoretical tapestry. If so, I think it was a failed experiment: social history is an activity based not around synthesizing the kind of vaguely structural frameworks beloved by sociologists, but around reconstructing the texture of ordinary lives. Essentially, the rich tapestry was already fully present, so there was no need to embellish the edges as well. Oh well!