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Tag: middling
Introducing the virtual early modern parlour
Featured by middlingculture, posted in Project Post, Uncategorized
Principal Investigator, Professor Catherine Richardson, introduces Middling Culture's newest digital project – a virtual room from the 1620s.
Fireplace and replica wall paintings in the Reigate House Extension 'parlour' at the © Weald and Downland Living Museum.
Quite a few years ago now, at the start of a book on Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England, I tried to imagine what it was like to be present in an early modern room, situating oneself in space through the sights and sounds coming from the rest of the house. It was an exercise in a kind of creative writing, piecing together the evidence of court depositions – what people said they heard and saw. This is how part of it went:
Imagine, for a moment, what it might be like to be sitting in the hall of an early modern house. Say it is timber-framed, three storeys high, the upper floors jettied out over the street in front. What are you sitting on? Is it an old 'turned' chair with arms and a back 'by the fyer sid', or one of several stools around the table, or a bench along the wall? Are you sitting on the hard oak or, if you reach down to touch the seat, do you feel a cushion? Perhaps it is one 'of crymson velvett, and ymbrodered with borders of greane sylke round about, saving it lackethe a lytle at one ende'. Can you be so precise because you know it very well indeed, both by sight and touch?
What is this room like? How large is it? Perhaps it has a long refectory table with stools around it. There is a court cupboard 'under the wyndowe', 'an olde carpett and a lynnen cuberd cloth upon yt', 'a bason, ii flower potte, a cupp of tynn and ii stone pottes' on top, and there are 'paynted clothes over the benche'. How many doors are visible? There may well be a little buttery 'opening to the hall', the small cupboard off this room in which the brass and pewter is stored. There might be a 'little place betwene the hall and the shop' with a 'little cupbord' in it, one of those curious spaces which spring up in timber-framed houses when new sections are built on. There might be an entry behind the room, opening on to the back side of the house where the kitchen is. Towards the back of the house the room is darker, and here perhaps is the door to the parlour. It is open and you can see the 'fether bedd wythe stedle standinge in the parlor furnysshed as a bedd ought to be', with its curtains and its tester and valance, with its bolsters and sheets and blankets and coverlets, all 'appropriate' to the status of this house in a way which you can judge intuitively. Then, fading from your vision in the hall, the 'dark room behind the parlour' which has no windows. At the other end of the hall is the window on to the street, and this casts light on the colours of the painted cloths, on the 'olde rownde lokinge glase', and on the 'payre of greate andyrons' in the chimney.
How aware are you of the rest of the house as you sit in the hall? Can you smell cooking from the back side? Can you smell onions and garlic, either in the room with you or upstairs in the chambers; perhaps the four 'bacon hogges that are hanging in the roof'? Is it autumn? Can you smell apples in the loft above, or the oily scent of wool? Can you smell the raw materials and the processes of production going on in the shop; can you hear shears, or hammers? These routine noises must fade away in your consciousness to almost nothing, to a reassuring background which means 'household' to you.
How aware are you of the presence of the rest of the household? The walls are thin and there are holes, cracks, spaces in them, some there by design and others the result of wear. They complicate the division between the hall and the rooms around it. As you listen, you hear 'one coufe [cough] in the howse'. Do you recognise the cough? If it is a stranger, you begin to listen much more carefully, to concentrate and make out sounds above your head. If there are 'no persones in the … hall hearing' but you 'alone', the disparity between the exchanges upstairs and your seclusion downstairs will make the hall seem larger and stiller. Those you hear 'in a chamber over the hall' are choosing their words very carefully. They are discussing issues which connect the house to the body and the soul as they 'speake and move' the testator 'to be good unto his wif'…
Whether you go upstairs, or outside, and how you go, will depend upon who you are. How have you been imagining yourself?
I enjoyed writing it, based on tiny snippets from the documents that I analysed quantitatively in other places in the book, and found it a useful way into an argument about the relationship between theory, practice and theatrical representation. It was an interesting intellectual exercise, to reconstruct the records of perception and use them to explore not only the sensory qualities of lived experience, but also the social norms they revealed.
That was a long time ago, and it's interesting to see that I was quite comfortable with experience being purely textual in form – no images, no physical objects in sight! But both scholarly practice and digital capability have moved on since then. So this blog is a first announcement that our virtual early modern room is coming!
A virtual room was always going to be a part of the impact work for this project, thanks largely to having the fabulous Graeme Earl on the team – more from him in a future blog. We wanted to present our findings in innovative ways, to engage people with those questions of how those in the middle of society, neither very rich nor in poverty, made material and cultural use of their space. We built on the Ways of Seeing network on which the team had also worked together, in which we explored questions of perception in relation to new technology and heritage outcomes.
Replica painted hanging in the hall of Bayleaf Farmhouse (c. 1540) at the Weald and Downland Living Museum. Explored through the Ways of Seeing project.
The other thing that's happened is that, as a project, we haven't been able to get into the archives as often or for as long as we'd intended in this phase of the work. And that's changed the way we've developed our digital resources. Rather than seeing them as the vehicle via which we disseminated findings after the end of the project, we've started to work with them more creatively as research tools. That has meant thinking with and through them about the big questions the project explores – for instance about the experience and place of reading and writing for the middling sort – and using them to problematise our evidence, rather than to present a seamless and straightforward narrative. We've also thought about them together, as a group – how this room relates to Middling Culture's Status Calculator, for instance.
Staircase and section of C17 wall painting in the 'parlour' from the Reigate House Extension at the Weald and Downland Living Museum. Photograph by Tara Hamling
As a result, the project's digital outputs have become considerably more significant. We are working with our project partners – the "real-world" room (pictured above) on which our virtual room is based is at the Weald and Downland Museum – and items from various collections such as The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, The Portable Antiquities Scheme, The National Trust and a number of local authority archives. We've also been working with creative writers, actors, digital artists and database developers, all of whom you will hear more from in this series of blogs leading up to the launch of the room.
It has been a strikingly different experience, for me at least, in the course of which I've had to think in new ways about how we work with evidence, probability, typicality and patterns of cultural behaviour. More on all of that too, but for now here is a short list of the issues we wanted to explore through spending time in the room:
Reading and writing in a specific location
The different ways in which reading and writing were used
Howa person's identity is built up over time
How cultural experience is formed and remembered
This desk box from SBT's collections is one of many objects to feature in our virtual room. SBT 1994-22, oak; sloped lid with butterfly hinges and scrolled book rest; body with scratch mouldings to front and sides. English, about 1600 © The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Finally, I'd like to come back at the end and think through just how different this way of presenting evidence is to the example with which I started. Our next challenge will be to come back to the linear narrative form and see how we can explore what we've learned in that way – in other words we have to write the findings up! I'd like to think more about the relationship between writing and experience, and how we bring material environments into written forms. The practices – both early modern and modern – that have cohered around the room offer different models for us to consider, and I hope to reflect more on them once we've spent a little longer inside….
Tagged digital, domestic interiors, engagement, interior decoration, material culture, middling, middling sort, parlour, projects1 Comment
Jamming together: Recreating improvised seventeenth-century musical divisions
29 Jul 2021 by middlingculture, posted in Guest Post, Long Read
We are delighted to host this guest post from Nina Kümin, a PhD candidate in music performance and baroque improvisation at the University of York.
The pleasure of your company is requested for a seventeenth-century jam session!
One of the main forms of music making for English middling society in the seventeenth century was consort music. Small groups of families, friends or neighbours would gather to play music together in several parts. While at the beginning of the seventeenth century, viols were the most popular instrument for this, as the century progressed the violin also grew in popularity. Of this music making, one of the most elusive traditions was that of playing "divisions". This was the practice of adding florid ornamentation to printed music and improvising variations (making them up on the spot) taking inspiration from a popular printed theme. At the middle of the century, Playford, a publisher based in London and member of the Stationers' Company, turned to printing collections of such example "divisions" on famous tunes which is testament to the tradition's existence and growing popularity. His attempt to materialise an essentially immaterial art represents an increased demand from the growing amateur market; the divisions he provides are teaching materials, once accustomed to the art and with some general technical ability, Playford encourages the players to improvise their own. Through improvisation, the players moved from recreating works to being the creators, in control of the emotional development of the piece, the technical difficulty and the length. These published divisions, therefore, acted as an intermediary, temporary material form. Thanks to Playford's publications, including Christopher Simpson's The Division Viol of 1659 and Playford's own The Division Violin of 1685, and through practice-led research, we can begin to reconstruct what it might have sounded and felt like to play or hear improvised divisions in the early to mid-seventeenth century, making the journey from immaterial sound and oral tradition through Playford's material representations to the immaterial nature of improvisation again.
Each theme in Playford's division manuals is set to a bassline which repeats all the way through called a "ground bass". Let's take "Faronell's Divisions on a Ground" from Playford's Division Violin as an example:
To the improvising musician, the bassline reveals which chords occur at which time. This ultimately reduces the number of possible notes an improviser can choose from as each chord change must be accompanied by a consonant (right sounding) note at first. The task of the improviser is then to find an interesting way to get between each of these important consonant notes. The theory of consonance and dissonance was widely discussed in composition treatises at the time (English examples include Morely 1597; Mace 1676 and Matteis 1682) and is evident in many compositions over ground basses such as passacaglias as well as all of the examples in the Division Viol, Division Violin and Division Flute (a later collection by John Walsh from 1706). For this particular set of divisions, the harmony is as follows: Dm, A, Dm, C, F, C, Dm, A, Dm, A, Dm, C, F, C, Dm A, D. To the improviser, this means that you can chose one of the follow notes to start each chord:
Dm: D, F, A
A: A, C#, E
C: C, E, G
F: F, A, C
These, however, can be anywhere on the instrument and thus there are many possibilities even if there are only three named notes available for each chord. The materiality of the instrument, therefore, comes into play here too. As the violin, for instance, has four strings, only a maximum of four notes can ever be played together at any one time. In addition, the player has to be able to technically execute their ideas. It is therefore not realistic to pick notes which are at the extremes of the violin to jump between repeatedly; music tends to move by step or in smaller jumps. This reflects the vocal tradition in which singers also find large leaps difficult. Other considerations include the timbre (sound qualities) achievable. The lack of a shoulder and chin rest on the baroque violin also makes shifting, which facilitates the comfortable execution of large leaps, difficult. For each instrument, different strings will have different timbres due to the make of the violin and the material and winding of the strings but also the player's technique and experience, not to mention the acoustic. This all also applies to viol playing and all of these factors might have a bearing on which of the options the improviser chooses.
Finding interesting ways to get between these notes has its roots in ornamentation. This was common practice in all music of this time. This meant that musicians would not just play what was written on the material page but add their own little flourishes and touches between printed notes. These could include trills, scales, arpeggios, repeated notes, turns, chords, vibrato and mordents, just to name a few. For example, here is the theme from the same set of Playford variations played without any ornamentation and then with:
The results are really quite different. This illustrates the frustration of music publishers and composers in notating their works as all printed notation only materialises a small amount of the sounds heard (Kuijken, 2013). Interestingly, contemporary writers sought to rectify this by providing lengthy treatises on composition and performance which attempted to explain these practices (some English samples include Morely, 1597; Simpson, 1659; The Burwell Lute Tutor,1660; Mace, 1676 and Matteis, 1682). The musician, therefore, has an interesting relationship with the material form of the music in that this does not represent an absolute but rather a set of guidelines or suggestions; the musician was free to follow the score or deviate from it as they saw fit. Of course, this opportunity still exists today but current common musical practice does not allow any creative licence in the form of added notes unlike the conventions of the Baroque. By reading these treatises and experimenting on period instruments, performers can attempt to ornament in a stylistic manner.
Adding to these structural harmony notes and ornamentation, each variation in the division publications is in a different character. These have their roots in the "affects" (emotions) and dances. Certain keys and intervals were viewed as evoking certain affects. While the key for divisions is already established through the ground bass, players can experiment with different intervals to create different emotional effects. In addition, English music took inspiration from the French tradition of Baroque dance using their forms and rhythmic characteristics. This use is evident in notated compositions but also in the dance melodies in Playford's The Dancing Master (1651). For instance, this set of Playford variations is actually based on a sarabande; the opening theme contains the characteristic crotchet + dotted crotchet + quaver rhythm and is in triple time. It can actually be danced to as I demonstrate here…
Middling musicians would also have been familiar with the different dance styles and characteristics not just from playing music based on dances but also through learning to dance themselves. The rhythms and playing styles associated with each dance style aid the dancer by stimulating lift, poise, energy or impetus, all of which these musicians would have been accustomed to and internalised through the physicality of dancing. Many of Playford's variations use these to add variety and interest as the harmony remains the same throughout. It is therefore highly likely that improvised divisions would also have included dance inspired variations. There were opportunities to escape the repeating harmony in other musical forms such as the fantasia but a characteristic of the division practice was this repeating "ground bass" so variety and interest came from creating these different characters.
Combining research into the intermediary material printed examples by Playford along with the advice in other treatises and the study of notated compositions in Playford's The Dancing Master and those by his contemporaries, a set of guidelines can be produced for the modern performer seeking to improvise their own stylistic divisions:
Begin each chord change with a consonant note, then find interesting ways to get between these structural notes
Keep in mind the technical possibilities and characteristics of your instrument and performance space
Create variety and interest through adding/ considering:
Intervals to create different affects
Dance rhythms and characters
Through practicing and experimenting in this manner, it is possible to improvise some stylistic variations. Therefore, I would now like to invite you to a virtual seventeenth-century jam session by encouraging you to pick and mix from the following variations, choosing however many you like and in whatever order you like, each video plays one example improvised variation. By playing them after each other you can build your own set of improvised divisions and therefore experience the improviser's task of making decisions between key structural points. In this way, you can orchestrate your own structure and each time will give you a different result. This in some way mimics the excitement and variety of improvisation; they would never have played the same variation twice and were in control of the development and length of the piece. These variations were taken from a longer recording of my continuous improvised divisions over the ground bass of this same Playford piece. If you would like to hear them in their original order, this is also provided below.
Playford's attempt to materialise the immaterial tradition of improvised divisions through his published examples, whether for viol or violin, not only recognised the existence of this tradition but allowed for a greater engagement with this by amateurs, a large number of which were middling recreational musicians, transforming their domestic cultural engagements. Musical improvisation is also deeply rooted in the material, however, as the performer's relationship with their instrument determines a large proportion of the compositional decisions as well as the limitations of the technicalities of the instrument. The variety, creativity and individuality performed by these middling musicians would have been exciting to experience but Playford's materialisations allow modern performers to also experiment with this practice.
Nina Kümin
Nina Kümin – Improvising Violinist – YouTube
Tagged early modern, early modern history, middling, middling sort, musicLeave a comment
Skill and Handwriting
1 Oct 2019 by middlingculture, posted in Uncategorized
This exploration of early modern skill in handwriting comes from Hannah Lilley, who joins the project as a Postdoctoral Research Associate this month and is based at the University of Birmingham.
My first post for this blog approaches one of the project's keywords: skill. This term, and how to interpret it, is something I've been thinking about over the course of my PhD on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scribes writing for a living and their material, spatial and social practices. Although skill can be read into any number of activities, I'm going to focus on writing, specifically handwriting. Literacy 'as learned and embodied skill, and as a site of cultural connection' has already been established in a previous post as a 'mark of middling status', alongside other activities. Knowing how to write could lead to gaining office and entry into administrative roles, and many of those middling sorts emerging for this project are those with the literacy to participate in record creation (though this could be artisanal, in the form of craft and the material record, as well as textually…).
The OED defines skill in multiple ways, including: 'to have discrimination or knowledge […] in a specified matter' (5a) and to possess 'capability of accomplishing something with precision and certainty; practical knowledge in combination with ability; cleverness, expertness. Also an ability to perform a function, acquired or learnt with practice' (6a).[1] These definitions establish skill as a term that can be applied to any number of activities: from baking to walking to storytelling to shopping. What is clear is that skill is usually applied positively to denote someone who has spent time learning, honing and practising an activity to develop the 'discrimination' or 'knowledge' to be perceived as holding expertise. Outside perception and judgement is essential to an understanding of a person as skilled, and this could take place in a commercial transaction – when commissioning work or buying a product, for example – or through sharing space with a person performing a task.
Speaking Skill
There are, however, multiple methodological issues when it comes to discussing skill. For example:
Skill is expressed through action and so it might be difficult for the actor to verbalise how they do a task/ it does not need to be passed on in writing or through speech.[2]
Skill's definition rests on those perceiving the result of an action as practised and, as such, is subjective and dependent on multiple factors such as: age, gender, geographical location, education, and purpose. Skill is also entwined with moral, political and economic value judgements.
Environmental factors could play a role in its development/ expression: access to materials, spaces, and social networks.
When thinking about these issues and handwriting, then, here are a few questions (of many) that come up, and I'm going to think about a couple of them later in this post:
How is skill individual and how is it social?
How might it be local or national?
What role does gender or social status have on perception of handwriting skill?/ Can we describe a skill as being 'middling'?
How does it develop within different spaces (workshops, homes, classrooms etc.)?
How might perceptions of practical skill be entwined with abstract concepts?
How can practice be interpreted?
Interpreting Practice Using Image Processing
One of the methods I've been using to explore questions around individual and social skill in handwriting is a digital approach called Image Processing, alongside a digital forensic handwriting analysis expert Dr Richard Guest. Although this is preliminary research with regards to using Image Processing to analyse sixteenth- and seventeenth-century handwriting practices, it does show promise as a means of exploring similarities and differences between demographic groups of scribes as well as between individuals. I used letterforms as a means of comparison (imperfect, but a good way of seeing whether the method works before moving onto full words) and some interesting interpretations of handwriting practice came out of the data.
To give a brief example, one of the experiments was on clerks working in the Kentish town of Lydd 1560-1640. I looked at how their handwriting practices changed over the period and thought about how this relates to changing perceptions of what constitutes handwriting skill in the town at this time. The examples below are from some of the simpler measurements applied to the letterforms – area and perimeter – and the charts show both the median and mean results.
Chart 1 showing mean area (in pixels) of samples of letterforms for Lydd clerks (earliest to latest) [sample for letter y doesn't cover full period]. More information in my thesis: Interpreting Practice: Scribes, Materials and Occupational Identities 1560-1640.
Chart 2 showing median area (in pixels) of samples of letterforms for Lydd clerks (earliest to latest) [sample for letter y doesn't cover full period]. More information in my thesis: Interpreting Practice: Scribes, Materials and Occupational Identities 1560-1640.
Chart 3 showing mean perimeter (in pixels) of samples of letterforms for Lydd clerks (earliest to latest) [sample for letter y doesn't cover full period]. More information in my thesis: Interpreting Practice: Scribes, Materials and Occupational Identities 1560-1640.
Chart 4 showing median perimeter (in pixels) of samples of letterforms for Lydd clerks (earliest to latest) [sample for letter y doesn't cover full period]. More information in my thesis: Interpreting Practice: Scribes, Materials and Occupational Identities 1560-1640.
Charts One to Four are brief examples showing a clear change in handwriting practices in Lydd across the period, with the majuscules for the earliest three clerks having mean and median values that far exceed the measurements for the later three clerks, meaning that the three earlier clerks are using much larger letterforms. This demonstrates a change in attitude towards letterform size over the late sixteenth into the early seventeenth century and is one example of how we might think about practical skill as being social. Collectively, the clerks in Lydd show a trend towards smaller letterforms. Furthermore, these clerks are all of middling status, literate and play an important role in their corporation. Skill at writing has enabled them to become part of their community's record creation. There is more to be done here, and more in my recently completed thesis – but this is just a glimpse into how a digital method can be used to approach non-verbalised practical skill.
Moralising Handwriting Skill
The aesthetic expectations for handwriting during this period included: script style appropriate to document type, purpose, or context, and this is one of the ways in which we might understand what scribes thought constituted skill at writing during this period. For example, mastery of chancery hand was essential for clerks working at the chancery court. Beyond this, there were plenty of printed prescriptive texts circulating during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, extolling the importance of fair handwriting and good practice. Although these present problems with regards to gaining insight into actual scribal practices because they are prescriptive texts, they do give information about how handwriting skill was connected to positive individual qualities.
Image 1. John De Beauchasne and John Baildon, A Booke Containing Diverse Sorts of Hands (1571). Italic hand example. Text: It is the part of a yonge man to reuerence his elders, and of suche/ to choose out the beste and moste commended whose counsayle/ and auctoritie hee maye leane vnto: For the vnskilfulnesse of/ tender yeares myst by old mens experience be ordered & gouern.
Although there are many examples of this in printed handwriting texts, the example in Image 1 is from John De Beauchasne's and John Baildon's A Booke Containing Diverse Sorts of Hands. Here, the handwriting exemplar for the starting-out scribe carries a moral message about revering and respecting elders and being governed by their experience. Due to the audience for this text likely being students at home or in the grammar school, the message for the 'yonge man' is pertinent. Furthermore, there is an example of a young middling scribe using this text to learn to write in Ann Bowyer, Elias Ashmole's mother, whose commonplace book (Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 51) includes exercises drawn from this text. Consequently, good handwriting practice would also likely involve close attention to moral sentiments, connecting skill at writing to good character (something which instructional texts – such as Peter Bales', The Writing Scholemaster – do very explicitly).
As such, for literate middling sorts of scribes, who would have likely gained their initial education in literacy at grammar school, at home, and at church, mastering scripts would have been important not only to their future employment but also to the way in which they may have been perceived by their social network. An example of this is can be seen in the chamberlain's accounts for Lydd, where the town clerk until 1574, John Heblethwaite, scribes the accounts because the chamberlains are 'unlearned'. He goes on to state in his will that he has written it 'with my owne hand welleknowne' demonstrating how important his handwriting becomes to his social standing – it leaves a recognisable mark.[3]
Writing not only rested on forming words in a legible and aesthetically appropriate manner and learning standard formats for documents, but also involved the mastery of the tools and materials of writing including cutting a quill fit for the hand, making ink or sourcing some of good quality to buy, and choosing paper. All of these processes generated a certain perception of both the document and its scribe.[4] The material knowledge displayed by scribes is also artisanal expertise; it rests upon a relationship between the equipment used in writing and the scribes' repeated practice with it in order to gain writing skill.
By way of concluding this post, then, skill might be thought of as involving the dialogue between a person, materials and their social world. As these brief examples show, practice was entwined with the social world in which it was embedded, where it was entwined with the collective activities of proximate scribes and their moral, as well as practical, education.
[1] "skill, n.1." OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2019, <www.oed.com/view/Entry/180865>. Accessed 17 September 2019.
[2] For useful reflections on this point/ further reading see: John Sutton and Nicholas Keene, 'Cognitive History and Material Culture', The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling and David Gaimster (Oxford: Routledge, 2017), Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013).
[3] Kent History and Library Centre, LY/2/1/1/3 and PRC 31/95 S1.
[4] For letter writing, see James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Tagged digitalhumanities, early modern, handwriting, manuscripts, material culture, middling, middling sort1 Comment
How to be a Goldsmith in Elizabethan Bristol
6 Aug 2019 26 Oct 2019 by middlingculture, posted in history, Long Read
We will be producing a series of posts and guest posts over the course of the project, including "Long Reads" (longer form (but still brief) explorations of a subject) and "Short Reads" (digestible in a brief survey). This opening Long Read explores what it was like to be a goldsmith in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bristol, looking at provincial craftspeople's relationship with the London company, the trendy craft hotspot of Bristol's Wine Street, and the surprisingly varied uses of goldsmiths' wares.
In late sixteenth-century England, a young man could do worse than become an apprentice with a goldsmith. The trade offered reasonable financial rewards and put its best craftspeople into contact with well-off and well-connected customers. That didn't always, unsurprisingly, guarantee financial success. One of the most famous goldsmiths of the period was the esteemed miniaturist, Nicholas Hilliard; despite reaching acclaim in courts across Europe for his artwork and running a thriving goldsmiths' trade from his London shop for decades, he spent much of his life in financial precarity. Yet he accrued other forms of capital, not least through his intimate access to English and French courts. Moreover, Pamela H. Smith has shown how artisans, in particular goldsmiths, were at the centre of a shift in the way cultural and scientific knowledge was represented in and produced through art: "early modern artisans were experts on natural processes" (7); Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin has similarly shown how individuals connected to the trade, such as assayers, "belied any purported boundaries between artisanal, mercantile and experimental worlds" (2). It is therefore perhaps no surprise that some of the leading innovators in representing the physical world during the Northern Renaissance—such as Albrecht Dürer—were goldsmiths by trade.
As such, the craft brings together a range of cultural, social, and financial opportunities, and the objects goldsmiths produced found their way into circulation in a variety of surprising ways. Those familiar with early modern drama know how something as simple as a ring can take on epic significance from the forensic to the metaphorical—as in the final scene of All's Well that Ends Well, for instance, which hinges on the evidentiary value of such an item of jewellery. Tradespeople in a host of livery companies might also recognise the business uses of rings, which could be "deposited" to bind people to oaths and price regulations, and rings hold a widespread memorial function, too, often left by bequest in wills and given at funerals. Goldsmiths therefore represent a major "middling" trade, with practitioners coming from a variety of backgrounds, with their wares reaching key middling sections of society, and with objects such as rings and spoons representing the combination of aesthetic, emotional, and business value at the heart of "middling" men and women's existence.
But what was it like to be a goldsmith away from the trade's national centre among the shops and selds (a structure of several stalls set back from the street, like a small market or mall) of London's Cheapside? This post assays life for provincial goldsmiths in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the network operating in the growing port city of Bristol: here, goldsmiths find themselves everywhere from the prison to the fair; they also demonstrate the successes of family trade dynasties and early forms of "banking" and financial management, while rubbing shoulders with playhouse entrepreneurs and prosperous merchants.
The Goldsmiths' Company
One of the prime concerns for any goldsmith is the weighing of precious metal and the attendant quality of their work or wares, and anybody looking to work in Bristol, as elsewhere, would have to be comfortable having their work assessed, deemed unworthy, and publicly destroyed by senior figures from London. This is because the royal charter possessed by London's Goldsmiths' Company granted them authority over the trade nationwide, making Bristolian goldsmiths subject to scrutiny and summons to their hall on Fetter Lane by London's Guildhall. More intrusively, the Company could search their shops and stalls, or attend commercially-orientated fairs—notably often at Marlborough, the Bristol fairs, and Sturbridge—where they tested goods by hand and sometimes further by more detailed assay or melting (sometimes taking goods into their possession to return to the Goldsmiths' Hall for further consideration or, when clear they're substandard, destroying or breaking them there and then).
While you're in the presence of one of these searches, you may learn a little more about the range and quality of your fellow craftspeople's work, and the court books duly list the types of goods being sold by Bristolian goldsmiths and their advertised vs their actual worth. For instance, in 1633, Thomas Northall's wares include:
23 Thimbles half made
24 gold rings
25 bodkins half made
12 gold ^beadrings
9 knot rings
15 enamel rings
6 deaths heads
51 gilt rings
We can imagine the presence of these goods laid out in Northall's Bristol shop and consider, as below, the ways in which these items would have circulated amongst his local community. These searches provide a rare occasion in which the breadth of provincial goldsmiths' goods can be recovered and studied, and they help to build a picture of metalwork in the early modern South West.
Petrus Christus, Goldsmith in his Shop, 1449. Met Museum.
Stubborn Goldsmiths
These obligations and the searches of the regions ask questions about the relationship between regional goldsmiths and the Company. If you worked as a goldsmith in Bristol, how much identification with the livery company might you feel—and how does being governed remotely by a London company and structure affect one's sense of civic and craft pride?
If this seems an important question, you might turn to your colleague from Salisbury, "stubborn" George Batter, for an answer (if you can pin him down…). Batter demonstrates what resistance to such London-centric measures might look like, given the disregard for the authority of the Company he displayed on one of its searches in 1631. He lied about being of the trade, refused to allow his items to be searched or tested, declined to show up in person when summoned, and is eventually imprisoned after the two wardens of the Company convince the Mayor of Salisbury to assist them in apprehending him and forcing him to cooperate. They had over the course of these events tested "one spoon … made by the said Batter with his mark thereupon, which being tried by the touch appeared not to be so good silver as that of 9oz fine" (Book R 1: 128).
Beyond your conversation with George Batter, you might turn to individuals in your parish to see how other trades resent intrusions from London authorities—particularly if you're friends with any members of Bristol's prominent Soapmakers' Company. They demonstrate a comparable resentment towards London intrusions into their local craft dealings a few years after Batter in 1633—just a short time after Charles I's grant to the London Soapmakers' of a nationwide monopoly similar to that long held by the Goldsmiths'. The Bristolian soapmakers, perhaps taking umbrage at being "governed," compare Bristol soap (also known as "Black Soap") with its competitors' through a napkin-based "whites challenge" in the presence of the London assayer:
[…] Certain Linen Napkins washed by Several Women with the same several sorts of soap […] And although the said napkins washed with Bristol Soap were altogether as white washed and as sweet, or rather sweeter, than the other, yet in the washing of the said Napkins There was not Altogether so much Soap expended of the said Bristol Soap as there was of the other Soap.
(BRS 10; 195)
The civic pride implicit in the Soapmakers' Guild is undercut in George Batter's unfortunate experience, as he has no recourse even to local protection, with Salisbury's mayor assisting the wardens' enquiries. They ultimately proved lenient towards him in levying a revised fine that took into account his "poverty" and eventual acquiescence and repentance (17 August 1631, R 1:127-9). Perhaps tellingly, two years later in 1633, Batter appears again in a Salisbury search, where he proved more compliant (Book R: 2:370).
Wine Street
Perhaps you are weighing up where to set up shop as a newcomer to Bristol—something that Giles and Edward Evenet would have done in October 1571, after they are recorded as "living, resident, and abiding [in] the country" in Bristol having left London without return "by a year and a day"–a move to the provinces that the Goldsmiths' Company seem to regard as important and in need of regulation.
In your new home of Bristol, the prime place to continue your trade would have been the thriving neighbourhood of Wine Street in the parish of Christchurch (also known as Holy Trinity). The street was home to a series of substantial tenements and properties, many of which were owned by the City Corporation and rented by prominent figures in the city (including aldermen and past and future mayors). It was also home to at least two major South West goldsmiths, Humphrey Clovell and Edward Harsell. In the mid-1570s, a new "meal market" (or corn market) was built at the end of Wine Street, which was rented out to 10-12 goldsmiths from London and other places during the most important commercial feature in any Bristolian's calendar, the St James' Fair, which attracted buyers and sellers from across the country (and beyond the seas). The street therefore represents a significant destination for anybody looking to buy jewellery and other metalwork.
If you're interested in doing some market research or understanding the tastes and styles particular to Bristol goldsmiths and their customers, it would be wise to head to No. 8 Wine Street to speak with Humphrey Clovell. From this property, Clovell would have sold items such as the 2 bowls, 6 gilt rings, and 3 spoons with heads for which he was assessed in 1599 (Book N 181). He was a major figure in Bristol's metalwork industry; he did his apprenticeship under Paul Freling, and the apprentices Clovell trained include Thomas Wall and John Corsley, the latter of whom went on to marry Clovell's daughter Elizabeth in 1592 and was the first of a long line of prolific Corsley goldsmiths working out of the south west (Kent 80).
When you arrive to speak with Clovell, you may find him slightly preoccupied with his son-in-law, who drifts in and out of Bristol. In 1606, nearly 15 years after his marriage with Clovell's daughter, Corsley finds himself "lying in Prison in Newgate in London upon sundry accounts of debt." According to the defendant (William Walton) in a Chancery case concerning unpaid debts, Corsley was freed thanks to significant loans by Walton and others that he neglected to repay. Walton claims to have spent years chasing Corsley, only for him to "go and lay in the North parts of this land where [the] defendant should not touch him". When he did return to Bristol, "it was under his father in law mr Clovell, goldsmith in Bristol." If you visit in the 1600s, 1610s, or 1620s in the years preceding Walton's lawsuit, you may well find both goldsmiths in Wine Street.
If you find Clovell unhelpful, you could always look for some financing from Corsley. According to Walton, by the 1620s, the erstwhile debtor has returned more permanently to Bristol and "dealeth in great sums in the trade of a goldsmith" (TNA C3/341/56). The defendant's phrasing suggests that Corsley uses his trade to function as a financier or money trader, perhaps indicating an early example of the form of "goldsmith-banking" that formed the foundations of England's banking sector in the late seventeenth century. But you may wish to take into account Walton's less-than-glowing consumer report…
You could speak instead with Edward Harsell, who lived two doors down from Clovell and who clearly knew him—well enough, at least, to witness the probate inventory after Clovell's death in 1627 that records some of Clovell's interior design choices, including "the wainscot, stained cloths, & pictures about the hall" (BRS Vol. 54;62-4). Harsell is also a significant figure among Bristol's early modern metalworkers. Work from Harsell's shop survives, marked with his name and a small symbol (for more details on surviving marks see Timothy Kent):
Harsell (possibly Richard or his son Edward), Spoon, "with a gilt maidenhead," © Woolley & Wallis, Salisbury, Wiltshire, (on marks4antiques.com
The marking of this spoon with Harsell's name suggests the advertising value tied to the craft, as this form of signature or branding seems to be unique to metalwork. Might these goldsmith-specific marks enhance or alter one's reputation in the wider community and make one's name more widely visible than those in other trades?
Have Connections in London
Appealing as Bristol might sound by now, it's certainly worth fostering good connections with London and particularly the hierarchy of the Goldsmiths' Company—perhaps, if you're well-backed enough, by looking to serve your apprenticeship in the capital. Timothy Kent observes how unusual it is for the Company to say anything nice about the work of provincial goldsmiths (95). But in their search of Bristol in 1633, they made comment "upon the wares of Thomas Griffyn and Edward Griffin," which "were found agreeable to the standards of gold and silver and redelivered them again" (Book R 2: 381). It is no coincidence that Edward Griffin (also Griffith) started his apprenticeship under John Wollaston of London—one of the wardens of the Company carrying out the search… (Kent 95).
Lastly, it's important to keep your wares and your belongings safe, so that these valuable items can be kept in either personal possession or sanctioned circulation. An entry on the 24 January 1573 in the Goldsmiths' Company court books describes how an apprentice found in a chamber a "ring of gold with a cross and a heart in a pansy, with a "d" the one side of the cross and "M" on the other side of the same, with a G & H above it, & this date "1569" under it." The ring was found in "The Temple wherein" Mr Fleetwood and Mr Sands have their lodging. The wardens of the Company order that the ring be delivered to those two men "to the intent that they shall deliver it to the right owner if it be possible" (L 1:179).
Elizabethan Betrothal Signet Ring; 1stdibs.com
This minor incident represents a curious textual recording of this piece of jewellery and its accidents and circulation, but it also points to the formal structures surrounding lost jewellery in such a heavily-regulated gold market. At the same time, it preserves the personal value of the item, delivering an ekphrastic lost and found record that announces the ring's personalised inscription and perhaps indicates that its safe return is ordered with a nod to its likely emotional significance. If it were central to a betrothal, it also has an added legal charge, testifying to a contract or binding. Its discovery in a chamber leaves to the imagination why the apprentice considered it lost (might it have been put aside for safe keeping?) and why it was not being worn (was it purposely discarded?).
The entry thereby combines the financial and personal significance of jewellery, something that accords with other uses of rings in company records. If you're curious about how your wares might be used once you've established your freedom to trade in Bristol, you could start up your conversation with the Soapmakers of Bristol again. In the seventeenth century, they begin to put rings down as deposits or forfeits for their observance of pricing agreements. In 1612, members agreed on a price to which they "set … hands and Possites [deposits]," including (to pick a selection) Humphrey Reade's signet ring and Thomas Burrows' ring of gold; in 1614, Mrs Slye deposited 1 ring with a diamond and Leonard Hancock's deposit was six silver spoons (BRS 10 95, 103-4). The symbolic qualities of these objects indicate how the deposits act as an extension of individual identity.
Tracking the varied circulation of rings in this way for middling members of livery companies suggests a broader cultural network for material objects such as jewels and in turn indicates the imbrication of commercial, personal, and domestic material culture. The Bristol soapmakers' rings may have had or once have had romantic or other significance for their owners, but they are (also) being put into a business network as promissory pawns. Such rings (or silver spoons) may well have come from one of the prominent goldsmiths producing such items in Bristol across this period, perhaps from the Wine Street shops of Edward Harsell or Humphrey Clovell. If you join the local collective of goldsmiths in Bristol, you would likewise release your work into a community where jewellery's practical and decorative uses combine to furnish men and women of the town with status symbols—ones that represent a combination of social, cultural, and economic currency. And, like Clovell, you may develop a deep familiarity with other cultural artefacts, from stained cloths and pictures to the plays that entertained audiences at Bristol's Wine Street playhouse for nearly 30 years.
Bristol Archives (Bristol). Diocesan Court, Cause Books. EP/J/1/11.
Bristol Record Society. 10 (Proceedings, Minutes and Enrolments of the Company of Soapmakers, 1562-1642, H.E. Matthews) (1940)
—. 48 (The Topography of Medieval and Early Modern Bristol: Part One, Roger Leech). (1997)
—. 54 (Probate Inventories, Part I, Edwin and Stella George, assisted by Peter Fleming). (2002)
The Goldsmiths' Company Hall, Library and Archives (London). Court Minutes. Books L, N, and R1 and R2.
Elizabeth Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist (2019)
Timothy Kent, West Country Silver Spoons and their Makers, 1550-1750 (1992)
Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin. "A Place of Great Trust to be Supplied by Men of Skill and Integrity": Assayers and Knowledge Cultures in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century London." BJHS (2019): 1-27.
Roger Leech. The Town House in Medieval and Early Modern Bristol (2014).
The National Archives (Kew). C3/341/56.
The National Archives (Kew). C2/JasI/W4/59.
Pamela H. Smith. The Body of the Artisan (2004)
Tagged Albrecht Durer, banking, Bristol, callan davies, Cheapside, early modern, Edward Harsell, elizabethan, Fetter Lane, finance, goldsmiths, Goldsmiths Company, Humphrey Clovell, jewellery, John Corsley, middling, Nicholas Hilliard, Nicholas Woolfe, playhouse, rings, Salisbury, Soapmakers, Soapmakers Company, spoons, stained cloths, stuart, Wine Street2 Comments
Interrogating 'middling culture': a workshop report
5 Jul 2019 by middlingculture, posted in Project Post
Middling Culture held its first project workshop on Tuesday 25 June 2019. Our team was joined by around 20 experts from different disciplines, including scholars of literature, social and cultural history, archaeology and material culture from both academia and the heritage sector. These participants generously gave their time to focus on the really big questions raised by Middling Culture and to contemplate the directions that our detailed research, which is just beginning in earnest, should take. It was a lively and thought-provoking discussion, and in this post we share a few of the themes that emerged.
The day began with a visit to the Canterbury Cathedral Library and Archives, where the librarians and archivists shared with us a range of 'things' – maps, account books, marginalia in printed books, deeds, a beautifully decorated family Bible – that could illuminate certain aspects of middling lives and identity.
John Cox's diary from c.1607, with plenty of visits to his local The Sun and a trip to a play, and a wonderful embroidered book #middlingculture pic.twitter.com/T9j1fz7GSH
— Middling Culture (@MiddlingCulture) June 25, 2019
We kept that focus on evidence when we returned to the University of Kent, where, after a brief presentation on the project and lunch, the first task was to work towards a definition of that very term, 'the middling'. Each participant had been asked to bring along 'evidence for an individual, object or practice' that they considered to be 1) below 'middling', 2) securely 'middling,' and 3) above 'middling' for our period. These examples introduced to the room a huge variety of sources, from paint pigment to wills, from drama to dress pins. However, it was not the evidence but the selection process that provoked the most discussion: how do we know what is middling? What working definitions are we, perhaps unconsciously, deploying in our work?
This conversation continued in the final session of the day, which concentrated on practice as a mark of middling identity—particularly the concept of 'skill'. The idea of literacy as one potential mark of middling status, as a learned and embodied skill, and as a site of cultural connection, is at the heart of the Middling Culture project; in this session, the aim was to question this by examining literacy as one of just a range of skills that could be taught, instilled and practised in culturally meaningful ways. Again, the range of evidence and examples that this audience could bring to the discussion was huge, and participants considered not just craft and formal education but horse-riding and breastfeeding as practices through which early modern people might find constitutive identities and points of connection. There was also a powerful warning for the project here, as speakers suggested the ways in which the idea of 'skill' itself was shaped by gendered and hierarchical assumptions in the early modern period. There was a danger, they suggested, of reflecting those prejudices and finding 'skill' only in certain, prescribed places.
Across the afternoon many ideas, questions and themes for future research emerged. We focus here on the following three:
Hidden middles and difficult groups: much of the discussion centred not just on the boundaries of the 'middling' as a group but on how to access and define people who don't fall within the economic or occupational criteria often used in historical enquiry. Gender was a recurring theme in these discussions—in particular how we might consider women in a way that doesn't assume that they derived their status wholly from men. Was there a distinctly female middling experience? How can we see the work, cultural investment and creative production of women, when our sources often render this less visible? We considered, too, other groups with attributes that make them difficult to classify within existing schema (including schema from the early modern period itself). The clergy came up repeatedly in this context, as did servants in training, and here the discussion revolved around the concepts of social, economic, and cultural capital, and how to both detect and allow for the ways in which these might not always coincide. Could you be a middling Catholic, for instance? How were disconnections between different types of power expressed and experienced?
Temporalities: the fluidity and vulnerability of status was a major theme of these discussions, and many participants pointed, in different ways, to changes over time. There are many different ways of conceptualising this change: perhaps most obviously across historical periods but also across the life cycle of an individual or within successive generations of a family: how long could the 'middling' status of a family endure before either rising up (into the gentry, for instance), dropping down, or disappearing from archival trace? "For three generations" was one (debated) answer to this question: is that the longest time span for across which successive family members might hope to dominate urban political and administrative bodies? The relationship between such individualised narratives of change and broader historical shifts is a difficult one. During our discussions, the unique nature of the 1640s and 1650s and the disruption of the 'norms' of status that this political upheaval created became key issues: how can the Middling Culture project capture both incremental and immediate change across the period? Things, too, have their own temporalities; how can these be understood and accounted for? How can we define and differentiate the ephemeral and the enduring and how might these categories also shape middling identity?
Expressions of similarity and expressions of difference: one central question here is whether there was a singular, cross-national middling identity. Was middling identity, as some have argued, inherently localised and fragmentary, or can we see any sense of a collective identity? Some participants suggested the movement of goods and people as one way of seeing middling-ness in contexts that extend from the local to the national, while others saw skill itself as one potential site for supra-parochial identity: within specialised knowledge that created both 'in' and 'out' groups. One central theme here was the necessity of considering what the middling might define themselves against. How can we understand who is above and who is below middling status in a way that recognises the fluidity and interchange between different groups while retaining an ability to differentiate? Several participants pointed out the necessity of moving beyond simplistic ideas of 'emulation' as a cultural practice among our demographic focus and instead emphasised appropriation and differentiation—up, down, and across the early modern social spectrum.
We are incredibly grateful to all the participants in this workshop (and those who could not attend, but sent their representatives in the form of historical evidence and thoughts to aid our discussion) for giving us their time and knowledge to help shape this project at its formative stage. These are conversations that we will be continuing over the life of Middling Culture, and beyond; in the immediate term, we'll be keeping this discussion alive on our website, including, in the coming weeks, blogs from some of Tuesday's participants. We also want to hear from as wide a range of voices as possible so please do get in contact or comment below with any thoughts or questions.
Callan, Catherine, Ceri, Graeme, and Tara. July 2019.
Tagged archives, Canterbury Cathedral, education, elizabethan, english history, event, gender, historians, history, identity, jacobean, libraries, local identity, methodology, middling, middling sort, national identity, skill, time, Tudor, university of kent1 Comment
In search of the middle…
20 Jun 2019 24 Jun 2019 by middlingculture, posted in history, Project Post
…it is now requisite (and, God, in justice, will so have it) that the stout, faithful, and prudent Citizens, and the men of middling Fortunes, who were heretofore scorned and oppressed, should be called into Office and employment…'
George Wither, 1646
"…most people actually still live in places like Harlesden or West Brom."
Doreen Massey, 1994
The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort is a project in search of the experiences of a crucial early modern demographic. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw the significant growth of a group of individuals—men, women, families, and households—who were not landed gentry or nobility, but neither were they peasants or wage-labourers. They worked for their living, but they had some control over their labour (and sometimes that of others); they were not necessarily rich, but they had some ability to spend and borrow. The "middling," as this group is now often termed, encompassed a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and occupations, trades, crafts, or professions.
Perhaps because of this diversity, historians in search of concrete class identities have sometimes characterised this group as variously elusive, tricky to define, incoherent. It's not until the late eighteenth century that historians can detect a set more easily aligned with conventional ideas of the "middle class." Yet the "middling" were at the centre of a crucial shift in Elizabethan, Stuart and Interregnum England centring on social mobility: one that begins to see new forms of social, economic, and cultural capital coalesce around a group of working people who had the ability both to consume and produce a variety of cultural artefacts, from literary works to medicines to furniture.
This project seeks to think holistically about the lived experiences of this umbrella group of people. It will broaden studies that have hitherto focused on the social relations and economic positions of middling people, and it also turns to an earlier period than that discussed by most historians of the middling sort. We will combine quantitative approaches with qualitative studies of language, networks, and visual and material culture, while unpicking topics ranging from religious practice to gender. As such, we're interested in cultural production (what did people write, make, fashion, and sell?) and cultural consumption (what and how did people read, what did they buy and how did they use purchases; what was it like to display and use particular objects?). Our research looks around the country at different communities, as we consider the relationship between local and national experiences and identities.
As such, our project is attuned to complications in social experience that are equally prevalent today. The remainder of this post explores the nature of both the modern and early modern "middle" and introduces the eclectic methodologies of the project via several short case study examples (in separate pages, linked here and below; click image to visit):
Micro Case Studies:
Talking class
In 2007, the geographer Danny Dorling noted that recent sociological research into identity in modern Britain showed that "Most people think they are average when asked." He glossed this trend in self-identification by adding, "in most things, most are not."
Just under ten years later, the researchers behind the Great British Class Survey explored the question of the average and "middle" of society further; they, too, found that people from across the economic spectrum saw themselves as of "middling" wealth. The researchers identify a renewed "obsession" with class in contemporary Britain, but suggest that the typical vocabulary used to describe class structures is no longer adequate. Their study, Social Class in the 21st Century, reflected on responses to their own survey as well as on other demographic data. From this, they revised the standard division of British society into "lower," "middle," and "upper" classes, positing instead seven different categories. The three to four groups that lie in between the "extremes" of this new class system might be considered the "middle."
The authors of Social Class in the 21st Century had many causes to reconsider what is meant by the "middle." They observed numerous social, economic, and cultural developments that have changed the texture of the British class system. Their nuanced approach was not limited to economic assessment: rather, they explored material wealth but also considered social capital (one's networks, friends, colleagues, and social circles) and cultural capital (one's familiarity with and uses of tastes, interests, and activities). These are, they argue, all part of the complex modern class system. While the increasing detachment of the super-rich makes them ever more distinctive a group, a model that posits a singular, catch-all "middle" class would misleadingly smooth out their essential diversity: "…we have a picture of growing cohesion at the top and bottom, but within the middle ranks—which are the majority of the population—a much more complicated picture."
The early modern middle
A number of the social developments raised by the authors of Social Class bear uncanny resemblance to developments in early modern England, too, and their characterisation of the twenty-first century "middling" provides a useful introduction to our own concerns. In early modern England, numerous complex factors—including a growing population, changing financial systems and cultures and the challenges of harvest failure and dearth, transformations in the objects and buildings of the physical lived environment, the religious changes and disjunctures of England's Reformations, educational expansion and the interlinked rises of print and the vernacular—saw the formation of a distinct but variable "middling" demographic. This group had to work for a living, unlike the landed gentry, but they often ran households, had control of some production means, and possessed social and cultural capital that distinguished them from many workpeople, wage labourers, smallholders, and tenant farmers (with farming being by far the most common profession across sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England). For instance, the rise in schooling saw a spike in what we now call first-generation university students, who left versed in both traditional scholastic as well as contemporary humanistic education; they brushed shoulders with the sons of aristocrats and mastered classical literature. A number of these graduates went on to reshape literary and commercial forms within the emerging print market; they include writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe.
Robert Greene at his writing desk and casually "shrouded in [his] winding-sheet." Greene in Conceipt (1598).
Who cares about the middling sort?
Research into this middle group of society has been a subject for social historians since the late 1970s. Keith Wrightson's language of "sorts" provided a new vocabulary, one drawn from commentary of the period, that helped historians reconceive the structure of society in a period before the Marxist language of "class" can be usefully applied (that is, contentiously, before the Industrial Revolution). Numerous studies have subsequently explored the significance of the "middling sort" for understanding major developments in early modern England: for Wrightson and Levine, they represent the gradual firming up of a tripartite class system, with the ascendant middle leaving below them a proletariat underclass and in turn ushering in the systemic exploitation and class conflict characteristic of the late eighteenth century and beyond. For others, the group are at the centre of shifts in consumption culture: changes in household production among the middling sort, combined with increased spending power, have been linked to a rising commodification of goods, particularly household items. Others have seen the middling sort as responsible for an increased emphasis on domesticity that helped to bring in a new concern for "gentility"—a set of manners, behaviours, and material expression that distinguished an increasingly middle-class or bourgeois existence from living standards below (and arguably also above). Beyond these approaches, one might think more broadly about the burgeoning businesses and trades across England driven by this broad group of people, men and women alike—apothecaries, scriveners, playhouse managers, printing press owners, skilled artisans, preachers—and of their increasing participation in public administration—as aldermen, vestrymen, justices of the peace, school and hospital founders and administrators, contributors to civic entertainments and events.
On and in their own terms
Many previous studies have concentrated largely on economic and social factors: they have used, often in ingenious ways, probate inventories (the list of possessions recorded at a person's death), parish records, apprenticeship records, and patterns of trade. Barring several important exceptions, they have often focused on a later seventeenth-century window, often with the consequence that the "middling sort" can appear to be a transitional group, an industrial-class-in-waiting, with much discussion resting on post-Restoration evidence. In part, this might be connected to historians' identification of the "middling" as an indistinct, incoherent grouping. In John Smail's words, for instance, "practice [was] particularly important as a vehicle for class identity in the early phases of the formation of a class culture because a coherent conceptualisation of class identity was still being constructed" (230).
Smail's investment in "practice," and by extension lived experience, recognises the problems with prioritising "class consciousness" (recognising one is within a particular class) as the essential endpoint in a history of class or of social formation. Other studies of the middling sort have also expressed frustration, or at least resignation, about the fact that distinct expressions of self-identity are few and far between. Henry French (author of the only book-length study of the middling sort in our period) sees middling identity as something that works within a parish—in relation to others in one's immediate community: "This does not mean that the 'middling' lacked other possible forms of extra-parochial identity or identification. It merely suggests that they generally did not express these through the idiom of the 'middle sort of people" (20). Self-identity in the twenty-first century seems to be equally difficult to pin down, as the opening remarks of this post suggest. While it may not be helpful to look for a narrowly self-defined group of middling people in our period, we are interested in the range of imbricated and understood identities within the umbrella grouping of the "middling sort"—much as the authors of Social Class in the 21st Century suggest for us today.
Cultural Lives
As such, our project is going to bring together these issues through a wide-ranging focus that takes into account all aspects of individuals' cultural experiences. We will do this by looking at the formative period of middling identities, in the century following 1560. It is from this date that many of the social changes described above occur or intensify.
By applying such an interdisciplinary lens—one centred on lived experience in all its cultural manifestations—we hope to add nuance and texture to the broad grouping of the "middling sort" in this formative period. We will explore the things, practices, and ideas produced and consumed in the household, the guildhall, and the church, such as: musical instruments, pictures, account books, books and printed materials, letters, administrative and legal records, architecture, and household and divine objects. The following case examples show brief and speculative samples of the different methodologies, items, and approaches that bring a wider cultural consideration to our understanding of a group of people who fundamentally changed the social, cultural, and economic landscape of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Opening Micro Case Studies:
Callan, Catherine, Ceri, Graeme, and Tara. June 2019.
Tagged caroline, class, Danny Dorling, early modern, early modern drama, early modern history, elizabethan, history, Hugh Latimer, jacobean, Lenard Fireback, Lucas de Heere, middle class, middling, middling sort, reformation, renaissance history, social class, social class in the 21st century, social identity1 Comment


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Dr. Brian Ladle is a pediatric cancer specialist in Baltimore, caring for patients with pediatric sarcoma.
Dr. Ladle received his undergraduate degree in molecular biology from Brigham Young University. He earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed his residency at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and performed a fellowship in pediatric hematology and oncology at Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Ladle joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2013.
Dr. Ladle's research focuses on translational immunology, with the goal of developing novel immunotherapies for the treatment of pediatric malignancies. His lab currently focuses on augmenting anti-tumor T cell responses to solid tumors such as osteosarcoma, Ewing sarcoma and rhabdomyosarcoma.
He is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society for Pediatric Hematology/Oncology, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the Children's Oncology Group.
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
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Oncology - Pediatric Oncology
Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center
MD PhD; Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (2007)
Pediatrics; Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center (2010)
Pediatric Hematology-Oncology; Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (2013)
Pediatric Hematology-Oncology; National Institutes of Health (2014)
American Board of Pediatrics (Pediatric Hematology-Oncology) (2015)
American Board of Pediatrics (Pediatrics) (2011)
Maryland Board of Physicians / Maryland Medical License
Dr. Ladle is a practicing pediatric oncologist and translational immunology researcher who has the goal of developing novel immunotherapies for the treatment of pediatric malignancies. His research seeks to understand mechanisms of immune tolerance in pediatric sarcomas and developing successful combination immunotherapies that will successfully treat sarcoma patients. He is working on translational projects combining immunotherapy with chemotherapy, epigenetic modifying agents and innate immune system adjuvants. Dr. Ladle has extensive expertise in immunology techniques – including both mouse and in vitro cell culture, multi-color flow cytometry and molecular techniques.
Nivolumab or Nivolumab and Azacitidine in Patients With Recurrent, Resectable Osteosarcoma
R.M. Thomas, C.J. Gamper, B.H. Ladle, J.D. Powell, A.D. Wells. "De novo DNA methylation is required to restrict T helper lineage plasticity." Journal of Biological Chemistry. 2012 Jun 29;287(27):22900-9
D.T. Le and B.H. Ladle (co-first authorship), T. Lee, V. Weiss, X. Yao, A. Leubner, T.D. Armstrong, E.M. Jaffee. "CD8+ Foxp3+ tumor infiltrating lymphocytes accumulate in the context of an effective anti-tumor response." International Journal of Cancer. 2011 Aug 1;129(3):636-47.
A.M. Ercolini and B.H. Ladle (co-first authorship), E.A. Manning, L. Pfannenstiel, T.D. Armstrong, J.P.H. Machiels, J.G. Bieler, L.A. Emens, R.T. Reilly, E.M. Jaffee. "Recruitment of latent pools of high avidity CD8+ T cells to the anti-tumor immune response." The Journal of Experimental Medicine. 2005 May 16;201(10):1591-602.
S. Murata, B.H. Ladle, P.S. Kim, E.R. Lutz, M.E. Wolpoe, S.E. Ivie, H.M. Smith, T.D. Armstrong, L.A. Emens, E.M. Jaffee, R.T. Reilly. "OX40 Costimulation Synergizes with GM-CSF Whole-cell Vaccination to Overcome Established CD8+ T cell Tolerance to an Endogenous Tumor Antigen." The Journal of Immunology. 2006 Jan. 15; 176(2):974-83.
Academic Affiliations & Courses
Courses and Syllabi
Graduate Immunology Course, Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Activities & Honors
$1000 Presentation Award, Immuno-Oncology Young Investigator's Forum, 2015
John G. Rangos, Sr. Medal of Honor in Creative Thinking, 2012
Optimist International Research Fellow, Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, 2011
Blackfan Research Award, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, 2010
Turock Young Scientist Award, Johns Hopkins Institute of Basic Biomedical Sciences, 2003
American Association for Cancer Research, 2019
American Society for Pediatric Hematology/Oncology, 2015
Children's Oncology Group, 2014
American Society of Clinical Oncology, 2012
Member, Protocol Committee, National Pediatric Cancer Foundation, 2018
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WELCOME TO THIS LOVELY CONDOMINIUM IN ONTARIO. THIS UPGRADED HOME FEATURES 2 BEDROOMS AND 2 BATHROOMS WITH ATTACHED GARAGE IN GATED COMMUNITY. LAUNDRY AREA IS INSIDE THE UNIT INCLUDING GAS AND ELECTRIC DRYER HOOKUP. WELL RENOVATED WITH NEW LAMINATED FLOOR, NEW GRANITE COUNTERTOPS AND NEW CABINETS IN KITCHEN AND BATHS, NEW STAINLESS APPLIANCES, NEW RECESSED LIGHTS, AND NEW CUSTOM PAINTS. HAS SOME PATIO SPACE IN THE FRONT YARD. THERE IS A COMMUNITY POOL THAT CAN ENJOY. GREAT LOCATION CLOSED TO SCHOOLS, PARKS, MALLS, AND FREEWAY NEARBY. MUST SEE!
Sold by Kelly Jones of Exp Realty Of California, Inc..


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Oscars Keep Streaming Releases Eligible for One More Year
Because of the continuing impact of the pandemic, films will still be able to qualify even if they never get theatrical releases
Steve Pond | June 30, 2021 @ 11:00 AM
AWARDS BEAT
Films can continue to qualify for the Oscars even if they don't receive a theatrical release in 2021, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Wednesday.
The move runs counter to a decision announced on Tuesday by the Directors Guild of America, which has gone back to its pre-pandemic requirement that films be released theatrically to qualify for DGA Awards.
In its announcement, the Academy noted that for the 95th Academy Awards, which will be handed out in 2023 and will cover the films of 2022, it intends to revert to stricter qualifying requirements.
Danny Glover, Samuel L. Jackson, Elaine May and Liv Ullmann to Get Honorary Oscars at Governors Awards
The Academy's decision to retain relaxed eligibility requirements for this year's films was made because "theatrical exhibition (is) still impacted by the pandemic this year." Under those rules, films can qualify for the Oscars even if they are released straight to streaming or VOD, as long as they had a theatrical release planned. Films can also qualify if they pay to be showcased in the Academy Screening Room, a secure viewing portal available to Oscar voters.
Films that qualify via theatrical release can still do so in any one of six metropolitan areas: Los Angeles County, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Miami and Atlanta.
The rule changes for the 94th Academy Awards also include three significant changes that had previously been announced:
Oscars: Academy Limits Number of New Members This Year After Reaching Diversity Goals
The deadline for eligibility will revert to the standard Dec. 31 date, meaning films will be eligible if they were released during the 10-month period from March 1, 2021 to Dec. 31, 2021. The shortened year comes because last year's eligibility period was extended to 14 months, ending Feb. 28, in order to give films more time to open during the pandemic. For the 95th Oscars, the eligibility period will fully revert to the usual calendar year.
The number of Best Picture nominees will be expanded to a flat 10 nominees rather than the fluctuating number of nominees that has been in place since 2011 (and has always resulted in eight or nine nominees).
In a long-in-the-works change to Oscar campaign rules, the mailing of DVDs, CDs and physical screenplays is now prohibited. Links to digital materials are permitted.
In other changes, the Best International Feature Film category will retain the new rules it passed in January, with an expanded shortlist of 15 films and the elimination of the executive committee that in the past had chosen three films to go on the shortlist. In keeping with the process used in this past Oscars, all members will be able to vote in the preliminary and nomination round of voting, provided they see enough of the eligible films.
Shortlists in the three short-film categories will also be expanded from 10 to 15 films. And Best Sound will be added to the list of categories that will go to a shortlist before the final nomination vote, with a preliminary round of voting determining 10 films that will advance. Those 10 films will then participate in a presentation similar to the "bakeoffs" used in the visual effects and makeup and hairstyling categories.
Billy Crystal Calls Modern Comedy a 'Minefield,' Throws Shade on This Year's Oscars
Both of the music categories were also changed: Music will be eligible in the Best Original Score category as long as it comprises at least 35% of the total music in a film, a significant reduction from the 60% requirement formerly in place. And in the Best Original Song category, no more than five songs from any one film can be submitted. (More than five submissions from one film is a rare occurrence, though some Bollywood films have been known to do it.)
Here are the submission deadlines for the 94th Oscars:
Documentary Short Subject – Friday, October 15, 2021
Animated Short Film – Friday, October 15, 2021
Live Action Short Film – Friday, October 15, 2021
Animated Feature Film – Monday, November 1, 2021
Documentary Feature – Monday, November 1, 2021
International Feature Film – Monday, November 1, 2021
Original Score – Monday, November 1, 2021
Original Song – Monday, November 1, 2021
General Entry categories – Monday, November 15, 2021
Complete rules are available at oscars.org/rules.
Steve Pond's inside look at the artistry and insanity of the awards race, drawn from more than three decades of obsessively chronicling the Oscars and the entertainment industry.
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Steven Spielberg, Martin McDonagh, the Daniels Nominated for Directors Guild Awards


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Avocado este un arbore originar din Mexic și Guatemala (America Centrală), clasificat cu floarea din familia Lauracee , scorțișoara și dafinul.  iar avocado se referă și la fructul acestui copac. Din fruct se face renumita pastă guacamole.

Utilizări
Din avocado se fac diverse lucruri, printre care: măști de ten, diverse specialități culinare, ornamente, dulciuri (mai rar), se folosesc uneori în torturi dar nu prea des, medicină, etc.

În cosmetică
Avocado se folosește pentru măștile de ten care revigorează tenul și îl fac să pară mai tânăr.

Pe lângă asta, din el se mai fac șampoane și alte lucruri care valorează mulți bani, făcându-l popular într-un anumit fel, pentru cosmetică. El este o veritabilă și importantă plantă pentru industria cosmetică cât și farmaceutică, alături de Aloe Vera.

Delicii culinare

Din avocado se fac rareori milkshake-uri, dar renumită este pasta de avocado, Guacamole. Avocado se mai folosesc în salate și rareori ori niciodată în dulciuri deoarece nu conține zaharuri. Nu foarte renumită este rețeta de înghețată de avocado, fără prea multe zaharuri, care se consumă în unele țări.

Planta
Este probabil originară din Peru iar planta crește înaltă de 10-25 de metri, fructele lui neavând o perioadă exactă, fructele putând fi consumate în  orice anotimp al anului. Fiind o plantă tropicală, fructele se coc în orice anotimp, cel puțin în California, de aceea putem întâlni avocado în supermarketuri în orice timp al anului.

Etimologie
Cuvântul "avocado" derivă din cuvântul spaniol AguaCate, care derivă din cuvântul Nahuatl āhuacatl , care duce înapoi spre cuvântul proto-Aztec *pa:wa care totodată înseamnă "avocado".

Cultivare

Se înmulțește prin semințe și prin butășire. Deși nu este un fruct foarte apreciat în România, mulți români îl înmulțesc deoarece este o plantă decorativă cu frunze închise la culoare.

Mari țări producătoare

De asemenea cresc și pe unele insule tropicale singuratice, acolo unde au ajuns, probabil prin natură sau prin mod accidental din vina oamenilor. Mai cresc sălbăticiți prin pădurile tropicale.

Export

Afacerea cu Avocado este una profitabilă în țările tropicale sărace deoarece avocado se exportă în toată lumea, fiind un fruct cu multe utilizări și foarte sănătos. Țăranii locali din țările sărace obțin un profit mic de circa 20-30% din cultivarea acestei plante, fiind însă destul pentru un necesar mic al familiei.

Însă în statele mai mari și civilizate precum California, se obține un profit uriaș adus statului de aproximativ 70-80%.

Avocado devine încet-încet un fruct din ce în ce mai cultivat și mai apreciat în statele europene.

Note

Legături externe

 Definitive illustrated list of avocado varieties
 Avocados beyond Persea americana , California Rare Fruit Growers
 3 motive să mănânci avocado, 21 februarie 2012, Andrada Floria, Adevărul
 Fructul-minune care își menține sănătatea și silueta, 4 martie 2013, RTV
 Despre Avocado si beneficiile lui

Specii cu risc scăzut
Lauraceae
Flora din Mexic
Pomi fructiferi
Fructe tropicale

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Disclaime
Incitasecurity Everything About Security
UpComing Car
Weekly poll: What is the best 2017 flagship – the compact options
You're all bummed out that smartphone makers keep making larger phones and devices that can be used with one hand and don't make a bulge in your pokcket are getting few and far between? Well, the situation isn't as dire as it may seem and there are still compact phone holdouts. Here's a list of the ones that we can think of off the top of our heads and we're looking for the one you'd pick as your favorite among those.
Since the dawn of the smartphones, Apple's ethos has been making phones for single-handed use, and even though the company has given in to trends in recent years, the 4.7-inch iPhone 8 remains a relatively compact device.
Not as compact as the one that has compact in its name, obviously – Sony's Compacts have been synonymous with flagship-grade hardware in a tiny package. After a brief misstep into the midrange with the Xperia X Compact, the Xperia XZ1 Compact is back into the top tier.
Apple iPhone 8 • Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact
Galaxy S phones have always been in the top tier, and this year's S8 is certainly one pocket-friendly phone, despite the initial impression a 5.8-inch diagonal makes. Yes, it's 2 full centimeters taller than the Xperia, but it's merely 4mm wider and your thumb will appreciate that, while you enjoy the extra screen space.
The LG G6, announced ahead of the Galaxy this spring, was actually the pioneer tall screen flagship to make it obvious how diagonals aren't directly comparable between different aspect ratios. The 5.7-inch G6 is anything but a phablet and is actually quite pocketable.
Samsung Galaxy S8 • LG G6
Sporting a more classic 16:9 aspect, the 5.1-inch Huawei P10 is both compact and versatile thanks to its dual camera with a monochrome sensor alongside the color one. If you're after a telephoto setup with blurred background portraits in a small body, Xiaomi's got you covered with the 5.15-inch Mi 6.
Huawei P10 • Xiaomi Mi 6
And then there's Google's own – the Pixel 2. As large as the last two, but with a slightly smaller screen, this year's small-sized Phone by Google isn't winning the STB ratio game. It does, however, offer pure Android in a small form factor, stereo speakers and outstanding camera performance – if only it cost less than an arm and a leg.
Which one of these would you say is the best one? You have a week to cast your votes.
["Source-timesofindia"]
- 2017 Best Compact flagship is options poll: the weekly What	2017-12-18
Loknath Das
How to Make Rummy Memorable on the Khelplay Rummy App?
3 Reasons To Learn Data Science
Effects Of Kratom Use
7 Reasons Why you should have an extra Income Stream
REASONS PEOPLE ARE NEEDING DRUG REHAB IN BRISTOL


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Жамби́л () — село у складі Жамбильського району Північноказахстанської області Казахстану. Адміністративний центр Жамбильського сільського округу.

Населення — 478 осіб (2009; 762 у 1999, 1361 у 1989).

Національний склад станом на 1989 рік:
 казахи — 53 %
 росіяни — 27 %.

У радянські часи село називалось Джамбул.

Примітки

Джерела

Посилання
 На Вікімапії

Населені пункти Жамбильського району (Північноказахстанська область)
Села Північноказахстанської області


text:
Stars: Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, Jack Thompson, Peter Whittle, Al Thomas, John Meillon, John Armstrong, Slim DeGrey, Maggie Dence, Norm Erskine, Owen Moase, John Dalleen, Buster Fidess, Tex Foote, Colin Hughes, Jacko Jackson
Review: John Grant (Gary Bond) is a schoolteacher in the Australian Outback who would much rather be anywhere else than where he is. He teaches a small class of all ages in one tiny schoolroom, and now the Christmas and New Year holidays are coming around he is at least looking forward to getting back to Sydney and his girlfriend who he has not seen in months. He orders a beer at the village's only bar as he waits for the train to pull into the station across the way, the bartender (John Meillon) observing him somewhere between amusement and contempt though he still accepts his offer of a beer, and strikes up a rather one sided conversation - it'll be good to get back to civilisation.
Ah, well, fate has a habit of throwing a spanner in the works, which is precisely what happens here in Wake in Fright, directed by versatile Canadian Ted Kotcheff and drawn from the novel by Kenneth Cook which exposed a side of rural Australian life that was less than flattering. At the time, the film was widely praised for its gritty realism in spite of its heightened, at times near-hysterical tone, but after a few years it fell into obscurity, not helped by the way every print appeared to have been lost. So memories were all film buffs had to go on, and as time went by it was largely other people's memories, a poor state of affairs for a production which represented one of the first of the Australian New Wave in cinema of the nineteen-seventies.
Fortunately for those interested, a negative was finally discovered nearly forty years after the film had been completed and a wider release than it had ever had before was the result. But with this newfound exposure came controversy: some viewers simply could not get past the kangaroo killing sequence operating as the centrepiece, and that was down to the footage used not being simulated: those were real animals being slaughtered in shots taken by animal rights activists to highlight the issue. Quite how John ends up in this situation, both witnessing and participating in the kill, is a deceptively simple one. He stops off at the town of 'Yabba (a fictional place, but taken from actual regions) and after checking into the dingy hotel he makes the mistake of seeking the local nightlife to stave off his boredom.
A theme could be how the demon drink can land you in all sorts of bother, as once John has ordered a beer at the bar, it's the trigger for his downward spiral into degradation. Not that we sympathise much with the man, as he's constantly looking down his nose at the others in the story, but events grow so extreme that we wind up feeling sorry for him in spite of how terrible it has finished up for him, as if everything is geared towards rubbing his nose in the grime of life. Step one is that beer at the nightclub where he meets lawman Jock (Aussie stalwart Chips Rafferty) who insists on buying him more and more beers, then introduces him to the local pasttime of gambling on the results of heads or tails coin tossing. Initially he thinks this is a pathetic waste of time, but soon he is taking part.
Thinking he will be able to earn enough there to buy out his contract which has forced him to teach in the back end of nowhere, he bets all his cash and naturally loses the lot, leaving him with one dollar. Therefore in a cruel joke his try at getting away has only ensured he is going nowhere fast. Soon he is mixed up with folks who seem to have hospitality at heart, but are actually victimising John for sport, the point of which remains mysterious other than the pull of teaching teacher a lesson himself, and the nightmarish mood overtakes the film from then on. Donald Pleasence, no stranger to nightmares in the movies, appeared as a doctor who is a self-confessed alcoholic, one of his greatest characterisations in a career which too often asked him to fall back on cliché, and Jack Thompson, one of the faces of the Australian New Wave, made an impression as one yahoo who takes John on that hunt. It's a harrowing sequence, and probably overbalances the whole film now, but the rest of it is pretty vivid in its dragging the protagonist through the mire: it should be funny but isn't. Music by John Scott.


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News Briefs: Burkhart's controversy; housing affordability strategy; poet laureate to read
by Collin Kelley January 27, 2018
UPDATE: A deal to sell Burkhart's, the Midtown gay bar renowned for its drag shows, has fallen through and the establishment remains closed. Georgia Voice reported over the weekend that Burkhart's ha been sold in the wake of owner Palmer Marsh's racist Facebook posts. Wussy magazine recently published Marsh's posts from 2015 after they began circulating on social media. Many of the bar's staff and most of the regular drag performers resigned last week. In a Jan. 26 post on Facebook, Burkhart's general manager Don Hunniwell said Marsh had sold the bar and it would reopen soon under new management. However, Project Q reported over the weekend that the deal to sell the bar had fallen through and would remain closed.
Fresh from a victory in requiring affordable housing along the BeltLine, Atlanta City Councilmember Andre Dickens is trying to form a multi-city coalition to create a regional – even statewide – housing affordability strategy. Dickens said he has reached out to leaders of several metro Atlanta cities who he had heard are also working on "housing affordability and housing diversity." And he's looking even farther afield: "We reached out as far as Augusta, too," he said. Read the full story at Reporter Newspapers.
Tracy K. Smith, the current U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner, will give a reading of her poems on Saturday, Feb. 17, at 4 p.m. at Emory University's Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. The event is open to the public at no charge. Tickets are not required, but seating will be limited. Books and a limited-edition broadside will be for sale at the reading, with a signing immediately after. Visit this link for more information.
Tagged: affordable housing, Andre Dickens, arts, Atlanta, culture, drag queens, Intown, LGBT, news, poetry, racism


Cathryn Antoinette "Toni" Tennille is best known from her '70s and '80s chart-topping hits with the pop duo Captain & Tennille. A classically trained pianist and a prolific song writer, Toni has also released numerous solo albums celebrating the romantic music of big band and American standards. Today Toni can be found working with her award-winning Australian shepherd dogs in Lake Mary, Florida, and continuing to play the music she loves. She has just completed a memoir of her life and career which will be released in April 2016.


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