The Court Fees Weren't Exactly Light

 

Advice to sojourners in the early-modern era who are trying to avoid execution for witchcraft: be sure you are born male and have a high social rank. These inheritances helped ensure the pardon of Jeronimo Dirucaca, alleged witch and onetime governor of Picuris Pueblo in northeastern New Mexico. In 1713 several men and women from Picuris accused Dirucaca of multiple crimes against the community, including sorcery. Four Puebloan women told Spanish investigators that the former governor, hoping to draw them to his bed or to punish their rejection of his advances, had either enchanted or magically sickened them. Dirucaca’s other crimes included several extramarital sexual liaisons and encouraging his constituents to ignore their priest and “live as your ancestors did.” This last was to the Spanish a chilling reminder of the great revolt of 1680, in which Puebloan warriors killed 400 colonists and liberated New Mexico for the next decade.

Picuris Pueblo, 1941 (Museum of N. Mexico)

Investigators in Picuris determined, however, that Ser Jeronimo’s rebelliousness extended little further than his own person. One of the Tewa Puebloans’ ancestral practices was polygyny, another of the crimes of which Dirucaca stood accused, and in aid of which he had allegedly employed his forbidden supernatural arts. For such a venial transgression Spanish officials were willing to grant leniency, particularly since the transgressor still retained his high rank in the community - the Puebloans allowed former governors to remain ranking elders or “notables,” and town leaders had even let Dirucaca retain his cane of office. Patriarchal rule hath its privileges.

Dirucaca’s willingness to pay a large bribe proved even more decisive in determining his fate. The defendant agreed to trade for a gubernatorial pardon an important piece of information: “the location of a hidden silver mine” in Picuris Canyon. Officials confirmed that the mine - probably the first actual source of silver the Spanish ever located in New Mexico - was real, and released Dirucaca after his payment of court expenses. More advice to time-travelers trying to elude witchcraft charges: be sure you own or have access to a silver mine.

 

Sources: Malcolm Ebright, “Advocates for the Oppressed: Indians, Genizaros and their Spanish Advocates in New Mexico, 1700-1786,” New Mexico Historical Review 71 (1996): 305-39, quote 312; Tracy Brown, Pueblo Indians and Spanish Colonial Authority in Eighteenth Century New Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2013), 46; Maurice Crandall, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 36-37.

Some Underground Movements Begin at Versailles

 

An improving climate did not bring lasting relief from famine to eighteenth-century Europeans. France, the most populous kingdom on the continent, suffered from food shortages every decade until the nineteenth century. After one of the nation’s many failed harvests (1769-70), the Académie de Besançon offered a prize for the most compelling essay on alimentary alternatives to wheat and flour. The prize winner, who published his essay in 1771, was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a fervent advocate of potato cultivation and a pioneer in the field of food chemistry. His scientific achievements brought him the acclaim of the French elite, culminating in the cross of the Legion d’Honneur in 1802. In an important sense, however, Parmentier’s career ended in failure: he did not, in his lifetime, persuade French farmers to take up the cultivation of his favorite plant, the potato. That particular social revolution had to come from below.

"Mass of foliage, or delicious snack?"

 

Mssr. Parmentier’s introduction to the humble spud came during the Seven Years’ War, when as an Army druggist he was captured and imprisoned by the Prussians. Prussia’s autocratic monarch Frederick II had obliged farmers to begin growing potatoes a generation earlier, and the nutritious tuber became a staple food of the east German peasantry. In prison Parmentier subsisted on three potatoey lumps per day, and upon his release found himself healthier than before. He subsequently became the leading French advocate of the pomme de terre, persuading the Sorbonne faculty of medicine to endorse potatoes’ salubriousness (1772) and winning converts to the cause at Versailles, where he gifted the high-born with potato flowers and potato-based dishes. One suspects the aristocracy, who enjoyed affecting rusticity, found the ingestion of pig food (as many European farmers used potatoes) charmingly earthy and authentic. One is reminded of P.J. O’Rourke’s joke about the Michelin-starred restaurant that served the hoi polloi a good meal but reserved for the true elite the opportunity to squat on the pavement and eat offal.

 

Parmentier in his later career conducted chemical analyses of wheat, chestnuts, and chocolate; developed sugar substitutes from grapes and beetroot; and opened a cooking school in Paris. He also tried to spread interest in solanum tuberosum by borrowing a trick from Frederick of Prussia: stationing guards around the test plot where he was growing potatoes, thus enticing the curious to steal samples of his secret and obviously valuable crop. Unfortunately, this won few lasting converts to the cause, and Parmentier died before spuds became popular with the rural majority. French peasants had believed for decades that potatoes caused leprosy, and even those who didn’t share this belief tended to avoid new crops. The French method of raising food on communal land divided into small, irregular family plots placed a premium on conformity and monocropping, and discouraged experimentation. Not until after the Napoleonic Wars and the devastating Year Without a Summer (1816) did large numbers of peasants begin adding potatoes to their crop rotation, whereupon the end of regular famines and concurrent rural population growth encouraged more cultivators to plant more potatoes. By the twentieth century France was the principal producer of pommes de terres in Europe. Though not of French fries, which are apparently Belgian. Which would explain the mayonnaise fixation.

 

Sources: Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (Walker and Co., 2009), 120-22; Diana S., “Antoine Parmentier & the History of the Potato,” landofdesire.com, 29 April 2021.   

Fritz Jennings, Poet Laureate of Ethnohistory

 

I had the privilege of meeting Francis Jennings - "Fritz" to his friends - at a party hosted by two of my doctoral advisors in 1996. Our conversation touched on such matters as Bernard Bailyn's late-career discovery that Native Americans existed (this counted as news among ethnohistorians) and Jennings's then-new book on Benjamin Franklin, which proved (IMHO) one of the better biographies of the man. I regret that I did not get to repeat the experience; Fritz entered managed care a year or two later and died in 2000.

Jennings was best known as a scholar and historical writer, but he made at least one foray into poetry. The advisors who hosted the aforementioned get-together, Mike Green and Theda Perdue, had previously co-directed with Jennings an ethnohistorical seminar at UNC Chapel Hill. The seminar seems to have generated some heated methodological arguments between historians and anthropologists, which Jennings finally commemorated in verse:

 

Of ages seminarish, I sing my plaintive lay

When the Anthros and the Histos went forth in great array

To battle fierce on issues large, resolved to clear the mystery:

"Historical anthropology," or merely "ethnohistory"?

 

As ever with each other, the Anthros' fight was bitter

Until the Histos hove in view and at the sight did titter;

Then closed the Anthro ranks, and soon against the foe

Their armament of jargon for bafflement did snow.

 

Upstreaming fast, they flanked the line. A fog enveloped all

While emic-etic bombadiers strafed hard the awful brawl.

"They're in the field!" howled Histos. "We cannot follow there."  

They ran and hid in archives deep -- dense darkness in their lair.

"The fight's not fair," the Histos growled, "we dare not come to grips."

"For if we do, the chronicheit will spread to cripple quips.

"We'll document with dates and data until they beg for ruth."

And so they fought until the field was littered with the truth.

It was a famous victory at the setting of the sun.

The only issue unresolved remained the rude, "Who won?"

It won't make the Norton Anthology, but it is a far better thing than I have managed for any of my own classes.

Those Weird and Luminous Lights in the Sky Don't Necessarily Mean Bad News

 

In March 1716 Edmond Halley became one of thousands of northern Europeans to witness a powerful display of the Northern Lights. The aurora manifested in England as streams of reddish-yellow light, perpendicular to the ground but spreading at the zenith to form a “corona.” Halley, later famed for predicting the periodicity of a certain comet*, published his observations of aurora borealis in the British Royal Society’s principal periodical. His article proved remarkable for two reasons. First, Halley attributed the aurora not to the glory of God or Earth’s venting of luminiferous vapors, but to an effusion of “magnetical effluvia” that the Earth’s magnetism drew toward the North Pole. Halley was only partially correct - today we know that the Northern Lights are caused by charged solar particles impacting the Earth’s magnetic field - but he did at least connect the phenomenon with terrestrial magnetism.

 

Photo by AstroAnthony via Wikimedia

Second, Halley observed that the Northern Lights had become quite rare in Europe. Apart from a few low-powered manifestations over the winter of 1707-08, he knew of no recorded appearances of the aurora since 1621. The Lights had in fact appeared a few other times in the previous century: in 1661-62 over England and Germany, and a couple of times in Romania in the early 1700s. That aurora borealis had not been seen in Halley’s homeland in over fifty years currently seems indisputable, and worthy of explanation.

In The Global Crisis (2013, p. 13), Geoffrey Parker pointed out the likely cause of the aurora’s long absence. As the Sun is the active agent in producing auroras, during periods of reduced solar radiation they tend to weaken or disappear altogether. Halley’s Hiatus (to coin a phrase) coincided with a period of drastically reduced sunspot activity - strong evidence of weakened solar output - that modern Earth scientists call the Maunder Minimum (1640-1715). This same period saw, not coincidentally, intermittent spells of drought and foul winter weather throughout the world, culminating in the devastating winter of 1708-09. The return of the auroras to northern Europe coincided with an increase in sunspot activity and solar output, and the subsequent decades saw a steady increase in the world’s population and food supply and the stabilization of some of its more powerful empires (e.g. Russia and China). Foul weather and failed harvests did not become commonplace again until the late 1780s. What Halley and his contemporaries were witnessing, then, was not an ill omen but a predictor of better times to come - the climatological end of the seventeenth century.   

 

 

* A disappointing one, for those of us who remember the dismal display Halley’s Comet put on in 1986. I’m told that astronomers expect no better from the 2061 encounter.

The World Is a Garden and We Are All Flowers

“I for one do not lament the passing of social organizations that used the many as a manured soil in which to grow a few graceful flowers of refined culture” - Theodosius Dobzhansky, quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (1979), 186.

 

Dobzhansky himself, 1966 (via Wikimedia)

 

Raised by elitist parents and schooled at a high-toned college - “four years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery,” to steal a phrase from Orwell - I in my youth grew accustomed to the argument that high culture could not exist without social inequality. The masses toiled and were taxed and exploited so that mannered commentators could discuss affairs of state on Sunday-morning television, philanthropists could endow galleries of art by past and present masters, and well-educated authors could write of adultery and ennui in the suburbs. Friedrich Nietzsche, a popular fellow on high-toned college syllabi, epitomized this aristocratic view in Chapter Nine of Beyond Good and Evil, claiming that only “a society believing in…differences of worth among human beings” could produce men of elevated spirit. These great-souled men, in turn, should rule a society that “is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and a scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may…elevate themselves to their higher duties.”

Exhausted and alienated by my parents' and contemporaries' elitism, how delighted I was to encounter, early in graduate school, Dobzansky's quote and his democratic attitude in a work by one of the modern masters of history. Braudel was a scholar as canonical in his way as Nietzsche, who nonetheless devoted his career to study and celebration of the everyday and common. People and the societies they create are ends in themselves, culture is produced and reproduced by everyone, the great innovators and artists of history owe much if not most of their insight to their teachers, contemporaries, and disciples, and nearly everyone has a good story to tell.* These observations and beliefs became all the more important for me to retain as American political and economic leaders adopted, in the early twenty-first century, the principles of one of Nietzsche’s bastard offspring, Ayn Rand. The United States’ headlong rush toward aristocracy slowed somewhat in the 2010s - more so during the recent unpleasantness - but the belief that most people don’t matter very much remains a compelling one for a powerful minority.

(The title of this post is from the underrated film Party Girl [1995].)

 

* I’d like to claim that I learned most of these lessons from my graduate-school training and subsequent reading, but actually most of it came incidentally, from magazine articles and genre fiction. I learned of the categorical imperative from one of George Will’s columns; of the diffusion of creativity and good stories through the general population by way of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and another underrated film, The Good Girl (2001); and of the idea that “solitary” geniuses were usually inspired by other, more obscure geniuses from some of Stephen Jay Gould’s articles. The universalist definition of culture I will admit to acquiring from the essays of Clifford Geertz.