From the Archives: Word with a Past – Silhouette
I’m poking around in the long eighteenth century these days and stumbling across lots of surprising tidbits.
Take silhouettes. I had long known that charming likenesses cut from black cardstock became a popular and affordable alternative to oil portraits in the mid-eighteenth century. To the extent that I thought about the word at all, I assumed it was the name of a clever scissors-wielding artist who started the new fashion.
Wrong.* The art form, originally called “shades” or “profiles”, pre-dated the name.
Étienne de Silhouette was a French attorney with intellectual leanings and political ambitions. He wrote treatises on this and that, translated Alexander Pope into French, made friends with Madame Pompadour, and earned a name as a garçon fort savant** for a book he wrote on the English taxation system. That book would get him in trouble.
In 1759, halfway through the Seven Years War, he was appointed Controller-General of France. The war was expensive and Silhouette had the thankless job of balancing a budget with a shortfall of 217 million livres.*** To make things harder, more than sixty years of almost constant warfare, had left France with a shortage of metal money and a budget crippled by existing debt. Silhouette issued some long-term debts and cut some expenses, but he realized that the long term answer was raising tax income. He took the not-unreasonable position that the easiest people to raise money from were the people who had money–especially true in the Ancién Regime, where the nobility and the clergy were exempt from taxes. He took away their tax exemptions and cancelled a range of pensions, sinecures and handouts. With the wealthy and powerful already in an uproar, he then instituted new taxes on luxury goods, from jewelry and carriages to servants and windows. The marquise du Deffand, writing to Voltaire, complained “they are not taxing the air we breathe, but apart from that, I can’t think of anything that’s escaped.”
Less than nine months after his appointment, Silhouette was out on his ear and the term à la Silhouette was applied to anything cheap, including the profile portraits known as shades.
* In more ways than one, it turned out. Evidently there were two schools of silhouette artists, cutters and painters. The things you find out when you follow a fact down a rabbit hole.
** Bright kid
***Roughly 459 billion dollars today ****
****Very roughly, since I had to work from livres to francs, then calculate it forward to 1800 and convert it into dollars before I could plug it into this currency converter.
From Heroine to Harridan
As I’ve worked on the subject of women warriors over the last year, a few things have surprised me. One of the surprises was the important role played by women in sieges. Historically, women who fought to defend their city walls were the most common type of women warrior, outnumbering many times over the combined forces of queens, commanders, women who fought disguised as men and women who fought undisguised alongside men in the times and places that allowed that sort of thing., It was always seen as a last ditch measure* and it was always assumed to be temporary. For the most part, women fought in anonymous groups remembered only in the collective. But here and there an individual heroine caught the public imagination. Here’s the story of one of them.
During the Dutch revolt against Spain (1558-1648),* Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaar (1526-1588), a forty-something widow who was a shipbuilder and owned a timber yard, became a national heroine for her role in the siege of Haarlem, one of the longest and most bitterly fought conflicts within a long and bitterly fought war.
In early 1572, the Spanish king Philip II*** appointed a new viceroy for the Spanish Netherlands, the Duke of Alba, and instructed him to suppress the Calvinist insurrection that was spreading through the Low Countries under the leadership of Prince William of Orange, known as William the Silent.****The Duke sent his son, Frederick of Toledo, and an army of 30,000 men on a a punitive expedition against the Dutch towns that had declared allegiance to William.
Toledo’s army reached Haarlem in December. The city had weak defensive walls and a garrison of some three thousand troops, most of them German mercenaries. Toledo was confident that the city would surrender, given that the Spanish army had left devastation behind it: cities burned to the ground that their citizen’s slaughter. Instead, Haarlem stood its ground. Citizens fought alongside the soldiers, men and women alike. Kenau organized a division of some three hundred women, who fought alongside the men on the ramparts.
Both sides suffered heavy losses through February and March, but the city was able to hold out because William of Orange kept the city supplied by sending skaters and sledges with provisions across the frozen Haarlemermeer, the huge inland lake that separated Haarlem from Amsterdam*****. The turning point in the siege came in the spring, when the Haarlemmermeer was no longer frozen solid and Spanish galleons were able to cut off the city’s supply line. The starving citizens of Haarlem surrendered on July 12 on the condition that the city would not be pillaged. The city was not sacked, but the citizens were massacred all the same.The German and English members of the garrison were dismissed. The remaining soldiers, along with one thousand leading citizens, were executed. Kenau and the women she led were not on the list of those the Spanish considered “war criminals.” Some historians argue that the absence of women on the list of executed citizens refutes the story of their involvement. Letters and diaries of the German mercenaries make it clear that the women of Haarlam fought beside them, both in the “feminine” style of pouring boiling oil over the walls and hand-to-hand combat.
Kenau came to personify the Haarlem defense. Her name entered the common language, at first denoting a spirited woman; it has degenerated over the centuries from its original positive meaning. Today it translates as tartar, battle-ax, or, most tellingly, virago–a word which has also tarnished over time. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, virago originally meant “A man-like, vigorous, and heroic woman; a female warrior; an amazon.” Today, my thesaurus gives the following synonyms for virago: bitch, shrew, vixen, termagant, fury, witch, bedam, she-wolf, she-devil, spitfire, fishwife, scold and battle-ax. There is more than one way to make a woman warrior disappear from history.
*Sometimes literally. Women dug trenches or helped repair battlements during sieges.
*Also known as the Eighty Years War and the Dutch War of Independence, the Dutch revolt was a complicated mess of religion (Protestant vs. Catholic), nationalism, and trade rights. Needless to say, it was ugly.
***You probably know him as the absentee husband of Mary Tudor of England, and the force behind the Spanish Armada.
****The great-grandfather of the William of Orange who became king of England in the Glorious Revolution. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the players without a program.
*****Don’t bother checking your map. It was drained in the nineteenth century and is now a soggy municipality.
Jeannine Davis-Kimball’s Warrior Women
I am ashamed to admit that Jeannine Davis-Kimball’s Warrior Women–An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines sat on my shelf unread for months.* I looked at it early on in the research stage. I decided I wanted to own a copy so I could scribble in the margins. (As opposed to scribbling in the Margins.) And once I owned it, there it sat.
A couple of weeks ago I was writing about the discovery of what appeared to be ancient women warriors in burial mounds at Pokrovka, on the Russia-Kazakstan border. I was having trouble keeping Scythians, Sakas, Samartians, and Sauromatians, straight in time and place.** The source I was using had fabulous pictures but was confusing on the details. The reputable internet sources were just as bad. In desperation, I pulled two books off my shelf hoping for a solid place to stand: my well-thumbed copy of Adrienne Mayor’s The Amazons*** and Davis-Kimball’s Warrior-Women. I opened Warrior Women first, and hit the jackpot. Not only does Davis-Kimball have a neat little sidebar on the chronology of the four ancient S-cultures mentioned above, she was one of the lead archaeologists on the Pokrovka excavations. Problem solved. And imagination engaged.
Davis-Kimball’s Warrior Women is not a scholarly report on an archaeological dig, though a quick glance at the bibliography makes it clear that she has written plenty of them. Instead it is the story of an intellectual quest, complete with archaeological adventures, difficulties with travel arrangements, political stand-offs, and thrilling discoveries. The style is engaging but never dumbed down. She asks questions about not only her own finds, but existing interpretations of earlier finds. I will admit to some discomfort with the final chapters of the book, where she wanders off the Eurasian steppes that are her area of expertise and into the Celtic world. At that point she makes some speculative leaps without a net that left me a little dizzy.
Warrior Women would have made the nerdy nine-year-old me who fell in love with C.W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves and Scholars very happy. For that matter, it made nerdy fifty-nine-year-old me pretty dang happy, too.
* This is not actually unusual. I acquire books at a much faster rate than I read them, which means that some books have sat unread on my shelves for YEARS. But not books titled Warrior Women when I am writing a book with the working title of Women Warriors. *headsmack*
**Can you blame me?
***Which I’ve neglected to review here. Short version: it’s really good.