“It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one’s nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.”
— The Alexiad, written by Anna Komnene, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, c. 1148.
Btw I went searching for your post about PhD research and grief after someone posted it on Instagram on some random crappy spam account. Id be super interested in reading your work but im sure its tied to your real name. Any recommendations for other related works?
Finally getting round to actually answering asks XD
This is the link to my thesis etheses.whiterose.ac.uk:37578
I can definitely suggest some other reading on the topic. I suppose it depends on exactly what you're interested in.
In terms of intro to Victorian Funerals:
Curl is a good starter, though not my favourite
Curl, J. S. (2000). The Victorian Celebration of Death. Stroud: Sutton
Litten is a better book, imo, but might be harder to get hold of
Litten, J. (1991). The English Way of Death: The common funeral since 1450. London: Robert Hale
Taylor is the most comprehensive author on mourning dress
Taylor, L. (2009) Mourning Dress (Routledge Revivals): A Costume and Social History. London: Routledge.
Harold Mytum (who is just the best guy) does a lot on burial and memorialisation. One of his latest books of edited essays is
Mytum, H., and Burgess, L. (2018). Death Across Oceans: Archaeology of Coffins and Vaults in Britain, America, and Australia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Sarah Tarlow is also a big name in post-medieval death studies
Tarlow, S. (1999). Bereavement and commemoration: An archaeology of mortality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Tarlow, S. (2011). Ritual, Belief and the Dead in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
In terms of historical grief:
Julie-Marie Strange is an amazing researcher. She's done a lot of work on 19th-20th century grief amongst the working class
Strange, J.-M. (2002). ‘‘She cried a very little’: Death, grief and mourning in working-class culture, c. 1880-1914’, Social History, 27 (2), 143–161. Available at: doi:10.1080/03071020210128373
Strange, J.-M. (2003). Only a Pauper Whom Nobody Owns: Reassessing the Pauper Grave c. 1880-1914. Past & Present, 178, 148–175. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600760
Pat Jalland is also a major figure in Victorian grief studies.
Jalland, P. (1996). Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Helen Frisby does folklore and death and grief
Frisby, H. (2015). ‘Drawing the pillow, laying out and port wine: the moral economy of death, dying and bereavement in England, c.1840–1930’, Mortality, 20 (2), 103–127. Available at: doi:10.1080/13576275.2014.954240
If you're more interested in psychologies of grief
Stroebe and Schut, and Klass et al. are really foundational theories of modern grief psychology.
Stroebe, M. and Schut, H. (1999). ‘The dual process model of coping with bereavement: rationale and description’, Death Studies, 23 (3), 197–224. Available at: doi:10.1080/074811899201046
Klass, D., Silverman, P. R. and Nickman, S. L. (1996) Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. London: Routledge
Robert Neimeyer is my favourite grief psychologist. He's written hundreds of articles.
Neimeyer, R.A., Klass, D. and Dennis, M.R. (2014) ‘A social constructionist account of grief: loss and the narration of meaning’, Death studies, 38(6–10), pp. 485–498.
Neimeyer, R.A. (2014) ‘The narrative arc of tragic loss: Grief and the reconstruction of meaning’, International Journal of Existential Psychology
If you're interested in works about grief and material culture/objects
Gibson has done a lot of theory
Gibson, M. (2004). ‘Melancholy objects’, Mortality, 9 (4), 285–299. Available at: doi:10.1080/13576270412331329812
Gibson, M. (2008). Objects Of The Dead: Mourning And Memory In Everyday Life. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing.
Gibson, M. (2010). Death and the Transformation of Objects and Their Value. Thesis Eleven, 103 (1), 54–64. Available at: doi:10.1177/0725513610388988
Stallybrass, Parrott and Barney and Yoshimura have some great case studies
Stallybrass, P. (1993). ‘Worn worlds: clothes, mourning, and the life of things’, The Yale Review, 81 (2), 35–50.
Parrott, F. (2011) ‘Death, Memory and Collecting: Creating the Conditions for Ancestralisation in South London Households’, in S. Byrne et al. (eds) Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum. New York, NY: Springer New York, pp. 289–305.
Parrott, F.R. (2010) ‘Bringing Home the Dead: Photographs, Family Imaginaries and Moral Remains’, in M. Bille, F. Hastrup, and T.F. Soerensen (eds) An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. New York, NY: Springer New York, pp. 131–146.
Barney, K. A. and Yoshimura, C. G. (2021). ‘“Cleaning Out the Closet:” Communicated Narrative Sense-Making of Bereavement’, Journal of Family Communication, 21 (4), 255–271. Available at: doi:10.1080/15267431.2021.1943399
Feel free to ask for more specific recommendations! This was fun!
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
Kind of funny how when you're obsessed with a certain character their mere presence on your screen can lift your mood. Like yeah I have probably like 10 diagnosed and undiagnosed ways my brain works atypically but one of those quirks makes it possible for The Character to salvage my whole day.
Baiae was a favourite destination for aristocrats and the powerful of the ancient Rome.
Between the 7th and 8th centuries, tectonic movements caused much of the coast between Pozzuoli and Cumae, including Baiae, to sink.
Baiae was discovered by a diver in the 1960s and is now an important reference point for underwater archaeology.
Remains of monuments have been found, such as a room from the imperial palace from the 1st century, a sculptural group depicting the Cyclops Polyphemus and a statue of Antonia the Younger, mother of the Emperor Claudius.
this post is so funny to me because this is absolutely a thing and was very popular at one point. people already did it 40 years ago and its called new romantic
romaincrisis
prguitarman
jacobvanloon
germansingergirl
annaxmalina
