#as quoted by stacy schiff

[frogshunnedshadows]

"Everything in American affairs happens contrary to probability."

– Thomas Hutchinson, 1779.

[dearemma]

Witches could be muttering, contentious malcontents or inexplicably strong and unaccountably smart. They could commit the capital offense of having more wit than their neighbors, as a minister said of the third Massachusetts woman hanged for witchcraft, in 1656.

The Witches: Salem, 1692, Stacy Schiff

[unhonestlymirror]

It seems that Cleopatra treated Antony as a grandmother treats her schoolchild grandson who came for the holidays, and now the same schoolboy comes to Rome, which he openly ignored all these idle months. He celebrated his forty-third birthday in Alexandria, and at the same time he was remembered by the townspeople mainly for his pranks and antics, which is ridiculous because from the very beginning, the accusation of Mark Antony against Octavian was “snotty boy” (for a Roman there was no worse insult: it infuriated Octavian so much that he would then pass a bill in the Senate formally forbidding anyone from calling him that).

(c) "Cleopatra: A Life"

[forwithinthishollowcrown]

ACOB:

Daemon seeing his kids as an extension of himself and as part of his legacy makes me think of the quote about Mark Antony: generally antony liked children and did not believe it possible to have too many. he was fond of the saying that “noble families were extended by the successive begetting of many kings.” – stacy schiff, cleopatra: a life

This is kinda ironic because Antony and Augustus hated each other and tried to kill one another but a good chunk of Augustus’s heirs and family (the Judo-Claudia’s dynasty) were also descended from Mark Antony

That is probably the funniest thing I ever heard. Like they tried to kill one another but their shared descendants ended up as rulers of the Roman Empire!

[womanoncesaid]

The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero's life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

[philologistandbibliophile]

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman’s success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life. Against a powerful enchantress there is no contest. Against a woman who ensnares a man in the coils of her serpentine intelligence—in her rope of pearls—there should, at least, be some kind of antidote…it is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent.

—Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life, p. 298.

[technicolorrelays]

-The Witches: suspicion, betrayal,and hysteria in 1692 Salem, by Stacy Schiff

[backlogbooks]

“Among the most famous women to have lived, Cleopatra VII ruled Egypt for twenty-two years. She lost a kingdom once, regained it, nearly lost it again, amassed an empire, lost it all. A goddess as a child, a queen at eighteen, a celebrity soon thereafter, she was an object of speculation and veneration, gossip and legend, even in her own time. At the height of her power she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands. She had a child with a married man, three more with another. She died at thirty-nine, a generation before the birth of Christ. Catastrophe reliably cements a reputation, and Cleopatra’s end was sudden and sensational. She has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since. Many people have spoken for her, including the greatest playwrights and poets; we have been putting words in her mouth for two thousand years. In one of the busiest afterlives in history, she has gone on to become an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor. Shakespeare attested to Cleopatra’s infinite variety. He had no idea.” 

I loved this book! I took a class on Cleopatra last year so technically had already learned about her, but A. I forget my classes way too quickly and B. the writing style was great, so I loved it anyway. Highly recommend if you want to learn about Cleopatra or have an interest in ancient history! 

[justthishumanheart]

Were he to sit in judgment of his own case, Humbert assures us in the penultimate paragraph, he would have sentenced himself to at least thirty-five years for rape. He himself assesses the cost of his transgressions when he realizes, with a shock, that amid the “musical vibration” that lifts from a valley below him, her voice is plangently missing from the melody of children at play. That absence impresses on him the gravity of his crime, the past that he has failed to retrieve, the future that he has interrupted. The scene counted among Nabokov’s favorites: he identified it as one of the most vital passages in the novel.

—Stacy Schiff, Véra Nabokov Was the First and Greatest Champion of ‘Lolita’

[echoazure]

In the ancient world too women schemed while men strategized; there was a great gulf, elemental and eternal, between the adventurer and the adventuress.  There was one too between virility and promiscuity: Caesar left Cleopatra in Alexandria to sleep with the wife of the king of Mauretania.  Antony arrived in Tarsus fresh from an affair with the queen of Cappadocia.  The consort of two men of voracious sexual appetite and innumerable sexual conquests, Cleopatra would go down in history as the snare, the delusion, the seductress.  Citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts.

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

[no-gorms]

hiya annie! i check out your dreamwidth sometimes (old hand at these things) & noticed you've been reading a fair bit these days! does your reading ever factor into your fic writing? or other forms of writing that you do? always curious about the writers behind the fics i love, and since you read a lot of non-fiction, i'm even more curious about what you think. also, if it's not too personal, i'd love it if you could share some of your esp faves!! looking for more stuff to read atm ty xoxo

---

Hello, hi, thanks for the ask! My reading definitely influenced my fic writing more in the past, mostly in terms of style and rhythm, before I figured out the writing styles I'm most comfortable with. I tend to be way more relaxed about fic-writing these days, so I think the main takeaway from reading non-fiction would be picking up interesting words or topics I can use as throwaway topics in fic. Like, what thing have I just read that Tony can mention off-hand in casual conversation, maybe hypersonic flight? That kind of thing. Though I do like picking up new words or terms through reading and that may subconsciously influence the way I think. Maybe?

OKAY BOOK RECS! These are all non-fiction, and I've posted about these before on my dreamwidth so you might've seen them, but here's a bunch I've really enjoyed:

I just read First Man, a biography about Neil Armstrong by James R. Hansen, it's very readable if you're interested about early NASA, the space race, and what the life of the first man of the moon was like after he came back the Earth. It does get a bit technical in places but it also humanizes a lot of the people involved in the US space program. Armstrong's fellow Apollo 11 crewmate Michael Collins has an autobiography, Carrying the Fire, which is REALLY witty, you might've seen some of Collins' quotes around tumblr, and this book is that, but MORE. (Aldrin has an autobiography as well but I haven't read that yet.)

Christina Thompson’s Sea People, which is about the investigative history on how the original Polynesians colonised the Polynesian triangle, of where the early settlers came from, how they navigated to get to the islands, what routes they took, and so on. Goes all the way to modern day with the resurgence of Polynesian navigation. (Related to this I have the book Hawaiki Rising by Sam Low on my To Read list but haven't been able to get it yet.)

Stacy Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1962 is as you can tell from the title about the Salem witch trials, and it is a dark chapter of US history that I only knew some of the broad strokes about before, and in my opinion this book is not just interesting for giving context for how it happened and what happened afterward once the dust cleared, but is good reading to understand how groupthink and community hysteria can happen.

John S. Croucher and Rosalind F. Croucher's Mistress of Science: The Remarkable Story of Janet Taylor, a biography about scientist Janet Taylor, who built compasses and navigation equipment in a field dominated by men, and who published maps and navigation documents for sailors during the height of the Age of Sail. If you're into the Age of Sail era this is also cool for how Taylor's career spanned the industrial revolution until sail started to be replaced by steam.

Maria Konnikova's The Confidence Game, which is about the psychology of scams, and how conpeople take advantage of their victims. Scams are so rampant these days so it's been something I've been thinking about a lot, and this book just hammers it home that intelligence level doesn't preclude anyone from being a victim, and there's no "right" way to exist in society if you want to never ever get duped.

[frankenshane]

6 and 11 for the history asks!

6. Favorite history book

A tie between Randy Shilts’ Harvey Milk biography The Mayor of Castro Street (as it’s as much about Harvey as it is San Francisco in the 1970s) and Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra (acknowledges the mythology that’s been built around the historical woman as much it delves into the precarious waters she had to tread re: the ascendant Imperial Rome of it all).

11. Favorite quote from an autobiography

Gonna fudge it a bit with one of my favorite quotes from Michelle Obama’s memoir: “I grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where an education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.”

[miss-shaley]

The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero's life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

[unhonestlymirror]

Politics has long been called "systematically organized hatred"

(c)"Cleopatra: A Life" quoting "The Education of Henry Adams"

[minervacasterly]

One of the darkest chapters occurred with the hanging of Bridget Bishop at Gallows Hill in Salem, Massachusetts for “certain detestable arts called witchcraft and sorceries" on June 10th, 1692.

To this day, despite the town’s openness to people of ever walks of life and being a safe haven for pagans and wiccans, the stigma of what occurred remains.

There have been countless analysis and retellings in the media about these witch trials. One (recent) theory that has gained a lot of traction is that besides fanaticism and want of attention, the girls’ hysteria was a product of wheat poisoning that was the result of a rye ergot –a hallucinogenic fungus.

The first person to offer proof of this was Linnda R. Caporael in 1976. Many historians have included her study in their assessment of this black chapter in American Colonial history. Among them is Stacy Schiff with her recent biography, “The Witches: Salem, 1692”.

A combination of mass hysteria brought about by this fungus and religious fanaticism is what culminated in the deaths of dozens of men and women falsely accused of witchcraft. Two hundred people were tried and close to twenty were executed –Bridget Bishop being the first.

Bridget Bishop was thrice married, first to Captain Samuel Wesselby from whom she had two children, then to a fellow widower, Thomas Oliver, from whom she had more children and finally to Edward Bishop, a prosperous sawyer. This last union produced no offspring.

Bridget Bishop’s accusers were five of the main afflicted girls: Ann Putnam, Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Abigail Williams two months before on the 19th of April. When she was brought before court, she was questioned by an equal number of men in whose eyes she was already guilty.

“The burden proof rested on the prosecution, but the prosecution enjoyed a few seventeenth-century advantages. An English trial of the time was inquisitorial, an informal, free-form, hectic, rapid-fire contest best described as “a relatively spontaneous bicker between accusers and accused.” Across the board, standards of proof were imprecise. A suspect had no idea of the evidence against her until she stepped into the courtroom, where she could be convicted of a different crime that the one for which she stood indicted. She had the right to defend herself but no guarantee she would be heard. Protests of innocence carried little weight …”

They wanted to hear her confession and reveal of other witches and warlocks. New England Puritan minister and science aficionado, Cotton Mather said in his later work “The Wonders of the Invisible World” that soon after the girls testified against her, other people showed up, presenting similar allegations. One of them was a middle aged man by the name of William Stacy who told the ministers that prior to her arrest, Bridget Bishop had told him that there were many in Salem who considered her a witch. Another man’s testimony followed his, accusing her of sending an affliction to his son.

“We know nothing of Bishop’s last words, of who tied her skirts around her ankles or her hands behind her back, who urged her up the ladder, placed the cloth over her head, or fitted the noose around her neck. Hangmen were not easy to come by. Sheriff Corwin may himself have delivered the push that left her suspended by the neck, thrashing desperately, twitching spasmodically, finally dangling, still and silent, in midair. She died by slow strangulation; the end could have taken as long as an hour. It was not necessarily quiet. It could be preceded by blood curling groans …

She died before noon; Corwin arranged for the corpse to be buried nearby, a detail he added to his report and later crossed out, presumably as he had exceeded his instructions. It is difficult to imagine who might have claimed the body. Bishop’s husband appears to have absented himself from the scene. From an earlier marriage, she had a twenty-five-year-old daughter, who could have kept her distance that season.

Across both Salems, villagers and townsfolk breathed a collective sigh of relief. They had dispatched a nuisance and a notorious sinner. Together they had engaged in a cathartic, calming ritual … such things were “painful, grotesque, but a scandal was after all a sort of service to the community.” The wise magistrates whose praises Mather sang in his charter-selling sermon … A decade earlier Bishop had pried a woman from her bed and nearly drowned her. The woman was thereafter insane, “a vexation to herself and all about her.” With Bishop’s arrest, her condition improved. And as Bishop swung from the gallows, the woman miraculous emerged from her decade of madness. The execution worked a spell of its own over Essex County, where –Mather would note- many “marvelously recovered their senses.” Accusations ceased over the next weeks, as did arrests …”

In the eyes of Puritan law, Bridget Bishop was beyond redemption, though there were those who still prayed for the good lord to bless their town and deliver them from evil. For a time, it seemed like God had answered their prayers but then the accusations resurfaced. The devil was still present and its agents hiding among them. People had to be vigilant and the ministers and judges act mercilessly against these offenders.

Source quoted: The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff

Image: Posthumous painting of Bridget Bishop.

For additional information about the Ergo fungus, here's a link to a good article that is pretty straightforward: https://uh.edu/engines/epi1037.htm#:~:text=In%201976%20Linnda%20Caporael%20offered,when%20they're%20actually%20stoned.

[womanoncesaid]

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman’s success to her beauty rather to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life