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Five Fun Books

  1. William Ian Miller (2006) Eye for an Eye – the discussion of why a penis is worth three wergelds (a wergeld is a “man-price”) while the middle finger is the least valuable finger is worth the price of the book. Short answer, flipping the bird is obscene, but losing your dick in battle is even more obscene.
  2. Domique Laporte (2000[1978]) The History of Shit – the hardcover English edition is especially wonderful: black “velvet” instead of the usual paper. It’s about poop, language, money and civilization. Wonderfully illustrated.
  3. E.P. Evans (1906) The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals – not as gruesome as castration or icky as poop, but perhaps more interesting: how do you present rats with a summons when you know that they can’t leave their holes and hiding places and report at the appointed time because, as it is well known, cats are the mortal enemies of rats and if the cats were to know that the rats would assemble at an appointed time, then the rats had no legal obligation to appear before the court. Further, why would it even occur to you to initiate legal proceedings against rats, locusts, ingers, donkeys, pigs, chickens and whatever else?
  4. Ernst H. Kantorowicz (1957) The King’s Two Bodies – Simply put, what king’s believe about themselves and what people were willing to believe about king’s is more or less completely nuts. Worth reading in conjunction with Ralph Giesey’s The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France and Marc Bloch’s The Royal Touch.
  5. Charles Butler (1609) The Feminine Monarchie – setting aside the scientific achievements (for instance, being the first to correctly identify that the hive was ruled by a queen) and his odd attempt to represent the buzzing of bees in musical notation so that bee-masters could properly hum to their bees, the absolute confusion between bees and humans is wonderful. It is difficult to tell if he is talking about bees being like humans or humans being like bees – or, worse, bees being like humans being like bees or humans being like bees being like humans. He also initiates the genre of comparing whoever was ruling England at the time to bee – Cromwell ruling? Well, clearly the beehive is organized like a Protectorate with a Commander.
This was written by Craig. Posted on Friday, November 14, 2008, at 2:17 pm. Filed under Teaching. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

2 Comments

  1. Scu wrote:

    I am really glad that they made an affordable copy of the King’s Two Bodies.

    And I guess I should read the Evans book sometime. But somehow I doubt it will be anytime soon.

    Monday, November 17, 2008 at 7:28 pm | Permalink
  2. Craig wrote:

    The Evans is helpful in terms of thinking about the general economy of violence, the relation between man/animal and sacred/profane. There are, of course, a number of problems with it: the work is not especially coherent – conflicting explanations are given for what appear to be the same phenomena (sometimes it is because they are superstitious, sometimes because they are uncivilized, sometimes because of lex talionis, etc), it isn’t especially well organized, but there is a wealth of information, should anyone want to do the requisite work and make it intelligible.

    Friday, November 21, 2008 at 4:01 pm | Permalink

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