Book Reviews 2000S

BOOK REVIEWS 51 BOOK REVIEWS neighbouring Clan, the Macdonnels, brings the story to a violent conclusion. Michael Brander, The Clan Gleneil. Pp. vii + 99. The Gleneil Press, 1996; Anyone interested in history of any kind will find these books a ISBN 0-9525330-2-2. The Mark ofGleneil. Pp. viii + 162. The Gleneil Press, fulfilling read, and both offer the reader a first hand account of life at the 1998. ISBN 0 952533081 time in the Scottish Highlands. The Mark ofGleneil also gives a revealing account of Richard the Lionheart, or Richard 'Yea or Nay', during the The Clan of the Gleneil describes the history of the Gleneil Clan from its Third Crusade, and what chivalry really meant to those at the time. beginnings in 1173 around the time of the Crusades to the last Chief of There is also an audio cassette that accompanies these books, containing Gleneil who died in 1949. As well as a look at the rousing activities of popular music from the Clan's past, including the lament 'Gleneil is the Clan in the past 800 years, Michael Brander (honorary 23rd Gleneil over the water', written at the death of the last Gleneil. of Gleneil) also looks at the Clan's characteristics, their background, the land they lived on, their economic and natural history, and a more Alistair Boyd general look at Scottish dress and the way of life in the Highlands. Although not an immediately recognisable name, the Gleneils were a prominent force in Scottish history and, partly because of the small glen Ulinka Rub lack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany. Pp. xii they lived in and therefore the need for the Clan to spread further afield, + 292. Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-19-820637-2 there are members of the Clan all over the globe. A 14-year old girl stabbed her newborn daughter to death to keep the From an almost complete set of diaries spanning the history of the Clan, birth secret from her father. She wrote a letter to the child expressing most kept by the chiefs themselves, Brander has given us an insight into her love and explaining her sense of helplessness. The girl, now 15, Scottish life throughout the last millennium: from the early chiefs and became pregnant while studying for her GCSEs. She wept at the crusades through the Hundred Years War (c. 1335-1445), the Jacobite Nottingham Crown Court as she admitted infanticide. It was 'a rebellions of 1715 and 1745, the introduction of sheep into the tragedy for everybody', Judge Christopher Pitchers said yesterday. Highlands and the ensuing clearances in the nineteenth century, ending He decided not to impose a custodial sentence, saying it was a case with the demise of the last chief in the twentieth. that cried out for a judgment that was compassionate and would help the girl rebuild her life. The letter read: 'Please don't think of your The Mark of Gleneil tells the rousing story of the first of the Clan chiefs. mummy as a terrible person. I am not horrible. I love you. You should The illegitimate son of the Scottish King, William the Lyon, he earns understand my position and helplessness. If you were here now, I the titles 'Boarslayer' and 'Master of Gleneil' as a youngster before would hold you. I would try and kiss your face ...'. The judge made setting off to the Middle East on the Third Crusade. Here his father a three-year supervision order with a condition that she receive 90 knights him after he makes a daring escape from crucifixion at the days' counselling. He told her: 'I don't believe any thoughtful hands of the Saracens. As he escapes, he takes with him a young member of the public, knowing the facts of this case, could think you 'caliph' and with the ransom paid he is able to return home and needed to be punished'. Daily Telegraph (8 December 1999). establish a castle in the Glen of Gleneil, the home of the Gleneils for the next 800 years. He also takes with him a mark from the nail that This unnamed girl from Sutton-in-Ashfield, near Mansfield, living at the pierced his left hand as he was nailed to the cross, a mark all chiefs end of the twentieth century, would have slotted easily into the have been born with since. A long-standing feud with a member of the 52 BOOK REVIEWS BOOK REVIEWS 53 world of which Ulinka Rublack writes. 'You should understand my into trouble; others offered temporary support. But even the most position and helplessness' is a plea which might have come from the sympathetic friends and relatives could do little to help in the long lips of any of the women, often young and unmarried, who were term, since a single woman without burgher rights could expect to be brought before the courts of south-west Germany during the period banished upon the birth of her child. 1500-1700, accused of theft or adultery, incest or infanticide. In common Reading the report of the Nottinghamshire case alongside the tales of with some of those women who lived four centuries earlier, the beheadings, drownings, and mutilations which form an unavoidable Nottinghamshire girl concealed her pregnancy with baggy clothes and part of Rublack's account, one might momentarily feel glad to be living denied it to herself as well as others. Giving birth alone in the kitchen in a 'civilized' and 'compassionate' age (suppressing, of course, all while her father was asleep upstairs, she first embraced the child, then thought of the 'uncivilized' events which characterise the history of our stabbed it, hiding the body ineffectually in a binliner beneath her bed. own time). Both alien and repugnant to us is the treatment of Katharina Rublack's chapter on infanticide is littered with little corpses, suffocated Hertz, who was placed in the pillory in Memmingen in 1609. Her crime or stabbed, hastily wrapped and hidden but rarely buried. Ashamed, had been to steal cloth, belts and caps. Before being banished from her frightened, but above all unable to see another way out of their neighbourhood, the hangman cut off both her ears. Sickening too is problems, there have always been mothers who would risk yet more Margaretha Milller's story: forced to have sex with her father as a young punishment and opprobrium by killing their babies. girl, she ceased to resist his advances; her pregnancy was taken as The cross-cultural similarities are striking, but so too are the differences. evidence of her complicity - of her pleasure, in fact - and she was Whereas infanticide was seldom prosecuted in the medieval period, by drowned for committing incest and adultery. While mutilations and the seventeenth century the authorities had adopted what might now be brandings became increasingly uncommon during the period of this construed as a 'zero-tolerance' policy. Capital punishment was believed study, Rublack states that 'there was no linear development towards to be a deterrent to other women. And to render that deterrent more more "humane" punishments'. On the contrary, excluding executions compelling, guilty mothers were sometimes tortured with hot pliers for witchcraft, the use of the death penalty against women rose in many before being beheaded, their heads stuck up on posts afterwards for all places during the seventeenth century. to see. Such measures were a far cry from the 'compassionate' approach Clearly, it is not enough merely to articulate our disgust at the barbaric of Judge Christopher Pitchers. Another difference lay in the support treatment of female criminals at the hands of early modern law courts. made available to the girl at the end of the twentieth century: not just We need to try to understand why early modern people were fined for the fact that she was represented by the foremost women's rights lawyer drunkenness and imprisoned for premarital sex, or why they could be in the country, Helena Kennedy Q.C., but also that she was provided executed for recurrent adultery. In analysing the social, cultural and with counselling to help her 'rebuild her life'. If the child had lived, political factors which determined the understanding and perception of social workers and child benefit would have played their part. By transgression, Rublack's relativism is rigorous and challenging. The contrast, the seventeenth-century authorities who cracked down on reader is constantly asked to consider why certain price-tags were infanticide, exhorting masters and mistresses to police the bodies of affixed to certain crimes. Throughout the book, it is demonstrated again young females in their midst, offered little assistance. A maidservant and again that there is nothing inevitable, natural, or obvious about impregnated by a passing soldier would have to shift for herself. such apportionings. Why, for example, was infanticide condemned as Mature women in the community who suspected an illegitimate the loss of a God-given soul, when such claims were curiously absent pregnancy would warn such a girl that she would have her head cut off from contemporary manslaughter cases? And why were elites so if she killed the child. Some were contemptuous of those who had got 54 BOOK REVIEWS BOOKREVlEWS 55 concerned to prosecute petty thefts? As Rublack speculates: if just one concludes that prosecution patterns were 'an expression of diverse Wiirttemberg treasurer had embezzled 20,000 florins and filched silver interplays of socio-economic, administrative, political, institutional, and ware worth 2000 florins, his ill-gotten gains would have exceeded the confessional structures, and of change which was often localised and value of all the goods taken by Wfuttemberg thieves across two never linear '.

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