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In honour of mothers around the world, past and present, a rerelease of our episode on the Unexpected History of MOTHERS!

THE UNEXPECTED HISTORY OF MOTHERS! A boy’s best friend is his mother’   (Norman Bates – Psycho, written and directed by Joseph Stefano and Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). Welcome to Histories of the Unexpected where you will discover the history of things you did not know even had a history, like the history of nonsense or the history of the itch. For this episode let us join the Abbott of historical action, Dr Sam Willis, and the Marconi of long distance historical communication, Professor James Daybell, as they bring forth the unexpected history of mothers.

Join the very well preserved and embalmed historical adventurers as they take you on a journey of nurturing and sometimes less than tender care, from Freud’s controversially proposed Oedipus complex to the archaeological site of Banpo, China, discovered in 1953, from the Cross of Honour handed out to mothers in Nazi Germany to Stalin’s Order of Maternal Glory, and from the maternal conflict and violence evidenced within the fifteenth-century Paston Letters to the poignant seventeenth-century diary extracts of a worried mother, Lady Anne Clifford.

Our two old maters discover that this unexpected history is actually all about: conflict and matriarchy, communist theory and shared economies, capitalism and inherited material wealth, legitimisation and state doctrine, propaganda and ideology, tyranny and idealism, cultural conformity and social engineering, knowledge transmission and dissemination, … and ugly babies, which were disliked by Queen Victoria.

Listen out for James’s own tribute to his mother, and a big Hi! to all mums listening.

‘Good mother, do not marry me to yond fool’  (Anne – Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 3, Scene 4, written by William Shakespeare, 1602).

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STRIPES!

In this latest episode, the Unexpected duo, Professor James Daybell and Dr Sam Willis try on the city slicker pinstripe suits and speculate on the history of STRIPES! Which is all about the Carmelite order, the banning of striped clothing and stripes as a marker of social stigma (via the sartorial garb of the gangster). It's also all about the eighteenth-century maritime world (including Nelson's stocking), stripes as a marketing phenomenon, zebras and patterned cathedrals, as well as about the moving story of concentration camp uniforms. Who knew!

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Happy Valentine's Day to our listeners! For this episode let us join the Cupid of history, Professor James Daybell and the Casanova of historical crime, Dr Sam Willis as they, with arrows notched and ready to fly, bring you from the back catalogue: the unexpected history of LOVE.

Our two star crossed history hunters take the lead along love’s fickle twisting and turning path, from the modern phenomenon of attaching inscribed padlocks to public bridges in Paris to the votive offerings made through centuries past, from the tempestuous affair between Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil in the 12th century and one of the earliest examples of a love letter to Verona in the 1930s and the beginnings of the ‘Juliette Secretary’s’, from the in-twinned savagery of politics and courtly love of the Tudor period and the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt to Stalin and the Soviet state and the poignant last letters of those condemned to death, and from the letters of Sir Edward Dering to his ‘dearest and best friend’ his beloved wife Unton in the mid fifteenth century to the earliest recorded English valentine letter from the Paston papers, written in 1477, love is most definitely all around.

Knowing no bounds and conquering all, Sam and James discover that this unexpected history is actually all about; affection and romance, family and companionship, cultural expression and interpretation, attraction and biology, chemistry and psychology, endurance and expectations, security and commitment, permanence and loss, betrayal and sacrifice, intimacy and passion.

“Farewell love and all thy laws forever;

Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more” (Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1557)

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