This year I took out a postal subscription to the monthly BBC History magazine. The December 2012 issue arrived in early November and I wasn’t expecting any more issues until the January 2013 one some time in December. So you can imagine my surprise when an extra, thirteenth, issue plopped through my letterbox right at the end of November (though it is not on sale in newsagents until 4th December) – a Christmas special. It seems the magazine publishes not twelve monthly issues but thirteen: one every four weeks.
So what is in this Christmas edition? Well the first thing I noticed is that it is not really all that Christmas themed. There is a Christmas history quiz and crossword and the regular list of historic places and events one can visit is Christmas themed, but the main articles have only the most tentative links to the festive season.
Christmas is a time for gift giving, which means going shopping first. What shopping was like in the past is covered in an article about shopping in Rome during the heyday of the Empire by Claire Holleran. She describes the many different types of goods and establishments, from the sellers of luxury items in fancy arcades, through the more modest shop alcoves that lined most main streets, built into the ground floors of many domestic properties, to market stalls and even the trays carried by wandering vendors.
One thing a shopper might buy as a gift is a toy, and this leads into a rather macabre article on toy and game-related deaths in Tudor England in the 1500s, taken from research into old coroners’ inquest reports. Staying on the theme of death, another article covers the trade in dead bodies for use in anatomy lessons at medical schools, a practice legal after the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act but so poorly regulated that there were numerous abuses.
With stories abounding of the Mayans apparently prophesying the end of the world in December 2012, Rob Attar takes a rational look at the evidence in a fascinating article which concludes that although a cycle of the Mayan calendar is indeed ending the Mayans themselves paid hardly any heed to those roll-overs, less than we do nowadays to the beginning of a new century, and that the classical Mayan civilisation certainly did not prophesy any disaster based on it.
Ryan Lavelle looks at inequalities in Anglo-Saxon culture and how those conflict with the romantic notion that has grown up in non-historic literature and culture of Saxon England being a land of free English farmers until their liberties were crushed by the Norman invaders. As I have been researching this period myself recently I found the article interesting, though it mainly confirmed my own understanding and told me little new.
Another article looks at Napoleon’s attempts to portray himself through art, bringing the total of feature articles this issue to seven and of a variety such that almost anyone interested in history will find at least some of them interesting.
All in all, this is a good issue and one that whets my appetite for the next regular edition, being the January 2013 one. But first, it would appear from the editorial page of this Christmas edition that BBC History are also publishing a special edition on the First World War and having a particular interest in that conflict I don’t want to miss it! Maybe I’d better stop writing and pop out to my local newsagent to get my copy!