London’s Victoria & Albert Museum has signed an agreement with the French city of Bayeux that will see them work together on scholarship surrounding the Bayeux Tapestry, a 223-foot-long work that ranks among the most important pieces of the Middle Ages.

The deal, first reported by the Times of London, could put the V&A one step closer to reviving a loan agreement for the tapestry itself, which hasn’t left France in more than 950 years. In 2021, that deal was put in jeopardy when a condition report on the Bayeux Tapestry found that it was too fragile to travel. Some read the report as a sign of strained relations between the U.K. and France in a post-Brexit Europe.

Created in the 1070s, the nine-panel embroidery depicts 58 scenes chronicling the 1066 Normandy Conquest of England following the Battle of Hastings. Scholars believe it was commissioned by the Duke of Normandy’s William the Conqueror’s brother Bishop Odo following the political victory.

It is not the first time the V&A has worked with French officials on efforts around the medieval artifact.

The museum’s first director, Henry Cole, helped lead the effort to produce a replica of the tapestry in 1869, negotiating with a Bayeux official to complete the project. The replica was first exhibited in 1873 and later displayed in the Cast Courts at the South Kensington Museum.

Lorenza Böttner gazes confidently and seductively over her left shoulder in a pastel self-portrait from 1989. Her hair is flowing; meanwhile, her naked and muscular body reflects the bands of rainbow light surrounding her. Though the environment lacks a horizon line, the rainbow fades into a deep, dark blue that helps ground the scene. Chalky, dirty footprints are scattered over the gradient, as if the paper had at one point itself been a ground—or more specifically, a dance floor. The portrait is a record of irreverent dancing in more ways than one: Böttner is grooving, and it’s contagious.

If you know anything about Böttner—a Chilean-German artist who was born in 1959, started presenting as female in art school, made many self-portraits, and died in her thirties of AIDS-related complications—you’ll recall that there is no arm at the end of that left shoulder she’s gazing over, nor at the end of her right one. Though it’s right there, in the middle of the five-foot sheet of paper, the nub on her shoulder is far from the first thing a viewer notices in this work. The other striking details include the deft, Degas-esque linework; the immaculate vibe; and Böttner’s skillful handling of color. The rainbow is both campy and delicate, gently refracted by the surfaces of her sculpted figure and windswept hair.

All this the artist pulled off by drawing with her feet and her mouth. Yet rather than depict herself as a freak capable of feats, Böttner appears, in the 20 or so self-portraits on view in “Requiem for the Norm,” her retrospective at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York, engaged in various banal and tender acts: bottle-feeding a baby or reading a book as she turns the pages with her toes. The self-portraits don’t invite pity or applause, nor do they hide her disability. They are joyful and beautiful, and decidedly not about “overcoming.”

Spanning Böttner’s 16-year career, the show also highlights a few series of photo-based works as well as ephemera from performances, including footage, photographs, and posters. A video of her 1987 performance Venus de Milo, a landmark work of disability culture, shows Böttner covered in a fine layer of white plaster and standing on a platform with a cloth draped over her lower body. For more than 20 minutes, she holds a pose resembling that of the titular armless statue. Before descending the podium and exiting stage left, Böttner asks the audience, in German, “Well, what would you say if the artwork moves of its own accord?” This wry piece retools the politics of staring, calling attention to how impairment can seem downright romantic as a metaphor, or when depicted in art or suggested by ruins, while in daily life, visibly disabled people are often gawked at or shunned.

9 min read

A brief overview of the history of vaccination in Oxford

The remarkable success of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine’s rapid development, testing and rollout presents a moment in time to look briefly back at the history of vaccination in Oxford. Since the pioneering works of Edward Jenner in the 18th century with smallpox vaccination and the social and economic issues that ensued, clear correlations can be seen to those same issues being encountered today with the COVID 19 pandemic.

Many of the issues encountered in the 18th century are currently familiar. They included inoculation resistance, misinformation and conspiracy theories, quarantine and isolation, reporting and surveillance, vaccine passports (a requirement to work) and incentivisation programmes.

Early inoculation

Edward Jenner is well known around the world for his innovative contribution to inoculation and the ultimate eradication of smallpox. Smallpox, the deadliest of all eighteenth-century diseases, was a terrible disease that spread from person to person without discrimination. It was widely feared, killing approximately 30% of those infected. After the initial symptoms of headache, muscle aches, exhaustion and fever, the body would become entirely covered in a rash, including inside the eyes, earning smallpox the epithet ‘Speckled Monster’. Jenner’s work is widely regarded as the foundation of immunology although its origins were in non-white cultures including China, Africa and later Turkey. Many people’s lives were saved from death and horrendous disfigurement thanks to Jenner’s remarkable work and the later developments from his endeavours.

His work started with Sarah Nelmes, a dairy maid, who had become infected with cowpox. On 14 May 1796, Jenner removed matter from pustules on her hand which he then used to inoculate an eight-year-old boy (James Phipps) who then also developed pustules but quickly recovered. On 1 July, Jenner performed the second stage of the experiment by inoculating James with smallpox. His aim was to see if the cowpox vaccine worked. This was long before medical ethics; the risk Jenner took with the boy’s life today seems unacceptable.

Vaccinating Oxford

In 1796 Finmere villagers were among the first to benefit from Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccination and Robert Holt the local rector (among others) became an enthusiastic vaccinator. Holt’s achievements are noteworthy as he was untrained in medicine.  His work is an early example of overcoming inoculation resistance as his parishioners trusted him and there was success in the majority of cases. Holt supplied other clergymen and small village doctors with vaccine and was a leader in dissemination. However, not the most sanitary of procedures were always employed and secondary infections could occur which led, in time, to villagers’ refusals. Holt recognised the experimental nature of the procedure and robustly documented his results; this work earned him considerable praise within the medical profession.

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The smellier side of the Stuarts in Oxford

A former Oxfam employee recalls a visit by the queen to the charity’s Summertown offices in the late 1990s. ‘We had to have a brand new toilet and washbasin installed,’ he says, ‘in case she needed to go. The queen can’t use a toilet someone else has sat on.’

Royal visitors in previous centuries were less squeamish. During the plague year in London (1665) the court of Charles II decamped to Oxford for the summer. The king and his ministers lived at Christ Church College, the queen and her entourage at Merton. Anthony à Wood, a local historian of the time, complained in his diary: ‘Though they were neat and gay in their apparell, yet they were very nasty and beastly, leaving at their departure their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, colehouses, cellers. Rude, rough whoremongers; vaine, empty, careless.’ Horrible Histories puts it even more graphically. The court was filthy not only in its habits, but also in its morals. Later that year Charles’ mistress, the Countess of Castlemaine, gave birth to the king’s illegitimate son. The countess was part of the queen’s court at Merton, where an outraged Fellow pinned an obscene poem (in Latin and English) to her door.

To be fair, disposal of human waste was not easy in the seventeenth century. Poorer households threw it into the street while more affluent ones might have a cesspit in the cellar, but the contents still had to be removed, often through the house. In royal palaces, human excrement piled up in underground chambers until it could be taken away. This accumulation of rubbish and sewage was one of the reasons why the Tudor courts went ‘on progress’ from one palace to another in the summer months.

Charles II was not the first Stuart king to live at Christ Church. In 1642, during the Civil War against Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, Charles I made Oxford his capital. This turned the city into a garrison town, filled with troops and preparations for battle. The university supported the king, and New College was made into a munitions workshop. But local people, who mainly favoured the Parliamentarians, were not happy. They were taxed for funds, required to recycle their metal possessions for manufacture of weapons and coins, and had to provide lodgings for the king’s followers. The presence of the court and the military meant that the town was overpopulated. Human and animal waste piled up in the streets and in 1643 this led to a typhus epidemic in the city. You can find out more about the Oxford court of Charles I, and typhus outbreaks in the city, from short videos and displays in the Museum of Oxford.

Written by volunteer Jane Buekett. 

Is it possible to reboot our minds by living a more feral existence?