Mothers

Published: June 3, 2018, 6:47 p.m.

b'

THE UNEXPECTED HISTORY OF MOTHERS! A boy\\u2019s best friend is his mother\\u2019   (Norman Bates \\u2013 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\\u2019s 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\\u2019s 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, \\u2026 and ugly babies, which were disliked by Queen Victoria.

Listen out for James\\u2019s own tribute to his mother, and a big Hi! to all mums listening.

\\u2018Good mother, do not marry me to yond fool\\u2019  (Anne \\u2013 Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 3, Scene 4, written by William Shakespeare, 1602).



Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'