Publications by Clare Button
Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion, 2024
Margaret Morris (1891–1980) was a dancer, choreographer, artist, costume designer, theatre manage... more Margaret Morris (1891–1980) was a dancer, choreographer, artist, costume designer, theatre manager, teacher and physiotherapist whose technique, Margaret Morris Movement, is still practised worldwide today. However, she herself remains little-known. A project to open up Morris's personal archive to researchers has revealed her as a key figure in various overlapping artistic, literary and medical spheres in the early to mid-twentieth century, but has also shown the importance of spiritual practices such as theosophy, nature worship and automatic writing to her work, all of which Morris kept private. This paper explores Morris's spirituality as it is revealed in archival sources such as correspondence and diaries and argues for her as an important figure amidst the tangled networks of alternative artists and thinkers at the birth of modernism.
Hellebore Issue No. 7, 2022
Ancient antlers, clashing swords, exuberant foliage, and of course, those bells and hankies: Engl... more Ancient antlers, clashing swords, exuberant foliage, and of course, those bells and hankies: English traditional dances are as varied as the country's landscape, by turns joyous and sinister, familiar and strange. The tar-black "Obby Oss" wheeling and diving through the streets of Padstow on May Day or the stately procession of antlered dancers in Abbots Bromley conjure echoes of pre-Christian rites whose magic and meaning endures in fragmentary form. But to reveal their true magic, we must look into their performative power and analyse their historical associations with the language of ritual and arcane, even occult, knowledge.
The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947. Edited by Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford. Oxford and New York: Routledge., 2018
The figure of Rolf Gardiner (1902-1971) remains contentious, not only because of his connections ... more The figure of Rolf Gardiner (1902-1971) remains contentious, not only because of his connections with right-wing European politics in the interwar period, but also for the diversity of causes with which he was involved. Gardiner’s belief in personal and national regeneration though reconnection to the land underpins his commitment to ruralism, ecology, organic farming and the revival of English folk dances, songs and customs. However, while Gardiner’s reimagining of morris dancing and his establishment of the Springhead Ring apparently advocate a philosophy of pagan abandon and occult communion rooted in the soil, they also display an obsession with discipline and deep anxiety about wild and untamed forces.
By exploring this contradiction, this paper will argue for a long overdue recontextualisation of Gardiner; one which looks further than the politics of interwar Europe and back to the literary and cultural climate around the turn of the last century. Writers and thinkers during this period often display a troubled ambivalence about the British landscape, presenting it on the one hand as a magical palimpsest overlaid with history and culture, and on the other as containing threatening forces which must be harnessed. Placing Gardiner within a wider matrix of early twentieth century visionary writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Arthur Machen reveals an eco-occultism far more complex than what some critics have dismissed as ‘gaudy mysticism’. Gardiner’s troubled relationship with landscape also needs to be explored with reference to the folk revivalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although he eventually rebelled against the tenets and practices laid down by organisations such as the emergent English Folk-Dance Society, Gardiner was, like them, intensely preoccupied with attempting to establish ritual and occult significance to folk culture whilst simultaneously imposing regulations and restrictions on its revival.
Interrogating Gardiner’s various ways of connecting with land and landscapes, this paper will argue that the tension between abandon and discipline is the factor which both unites and undermines his occult ideology.
Journal of the History of Biology, 2018
In 1919 the Animal Breeding Research Department was established in Edinburgh. This Department, la... more In 1919 the Animal Breeding Research Department was established in Edinburgh. This Department, later renamed the Institute of Animal Genetics, forged an international reputation, eventually becoming the centrepiece of a cluster of new genetics research units and institutions in Edinburgh after the Second World War. Yet despite its significance for institutionalising animal genetics research in the UK, the origins and development of the Department have not received as much scholarly attention as its importance warrants. This paper sheds new light on Edinburgh's place in early British genetics by drawing upon recently catalogued archival sources including the papers of James Cossar Ewart, Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh between 1882 and 1927. Although presently a marginal figure in genetics historiography, Ewart established two sites for experimental animal breeding work between 1895 and 1911 and played a central role in the founding of Britain's first genetics lectureship, also in 1911. These early efforts helped to secure government funding in 1913. However, a combination of the First World War, bureaucratic problems and Ewart's personal ambitions delayed the creation of the Department and the appointment of its director by another six years. This paper charts the institutionalisation of animal breeding and genetics research in Edinburgh within the wider contexts of British genetics and agriculture in the early twentieth century. After more than a decade of effort and negotiation, the Animal Breeding Research Department (ABRD) was founded in Edinburgh in 1919, one of a number of government-funded agricultural research institutes around Britain. The Department, renamed the Institute of Animal Genetics in 1930, forged an international reputation that influenced the situating of new genetics research units and institutions in
Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, Dec 2015
Places are haunted. They are haunted by the stories or legends we hear about them and the history... more Places are haunted. They are haunted by the stories or legends we hear about them and the history we uncover about them, but they are also haunted by our own personal and emotional associations. We need look no further than the word 'haunt' to unveil its close relationship with place; the dead can be said to 'haunt' a place, but a place can also be the 'haunt' of the living. For scholar Alexandra Walsham, places and landscapes represent 'a surface onto which cultures project their deepest concerns and recurring obsessions, a medal struck in the image of their mental structures.' We can view the role of traditional music, dance and other customs in a similar way, as Henry Glassie does, as the means by which people 'construct their history, drawing their own map of past time.' (1) Today I want to talk about 'places, haunts and haunted places' and their close interweaving with traditional song. I will argue that, while traditional singers saw the 'haunted place' in local, personal terms, the folk song collectors of the first folk revival, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fashioned an idea of folk culture and landscape as haunted in both idyllic and horrific ways. This ambivalent concept evolved during the second folk revival, which fused a nostalgic 'new Albion' haunted by the weird and primal. Finally, I will make the case that many contemporary musicians whose work is inspired by traditional song have broken free from this duality to create vivid evocations of 'haunted places' that are both personal and rooted in contemporary landscapes. The 'haunted place' is a crucial concept for understanding the role of traditional song in local communities. Throughout history, restricted or non-existent options for travel even beyond one's immediate locality made the idea of 'place' a much more compact concept than many of us might grasp today.
Proceedings of the English Folk Dance and Song Society Folk Song Conference 2013, 2015
On Saturday 11th January 1834, the body of a woman was found on Leatherhead Common by the Surrey ... more On Saturday 11th January 1834, the body of a woman was found on Leatherhead Common by the Surrey Union Fox Hounds. Over fifty years later, a song commemorating this event was collected by the Reverend Charles Shebbeare 24 miles away in Milford, from Mr Foster, a young labourer. Said to have been composed by a Leatherhead bricklayer James Fields, The Poor Murdered Woman Laid on the Cold Ground was collected from the oral tradition only once, with no known printed version. Although it has been described as ‘a song about a non-event’, it was clearly resonant enough with the local community to remain geographically rooted and in oral circulation for over half a century after the crime it describes. The song continues to prove its strange efficacy into present day revival repertoires, now at a far contextual and geographical remove, and seemingly at odds with its unremarkable, understated nature. The song is not a ‘crime’ or ‘murder ballad’ in the usual sense, refusing many features common to that genre, whilst still seeming to display an awareness of them. Rather, the song functions as a commemoration of a local, personal kind, and in that is, I argue, not only highly unusual in the tradition in this form, but also deeply unsettling in the way it subverts what we might expect from a ‘crime song’. It is sensational precisely because it is not sensationalist. A song which as much of a textual as a literal ‘post mortem’, it provides an intimate glimpse of how a local community might strive to make sense of a senseless crime through song, in contrast to the more geographically widespread ‘broadside journalism’ which frequently utilised the subject of true crimes for varying ends. Finally, I will examine how the song’s original purpose within a local community context has changed to fulfil a need on the part of a larger, revival audience.
Conference papers by Clare Button
Traditional songs are deeply rooted in place; those which they describe and those in which they e... more Traditional songs are deeply rooted in place; those which they describe and those in which they exist and live. Folk song can define and make sense of their surroundings in highly personalised ways as singers use geographic associations and identifications to express feelings and beliefs about places and what happens in them. Specific places may be cited as evidence of the perceived authenticity of a song, while a sense of locality, of belonging to a place, can bestow legitimacy on a singer. However, folk song can also be a vehicle for expressing dispossession and displacement. This is complicated further by past collectors and scholars’ uneasy relationships with landscapes and origins, rural and urban spaces. Drawing upon seasonal songs, ballads, songs of exile and singers’ testimonies, this paper will examine how folk song’s perceived authenticity is intricately yet troublingly bound up with landscapes and localities.
M.R. James was writing at a time when the archive profession was becoming more highly defined, an... more M.R. James was writing at a time when the archive profession was becoming more highly defined, and increasingly differentiated from the figures of librarian, historian or antiquarian. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the publication of two seminal archive manuals by Muller, Feith and Fruin (1898) and Hilary Jenkinson (1922), and these helped to fashion the concept of the archivist as custodian of the truth, impartial gatekeeper of documentary evidence, and privileged interpreter and mediator of texts. While James’ fiction has frequently been viewed through the analytical lenses of archaeology and excavation, we can instead employ a rich body of archival theory to pose new questions about the function of texts - archives, manuscripts, books and catalogues - in James’ writing. Concepts such as Jacques Le Goff’s ‘politics of archival memory’ and Derrida’s ‘archival violence’, or textual ‘death-drive’, reveal Jamesian hauntings which are reliant upon interpretation, curation, memory and provenance. Archival theory also illuminates the ways in which James plays with the reader’s preconceptions of the relationships between text, artefact, and the supernatural.
Papers by Clare Button
The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947, 2017
As one might imagine, Edinburgh University Library Special Collections contains a vast array of m... more As one might imagine, Edinburgh University Library Special Collections contains a vast array of material, from the magnificently varied and priceless items amassed by antiquarian David Laing to the library of eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith to shelf after shelf of university matriculation registers. In order for these collections to be as widely available as possible, our approach as curators needs to be imaginative, innovative and flexible. Four very different special collections will be discussed below, with reference to the different ways in which they are promoted, used and disseminated both among, and with the aid of, specific academic communities, the student body, volunteers and the general public.
Journal of the History of Biology, 2017
Journal of the History of Biology, Oct 16, 2017
Book Reviews by Clare Button
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Publications by Clare Button
By exploring this contradiction, this paper will argue for a long overdue recontextualisation of Gardiner; one which looks further than the politics of interwar Europe and back to the literary and cultural climate around the turn of the last century. Writers and thinkers during this period often display a troubled ambivalence about the British landscape, presenting it on the one hand as a magical palimpsest overlaid with history and culture, and on the other as containing threatening forces which must be harnessed. Placing Gardiner within a wider matrix of early twentieth century visionary writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Arthur Machen reveals an eco-occultism far more complex than what some critics have dismissed as ‘gaudy mysticism’. Gardiner’s troubled relationship with landscape also needs to be explored with reference to the folk revivalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although he eventually rebelled against the tenets and practices laid down by organisations such as the emergent English Folk-Dance Society, Gardiner was, like them, intensely preoccupied with attempting to establish ritual and occult significance to folk culture whilst simultaneously imposing regulations and restrictions on its revival.
Interrogating Gardiner’s various ways of connecting with land and landscapes, this paper will argue that the tension between abandon and discipline is the factor which both unites and undermines his occult ideology.
Conference papers by Clare Button
Papers by Clare Button
Book Reviews by Clare Button
By exploring this contradiction, this paper will argue for a long overdue recontextualisation of Gardiner; one which looks further than the politics of interwar Europe and back to the literary and cultural climate around the turn of the last century. Writers and thinkers during this period often display a troubled ambivalence about the British landscape, presenting it on the one hand as a magical palimpsest overlaid with history and culture, and on the other as containing threatening forces which must be harnessed. Placing Gardiner within a wider matrix of early twentieth century visionary writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Arthur Machen reveals an eco-occultism far more complex than what some critics have dismissed as ‘gaudy mysticism’. Gardiner’s troubled relationship with landscape also needs to be explored with reference to the folk revivalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although he eventually rebelled against the tenets and practices laid down by organisations such as the emergent English Folk-Dance Society, Gardiner was, like them, intensely preoccupied with attempting to establish ritual and occult significance to folk culture whilst simultaneously imposing regulations and restrictions on its revival.
Interrogating Gardiner’s various ways of connecting with land and landscapes, this paper will argue that the tension between abandon and discipline is the factor which both unites and undermines his occult ideology.