Walloon -in-law

More genealogy stuff, this time on my dad's side. Apparently the second wife of my great-great-great grandfather was a woman from Belgium (or of Belgian heritage) living in Prussia; she kept a diary which my uncle is having translated. He sent on the first part and it talks about them being able to go to church again after the Walloons were "expelled from the church" due to "unrest from the war" (this would have been sometime between 1790 and 1810. I don't know what war is referred to for sure, apparently it was between Prussians and French). She also apparently had a very unhappy first marriage.

She makes the comment: "The legal proceedings were skewed by bribes but I still won through the strictest justice and a majority. Additionally, he and his son will not escape God....."

So apparently, she managed to get a divorce and remarry (apparently Walloons were a Protestant group, so divorce would have been possible at that time, even if it was very likely frowned upon). (Or perhaps her first husband died while they were separated; I have only the first few pages and they're a pretty rough translation in spots. I'm not totally sure of the language it's written in; it looks German but also not quite: perhaps it's a dialect, or perhaps, like some women of her time, her education did not extend all that far and her spelling and syntax are not perfect. Also the translation makes me think that the person who translated it doesn't have a good grasp of the idiom of the language; there are some things that appear to be literally translated but that do not make good sense.)

I say she's an "in-law," because I don't know if her children were the ones in my direct line, or if it was from my great-great-great-grandfather's first wife (I THINK he had a first wife who died...) who were.

But still, it's interesting. (And a little bit sad, that she had to flee her first husband, apparently. There's also an entry where it talks about her brother fighting her husband.)

Stuff like this makes me curious about those bits and pieces of European history that I know little about. I kind of knew who the Walloons were but I had to look up to be sure. I have a number of books of European history - mostly from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, because that time period interests me - and I really should make up some kind of plan for reading them.

I want to read (or actually, re-start) Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" which is in that time period. (And I should really try to finish "The Guns of August" - which is about WWI but is partially set in Walloon territory - the Sambre and Meuse valleys being where the Walloons were centered, and where a lot of early fighting of that war took place)

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Right now, though, I'm reading a book that alternately fascinates me and makes me want to throw it across the room. It's called "A is for Ox" by Barry Sanders. It's about oral culture versus literate culture, and while I am really interested in what he has to say about the idea of how cultures changed (in the Middle Ages, right at the end) from being primarily oral to primarily literate - and how our way of thinking is different when we are literate (He also talks about the transitions children go through, from being unable to read to being able to read), I find his constant drumbeat of "we are killing ourselves as a culture with the world wide web" very tiresome.

I don't know how much of his arguments to accept or discount. He does have footnotes and all, and some of the data he provides seem solid. And I agree with his premise that children who spend their early childhood plunked in front of a tv screen all the time instead of having parents who talk with them and take them to the zoo and read the labels of the cereal boxes to them in the grocery store have a much more difficult time managing in life than children who do, I think he's searching for a single big answer to the problems plaguing some inner cities, when it's really a lot of problems.

He basically is making the claim, as I understand it, that violence is rising in cities because kids who don't grow up in a culture where they're spoken to and learn the intricacies of language - and later on, become readers - don't develop a sense of self the way kids who are read to and talked to and all that do. And as a result, they're more likely to become sociopaths who kill other people, because human life means less to them. And I find that very hard to swallow, somehow. Like, it's too simple of a solution for a big complex problem. And at the same time, it's a very pessimistic view - that these kids are essentially unsaveable, because they have passed through the critical stage without experiencing something.

I don't know. On the one hand, he seems to be celebrating some of the pre-literate cultures, where people were "engulfed in orality" and at the same time, he's roundly criticizing (mostly) urban, inner-city families and schools for not properly socializing their children into literacy. (And part of me wants to say: when the family's worried about whether they're living in a safe place, and if there will be enough to eat, probably making sure the kids have access to books is low down on the scale of priorities).

He also, somewhere, makes the comment that "10% of the population reads 70% of the books." If that's true, then there must be a lot of socioeconomic/profession skew to that number, because far, far more than 10% of the people I know are avid readers.

So I don't know. I wish he stuck to exploring (a) how oral and literate cultures differ (b) the history of literacy and possibly, (c) the best ways to teach disadvantaged kids to read (he argues that it's NOT plunking them in front of a computer - yet another screen - with a reading tutorial, that what they really require is interaction with real live people, and I do agree with that point) and would back off on the OH NOES WE ARE ALL DOOMED! screediness.

There is another book - a Folio Press book, I forget the author - by the same name (A is for Ox) that is about the history of the alphabet. I should probably be reading it instead; I'm sure I'd find it much more restful. (I find I greatly prefer to read books about the clever things cultures have done, rather than how the cultures destroyed themselves.)