By Natalie Bennett

We like to think of branding as a modern invention, part of our sophisticated media age, something that you might even have to study to understand. But back in what we used to call the “Dark Ages”, they were just as aware of the usefulness of creating images of themselves for others to absorb – just that the technology to do it was a little more basic. All it required was a suitable carving or cast and a lump of wax, and you could send your self-presentation around the world – or at least around Europe, where its imagery would be “read” just as though it were text.

According to “Good Impressions, Image and Authority in Medieval Seals”, a small but nicely formed and informative exhibition now at the British Museum, by about 1100 people recognised the authority of seals. So you get a tiny lead pilgrim flask of about 1185 from the shrine of Thomas Beckett at Canterbury. It would have been used for a mix of holy water and a drop of the saints blood. The back has a seal design showing the saint’s murder and in Latin “Thomas is the best doctor of the worthy sick”. Simple but clear, and apparently very effective branding.

But it wasn’t just saints who had their own brand, or even kings. Richard de Lucy, Chief Justiciar to Henry II moaned: ‘It was not the custom of old for every lesser knight to have a seal, they are proper only for kings and great men.”
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by Natalie Bennett

Maps: sounds like a bit of a specialist subject – a bit nerdy and detached from everyday life. That was what I thought, but since I was at the British Library anyway, I thought I’d pop into the London: A Life in Maps exhibition.

Two and a half our later, with the gallery attendants providing a chorus of vacuum-cleaners, I was thrown out when the gallery closed. It had become clear that while at first thought the recording of the lines on a map marking streets and buildings might seem mechanical, it is in fact an intensely political, contested process, which tells not just the story of the physical changes in London, but also is highly informative about its social and cultural development.

There are earlier representations – the earliest being on a gold coin of 310 that commemorates London’s surrender to Constantius I Chlorus, whose forces had defeated the usurper Allectus – but it is only in the middle of the 16th century that maps as we understand them start to become readily available.

One of the earliest, which survives only in fragments, was a copperplate map of late 1550s. Already, the city map is an intensely political object. This was probably commissioned from a foreign surveyor for presentation to Phillip II (Bloody Mary’s husband) by German merchants, as part of their struggle to maintain trading privileges.
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by Natalie Bennett

On a wet holiday Saturday afternoon at the Royal Academy you’ve now got two choices. There’s the Rodin blockbuster exhibition, predictably heaving and really only suitable for those who view gallery visiting as a contact sport. But if you climb higher, you can venture into another world. The gallery is almost empty, but the art – that of southern India from the 10th to 13th centuries — is every bit as spectacular.

You are entering the empire of Chola, one of the greatest Hindu empires. It traded with the Tang in China, Jewish traders in Aden and the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, yet it developed from the indigenous tradition a form of art all its own – the sacred bronze statue, designed often to be carried through the streets.

For it’s a curious fact that roughly contemporary with similar developments in Catholicism, the worship of Shiva here emerged from religious sanctuaries and on to the streets, associated with a great, emperor-supported temple-building programme, just as Europe was building its great cathedrals.
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Does it matter what your favourite novelist looks like? Well of course not, but it is human nature to be curious, and through the 20th century that curiosity was given full rein as writers went from being hidden figures in their garret to glamorous celebrities — or so at least their publishers hoped.

Between 1920 and 1960, women writers ruled the shelves of England’s bookshelves – at least in the popular market. “Being single, and having some money, and having the time – having no men, you see,” was how one of their number, Ivy Compton-Burnett, explained this trend. And it is these women — not all of them single — who dominate a new showcase display at the National Portrait Gallery.

Some are names that still resonate: Virginia Woolf, of course, Dorothy L. Sayers, Barbara Cartland, Daphne du Maurier and Doris Lessing. But others may test out the knowledge of even the most dedicated English graduate.

There’s Joanna Godden who wrote 31 novels, mostly about the farming communities and landscape of her native Sussex while also teaching and running a farm with her husband; she’s photographed looking terribly practical and matter-of-fact – the working writer at her desk. Then there’s the impressive Ethel Mannin, snapped in full avant-garde style with sleeked-down hair against a futuristic geometric backdrop. She wrote sympathetic accounts of the Soviet system in works such as Women and the Revolution and luxuriated, you get the feeling from the photo, in the title of “the most unpopular writer in Britain”.
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What is religion for? Should you happen to believe in the real existence of some deity or another that question answers itself, but if you don’t, you have to wonder why such an apparently dysfunctional structure — one that consumes vast resources — has persisted in most places throughout human history.

A new exhibition at the British Museum, Power & Taboo, provokes reflections on this big question from the perspective of a society whose complex, polytheistic gods created a very different worldview from the primarily monotheistic stance that shaped the modern European world.

The exhibition covers Polynesia from 1760 to 1860, the period of early contact with an outside world from which the peoples had been largely isolated for many centuries. For the islanders their multiple gods were ever present in the world. They used tapu, from which our word taboo derives, to describe strategies for human control of these gods.
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What is conjured up in your mind by the phrase “women of India”? You might think the powerful figure of Indira Gandhi, but more likely you’ll be thinking about dowry killings, sati, underfed girl-children – images of abuse and suffering. It is striking then that what shines out of the British Museum’s new Myths of Bengal exhibition is a vision of female power – dangerous, often out-of-control power, but certainly of a force to be reckoned with.

At its centre – physically and intellectually – is Durga, the supremely powerful goddess created by all of her fellow divine beings at a time when they had been almost overwhelmed by demons. Armed with a weapon donated by each of the gods, and mounted on a lion, she ensured that, after an appropriately fierce battle, order was restored to the world.

Durga greets visitors to the exhibition, in a fantastically detailed carving of the obvious malleable “pith from the inside of a shola weed” (surely a curator’s nightmare to handle). Serenely triumphant in victory, she’s totally in control – the matriarch – flanked by her daughters Lakshmi and Saraswati and at the bottom (unusually enough), her sons, Ganesh and Kartik.

Yet soon, the visitor sees, her story is more problematic as a vision of female power. Charted in historical prints and modern-day photographs is the annual Durga Puja in Bengal, when her victory is celebrated. But like the Greek Persephone, she must leave this happy scene at the end of the ceremony to return to her husband Shiva, who stays far away in the Himalayas. Her sorrow is heavy as she turns her steps towards him – reflecting no doubt the anguish of many a young mortal bride.

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