Trauma & Art

Life as an embroidery or stitched cloth

“Needlework can take us far away from where we are in our imagination, but it can also lead us back to where we belong.”  Clare Hunter

“Sewing not only traps memory; it can also help to rekindle it.”  Clare Hunter

In her book, Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter, a community-minded textile artist, banner maker, and exhibition curator from Scotland, traces the history of needlework across eras, and explores the expressive possibilities and diverse uses of fabric, needle and thread. Her book is about the social, artistic, political and emotional significance of sewing and embroidery. It is a wide-ranging account of the ways needle works of all kinds have mattered and made meaning throughout history, and it is a chronicle of memory, identity, power, politics, protest, loss, and recovery. Above all, it is a book about our inhernet human need to tell stories, no matter the medium, and the power of needlework to do this. Sewing and embroidery have not only being a means to create works of beauty, but also a subversive art that has allowed individuals and collectives to express themselves, communicate ideas and emotions, protest, connect generationally, and record historical events. Mostly women, but also many men, have used the language of needlework to make their voices heard, even in very difficult circumstances.

Hunter uses the history of needlework as a lens to explore human history and historical events, with an emphasis on sewing as a means of expression for the hurt, marginalized, impoverished or silenced. She has selected evocative titles for her 16 chapters: Unknown, Power, Frailty, Captivity, Identity, Connection, Protect, Journey, Protest, Loss, Community, Place, Value, Art, Work, & Voice. In each chapter she animates historical figures, movements and events, and she writes about both the sewn creations of particular historical figures or individual stitchers, as well as, the collective efforts and histories of different groups and peoples. She moves across centuries and continents from medieval Europe to Southern America and the USA, from African tribes and Asian cultures to Scotland, her homeland, while simultaneously situating her own journey and experiences, creating an autobiographical thread that runs through all the chapters.

Hunter draws on different geographic regions and historical eras to demonstrate how needlework has contributed to communities, and religious and political movements, and how stitching has been used for survival, solace, commemoration, and a means pf protest and awareness-raising. She also makes visible the two aspects of needlework: work for public display and work of a more intimate and personal nature. Finally, she provides a plethora of examples to support her arguments.

She begins with the famous Bayeux Tapestry, “a precious cultural relic deemed worthy of special safeguarding by UNESCO.” The Bayeux Tapestry, an embroidered narrative cloth with 58 numbered scenes depicted in linen cloth and wool yarn, “the simplest of material,” tells the story of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and is “at heart a morality tale: a warning of the cost of betrayal.” Hunter traces the long history and adventures of the cloth. When Germany invaded France, Heinrich Himmler appropriated the tapestry and in 1944 he had it secreted in a basement of the Louvre; however, when his guards arrived to take the tapestry, the Louvre was already in the hands of the French Resistance, and thus, it remained in France. She suggests that it’s the tapestry’s story rather than its stitching that saved it, its political rather than cultural worth. She also considers the creators of the cloth and notes that even though their needlework might be of historical value, collected by museums, its anonymous women embroiderers remain uncelebrated. She conjures up an image of how these women would have sat for hours, months and years on end, their bodies aching and their eyes smarting with the fire smoke and candlelight, bent over a rectangular frame, some sewing upside down, under the pressure of an overseer.

In her chapter, Power, but also throughout the book, she succeeds in illustrating the intrinsic link between historical events and the art of stitches. She explores Mary, Queen of Scots’needlework story. Mary was a talented embroiderer, who created and displayed a magnificent “armoury of textiles” from her early years in France up to her execution in 1587. During her long years of captivity, her exquisite embroidery, embroidery written in secret codes, provided her with an outlet for her energy and creativity, gave her strength and carried her messages to the outside world. Her work became her emotional and political representative, and her stitched signatures asserted royal rights and claims. Hunter concludes that while Mary used needlework “to assert her sovereign power and campaign for her reinstatement, perhaps there also lay behind her stitching a more basic human impulse: to maintain self-control, create order and exercise choice among the tumult and humiliation of her life.”

Another example of this intricate link between political events, needlework and art, concerns the suffragettes’ deliberate decision, in the early 20th century, to create and carry banners “sewn in ravishing needlework, employing the most beautiful of fabrics — brocades, silks, damasks, and velvets — and using materials deliberately displaced from the privacy of the drawing room to the public arena of demonstration.” Mary Lowndes, for instance, “set up the Artists’ Suffrage League to supply the suffragette cause with bold, eye-catching campaigning artwork.” In 1911 one of Ann Macbeth’s banners was embroidered with eighty signatures of suffragettes that had been incarcerated and force fed in Holloway Prison. Towards the end of the book Hunter notes how stitched signatures are the physical marks of individual or collective insistence on being recognised and how signing textiles amplifies individual voices. She writes: “… people have embroidered their signatures on textiles to register their existence or record a common trauma in indelible sewing which leaves a lasting impression.”

In her chapter Frailty, Hunter explores needle work as a means of healing, recovery, and mere survival. She provides examples of people, women and men, in severe physical and / or mental pain that were able through sewing to find a voice, retain their sense of identity or sense of purpose and record events or personal experience. John Craske, for instance, was a third-generation fisherman, who during WWI caught influenza, which developed into a brain abscess. He was hospitalised, briefly moved to a lunatic asylum, and then sent back home incapacitated, to his wife, prey to episodes of amnesia. He painted small objects and boats to make a living, but when he became increasingly bed-ridden and couldn’t paint lying down, his wife taught him some rudimentary embroidery stitches. Through sewing, John discovered that cloth and thread allowed him to create the texture of the sea, which he loved so much, and the softness of sand dunes, even more tangibly than paint. Near the end of his life he began work on his most ambitious embroidery, The Evacuation of Dunkirk, a panorama of war pandemonium.

During, and after World War I, sewing provided support and healing to soldiers suffering with PTSD, then known as shell shock. Hunter notes that for the men who returned home from the carnage of the First World War, new approaches to healing were necessary, and so occupational therapy was born. She writes: “Handicrafts played a major role in therapeutic post-war rehabilitation. Through a coalition of government, voluntary and medical authorities, artists and craft workers were recruited to organise projects, workshops, exhibitions and commissions…..” and even though sewing “seemed the least likely candidate for male recuperation, yet it was embroidery that became the absorbing occupation for thousands of ex-servicemen, affording them not just the satisfaction of skilled accomplishment, but also a means to boost self-worth and earn a little income.”

In her chapter, Captivity, Hunter refers to humanitarian Elizabeth Fry, who is credited with first introducing needlework into prisons, as an antidote to powerlessness and means of creative self-expression. A century later, during the Second World War, at the fall of the Singapore to the Japanese in 1942, women prisoners of war used sewing as a subterfuge to stay in contact with their men, to resist and retain a sense of identity.The conditions were dire and dehumanizing, and uncertainty and malnutrition, brutality, disease and death were everyday experiences. Ethel Mulvaney suggested they make patchwork quilts, which they convinced their captors were humanitarian gifts to comfort patients in the prison hospital. Each small square was to have a sewn autograph and a personal image. Some were made by girls aged 8 to 16. One girl’s most subversive piece was an image of the Japanese flag, which she entitled The Flag of Tyranny. Hunter comments that even though its discovery would have meant punishment and possible execution, she still stitched out her truth.

Many men also sewed in the Second World War POW camps. Sewing kits known as a ‘housewife,’were included in the occupational parcels provided to soldiers by the Red Cross. Major Alexis Casdaglis ran sewing classes for fellow prisoners in his camp in Germany. Hunter writes: “He unravelled wool from old jumpers to cross-stitch defiance,” and sent embroideries to his son and family via Portugal, a neutral country. More recently, writer, Tracy Chevalier, commissioned The Sleep Quilt, which is entirely stitched and quilted by prisoners, mostly male, in some of Britain’s toughest jails. Fine Cell Work is the charity that made the quilt possible. Each of the 63 squares explores what sleep means in prison. Sleep has a great significance in prisons because it is that more difficult to find, in these noisy, hot and cramped environments. Also, for some it is a moment of escape and peace, but for others a return to all that hurts or they most regret in life [See at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx_0VQ4Vj78].

Esther Krintz and her younger sister survived the Holocaust and the unfortnate fate of her whole family by pretending to be Catholics and hiding. Hunter tells us that we know her story because she sewed it down. Long after the events, when living in America with her family she created her beautiful embroided memoir, choosing “sewing as an act of restoration.” She has included the scene when the Nazis arrived in Mniszek in the fall of 1939, her mother in her apron standing in front of her house with the lace curtained windows, her grandfather’s shoe lying where it had fallen off his foot as he was dragged by the Nazis, she and her sister in their pretty frocks and plaited hair witnessing the scene. Needlework takes time and requires patience and care. The process must have been painful and one of remembering, feeling, commemoration, sublimation of the pain into something beautiful, and also, creating a visual history for future generations.

Hunter reminds us that during the German occupation of Holland women had played an equally courageous role as men through civilian resistance. In 1946 many new women’s organisations were formed. During the war Mies Boissevain-van Lennep had helped Jewish citizens and as a consequence had her house raided by the Nazis. Her husband, four children and nephew were all killed, and she was incarcerated in a camp, in which by 1945 over 90,000 women and children had died. Hunter writes that after the war Mies called on women to make what she called the ‘skirt of life’ or the ‘liberation skirt.’ This commemorative skirt was made of old, colourful patches, sewn on to an older skirt so that the original background disappeared. The women were to weave the pattern of their life into their skirt, and the hem had to consist of orange triangles with the date May “5^th, 1945” and the dates of national holidays, on which the skirt was worn, sewn into it.

In her chapter on Identity, Hunter claims that “embroidery is often the last remnant of identity to be salvaged by the dispossessed.” She describes how displaced Palestinian women in refugee camps, initially, safeguarded their particular village stitches, but then began to mix styles indicating the change that had taken place, and also, the need to strengthen a national identity or consciousness. The Hmong, an Asian ethnic group that have faced “centuries of ethnic division, warfare and enforced migration,” have told their stories of rural life, village bombardments, jungle marches, the treacherous crossing of the Mekong River and meagre existence in refugee camp,” through story cloths. Women in these contexts also sew to earn a little income. Hunter claims that needlework is often used as a first step to empowering women to determine ways to improve their status and diminish the social controls and economic dependency that limit their well-being and progress; however, she adds that their motive is not solely financial because embroidery and sewing re-thread a sense of identity, reclaim a culture, and keep future generations in touch with their heritage.

Under Pinochet’s harsh rule in Chile women created colourful arpilleras, embroideries sewn on burlap, to send word to the outside world of deprivation and the suppression of human rights, and to tell the stories of kidnapped family members. At first, the regime overlooked this activity as innocent craft-making, and not tools of subversion, but once they became aware of what was actually going on, women were followed and houses were raided. She also discusses how oppressors’ assertion of power has frequently been enforced through the suppression of traditional dress.When, for instance, the Soviet Union repressed the embroidering of ethnic designs and symbols and the wearing of national costume in Ukraine, they succeeded in “engineer[ing] a natural loss of embroidery practice and knowledge,” which had to be reclaimed and adapted to contemporary times after independence. She examines the frequent detrimental effects of missionary or imperial incursions that forced changes to indigenous dress, crafts and traditions in Africa, the Herero tribe, in particular. And in China the Cultural Revolution banned what was termed the Four Old Things: old customs, old culture, old ideas and old habits, and an obligatory uniformity in dress was imposed.

In her chapter, Connection, Hunter writes about the 18^th century “billet books” from London’s Foundling Hospital. Mothers, mostly impoverished and unmarried, who left their newborns there were “encouraged to leave tokens, both as a memento and as proof of parentage” in case they were ever able to come back for their children. These tokens were tiny, just an inch or two of cloth snipped from the mother’s clothes. She writes: “Many are grimed in dirt, some thinned with wear, most dulled by poverty. . . . One child was left a pale blue satin-soft rosette. In the company of the other, more austere tokens, it appeared as luxuriant as a full-blown rose.” Hunter conxludes that the result is an intensely heartbreaking record of “that moment of choosing, of mothers deciding what remnant of themselves to leave, how best to communicate love, regret, hope, a small explanation to the child they will never see again,” but one woman, Sarah Bender, was able to come back eight years later, “clutching her half of an embroidered heart and was reunited with her son.”

She opens her chapter, Place, by referring to Scottish singer and story gatherer Alison McMorland’s 1994 project on the island of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides, in which she recorded the memories of the island’s oldest residents. These recollections were then transformed first into a painting by Edinburgh based artist, Kate Downie, and then into a textile by Hebridean spinner, weaver and dyer, Flora McDonald. In the same chapter Hunter talks about 18th-century stitched globes and maps sewn by schoolgirls that had gained popularity from 1770 onwards in Europe and North America, in an age when geography, “a narrative that explored the cultural, economic, religious and hierarchical social organisation of different continents,” was an important part of the school curriculum and there was “a growing appetite for lists, for quantitative rather than qualitative data, for precise details of size and scale.” Additionally, Hunter writes that in America embroidery was to play a significant role in recording its altered consciousness after its independence, and that girls were invited through education to have a place in the civic evolution of their country. It was through embroidery that they first made their mark. She also refers to more recent community map making, and suggests that “In community map-making, time can conflate: it is possible to layer knowledge and memory, insert lost landmarks, reinstate hidden paths, reinstall the ghosts of vanished architecture.”

Through her community work with groups from different cultures in dofferent countries, Hunter has found that “When a cultural language is threatened, or forbidden, its distinct vocabulary is often preserved through needlework as an alternative visual script. When the Welsh language was banned in Welsh schools, people conserved it on sewn samplers.” She has observed that the loss of culture, when people have, for instance, been forcibly removed from their homeland, is not relinquished by people, but translated into other forms. She writes: “So it was with African American slaves: they kept hold of cultural memory by translating it into mediums where it could be kept safe.” She considers the siginificance of place in the “syncopated, free-spirited” quilts made by enslaved people in North America. Not many slave quilts have survived, since they were made with cheap or already worn fabric; however, two that have survived were made by Harriet Powers, born in 1837. They are “a fusion of American quilt-making, Christian imagery and African traditions,” and are known as The Bible Quilt and The Pictorial Quilt. Hunter notes that they offer a unique insight into the visual vocabulary of enslaved women and provide indisputable evidence that African American slaves carried their visual culture with them and used sewing to preserve it.

In her reference to Judy Chicago’s famous installation, The Dinner Party, Hunter comments that the significance of the artists designs and commissioned embroidery got lost in the mostly male critical fixation on the dinner plates, but the plates were only a part of this overall work, which also included “large fabric runners to each place setting which referenced–symbolically and pictorially–each woman’s chronological place in history and provided greater insight to their narratives.” Each runner was researched and a wide variety of needlework techniques were used and many embroiders were employed. For instance, the runner, dedicated to the female Egyptian pharaoh, Hatsepsut, was embroided with hieroglyphic characters and it took two years to complete.

Hunter also sheds lights on the working conditions of embroiders and seamstresses over different historical periods, and includes elements like economics, class and race in her discussion. In her chapter, Work, she focuses on major shifts that were brought about in the working lives of people who worked with fabric and thread, during specific eras, and the “increasing public concern about the inhumane conditions suffered by the working poor” in Britain, Scotland and Irleand. She also discusses the changes that the invention of the sewing machine brought about, which didn’t ultimately free people from labor, but instead changed the pace and nature of the work. On the one hand, it did give women an opportunity for independence, financial freedom, and the possibility to run their own workshops. On the other hand, women lost the sociability that needleworkers had enjoyed because until the invention of the sewing machine, sewing had mostly been companionable, whether women worked in group settings or at home with family. Now it became a solitary occupation at home, or the toil of factory workers sewing amid the clang and clatter of machinery. Also, sewing machines rather than alleviating exploitation exacerbated it. In the textile industries women were cheaper labor and largely un-unionised. Hunter quotes Karl Marx, who in his book, Das Kapital, foresaw the devastation the arrival of the sewing machine would wreak on textile workers.

She comments that time and sexism have been needlework’s two great antagonists, due to the inherent fragility of these works of art made of thread and fabric, that are vulnerable to fading, fraying and tearing, and to museum curators’s tendency to reject pieces and collections that often get lost for ever. At other instances, women’s achievements, have either been subsumed into their male partners’ careers, or otherwise discounted and ignored. In her chapter, Value, Hunter expands on the lives and achievements of three artists Mary Delany, Mary Knowles and Mary Linwood, who “crossed the threshold of the exclusive world of male fine art to revitalise the artistic and commercial value of sewn art. They attracted royal patronage, exhibited widely, and made money and reputations as artists. But their time in the sun was temporary, their sewn masterpieces now forgotten.” Charles Dickens wrote a poignant elegy after a visit he made to see Linwood’s textural re-interpretations of the masterpieces of Gainsborough or Rubens offered by her needle painting.

In this chapter, Hunter traces the gender politics and history of the importance and value of needlework. In the 19^th century, for instance, soldiers and tailors restored needlework’s value as an artistic pursuit; however, these men chose not to call themselves ‘embroiderers.’ Stokes, for instance, a war veteran and invalid, illustrated The Battle of Cairo in nearly 10,000 scraps of fabric, which he had stitched together while ‘in a lying position.’ Hunter notes that these works were not only an exemplar of male artistry and industry; they were also made to support a movement that advocated sobriety amongst the working classes. In particular after the Crimean War, in which both sides suffered cataclysmic losses, there was an escalating alcohol addiction amongst soldiers, and needlework was fostered as an alternative to drink.

In her chapter, Art, she traces the history, mostly in Scotland, of the elevation of needlework to art needlework. She claims that art was emphatically a male preserve and women had been barred from membership of art institutions, societies and clubs, and excluded from the Royal Academy in Britain. They were restricted observers of the world they lived in and with few opportunities to interpret it through their art. She writes: “Women on the cusp of the twentieth century were intent on broadening their professional and political horizons and with the suffragette movement gathering momentum, the endeavours of Glasgow’s aspiring women artists were lending support to a wider social change by using their art to make the talents and achievements of women more visible.” Now, she writes, an individualistic stamp and exploration of materials and their effect were encouraged, and Jessie Newbery, among many others, an active supporter of the suffragette cause became involved in initiatives to bolster the place of women in society and secure visibility for women’s art. Hunter claims that Newbery heralded a new consciousness of the sensual potential of surface stitchery, unloosed from tradition.

Hunter weaves her own story into each chapter, especially, in the last one with the title, Voice. She reflects on the question: “Why did my mother, so hard-pressed with the toil of housework and the rearing of four children, take time to sit patiently by my side and induct me in the intricacies of embroidery….?” And responds: “I believe now that she wanted to find a way to keep me occupied. Although never boisterous, I was forged from a curious spirit, ever questioning, wanting to explore the small world around me. My inquisitiveness claimed an excessive share of her attention. The absorption of needlework encouraged me to be stiller, quieter. But it also gave me another way to express myself.” I pondered on whether to situate my own relavant experiences and reflections on the links between me and a generation gone, my mother and aunts, and my primary school crafts teacher, but decided against it due to the length of the post. In some sense, needle and thread “stitch” generations together through the passing down of both creations and skills, from mothers to daughters. Maybe I will return to this, as it turns out, interesting and broader than I thought topic, in the future.

In this chapter Hunter expands on the possibilities of needle and thread as a visual language and the power it has to give people a voice, but also on the ways that oppressors have appropriated sewing to disempower and diminish others. For instance, sewing was used by the Nazis to silence a people. One of their strategies was “destruction through work.” In one context, in 1940 the Nazis corralled over 160,000 Jews, children included, who were forced to sew from morning till evening with only one daily ration of 700 calories. By 1945 few had survived. She also mentions that in 1631, John Taylor advised “the tempering of women’s speech through their needlework.” An exhortation, she writes, that “was zealously seized upon by the educators of schoolgirls, as an effective way to temper the supposedly febrile female spirit.”

I think that after reading the book one becomes much more aware of the great potential of fabric, needle and thread. Summarily, needlework can: become a metaphor for life, record history, convey complex social information, conserve memory, protect and preserve personal and collective testimonies, trace out a map, convey a prayer, celebrate a culture, commemorate lives lived and lost, heal and empower, provide a means to create art, generate income, support women’s independence, give voice, proclaim a manifesto, preserve a cultural language, and maintain identity. It can also be a means of protest and documentation. Hunter writes that during apartheid in South Africa, the resistance fighter Ruth First was the first white woman to be incarcerated in solitary confinement for 117 days. By the time she was assassinated in 1982 she had published a short autobiography in which she documented her days of sensory deprivation and the significance of her embroidery to maintain her identity and express her sense of self. Finally, it can serve as a link between generations: “Needlework which remained within families or tribal groups was cherished as emotional and cultural connectors between generations.”

.Ignorance   /  ΄Αγνοια                                                                 Edited: June 10th, 2025

“If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.” Thomas Jefferson

“The main scourge of humanity is not ignorance, because the ignorant often have excuses, but the refusal to know.” Simone de Beauvoir

“You will search the world over and not find a non-superstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution….” From The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom,

“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding…… Albert Camus

Today’s post is about ignorance and Peter Burke’s book, Ignorance: A Global History (2023). Peter Burke is a British polymath, historian, professor and writer.

Burke begins by telling us that in the past the ignorance of individuals was due to the fact that too little information was circulating in societies, and some knowledge was ‘precarious’ and hidden away because the authorities in both church and state rejected it. On the other hand, today it is abundance that has become a problem. This he says is known as ‘information overload’. People experience a deluge of information and are often unable to select what is useful and of value, which is described as ‘filter failure’. Therefore, he writes: “our so-called ‘information age’ enables the spread of ignorance just as much,” and so even though collectively, we know more than ever before, individually, we do not know more than our predecessors.

Burke believes that we need to think of knowledges and ignorances in the plural, and he discusses the necessity of ignorance in helping us shape our sense of what it means to know, the fact that knowing is not only passive, but also selective and active, and that ignoring facilitates our acquiring new knowledge, given the limits of our time and attention, and our individual and collective capacity to understand. We also need to decide what to keep, promote or discard. For instance, libraries and archives are the technologies by which we produce both knowledge and ignorance, hopefully, in a wise and judicious manner.

In the course of Burke’s exploration we encounter diverse, conflicting or / and complementary views around ignorance: Kant’s motto “Dare to know” as a reaction to forces that viewed curiosity and seeking knowkedge as a mortal sin, botanist Bernardin Saint-Pierre’s praise of ignorance on the grounds that it stimulates the imagination.  Philosopher John Rawl argued in favour of the ‘veil of ignorance’, a blindness to race, class, nation and gender that helps us see other people as morally equal beings. The term ‘virtuous’ ignorance has been used to describe the renunciation of research on nuclear weapons. Another kind of virtuous ignorance is the confidentiality and respect for privacy expected from doctors and other professionls, and democracy is protected by the secrecy of ballots, and so on. However, Burke concludes that the examples discussed in this book suggest that the negative consequences of ignorance generally outweigh the positive ones.

The book is divideδ into two basic parts. At the outset of his book Burke provides some beliefs and theories about ignorance and identifies the methodological problem of studying ignorance. In the first part he traces nearly every area of human activity and knowledge, mostly European, but not entirely, because as he explains that’s what he knows best, unified by the theme of what is not known / ignorance. Burke explores specialized fields like philosophy, religion, history, geography, natural sciences and the field of medicine. He makes his points through a plethora of historical examples and exploratory questions:

Who is ignorant of What, When, Where and with What Consequences? Who wants Whom not to know What and for What Reasons? Who has the power (the opportunities and the resources) to do this and what are the consequences of their actions? Or Who leaked What to Whom…..for What Purposes and with What Consequences?

At the end of the book Burke has provided a non exhaustive long list of types of ignorance. For instance he defines agnoiology, which is the study of ignorance, and agnotology, which is the study of the production of ignorance.  He explains that many forms of agnotology derive from social criticism, and the fact that ignorance can result from the operations of power, inequality, and prejudice. Studies have been conducted on the deliberate social production and maintenance of ignorance in our time. He explores the social forces that produce ignorance and the campaigns launched by industry and government to disinform the public, and further adds, that those with power often lack the knowledges they need, while those who possess those knowledges lack power. He explores public ignorance and claims that the absence or deprivation’ of knowledge, often invisible to the ignorant individual or group, is a form of blindness that has massive consequences. This is true both in our personal lives and the public arena since ignorance and secrets can often function as means of control and manipulation.

Examples are provided in relation to how ignorance runs through every historian’s work. Burke writes: “On the map of the past, there are many blank spaces.”  In relation to historiography he examines various aspects and problems, such as, bias and lack of evidence, the reliability of sources, the problem of standpoints, the need for critical thought and discernment of myths from true events. He describes the various phases it has gone through from the necessity for radical doubt to the discovery of the ‘selective ignorance’ and the realization that history has been written for the most part by elites, about elites and for elites. Burke writes the 20^th century focused on political events from the perspective of the leaders, but this kind of history was rejected by economic historians, who focused on structures and trends rather than events or individuals. Later social historians rejected economic history as reductionist, and in the1960s, history from below, focused on ordinary people, the ruled rather than the rulers, including the writers’ point of view, their lives and sufferings. He also attends closely to women’s past exclusion from scholarly professions, which had until recently led to ignorance of women’s social and cultural contributions. This reality has to some extent and in some places been partly remedied through the influence of feminist historians.

Burke goes on to discuss how ignorance plays various roles in both the theory and the practice of religion, and notes that “religion itself might be described as a response to human ignorance.” Historically, he adds, ignorance has been imputed to others, and others’ beliefs are often treated as an absence of knowledge rather than a different or rival knowledge. Agnostics [a Greek term meaning lack of spiritual knowledge], following the example of Socrates, impute ignorance to themselves. He also refers to the ignorance of the doctrines of people’s own religion on the part of both the clergy and the laity. At some point in history due to the immense ignorance of the lower clergy Lutheran and Calvinist pastors, for instance, were expected to have studied at university. He discusses the ignorance of Europeans about the peoples and places they conquered, and adds, that what has been discussed less than the ignorance of the laity is the reciprocal ignorance of the three groups involved in this process: the local or indigenous people, the missionaries in the field [although in the 20^th century, there was a shift and many missionaries might be described as amateur anthropologists], and their superiors at their desks at home [organizational ignorance].

Burke highlights the fact that in the absence of reliable knowledge, humans are prone to constructing stories to fill in the gaps, and while ignorance about the religion of others is often coupled with contempt, it has also, in different historical contexts lead to the spread of rumours. However, the circulation of rumours can solidify into long-lasting myths, beliefs or stereotypes about other groups or other religions leading to accusations and hostility.  Across eras rumours and false accusations have been used to legitimize violence, wars or pogroms against particular individuals and groups.

Finally, he traces the most important shifts in religious knowledge / ignorance over the centuries. In medieval Christendom, many had faith, but few knew much about their religion. From 1500 to 1900 there were movements of evangelization both in the Christian and in the Muslim worlds. And although since 1900 religious knowledge has more widely available than ever before, it has come to have a low priority, and more and more people, in the West mostly, choose to be ignorant of religion, in contrast to what is happening in the Islamic world, where a religious reformation began spreading widely in the later twentieth century.

In chapter seven Burke tells us that some of the most important studies of the history of ignorance have focused on the natural sciences. He quotes many thinkers to assert this point. The British physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, wrote that “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.” More recently, in 2004, in his Nobel Prize speech, the American theoretical physicist David Gross said: “The questions we ask today are more profound and more interesting than those asked years ago when I was a student . . . back then we did not possess enough knowledge to be intelligently ignorant . . . I am happy to report that there is no evidence that we are running out of our most important resource – ignorance.”

Ignorance associated with science can be studied in relation to the history of science; its place in new research; the management of ignorance; resistance to new knowledge by both scientists and the laity; the ignorance of the laity, the loss of knowledge, and more. Scientists inevitably practise a ‘selective’ or ‘specified’ ignorance: the deliberate ignoring of some of the data in order to concentrate on a particular problem. Burke mentions that the neuroscientist Larry Abbott has talked about the importance of choosing ‘precisely where along the frontier of ignorance I want [he wants] to work’. He also refers to the medical field, which is a field in which ignorance was actually studied relatively early. He briefly touches upon how vast ignorance is in this field, and the reasons for this: the constant new knowledge and discoveries concerning illnesses, causes, remedies and diagnostic tools, physicians’ work overload, or disinterest in acquiring new information and invested interests.

Ignorance can be intentional and wilful, in other words not wanting to know, an‘active’ ignorance in the sense of resistance to certain ideas, especially new ones. Frequently, members of an older generation are unwilling to abandon theories in which they have invested their professional capital. One example in the book is that of a few well-known scientists, in the 1980s and 1990s, who cast doubt in public on what was becoming the scientific consensus about four threats to life and health in particular: the link between smoking and cancer, the problem of acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer, and the trend towards global warming. Their wilful ignorance was not the healthy and necessary initial scepticism of new discoveries or theories, but the consistent ignorance of information that pointed to what they did not want to know. They were all politically conservative with links to industry and government.

Two other aspects of willful ignorance are: what he refers to as the chronic lack of funding the humanities [undone social science], and the collective ignoring of problems and areas of research that are left unfunded [undone science]. Burkes says this ‘systematic non production of knowledge’ illustrates the politics of science, the competition between groups with different agendas (government, industry, NGOs, foundations, universities, and so on). Ignorance can also be the result of loss of knowledge, a kind of collective amnesia. Burke provides examples, a classic case being Greek science (including mathematics), lost to western Europeans in the early Middle Ages, or the fate of the research on the transmission of hereditary traits in plants carried out by Gregor Mendel, who formulated his principles of transmission in a paper published in 1866. However, the international scientific community paid little notice to, so these discoveries had to be made all over again a generation later by a German biologist and a Dutch botanist.

Finally, Burke traces the shifts in knowledge and ignorance in this field. He writes that there was a movement for the popularization of natural science in the later 18th century, when some leading scientists participated in the spreading of scientific knowledge through lectures and performances that often included demonstrations of experiments carried out in public for lay audiences. He mentions, for instance, T.H. Huxley’s lecture on a piece of chalk to the working men of Norwich in 1868, introducing them to chemistry, geology and palaeontology.  There was some lay resistance to scientific theories, notably Darwin’s theory of evolution; however, Burke claims that despite the resistance to Darwin, the 19th century now appears to have been a golden age for lay knowledge of science, followed by a decline ever since.

More recent forms of popularization are scientific magazines, the dissemination of scientific knowledge via journalism, television programmes and documentaries, and via the Internet. He mentions that today there are gowing groups of citizens, who are mobilizing science in campaigns to defend the environment, to protect wildlife, to warn about the effects of climate change, and so on. However; Burke notes that science is becoming “more inaccessible to the general public than before, so much so that it maybe no exageration to speak of the rapid growth of ignorance in this large domain. This is due to many reasons, like the ever-increasing specialization, the increasing complexity and remoteness of scientific experiments from everyday life, political reasons and the ‘warfare of science with theology.”

There are many aspects through which to explore ignorance of geography, too. Burke begins with the ignorance of outsiders, the colonizers. He claims that the declaration of ignorance about the existence of indigenous peoples was convenient and was probably feigned. He writes: “Whether or not the phrase ‘no one’s land’ was in use, the assumption behind it was certainly current among white settlers from the 16th to the 19th centuries.” He explains that colonists did not want to know about the use of the land before their arrival, by the First Peoples in the Americas, the Maori in New Zealand and Aboriginal groups in Australia. This deliberate unawareness has been described as ‘the conceptual erasure of those societies that had been there before’.

However, there was also true ignorance of geography and many erroneous beliefs about places and cultures, like: the assumption that the earth was flat and square; the belief in medieval Europe that the world was divided into three continents;  the belief of the ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy that Scandinavia was an island; the common belief in ancient Greece and Rome that non-human peoples, the ‘Plinian races’ as they are now known could be found in distant parts of the world, stories that would have been a deterrent to travel; the fact that in Sicily, as late as the 1950s, an investigator discovered that some peasants did not know where Russia was, or that Columbus actually re-discovered America because around the year 1000, a Norse explorer, Leif Erikson, had reached part of the North American coast that became known as ‘Vinland’, a knowledge that was eventually lost; the belief that the Amazons, mentioned in the 5th century BCE in the Histories of Herodotus, were declared found by Columbus and other explorers in a variety of places; the myth of El Doarado; the ignorance of the existence of China and its civilization in Europe, and the Chinese ignorance of Europe, and on and on.

Moreover, often travelogues were innacurate and Burke claims that some writers “may have gone too far in the direction of fiction without admitting this to their readers.” Censorship often impacted what information was allowed to circulate or reach other places. Travelling, especially by land, was difficult and dangerous and some countries were officially closed to foreigners by the authorities, for political and religious reasons. For instance, Copernicus was introduced to the Chinese after the  ban on teaching heliocentrism was lifted in 1757, Korea, nicknamed ‘the Hermit Kingdom,’remained almost unknown in the West until it became a protectorate of Japan in 1905, and Mekka and Lhasa, resisted European knowledge and visitors well into the nineteenth century. Even when discoveries were made, often travel accounts were not allowed to be published and maps often remained secret [cartographic silences]. Even in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, some regimes and corporations have continued the policy of secrecy.

Finally, Burke tells us that in the 21^st century ignorance of the earth’s geography has been greatly reduced through exploration and scientific research, “our remaining ignorance and its tragic consequences concern nuclear weapons, pesticides, pollution, the decline of biodiversity, and above all by forecasts of climate change.” He quotes Bill McKibben, who wrote that one reason we mostly ignored the natural world around us is that ‘it has always been there and we presumed it always would’, but the threat of destruction, as a result of industrialization, awakened interest in what was threatened. Global warming and its denial, “has revealed new ignorance about the earth as well as presenting new challenges to all its inhabitants.”

In the second part of the book we read about the consequences of ignorance throughout history and across contexts. We soon become aware of how these can be dangerous, even lethal. Education, says Burke, is essential and less costly. This part of the book contains plethora disastrous forms of ignorance organized by types of human activity: ignorance in war, in business, in politics, and the strategic ignorance involved in industrial and political espionage and conspiracy.

Burke introduces the idea of relative ignorance in relation to war, claiming that “In war, both sides suffer from ignorance. …… The fundamental question whether battles and wars can be won by planning remains controversial.” Stendhal, Tolstoy and Zola, all wrote about the chaos and ignorance concerning war, and probably war is a combination of crass ignorance on many fronts, arrogance and a sense of superiority, deception, planning, adequate supplies and knowledge. He provides many historical examples to support his claims. For instance, he refers to Hitler’s lost touch with reality, the ‘multiple ignorances’ of the Vietnam War from the military to the press to the public, the lies, arrogance and disregard of the Vietnamese resistance to foreign rule and anti-colonialism stance.

In his chapter on ignorance in business, Burke explores ignorance in trade, industry and agriculture, organizational ignorance, advertising, unconscious desires, consumer ignorance and vulnerability, ‘financial illiteracy’ and ‘accounting illiteracy,’ the spreading of false rumours, the ignorance of investors and bursting of bubbles, which in serious cases like the South Sea Bubble in 1920 led to a wave of suicides and the fall of the government in England, clandestine business and the need of feigned ignorance.  Concerning agriculture, for instance, he refers to the ignorance that colonists had of the lands that had been colonized with dire consequences; the frequent campaigns to improve agriculture from above, and the dangers of imposing changes in defiance of local knowledge and the experience of those who worked the land; the aggressive plowing of grasslands or the emphasis on short term self-interest.

Burke begins his chapter on politics and ignorance by saying that Michel Foucault’s work has helped us to understand the relation between power and knowledge more clearly than before, but examining the relationship between power and ignorance is also illuminating. He explores the ignorance of ordinary people, which he claims  is an asset for more or less authoritarian regimes, and an anxiety for more or less democratic states, the ignorance of rulers and politicians, and the organizational ignorance built into the political system, the machinery of government. He also provides examples to explain strategic ignorance. One being that of The American Party that had acquired the name of‘The Know Nothings’ because members were advised to say ‘I know nothing’ when faced with questions about their organization.

He provides examples of views promoting the importance of keeping vast numbers of people uneducated and ignorant held, for instance, by Voltaire, initially, and rulers like Knig Louis XIII and Richelieu, King Frederick VI of Denmark, the Ottoman sultan or oriental despotism, and many more since. Polish journalist R. Kapuscinski’s (cited in the book) wrote in his report on Iran under the rule of the shah that “A dictatorship depends for its existence on the ignorance of the mob; that’s why all dictators take such pains to cultivate that ignorance.” Burke refers to William Lovett, who in the 19^th century proposed a reform of education and wrote: “the ignorance of the masses has made them in all ages the slaves of the enlightened and cunning.”

Ignorance and the spreading of rumours create problems both in people’s personal lives and bigger systems like democracies. John Kennedy had said that “the educated citizen knows that . . . only an educated and informed people will be a free people…(ctied in Burke).” Burke refers to ‘rational ignorance’ coined by Anthony Downs to describe those who think that informing themselves about politics is not worth the trouble, and how voters for Donald Trump make a series of choices to avoid knowledge that contradicts their opinions. He refers to what has been termed by philosopher Philip Kitcher ‘vulgar democracy’ described as a ‘tyranny of ignorance’. He gives examples of ‘voter ignorance,’ like, for instance, the widespread ignorance about the effects of Brexit. We could probably find examples of this type of ignorance in every country.

Concerning the rulers’ ignorance, Burke writes that the pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind. However, there are plenty of examples of rulers’ ignorance both in the more recent past and in our current era. He writes that even though today most prime ministers have studied economics or social sciences, practised law or have served as ministers, diplomats or mayors, and therefore, have some knowledge of politics, the problem of ignorance arises from the fact that professional training involves specialization, while the job of president or prime minister requires wide-ranging knowledge. He refers to a long list of heads of states, who displayed notorious ignorance of geography, other countries and foreign affairs, and their unwise or detrimental decisions as a result. Burke also discusses “imperial or colonial’ and neo-colonial ignorance, and their often tragic outcomes. The famines in Bengal, Ireland and Africa are examples of this type of ignorance combined with other factors.

Burke explains how many catastrophies often ensue from willful ignorance of business leaders and politicians, like for instance, Presidents Jaοr Bolsonaro or Donald Trump, [who also suffers from ignorance in its acute form, that of not knowing that he does not know], who both refused to respond to the COVID 19 pandemic and are failing to acknowledge or confront climate change. In his chapter on catastrophies he distinguishes between inevitable ignorance of the future & culpable ignorance and lack of preparation. He moves across historical eras to shed light on “too many cases in history of natural disasters striking after dangers had been ignored.” It seems that we repeatedly neglect to prepare or take measures to prevent or reduce the impact of natural disasters. In areas vulnerable to floods or earthquakes lack of preparation is culpable. Burke writes that the more recent natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, “revealed what might be called the ‘social distribution’ of ignorance,” a recurrent theme in history, when local knowledge is ignored not at one’s own peril, but at the peril of others.

Moreover, we neglect to take measures to prevent catastrophic events like Chernobyl. In 17^th and 18^th century Northern Europe, even though most houses were constructed of wood, arrangements to fight fires were insufficient, and thus, the burning of whole towns was common. All the great and traumatic famines in history point to the fact that they are both natural and man made disasters, a combination of ignorance, arrogance, indifference and incompetence. Burke also explores many examples of the consequences of ignorance that come from the long history of outbreak of disease and pandemics from the14^th century outbreak of bubonic plague to the Coronavirus, more recently. True ignorance, but also willful ignorance, hubris and resistance to new knowledge and technologies, have all been part of the story, and history seems to repeat itself. For instance, quarantine was resisted by business in the 19^th century cholera outbreak as in the 2020 pandemic. Ignorance and outdated beliefs have across time led to what is called the ‘Scapegoat Syndrome’. As for resistance against preventive measures, it goes back in time. For instance, he writes that inoculation against smallpox, “a practice long known in China and the Middle East, became the subject of vigorous debate before it was adopted in 18^th century Europe.”  Later in 1904 in Rio de Janeiro it led to the ‘Vaccine Revolt.’  Burke, however, warns against simplistic explanations, adding that it was not only the result of ignorance due to illiteracy and poverty, but an angry response to interference in people’s lives by the authorities and a clash between different cultures.

In the last few chapters of the book more important themes are explored, like secrets and lies in the world of science and scholarship, in politics and industry, denial and cover-ups of disasters, massacres and scandals, taboo historical events omitted from school history textbooks, deception of the masses by rulers, censorship and surveillance, and whistleblowers supporting transparency and divulging critical information to the public, in the age of the Internet. Publications have in different eras generally been subjected to censorship by authorities, to a lesser or greater degree depending on the country. In early Europe there was to a double censorship, both religious and political. However, writers have often been able to pass their messages or criticism of authoritarian regimes through the use of allegories, where animals stand for humans, by writing about other similar historical eras and events or by publications that are made and distributed secretly by hand.

Burke says that denial is a defence mechanism for both individuals and institutions, but public denial is also a form of disinformation. Denial and cover-ups go back a long way, but denial of atrocities in warfare, genocides, nuclear accidents, global warming became more frequent or at least better known, in the 20^th century. The Holocaust denial, one of the better known examples, is still with us even though by 1942 millions of Germans knew what was going on in camps. Suppression of research (tobacco companies), encouraging disbelief in what has been exposed, spreading doubt or false rumours, forged documents, are all methods of what has been described as the ‘manufacture’ of ignorance and the maintenance of ignorance.

Disinformation includes damaging others’ reputation, interfering in elections of another country, deliberate propagation of misleading information, which Burke writes: “has exploded in the past century, driven both by new technologies for disseminating information …..  and by the increased sophistication of those who would mislead us.” As for the prospects of truth, he notes: “The current proliferation of ‘fake news’ is an alarming one, but the prospects for truth are not completely black. Just as cover-ups are followed by uncovering, so the lies current in the media are regularly exposed by fact-checking agencies on their websites.”

And while scholars are interested in ignorance, business writers and consultants use ignorance and our fear of uncertainty to gain. We are all ignorant of the future and techniques for managing this ignorance and the fears connected to this uncertainty can prove lucrative for some. Burke remarks “if we read the predictions of futurologists decades after they have been made, the failures spring to our eyes.” Rather than our consuming futurologists’ predictions he suggests it would be wiser to study the past, not because the past is a source of precedent on which we can base our own predictions, but on the common sense grounds that it could prevent us repeating mistakes. Ignorance of history on the part of voters can function like a kind of collective amnesia with important consequences. Burke provides examples like the case of Spain. He writes that the return to democracy after the death of Franco was assisted by memories of the Civil War, and later when the Left was defeated largely because it was divided, memories of that defeat encouraged different parties to work together in the 1970s; however, now (2021) that the memory of the Civil War has faded, Spanish democracy appears to be becoming more fragile. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the phrase immunizing memory believing that memory is a better protective measure than law.

Epilogue

Inevitably, each book we select to read, each film we watch, each field we decide to study or specialize in, each language or activity we choose to learn and engage with, necessitates our omitting or ignoring something else, and the more one learns and knows the more one becomes aware of the immensity of one’s ignorance. As knowledge shifts so does ignorance. And no matter how much we know or are capable of learning, our ignorance [even for the very smart, the highly educated, and polymaths], will always be greater than any knowledge we can hope to acquire in the short span of a human life.

It might be wise then to try to be somewhat selective as to where we want to spend our energy and time, in terms of the things we want to know, which is not that easy in an age where we are bombarded by information, and real and fake news, not to mention the overwhelming knowledge that has been acquired. As for my recent choice of this book, I have felt that it was worth the time and energy I invested in it. It increased my knowledge, refreshed my memory, and also, brought my ignorance to the forefront of my awareness.

Also, it is useful to bear in mind that everybody has knowledge, irrespectively of literacy and education, but of different things, and everyone is ignorant to a lesser or greater degree. Burke quotes Mark Twain, who said that ‘We are all ignorant, just about different things.’ And we can choose either to be generous in sharing knowledge or to withhold information that could otherwise benefit others and facilitate their decision making. Lies and the withholding of important information can often function either as tools of control or lead individuals or masses of people astray, decreasing their possibility of wise choice.