Beards : THeir Social Standing Religious Involvements Decorative Possibilities and Vallue in Offence and Defence Thorugh the Agss

Reynolds, Reginald

Published by Doubleday and Company, Garden City, 1949

About this Item

Hardcover 1st edition stated. In fabulous condition. Aside from a hint of edgeweaer, appears unread. No dj.Reginald Reynolds (1905?1958) was a British Quaker, left-wing writer, and anti-colonial activist whose range as an author was, by any measure, extraordinary. He served as an intermediary between Gandhi and the British government during the independence movement, co-edited British Pamphleteers with George Orwell, wrote a memoir, a quest for Gandhi, a book about African travel, and ? in what constitutes a small parallel body of work in comic cultural history ? produced Beards, its companion volume Beards: An Omnium Gatherum, and Beds: With Many Noteworthy Instances of Lying On, Under, or About Them. He was, by all accounts, a familiar figure in the British Library, pursuing the most delightfully bizarre references with formidable seriousness. Beards was first published in 1949 and reissued in paperback by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1976 as a Harvest Book. It runs to 301 pages. The book began, as Reynolds freely explains in the opening pages, from a puzzling declaration in some old text asserting a necessary correlation between hippophagy ? the eating of horse flesh ? pogonotrophy, the growing of beards, and possibly paganism. Rather than dismissing this as antiquarian nonsense, Reynolds spent what appears to have been a considerable portion of his scholarly life chasing it down, and the book that resulted is the monument to that chase. The tone throughout is deadpan mock-scholarship of the highest order ? a mode Reynolds had already deployed with considerable success in his earlier Cleanliness and Godliness ? but the learning behind the comedy is entirely genuine. The range of sources Reynolds consults and cites is formidable: patristic literature, papal decrees, canon law, medieval chronicles, Byzantine theological controversy, military history, anthropological records, and the full apparatus of pogonological scholarship, such as it is. The religious dimensions of the subject receive the most sustained treatment. The beard controversies of the early Christian church, the disputes between Eastern and Western clergy over shaving and the tonsure, the position of the Council of Carthage, the writings of Clement of Alexandria and numerous later authorities, and the role of beards in distinguishing Orthodox from Roman Catholic clergy are all examined with the care of a genuine ecclesiastical historian ? which, for the purposes of this book, Reynolds temporarily becomes. The Saracen question ? the use of beards as a marker in the Crusading context ? leads to one of the book's more alarming chapters, which a contemporary reviewer noted involved culinary instructions for a banquet at which shaved Saracen heads reportedly formed the centrepiece. Henry VIII and Charlemagne make appearances, as does Julian the Apostate's own complaint about his beard, the Misopogon. False beards in ancient Egypt, bearded women, side-whiskers as a distinct subcategory, and the role of the razor as a political instrument across multiple centuries all receive chapter-length attention. The New York Times reviewer of the first edition captured the book's method and manner with economy: Reynolds, the review noted, roars genially down the corridors of time shouting Beaver! Without splitting a hair, he writes of a tangled subject lucidly. He takes history on the chin. It remains one of the most entertaining works of British comic scholarship of the postwar period, and one that is, as Goodreads readers have repeatedly noted with some bewilderment, monstrously underserved by history.

Seller Inventory # 1013829

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Beards : THeir Social Standing Religious Involvements Decorative Possibilities and Vallue in Offence and Defence Thorugh the Agss
• Publisher: Doubleday and Company, Garden City
• Publication Date: 1949
• Language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Seller catalogs:
  • .Social Sciences - Sociology