Last week I began a three-part series with A Bayesian Analysis of Susannah Rees’s Ishtar-in-the-Manosphere Thesis. Today I will continue with the second random selection from my test set, Kate Loveman’s “Women and the History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary” in The Historical Journal (2022): 1-23. Yes, another random selection in feminist history, but another good one (though a warning: references to rape will come up in this discussion). On what my project is, what I’m aiming for here and how I settled on these selections, see my previous article. But the gist of it is: I’m describing some real, peer-reviewed papers in history and showing how “under the hood” as-it-were their entire argument is Bayesian, and then illuminating what this can tell us about how to evaluate (or even challenge) claims about history, and why that’s important.

The Historical Journal has a proper ISSN and though it isn’t indexed by the DOAJ, it is published by Cambridge University, which is about as prestigious as you can get, and it ranks in the top quartile of all journals worldwide; it also ranks quite well among open source history journals, and doesn’t do too bad even among history journals altogether. Kate Loveman is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Leicester (pr. leh·str), specializing in the 17th and 18th centuries, and in particular Samuel Pepys, the subject of the selected paper, which is a work in literary studies. Loveman even composed one of the leading peer-reviewed monographs on Pepys today: Samuel Pepys and his Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability, 1660-1703 (Oxford University 2015); and also a peer-reviewed monograph on another subject relevant to her thesis in the paper I’m examining: Reading Fictions, 1660-1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture. So this could not be any more in Loveman’s wheelhouse. We can expect this to be top work.

The Thesis

There is a treasure trove of diverse assertions and revelations in this article, almost countless “theses” one could analyze, though they are all well-supported factually and methodologically. Much of the function of this article is to add to a database of knowledge from which more premises and conclusions can be derived; the “brickwork” of history, as I call it in my editorial on the social function of the historian that I referenced last time. But the central over-arching thesis of this article is that when using the Diary of Samuel Pepys, historically a British naval administrator and member of Parliament, we will be “much better equipped to realize [this] source’s potential” as a source of information about history “if we understand the methods employed across its history to protect its contents from readers, to present the document to posterity, and to magnify its writer’s reputation,” and in particular with respect to women.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys is a renowned work. So this is not an obscure subject, though it is entirely outside my fields of expertise. I hadn’t heard of it until reading this paper and checking up on its content. Wikipedia currently describes the matter well enough to quote:

The detailed private diary that Pepys kept from 1660 until 1669 was first published in the 19th century and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War, and the Great Fire of London.

…

He recorded his daily life for almost ten years. This record of a decade of Pepys’s life is more than a million words long and is often regarded as Britain’s most celebrated diary. Pepys has been called the greatest diarist of all time due to his frankness in writing concerning his own weaknesses and the accuracy with which he records events of daily British life and major events in the 17th century

I should note that this is the kind of historical source we have nothing like from the ancient world—but would dearly wish to have. There were such resources. Tacitus referenced using the Memoirs of several public figures (women among them); none survive. Pliny the Younger mentioned a massive set of notes his father made in producing his many books, which notebooks were considered a priceless collection in and of themselves; none survive. And while we have the “published” Diary of Marcus Aurelius (the so-called Meditations), that was more a polished collection of thoughts to himself and not an “accurate record of historical events”; but there would have been a Diary answering more to that description, the imperial Acta Diurna and the Archive of Correspondence (a collection of copies of every letter sent and received by the Emperor). The closest thing we have left are a small number of collections of letters (principally, the correspondence of Pliny the Younger and of his literary predecessor Cicero). There would have been a great many more of those. Indeed, for example, we know the Apostle Paul’s “archive of correspondence” was substantially larger than the snippets we have, and in fact the Epistles appear to be a “cut and paste” collage of sections extracted from that archive, rather than the distinct letters they are presented as in the Bible today. We would know a great deal more about early Christian history (and more even about ancient Roman history) if we had that original archive complete.

Loveman’s thesis dovetails with these in that historians have also noted that the curation history of these texts of Paul’s should be taken into account when relying on them as a source: what they omit, what they polish, what they do to “frame” what they say, all affects what conclusions can be drawn from the data—and as such are themselves data. Because these were always meant for publication (even if to a limited audience); the authors knew that, and framed what they said accordingly. These were not “candid” sources. Though they were constrained by context (an author could not say things that would undermine their own goals or arguments, and thus had to be conscious of their audience’s knowledge—so they couldn’t just “make things up willy nilly”). Likewise, subsequent to an author’s composition, further editing choices by later operators come in, which must also be taken into account.

One could note how much these kinds of facts Loveman is relating also influenced, indeed outright distorted, modern understanding of Hitler’s so-called Table Talk. But to the majority of my readers this phenomenon will be most prominently observed in the Epistles of Paul, where what we are allowed to see from his archive is extremely curated (in some cases, outright doctored), and by persons not necessarily sharing the same goals or interests as Paul. There is usable data in the fact of what has been omitted, and what has been altered, or even attempted to be altered—since we have manuscript evidence of the ways scribes tried changing what Paul said that didn’t survive selection into the canon, and that tells us things about what they thought he did or didn’t actually know or say. And there is data in the structure of Paul’s rhetoric: what he says, how he says it—and what he chooses not to say. This is what Loveman is illuminating to be the case as well for Pepys. Although his Diary did not (like Paul’s epistolary) undergo hand copying, much less through many layers of propagandists and ideologues, and thus did not suffer from signal distortion, Loveman notes some ways it nevertheless did suffer until more recently (e.g. until the 1980s, only edited versions of the texts were made available to the public).

The Case

This paper is essentially flawless from a historian’s perspective, so I haven’t any criticism. It hits all the right marks: it is measured and critical, it makes more than adequate use of citations to scholarship and primary evidence, it is focused and clear, and doesn’t drop any balls. As to its thesis: “It is a premise of this article,” Loveman writes, “that our understanding of this source,” Pepys’s famed Diary, “should be informed by sharper reflection on Pepys’s methods of protection when diary-keeping and his decisions when preserving it.” For example, “Taking the material that he was most keen to keep private, his ‘amours’, I [shall] examine the diary’s accounts of sexual activity and how these have been read,” because “Pepys’s diary has sometimes been said to offer near ‘scientific impartiality in his self-observation’, along with ‘full objective reporting’ and ‘a fair record’ of his sexual encounters, although close reading suggests otherwise.” This claim shall be the focus of today’s analysis.

There are several minor aims as well, such as “tracking Pepys’s mother’s family,” and his engagement with his lower class relations generally, which no scholars prior had adequately done. Loveman cites numerous studies of Pepys’s family ancestry as proof of that point, which is not impossible but is improbable she could do unless her statement about this were true. Likewise she discusses how Pepys arranged to have his Diary archived by his alma mater, Magdalene College (where it remains to this day), including the unsung woman on whom the fulfillment of his last wishes ultimately depended, all based on surviving wills and documents, where the evidence establishing Loveman’s account is about as strong as one could ever have in history. As I discussed last time, one should marvel at how much more evidence and documentation we have for modern history compared to ancient—for example, we have no such documentation, not even mention of it, with respect to how and in whose hands Paul’s epistolary archive survived him. Ultimately, as with last week’s article, this one is another treasure trove of information and scholarly bibliography on numerous related topics. But I will not linger on a Bayesian analysis of these side-points, and instead focus only on her central point.

Loveman notes that Pepys’s Diary “contains valuable information on the history of early modern women,” such that “a focus on two strands—the women who feature in Pepys’s accounts of his sex life” and “his maternal kin—can in turn prove valuable in assessing this influential source on the period, and the histories we choose to tell using it.” So Loveman claims she can extract more and new information about roughly half the human population in England (or at least the London area) in the period covered by the Diary, which is an important project. This lapse is being remedied generally of late by a whole turn in academic history toward researching under-studied minorities that I noted last time. Do know that I always use the word “minorities” not in a colloquial numerical sense but in the proper sense employed in political science: groups with a minority of power in a society; which thus includes women, particularly in 17th century England. But crucial to Loveman’s core thesis, part of the work one must do to extract this information from Pepys’s Diary is attend to omissions and curation in the text, rather than simply trust the text we have is “scientifically accurate” and “complete.”

Loveman sets forth many examples establishing this point. In broad scope, she shows how Pepys ensured only a rare few scholars could even access his Diary: it was restricted to one room at one college; it was written in short-hand (all but unreadable to any but the most trained or determined); and it at convenient times employed numerous languages besides English, leaving a “polyglot” text, almost a “code language,” obscuring simple descriptions of some things. All of this is unlikely unless, as Loveman concludes, “Pepys preserved his diary under conditions which encouraged readers to approach it as a worthy historical source, while controlling how it could be read and by whom.” The Magdalene college master could also control what was published from it, and indeed, when a transcription was first published, to “protect readers’ sensibilities and Pepys’s reputation” editors “excised anything” that they “deemed offensive or trivial, including most of Pepys’s personal life.”

Much the same will have been done to Paul’s Epistles with respect to dogma. Anything its preservers noticed that they didn’t like, will have been excised. But unlike Paul, we have access to Pepys’s original, unexpurgated, autograph copies; which have since been transcribed and published in full (though it took until literally the 1980s to complete that task). And yet even then concealment remains, partly in consequence of Pepys’s deliberate design, because:

…even [in this new and complete transcription] Pepys’s sexual activities stay cloaked, for the polyglot is not translated at any point. This has had lasting consequences for the diary’s reception. Even dedicated readers struggle to understand these passages and there is [even] a tendency among historians who quote the polyglot not to translate it, which begins to look very much like collective avoidance of a tricky task.

Loveman gives an example and translates it, well proving her point, and later gets to many others. Again, from a Bayesian perspective, the probability of the evidence presented existing is as near to zero as makes no odds unless her interpretation of why it’s like that were correct. Likewise, at that time such a practice is unusual enough but for similar efforts to conceal the indelicate (both in Pepys’s Diary and elsewhere in his period and place) that she also has prior probability on her side. For example, I can add that a student of ancient history will notice that Loeb editions of ancient texts, which have the ancient language on the left side and the English translation on the right, that were produced in the early 20th century still do this: leaving any discussion of sex untranslated, simply repeating the Greek or Latin mid-text on the English side. Only the most determined and educated could thus access it. Only later translations, usually those produced by the 1980s and later, ceased this ridiculous practice.

Here Loveman dutifully mentions competing theories to hers, based on a few counter-examples (not all Pepys’s discussions of sex are like this; and he uses this technique a few other times not relating to sex), and then explains why they don’t carry. Her argument is again implicitly Bayesian. For example, she notes how Pepys’s “measures show that concerns about prospective readers developed as he wrote,” because “In January 1664, the sexual passages in shorthand began to include French; in June 1665, he introduced polyglot shorthand; in May 1667, he started inserting extraneous letters into his English shorthand and, nine days later, started adding those extraneous letters to polyglot shorthand, further complicating transliteration.” This is improbable unless her take is right: Pepys is starting to think he should make this stuff more inaccessible, and coming up with increasingly devious ways to make it so.

Hence anyone who wanted to access anything in Pepys’s Diary “would need to be welcomed by his alma mater, to navigate his library, to master the shorthand, and to know foreign languages—and they would need to be sufficiently interested in the library’s owner to bother working carefully through his diary.” Thus, we can conclude it’s most likely that “when Pepys decided to leave his journal behind him, he had conceived an array of measures to try and ensure that the first readers of his manuscripts, and those who controlled his papers’ circulation, would be sympathetic to their creator’s interests and protective of his reputation.” This is a good example of inferring an author’s intentions, their unstated thoughts and desires, from their evident behavior, the peculiar choices they made that deviate from what would “usually” be done in their time, or be done if these concerns were not present in their mind. And by deviating from such “usual” things are therefore improbable on any other explanation.

Additionally, when it comes to sex (unlike many other topics addressed in his Diary), “Pepys, for
all his unusual explicitness and detail, is frequently euphemistic, obfuscating, and mitigating in ways that are hard fully to identify,” and this, Loveman documents, has led to some less than critical treatments of this content by other historians. So she focuses on that failing to pick up what is not being often-enough noticed or admitted: that much of this content does not support the conclusion that his liaisons were always or even typically consensual. He was essentially raping under-age servant girls and even family friends and the wives of clients, and on a more regular basis than his Diary records (as Loveman confirms by quoting Pepys’s own references to doing so). Though Pepys does not include details like the ages of his targets or usually even their feelings in the matter (if they’d even have admitted them), Loveman includes information enough to allow strong inferences about such details as their very young age and lack of full consent. There are also instances “when he encountered resistance from women and girls that he felt was significant enough to merit registering,” corroborating this conclusion, even though he himself does not imagine it that way.

The evidence Loveman presents is again improbable (it is improbable that Pepys would write all what he does) unless her take is correct. Alternative explanations (“excuses” one might contrive) suffer either from not explaining the evidence (not making it even as probable as, much less more probable than, it is on Loveman’s hypothesis) or relying on prior probabilities too low to score even the same, much less greater posterior probability (as “excuse-making” always fails to do generally, when no evidence for those excuses being true is available; and in this case, there doesn’t appear to be any); or, of course, both. Loveman presents enough examples, in fact, to well establish Pepys was a serial rapist. And not only that, but that at no time was anything ever done about it. His targets appear never to have told anyone. In at least one case Pepys says he paid them off; but in others, one can infer that society simply wasn’t capable of treating such women well had they come forward, thus impressing their silence. Like his servant girls: they needed the job, not the disgrace. So “it is what it is” was the likely refrain. Which tells us something perhaps not surprising but nevertheless now securely true about the life of women (and the attitudes of men) in that period and place. (One could surely document how this only gradually changed in centuries since, and still hasn’t fully; which brings us to a point of contact with last week’s study, which addressed contemporary manosphere ideology.)

More importantly, Pepys’s Diary reveals this to be a normal part of life at the time, and not just a peculiarity of his own deviancy, a point Loveman documents with additional evidence from the cultural context (like the rarity of rape and sexual assault cases at law, and even rarer convictions), and also with entries by Pepys. For example, according to his own account:

In 1667, Doll Lane (one of Pepys’s willing partners), came to Pepys and her sister ‘blubbering and swearing’ against Captain van den Anker who had ‘pulled her into a stable by the Dog tavern and there did tumble her and toss her; calling him all the rogues and toads in the world’. Pepys felt Lane’s objections were hollow since ‘ella [she] hath suffered me to do anything with her a hundred times’. Pepys’s sexual language of being ‘kind’, ‘touching’, and ‘tumbling’ emphasized his indulgence and playfulness, while masking coercion and violence; meanwhile, Lane’s claims of assault he regarded as exemplifying a woman’s ‘falseness’, not because he thought there had been no violence, but because she had no moral right to protest.

No rape or assault was reported. It was considered enough for Lane to simply complain of the incident to her sister, and her illicit lover, Pepys himself, yet even he was unsympathetic, essentially calling her a slut who deserved it. The whole narrative implies a normalcy to this kind of thing, that this is just what women put up with constantly (or at least, women of the lower classes, who were Pepys’s predator pool; but that means, most women), and that there wasn’t really anything to do about it, other than vent. Certainly, as Pepys’s response implies, men weren’t interested in even taking it seriously—a generalization confirmed by Loveman’s summary of the legal history of rape and assault prosecutions reveals (it wasn’t just one rapist’s disinterest here). When even Pepys records other such attacks by men on women, not just his own, we have evidence how ordinary it was.

As an example illustrating the point, by his own account Pepys persisted in an effort to seduce the wife of a man seeking from him patronage and promotion, and after many protests she eventually agreed to some ongoing sexual favors in exchange for his doing right by her husband, but that this stopped short of actual sex—so on more than one occasion Pepys describes forcibly raping her, even mentioning her violent resistance, one time so great as to have injured him (it sounds like she tried to break his finger; albeit to no avail, as he admits). The idea of a woman being coerced into sex to win favors for her husband or family sounds cliche, but here it is related as so normal Pepys was confident he could arrange it, and her agreement so pragmatic (meeting him “half way” as he might put it) that he ultimately had to take what he really wanted by force. Doubtful she ever told anyone, even her husband. There is certainly no record of it, or any repercussions. Loveman shows how his choices of vocabulary in this instance allow us to infer unspoken details of other encounters he describes with the same words.

Loveman then devotes a section of her article to all that can actually be gleaned, from the Diary and much more limited external evidence, of women in the Pepys family tree (almost none of whom bore that name), and how Pepys engaged with them as relations—generally instrumentally, seeing them as either useless (and thus to be avoided) or as potential fallbacks when he had need of assistance or services. He made particular use of their lower class status when he could (his own station was much above theirs). A principal example Loveman relates is how, when fearing a foreign invasion of London (and knowing himself a target for his high-level involvement in Royal Navy affairs), he had all his Archives and Diary cared for by a lower-class family of relation because few would know their connection to him, and he had loaned them money, so “Keeping his papers safe was one way to repay him,” but also, Loveman suggests, “likely they were selected” because “their poverty (and possible illiteracy) made it less likely that they would be able to exploit the papers’ contents.” Which is a credible hypothesis, albeit more difficult to prove than the rest (duly indicated by Loveman’s vocabulary of uncertainty here).

Conclusion

Loveman’s core thesis is that we can’t trust Pepys to be entirely honest or clear or detailed when matters would make him look bad, and she focuses on two examples of this relating to women: his affairs and rapes; and his interaction with women connected to him by family. She finds that through his omissions, admissions, euphemisms, and recorded behaviors less direct, we can establish facts about his life (and the lives of women generally in that time) that are not what historians extract from it when they simply treat the text as given, trusting Pepys to be a reliable narrator, and not asking what the backstory and motives must be to each case, because those are precisely the things Pepys is most coy about.

Loveman surveys the cultural background establishing her conclusions meet the requirements of having a reasonably higher prior probability than competing explanations of the same evidence. In short, what she concludes about Pepys fits his context, and thus is no extraordinary claim, but quite an ordinary one. And Loveman presents abundant direct evidence of the fact, from Pepys’s own Diary, evidence even item by item is unlikely on any other interpretation but hers (yet exactly what we expect if her thesis is true), but is far more so when considered together. The probability all this evidence would exist, as we have it, on any other theory of it is simply too low to credit. There really is no explanation of the data but that Pepys was a serial rapist who nevertheless thought unashamedly highly of himself. Alternatives suffer from either too low a prior (excuses for which there is no evidence, even as external commonplaces), or too low a likelihood (they would not likely cause Pepys to write the things he did). Loveman’s core thesis is thus securely established.

I’d set posterior odds on it at thousands to one, at the lowest. Because even if the prior were even-steven (it’s not), and even if Loveman had only five examples as evidence (she has more), and even if each were 20% likely to exist on some other cause than she hypothesizes (it’s nowhere near), then if no common cause explains them all (and given their diversity and independence as events, it couldn’t), that’s 1/1 x 5/1 x 5/1 x 5/1 x 5/1 x 5/1 = 3125/1, over three thousand to one odds on her being right. The actual odds therefore must be even better. These are rough estimates to be sure, but they measure the unmistakable. There is no way all this evidence would exist unless, indeed, Pepys was a serial rapist and kinship instrumentalist. Alternative theories predict more evidence would exist that doesn’t; and don’t predict the evidence that does exist, without piling on ad hoc suppositions, for each of which there is no evidence. There are only so many times you can make excuses, contrive some convoluted story, and each time a completely different set of same, to get a different result out of this data before you admit this just is not epistemically credible. And what this means in mathematical terms is as I related.

This in turn tells us what we would need to “refute” Loveman’s thesis, namely some actual evidence that her theory struggles to explain (thus, evidence that is improbable on her theory, but probable on yours), or some omitted background information that, once considered, alters our prior expectations of what would be usual on her thesis vs. yours. What makes her thesis sound is that there does not appear to be any such evidence. To the contrary, all the particular evidence, and all the background evidence, align with what is expected on her theory, and not on any other.

The comparison with Paul and the historicity of Jesus is less salacious but informative. We have long noted that Paul’s silences speak volumes, and are not as easy to explain as historicists aver (see Chapter 11 of On the Historicity of Jesus); and that his epistolary material was curated by early historicists, which impacts our assessment of what we can honestly expect to find in them. This is relevant data, in background knowledge b, that affects every epistemic probability we estimate. In Pepys’s case, the concealment was his own. He took several steps to hide his rapes, behind euphemism and elision, even polyglot and shorthand code, and by creating significant barriers to its access by others after his death. And yet later historians (even until recently) continued to fall in line with his wishes (first, omitting these details from a published transcription; then, by “believing” his version of events, calling what are plainly numerous rapes mere “liaisons” or “dalliances”).

In Paul’s case, it was mainly subsequent editors who did this, although we know some places where his silence or distortion was of his own design, such as his insistence, swearing up and down—one might even say protesting too much—that he never learned the gospel from any of the Christians he claims to have “persecuted,” but only from a revelation of Jesus himself (Galatians 1; cf. 1 Corinthians 15:8-10 and Philippians 3:6). Although one wonders what he was persecuting Christians for if he didn’t even know what they were preaching; and notably, Paul peculiarly avoids ever telling his readers what he persecuted them for, or what he did to those Christians, what “persecuting” them even meant. Just as Pepys rarely related what the women he had sex with thought or felt about it, or how instrumentally he viewed his lower class relations.

Notably, it can be expected that Pepys never imagined any woman would read his Diary, given all the barriers he set (verbally, institutionally); he could not have expected its eventual publication, much less an actual woman being an actual historian actually getting into the archive at Magdalene College and actually reading it. It seems to me that Pepys expected “boys club” protection, whereby a select few men could secretly admire his “conquests,” while simultaneously never letting anyone know about them who might take less kindly to the information. Which entails he knew the men of his time quite well, as history proves out. The secret was well kept for centuries. What he could not anticipate was a rising equality, affecting both the prevalence of women at that level of study and the prevalence of men not admiring his treatment of women once learning of it. Thus, context changes everything. Pepys acted within the context he knew, not anticipating the changes that would ensue. And knowing context of Pepys’s treatment of his Diary and its more sensitive subjects allows us to better understand its content. Yet if his Diary had merely been translated, and the original and all knowledge of it then lost, all this information about it would have been lost as well. Historians therefore must always attend to this information. Because even not having it is important information.