The Marriage Plot

I've just finished reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel, The Marriage Plot. I haven’t read his earlier feted books, Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, and although this latest offering is less outlandish in its subject matter (to the disappointment of some reviewers), it will probably have strong resonances for anyone studying or teaching at Oxford.

The Marriage Plot is simply an exploration of the experiences of three undergraduates at the Ivy League Brown University, respectively majoring in English literature, Religious Studies and Biology. It covers two years of their lives – their final year at university, and the first year out in the big bad world in America, France and Calcutta in early 1980s. For me, one of book’s most impressive achievements is the way it explores (or: reminds you of) what is like to be in your final year at an elite university, in an environment which is both intellectually and emotionally intense. The protagonists Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard are caught up in friendship networks which are at times hugely supportive, and at times claustrophobic and judgemental; they are making epic decisions about their personal relationships which may shape the rest of their lives, and they’re under enormous pressure to decide where to go after Brown, and to put those plans for future success in motion before they even write their final papers. And in the midst of all this, they are not only hugely intellectually engaged with their studies (carrying their Derrida and Foucault around with them like Bibles), but challenged by them, trying to apply the electrifying ideas they are exposed to in the classroom to their own lives, attempting to adjust as their intellectual sense of the wider world around them shifts day by day. If Donna Tartt’s thriller The Secret History evoked life in a small Liberal Arts college splendidly, Marriage Plot is in a different league.

I have no idea how far this story of the early 1980s, of bright graduates fleeing abroad to escape an American recession, would chime with our own students here. But I do think that for Oxford tutors, with all our pedagogic and pastoral responsibilities, this book should be highly recommended reading – a bracing fictional reminder not only of how big and deep our undergraduates' lives are outside the tutorial or classroom, but also of the enormous impact that the ideas we introduce students to can have after they have left the room, whether they agree with them or not.

The Archive Trip

At the coalface - the Archive of the Archdiocese of Poznan

On sabbatical leave and armed with a travel grant from the Oxford History Faculty, I spent last week in the western Polish city of Poznań, on a research trip for my current book project (ahead of the Euro 2012 football fans who will descend on the city en masse in June). I was there to look at 16C sources in the Archdiocesan Archive, which I could see clearly as my Ryanair flight swooped down over the city – a square, red-roofed building on Poznan’s impressive cathedral island, in the Warta River.

If a conference is the most socially exhausting experience in academic life (speaking to people almost non-stop from 8am to 11pm), the archive trip is the academic equivalent of solitary confinement – multiple days on your own in a foreign city where you know precisely nobody. It’s not like a business trip, because although sitting in remote archives is serious professional work for historians, there is no secretary organising your travel, no local office or clients responsible for looking after you, far less providing entertainment and welcome. The inhabitants of Poznań I’d come to see have been dead for 500 years, leaving only traces in 16C ecclesiastical records and the (heavily refurbished) buildings in which they lived.

Poznań at least has the advantage of being a major city with an attractive historic centre, so I was able to browse bookshops, peer at old churches, sit in cafes and conduct a tour of restaurants outside archive opening hours. The most psychologically testing archive trips I’ve had have been to pretty but very small Polish towns, like Gniezno or Włocławek, spending 7-15 days alone in a place which the Rough Guide suggests could be comprehensively toured in a couple of hours. Eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in the same hotel restaurant, watched by the same four silent waiters, reading the same novel at every meal for days or weeks at a stretch, quickly feels like Groundhog Day. After a short spell of this, with 16C clerical handwriting swimming before your eyes, speaking to nobody all day long apart from the archivist and the aforementioned waiters, you start to wonder if you’re going a little bit crazy. And even on archive trips to sunny and vibrant places like Poznań, no matter how well the research itself is going at the coalface of crumbling 16C papers, there are always two voices in my head - one saying ‘how exotic and exciting this is!’ and the another, slightly more persistent, saying ‘what an earth am I doing here?’.

Casting Spells

Florence in action...
Photo by Tangentical, reproduced under the
Creative Commons Licence.

Last week, I bought Ceremonials, the new album by Florence + the Machine. I find listening to this group slightly peculiar, ever since I discovered that Florence is the daughter of an eminent art historian of the Italian Renaissance, whose books we study for our Florence (spot the connection) & Venice Special Subject.

Ceremonials is probably the first time that a musical track has strongly evoked for me a manuscript I’ve worked with. One of the strangest songs on this highly melodic but slightly creepy album is Seven Devils. The Guardian music critic has written that part of the appeal of Florence Welsh’s first album lay in her air of witchery. As far as I can tell, Seven Devils is a song about necromancy and casting spells. ‘Seven devils all around me, seven devils in my house, holy water cannot help you now…’, with music that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror film.

When I listen to this in my kitchen, it instantly conjures up British Library MS Sloane 3854. This is a 14C Latin manuscript, possibly from Germany, which contains a rich collection of medieval spells. A while back, I did some research on divination at the Polish royal court, and ended up consulting this text to look at examples of the genre. MS Sloane 3854 contained diagrams and clear instructions (“kneel at this point”) showing how to draw chalk circles, invoke the names of devils, and conjure up spirits. I didn’t like it at all – not because I believed that the disconcertingly well-thumbed book in my hands had the power to summon dark supernatural forces, but because the manuscript had clearly been handled (possibly in medieval German forests!) by people who thought that it would, and who wished to do so. It was the human impulses behind it which made it a slightly alarming artefact. But I think the British Library could do worse than to have an atmospheric little corner of its Manuscript Reading Room reserved for scholars consulting texts of medieval magic, with Florence Welch’s Ceremonials gently piped in the background. 

Living Above the Shop

Comfortable canons' houses, Kanonicza Street, Cracow
Photo by denvilles duo,  reproduced under the Creative Commons licence.

Although the impact of the recession is clear to see in Little Clarendon Street (Oxford’s boutique shopping street, next to Somerville), where there are plenty of empty shop-fronts, the impressive amount of building work taking place in and around the college suggests a more buoyant story. There is currently construction on all four sides of Somerville – to the north, as the Maths Institute goes up on the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter; to the east, where St. Aloysius’ church is putting up an extension; to the south, where a new Tesco is taking shape, and finally on the western perimeter, where college itself is renovating and extending its Grade II Listed Wolfson building.

All this has been so noisy, that I have fled my Wolfson room and taken refuge in a Fellows’ set, or flat, at the top of the Victorian Maitland building. Moving here has been a reminder of how much the lifestyle of Oxford dons has changed. Although there are still plenty of Fellows who live in accommodation provided by, or within, their college, it is increasingly a minority experience. Nonetheless, living in is, historically, how dons have lived – giving tutorials, writing books, receiving visitors and sleeping in the same connected set of rooms. In my borrowed Maitland set, for example, I have at my disposal an airy living room, study, fridge-freezer and two bathrooms, should I need them. Dwelling in college is still the classic, romanticised perception of how Oxford dons live and should live, celebrated in C.P Snow novels and Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue. Every year, our Freshers look dimly disappointed when I tell them that I don’t live inside Somerville’s walls, but actually come into Oxford every day by train from a major town in the Thames Valley; the don as commuter seems incongruous and unglamorous.

Living on the college site is of course an ongoing legacy of Oxford’s medieval past, and the medieval conception of a university as a community, of celibate and ordained men, similar to a cathedral chapter or monastic house. When I read the 15C minutes of the Cracow cathedral chapter, a surprising portion of their deliberations consist of squabbles about who got to live in which of the chapter’s stunning houses on Kanonicza Street, at the foot of the royal castle. In the Loire Valley, in the hilltop town of Montreuil-Bellay, you can still see the luxurious 15C bath-house provided for the collegiate canons who lived on site. My Maitland set might have a washing machine instead of a steam room, but it is a keen reminder of the ways in which Oxford colleges have for centuries functioned, and still strive to function, as living communities of academics and students, even if the norms of that shared life are constantly evolving.

The Borgias

Alexander VI goes to Hollywood...
Photo from Wikipedia Commons, Pinturicchio fresco.

On Easter Sunday, with cheeky timing, the first episode of season 2 of The Borgias, a lavish Showtime series starring Jeremy Irons, was broadcast in North America. I received a box set of the first series/season 1 for Christmas, and have been watching my way through it in recent weeks.

The infamous pontificate of the chubby and jolly Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503), has long stood at the heart of my interests as a historian, ever since I studied the (now sadly defunct) Oxford final-year special subject on Renaissance Papal Rome. The questions about the 15C which most interested me when applying for graduate study are essentially the same ones which underpin my current research: what forces in the medieval church produced a pontificate of such celebrated seediness, sexual scandal and military brutality? How were the antics of the Borgia dynasty in Rome perceived further afield in Christendom, in kingdoms like Poland, and what effect did they have on the church and its development there?

For these reasons, I curl up on my sofa with a certain amount of curiosity, trepidation and relish to watch my Borgia DVDs. The series is of course sensationalised (but not much!), but I’ve not so far found it trashy, factually footloose or two-dimensional in the way that what little I could watch of The Tudors was. A lot of the characterisations, particularly of Alexander VI’s children, seem pretty spot-on. There is an earnest attempt to educate the audience in the intricate geopolitics of 15C Italy – whether it’s Rodrigo Borgia giving his youngest son a laboured geography lesson in front of a giant map, or the pope drawing a political diagram on his mistress’ thigh for her edification. In particular, the series’ writer Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), has stuck surprisingly close to the sources – a lot of the characters and events depicted in The Borgias seem to come straight from the pages of the diary of Johannes Burchard, our chief source for the court of Alexander VI, and Burchard himself is given various cameos. In the series’ presentation of the political and military history of Italy, there are various echoes of Francesco Guicciardini’s grand narrative of the period, the Storia d’Italia.

Watching the series has, perhaps because of its surprising historical fidelities, therefore felt slightly strange. Seeing on screen, with cinematic clarity, events which as a historian you have been visualising in your head for years feels like an act of necromancy – like watching spirits raised and speaking before your eyes. So much of what historians do is rooted in imagination (‘historical imagination’ is indeed one of the official criteria for Oxford undergraduate entry), that to have someone else do the imagining for you, on a multi-million dollar budget, is an unexpectedly unsettling experience.

Ships Past



Photo by omblod



Although I’m not particularly well versed in maritime history, I’ve noticed that there have been plenty of historic ships in the news this week. The new Titanic Belfast visitor centre has been heavily publicised ahead of its opening on March 31st. There is even a large poster at Oxford station, the startling building – evoking the doomed ship and its iceberg - looming over the passing trains. It’s interesting to see that Titanic Belfast has galleries about the city’s shipbuilding past and the vessel itself, but a good part of its focus seems to be on Titanic’s afterlife, on human interaction with the wreck and also ‘myths and legends’. In that sense, this new centre (which insists on calling itself an experience, rather than a museum) appears to take as one of its main subjects historical consciousness, popular and cinematic memory, and even (although they’d never call it that) historiography, the shifting interpretations and responses to the events of April 1912. It’s an arresting and rather postmodern approach – very different, say, to the fine but earnest Mary Rose visitor centre in Portsmouth. There the ghostly wreck itself, half-glimpsed in a hall dark with water-spray, is presented above all as a window onto Tudor social history, as a way of recovering the everyday life of the unjustly forgotten common man via his flutes and medicine pots… an approach which in itself reflects an earlier set of historians’ agendas.

This week, it was also announced that the good ship City of Adelaide is to return to Australia. This ship, which carried an estimated 250,000 visitors and settlers to Australia from its construction in 1864, now sits ignominiously rotting in Irvine in Scotland, having been rescued from the waters of the Clyde, in which it sank in 1991. The City of Adelaide is finally going back to Port Adelaide, for a projected new visitor centre, its preservation secured. It’s interesting to see the varied ways in which we treat the physical remains of ships (as relics, or junk), and to be reminded of how central ships are to national and urban stories, of how certain vessels become iconic, and of the very different ways in which we choose to remember them and decide what they represent about ourselves and our pasts.

'The City of Adelaide', Irvine
Photo copyright wfmillar, reproduced under Creative Commons license.

Spin the Wheel

Now that Hilary term is over, and the undergraduates (barring our revising Finalists) have gone home, it is time for tutors to head back to the library. In the Bodleian’s Upper Reading Room, I’ve been working on early Polish polemics against the Reformation. This has involved both reading about early modern practices of handling and producing books, while also handling a large quantity of printed books myself, as a 21C scholar. At my desk in the Bodleian, I’ve feel as I’ve been literally juggling books – trying to consult 3 volumes of the Jagiellonian Library catalogue simultaneously, while typing on my laptop at the same time. At the British Library, there are laminated A3 sheets on the desks which sternly warn readers of all the things they should not to do to books – such as weighing them down with a mobile phone, or a hefty dictionary, to keep their pages open. I sometimes feel as if I literally don’t have enough hands.

Handy? Ramelli's bookwheel
Image from Wikipedia Commons.

Medieval and Renaissance scholars had this problem too, and I think their solutions were a little more ingenious than the crumbling, green-grey foam book rests which are sometimes made available to researchers in British libraries. Looking at Dora Thornton’s The Scholar in His Study (1997) last week, the illustrations leapt out at me. There was a 14C illumination of an Italian cardinal sat at his desk, in a chair with a bookcase built into its back. Not very comfortable, perhaps, but handy. There were woodcuts showing men craned over giant book rests, which held 3-4 works open at the same time, in a nice straight line, so you could scan across them all. There were images of book wheels, which displayed volumes open at the requisite page, but on a little carousel like those you find today in greetings card shops. One of the most grandiose solutions to the simultaneous consultation of multiple books was Agostino Ramelli’s 1588 design – a contraption reminiscent of a giant hamster wheel, which the scholar at his (or, theoretically, her) desk could manually rotate, to see mounted books whizz past their face. (This design impressed the Princeton historian Anthony Grafton so much, he had one constructed for his office). In some ways, our 21C book technologies, with digitalisation and e-readers, are breathtakingly sophisticated; in others, when the only bookholder on sale in Blackwells on Broad Street is a 30cm strip of blue plastic, perhaps we lack a little imagination.