tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8545565790730614962024-03-23T03:13:47.178-07:00Somerville HistorianNatalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.comBlogger131125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-57249928195868210682020-05-06T02:03:00.002-07:002020-05-06T02:03:27.726-07:00Postcard from Westerplatte, 2019<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This
week, the world remembers 75 years since VE day, the end of the Second World War
in Europe (May 8<sup>th</sup>, 1945). That sobering anniversary – which falls
in the midst of a quite different kind of global crisis – comes hot on the heels
of another grim anniversary marked back in September 2019: the 80<sup>th</sup>
anniversary of the outbreak of the war. Whereas the VE day anniversary takes
place under lockdown, the 1939-2019 commemorations occurred in what now seems a
very different moment in history, at the end of a long, hot summer, amidst
tourist crowds and international jet-setting by world leaders. The blog below
was written in Gdansk in September 2019, and it is posted now as a postcard, if
you will, from a recent-distant past.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Westerplatte, Poland</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In August 2019, international
dignitaries flew to Warsaw to mark the 80<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the
outbreak of World War Two. A parallel gathering of European city leaders,
including the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, was held in the Polish city of
Gdansk. They flew to Poland because the opening military clash of this war,
which would leave an estimated 70 million people dead, occurred just outside
the port-city, on a low-lying Baltic peninsula called Westerplatte. At around
4am on 1<sup>st</sup> September 1939, the German battleship <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Schleswig-Holstein</i> opened fire on a
Polish military depot at Westerplatte. Both countries had shared an uneasy
presence in the Free City of Danzig since the end of World War I, under the eye
of the League of Nations. The Polish forces at Westerplatte surrendered seven
days later, by which time most of their country had been overrun by invading
forces, and Great Britain too was at war.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Twentieth-first century Gdansk is today
a dynamic water-side hub, a popular destination for tourists and foreign
investment alike, with gourmet restaurants and gleaning hotels springing up
along its canals. The easiest way to see Westerplatte is to take a cruise,
slightly improbably, on one of the two replica pirate ships which dominate the
Gdansk summertime panorama, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Black
Pearl</i> (a nod to Hollywood) or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Lion</i> (a nod to a local galleon wrecked in the 17<sup>th</sup> century).
Tickets are sold by bored Polish girls sitting under an umbrella on the
quayside, departures are on the hour, and eager crowds push their way aboard,
as a string quartet lustily plays the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pirates
of the Caribbean </i>theme tune on a pavement nearby. The passengers are mix of
holidaying Polish families with toddlers, East Asian tourists, inebriated
stag-groups from Germany, and earnest history aficionados. As the ship turns on
its engines and pulls away with surprising speed, children explore the forecastle,
parents rush for good viewing seats, and many others head straight for the
giant bar in the hold. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Czarna Perla</i> – The Black Pearl – takes
you past the fourteenth-century red-brick spires and city-gates of
Gdansk/Danzig, past the striking new Museum of World War II, jutting out of the
ground like a crooked red tooth, and towards the historic shipyards where
Solidarity, and perhaps a new Europe, was born in the 1980s. The fully rigged,
beer-stocked pirate ship continues through a flat expanse of docks, cargo ships
and coal heaps, as it negotiates the last stages of the Vistula delta, a maze
of waterways and marshes which eventually ooze out into the Baltic, with its
sand spits and storms. The pirate ship, stag party in full swing and playing
with the plastic cannons, passes the late medieval brick lighthouse-cum-fort of
Wisloujscie, which for centuries guarded the entrance to Gdansk. And then,
abruptly, with no sea yet in sight, it reaches Westerplatte – there is a sign,
a ruined 1930s brick building, and a tiny quay with an ice-cream van. A wooded
park stretches along the shore. That’s it. Nearby a rust-streaked car-ferry is
moored, bound for Stockholm. Nobody much disembarks from the pirate
booze-cruise, the captain booms over the sound-system that this is the very
spot where World War Two began, and a live folk guitarist promptly starts
playing to cheer up any melancholy passengers. And then <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Black Pearl</i> turns back towards the cafes of Gdansk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
September 1939, the senior officer in command of the Polish base at
Westerplatte was Major Henry Sucharski. On his death-bed in Italy in 1945,
Sucharski recounted his experiences to the writer Melchior Wankowicz, who
novelised them in his hugely influential 1947 work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Westerplatte</i>.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"> </span>Accounts of
the battle remain inconsistent and confused. The Polish base suffered aerial
bombing, an attempted German landing, and much of the Polish artillery was soon
put out of action. On 7<sup>th</sup> September, after a long battle in the
muddy mouth of the Vistula, with some 60 combatants dead, the Polish forces
raised a white flag. Aided by Wankowicz’s stirring book, in post-war Poland
Westerplatte fast acquired near-mythical status, as a definitive site of 20<sup>th</sup>-century
Polish heroism, resistance and martyrdom. Today, Gdansk’s brand-new World War
Two Museum offers special guided boat trips to Westerplatte, ‘the site of the
global and Polish tragedy of September 1939’. Roger Moorhouse’s new account of
the September campaign, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/first-to-fight/roger-moorhouse/9781847924605">First to Fight:the Polish War of 1939</a></i>, published in 2019, will likely bring the
Westerplatte story afresh to new international readers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>At
the Gdansk commemorations in September 2019, wreaths were laid at Westerplatte,
followed by a debate between European city mayors entitled ‘Solidarity and
Peace: the City as a European Community’. The city’s streets were decked with
striking black ‘1939-1989-2019’ flags. Separate events were organised in Warsaw
– the seat of the nationalist Law & Justice party (PiS) government – and
cosmopolitan Danzig, whose most famous son Lech Walesa openly campaigns against
PiS, and where the murder in January 2019 of the city’s long-serving mayor
Pawel Adamowicz by an assailant allegedly inspired by far-right hate speech is
still a very raw memory. Adamowicz’s desk is on display, behind glass, in the
splendid Renaissance state rooms of Gdansk town hall. In the austere 14<sup>th</sup>-century
gothic basilica of St. Mary’s, modern pilgrims come to seek his grave.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the unseasonably hot Polish September of 2019, the ruins of Westerplatte are
not faced by Nazi cruisers, but by mock pirate ships. In 1509, the Swiss
scholar Sebastian Brandt published his classic satire, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ship of Fools</i>, a book no doubt much read in the
German-speaking, intellectually fertile and wonderfully wealthy Gdansk/Danzig
of the early sixteenth-century. In its own way, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Czarna Perla</i> is perhaps a kind of 21<sup>st</sup>-century
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Narrenschiff</i>. Its late-summer
passengers, with their ice-creams and Budweisers, half-look at Westerplatte and
the black hole it signifies in our collective histories, and half look-away.
Whether these global passengers are listening to the explicit historical
commentary dispensed by the replica ship’s audio system, above the hub-bub of
music and chatter, is an open question. For there are many histories, and many
Europes, lurking in the heavily dredged and wreck-strewn waters of the Gdansk
channel; and a labyrinth of possible European futures. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The <i>Golden Lion</i>, Gdansk</td></tr>
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<br />Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com72tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-38983710837330127672020-04-30T02:00:00.000-07:002020-04-30T02:00:12.624-07:00Gesture - from Botticelli to Microsoft Teams<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_an-ihfXxeHg2PInzFre9rjkuc5oZwrRSLrBgjLNfVEvO9ttErPeLwxt9Ywb4-_c9vi10jiYHmX2Y2hMQR5Ur2eEE9WYTMdCw_DijPYLup_EYeN1kGUoMIyBv_pmPZqzph9r5ULeXG5I/s1600/primavera.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1051" data-original-width="1600" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_an-ihfXxeHg2PInzFre9rjkuc5oZwrRSLrBgjLNfVEvO9ttErPeLwxt9Ywb4-_c9vi10jiYHmX2Y2hMQR5Ur2eEE9WYTMdCw_DijPYLup_EYeN1kGUoMIyBv_pmPZqzph9r5ULeXG5I/s400/primavera.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Primavera</i>, Sandro Botticelli (1470s/80s)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> As Trinity term starts in Oxford, it is not only teaching
which has moved online, but also the regular College and Faculty committee
meetings which pepper the diaries of academics in this self-governing republic
of scholars. Normally, we meet in groups of 20 in the high-ceilinged rooms of
the History Faculty, in groups of 10 in Somerville’s SCR Dining Room,
or in the full 40+ Governing Body assembly of college Fellows, in the basement
hall of our 1970s’ Wolfson building. Instead, we now meet exclusively on
screens. Microsoft Teams, the video-conferencing tool used by the University
(and the UK House of Lords), currently shows only the faces of the four most recent
speakers. The other digitally-present committee members are visible purely as
tiny initials at the bottom of the screen. While online committee meetings work
surprisingly well in many respects, the move from physical Oxford rooms to
screens has revealed how much of a traditional meeting is conducted silently,
via body language. Not all 40, 20 or 10 members of a committee will speak on
every topic on the agenda, of course, but vigorous nods, discreet frowns,
smiles, agitated shuffling of papers – even when only half-registered by others
– together create a mood, a collective sense of a group reaction, over and
above what is actually said (and minuted). At present, we cannot see our
non-speaking colleagues’ mini-gestures, just rows of silent initials in coloured
circles – even as we grapple with critical issues, such as the financial
challenge which the pandemic urgently poses for Oxford colleges, or the
implications of social distancing for teaching now and in the months to come.
The ‘chat’ function, where committee members can post brief comments on the
discussion in a side bar for all to see, is helpful, but it is still verbal
communication; with emojis, but without gesture or human facial expressions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Historians
have for decades studied the role and importance of gesture,
particularly in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The theme of the International
Medieval Congress in Leeds (IMC) back in 2006, for example, was ‘Emotion and
Gesture’; in 2016, <a href="http://ihuw.pl/instytut/o-instytucie/pracownicy/dr-hab-piotr-wecowski">Piotr Węcowski</a> of Warsaw University published on the gestures of
the Jagiellonian kings of Poland in the 15C and 16C, and their grave political
meaning to contemporaries. Michael Baxandall’s celebrated book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Painting-Experience-Fifteenth-Century-Italy-Paperbacks/dp/019282144X">Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy </a></i>(1972), argued that decoding body language in Renaissance paintings is
key to understanding their meanings and composition. He pointed out, for
example, that in Botticelli’s famously enigmatic <i>Primavera</i>,
Venus’ raised hand would have been understood by (educated) contemporaries as a
gesture of welcome to her spring bower. Or that the manically grinning,
pointing angel seen at the foot of many Renaissance paintings is a reference to
a character familiar from 15C street theatre – the <em><span style="background: white;">festaiulo</span></em><em><span style="background: white; font-style: normal;"> </span></em>who literally pointed out which actor the viewer should be
paying attention to. Late medieval preachers, meanwhile, had a
repertoire of gestures, or sign language, so extensive that (some argue) a wandering Italian
friar could preach through body language alone in, say, Brittany. By contrast, on Teams we communicate oblivious to most of the pointing, sighing and waving of colleagues.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg38w8O5gUDiVtG4JeTy4S_twbdF-4igbM98v8xCM-syMC3EpmlTjpqxSDC7nyuNvaeN0YlX9YF9NPK1zY_ESWvFEvskUO-lrP69G1xl8GViVROPLByHwHiJrNe9B7cO1CHSF1DJ-jNvLk/s1600/teams+logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg38w8O5gUDiVtG4JeTy4S_twbdF-4igbM98v8xCM-syMC3EpmlTjpqxSDC7nyuNvaeN0YlX9YF9NPK1zY_ESWvFEvskUO-lrP69G1xl8GViVROPLByHwHiJrNe9B7cO1CHSF1DJ-jNvLk/s1600/teams+logo.jpg" /></a><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></div>
<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Having
our normal professional interactions as scholars shaken up so radically by
social distancing, however, can create a new space for potential historical insights and
reflections. Looking at day-to-day 21C academic life, as it is turned upside
down and rendered no-longer-familiar, mediated entirely through screens, might
make us newly alert to elements in past cultures which we have not adequately
spotted to date, and generate new research questions about society, culture and communication. Because it is not only
teaching and research which are famously complementary scholarly activities;
historians and anthropologists know that committee meetings, in both their
traditional (tables) and novel (screens) forms, are also a crucial forum for
watching, reflecting, and thinking on many levels – a surprising window, if you will, onto
bigger norms and wider worlds.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-31404277419789179632019-07-26T06:46:00.002-07:002019-07-26T06:48:07.477-07:00The First ‘Love Island’ (1838) <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOmCylvQvgZhWuqZxI6pAlAO5FvsP6rfpbi6sOFFXVy8zSg0V1UcHR_dynC-e_Co5cnSk6AP6T6jZiJgZ9gjoeCEiqBhEzpi250GtfRI5-glNk3GiXeqhZ-rWb5D-JuO9HUNwtjUrSMSk/s1600/george+sand.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1068" data-original-width="800" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOmCylvQvgZhWuqZxI6pAlAO5FvsP6rfpbi6sOFFXVy8zSg0V1UcHR_dynC-e_Co5cnSk6AP6T6jZiJgZ9gjoeCEiqBhEzpi250GtfRI5-glNk3GiXeqhZ-rWb5D-JuO9HUNwtjUrSMSk/s200/george+sand.png" width="147" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">George Sand, <br />
painted by <br />
August Charpentier (1838)</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFY6impoVs1KUC0BHlG3exrwSCNWVXRSuPTKowMxvr4D8R2Az6kQTeRQRLFqxnT4HoGeGTEIzWgOUg0YVMJtncrGwRWCV9ElvC_2pH7o8MXSzMuN1hzxvIRJTxCEu086kEtgECtpH5oHM/s1600/Frederic_Chopin_photo+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1455" data-original-width="1014" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFY6impoVs1KUC0BHlG3exrwSCNWVXRSuPTKowMxvr4D8R2Az6kQTeRQRLFqxnT4HoGeGTEIzWgOUg0YVMJtncrGwRWCV9ElvC_2pH7o8MXSzMuN1hzxvIRJTxCEu086kEtgECtpH5oHM/s200/Frederic_Chopin_photo+%25282%2529.jpg" width="137" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fryderyk Chopin, c. 1849, by Bisson</td></tr>
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On British television, the reality dating show and
pop-culture phenomenon ‘Love Island’ is nearing its finale this weekend. With
over 6 million viewers, the programme places 20-somethings on the Balearic
Island of Mallorca, in a converted farmhouse-villa decked out with neon signs
and gaudy summer accessories. Yet perhaps few of the contestants or viewers
know that tourism on Mallorca was kick-started almost two centuries ago by an
earlier pair of celebrity, star-crossed lovers, in a remote lodging just a few
miles away from the ITV villa.<br />
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In 1838,
the ‘most famous woman in France’, the avant-garde, aristocratic,
cross-dressing, best-selling novelist George Sand (Amantine Dupin) travelled to
Mallorca with the Polish composer, pianist and political refugee Fryderyk
Chopin. She was 34, a divorced mother of two, he 28. Sand claimed they were
seeking solitude, where she could write and Chopin compose; they were likely also
fleeing from the scandal their love affair had caused in Paris. Mallorca in the
1830s was heavily agricultural, with limited infrastructure for foreign
visitors – the couple could not find a functioning hotel in Palma, and ended up
renting a cell in an abandoned monastery, in the mountain village of Valldemossa.
The lovers’ Mallorcan tryst was bitter-sweet. Chopin’s letters praised the
natural beauty, calm and ‘poetic feeling’ of the island. Sand, however, grew
disillusioned, and angry at the locals who disapproved of the unmarried lovers.
She later vented her feelings in her famously acerbic<br />
memoire <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Winter in Mallorca.</i> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sand’s book
put Mallorca on the literary map. She joked that she had ‘discovered’ the
island, and predicted that once international travel connections improved
‘Mallorca would soon prove a formidable rival to the Alps’, a new destination
for the North European traveller. That prophecy was realised with the opening
of an international airport at Palma in 1960, and the advent of mass tourism.
Today, ‘Love Island’ producers distil Mallorca into its essential modern
tourist image – turquoise waters, limestone coves, endless sunshine, endless
swimming pools. Yet, as the 2019 contestants chat, court and argue on our
screens, this social-media television spectacle still evokes the unquiet ghosts
of Mallorca’s original, nineteenth-century ‘Love Island’ couple.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In their villa,
the current ‘Love Island’ contestants are cut off from the outside world, kept
well away from the locals. They can only imagine what is being written and
tweeted about them in the outside world, or what fame or infamy will greet them
on their return. They come to find love, or fame, or the £50K cash prize.
Chopin and Sand, too, in their damp monastery sought total privacy, but
wondered what the Paris papers were saying. And they too found that that a
Mallorcan hideaway holiday had an ambiguous effect on their relationship. Chopin
was in 1838 already ill with bronchitis or tuberculosis, and his love affair
with Sand would break down in terrible, very public recriminations a few years
later. The Polish pianist died in Paris in 1849; Sand did not attend his
funeral. The Mallorcan interlude had proved productive for both their careers:
Sand wrote her novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spiridion</i> in the
monastery, and Chopin composed a number of pieces at Valldemossa. But the romantic
happily-ever-after which the most gossiped-about couple of 19<sup>th-</sup>century
Europe had sought in the Balearic sun had proved, ultimately, far more elusive.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk5ga0QfSrdi2v0EFUGiPctm75-v3Y66-ePthyphenhyphenj-rA1AolugkY43uzu5vwW7Kzlut3l1oCwqJcZ5wHW6Rfdc5EbyXnA_Wq1S-gBECRdr0OLI2RmgLTGfrSQjABgS8XNGAMggoMjXJECCA/s1600/loveisland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="158" data-original-width="300" height="105" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk5ga0QfSrdi2v0EFUGiPctm75-v3Y66-ePthyphenhyphenj-rA1AolugkY43uzu5vwW7Kzlut3l1oCwqJcZ5wHW6Rfdc5EbyXnA_Wq1S-gBECRdr0OLI2RmgLTGfrSQjABgS8XNGAMggoMjXJECCA/s200/loveisland.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<br />Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com77tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-2427295258992459642019-03-26T03:48:00.002-07:002019-03-26T03:48:40.353-07:00History on the March...<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmSHCuq8aiArNuBkMRuiVf1i2T_eaOiJC-q65KIe6R1-5yuNi9uyP9dU5ASw5Rzq0FCsq4-ZEGl7XQkWXL6gyt0JzTXHbdiBfuiuDSOlfng3legE-EDPXIUK2200AYboQNd5gcTcaNv4s/s1600/pilgrim+badge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="299" data-original-width="263" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmSHCuq8aiArNuBkMRuiVf1i2T_eaOiJC-q65KIe6R1-5yuNi9uyP9dU5ASw5Rzq0FCsq4-ZEGl7XQkWXL6gyt0JzTXHbdiBfuiuDSOlfng3legE-EDPXIUK2200AYboQNd5gcTcaNv4s/s320/pilgrim+badge.jpg" width="280" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pilgrimage of Grace banner, 1536</td></tr>
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Last weekend, along with a million other people, I attended
the Peoples’ Vote March in central London. We arrived in
Park Lane, super-luxury hotels looming over us, and stood for over two hours in a
tightly packed crowd. The two-mile column of humanity ahead of us was so dense,
that there was no room to actually march. We eventually shuffled through
London, hemmed in by hundreds of people on all sides for 5 whole hours.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbxyQXJYydctVuO_dUfUfY_zqPIFrNjBNmDqBN6uWutl7ao3Ml51h3ZyIfEg9E06IgteD1m8FJCUKaTd2gzuOkrF4rr7e-JsLuFO0wmZwqwyXXGSeEcyjOWXCo-7VGLx8vJPlVIGTHO3o/s1600/york+rose.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="900" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbxyQXJYydctVuO_dUfUfY_zqPIFrNjBNmDqBN6uWutl7ao3Ml51h3ZyIfEg9E06IgteD1m8FJCUKaTd2gzuOkrF4rr7e-JsLuFO0wmZwqwyXXGSeEcyjOWXCo-7VGLx8vJPlVIGTHO3o/s200/york+rose.jpg" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by @JesseJJWS</td></tr>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As well as the
in-the-present-moment sense of insurrectionary urgency which infused the march,
the day was full of curious historic echoes, like a magic lantern show. The
tallest flags, on enormous home-made flagpoles, were from the regions. High
above the crowd, there fluttered Yorkshire white Roses, Lancashire red roses,
the yellow Dorset cross, and the black flag of Cornwall - all held proudly
aloft by protestors who had travelled by coach to London, setting out in the
early hours of the morning. The Cornish flags marching on Parliament put me in
mind of their most famous antecedent, the Cornish rebellion of 1497 against
Henry VII, in which armed Cornish miners made it all the way to London, and the
Battle of Blackheath. The roses from northern England, meanwhile, in their own distant
way evoked the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace, that great early modern rising of the
north, which marched under its own banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, with
matching badges for the Pilgrims: begging Henry VIII to reconsider his legal
breach with Rome, and save the English monasteries.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As this
great anti-Brexit carnival shuffle-marched past Green Park, a man stood on the
metal railings, blowing kisses and calling out to the crowd like a preacher: ‘All
you need is love! I love you all! You are looooved!’. Someone in my party said: ‘Do you think that’s how the Levellers started?’,
imagining the most radical sects of the English Civil War originating as
yelling mystics on the edge of a 17C political crowd. On the march, people were
talking excitedly about the on-line petition to Parliament to revoke Article
50: as fellow historians have pointed out, petitions are not trivial gestures,
but a tradition deeply embedded in British political culture. When James VI
& I processed from Scotland to take up his new English crown in 1603, he
was met outside London by a delegation of Puritan ministers who handed him the
Millenary Petition, which they claimed had 1,000 clerical signatories.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Past the Ritz, and down Saint
James, into London’s club-land. In the window of a cigar boutique, three tanned
men smoked insouciantly, watching the noisy crowd pass by. On a balcony on Pall Mall,
a family sipped champagne, as a million shouting, singing people filed past. Approaching Trafalgar Square, we spotted signs in the
crowd in Polish: a bilingual placard saying ‘The Duchy of Cieszyn rejects
Brexit’ – Central European regionalism here – and, more bracingly, an unfurled red-white
‘Solidarność’ banner, bringing Poland's anti-Communist resistance symbol
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">par excellence </i>to Britain’s
anti-Brexit march. And, of course, in the crowd demanding a second referendum,
there were hundreds and hundreds of blue-yellow EU flags: worn as capes, as
face-paints, as antennae on children’s heads, wrapped around dogs, serving as
blankets for protesters in wheelchairs. Here, a flag – the 19C medium of
national identity par excellence – was repurposed for a very 21C
anti-nationalist, transnational message. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is the trouble with
historians: they see deep layers of meaning, century upon century, wherever they
look, as if deep time were all around them. Most commentators referred to the
march as ‘historic’, by which they meant that it would be remembered, shape events, feature in future textbooks. But historian-marchers keep one eye
behind them too: the People’s Vote March was also historic, because it drew together,
in a carnival of protest, so many rich threads from the past of both these
islands and of their European neighbours.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com75tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-63620505014139706872019-03-14T03:44:00.002-07:002019-03-14T03:44:50.018-07:00Three Days in Budapest<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2zmklmIfP53-tcudENAypdrBcpi687OTLYlhnzxPwe5rv0A_BSHFG_weuFvWPbW3ZUE3tOA0oMPaWYHobkKSPNTTOJE1aENvTLE0QArYhBSH7ss8KgiWmo7mMH0YjnZmdd5lxDz0TPXk/s1600/isabella+cranach.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="220" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2zmklmIfP53-tcudENAypdrBcpi687OTLYlhnzxPwe5rv0A_BSHFG_weuFvWPbW3ZUE3tOA0oMPaWYHobkKSPNTTOJE1aENvTLE0QArYhBSH7ss8KgiWmo7mMH0YjnZmdd5lxDz0TPXk/s320/isabella+cranach.jpg" width="281" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Isabella (1519-1559), Queen of Hungary, attributed to workshop of Lucas Cranach</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><br /> This month, I attended a </span><a href="https://tti.btk.mta.hu/images/events/Izabella-kicsi.pdf" style="font-size: 11pt;">conference</a><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> in Budapest, to
mark the 500</span><sup>th</sup><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> anniversary of the birth of Isabella (1519-59), a Polish-Italian
princess and Queen of Hungary. In spite of the tsunami of books and novels on
Renaissance queens in recent years, Isabella’s dramatic life is still
surprisingly little-known outside Hungary itself. Raised at the Cracow court at
the height of the Polish Renaissance, Isabella travelled south in 1539 to marry
King John of Hungary: only to find herself, just 18 months later, widowed, with
a new-born son, and an Ottoman army led by Sultan Suleiman I surrounding her
capital of Buda. Via many twists and turns, she came to rule the new
principality of Transylvania for her son, as the Sultan’s vassal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Isabella was a highly international 16<sup>th</sup>-century
figure, continually crossing borders, and this conference, organised by the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, also involved much border crossing, with
speakers from Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Finland and the UK. Isabella has fallen between the cracks of different national scholarships,
but an international conference like this can start to put the pieces back
together. Attending the conference programme put together by Dr. Terez Oborni
and Dr. Agnes Mate was like watching a new biography of Isabella write itself
in real time – as chapter after chapter of her life unfolded before us, reconstructed
by experts from sources and archives all over Europe. In the ornate halls of
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences headquarters, a 19C <a href="https://welovebudapest.com/en/venue/hungarian-academy-of-sciences-2/">academic palace</a> on the
banks of the Danube, we spent two days conjuring up Isabella’s Hungary, where
great geopolitical and cultural forces clashed in the mid-16C – surrounded by
paintings of medieval castles, and listening to a performance of 16C Central
European music on period instruments by the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Musica
Historia</i> group.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">It
was hard, during this wonderful conference, not to notice also the modern-day
political forces at work around us. The conference coincided with an
international <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-03/hungary-s-orban-doubles-down-on-anti-eu-campaign-with-new-target">dispute</a> over a new<a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/hungary-launches-campaign-targeting-jean-claude-juncker-george-soros/"> poster-campaign</a> by the Hungarian government:
the posters in question, showing George Soros with Jean-Claude Juncker, were
prominent all over Budapest during our stay. The conference also took place
during a serious crisis for the <a href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-hungary-academy/hungarian-scientists-fear-for-academic-freedom-with-new-government-interference-idUKKBN1QQ0AE">Hungarian Academy of Sciences</a>, our hosts – the
Hungarian government is poised to close or take direct control of its network
of excellent research institutes, a move which has drawn international protest,
including from the UK’s <a href="https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/british-academy-joins-calls-safeguard-academic-autonomy-hungarian-academy-sciences">British Academy,</a> as an assault on the fundamental
principle of academic freedom. Staff of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have
<a href="https://adf2019.com/english/">appealed</a> for international support. Hungarian historian colleagues and friends
now find themselves on the front line of this dispute, their research projects,
jobs and careers suddenly uncertain. Historians are a tellingly early focus for
populist regimes – as we see in clashes over the Poland’s Museum of the Second
World War in <a href="https://www.channel4.com/news/polish-government-accused-of-cultural-purge-in-world-war-museum-row">Gdańsk</a>, the Polish Jewish Museum (<a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/poland-ousting-jewish-museum-head-who-criticized-holocaust-law-not-political/">Polin</a>) in Warsaw, and now in
Hungary. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">In
the 30 years since 1989, we have made real progress in integrating the rich
history of Central Europe into our wider histories of Europe, after decades of
intellectual separation in the Cold War. Scholars working in Budapest have been
key to this – both those at the Central European University (also now under
sustained and grave governmental attack), and at the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences, who have written reams of excellent work, opening up their country’s
past to international audiences. Back in Oxford tutorials, my students sat
grim-faced as I explained how historians were under government pressure in
Hungary, certain areas of teaching <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/hungary-bans-gender-studies-programmes-viktor-orban-central-european-university-budapest-a8599796.html">banned</a>, and that we
should seize in both hands the intellectual freedoms we have. EU expansion,
migration and the Brexit crisis have, I hope, by now given the lie to
Chamberlains’ infamous words of British indifference to Central Europe in 1939:
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we can no longer say that this is ‘a
faraway country of [whose people] we know nothing’. As Isabella, the half-Italian
queen of Hungary shows, the history of Central Europe <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> the history of Western Europe, in the Renaissance, 20C, and
today alike.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-49166361339751476252018-11-09T10:49:00.000-08:002018-11-09T10:49:45.372-08:00Between Two Novembers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigDeejf6kmZKhc-qvAiLZjdAVHB3P4y1fMZ6E0iSJbKRab5rxKf1i8WIGU6N4JooiyYf9FRC4sxcJTvkoqlBXPU7ke6ukoFQPFlNIPMKfix93kTlfyr0s9gs82AGZNHOxC4Gd0uf4uXXo/s1600/poppy+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigDeejf6kmZKhc-qvAiLZjdAVHB3P4y1fMZ6E0iSJbKRab5rxKf1i8WIGU6N4JooiyYf9FRC4sxcJTvkoqlBXPU7ke6ukoFQPFlNIPMKfix93kTlfyr0s9gs82AGZNHOxC4Gd0uf4uXXo/s200/poppy+1.jpg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh181LNoc2OJDhWso15NXJGEaDytgexkmeTk_UXn7iCUFw38-HF18n0zPkumIuXYkbJYUHSwbY577HTWy8hSLl76Y0bfRZyeaIRNpy64Qx-YKB1nfPJiSUWcbDkNlkuURab7wdl_4v-zBw/s1600/polska+flaga.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="199" data-original-width="253" height="157" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh181LNoc2OJDhWso15NXJGEaDytgexkmeTk_UXn7iCUFw38-HF18n0zPkumIuXYkbJYUHSwbY577HTWy8hSLl76Y0bfRZyeaIRNpy64Qx-YKB1nfPJiSUWcbDkNlkuURab7wdl_4v-zBw/s200/polska+flaga.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 36pt;">This weekend, the world will face
the bracing 100</span><sup style="text-indent: 36pt;">th</sup><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> anniversary of 11</span><sup style="text-indent: 36pt;">th</sup><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> November 1918 – a
date with very a different meaning in the two traditions in which I grew up,
British and Polish. In the UK, on their winter coats people are wearing
not just red paper poppies, but elaborate enamelled flowers engraved with the
dates 1918-2018. For the British, November 1918 is Armistice, a solemn national
occasion of mourning and memory, in a military key. For Poland and its international
diasporas, however, the 11</span><sup style="text-indent: 36pt;">th</sup><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> November 1918 is celebration –
Independence, the day on which the European empires which had partitioned and
gobbled up the old Polish kingdom, and ruled it for 129 years, fell away, leaving
the way open for Poles to take up arms and create their country anew (or a
remembered version of it).</span></div>
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This 100<sup>th</sup>
anniversary comes at a time when both these countries are debating their identities,
and pasts, out aloud before the eyes of the world. In Britain, some look
forward to a sharp break with the EU and a rekindled imperial trading future,
while others wait for a UK-style <i>en
marche</i> progressive wave to sweep those visions, and Brexit itself, clean
away. In Poland, meanwhile, the ruling nationalist Law & Justice party, the
liberal mayor of Warsaw, and ultra-far-right groups are caught in a three-way
struggle over the annual <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/09/fears-of-violence-as-polish-state-intervenes-in-nationalist-march">Independence Day march</a>, in a proxy fight for the
meaning of the day.<o:p></o:p></div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a
historian and British citizen, I’ve always been caught between, and within,
these two national conversations, but the tensions of British-Polishness (or
Polish Britishness, if you will), are in November 2018 more pronounced than
ever. The rise in anti-East European xenophobia seen in the UK during and since
the 2016 referendum has, and has not, caught me by surprise. In the 1990s, during
an internship at the Foreign Office, a succession of top civil servants
commented on my surname with disapproval, declaring: ‘we can’t have foreigners
working here, can we?’ In the 2000s, habituating the riverside children’s
playgrounds of Reading, I could see local parents and grandparents visibly
stiffen when I spoke Polish in that public setting; and visibly relax when I
took care to intersperse it with a few sentences in my impeccably middle-class
English, as I have learnt to do ever since, on streets, trains and buses. After
the Referendum, guests at Oxford high tables and shop workers alike felt free
to announce that I was not British, à propos nothing at all. English white-on-white
xenophobia is not universal, but it is a persistent daily undercurrent,
encountered along the whole social spectrum - upper class, middle class and working
class fellow citizens alike, in metropolises, provincial towns and rural pubs. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And in
Poland itself, people are equally quick to judge the name-accent-passport
combination of their diaspora kin, in archives, hotel receptions, restaurants, conferences.
Poles in these varied social situations quickly feel the need to tell the
diaspora who they really are: ‘so you are not Polish’, ‘so you are Polish’, ‘so
you are foreign’. This urgent need to categorise reflects a deeper set of
anxieties about what, and who, ‘Polish’ is, 100 years on from independence.
Whoever ends up marching, and in the name of what, in the streets of Warsaw on
Sunday, the very equation ‘1918-2018’ is, historically speaking, a potentially
uncomfortable sleight of hand. It tacitly equates the Poland created in 1918 by
the Versailles Peace Treaty with the Poland created in 1945 by the WWII Allies.
Yet, in their borders and peoples, these two countries were very different
places. The Poland born on 11<sup>th</sup> November 1918 had a highly mixed
population: the 1921 census found that 30% of its citizens were
Ukrainian/Ruthenian, Jewish, German or from other minorities. The Poland of 2018
is one of the most ethnically and religiously homogenous states in Europe. The
celebratory slogan ‘1918-2018’ does not seem to make much room for that absent 30%.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"> So,
for the British-Polish and Polish-British, this will be a strange weekend,
watching stately processions to the cenotaph in London, and the noisy and
possibly violent Independence march in Warsaw – red poppies, red and white flags.
Many histories, communities and lives do not fit the clear national stories which
these 1918 commemorations try to unite their respective societies around. Yet, in
the wider run of European and global history, those who cross boundaries,
inhabit margins, or live in zones of overlap make up a large part of the world’s
story. Perhaps one day the solemn Polish and British Novembers will also find a
way to make their peace with that.</span>Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com94tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-64006964002545167822018-05-21T02:30:00.000-07:002018-05-21T02:30:21.229-07:00Royal Wedding as Microcosm...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw371m-uJqL-GxdDkD9VFZH0ymj44FP0HfyRcMgMTxg5_b3NUkIEtq9T_RavHHsRI3Tc4WhB-4kLLt_YHc-S5lgyon7TCuwCujzO609R9FnfCr0WRT5Zq4ZF87wklCYwx0BWSANSOB_J0/s1600/harry+meghan.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="450" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw371m-uJqL-GxdDkD9VFZH0ymj44FP0HfyRcMgMTxg5_b3NUkIEtq9T_RavHHsRI3Tc4WhB-4kLLt_YHc-S5lgyon7TCuwCujzO609R9FnfCr0WRT5Zq4ZF87wklCYwx0BWSANSOB_J0/s200/harry+meghan.png" width="150" /></a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7qxqAgYTkicdPTFyUh207kH-EYvY8r5Vv0rMb-HEOqF-yzDL0LlJXtC-sd5sdkCVh_6_RVnCFzBc9E65nr-wnoZjG8ubiATtHKbIXVHkI5k8JDJD4F4uPgPT6sTOkk_DaT2r26Ugb-Rs/s1600/bona+sig+decius.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="440" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7qxqAgYTkicdPTFyUh207kH-EYvY8r5Vv0rMb-HEOqF-yzDL0LlJXtC-sd5sdkCVh_6_RVnCFzBc9E65nr-wnoZjG8ubiATtHKbIXVHkI5k8JDJD4F4uPgPT6sTOkk_DaT2r26Ugb-Rs/s200/bona+sig+decius.png" width="146" /></a><br />
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=</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="color: black;">Two years ago, serendipitously, the Bodleian Library offered
the Jagiellonians Project (which I lead) a spring 2018 slot for an <a href="http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/renaissance-royal-wedding-0">exhibition</a> about a Renaissance royal wedding. As the Bodleian staff, my co-curator
Katarzyna Kosior and I hurried to write captions, secure an object loan, design
flyers and pick 9 objects to mark the 500<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the 1518
wedding of King Sigismund I of Poland and the Italian princess Bona Sforza, the media grew steadily more excited about preparations for the British
royal celebrations. As we held a conference on <a href="http://www.jagiellonians.com/single-post/2018/01/25/Conference-programme-Renaissance-Royal-Weddings-Cultural-Production">Renaissance Royal Weddings</a>, from
Paris to Constantinople, the imminent Windsor wedding moved higher and higher
up the news agenda. And the parallels between 16<span style="font-size: 13.3333px;">C</span> and contemporary royal nuptials are rich.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="color: black;">The British royal wedding this weekend boasted impeccably
21<sup>st</sup>century features: the digital clock on Windsor Council’s website,
A-list celebrity culture, the tens of thousands of tweets generated. But, like
royal weddings across time and space, the event was at heart a symbolic
performance. It was thus in the Renaissance, when princes put on
treasury-draining, eye-poppingly spectacular festivities for their nuptials. It
was thus in imperial nineteenth-century Britain, when the royals invented a new
traditional-looking pageantry to awe onlookers. Historians know that royal
weddings perform identity because they are a chance for princes, and their
subjects, to stage who think they are - or who they might like to be. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="color: black;">When the bride is a foreigner, from a distant land, this
effect is heightened. Meghan Markle is the first foreign bride for a senior
British royal since, whisper it, the abdicated Edward VIII took the American
socialite Wallis Simpson as his wife. Historically, a royal marriage to an
overseas bride was proof of a country’s essential cosmopolitanism – its
diplomatic connections, its international power, and also of the prince’s good
cultural taste and broad horizons. When, 500 years ago this spring, King
Sigismund married Bona Sforza in Cracow, he was reinforcing his own reputation
as a leading enthusiast for the Italian Renaissance and all its heady glamour.
Prince Harry too was showing us a more global, forward-looking British
monarchy, open to the future.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: black;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="color: black;">But a prince’s foreign spouse has also consistently been a
touchstone for anxieties about national identity and belonging, galvanising
local anger. In 1554, for example, the English noble Thomas Wyatt led a rebel
army to London, to prevent Mary I from taking a foreigner, Philip II of Spain,
as her husband. In Poland, the teenage Bona Sforza immediately became the
subject of obscene verses, lambasted for bringing with her Italian ‘sodomites,
patricides and epicureans’ who stole jobs from honest Poles. Meghan Markle,
even before the wedding, became the target of hate mail. At a country house
outside Reading this weekend, I heard visitors (racism alert) grumbling out
loud, as they tucked into their picnic, about the inclusion of a Gospel choir
in the royal wedding service because this ‘wasn’t British music’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="color: black;">Foreign brides for princes have, for centuries, highlighted
and even inflamed tensions between a country’s local and cosmopolitan
identities. Royal weddings thus show us a society in microcosm. Royal nuptials
hold up a mirror in which historians catch a glimpse of past identity crises;
and in which we can today catch a bracing glimpse of Britain, with all its
fissures, in 2018.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com126tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-62164854431151116832017-09-27T04:20:00.002-07:002017-09-27T04:20:58.407-07:00Beach / Museum<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx1zdCH0r8XllNAegu2FBfKP9AKPh3YjuSjNbo6ZMVYa5QSFmAKfG5l7mKzyuLzQqOl7q0D3mAhqK6gn5UroZgKOU5nFAXNXBAu4PgH9v25uHFQk7lzwvJZeCdObS_UtYwi9rty62MY0g/s1600/san+sebastian+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx1zdCH0r8XllNAegu2FBfKP9AKPh3YjuSjNbo6ZMVYa5QSFmAKfG5l7mKzyuLzQqOl7q0D3mAhqK6gn5UroZgKOU5nFAXNXBAu4PgH9v25uHFQk7lzwvJZeCdObS_UtYwi9rty62MY0g/s400/san+sebastian+%25282%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Edge of the Old World? San Sebastian, La Gomera</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Summer is over and in Somerville Senior
Common Room, academics are swapping tales of holidays. Many colleagues have
holidayed in cultural-historic hotspots, such as Central Italy, and so I wonder
if they will wince when I admit to spending a fortnight in Tenerife – an island
associated, in the UK, with loud mega-resorts, high-rise hotels, beaches full
of British tourists, and not much else. The lavish modern water parks and zoos
built on the island, consistently rated as its top attractions, only reinforce
the impression that there is nothing really to see on this remote Canarian
isle. Bucket-and-spade tourism dominates, in an archipelago whose economy has a
long track-record of dependence on just one industry (wine, cochineal,
sunseekers).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> It is no real secret that there is more
to the island – travel journalists regularly write features on
‘<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/spain/canary-islands/tenerife/articles/the-secret-side-of-tenerife-that-lured-agatha-christie/">hidden Tenerife</a>’, its live volcanos, pre-historic fauna, mountain villages.
What interests me, however, is the way in which Tenerife and its tourism
industry shrug off the past, an island refusing to wear its history on its
sleeve. Yet historians of the late medieval and Renaissance worlds have long stressed how important the Canary Islands are – from John Merriman in the
1960s to <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/583.html">Felipe Armandez Armesto</a> in the 1980s, the archipelago has been
described as a laboratory of empire, the place where Europeans learnt to
colonise from the 14C, a stepping stone between medieval Christendom and global
modernity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Taking the ferry to the island of La
Gomera, day-trippers from Tenerife dock in the tiny port of San Sebastian, cuboid houses perched on the mountainside. This is where Columbus provisioned
his fleet, the port from which he set sail into the blue yonder in 1492. San
Sebastian still feels remote, on the very edge of the Old World. When the Fred
Olsen trimaran navigates the choppy channel between La Gomera and Tenerife, you
can peer west through the salt-greased window and think of the <i>Santa Maria</i> sailing these same waters.
All over the Canaries, you can eat <i><a href="http://www.papasantiguasdecanarias.org/dop_intro.php">papas arrugadas</a></i>, rare ‘heritage’ varieties of potatoes, genetically important
because these are potato strains first brought to Europe from the Americas
in the 16C, preserved in their original form in this archipelago. In colonial
towns in misty northern Tenerife, such as Oratava, you can visit the
three-storied 17C town-houses of people who grew rich on trade, because the
Canaries were an essential staging post for Spanish maritime traffic between
Europe and the Americas in the early modern centuries. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> There is more than enough material,
to build among the hotels of Tenerife, a magnificent Museum of the Canaries, of
Atlantic History, or of the Americas, to address the richness, complexities,
controversies and myths of Iberia’s global empires – launched from these very
shores. So Tenerife is a useful reminder that however historically significant
or evocative a place may seem to scholars, 15,000,000 people a year fly to the
Canary Islands for quite different reasons. After all, who needs history, or a
heritage industry, in order to prosper if you have a really hot beach? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com42tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-54731314356295400902017-07-28T08:45:00.000-07:002017-07-28T08:45:41.826-07:00Back in the News...<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ_KrzzU2eAr373UH-UNbGkcnzyd23a2In8N5zoCpikQ50I-uRuLW-_jV8JXUkweAmE6GICNh4j4ykPXlCzBcxsdkuguT4dsYQ6rpkv3Gs5TjmoA8cK-TeCcQAzjCkmUfUzYCFQHxH_G4/s1600/collegium+maius.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ_KrzzU2eAr373UH-UNbGkcnzyd23a2In8N5zoCpikQ50I-uRuLW-_jV8JXUkweAmE6GICNh4j4ykPXlCzBcxsdkuguT4dsYQ6rpkv3Gs5TjmoA8cK-TeCcQAzjCkmUfUzYCFQHxH_G4/s320/collegium+maius.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The 15th century courtyard of the Jagiellonian University, Krakow:<br />still debating Jagiellonians...</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In this, the 4<sup>th</sup> year of
the ERC-Oxford <a href="http://www.jagiellonians.com/">Jagiellonians project,</a> this enigmatic and mighty Renaissance
royal dynasty are suddenly making it back into the news. Between 1386 and 1572,
the Jagiellonians (as we now call them) ruled a chunk of Europe – encompassing,
at their height, present-day Lithuania, Belarus, western Ukraine, western
Russia, Poland, Prussia, Hungary, Romania, Bohemia, parts of Serbia and
Croatia. With a cv like that, it is no surprise that they cast a long
historical shadow. Just as some British politicians invoke the Tudors, and Henry
VIII’s 1534 break with Rome, as a precedent for Brexit, so in Poland’s own fraught
domestic politics this year the Jagiellonians are back. For it is in Poland
above all that the Jagiellonians, with their glittering court at Krakow, are
most fondly remembered, and today most fiercely argued over.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> This month, for example, sees the
launch of a new Polish research project, ‘Jagiellonian Ideals and Present-Day
Challenges’, led by the Krakow University sociology professor Leszek Korporowicz. In a
series of seminars to be held in Krakow, Oxford and Kiev, social scientists and
historians will ask what social or policy lessons can today be drawn from the
multi-ethnic, multi-religious societies found in Renaissance-era Central
Europe. Also interested in what this Renaissance royal family can teach us in
the 21<sup>st</sup> century are members of Poland’s Citizens’ Congress (<i><a href="https://www.kongresobywatelski.pl/o-kongresie/czym-kongres-obywatelski/">Kongres Obywatelski</a></i>), a civil society
group which seeks to promote active citizenship and open policy debate. One of
its members recently visited Somerville, where we drank tea in the SCR and he
spoke passionately about the need to write new, provocative narratives of the
Polish past (especially its Jagiellonian phase) in order to stimulate critical
thinking about the country’s present, and its future. Earlier this month, in
London, I had the opportunity to meet with a number of EU Ambassadors from the
Baltic area, and was struck by how keen they too were to discuss this region’s 16<sup>th</sup>-century
dynastic history. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Meanwhile, there has been controversy in Poland over the ‘Three
Seas’ (</span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://niezalezna.pl/85461-trojmorze">trójmorze</a></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">) summit of Central
European countries attended by Donald Trump, which for some Poles evokes a
nostalgic vision of former Jagiellonian power stretching between the Baltic,
Adriatic and Black Seas. Since the 1930s, the </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">idea jagiellońska</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">, ‘Jagiellonian vision’, has regularly functioned as
a byword for Polish would-be hegemony in Eastern Europe.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> As our project’s first book (<i>Remembering the Jagiellonians</i>,<i> </i>due out in May 2018) shows, the
Jagiellonians have been used to legitimate (or denigrate) a vast array of
different political projects since their official extinction in 1572. And in
the current political turbulence across Europe, it is interesting to see how
this Renaissance dynasty is being redeployed in new 21<sup>st</sup> century
contexts. For liberals, the vast territories ruled by this curious late medieval
royal house offer a narrative of outward-facing internationalism,
cosmopolitanism and tolerance; for populists and nationalists, a story of
national ascendancy, achievement and empire. In Europe’s latent culture wars,
great Renaissance dynasties are useful to have on one’s side. We shall see which
of these narratives wins out, and in whose image the Jagiellonians are
remoulded in this century.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgna6YEZnNsCSiXFOKYMSU4v6afOxqcbHGNdMnsSBq7UJu_JLIyqpTwerEsoPlSkJHqW0IaeYDLO5ps7nbA9AkaXYRaTrYZAtdCkOoCE73zbR1tpcy9qOhXhq0BNYyBfuYE07C7ILYGdw8/s1600/trojmorze+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="459" data-original-width="788" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgna6YEZnNsCSiXFOKYMSU4v6afOxqcbHGNdMnsSBq7UJu_JLIyqpTwerEsoPlSkJHqW0IaeYDLO5ps7nbA9AkaXYRaTrYZAtdCkOoCE73zbR1tpcy9qOhXhq0BNYyBfuYE07C7ILYGdw8/s320/trojmorze+%25282%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Europe of the Three Seas:<br />graphic from biznes.onet.pl</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-22362336053817776112017-03-29T08:36:00.001-07:002017-03-30T02:06:44.588-07:00A Birthday Party...<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> On
a wonderfully sunny afternoon this March, there was a party in Corpus Christi College
to celebrate the <a href="https://erc.europa.eu/ERC10yrs/home">10<sup>th</sup> birthday of the European Research Council</a>
(ERC). In case it has passed you by in all the noise about the Brexit vote, the
ERC is the EU’s pioneering research funding agency. In the past decade, it has
disbursed E12 billion and created jobs for 50,000 researchers, with a distinctive
focus on blue-skies, excellence-driven research questions – the UK has been the
most successful of all EU member states in winning these fiercely competitive
grants, and the single institution which has won the most ERC funding is Oxford
University.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> So it is no surprise that, as we
gathered to toast the ERC’s next decade (or century!) the UK’s Brexit vote was
the ghost at the feast. We watched a <a href="http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-03-16-oxford-marks-tenth-anniversary-european-research-council">video birthday message </a>recorded by Oxford
University for the ERC: somewhat bitter-sweet. Grant-holders, post-docs and senior
university staff enjoyed canapes and drinks beneath the portrait of Corpus’
founder, Bishop Richard Foxe (d.1528), fittingly enough a patron of the
international scholarship of the European Renaissance. Presiding over the event
was Professor Alistair Buchan, Oxford’s <a href="http://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/oxford-and-brexit/head-brexit-strategy">Brexit Strategy tsar</a>. One of the key
demands put to the UK government by British universities is that it preserve
our access to the EU’s world-leading research funding programme: the current
success of the UK’s top universities has been built with international talent
and, in no small measure, with pooled European funds. This is a shared British and
European achievement, across science, social science and humanities alike.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> The fears at the party were in part,
of course, about money: we heard from heads of departments whose budgets risk
(to use a current phrase) falling off a cliff if ongoing access to the ERC is
denied. But it is about much more than money, as speakers at the party so
passionately conveyed. ERC funding brings to Oxford and the UK a vibrant population
of postdocs from all over the world; it enables us to ask cutting-edge
questions without being forced to shoe-horn these into the often politicised agendas
set out by national funding bodies; its grants are so large that their impact
on a field, or in creating a field, can be transformative; in setting such high
standards for new ideas, it raises standards everywhere, with a ‘halo effect’. </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Research funding on this scale, of this ambition, is an
obvious good in itself, generating knowledge, discoveries and international
dialogue at an accelerated rate, to the benefit of very many people across the
globe – there are ERC-funded British-led projects in the Amazon and Antarctica.
But, to speak in different terms, the dozens of ERC grants which have come to
Oxford have also poured millions in the local economy – creating jobs for
researchers and administrators, creating business for local hotels, caterers
and conference facilities, with all the people whom they in turn employ. I think of
the voter I met on the streets of Oxford on June 23<sup>rd</sup>, who was
open mouthed to hear that the EU awarded so much money to the university, or that
the UK won more money out of this scheme than we paid in.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> So at Corpus we thanked the ERC, and
over drinks crossed our fingers that this door was not about to be slammed in our face – that this community of British, European and international talent in that
medieval hall, in a small city near the middle of England, would find a way forward,
would not dissipate or disperse, not allow the
impoverishment of its intellectual vision and international horizons, not
resign itself to an externally-imposed decline. One-to-one, we had
conversations about managing uncertainty, contingency planning – and about
speaking truth to power, whether loudly or <i>sotto
voce</i>. Because if we do not, who will?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com60tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-51412924983852219582017-01-04T02:12:00.000-08:002017-01-04T02:12:41.673-08:00Arriving at Somerville: Ten Years On<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Somerville: you can walk on the grass, but please don't drive across the quad.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Yesterday marked ten years since the day in January 2007 when
my husband and I loaded all my books into a car, and drove it illegally (unwittingly) across the paths of Somerville quad to my new office and job, pursued by
shouting porters. In Oxford terms, a decade is a mere blink of an eye. Nonetheless,
here are a handful of tentative reflections, from just one college tutor and
university lecturer’s perspective, on how life at Somerville and the Oxford
History Faculty has evolved in this past decade.<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The college
itself, graced with award-winning new buildings, with more designs by the same
<a href="http://www.niallmclaughlin.com/">architect</a> in the pipeline, and major academic initiatives in the form of the <a href="http://www.some.ox.ac.uk/research/oxford-india-centre/">Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development</a> and <a href="http://www.some.ox.ac.uk/studying-here/fees-funding/thatcher-scholarships/">Margaret Thatcher ScholarshipsTrust</a>, feels shinier, more confidently outward-looking, with an ever clearer
sense of a shared college purpose among the Fellows – all of these years in the
making. Watching this academic community coalesce more fully has been educational
in itself, and timely as Governing Body at the start of this New Year embarks
on the election of a new Principal. For our undergraduates, who seem cleverer
every year, the world after Somerville is however seemingly getting tougher:
compared to 2007, more of those graduating in History choose to do a Masters,
often to maximise their employment chances, and always at great financial cost.
It is now rarer for students to take Finals in Trinity and start a secure ‘milk-round’
job with the civil service or in the City three months later. Instead, since
the 2008 financial crisis, we tend to hear about periods of unpaid internships, more
opaque pathways into careers, and longer waits for a permanent contract.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The History
Faculty, in its recent reforms to the BA syllabus, research strategy and
appointments, has also become even more outward looking with its embrace of
global history. In 2007, to work on Poland was still regarded as weirdly exotic
by some colleagues; today, there is an expectation that historians in their
overall intellectual panorama will look further afield, beyond Britain’s
Atlantic shores, beyond Europe. Another significant change in how we conduct historical
research has been the growing importance – intellectually and financially – of the
major external research grant, from British, private or (most generously) EU
funding bodies. In 2007, entire funded teams of history researchers working on
funded projects (such as Robert Gildea’s <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/europes-1968-9780199587513?cc=gb&lang=en&">1968 project</a>) were rare as hens’ teeth;
today, the Faculty hosts at least 5 European grants each with a value of over
£1 million, employing clusters of top postdocs from around the world. This kind
of collaborative research (long of course the norm in science and social
science) is thus becoming a more common experience for Oxford historians. This
change is, in turn, further complicating the rapidly evolving role of the
traditional college tutor, a role which even since 2007 has grown more
variegated, accumulating competing demands.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Perhaps it is no surprise that,
from the particular vantage point of January 2017, one can look back on that
grey and nervous January day in Somerville quad a decade ago, and detect in
both college and the Faculty the trends which dominate public discourse and
global politics today: the ongoing legacies of the 2008 financial crisis, but
in particular the paradoxical twins of growing uncertainty, and growing international inter-connectedness.<o:p></o:p></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-30114101304063012332016-11-30T09:38:00.002-08:002016-12-01T02:25:48.121-08:00Academia and the End of Polite Neutrality?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAaSlP8at3hzFclASaT8bGJf00zJgOVtvDiKi6pfOAGozaOlfDLY-1nJq0YhUeH3LtJX21pB2dNKNpHyzESRFRZJsX3_aojmE953Y4kyeqfofravrWSwo4rN2-X2A-RrMbRPSFUFmySfk/s1600/saint+jerome.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAaSlP8at3hzFclASaT8bGJf00zJgOVtvDiKi6pfOAGozaOlfDLY-1nJq0YhUeH3LtJX21pB2dNKNpHyzESRFRZJsX3_aojmE953Y4kyeqfofravrWSwo4rN2-X2A-RrMbRPSFUFmySfk/s320/saint+jerome.jpg" width="251" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Scholar in their Study...<br />
St. Jerome, Antonello da Massina, National Gallery.</td></tr>
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It transpires, then, that you can
spend quite a lot of time teaching and writing about History, and it can still
turn around and bite you on the nose. Politics (read: history) has swept into
Oxford, into our cafes, venerable college halls, our committee meetings and
strategic planning. As I explained to a visiting colleague from Prague, until
six months ago, at Somerville College lunches or with one’s students at Fresher’s
Dinner, one might well discuss UK Higher Education policy, or immigration
policy as it affected universities…. but rarely actual party politics. Perhaps
a traditional British reserve, politeness and sense of good taste prevented it
being otherwise (I was once told: no religion, sex or politics at high table). That
set of mores was swept away overnight with the June 23<sup>rd</sup> UK
referendum on membership of the European Union, and again with the election of
Donald Trump as President of the United States. After the first result, the
atmosphere in college was one of palpable collective grief, and after the
second a stunned, sheer funereal silence.<o:p></o:p></div>
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These
events are rapidly redefining what it means, for an intellectual community, to
be political. Before June 2016, a handful of historians in the university were
openly active in party politics (addressing party meetings, leafleting for one
party or another in city council elections). Yet with the sudden advent of xenophobic,
anti-liberal democratic, anti-intellectual and <a href="http://theconversation.com/no-this-isnt-the-1930s-but-yes-this-is-fascism-68867">populist</a> politics, as if
with the flick of a wand, the most basic things we do in this (or any) university
have suddenly become highly political and partisan – catapulting us into the frontline
of a culture war. When in tutorials we school young people in questioning and
critical thought; when we lecture on how nationalism was constructed / invented
in the 19<sup>th</sup> century; when we speak up for continued access to the
EU’s mould-breaking research programmes; when we defend the legal rights of our
non-British-passport-holding colleagues, all of them top international scholars
– all this, improbably, has now become politics with a capital P, setting us sharply
at odds with the UK Government and its rhetorics, and liable to bring a torrent
of online insults down on any academic publicly defending these things. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The rules
of engagement have shifted under our feet, with a bracing lurch. Academics are
trained to deal in nuance, complexity, uncertainty, slow reflection and
precision – skills which famously do not automatically translate into punchy
public policy positions, or rhetorics. For academics – particularly those
active in the publicly-visible world of social media – there are personal risks
in speaking out on Brexit, xenophobia or Trump: of outright abusive messages
online, or of being seen to use a university post to proclaim private political
views. Yet not to speak out arguably carries a greater risk for us all, and what
threatens the essential liberal values of universities is not a private matter for
those employed to serve, staff and run these major national institutions. Earlier this year, Simon Schama spoke to a packed lecture theatre in
Oxford’s Natural History Museum about ‘public history’: he urged Humanities
scholars to be bold, and intervene in public debate to defend our values. Simon Schama gave that talk, prophetically, well before the June referendum.<o:p></o:p></div>
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</div>
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The (hostile)
politicisation of our university life by external forces is unfamiliar to this
generation of UK academics, but none of it is new. Down the centuries, scholars
and writers have found again and again that, against all their wishes and
private inclinations, they get pulled personally into big and dangerous
political struggles: one need only look at the life of Niccolo Machiavelli, or Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Our sources have been telling us all along how painful, frightening, and disorientating this situation is. Perhaps we have not been listening to those early modern voices as
well as we thought we were; perhaps we did not, after all, entirely hear or
recognise until now what they were saying. That intellectual freedom, although
practised from within the quiet space of the Academy, cannot be quietly
defended.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-55111867076513341612016-09-21T06:45:00.000-07:002016-09-21T06:50:24.670-07:00Postcard from Salento<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaGWCNkx_CapnfStBvcW5WJiF4G_HeIyu_bp7tBeSk9s7HFN52MvtQCZOVxLm9H8zlE7Elxhw_esoTlnBSIe921fi_nyWvND0LJcJ_0A3JinEXpxVriVYVrB_YIueS2AsDjAa8Ic573qM/s1600/leuca+church+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaGWCNkx_CapnfStBvcW5WJiF4G_HeIyu_bp7tBeSk9s7HFN52MvtQCZOVxLm9H8zlE7Elxhw_esoTlnBSIe921fi_nyWvND0LJcJ_0A3JinEXpxVriVYVrB_YIueS2AsDjAa8Ic573qM/s400/leuca+church+%25282%2529.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Santa Maria de Finibus Terrae, Leuca, Salento<br />
Photo N Nowakowska</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Salento is one of Europe’s many evocative ‘finis terrae’ –
places where the land just runs into the sea, like Portugal’s Sagres,
Brittany’s Finisterre, England’s Land’s End. Salento is the far tip of Puglia,
the stiletto point on the heel of Italy, and its Cape Leuca overlooks the spot
where the postcard-blue Adriatic meets the darker Ionian Sea. Even on a hazy
August day, at Leuca you can see Albania to the east, like
a mirage. With its ancient Greek heritage and Greek-speaking villages, olive
groves with clumps of prickly pear, and ruins of the local <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messapii" style="text-align: center;">Messapian</a><span style="text-align: center;"> civilisation, Salento has often claimed itself to be a distinct region of Italy, historically separate even from Puglia, whose regional capital lies 200km north in Bari.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Whatever I
had expected as a historian to find in Salento – a traditionally agricultural
and poor part of Europe, ‘Maldive-like’ beaches which attract Italian holidaymakers
in their thousands, local black widow spiders – wasn’t quite what we saw. Over
Salento’s rural emptiness, there is a strong veneer of design chic.
Baking hot Otranto, famous for being sacked by the Ottomans in 1480, has
medieval alleys bursting with high-end boutiques: designer bikinis, designer lights. It was
clear from fabulous coffee-table books widely on sale that there is a trendy
Salento style… white wash, white linen, ironwork furniture, the essential
rustic farmhouse vibe. The cover story of one of Italy’s national interior
design magazines, this summer, was the Salento look.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It was also
striking how strong a narrative of its own identity Salento can project. I
picked up a little <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tarantapatia-lunghe-notti-della-taranta/dp/8895161904">book</a> by Pierfranceso Pacoda about the <i><a href="http://www.lanottedellataranta.it/en/">Night of Tarantella</a></i>, the hugely successful folk festival centred
around Salento’s dionsyian, dervish-like ‘tarantella’ dance: the dance you
danced if bitten by venomous local arachnids. Pacoda, and other local
intellectuals, argue that international interest in the dance and its <i>pizzica</i> music has sparked pride in
popular Salento culture, given its populace back a firm sense of place and
identity. If Salento could not have actual automony of government, they wrote,
it could at least create its own ‘autonomy of imagination’. These writers spoke
of Salento as typifying the Mediterranean dilemma: for so long the centre of
the world, over slow centuries coming to terms with becoming a backwater. Salento, they write, can renew itself by reclaiming its own distinctive cultural outputs. </div>
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This lively debating of past and present is manifest in Salento’s
impressive local museums. In Ugento, the town <a href="http://www.sistemamusealeugento.it/">museum </a>(pointed
out with great pride by locals, who approached us in the street full of civic
enthusiasm) is an imaginative museum-within-a-museum: an early modern monastic
house, with many frescoed side-chapels in tact, in which Messapian artefacts
are carefully displayed. The Ugento museum tells its ancient, and 17C,
histories together, cleverly interweaving them. And in the Greek-founded port of Gallipoli,
the <a href="http://castellogallipoli.it/">medieval castle</a>, jutting into the harbour, has been restored as both
heritage site, architectural academy and contemporary art space. Walking
through its dim corridors, you are greeting with glass-and-LED tortoises and installations made from the lifejackets of Mediterranean refugees, while in the courtyard Anthony-Gormley-style humanoid sculptures peer down from the ramparts.
Gallipoli castle’s bookshop was a treasure trove of publications on Salento:
everything from colouring books to collections of late medieval
documents. Salento has a lot of problems, but it has a tangible energy and self-assertion
too, presenting itself not as periphery, but one of Europe’s historic cultural
crossroads. <i>Finisterrae</i>: where the
land ends, and the story begins.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeya572yC4MM98c2M1yNRYuUmia8RrPDfhjKdYZ3OGVsSi2_6by9xJzbibdq-OS6-Kt_lnkIkP4nuxDYT5Y-1yIUUf1ZDED-Rly__SgU03SJXwGsmEQfQptklj1BlZRgK22-ZgOmcxLeo/s1600/gallipolli+castle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeya572yC4MM98c2M1yNRYuUmia8RrPDfhjKdYZ3OGVsSi2_6by9xJzbibdq-OS6-Kt_lnkIkP4nuxDYT5Y-1yIUUf1ZDED-Rly__SgU03SJXwGsmEQfQptklj1BlZRgK22-ZgOmcxLeo/s400/gallipolli+castle.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gallipoli Castle<br />
Photo N Nowakowska</td></tr>
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Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-11936853048851103892016-06-29T03:18:00.000-07:002016-06-29T03:20:52.498-07:00Poland, the UK and the Brexit Vote <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A great Polish Anglophile: King Stanislaw August Poniatowski</td></tr>
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In 2008, Richard Unger edited a volume entitled <i>Britain & Poland-Lithuania: <a href="http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/9789047442684">Contact and Comparison</a> from the Middle Ages to 1795</i>. In light of the UK’s vote for
Brexit, it is worth going back to books like these, to ask where Polish-British
relations have come from and where they might be heading. There are many
narrative threads within the Brexit vote, but this is certainly one of them.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
This is a story of intensifying
contact, convergence and progressive entanglement between two European
polities, one thousand miles apart. Throughout the Middle Ages and sixteenth
century, contacts between these isles and the Polish kingdom were ongoing,
albeit in a piecemeal, low-key way. Readers of Unger’s collection can pick up
interesting morsels: the long shoes fashionable in England in the 1360s were
called ‘crakows’, in the 1590s Cracow boasted its own Scottish pub. The monarchs
of England and Poland exchanged infrequent, polite letters, mostly on crusading
(and were often unclear even of one other’s names). It was in the 18C that mutual
interest between the two countries picked up: the last king of Poland,
Stanisław August Poniatowski, and his court were <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/polands-last-king-and-english-culture-9780198207016?cc=gb&lang=en&#">Anglophiles</a>, with a strong
interest in British literary and political culture. In 19C London, exiles from partitioned
Poland were a high-profile cause celebre to many. In 1939, it was of course
Hitler’s invasion of Poland which triggered the United Kingdom’s declaration of
war; famously, Polish citizens played a role in the Allied war effort at RAF
Northolt, Bletchley Park, Monte Cassino. It was as a result of this conflict
that the first large-ish <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_in_the_United_Kingdom#Polish_Resettlement_Corps_1946.E2.80.9349">Polish diaspora</a> settled in the UK, numbering some
200,000 people. The end of the Cold War, and Poland’s much celebrated joining
of the EU in 2004, saw Polish citizens coming to the UK in astonishingly high
numbers, attracted in part by the presence of an established Polish community
in the country. Tabloid papers began to run stories alleging Polish vagrants
roasted swans in English parks. And now we have this: a Brexit vote in June
2016, in which Leave campaigners voiced open displeasure about the
presence of <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1342831/streets-full-of-polish-shops-kids-not-speaking-english-but-union-jacks-now-flying-high-again/">Polish shops</a> on their streets, of Polish-speaking children in the
school playground. Post June 23<sup>rd</sup>, there are repeated reports of
verbal abuse of Poles, and a nasty <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/06/rise-hate-crime-reports-dark-sign-post-brexit-britain">graffiti attack</a> on the long-standing Polish
Cultural Centre in west London – a place for international film, artists and
theatre. A notable WWII alliance has given way to rancour and fear.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1dm3Zs8FDgluQyUikiRNNXAAbJWh96W62feHxyALkD4GfIbAv_TgTNtSMeoBTdANlAsw-Kq3qmwFXAQjm6pro7sneCTA90v4lU0ZvbbNITHlMZpWwbREgldosBBtrnx0BUHt8w9XYaZY/s1600/polski+skelp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1dm3Zs8FDgluQyUikiRNNXAAbJWh96W62feHxyALkD4GfIbAv_TgTNtSMeoBTdANlAsw-Kq3qmwFXAQjm6pro7sneCTA90v4lU0ZvbbNITHlMZpWwbREgldosBBtrnx0BUHt8w9XYaZY/s320/polski+skelp.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Polish shop, Oxford, 2013</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
But Poland is not just the Polish
delicatessens on streets up and down the United Kingdom. Poland ‘over there’ is a NATO
member, an EU ally, its nationalist Law & Order (<a href="http://pis.org.pl/">PiS</a>) ruling party
currently engaged in its serious own stand-off with the EU over the rule of
law. In meeting as a group of 6 self-styled ‘EU founder members’ the day after
the Brexit vote, the EU west European states
caused anger and dismay in Poland. Jarosław Kaczyński,
leader of PiS, has quickly urged the EU to consider again a 2 speed Europe, with a new
European treaty; Polish liberals fear Brexit might galvanise PiS towards a ‘Polexit’,
allowing it to rule in populist style without sanction from Brussels. So the
Polish government, and fraught Polish domestic politics, will play an important
role in any forthcoming EU-UK negotiations on Brexit. The EU institutions in
Brussels have a problem to the north with their British Brexit neighbour, and a
problem to the east with openly nationalist regimes such as those of PiS (and
Orban in Hungary).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Poland and Britain interacted for
centuries in their very different forms: as medieval monarchies, early modern
composite states, dynastic unions, and modern nation states. Now, with their
very populations entangled in the 21C, Poland and the UK are interacting within
a new globalised world and interconnected Europe, still speaking loudly of
inviolable ‘sovereignty’, yet both in a strong mutual embrace they cannot
easily escape. The Brexit vote is a British earthquake, but it is also a highly
significant event in Central European history and politics. Poles, both in
Lincolnshire and in the Belvedere Palace in Warsaw, are today actively shaping
the UK’s history; just as the UK is shaping theirs. We shall see, to our relief
or to our cost, whether in this decade the oscillating centripetal or
centrifugal forces in European history will win out. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW4sc7lMGKh42hJZRYSkh8E9PXCpiSSkNWq-2Qx9Env9kfhRdMYKfUBSfoViltBniGj_8d-CXgrbbDGBS1E4zNf3cZyKv3VRriWSIDDdZrczaa7Pa1Ky9XUdGTLvTbUmeQwF8Dyb0od10/s1600/cracowers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW4sc7lMGKh42hJZRYSkh8E9PXCpiSSkNWq-2Qx9Env9kfhRdMYKfUBSfoViltBniGj_8d-CXgrbbDGBS1E4zNf3cZyKv3VRriWSIDDdZrczaa7Pa1Ky9XUdGTLvTbUmeQwF8Dyb0od10/s320/cracowers.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Polish Cracower shoes - the height of 14C London fashion...<br />
(From http://bit.ly/29o3x5E)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com398tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-63511423747554103552016-06-16T02:36:00.000-07:002016-06-16T02:36:35.146-07:00Strangers in London<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsTEwZIrX4xzvbIoDwH5WJVniGA3R562ba6MfbVYLNPZzvkT1DtbS3PVnyil00j65fvWeLGGh71rD9P2JOkwc5E60H8J5Ck77WwNICNx-OtmMyXqWwWkNETNRYy7jogFiYv3gHnw5_Cq8/s1600/lasco+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsTEwZIrX4xzvbIoDwH5WJVniGA3R562ba6MfbVYLNPZzvkT1DtbS3PVnyil00j65fvWeLGGh71rD9P2JOkwc5E60H8J5Ck77WwNICNx-OtmMyXqWwWkNETNRYy7jogFiYv3gHnw5_Cq8/s320/lasco+1.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Dutch Church, Austin Friars (photo by NN)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Academics
are increasingly encouraged to engage the public in their research - via
‘impact’ initiatives or through active collaboration with non-scholars in what
is termed ‘knowledge exchange’. It was therefore refreshing to participate in
an academic conference on the Reformation which was entirely conceived, curated
and organised by the <a href="http://www.dutchchurch.org.uk/">Dutch Church</a> in the City of London (and not by early
modern historians). Last week, the conference ‘<a href="http://www.dutchchurch.org.uk/lasco/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/20150829_lasco_flyer.pdf">John a Lasco: I am A Stranger</a>’
heard speakers from the United States, UK and the Netherlands. Johannes a Lasco
(or Jan Łaski the Younger, 1499-1560), was the most significant Reformation
figure produced by Poland: nephew of a powerful Polish archbishop, furnished
with the best possible foreign education, Johannes a Lasco went on to play a
leading role in Protestant communities northern Germany, England and his native
Poland. Here in England, it was to Johannes a Lasco that Edward VI entrusted
leadership of the ‘Strangers Church’ in 1550 – a place where London’s foreign refugees and immigrants could worship together. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> It was marvellous to hear papers
about Lasco and the Strangers’ Church in the very place where that church once stood.
Originally part of the enormous Austin (Augustinian) Friars monastery, the
building was given to the Strangers, destroyed in the Blitz, and rebuilt by the
Dutch community in London. It is an inspiring, beautiful and resonant space. Thomas
Cromwell’s great mansion was built just across the road (as readers of <i>Wolf Hall</i> will know). The speakers
delivered their lectures before an enormous stained glass window showing John a
Lasco, bearded and in green robes, and the two children connected with this
church, the boy-king Edward VI of England, and Princess Irene of the
Netherlands who laid the foundation stone of the new building in 1950. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> We heard from <a href="http://www.uco.edu/la/history-geography/faculty/springer.asp">Michael Springer </a>about
Lasco’s magnum opus, the <i>Forma ac Ratio</i>,
an extended ‘how to’ guide on running a Calvinist congregation, from <a href="http://www.history.brookes.ac.uk/People/Academic/prof.asp?ID=586">Andrew Spicer </a>about the foreign residents of London in the 1550s, from <a href="https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/History/People/david.gehring">David Gehring</a>
about a parallel life to that of Lasco, the Elizabethan Robert Beale. Silke
Muylaert spoke on how the Stranger Church in London reacted when the
Netherlands erupted in religious revolt, bringing traumatised and impassioned
refugees to their corner of London. The Dutch Church had however also organised
this conference to pose broader and contemporary questions about refugees,
immigrants and toleration. We therefore heard how in 16C eastern Germany, or
17C Prague, or 16C Poland, very different religious communities could coexist
in curious, unexpected and usually precarious ways. This conference was most
timely, in light of the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, and the UK’s own
referendum debate about identity and migration. It was sobering to hear that in
late 16C London, the government had conducted a full census of foreign
residents, quizzing them in depth about their reasons for coming to England;
that other Londoners complained about immigrants driving up 16C house prices
and taking jobs; that the Elizabethan government deeply feared that refugees
from a savage European war would bring religious and political
radicalism to these shores (Andrew Spicer, Michael Springer). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It is always a pleasant surprise when
research on 16C Europe speaks so directly to communities in the UK today. A
Lasco was in London only three years, forced to flee by ship along with his congregation
of ‘Strangers’ in 1553, when the Catholic queen Mary I ascended the throne. The
Dutch Church is soon to unveil a new plaque commemorating Johannes a Lasco and
his time in London: it will mark how a unique life, and a unique building,
connect England, Poland and the Netherlands and their respective histories. The
plaque will also be a prompt to reflect on the different experiences which
foreigners, immigrants and refugees have had in our capital city (welcome, warm
coexistence, expulsion) over the centuries, as the United Kingdom again finds
and articulates its place in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxgxKpxlyQb2Q_4IeE2hyphenhyphenGjeT7pSdnIp8QiCSg0dm4vO-4tmqMdKKVoqyO0OhTqnwjSi9GyVsTMYxiVd1s6SBRATaxy9RQxHsobng3_dNTjU5XsKdjpWtY34SGQeM-9JE2BeoyOLnzWHo/s1600/lasco+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxgxKpxlyQb2Q_4IeE2hyphenhyphenGjeT7pSdnIp8QiCSg0dm4vO-4tmqMdKKVoqyO0OhTqnwjSi9GyVsTMYxiVd1s6SBRATaxy9RQxHsobng3_dNTjU5XsKdjpWtY34SGQeM-9JE2BeoyOLnzWHo/s320/lasco+2.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com126tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-33325964814573468552016-06-06T01:34:00.001-07:002016-06-06T01:34:49.530-07:00The Tudors & the EU Referendum<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV0dKfpU7ByV9cr4UnliPpEKv-h__Astgem8x3Cb3t85nwLimqY2jsp3rKAIbd6VRjdiG5KOvt4l1xlvqbGUd8Nz6MGk1lJefN-br4ITDfG8Bh-0ayxBZ3KEsZF3tkgyjoUIZfzNeYx8Y/s1600/English_Channel_Satellite+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV0dKfpU7ByV9cr4UnliPpEKv-h__Astgem8x3Cb3t85nwLimqY2jsp3rKAIbd6VRjdiG5KOvt4l1xlvqbGUd8Nz6MGk1lJefN-br4ITDfG8Bh-0ayxBZ3KEsZF3tkgyjoUIZfzNeYx8Y/s400/English_Channel_Satellite+%25282%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The English Channel; the edge of history?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Historians
have been prominent in the EU referendum debate, with George Osborne hosting a
reception with </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/may/25/vote-to-leave-eu-will-condemn-britain-to-irrelevance-say-historians" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Remain academic supporters</a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> last week. The question of the
British Isles’ relations with the wider European continent is, however, a
problem which has long underpinned the popular Oxford undergraduate course
‘British History, 1500-1700’, quietly and subversively. In teaching the history
of Tudor England, Europe is a well-established ghost at the feast.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Teaching this paper to some of the
UK’s brightest students, using books written by some of our brightest scholars,
is to see how deeply ingrained the idea of a separate ‘England’ and ‘Europe’
is. Students from a range of ethnic and social backgrounds instinctively write
of the Tudors and their subjects as ‘we’: ‘we had a Reformation’, ‘we invaded
France’. Europeans become ‘they’. This is merely a crude echo of what history
students find in many books about early modern England, which breezily sketch
differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – England had a sensible, state-imposed
Reformation, while those continentals had wild riots, image-breaking and wars.
English witchcraft trials were calm local affairs and small scale; the
Europeans (and Scots) had out-of-control paranoid panics. The English ‘we’ is
civilised and law-abiding, the continental ‘they’ is slightly hysterical. This
kind of seductively simple picture of the sixteenth-century is possible only if
one employs a rhetorical sleight of hand – to pack the entire European landmass
and its islands into one homogenous ‘they’, neatly contrasted with an English
‘us’. There was of course no single European experience of Reformation (and no
Protestant Reformation at all in many places), or witch-hunts or, say, the
evolution of parliaments. Tudor England might have been much like Denmark or
Transylvania in certain respects, but more like France or Portugal in others.
Europe was in the sixteenth century a collection of kingdoms, duchies and
republics, just as it is today a collection of highly varied nation states.
England was distinctive, but so was every polity in Europe. (And all those
polities claim, when writing their national histories, that they were unique).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> This powerful idea of a pristine
historical separation between Tudor England and a chaotic Continent is of
course a myth. The events which rocked the kingdom, and these islands, in the
sixteenth century were not purely indigenous in origin: ideas of Reformation,
state power, witchcraft, history, art and many others came primarily from
abroad. The religious reformer and Polish refugee, John a Lasco, was for
example a prominent Protestant in Edward VI’s London, as a major <a href="http://www.dutchchurch.org.uk/lasco/">conference</a>
next month in London will recall. Books, ideas, objects, images and people
crossed (and criss-crossed) the sea. This is a history of dense, ongoing
connections and exchange, which is no cause for embarrassment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> This myth of a historic separation
between the British Isles and an abstract place called ‘the Continent’, however
historically questionable, is one which we unfortunately still perpetuate in
our teaching. At Oxford, the History B.A. offers separate papers in British and
‘General’ (European) history. At post-graduate level, cutting-edge research is
discussed in two separate groups – an Early Modern Britain seminar, and an
Early Modern Europe/World seminar. It wasn’t true in the sixteenth century that
the British Isles had a historic experience so unique that it set them totally
apart from other societies in the geographical vicinity; it still wasn’t true
in the twentieth century when so many of our classic Tudor England textbooks
were written; and it is not true today. Britain, and England, have always been
an integral part of a rich, difficult, mutually entangled European history: in
the referendum, we risk breaking crucial twenty-first century alliances, on the
basis of a historical myth to the contrary. The United Kingdom, with its constituent
territories, is part of Western Eurasia; it can of course pretend that it is
not, but to do so on June 23<sup>rd</sup> would be unwise. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-22129988089256415292016-04-26T04:12:00.000-07:002016-05-05T05:43:46.054-07:00Faustus: Magic & the Medieval City<i>This term, Oxford will see a new student production of Christopher Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus'. As part of their public & educational outreach, the students have commissioned blogs from academics on themes related to the play. This blog first appeared on the Doctor Faustus <a href="http://doctorfaustus.wix.com/faustus-oxford">production website</a>.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb50MgFA73uVb_CeHNBBqyCYljsT0dYhkkISE_81Hpyt41DcsT8L3G4rQFZoZKc38h13yMCxmMi1x6bdv5dGqRYeW1snN5XTcXWr-ziSw2pMnJBoKcbWtMIu8tz1uQ-xSggQd7ayIKB9Y/s1600/collegium+maius.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb50MgFA73uVb_CeHNBBqyCYljsT0dYhkkISE_81Hpyt41DcsT8L3G4rQFZoZKc38h13yMCxmMi1x6bdv5dGqRYeW1snN5XTcXWr-ziSw2pMnJBoKcbWtMIu8tz1uQ-xSggQd7ayIKB9Y/s200/collegium+maius.JPG" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Collegium Maius, </i>Krakow's Jagiellonian University</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Of all the prophets, wandering
scholars and conjurors produced by sixteenth century Germany – a society
undergoing profound change – few have captured the imagination of later
generations quite so much as Dr. Johann Faust. Marlowe’s play (1592) is based
on an apparently real figure, whom we can just about glimpse in the historical
sources: in decrees issued by city officials, and above all in gossip, letters
and rumours circulating among educated men. This shadowy Faust, trailing from
German town to German town until his reported death in an alchemical explosion
in the 1540s, is described as a trickster, great sorcerer (necromancer) and
blasphemer. But while Faustus may have existed on the margins of recorded
history, and on the margins of acceptable society in his own day (banned from
entering various German towns), his interest in magic was anything but marginal
in sixteenth-century Europe.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Poland, for
example, has its own Dr. Faustus figure – celebrated for centuries in
literature, art and even in the Cold War children’s songs I sang at my Polish
Saturday School in London in the 1980s. He is called Pan (or Mr) Twardowski. Twardowski
was rumoured to be the magician employed by King Sigismund Augustus of Poland
(d. 1572) to conjure the spirit of his late wife Barbara, and this grew into a
bigger story, about a Twardowski who made a pact with the devil and became the
Man in the Moon (one of only two Poles to make it into space so far!). In fact,
the Polish royal capital of Kraków was one of Renaissance Europe’s great hot-spots
of fortune-telling and magic. The first professor of astrology at Kraków was
appointed in 1459, and the predictions of the university’s astrologers were
much sought thereafter, reprinted across the continent. At the Polish court, a
crystal-gazing prayer book (now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford) was produced
for the royal family, which explained how the monarch could summon four
archangels to tell him the future. In an episode reminiscent of Faustus’
reported demise, two Kraków friars were killed in the 1460s in an alchemical
experiment which went badly wrong. In fact, a Central European capital like
Kraków could have such a reputation for magic, that the great Lutheran theologian
Philip Melanchthon asserted that Johann Faust must have been ‘a scholar of
Kraków’, where magic was openly taught.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg55OLnuEXhBakTDkejNbUCdnXsM-n45XONnuETJhxc5NDfrXTXudh10zaOguKqmFw4KSVM_HlGY6aYKyHODqP1W6PTwGSxYvDms6eRPSOxEEYY6ahFO9q786MSWdRpA6StuoxFY5RSUtA/s1600/Twardowski_z_diablem.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg55OLnuEXhBakTDkejNbUCdnXsM-n45XONnuETJhxc5NDfrXTXudh10zaOguKqmFw4KSVM_HlGY6aYKyHODqP1W6PTwGSxYvDms6eRPSOxEEYY6ahFO9q786MSWdRpA6StuoxFY5RSUtA/s320/Twardowski_z_diablem.jpg" width="247" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Twardowski with the devil<br />
<i>Sketch by M E Andriolli, 1895</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</o:p></div>
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Historians
pay a good deal of attention to magic and astrology in medieval and Renaissance
Europe, because contemporaries themselves saw it as a serious if problematic
branch of knowledge. In the Renaissance period, European magic underwent a
profound shift. Medieval magic (as numerous well-handled 14<sup>th</sup>
century<a href="http://somervillehistorian.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/casting-spells.html"> manuscripts in the British Library</a> well testify), employed spells derived
from mainstream Christian prayers, typically with the intention of summoning
spirits. A new Renaissance magic was, by contrast, focused on recovering from
the ancient Greek or Jewish past new methods for seeking higher truths: by
practising Kabbalah, or singing the mystical hymns of Orpheus. Figures such as
Faustus and Twardowski have perhaps inspired so many stories since their own
day, because they represent a kind of shadowy last gasp of that older, medieval
form of magic – spells, Christian liturgy said backwards, spirits, demons, in
other words traditional necromancy. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
This, as Christopher Marlowe well
knew, was a European tradition in which England very much participated. There
was a legend of a Cambridge student who had made a pact with the devil, in
order to achieve his dream of becoming professor of theology at the great
Italian university of Padua - but was promptly found dead. There is a sea of
scholarship on Queen Elizabeth’s I advisor John Dee (d. 1608/9), occult
philosopher and astrologer. In the seventeenth century, England would produce
in the words of John Maynard Keynes ‘the last of the magicians’, that passionate
pursuer of ancient mystical truths, Sir Isaac Newton (d. 1727). The methods for
doing magic changed, but the dream of acquiring secret knowledge lived on among
the scholarly elites of early modern Europe, very long after the curtain fell
on that first performance of <i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="background: white;">The Tragical History
of the Life and Death of Doctor<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Faustus</em></span></i><em style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="background: white; font-style: normal;">.</span></em></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-6028405934664060752016-02-05T08:40:00.000-08:002016-02-05T08:40:03.911-08:00Talking about Jagiellonians...<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-gcYRc-2NZ6F45io-rh96Qaw4h53A2WAhqtZybLNxpkAj41N0OMqtCtxZ5pkpI-GIcSGWKcFDtKM9temoMlbqwal_tNfyfJxUvLeu9N-hqSVAfwvBRyZmQ-ovoE54slSwvuLle8ztOEs/s1600/anna+jagiellon+austria.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-gcYRc-2NZ6F45io-rh96Qaw4h53A2WAhqtZybLNxpkAj41N0OMqtCtxZ5pkpI-GIcSGWKcFDtKM9temoMlbqwal_tNfyfJxUvLeu9N-hqSVAfwvBRyZmQ-ovoE54slSwvuLle8ztOEs/s320/anna+jagiellon+austria.jpg" width="225" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anna Jagiellon, Queen of Bohemia & Hungary (d. 1547)<br />Hans Maler zu Schwaz</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We are gradually approaching the half-way mark of the 5 year
<a href="http://www.jagiellonians.com/">Jagiellonians Project</a> which I run, funded by the <a href="https://erc.europa.eu/">European Research Council</a>. One
of the (many pleasurable) challenges of directing a project such as this is
managing its communications – striking a balance between saying too little, and
saying too much. On the one hand, part of the purpose of this project is to
raise the profile of the Jagiellonians as an international dynasty among
historians and audiences outside Central Europe. Making full use of a project
webpage, <a href="https://twitter.com/Jagiellonians?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">Twitter</a>, mailing lists, quarterly newsletters and conferences in the
UK and beyond is therefore an important part of our activities. At times, I
have felt like a P.R. agency or professional evangelist for the Jagiellonians,
even as (paradoxically) my own scholarly and personal relationship with them
has become more nuanced, and perhaps more ambiguous. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
On the other hand, this is also a
fast-moving, collaborative research project – academics often work on a topic
for some time before feeling ready to air their findings. There is a time lag (sometimes
of years) between a project (or project website) launching and polished
historical research hitting journals or bookshelves. All the Jagiellonian
Project’s communications have to come with the tacit tag-line: ‘work in progress’,
or ‘historians still at work’. Another reason for not saying too much is
because this is not a solo project, but a highly collaborative one involving a
team of six researchers. When writing books on my own in the past, I have been
relatively relaxed about recounting the <a href="http://historymonograph.blogspot.co.uk/">ups and downs of research</a> online.
However, it is not necessarily appropriate to give a blow-by-blow account of
the internal workings, and private discussions, of a large team of scholars as we work together on a collectively authored publication.</div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
As it turns out, a major focus of
the project’s research has been communication itself – how ideas about a Jagiellonian
dynasty were articulated by humanist scholars (those masters of rhetoric and
persuasion) in splendid orations delivered at diplomatic summits, royal
weddings, coronations, and funerals in 16C Central Europe. When I look at our website, so well run by our
project Administrator Briony Truscott, with its family lists, (forthcoming)
maps, timelines and royal portraits, I wonder how far we have inadvertently
slipped into the shoes of those humanist diplomats, courtiers and poets, taking
on ourselves, five centuries on, the task of presenting the Jagiellonians to a
wider world.<o:p></o:p></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-74426234638331622722015-12-16T06:53:00.001-08:002015-12-16T06:57:00.931-08:00Winter Conversations<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj67nz0B0P1ovWhHVafbSAYI00epnQmHJFrkmAIrPOZfMpvhQmFQ2wVlhi4Les3QohjoGJjPIAsLWSKx1WHldnFNbbPmGtzmQo8gRPc-7hW17Q1seV5rRPRhQGQqccwrMHTlIYoNNcIs4w/s1600/engelsberg+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj67nz0B0P1ovWhHVafbSAYI00epnQmHJFrkmAIrPOZfMpvhQmFQ2wVlhi4Les3QohjoGJjPIAsLWSKx1WHldnFNbbPmGtzmQo8gRPc-7hW17Q1seV5rRPRhQGQqccwrMHTlIYoNNcIs4w/s320/engelsberg+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Engelsberg manor, in the mid-afternoon sunlight.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
After an unusually busy term and
Oxford History admissions week, in a final gasp of academic activity before
Christmas, I flew to Sweden for a seminar on ‘Declinism’ organised by the <a href="http://www.axsonjohnsonfoundation.org/seminars.htm">Ax:son Johnson Foundation</a>. One of the hallmarks of the Foundation’s seminars is that
they are often held in a late 17C manor house in the village of Engelsberg,
160km north of Stockholm. <a href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/556">Engelsberg </a>itself is listed as a UNESCO World
Heritage site due to its preserved ironworks, a monument to the importance of
iron ore mining in Swedish history. The aim of the seminars is to stimulate
interdisciplinary debate in the Humanities – this month’s, on ‘Declinism’, was
the third in a series which had begun with ‘Decadence’ and ‘Decay’.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And so as
part of a group of some ten speakers – from Mexico, the UK, the USA, Germany – we
found ourselves crunching across hard frost with our suitcases, in air several
degrees below freezing, towards a manor house decorated with candles, evergreen
and traditional glazed stoves. We were taken into a room rigged up with television
cameras, ready to film the seminar for broadcast by the Foundation. Throughout
the day, we heard papers on how the notion of ‘decline’ did, or did not, play
out in ancient Assyria, ancient Greek literature, in perceptions of the Ottoman
or Aztec worlds, in 20C America or in modern debate on climate change. I spoke
on the <a href="http://www.jagiellonians.com/">Jagiellonian dynasty</a>, perceptions of its demise, and claims of its rebirth,
in 16C Central Europe. The event, deep in rural Sweden in December, felt like a
cross between a country-house party and a monastic-style retreat for academics.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfbJvnfLX0bqBa83eri0GUQW11MpmZjaBZKpQJ1Wp7WJ0AiNhnhf7FgHpTBjZtGmlCjuCEzkF-HK07ONC3sQHL3M8bcujkk1gxFjWy7tYd8PtfT9NslEUt9lx1W45CkxOT9cY2G9xBROc/s1600/engelsberg+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfbJvnfLX0bqBa83eri0GUQW11MpmZjaBZKpQJ1Wp7WJ0AiNhnhf7FgHpTBjZtGmlCjuCEzkF-HK07ONC3sQHL3M8bcujkk1gxFjWy7tYd8PtfT9NslEUt9lx1W45CkxOT9cY2G9xBROc/s320/engelsberg+2.jpg" width="240" /></a> The
discussions continued late into the night, and the interdisciplinary
conversations in particular were memorable. We have various fora in the UK for
talking to scholars in other Humanities (and/or social science) subjects, not
least the dynamic <a href="http://torch.ox.ac.uk/">TORCH </a>here in Oxford. But sometimes I wonder if we are so
careful to be polite to each other that we don’t say what we really think.
Before Engelsberg, the closest I’d come to having very open interdisciplinary
conversations (of the sort where you can look an esteemed colleague in the eye
and say: ‘I just don’t understand why you do what you do’) was in the
<a href="http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472425089">Somerville Medievalists group</a> meetings, with my German & Italian literature
colleagues. At Engelsberg, (in a smoke-filled room, with low lighting and lots
of loud intellectual exchanges going on), I was able to have very frank
conversations on whether it is possible to write history at all, on
postmodernism, text and, indeed, truth. It is good to be challenged on the fundamentals
of what you do as a scholar. I think there are some misperceptions of what
historians do, or think they are doing, which suggests that there are things we
could articulate better. I learnt at Engelsberg that the gaps between
Humanities disciplines can be quite big, maybe bigger than we like to admit
outside of a darkened room. But I also learnt that – however heated the
discussions – even in the early hours of the morning they are tempered with
genuine mutual academic respect and curiosity.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-24382277330108791022015-09-09T02:08:00.000-07:002015-09-09T02:11:58.945-07:00Open Days<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWNvIEp1V0IM9d8ubvEKbSzz6mFbxnBpGca5daGtCDjUqVOxTA7dabwtreGOKI7dVEDYcXv8hU304x4SMQ1JSCUPgt54u62FX3tArQJXby0wx4EyeY9RtsIg9vYEIeUK2Laa3n2VdkTJQ/s1600/Village+fete.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWNvIEp1V0IM9d8ubvEKbSzz6mFbxnBpGca5daGtCDjUqVOxTA7dabwtreGOKI7dVEDYcXv8hU304x4SMQ1JSCUPgt54u62FX3tArQJXby0wx4EyeY9RtsIg9vYEIeUK2Laa3n2VdkTJQ/s320/Village+fete.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Like a village fete?<br />
Photo by <a href="http://www.geograph.org.uk/profile/72897">Vieve Forward</a> </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
On September 18th, the flags and bunting will come out as Oxford
University hosts the last of its <a href="http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/open-days-outreach/open-events-and-visiting/university-open-days/friday-18-september">2015 Open Days</a>. For many years, each
college had its own schedule of Open Days, which did not necessarily coincide
with one another. Now, Open Days are bigger, fewer in number and centrally
co-ordinated, with departments and faculties welcoming visitors too. This makes
for a more efficient visit for prospective students (and gridlock on Oxford’s
roads and pavements).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Exactly
what a college tutor is expected to do on an Open Day varies. Somerville for a
while assembled its tutors in a big hall, where we stood behind little tables,
handing out leaflets about our subject to the passing crowds – a bit like a
village fete. We now have a more congenial model, where visitors are able to
visit tutors in their college rooms, see them in their natural habitat, and get
some feel for the environment where tutorials take place. (Or a hastily tidied version
of that environment.) Prospective students can drop in at any point over a two-hour
period, and we sit and chat – for five, ten, fifteen minutes. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So what do
we talk about? I’m usually asked about the <a href="http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/prospective/undergraduate.html">course</a>: what options one can do in the first year, are they taught in college or not? I’m asked too about how the
admissions system works, which involves taking a deep breath and explaining the
different elements on which we assess a History application: GSCE marks,
submitted written work, History Admissions Test, scores from 2 separate
interviews (all of which we look at together, to form one big picture). I’m
asked what would-be Oxford historians should be reading over their summer
holidays, what in my opinion caused the English Reformation, or the unification
of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, or for my views on post-modernism. But
most of all, I’m asked a wise and cunning question: as a tutor, what advice
would I give an Oxford History applicant?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That too
involves a pause, and a deep breath. I say things such as: if you are applying
for a joint school (e.g. History and subject x), be very sure that you
passionately want to do both those subjects, and are genuinely gifted in them
both – don’t do it if you simply can’t choose between them. If you are
specifying a college in your application, it’s a really good idea to go to an
Open Day there and talk to the tutors who will be teaching you – it’s nice for
them to meet you, but more importantly it will give you a chance to see if
these are human beings you can and want to work with over three years. If you
are specifying a college on your application, do a little bit of research on
it. And then I shake their hand, and say a sincere ‘good luck!’. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Often, I never see these bright
and engaged interlocutors ever again. Sometimes, they return as Freshers a year later; some of them I remain in touch with for many years...<o:p></o:p></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-64087535773410517272015-08-07T06:07:00.001-07:002015-08-07T06:10:09.708-07:00Professor Paul Langford<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHkC7WGssVvZdXa_of64RuwaHm0OMVnn2mgvj9SwunxNpCK07Ucl54LmYpf3MA4bBT8IXzL7c95JrNMXZyRKJcAoC_ohV5BZoGrFM0DDiGqpslV7C3SFdfmxwgX7xwQHrkZVlKO_3sSV8/s1600/langford+paul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHkC7WGssVvZdXa_of64RuwaHm0OMVnn2mgvj9SwunxNpCK07Ucl54LmYpf3MA4bBT8IXzL7c95JrNMXZyRKJcAoC_ohV5BZoGrFM0DDiGqpslV7C3SFdfmxwgX7xwQHrkZVlKO_3sSV8/s1600/langford+paul.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
On returning to Oxford from
holiday, I was very saddened indeed to receive an email from Lincoln College stating that Paul Langford, former rector and my undergraduate tutor had died.
Paul Langford was a highly distinguished historian of eighteenth-century
England, a Fellow of Lincoln College from 1969, and a Fellow of the British
Academy, well known in particular for his book<a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198207337.do"> <i>A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783</i></a> (which I was
spectacularly impressed, as a student, to find in paperback in airport
bookshops).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I first met
Paul Langford on an exceptionally bitter winter evening in 1994, in his room in
Lincoln College, for my undergraduate admissions interview. There was a ticking
clock, an extraordinary panelled Oxford interior, and four imposing figures
seated in a row, one of them smartly dressed, serious but friendly, whose leg
tapped away in rhythm to my answers. I completely lost my thread half-way
through one answer, and was seized with terror that all hopes of an Oxford place
had gone. Paul Langford then smiled and said: ‘To be honest, I can’t remember
my question either’, and the entire situation seemed much more human, and
retrievable. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There were
many tutorials in that panelled room, with that same intimidating clock,
reading out essays on eighteenth-century Europe. Paul Langford was a quiet but
intense presence in a room: a tutor who was not afraid of silences in which you
were made to sit and think. He was genuinely kind to
his undergraduates: tactfully helping us to arrange entertainment in college
for speakers we’d invited down from Westminster, treating us to a splendid
post-Finals lunch at his home in Berkshire. Towards the end of my degree, Paul
Langford talked about my plans to do research. I explained that I was
interested in working on Polish-English ties in the 18C, or (more tentatively)
on Renaissance Poland. He gave me then some of the best advice I’ve
had, which I now often repeat to my own students: study what you are absolutely
most passionate about. He seemed sure that, even at the very earliest stages of
research planning, everyone knew deep down what that really was. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I shall
very much miss seeing Professor Langford walking through the streets of Oxford,
carrying off his distinctive mixture of gravity and joviality, immaculately
attired, often looking (to my mind) just a little bit like the
eighteenth-century squires he wrote about. I shall miss the knowledge, which I
and his fellow students had for so many years after leaving Lincoln, that
whenever we walked down Turl Street, he was somewhere behind those walls, such
an intrinsic part of the college’s life and identity. Paul Langford, like
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_H._H._Green">Vivian Green</a> (also former History tutor and former rector), is a scholar who
made a profound mark on both Lincoln College and on his own historical field. And,
like a true Oxford tutor, Paul Langford touched the lives of generations of
students in so many ways, that even the ablest historian would struggle
adequately to record them.<o:p></o:p></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-76237195565912739432015-05-07T08:25:00.001-07:002015-05-07T08:25:38.243-07:00How to Vote<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHolV-VuknB5Tg75ILmhkkEeiL06zcyxySkYhFQ7eg-2kTxph4AZFqmYhp_Bkqemu-ksX-yB55u7U3tVz5BwTH6KlSWT7blJZu6lINLqS6efgSiC7mT_9Jct4WAeH8JEowIbvMszZ77iM/s1600/Matejko+election.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHolV-VuknB5Tg75ILmhkkEeiL06zcyxySkYhFQ7eg-2kTxph4AZFqmYhp_Bkqemu-ksX-yB55u7U3tVz5BwTH6KlSWT7blJZu6lINLqS6efgSiC7mT_9Jct4WAeH8JEowIbvMszZ77iM/s400/Matejko+election.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Polish royal election of 1573, as imagined by Jan Matejko (d. 1893)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On UK Election Day (which on this occasion has been awaited
for the unusually long span of five full years), what do our late medieval and
Renaissance forbearers tell us about how to vote?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Although we think of it as a period of mighty monarchies, 15<sup>th</sup>
and 16<sup>th</sup> Europe was in fact full of elections and voting. The
hundreds of bishops in Latin Christendom, for example, were all elected by
their cathedral chapters: the canons would hear a solemn Mass, gather in the chapter
house and vote. If they were ‘inspired by the Holy Spirit’ (in practice meaning
if the result had been negotiated or fixed in advance) the chapter would
unanimously acclaim a single candidate. Alternatively, they could hold a ballot
(‘per scrutinium’) or appoint a subcommittee to make the decision (‘per
comprossimum’). Republics such as Florence or Venice, meanwhile, had a constant flow of elections to office, with elaborate voting procedures involving beans, silver balls, and giant urns.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The pope in Rome was of course elected, by cardinals who
were locked in the Sistine Chapel, with the Botticelli frescos and their own make-shift
beds, until they reached a majority verdict. Papal elections in the Renaissance
were characterised by the electoral capitulation – a formal list of promises
which the cardinals would make the successful candidate swear to deliver, before
formally electing him. (Not being carved in stone or enshrined in legislation, <i>pace </i>the UK party leaders, these were
always transgressed).<o:p></o:p></div>
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And even in monarchies, there were plentiful and often
momentous elections. The kings of Poland, Hungary, Bohemia and Sweden were
elected throughout the Renaissance period, as was the Holy Roman Emperor
himself. A Polish royal election, for example, such as that of 1492, involved
the 40 or so members of the royal council assembling at Piotrków castle with
ample numbers of armed troops, ‘conferring’ for several weeks, and only when a
successful candidate emerged as a result of those negotiations did the council proceed
to a formal oral vote, in the castle Hall. Then there were fireworks, feasting
in Kraków, and a lavish coronation. <o:p></o:p></div>
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What these varieties of 15C and 16C European elections have
in common is a conviction that all the important issues had to be thoroughly
negotiated, and agreed, by the key players before proceeding to a vote – the purpose
of which was partly ceremonial, or symbolic. In that sense, the UK 2015
election campaign – which has been characterised by negotiations and posturing between
possible allies, well in advance of the actual vote – has had something of a
Renaissance echo to it.<o:p></o:p></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-64542904128217776172015-02-25T08:36:00.000-08:002015-02-25T08:36:11.794-08:00Research & Anthropology<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_wuj31pB7p4SQUtgjnnQMu7Ib2lw_V_yoSEWdjQK8lOrZvXDisdrQqmoZhoAMH_tj3SiCTkQ8UFnqr7lUD8hnnXjxYnP9LqLVceVJhtw3UYhr6YL_LH92rfUrMbgbzq6x1NVMDuvgW08/s1600/babel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_wuj31pB7p4SQUtgjnnQMu7Ib2lw_V_yoSEWdjQK8lOrZvXDisdrQqmoZhoAMH_tj3SiCTkQ8UFnqr7lUD8hnnXjxYnP9LqLVceVJhtw3UYhr6YL_LH92rfUrMbgbzq6x1NVMDuvgW08/s1600/babel.jpg" height="291" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div class="MsoNormal">
Are we talking the same language?</div>
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Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s <i>Tower of Babel</i> (1563).<o:p></o:p></div>
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The <a href="http://www.jagiellonians.com/">Jagiellonians Project </a>which I lead has an anthropological strand: asking how anthropologists’
work on kinship, family and ritual can help us better understand this 15<sup>th</sup>
and 16<sup>th</sup> century royal house. Just last week, I found myself talking
over lunch at Somerville College with <a href="http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/jdyson.html">Dr. Jane Dyson</a>, comparing notes on
marriage practice in remote 21stC Himalayan villages and among Renaissance
princes.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Eighteen months in, however, the
project is also having to engage with anthropology in a broader, more immediate sense. The lands once ruled by the Jagiellonians today make up
some 13 different countries and national scholarships on the dynasty. The
project itself operates in a British environment,
with an international team. This means that the project is talking to a range
of audiences, and operating within and across a number of quite different
academic cultures.</div>
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Universities
and scholarship may look superficially similar across the world,
and we might use the same terminologies, but these often conceal important
differences. ‘Project’ is one such term, which can imply different things
in different places. In the UK, a research project is typically a team of
scholars employed to work full-time on a topic in a co-ordinated way, recruited
through open competition; in other places, ‘project’ is a network, an umbrella
which should properly group together all the leading experts in a given field. ‘Conference’
in some academic cultures is an event at which you speak, and pay a fee in
order to cover the organisers’ costs; elsewhere, ‘conference’ is an event to
which scholars, as a mark of honour, are invited to speak, all their expenses
generously paid, and fine meals lavished upon them. <o:p></o:p></div>
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‘Scholarship’ itself can mean
different things, depending on where in the modern world you are. In some
places, a particular mark of scholarly excellence is the successful
identification of new sources: new archival documents or visual artefacts. In
other places, scholarly excellence instead lies in fresh interpretations and
analyses of evidence, either old or new. This important difference reflects, I
think, the different functions which history plays within different cultures
today. My sense is that in some places the basic shape and themes of national
history (and its place in national identity) are already widely agreed upon,
and research simply fleshes these trajectories out further. By contrast, in
places where a canonical narrative of the past (for whatever reason) is less central
to present-day national identity, revisionism and the rewriting of old stories
by historians is applauded. <o:p></o:p></div>
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To openly acknowledge these
differences is not to make judgements about the relative merits of different academic
cultures. An international project such as the <i>Jagiellonians</i> therefore needs to be attuned to anthropology,
willing to decode cultural difference – ready to accept that some, or indeed
much, of what we do will (inadvertently) be baffling or annoying to scholars
elsewhere; and that, vice versa, there are reactions which we will struggle to
understand. The important thing is to start talking more frankly about our different
experiences and expectations; and to keep talking.<o:p></o:p></div>
Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-77124949243684887492015-01-12T01:51:00.002-08:002015-01-13T01:31:14.613-08:00Dolphins in the Bodleian<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFan46gs8gDvymhbsZefbAP9MwLEKoNXkT3-KAb557AV2XzOKVBvpQZ3rHBhH4z3eel2hDRei9t0BXQolToUe4dxD1SK5dzbttffwa7B6uMO-KPsyr6afHnmZBxU5jzoNH5jL3a9rOGmw/s1600/aldus+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFan46gs8gDvymhbsZefbAP9MwLEKoNXkT3-KAb557AV2XzOKVBvpQZ3rHBhH4z3eel2hDRei9t0BXQolToUe4dxD1SK5dzbttffwa7B6uMO-KPsyr6afHnmZBxU5jzoNH5jL3a9rOGmw/s1600/aldus+1.jpg" /></a></div>
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After a long, busy autumn term of teaching and running a
research project (hence the gap in blog posts, apologies), last week I finally
ventured back into the Bodleian Library, and found a new exhibition in the entrance hall. <i><a href="http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/whats-on/online/aldus-manutius#gallery-item=">Aldus Manutius:The Struggle and the Dream</a></i> marks the 500<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the
death of the pioneering Venetian Renaissance printer (c. 1450-1515), who
created distinctive editions of classical texts treasured by humanist scholars across
Europe, and in the process set a new standard in the printing of learned books.
The exhibition is curated by my Somerville History colleague, <a href="http://www.some.ox.ac.uk/195-6771/all/1/Dr_Oren_Margolis.aspx">Dr. Oren Margolis</a>, with assistance from current Somerville History undergraduates Jennifer Allan, Anna Clark and Qaleeda Talib, whose own work on Aldus will be showcased at an event at the
Bodleian in February.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At a time when academic publishing is again going through a
major metamorphosis, and experiencing another technological revolution, it
seems apt to reflect on the printer Aldus and his legacy. The Bodleian exhibition stresses
that Aldus’ Venetian workshop gave the world the italic font: the display
includes the first printed books in which it was seen. Probably few of us, when
pressing <i>Control I</i> on our computers,
know or think of the great copyright squabble which the discovery of printed
italic triggered between Aldus and his punch-cutter, Francesco Griffo. The
exhibition includes too a Roman denarius from 80AD, showing a dolphin and anchor, which Aldus adopted as his own device. Modern academic publishers must
surely remain envious of the little surge of delight, the flash of excitement,
the joy of possession, which the sight of Aldus’ dolphin logo seems to have
instantly provoked in the learned 16C reader.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Aldus printed for the republic of letters, for those
anywhere in Christendom who, at the turn of the 15<sup>th</sup> and 16<sup>th</sup>
centuries, were serious about scholarly and beautiful books. So it was a
particular pleasure for me to see in <i>The
Struggle and the Dream</i> an Oxford copy of Aldus’ <i>Erotemata</i>, by Constantine Lascaris, a key text for those learning
ancient Greek. I’ve been working for some years on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piotr_Tomicki">Piotr Tomicki </a>(d.1535),
bishop of Kraków and a key advisor to the Polish Crown. In Kraków’s Jagiellonian
Library, I have examined Tomicki’s own diligently, neatly annotated copy of Aldus’
<i>Erotomata</i>, which he had purchased as
a student in Italy, very far from home, and kept throughout his life, even once
he was a great statesman. Aldus’ volumes – whether in Venice, Kraków or Oxford
- still have the ability to make people, now as in the sixteenth-century, feel
they are holding in their hands very special books.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-854556579073061496.post-26128422461583477372014-10-27T09:22:00.000-07:002014-10-27T09:30:30.936-07:00Oświęcim or Auschwitz?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL-SEOkgAx9Ev0eEBUvBKy3T7uOQ6G4BWLuNjj03Rg3R-bu7MAvCyRGYegNjJ97AHtpgC9hIcyKo6UcbGFnBqBdDNZBSnDa9NDULOcONGbmcUKXTI9m3yNfLPBzI3vIc2NB-paPOm6Q_c/s1600/oswiecim+castle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL-SEOkgAx9Ev0eEBUvBKy3T7uOQ6G4BWLuNjj03Rg3R-bu7MAvCyRGYegNjJ97AHtpgC9hIcyKo6UcbGFnBqBdDNZBSnDa9NDULOcONGbmcUKXTI9m3yNfLPBzI3vIc2NB-paPOm6Q_c/s1600/oswiecim+castle.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oswiecim castle</td></tr>
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Earlier this month, I attended a <a href="http://muzeum-zamek.pl/konferencja-naukowa/">conference</a> in Poland
on the <a href="http://www.jagiellonians.com/">Jagiellonians</a>, a favourite
national dynasty representing a lost golden age. The conference, jointly
organised by the Universities of Warsaw and Katowice, was held in the
medium-sized, southern town of Oświęcim – in the 15<sup>th</sup> century, the
capital of a small Upper Silesian duchy on the tempestuous border between the Kingdoms of Poland and Hungary. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The conference took place in Oświęcim because the event was
generously sponsored and hosted by the town council and mayor. It took place in
the newly opened Oświęcim Museum, housed in a fine little castle above a river. The local authorities greeted
this gathering of historians enthusiastically. The conference is part of their
wider endeavour to reshape the image of their town, because Oświęcim is better
known across by the world by its German name, Auschwitz.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Coming from the UK, with its strong tradition of national Holocaust
education, the very idea of softening the image of a place called Auschwitz can
sit very uncomfortably indeed: this network of camps, one of them right outside
my hotel, is arguably the defining traumatic memory of the modern west. This is
a place which can seem irredeemably bleak, historically radioactive, drowning
out everything else around it for miles and miles; with its genocidal past,
quite simply the darkest spot in all of Europe.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4fhTr-nb4jOqraz72KtWDjxR_s_X_FgCXTagiFq81R556i-re62dzBcuXULOjRMwT56SLbCxTU__x_AV-ErCdaY3dpancgoIrTmCTnUeIDLl8CTjNq3p3_ec5ypLMFqRI43jvG-ftJDc/s1600/oswiecim+square.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4fhTr-nb4jOqraz72KtWDjxR_s_X_FgCXTagiFq81R556i-re62dzBcuXULOjRMwT56SLbCxTU__x_AV-ErCdaY3dpancgoIrTmCTnUeIDLl8CTjNq3p3_ec5ypLMFqRI43jvG-ftJDc/s1600/oswiecim+square.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Town square</td></tr>
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People who live in the town, most of whom were born long after
the war, perhaps in order to be able to live here at all, have a different
perspective. Oświęcim is simply their town: it has medieval churches, shops,
schools, Italian restaurants, bars. They wish visitors would come not just to the camp, but also get a flavour of local history by visiting the castle museum, or perhaps the town synagogue mueum. The camp itself has simply become
a fact of life: the town archives, for example, are housed in one of the blocks
in Auschwitz 1.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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Oświęcim’s attempt to rebrand itself, with EU funding for
its new museum, will seem heretical and deeply disrespectful to many outside
Poland, an implied minimisation of the Holocaust. For local Poles, for the
energetic mayor, it’s an attempt to ask the world to see this 21C community on its own terms, in a broader context. It comes down to one question – to whom does Oświęcim- Auschwitz belong?
To the world, to the 1,100,000 people who were murdered in this small place, or
to the Polish population who call this pretty but scarred town their home? Is
it, and should it always be, 1944 in this pocket of Europe? Are the locals
allowed to move on, or is the existence of normal life here some kind of
affront in itself? As a British citizen from the Polish diaspora, I can hear
what is said in both languages and narratives, and I can hear that they are not
hearing each other at all. And that is why there is no agreement - in guidebooks, on maps - on
what to even call this place, (Polish) Oświęcim or (German) Auschwitz.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9591bXqbXrS5hjgozz7QyDMYZzIudhQKGJjBWYlyWo3UBvekOMczlvGp8G1RhUhi5iIYPIiyxeyC6fn_hcddk1nLDaKxhY9wEb1SUUl8uykYIuKTQu-VtfZDXJpABulWCmr0m8mGFnh0/s1600/osweicim+sign.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9591bXqbXrS5hjgozz7QyDMYZzIudhQKGJjBWYlyWo3UBvekOMczlvGp8G1RhUhi5iIYPIiyxeyC6fn_hcddk1nLDaKxhY9wEb1SUUl8uykYIuKTQu-VtfZDXJpABulWCmr0m8mGFnh0/s1600/osweicim+sign.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Town sign: two identities, Oswiecim castle & Auschwitz camp</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Natalia Nowakowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11247199340436565556noreply@blogger.com5