Vera

It is very sad to write for a second time in less than six months about the premature death of a member of the Oxford community. I was working in the Bodleian’s Upper Reading Room (URR) this week, when I saw a notice announcing that one of the URR’s long-standing staff, Vera Ryhajlo, had died after a short battle with cancer.

I’ve been reading history books in the genteel surroundings of the URR – with its high ceilings, seventeenth-century friezes, walls lined with history journals – since I was an undergraduate, in the mid 1990s. As long as I can remember, Vera was there behind the Reserve Counter, jolly, larger than life, and always totally helpful and professional. If I had a complex photocopying order, involving dozens of forms and hundreds of pages of a nineteenth-century book, Vera would go patiently through the paperwork with me for half an hour, to ensure that the order was correct. Her laughter would carry through the reading room.

Historical research – as I’m being reminded this term, on sabbatical leave – is often a pretty lonely business, even in an apparently well peopled place like the URR. It’s just you, a stack of books and a clock, for months on end. For over 15 years, I’ve gone up the Reserve Counter, watched Vera hand over my books, and maybe come to her with a query if something went wrong with the electronic catalogue OLIS. It wasn’t until this week that I realised that, although my interactions with her were entirely about history books and often wordless, I find it hard to imagine the URR, my main research base throughout my career, without Vera. It reminded me, perhaps too late, that librarians humanise libraries (or dehumanise them in parts of the former Eastern bloc, but that’s another matter). I’ve sometimes written about communities here, but I had not realised until now that the URR is a community too – a community of people sitting silently at their desks, who by dint of the fact of being in a library don’t talk to each other, but a community nonetheless. It was a community which was made visible today, at Vera’s funeral at Saint Aloysius church in Oxford: academics, librarians, readers side by side in the pews. If you Google Vera’s name, you can see how many eminent historians and academics have fulsomely thanked her, and her colleagues David and Helen, in the prefaces to their books. In a community where books, and not speech, are the main method of interaction and communication, I hope that is an apt tribute.

Witches

1508 woodcut of witches
Photo by FrauBucher

I recently found myself in conversation with a small child in the run-up to Halloween. “What is a witch?” the child asked, “and where do they live?” As a history tutor who teaches the European witch-hunt for at least four separate Oxford undergraduate papers, I knew what the scholarly answer might be. A witch is early modern (and late medieval) Europe’s projection of its own ultimate imagined Other, the inversion of all the values that society most appreciated – a witch worshipped the Devil instead of God, engaged in sexual orgies in lieu of continence, killed cattle, made people sick and messed with the weather, rather than living as a useful member of the community. The witch was the infertile, jealous woman who poisoned infants, instead of the nurturing Christian mother. A witch was the parody of all that early modern Europeans believed held their fragile world together. (You can read about all this, for example, in Witch Craze, by Oxford's new Regius Professor, Lyndal Roper).

Instead of saying that, I said: “A witch is a woman who rides through the sky on a broomstick.” And because of the Polish elements in my upbringing, on the question of place of abode I went on to say: “She lives on Lysa Góra (Bald Mountain), with her friends.” There is a popular Polish nursery rhyme that goes: ‘There once was a witch who lived in a hut made of butter, and that hut was full of wonders…’ I was a bit surprised that, put on the spot, I gave this 21C child a 16C definition of witchcraft, which could have been straight from the pages of a demonological treatise (albeit with the more graphic details excised). Was it because I thought the 16C answer would be more comprehensible to a three-year old than the 21C answer? (I did add that witches could be men too, and that they are not real, as concessions to modernity). But this conversation did bring home to me this Halloween that, however much historians analyse and research and deconstruct, certain elements of early modern culture do live on, stubbornly and surprisingly, in our own, and we too transmit and preserve and hand down that culture, if only in our oral and story-telling traditions. And interestingly, when the child then pointed and said: “I can see a witch walking on the roof of your house” I was, half a millennium after the European witch-hunt and after decades of brilliant modern witchcraft scholarship, a little bit spooked.

Urban Dislocation

This week I finished reading The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness, who as well as being a poet and (with this novel) Booker long-listed author is also Professor of French Literature at Oxford. This possibly partially autobiographical book is about a drifting young Brit who finds himself in Ceausescu’s Romania during what transpires to be the regime’s endgame in 1989. The Last Hundred Days is probably the best evocation of life under Communism I’ve read since Marian Brandys’ memoir Moje Przygody z Historią (‘My Adventures with/in History’), which I read, I have to admit, for my Polish A-Level.

McGuinness wonderfully evokes a Bucharest in which the boundaries between space and time have become strangely fluid, as the regime tears down belle époque villas and medieval monasteries in order to erect in their place an ‘Stalinist legoland’. At its centre point is the Palace of the People – as the character Leo declares, “When they’ve finished building it, the whole of communism will climb in there, shut the doors, and die.” The pace of urban vandalism is so fast that the characters are regularly lost. As they wander around 1980s’ Bucharest at night armed with 1920s’ maps, they stumble upon people dancing to accordion and fiddler music by lamplight, or deserted nineteenth-century palazzos, unsure if they have accidentally crossed over into an earlier century, or an eternal Bucharest living in the gaps between past and present.

I was thinking about The Last Hundred Days during the Long Vacation, when I turned into Saint Giles and had my own experience of stunning urban dislocation. That long thoroughfare of buses, trees and college buildings had become a kilometre long traffic-free fairground, packed with people pushing buggies, kids holding bags of cotton candie, and the most extraordinary rides – a 3 storey high ghost train erected right against the façade of the Humanities Division, a twister which sent screaming teenagers hurtling within feet of the dour face of Saint John’s college, and a ride which shot people up into the sky higher over the spire of the Martyrs' Memorial. This subversive spectacle reminded me of early modern carnivals, when authorities and dominant institutions were mocked and riotous fun ruled the streets – the world turned (literally for the riders) upside down. It felt like crossing into an alternative Oxford.

Seeing Double

This week, after years of work on the part of many people, the Kraków publishing house Societas Vistulana has published the Polish edition of my first book, which appeared in English in 2007. Translated by my Oxford colleague Tomasz Gromelski, Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland: The Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468-1503) has now become Królewski Kardynał. Studium Kariery Fryderyka Jagiellończyka (1468-1503).

Seeing the handsome blue-white-red cover of the Polish edition, initially in proofs and now on the Societas Vistulana website, has been exciting but also unexpectedly unsettling. When you’re writing a monograph, for months and months it exists just as a series of messy Word files on your computer (usually pock-marked with comments to yourself in bold typeface: ‘check this fact!’ ‘Where did I find this quote?’), but you think of it as a material object in waiting. The great moment, the moment when you know it really is finished, is when you tear open a brown cardboard package from your publishers and hold the gleaming book in your own hands. (Kindle et al may yet change this moment of epiphany, but I’m not so sure).

It’s therefore slightly strange when that same book, i.e. the text and its arguments, metamorphose and take on a second, alternative physical form – transposed into a different language, in the process becoming a different object, with a different physical appearance. Seeing the Polish edition has undermined my own (perhaps naïve) sense of the materiality of my book, perhaps betraying a Platonic assumption that it can have only one ultimate form. I’m going to put both covers on my college webpage – the appropriately Somervillian red and black of the Ashgate edition, with a woodcut of Fryderyk kneeling before Saint Stanisław, and the more abstract Polish cover, showing half of Fryderyk’s carved coat of arms bathed in an electric blue light. Now that the book exists in two parallel forms, it suddenly feels like a slippery, intangible thing again, as it was when it was just a series of Word documents on my computer. The artist Grayson Perry said in a television interview this week that there is, even in this digital age, a basic human need for the object, for its 'tangible, visceral experience'. Even when seeing double, with two books where once there was one, I think he's right.

Treasures of Heaven



Missing Relic?
The Crown of Saint Stephen of Hungary



This weekend, I went to the British Museum's exhibition Treasures of Heaven: Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe (which closes this week, on Oct 9^th). The exhibition has been very positively reviewed in the British and American press (it showed in the US earlier in the year). The sheer array and number of reliquaries on display is certainly impressive - if you like peering into display cases in a darkened hall with atmospheric 13C music playing in background, admiring the aesthetics of medieval goldsmithery, enamel, ivory-carving and wood polychrome, this is certainly an exhibition for you. On the whole, though, I wasn’t sure it amounted to much more than the sum of its parts – it felt a like an attempt to amass a huge collection of relics under one roof for its own sake, not unlike a modern museum version of the

relic-collecting medieval rulers featured in the show.

What particularly troubled me as a historian about this exhibition, however, was the ‘Medieval Europe’ claim in the title. The exhibition catalogue opens with a glossy but shocking map of ‘Medieval Europe’, a map which labels key places in Western Europe and the Byzantine world, leaving Catholic Eastern Europe totally blank, as if it were one big tract of uninhabited forest. It’s a map straight out of the Cold War. Were there no relics in medieval Budapest, Cracow or Vilna? What about Hungary’s most precious relic, the Crown of Saint Stephen, or the head of Poland’s Saint Stanislaw in its fabulous 1504 gold casket, or the celebrated 1388 ‘Elbląg’ diptych reliquary made for the Teutonic Knights in Prussia? The reliquaries on display in Treasures of Heaven come chiefly from the collections of the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore – if those collections, for historic reasons, feature overwhelmingly west European and Byzantine artefacts, it’s important to explain that as such they are not necessarily representative of medieval Christianity as a whole. In the catalogue, the curators thank international colleagues and museums who had assisted the exhibition – institutions in France, Germany, Italy and (one South-East European example) Bulgaria. One wonders if curators in Hungary, Poland and the Baltic states simply didn’t pick up the phone, or whether they were not asked, because it’s still – in spite of all we know – ok to view medieval Europe through a twentieth-century geopolitical lens.

The Writing on the Wall

The college was in high celebratory mood last weekend, as we marked the opening of Somerville’s gleaming new ROQ buildings, which will provide accommodation for 68 second-year undergraduates from October. Niall McLaughlin Architects told the Fellows right from their opening pitch for this project that their practice was to work closely with potential users to create the best possible, people-friendly buildings. It is now clear how true to their word they were – the ROQ buildings have textured interior walls which look like a modern art installation, glass towers to shine light into the corridors, kitchens in the trendiest brightest colours, and very tempting desks in window alcoves, with views onto the developing Radcliffe Observatory Quarter (as it takes shape under a forest of cranes…)

What most impressed me about the buildings, however, were not their aesthetic or eco-friendly credentials, but the way in which the two structures embody memory. Memory is a concept (or a social phenomenon) which historians have become increasingly interested in the past decade. At the University of Leiden, for example, Professor Judith Pollmann is leading a project on local memories of the 16C Dutch Revolt in the 17C, while Janet Watson’s 2007 monograph studied memories of the First World War in Britain. The corridors of the ROQ buildings are full of plaques. These don’t give just the name of the donor who sponsored an individual student room, kitchen, or entire floor, but carry messages from those donors to future student-inhabitants. Whole year groups (e.g. year of 1960) have sponsored rooms, to celebrate the formative 3 years they spent together at Somerville. Certain rooms have been dedicated in memory of late Somervillians, by their friends and contemporaries. A recent JCR President sponsored a kitchen - his plaque gives a favourite quote from Lucretius, and urges students to enjoy their time here. On another plaque, two major benefactors celebrate the fact that they met as Oxford undergraduates, and remember their subsequent marriage in a church close to the college. The ROQ buildings, in a very-past conscious way, transmit and store memory. They are an eloquent and moving reminder that an Oxford college is not just a collection of smart buildings, but a dynamic inter-generational community.

Landscape, Memory and the Mercury

Last night (don’t ask how) I ended up with a ticket to the sort of event Oxford dons don’t find themselves at all that often, the Barclaycard Mercury Music Awards. This is a big annual shin-dig for the UK music industry, where the best album of the year is announced in the massively crowded Great Room of the Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane. It made even Christ Church hall at full capacity look rather small.

The 12 albums nominated for the award were very varied – from the Fife folk singers King Creosote and Jon Hopkins, to the hiphop singer Ghostpoet, to the jazz pianist Gwilym Simcock. I was very much struck by how many of them took as their themes the British landscape and, indeed, British history. My Somerville English colleague, Professor Fiona Stafford, has recently written a prize-winning study of the sense of place in English poetry, Local Attachments: the Province of Poetry. There was an acute sense of place in these music albums too – in Metronomy’s electro-pop hymn of praise to Devon (The English Riviera), King Creosote and Jon Hopkins quite meditations on coastal villages of Fife in Diamond Mine, in Elbow’s recollections of their Manchester childhoods in Build a Rocket Boys!

But these songs aren’t just about an English or Scottish physical landscape, but also about nostalgia and a British sense of past. Diamond Mine includes field recordings of Fife oral history as part of the album, and the most historically-conscious album of all, PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, was in fact the winner. Harvey’s bold album is a meditation on English identity as expressed (this is my reading, at least!) through the experience of English military interventions abroad – it’s about WWI as much as it’s about present-day Afghanistan. Harvey recorded the album in a 19C Dorset church, but apparently spent months researching British military history, reading up on the Gallipoli campaign of 1915… So it was fantastic to see such careful readings of history married to cutting edge, and indeed prize-winning, forms of cultural expression.