Old Rope?

The Corderie Royale, Rochefort.
Photo courtesy of Charente-Maritime Tourisme

I’ve just got back from two weeks in western France, in the Cognac region, with its fields full of vines and gardens full of hollyhocks. It’s an area packed with 11^th-century Romanesque churches, medieval keeps and, along the coast, Napoleonic fortifications. The most historically stimulating site of the trip for me, however, was the Corderie Royale in the 17^th-century planned military town of Rochefort.

When an outing was proposed to the Corderie, a museum dedicated to 17^th-century rope-making, some members of our party were less than convinced that this would make for an entertaining day out. The Corderie, rebuilt after World War II, is a stark, slim building constructed in the 1660s on former marshland on the banks of the Charente river– over  300 metres long, with an endless façade of windows. An early attempt to produce military supplies on an industrial scale, it supplied Louis XIV’s navy with its entire supply of rope, over three tonnes of it for every man of war, in dozens of different lengths, thicknesses and finishes.

The Corderie museum today displays different types of naval rope, the wooden machines & accessories used to manufacture it, 17C etchings of the process, and samples of the hemp and other dried vegetable matter which provided the basic raw materials. A historian gave a demonstration of how production worked in the Corderie, using original tools (and a volunteer from the audience). The emphasis was very much on the technical, technological history of rope-making, and – judging by the faces of the French and foreign visitors – it was strangely riveting.

In British museums and English Heritage sites, there is an attempt to make visitors feel connected to the history they are learning about, and to encourage imaginative empathy, by presenting the past through the eyes of the ‘ordinary’ people who lived in it – the humble sailors on the Mary Rose, or locals caught up in the Battle of Bosworth. The visitor audio guide at Whitby Abbey consists of an early medieval nun telling you about her life on that headland. Even though 20C French historians were so important in reinventing social and cultural history, there was nothing at the Corderie about the everyday life of the rope makers, or their experiences. They existed only as little male figures, in breeches and big hats, toiling away on 17C prints. But the museum was, nonetheless, no less exciting, or stimulating to the imagination, for that. It was good to see an institution telling its own slice of industrial, naval and French history with such passion, clarity, and confidence that the public would respond to a good story, clearly told, however recondite it might appear at first glance. I liked the fact that the Corderie made no apologies for being a museum dedicated to 17C rope making in western France, and pulled it off with such panache. 

Photo by akial

The Museum of Brave Questions

       

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Photo by Hans Kundnani

        When I was in Poland last month, I had a day to spare in Warsaw, which I spent visiting the city’s newest and long-awaited museum, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The museum opened, but only part-opened, in spring this year – visitors can tour the striking building, designed by Lahdelma & Mahlamaki architects, but the main exhibition will open in 2014.

            I stood in the main hall, which looks like a cave in the Judean desert, with an orange sticker on my coat, waiting for my tour to begin, and flicked through one of the glossy booklets distributed by museum staff. It was entitled ‘the museum of brave questions’, and opens with a thoughtful preface by Andrzej Cudak, the museum’s current director. “This museum tells a history which is important for us all. The Polish Jewish past not only shaped contemporary Poland and its inhabitants, but also the face of present-day Europe, and the wider world… Our museum does not have a monopoly on the truth. We don’t offer ready-made answers, we encourage independent thought, the posing of bold questions and the expression of different views. Let’s have the courage to ask, to debate…." (my translation from the Polish).

            A lot – indeed, the best of – modern historical scholarship has been about deconstructing histories, about pulling apart familiar narratives, exposing comforting myths, revising what we thought we knew, particularly what we thought we knew about the history of nations and their nationalisms. This is what we teach our students: to think iconoclastically. Such values, however, can be rather difficult to capture in a museum. It’s hard to tell a coherent story to your visitors, while also communicating how open to challenge, how contingent, how subject to multiple perspectives (almost?) any narrative about the human past is. It’s hard, in other words, to create a museum which embodies historical revisionism. But Andrzej Cudak’s brave preface made me think that this cutting-edge, imaginative Warsaw museum might well be able to pull off just that. Museums often simply reflect prevalent historical narratives and approaches, but this new institution might yet help to forge new ones – by providing a dynamic space, in the heart of the old Warsaw ghetto, where Jewish, Polish and Polish-Jewish history can be revisited, retold and debated afresh. The airport style security in the museum entrance shows how necessary, and how risky, this kind of frank history of the Polish lands is.

Educating for what?

           

The Oxford spires
Photo by Tejvan Pettinger 

 Last week, the academic Fellows at Somerville College were asked to think about the qualities they believe that we as an institution should be nurturing in our undergraduate students. With Finals season drawing to a close, and another generation of students about to graduate, this seemed an apt time to be asked.

            We are used to talking about the skills which students should possess – there is an official list of the skills we are looking for in potential History students at admissions stage, e.g. historical imagination, enthusiasm, originality of thought. When dons sit with big piles of exam scripts before them, there is also a Faculty mark scheme which lists the skills which a good script will show evidence of – precision, originality, analytical power, range of issues addressed etc. Skills and qualities overlap, but not completely. So what I jotted down in my response to the survey of college tutors, on a train whizzing through the Chilterns, was this… When my students graduate from Oxford, I would like them to have, or aspire to, these qualities:

·        -   imaginative & innovative thinking
- questioning, iconoclastic mindset

·         -  ability to formulate new ideas, insights & visions.

·         -  ability to really hear & take on board alternative viewpoints

·         -  thoughtful about the wider implications of their ideas/actions on society, & thoughtful more generally about -      their engagement with society

·        -  committed to the pursuit of excellence

·         - ambitious to make the most of their talent

·         - thought leadership, seeing things other people don't see & explaining them in a compelling way

·         - clarity of thought & expression, as a way of inspiring others

Maybe that list is simply the Finals mark scheme rewritten in more general terms, or interpolated with implicit moral and social concerns. The question of what we are educating our young people for has always been a political one. In the Renaissance republics, which constantly looked to the ancient world, education was preparation for active, responsible citizenship; in Renaissance principalities, it was there to equip you to serve the prince and /or commonweal. Oxford humanities education is risky in so far as it doesn’t seek to teach specific values, loyalties or beliefs (which might helpfully hold a society together), but rather encourages their rigorous challenge – a society testing itself.

Brainstorming that list of qualities on the train, I wondered what kind of job it might be a description for. Strategy consultant, army officer, school teacher, politician, academic? Do Oxford dons themselves, as a professional group, live up to these same aspirations? I await with interest to learn what my Somerville colleagues put in their lists.

Postcard from Olsztyn

Olsztyn castle, May 2013

This past week, I’ve been in Olsztyn, a medium sized town in the north-east of Poland, doing archival work – shuttling between the contrasting worlds of a modern business hotel, and the archdiocesan archive across the road.

This is a town where a lot of people are looking for the past. Olsztyn – 4 hours north of Warsaw by train, 2 hours south of Gdańsk by car - was founded in the 14C as Allenstein, within the territory of the Teutonic Knights. In the mid 15C, the area revolted and came under the authority of the Polish Crown. Allenstein, with its pretty castle built over a winding stream, was within the prince-bishopric of Ermland, administered by cathedral canons including Nicholas Copernicus. From the 18C until 1945 Allenstein was part of the kingdom of Prussia, and subsequently of post-unification Germany. In those centuries it acquired grand, red-brick neo-gothic buildings, and witnessed difficult relations between the local German and Polish populations. By 1945, many of the local Polish population had been killed or displaced; the German inhabitants of Allenstein who had survived the arrival of the Red Army were deported en masse, and the area resettled with Poles from the eastern borderlands, from what are now Lithuania and Belarus.

In that sense, Olsztyn/Allenstein is a pretty typical East European town, with a past you can’t sum up in a single sentence, a history dense with the movement of peoples, armies and borders. That past remains very much in the air. The hotel and the attractive Old Town are, for example, full of coach parties from Germany, many of them here to see the place where they, or their parents, grew up. They come into the archive, people in their 70s, asking for the pre-war baptismal registers for the parishes where they were born; looking for grandparents, for connections. In Olsztyn Castle, meanwhile, regardless of the fact that Copernicus started his great work ‘De revolutionibus’ in that very building, the chief focus is an exhibition on the ‘Kresy’, the eastern areas which people left c.1945, as part of the great resettlement of Prussia with ethnic Poles. There were mock ups of Vilnius middle-class parlours c. 1939, school certificates from Vilnius schools, recorded interviews of people reminiscing about their ancestral lands in the east. What the people of Olsztyn want to remember, it seems, is not the history of this town, with which they have no genealogical connection, but lost places far away.

And I too came here in search of more than one kind of ghost – not just Copernicus’ bishop and fellow canons as they tried to fend off Lutheranism in the 1520s and 1530s, but my grandfather, a Polish writer born in Olsztyn in 1917, and my great-grandfather, a long-serving editor of the Gazeta Olsztyńska, a major Polish political newspaper of the early 20C. Their photos are prominent in the town museum; the 21C journalists from that same newspaper came to interview me, as the descendant of these local heroes; people came to reminisce about my grandfather’s anti-Communist broadcasts. So this research trip felt more personal than most. Sometimes the great volumes of 16C letters in the archive, with their crabbed brown handwriting, can be a welcome escape from the East European history which happened afterwards.

Allenstein, 1920

Twitter (II)

Inscription above the Bodleian entrance - a 21C Republic of Letters?
Photo by summonedbyfells

It is several months since I nervously ventured onto Twitter, and now’s as good a time as any to reflect on what it’s been like stepping inside that noisy room. So here are some interim observations on that strange new world.

1) As someone who’s published on the printing revolution of the 15C, one of the striking things about Twitter (or twitter, as it seems to be losing its T) is how self-referential and self-conscious a medium it is. You can, like the great historian of printing Elizabeth Eisenstein, scour the pages and prefaces of early printed books and struggle to find much comment on, or reference to, the new medium in which they were produced. That’s why historians have to work so hard to tease out the contemporary meanings of early printing. The voices on Twitter, however, very often seem to be talking about Twitter itself. 

2) Twitter has also refined and expanded my sense, at least, of who the audiences for academic history might be; of whom we can and should be talking to from the virtual ivory tower. It’s a place to talk directly with young artists interested in Renaissance images, documentary makers, or the wide range of people in the UK (and beyond) with an interest in Polish history. It reminds you what a curiosity there is about what we do; and how open it is to challenge.

3) Twitter can enhance the sense of academia as a community. The inscription above the entrance to Oxford’s Bodleian library reads: 'to you, and the Republic of Letters’. The republic of letters, from the 15C to the 20C, was a physically disconnected, slightly virtual community of scholars and writers, but Twitter can knit it together in new ways. It lets historians from different universities around the world, with different research interests, converse together about how we write books, how we teach, and so on. This effect is perhaps particularly powerful locally, in Oxford’s famously fragmented institutional environment. The History Faculty here has over 100 postholders (or faculty), and there are simply no opportunities to meet collectively, far less debate, with the great majority of one’s departmental colleges, scattered as we are across our different colleges. But Twitter allows me, at last, to eavesdrop on what my fellow historians in St. John’s, or St. Catz, are thinking about. (@redhistorian, @katheder, @CraigClunas)

4) Finally, one of the more unexpected networks which Twitter seems to be creating is one of Somerville historians past and present – tutors, current students, and former students. This started to become clear this month, when my colleague Benjamin Thompson (@HistorianBenj) acquired a Twitter account. Twitter can, potentially, allow all these generations of Somerville historians, in Oxford and beyond it, to talk directly, regularly and spontaneously to one another for the first time. This communications revolution starts to dissolve the barriers between Fellows, those studying here now, and those who studied here 5 years ago. So, if you can block out the white noise of social media, this is what twitter at its best can achieve – to turn imagined communities (to cheekily borrow a famous phrase from the history of nationalism), into closer, more tangible communities.

Children of Tomorrow?

Art on the Berlin Wall,
Photo by Gonzo Carles

         

        As the UK recalls the 1979-90 years, in the week of Margaret Thatcher’s death, I did some parallel reminiscing of my own in an Oxford restaurant, when the music system began to play the Scorpions’ 1990 hit, ‘Winds of Change’, about Glasnot and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Take me to the magic of the moment on a glory night, when the children of tomorrow dream away in the wind of change. It captures that moment in 1989-90, when it was promised that Europe would be reunited, and believed that it had embarked on a new, happier historical course.

            Sitting in an empty Oxford restaurant 23 years on, in austerity Britain, with the EU in serious financial crisis, the gap between that Berlin Wall moment of hope for a new, historically more complete Europe and the current realities seemed rather stark. Yes, the countries of the former Soviet Bloc have mostly joined the European Union, made successful (if sometimes fragile) transitions to democracy, and their economies have long since moved from a control to capitalist model. Yet behind these seismic changes, I wonder as a historian if we have, somewhere along the way, suffered a failure of collective intellectual imagination. In English-language school textbooks, undergraduate survey texts, maps in exhibition catalogues, and even major works by academic historians, when we speak of European history, what we are teaching students, and what dominates our research agendas as academics, is still overwhelmingly west European history. We have, in the UK and beyond, collectively failed since 1989 to develop a convincing new narrative of pre-modern European history, which takes us beyond the Cold War model, retrospectively applied, of a thrusting west, and a distant, exotic, backward and peripheral east. We know that this is emphatically not how Europeans in, say, the Renaissance perceived their world and its geographies, but we don’t have anything to put in its place. If Chamberlain could declare the Czechoslovak crisis of 1938 to be a quarrel in ‘a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’, one world war, a cold war and a revolution later, can even Oxbridge History students graduating today claim to be much better informed?

            This is a problem if we really want to understand the wider dynamics of European history (and I of course include British history within that category). But it is also a political problem for the European Union, as it tries to articulate its vision with reference chiefly to very recent history (since 1945). It’s a political problem too more locally here in the UK. Across the country, sitting at desks in British primary schools, there is a whole generation of children born in the UK to Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian parents. When the current painful debates about history in the national curriculum are over, what kind of story are we going to tell these particular ‘children of tomorrow’, the heirs to the revolutions of 1989, about themselves, and where they fit into Britain? How are they going to integrate the narratives they learn at school about west European history, with the national (or nationalist) narratives they will hear from their families about the history of Poland or Slovakia? Now, with major public funding cuts and media scare stories about an imminent invasion of semi-barbarian Romanians and Bulgarians, when Central Europe has such a bad image in the UK, is a very difficult time to try to tell a fuller, more integrated European history; but that is also precisely why now is such an important time to start doing just that.

            If anyone doubts that Central European history, identities and legacies do not stop at the UK’s well-manned borders, they need only read Deborah Levy’s ‘stealthily devastating’ (to quote one reviewer) Booker Prize short-listed novel, Swimming Home. On the surface, a social satire about a north London literary family holidaying in the Cote d’Azur, it is really about the challenges of surviving 20^th century Polish history, and the devastating difficulty one man faces in holding together both a middle class British and Central European identity. Dissonance in identity, and in the basic stories we are told about the past, is bad for individuals, bad for societies, and bad for Europe; we need to tell our children better stories.  

Feasting & Civil War

Spiced wine & war in the West Country
Glastonbury Tor at dawn, by oldbilluk

Over the Easter weekend, I finished the second of two historical novels which I’ve recently read set in seventeenth-century England. If Jeanette Winterson’s Daylight Gate offered us 17C Lancashire as horror, with talking corpses, torture chambers and witches, Lawrence Norfolk’s John Saturnall’s Feast gives us 17C Somerset as fairy tale. It traces the story of John Saturnall, from his childhood as the son of a rumoured village witch, to chief cook at Buckland Manor, where he develops a relationship with the Lady Lucretia, and tries to keep the household fed through the chaos of the English Civil War. Norfolk gives us religious radicals terrorising the Somerset Levels, boys plucking game birds in the cellars of an early modern house, a mother and son roaming abandoned orchards foraging for food. At the heart of the novel, however, is a local legend – or folk memory - about the coming of Christianity to the West Country, about the great Feast served by a sorceress or queen called Bellua, and its destruction by priests.

This is a colourful book, punctuated with outlandish recipes devised by John Saturnall, written in a 17C voice so arresting and original, that you wonder why Norfolk didn’t incorporate it more centrally into the work. The John Saturnall of the novel’s dialogue doesn’t sound nearly as mordant as John Saturnall the cookery writer. The book has a fairy-tale quality - beautiful aristocratic girls, lost magic books, ancient secrets - which works well enough for the 1630s, but by the time we reach the Civil War and interregnum, it arguably starts to sit uncomfortably with the subject matter. There are one or two scenes which perhaps capture the danger of the home front, in a way slightly reminiscent of the magnificent US Civil War novel & film Cold Mountain. Tim Willocks, in his novel about the 16C siege of Malta, The Religion, carried off the improbable feat of marrying a Hollywood-esque love story fairy tale, with a grittily realist account of military conflict. Norfolk’s English Civil War, however, is neither terrifying nor brutal, not the breakdown of the early modern English state that we know it to have been. John Saturnall’s Feast is a historically thoughtful book, with its early medieval stories echoed poignantly in 17C events, in a cycle of feast and destruction. However, as a novel it handles spiced wines and date trees far more surefootedly than it handles war on English soil.