Lindqvist and Las Casas



Dorre Island, NW Australia - pretty island, ugly history?
Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center.



Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One’s Land, a travelogue about Australia by the veteran Swedish journalist Sven Lindqvist (English version Granta books, 2007 - see http://grantabooks.com/page/3012/Terra+Nullius/552). In part the book is an account of a truly epic road trip through the deserts, plateaus, farmlands and coastal strips of central, Northern and Western Australia. But the book is, above all, a meditation on the relationship between the Aboriginal populations and Europeans since the 18C. There’s some great intellectual history here: Lindqvist argues persuasively that the grand ‘theory merchants’ of the 19C, Marx, Durkheim, Freud and the early anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, all derived major chunks of their ideas from their (very second-hand) reading of Aboriginal ‘primitive’ life. I can’t imagine this book went down well in (white) Australia, however. Above all it is a bleak pilgrimage, as Lindqvist visits dozens of sites which tell the story of how Aborigines were oppressed, murdered and exploited by Europeans from the 18C. He describes ambush massacres, forced marches through the desert in irons, prison-camps for blacks suspected of carrying venereal disease on Dorre and Bernier Islands (see photo), the mass rounding of up mixed race children, desecrated burial sites, detention/labour camps - much of all this in the 20C.

Initially, Terra Nullius reminded me of Matthew Kneale’s Whitbread-prize winning novel English Passengers, which explores the extermination of Tasmania’s native population. But the more I read, the more Lindquist’s relentless, dispassionate narrative of atrocities and genocidal actions reminded me of an iconic early modern ‘human rights’ text. In 1552 the Spanish friar Bartolome de las Casas published his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a little book which detailed how Spanish conquistadores had murdered, tortured, enslaved and dispossessed native populations in every single part of the Caribbean, Central and South America. Neither text is easy to read (as first year students studying Las Casas for the ‘Conquest and Colonisation’ paper on the Oxford history degree soon find). Las Casas wrote because he wanted to shock the 16C Spanish Crown into acting, and thus saving the native populations that had survived the first half-century of conquest. Lindqvist seems to have a different agenda – his concern is with history, as he offers an alternative, highly uncomfortable narrative of Australia’s past, which brings to the fore shocking events which he claims has been sidelined, forgotten and deliberately passed over in silence. Reading Lindqvist, I imagined most 21C readers will find the stories he recounts very grim, wonder if they could all be true, marvel how these things could have happened, and ask why they have not been investigated and acted upon further. Perhaps 16C Europeans, when reading Las Casas’ description of early colonial enterprise in Mexico, Cuba and Panama, felt a similar chill of disbelief, and a similar historical-moral disorientation. Interestingly, The Short Account made the Amerindians a cause-celebre in early modern Europe; Terra Nullius’ plea for the Aborigines seems instead to be regarded as a slightly left-field, literary and niche travel text.

The Unstable Lecture

The Oxford Examination Schools - lecture venue par excellence
Photo by Matthias Rosenkranz

Hilary term is the point in the academic year when I give most of my lectures. In its basic tangible form, a lecture (at least the way I do it) consists of about 10 A4 pages of bullet points, and a memory stick with slides of 15C monarchs, paintings and frontispieces. When the time comes to dust off these props, you might tinker by incorporating the latest literature on the subject, but the lecture itself is substantially the same year after year. And yet the experience of preparing and delivering it is anything but.

Oxford lectures are meant to last 50 minutes. A lecture which has always filled this time-slot perfectly can sometimes go wildly off-schedule for no apparent reason. This term, I got half way through an often-aired lecture on Renaissance art patronage, glanced up at the big Victorian clock in the hall, and realised to my horror that we were only 15 minutes in. So I began to ad-lib, spin out some of anecdotes, speak slower – and then mysteriously struggled to wrap up in time.

One’s sense of how useful, or successful, a lecture is is also prone to highly unpredictable shifts. Most years, I pull one particular Reformation lecture out of my filing cabinet, read over it the day before, and feel that it’s basically coherent and will serve its purpose just fine. But this year, as I scanned it a certain chill descended – the text seemed full of logical non-sequiturs, gross generalisations, strangely irrelevant detail, and totally inadequate to air in public. Year after year, students had said in their feedback questionnaires that they had liked this lecture very much: how could they possibly have thought that? It was my perspectives, not the lecture stowed away in its dark drawer, which had evolved so much over the intervening year – I’d spent 5 months of leave researching this topic, and having learnt about it in much more (archival) depth, my state of knowledge from a year before (fossilised in the lecture) seemed suddenly alarmingly limited.

And a lecture isn’t just a text, it’s also a performance. One year you may have a lot of energy, real conviction about what you’re saying, and the whole thing seems to pass off pretty well.  Other years, you worry you’ve descended after 45 minutes into a monotonous low-energy mumble, and you’re not quite sure how that happened. On top of all this, audience reaction is hugely unpredictable, and totally unrelated to one’s own sense of how well the lecture has gone. Sometimes, I make it to the end of a lecture and think it would be best to leave the room as quickly and discreetly as possible; only to find the students have burst into spontaneous applause. Yet when you give a passionate delivery, with arguments which challenge received thinking, ending with a poignant vignette by way of a final flourish, you look up from the podium and find a row of very silent faces staring back.

So a lecture is at first glance a fixed body of knowledge, a sensible & steady text to teach from – but in fact it’s a living document, a reflection of the lecturer’s own shifting views, a one-off performance, an interaction with a particular set of personalities in the room. And that’s why every single lecture delivery, like a game of roulette, has a life of its own.

Egypt and Florence

Being a historian of 15^th and 16^th century Europe doesn’t really grant me special insight into current events in Egypt. But nonetheless, I’ve been struck by certain resonances over the past couple of days, as I’ve been marking collection papers (i.e. mock Finals exams) sat by Finalists studying the Florence & Venice Renaissance Special Subject. In this test, students have to write high-speed commentaries on 12 extracts or quotes from a selection of 16C sources. While marking, I've been wandering over to my computer at regular intervals to check the latest developments in North Africa on BBC news. So here are some quotes from Renaissance Florence and present-day Egypt.

‘And you know that our house [the Medici] never rose to any rank of greatness [in Florence] to which it was not thrust by this palace and your united consent’.

(Renaissance Special Subject paper, 2010, Question 1a:

Speech to the people by Lorenzo de’ Medici, ruler of Florence, after the Pazzi revolt of 1478, from Niccolo Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories)

‘I have never, ever been seeking power, and the people know the difficult circumstances [in which?] I shouldered responsibility.”

President Hosni Mubarak, speech to the nation, 1^st Feb 2011

‘[The tyrant] lives beset with fantasies of grandeur and with melancholy and fears that always gnaw at his heart.”  

(Renaissance Special Subject paper, 2010, Question 1b:

The verdict of Savonarola, reforming friar and self-proclaimed prophet, on Lorenzo de’ Medici, 1498)

‘The tyrant has shamed himself and his name forever.’

                        Tweet from Cairo, 2.2.11 (http://twitter.com/habdelgawad)

“History will judge me and others for our merits and faults.”      

Hosni Mubarak, 1^st Feb 2010

To which one might add:

“There is nothing new under the sun.”

Saint Augustine, City of God, (set text, Oxford Prelims Historiography paper).

Real Books and Magic Books



Better on a screen? An illuminated 15C Bible from Malmesbury Abbey.
Photo by Adrian Pingstone



I caught my first sight of a Kindle this week, over somebody’s shoulder on a train. In its black leather (or mock leather?) case, it initially looked like a travel document pouch. When I realised what it was, I craned across the train aisle rather indiscreetly. Would it hurt my eyes to read this for 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours, or had technology cracked this problem? Was this an exclusive, paradigm-shifting glimpse into the future, the equivalent of being taken into a smug 15C cleric’s library and shown a printed book fresh from the presses of Peter Schoeffer or Georg Stuchs? (Important new technology brand names too, in their day…)

A few months ago, the British Library was conducting internal research on the needs of its users and I agreed to participate via telephone interview. The principal question was seemingly straightforward: If you needed to look at a 16C book, and there was a digital copy on-line and an original in the British Library, would you come all the way to London to look at the latter? In the usual historian’s way, I ummed and aahhed and said it depended. If I wanted to check something very simple, like a date of publication, then the online version would do. But if I were really studying and writing about, say, an anti-Lutheran polemic from 1524 by a Polish bishop, I’d certainly want to see the original if it was in the UK. Justifying this seemingly irrational position to the interviewer was easy on one level - there is a big intellectual trend in Renaissance research to treat the book not just as a disembodied text, but as a material artefact. Its size, weight, texture of the covers etc. are important evidence too, and better gauged through an encounter with a ‘real’ peculiar-smelling original book rather than with its clean and disembodied electronic cousin.

But there was also something else, which I rather struggled to communicate to the BL interviewer. Many historians feel a very strong need to be in the physical presence of the books, manuscripts, letters etc. they study. This isn’t just a self-indulgent desire to take delight in the age and rarity of our sources, enjoying our exclusive access to them – not just the connoisseur’s frisson of pleasure in holding, say, an illuminated tract on astrology produced for Henry VII’s doomed son Arthur. Writing about the past requires an effort of imagination, and that doesn’t in any way detract from its intellectual rigour. It’s much easier to imagine, think, analyse and see new things if your access to the past is unmediated via a screen, and bright fonts, and dialogue boxes.

It does feel like magic to click on the mouse in my Somerville room, and see rare 16C printed books opening up on the screen, and this is transforming and massively accelerating the way we do research. If that becomes a substitute for handling and thinking with the original physical books in front of us (good though that would be for the conservation of the poor books themselves), I think we would lose something precious but rather intangible in the process. Which is also what many consumers say when faced with the wizardry of the Kindle – they prefer to hold a real book in their hands. Whether this is a irrational, wrong-headed, Luddite resistance to a new technology, or people putting their finger on something genuinely hollow in the heart of the Kindle and its virtual 16C friends, we will of course have to wait and see.

Human Error

In the past week, I’ve been engaged in one of the things I like least about academic writing (although I’m sure I’m not meant to admit it) – laboriously checking every fact, statement and reference in an article that I’m about to send off to a journal. It’s the end-game: after months, and maybe years, of reading, thinking, analysing, writing, redrafting and redrafting again the very last thing we’re meant to do before unveiling our research to the wider world is to check that all the nuts and bolts are in the right place – or, put more bluntly, that what we’re saying is error-free. So this means double-checking every date against some reputable source, and in particular going through every footnote, using library catalogues to check you’ve got the details of the publication right, your own notes to ensure that the book/piece you’re citing does indeed say what you thought it did when you devised your own arguments, and returning to originals where necessary.



The messy reality - a double-checking check list.



Done properly, this is hugely time-consuming and extraordinarily dull, involving not only hours in front of a screen staring at footnotes in 10 point font, but bitty trips to libraries to check a page number here, the spelling of a 16C surname there. Meticulous double checking of every single detail really is the pedantic end of academia. But it’s important because it’s also the intellectual bedrock of what we do as historians, as it anchors our work to the known ‘facts’, both major and obscure. It gives us whatever credibility we have.

The more I write, the more I realise just how many tiny slips creep into a text unnoticed as you work with it, like a file slowly corrupting itself. I’ve also realised that different academic cultures regard those tiny slips in different ways. In the English-speaking world,  it seems to me, it is assumed you’ve done all you can to check the accuracy of your information and references, but fellow scholars are mostly sanguine about the fact that any piece of research, no matter how exhaustively checked by how many people, will still have some small mistakes left in it. In certain European academic cultures, by contrast, where history is still regarded as a science, error remains a disgrace: 100%, infallible technical and typographic accuracy is the basic expectation of any academic. Reviews of history books in some countries frequently consist of nothing more than a list of the minor errors the reviewer has gleefully identified, and publicly castigates the wretched author for, regardless of the wider value and achievements of the work itself. Like some of the more pragmatic 16C religious reformers who grappled with expunging sin from their communities, I think the 100% error-free article is a lofty, almost transcendental thing to aspire to, but in the meantime we have to accept gracefully  the messy reality of human error.

Space to Think

A very good space - the British Libary at Saint Pancras
Photo by Stephen McKay, some rights reserved

This week, for the first time in many months, I worked in London’s British Library. Although the building, designed in the 1970s but finally opened in 1998, is rather controversial I’ve always been a big fan. I’m impressed by the way the Library’s modern red brick clock-tower echoes the neo-gothic spires of the neighbouring St. Pancras Hotel; I love the way that the Library’s founding collection, King George III’s books, is symbolically preserved in its own glass tower in the heart of the building; but above all the cavernous Humanities One reading room is one of my favourite places to work.

What makes a library inspiring is not altogether straightforward. Simple physical comfort is one factor – big tick for the armchair-style seats of the British Library and the art deco New Bodleian Building. Lots of light is another – the Rare Books Room in the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow is one of the best-lit rooms in that rather dim interwar monolith, and giant pot plants lovingly tended by the curators grow trifid-like around the desks and windows, as people quietly read incunabula. Good cafes to sit, and drink tea, and think, are also a big bonus. There is a spectacular research library café in the courtyard shared by the Vatican Archive and Vatican Library. This café (which some claim is constructed over a nuclear bunker) is built inside a Renaissance fountain, a giant shell-shaped sculpture with a modern glass frontage.

But I think the libraries I’m most attracted to (perhaps no coincidence for a historian who writes mainly on religion) seem to be those which feel most like ecclesiastical structures, buildings with very high ceilings, and a quiet but portentous sense of space, and interesting things to see if you look up. The Bodleian’s Upper Reading Room (where Oxford historians tend to congregate) has a real sense of space, and a wall frieze of famous scholars from Plato onwards to inspire or intimidate the reader. Lincoln College library, a converted 18C church with possible Hawksmoor touches, has fantastically high ceilings, with crisp plasterwork and candelabras. But I think the British Library’s Humanities One has the highest ceilings of all – it’s simply a vast, extravagant indoor space, like sitting in the hull of a very bright ship. When the high-brow television channel BBC 4 was launched, its advertising slogan was ‘everybody needs a space to think’. Perhaps that’s true in a more literal way than the BBC realised.

Nativity Scenes

At this time of year, I usually receive through my door a collective Christmas card from my area’s local churches, which typically takes the form of a series of nativity scenes executed in felt-tip pen and crayon by school children. What strikes me about this card – coming as it does after 8 weeks of teaching an intensive course on the Italian Renaissance – is how the imagery, composition and basic colours of these drawings by children in 21^st-century, officially Protestant England are in their essentials identical to the Nativity scenes painted in 15^th century Tuscany by Botticelli, or Piero della Francesca, or Ghirlandaio or even the reliably unconventional Leonardo. There is a stable, a woman in blue and a small infant in the middle of the image; there may be any combination of animals, shepherds, monarchs and angels around the margins of the scene.

It might seem self-evident to us that a Nativity scene should look like this, but that in itself is testament to how powerful and embedded this iconography is. What interests me is how the pictorial conventions of the medieval and Renaissance church, which set out for artists how depictions of the Nativity should look, have been transmitted to modern English classrooms, across the centuries and across the confessional divides created by the Reformation. Presumably these children, in drawing their Christmas card, did not have reproductions of Florentine Old Masters propped up in front of them. I imagine they have picked up the archetypal Nativity composition from children’s books, Christmas cards and decorations, cribs or even theatre (an important form of religious education in Renaissance Italy, as it happens), i.e. the Nativity play, but I’m only guessing. I’ve been reading Dana Arnold’s Very Short Introduction to Art History, an excellent digest of the core conceptual problems and current controversies in that discipline, in preparation for a new course I’m teaching next term.  She poses the question: when we see a painting of a woman holding a baby, how do we know it’s a representation of the Madonna and Child, and not just ‘any’ woman holding ‘any’ baby? The school-children’s Nativity drawings show, in apparently secularised 21^st century Britain, how resilient, deep-seated and widely diffused the imagery of western Christianity still is; how  iconography is apparently set to outlast mass adherence to traditional doctrinal belief.