Living Above the Shop

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

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

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

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

The Borgias

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

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

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

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

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

Ships Past



Photo by omblod



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

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

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

Spin the Wheel

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

Handy? Ramelli's bookwheel
Image from Wikipedia Commons.

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

New Books, Old Story?

This week I’ve written a guest blog on the Oxford University Press Blog site (http://www.blog.oup.com/), so for the latest blog ‘New Books, Old Story?’ - about links between the new Roman missal launched by the Vatican at the end of 2011 and late medieval church - see here.

Red Hats in the News



One of the new cardinals - Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York
Photo by Lawrence OP



Last weekend, Pope Benedict XVI presided over hours of ceremonies in the Vatican during which 22 new cardinals were given their birettas and formally made princes of the church. The widespread media coverage of this event, in the Boston Globe, Associated Press, BBC etc.,  focused on a number of connected questions. There were sotto voce observations about the advanced age and apparent ill health of the reigning pontiff, and also rumours of nefarious politicking and jockeying for position within the Vatican as people sense a pontificate might be drawing to an end. The BBC quoted one Vatican official as declaring that ‘Wolves were on the prowl in the frescoed palace of the popes’. There has been much analysis of the identity of the new cardinals, and what it reveals about a) how these new additions might affect the choice of the next pope at a future electoral conclave and b) the Roman Catholic church’s geo-political centres of gravity – 12 of the new cardinals are Europeans, one is from New York.

This week, as I’ve been lecturing and giving tutorials on the Counter Reformation, I’ve been reminded of cardinal-creation events in the early modern period. For a start, in those days, cardinals were given much grander hats – more sombrero than nightcap. It’s also been striking how media coverage of Benedict XVI’s new cardinals, in its tone and concerns, is remarkably reminiscent of the news reports which would leak out of Renaissance Rome. When a pope, such as Leo X (d.1521), was taken seriously ill, rumours would quickly reach royal courts in Budapest or Vilnius. When Renaissance popes created new cardinals, diarists, diplomats, chroniclers and commentators would pore over the lists, trying to decode their inner meanings as if they were astrological charts. In 1493, when the churchman I’ve studied most closely, Fryderyk Jagiellon (d.1503), was named cardinal at the tender age of 25, there was massive speculation as to the motives of the Borgia pope, the notorious Alexander VI – what did it portend, that he had created cardinals from England, Poland, Spain and Venice? The speed at which rumours and speculation about cardinals and future popes leak out of the Vatican (never slow, even in the fifteenth century), has of course been much accelerated by the internet. But it’s interesting that, five hundred years after the Reformation, the questions, commentary and interest show no signs of abating, as if the creations of new cardinals were somehow hardwired into European/western political news reporting.

Leonardo's Polish Connection



Lady with an Ermine, Leonardo da Vinci
Czartoryski Museum, Krakow
(or, Dama z gronostajem)



This is another ‘picture’ blog, because as well as getting to the London Art Fair last month, I was also able to see the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition before it closed last week. Within the exhibition’s story of two self-made men - the illegitimate Tuscan boy who became a celebrity genius in his own day, and the unscrupulous usurper who became Duke of Milan – there was an unexpected Polish twist. Many reviewers declared Leonardo’s painting of the duke’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani (The Lady with the Ermine, 1489-90) to be the exhibition’s highlight, and this was the image used in all the National Gallery’s advertising materials. The portrait had been lent by the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow, with the permission of Prince Adam Karol Czartoryski. At the Forum on Early Modern Central Europe, a seminar I co-convene in London, we recently heard a great paper by Agnieszka Whelan on the patronage and collecting of the 18C Polish noblewoman Izabela Czartoryska. It was her son, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, who purchased Leonardo’s Lady with the Ermine in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century. It was exhibited in the family’s Polish and Parisian houses during the Partitions of Poland, and Cecilia Gallerani later travelled to Kraków when the city offered premises to house the Czartoryski collection. She was still there in 1939, when the canvass was man-handled by German occupiers, and thereafter she was appropriated by the post-war Communist government as state property.

Looking at The Lady with the Ermine – at the slightly creepy rodent, and Cecilia’s trademark enigmatic stare into the middle distance – we can on the one hand see a story of the Duke of Milan, his teenage mistress, court painter and the reinvention of the portrait genre. But this painting also tells a more modern story, of 19C Polish émigrés drumming up support for Polish independence by demonstrating the impeccable taste of Polish aristocracy, of nationalism, Fascism and Communism. So standing in front of The Lady with the Ermine, I thought of Leonardo, but I also thought of Izabela Czartoryska and the ways in which this Renaissance masterpiece reflects Polish – as much as Florentine or Milanese – history. In that sense, it is a pleasingly European painting.