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.

Rome & Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires Cathedral
Photo by longhorndave

            In 1979, my grandfather wrote the first English-language biography of the new Polish pope, and he entitled it ‘The Man From Cracow’. The new pope of 2013 is, then, the man from Buenos Aires. “It seems my brother cardinals have gone to the ends of the earth” to find a pontiff, Pope Francis said on Rome’s most famous balcony last night. When I first flew into Buenos Aires, it did indeed look like that – a city on the far edge of the Atlantic, surrounded by a vast South American plain, lapped by the brown waters of the Rio de la Plata delta.

Those who write on South America’s troubled 20^th century will have their own perspectives on what the election yesterday of the cardinal-archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (b.1936), as pope means. For a historian of the early modern church, however, this feels like a moment when two great legacies of the 16th century have finally struck home in Rome. The 16^th century was of course the period in which the Roman church, after tentative beginnings with new dioceses in the Mid-Atlantic isles in the 15^th century, went truly global. Throughout the brutal Spanish conquest of South America, the conquistadores were followed by Catholic missionaries, who baptised the subjects of the defeated Aztec, Inca and Maya rulers in their millions. Buenos Aires, on the southern, coastal fringes of that Spanish continental empire, was founded in the 1530s, and in 1620 Pedro Carranza was named the very first bishop of the diocese of Rio de la Plata.

The sixteenth century also saw the birth of what is perhaps the Catholic Church’s most famous religious order, the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits. Founded by the Spanish ex-solider Ignatius Loyola, and officially launched with a papal bull of 1540, the Jesuits specialised from the outset in mission work – in Protestant areas of Europe, in what they saw as the un-evangelised rural heartlands of Catholic Europe, in Japan, China, and of course the Americas. They were particularly active in the areas we now call Paraguay and Argentina, setting up networks of missions deep in the interior, founding the Jesuit college of Cordoba in 1611. In over half a millennium of high-profile activity, the Society of Jesus, this distinctive product of the 16C Roman church, never produced a pope.

So, when on Tuesday an archbishop of Buenos Aires and a Jesuit is enthroned as bishop of Rome, we need to look to the 16^th century to grasp the long-term trajectories which have led Cardinal Bergoglio to the papacy. His church has never recovered the religious monopoly in Western and Central Europe which it lost with the 16C Reformation, but the story of this particular papacy begins in 16C Spanish America. We can only guess what Pedro Carranza, as he began the construction of Buenos Aires’ first cathedral by the brown river in the 1620s, or Argentina’s only beato, the Mapuche Ceferino Namancura, a pious teenager who died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1905, would have made of the idea of a pope from Argentina. However, for Christianity, which itself came to Rome from the imperial margins, a pope from the periphery of Spain’s pioneering global empire seems a historically apt choice.

The man from Buenos Aires
Photo by Catholic Church England & Wales

Our Speaker Tonight...

A chair's eye view...
The Class of 1968 Seminar Room in the Weigle Information Commons at UPenn's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center
Photo by Weigle Information Commons

     From an early stage in most historians’ careers, they find themselves being asked to chair seminar papers or conference panels. As with most things, nobody tells you how to do this; you’re meant to learn the dos and don’ts through observation alone. Chairing is meant to be straightforward compared with the greater intellectual challenges of research and teaching, but it’s not that simple.

       The chair of a History paper is a mixture of game-show host, compere and master of ceremonies. They are meant to be welcoming and witty, to inject a bit of energy into proceedings and keep the show on the road, but also to act as a mere facilitator, a warm up act, for the guest speaker/s. As chair, you have to introduce the speaker, by giving a précis of their career which they will approve of and recognise. By convention, the chair asks the opening question in the post-paper discussion, so during the talk there is pressure to think of a menu of possible lines of enquiry. Even if the audience starts to flag or fidget or yawn during the talk, there is a moral responsibility to look attentive, encouraging and fascinated, as if to set the audience a good example. If the speaker speaks for more than their allotted time, the chair has to stop them, but has no real tools with which to do so. You’re caught between the sense that it’s very rude to interrupt someone, to bluntly and publicly ask them to stop talking, and the sense that that is precisely what the audience keenly expect you to do. With the overrunning speaker, one can start with subtle cues: leaning towards them attentively as if they are coming to their concluding sentence, adopting an anxious body language, and of course slowly pushing your watch back and forth across the table.

Photo by smaedli

     

   There is a risk that, after the paper, the audience are not inspired to ask more than a couple of desultory questions, and then it falls to you to engage in a spontaneous, public, unprepared tutorial-style dialogue with the speaker, on a topic about which you may know almost nothing. As for the speaker, you don’t want them to respond to questions at too much length, using them as an opportunity to quote whole paragraphs they had earlier edited out of their paper, seeing the discussion as simply a chance to continue with their delivery in extra time. Equally, you don’t want the speaker’s answer to be too short, meaning that the precious store of communal questions gets used up too quickly. As a chair, it can feel like a personal failure if the session ends obviously early.

     

   But despite all the potential intellectual and social pitfalls, while chairing you’re always aware of how much harder it is to be in the speaker’s seat - where, at a conference, you might well find yourself sitting in about 20 minutes’ time.

Papal Resignations & Abdications

Pope Benedict XVI...until the end of this month.
Photo by M.Mazur/www.thepapalvisit.org.uk

It was a bit of a surprise yesterday, when working in the SCR surrounded by a mass of notes on the 16C papacy, to receive a text message saying that Benedict XVI had just resigned as pontiff. To all the late medieval and Renaissance popes I lecture on to Oxford undergraduates, this would have seemed a totally incomprehensible, reckless move, which just serves to show that although timelessness is a central part of the Roman Catholic church’s identity, things do change.

Journalists have been reaching for their dictionaries of medieval popes to grapple with the precedents for a papal resignation / abdication. Producing a definitive list is not easy, because there are different ways of defining ‘resignation’, and early medieval sources can be murky. There are claims that certain late antique popes resigned after being arrested and sentenced by the persecuting Roman imperial authorities. John XVIII was recorded as having died in 1009 as a simple ‘monk’, possibly implying an abdication. Later that century, Benedict IX allegedly sold his papal title in 1045, to Gregory VI who was forced to give it up in the ensuing fall-out. Most famously, the hermit-pope Celestine V abdicated in 1294, issuing a decree which for the first time made papal resignation legal and a recognised possibility in canon law. More recently, in 1415, Gregory XII was leaned upon by Europe’s princes to resign gracefully (like the anti-popes opposing him), and thereby end the 37-year long Great Schism.

Celestine V, Castel Nuovo, Naples
Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen

Although there are, then, precedents and a clear (13C) legal basis for Benedict XVI’s actions, it is nonetheless an unprecedented act. All the medieval pontificates listed above were in acute crisis, whereas Benedict XVI is seen within the Catholic church as the legitimate, uncontested pope, with the support to continue for much longer. The reasons for earlier papal resignations have been incompetence (Celestine V) or corruption, but yesterday a pope gave up the office for the very first time on grounds of physical frailty.

That last point signals a surprising shift in understandings of the role of the pope, if only on the part of the current incumbent himself. The pope is, according to the Catholic church, the Vicar of Christ, directly selected by God (through the agency of the cardinals) in conclave, in the general expectation that he will serve until the end of his life; a bit like a marriage. This was the view taken by John Paul II, who suffered from a long illness, seeing this very public suffering as a necessary, Christ-like part of the office of pope. This contributed to the air of saintliness around the late Polish pontiff. Benedict XVI, however, yesterday clearly rejected his predecessor’s model – stressing that the papacy was an office with actual functions which needed to be performed (e.g. travel). The papacy, in other words, is something you do, not something you simply are. This interpretation of the office – which future popes may or may not embrace – looks modernising, pragmatic, and de-mystifies the papacy. It is a radical step, and will arguably be the Bavarian pope’s most important legacy.

As for the popes of the High Renaissance, they could not have resigned, because they feared their successors would simply murder them and their families – just as the ex-pope Celestine V was reportedly murdered in Anagni castle, where he had been imprisoned, in 1296. In the 21C, a pope can at last resign, retire or abdicate without any such fears.

Back to Pendle Hill

Who's up on Pendle Hill?
Photo by BasiliskSam

One of my Christmas presents (a rather unseasonal choice, as it turned out) was Jeanette Winterson’s latest foray into historical fiction, The Daylight Gate, a novel about the Pendle witch trials of 1612.  The Pendle trials saw 10 individuals executed for witchcraft, most famously the two elderly matrons Chattox and Demdike, but also the wealthy yeoman’s widow Alice Nutter, Winterson’s chief protagonist.

The Daylight Gate seems at first to be a realist and rational take on the Pendle material – the prosecutions presented as a cynical conspiracy against local pauper families by paranoid, misogynist local elites. In Winterson’s 17C Lancashire, people are routinely raped, tortured, starved, beaten and imprisoned in squalor, events here described with a reportage-style detachment.

However, The Daylight Gate slowly becomes something stranger, and engages at a pleasingly sophisticated level with research on early modern witchcraft trials. It’s been argued for some time now that the great witch-hunts of the 16C and 17C were made possible by a temporary fusion between the long-standing beliefs about witches found in rural traditional culture, and new intellectual, elite beliefs about the devil. Winterson weaves these two strands of early modern culture neatly together, plausibly linking up the spirit-conjuring of the gentleman magician John Dee in Elizabethan London, with Lancashire women boiling corpse heads in pots to injure their neighbours.

Historians are paying ever more attention to the claims of some early modern individuals that they were indeed witches able to wield dark powers – there are psychological explanations for this phenomenon, and even religious ones, as Michael Ostling has recently argued in his study of Polish witchcraft trials, Between the Devil and the Host. Winterson navigates these possibilities skilfully, giving us the Pendle witch scandal as its participants, with their 17C cosmologies, might have seen it. Pendle Hill itself is splendidly evoked, as a liminal place where boundaries between worlds might be crossed. If Hilary Mantel tries to make early modern England comprehensible to 21C readers by rendering it as a political and psychological thriller, Winterson presents a far stranger, more alien, and probably more authentic vision of that society.