Dolphins in the Bodleian

After a long, busy autumn term of teaching and running a research project (hence the gap in blog posts, apologies), last week I finally ventured back into the Bodleian Library, and found a new exhibition in the entrance hall. Aldus Manutius:The Struggle and the Dream marks the 500^th anniversary of the death of the pioneering Venetian Renaissance printer (c. 1450-1515), who created distinctive editions of classical texts treasured by humanist scholars across Europe, and in the process set a new standard in the printing of learned books. The exhibition is curated by my Somerville History colleague, Dr. Oren Margolis, with assistance from current Somerville History undergraduates Jennifer Allan, Anna Clark and Qaleeda Talib, whose own work on Aldus will be showcased at an event at the Bodleian in February.

At a time when academic publishing is again going through a major metamorphosis, and experiencing another technological revolution, it seems apt to reflect on the printer Aldus and his legacy. The Bodleian exhibition stresses that Aldus’ Venetian workshop gave the world the italic font: the display includes the first printed books in which it was seen. Probably few of us, when pressing Control I on our computers, know or think of the great copyright squabble which the discovery of printed italic triggered between Aldus and his punch-cutter, Francesco Griffo. The exhibition includes too a Roman denarius from 80AD, showing a dolphin and anchor, which Aldus adopted as his own device. Modern academic publishers must surely remain envious of the little surge of delight, the flash of excitement, the joy of possession, which the sight of Aldus’ dolphin logo seems to have instantly provoked in the learned 16C reader.

Aldus printed for the republic of letters, for those anywhere in Christendom who, at the turn of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, were serious about scholarly and beautiful books. So it was a particular pleasure for me to see in The Struggle and the Dream an Oxford copy of Aldus’ Erotemata, by Constantine Lascaris, a key text for those learning ancient Greek. I’ve been working for some years on Piotr Tomicki (d.1535), bishop of Kraków and a key advisor to the Polish Crown. In Kraków’s Jagiellonian Library, I have examined Tomicki’s own diligently, neatly annotated copy of Aldus’ Erotomata, which he had purchased as a student in Italy, very far from home, and kept throughout his life, even once he was a great statesman. Aldus’ volumes – whether in Venice, Kraków or Oxford - still have the ability to make people, now as in the sixteenth-century, feel they are holding in their hands very special books.

Borderland Stories?

Ukraine: which narrative?

How do current events in Ukraine look to historians? Historians are often reluctant to commenting on fast-moving crises, because we are trained to sit back, ponder, cogitate and reach conclusions slowly and carefully; it’s not a natural reflex to offer instant verdicts. So far, Timothy Snyder – author of the seminal Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus, 1569-1999 – has appeared on BBC’s Newsnight, and he’ll be talking in Oxford next week on ‘Poland, Ukraine and the Politics of History’. Tarik Cyril Amar, from Columbia’s History Department, has written a column on the crisis in the Guardian.

How do events in Ukraine and Crimea look to a historian of early modern Central Europe? If you want to tell a story of Ukraine as a long-standing, contested borderland, there is plenty of material at your disposal. At the end of the 14C, Poland’s last Piast monarch, Kazimierz the Great, conquered (annexed) the Orthodox principality of Halych (a chunk of present-day Ukraine) and made it part of the Polish kingdom. In the 15C, when Ottoman janissaries and Tartar forces molested Poland with increasing regularity, it was this area which felt the full force of their raids – Polish nobles saw what we call western Ukraine as a useful buffer, which might absorb the military shocks coming from the south-east, and keep raiders far from Cracow and Poznań. In 1494, Grand Duke Ivan III of Muscovy invaded the Grand Duchy of Lithuania without warning, and he gave as his reason the alleged mistreatment of Orthodox believers in that polity, presenting himself as their protector and saviour.

There are many competing narratives on offer about current events in Ukraine. A narrative of democracy versus autocracy; narratives of a greater Russia, or of a greater EU. In these grand narratives, Ukraine itself tends to be portrayed as a passive subject – as a borderland, a buffer zone, a geopolitical frontier, a place to be rescued, a place characterised above all by the very fact that it is endlessly contested, and thereby endlessly destabilising. Anna Reid, for example, gives her history of Ukraine the title 'Borderland'. Perhaps that is just a reflection of historical reality itself since the 14C. There is, however, a risk that at this juncture we look back into Central European history and find the stories we expect to find – that the persistent tropes of Ukraine as a doomed, fought-over borderland risk becoming self-fulfilling. There is nothing inevitable about what happens next in Ukraine, bordered by EU Poland and Putin’s Russia: there is everything to play for. If European history tells us anything, it is surely not that the same pre-ordained stories will play themselves out time after time, but that anything can happen.

Harvest

 

A field that is forever England?
Photo by Charlotte90t, under Creative Commons Licence

As usual at Christmas, I received a gratifying pile of historical novels. Top of the pile, with its blazing yellow cover, was Jim Crace’s Harvest, short-listed for last year’s Man Booker Prize. Reviewers have had mixed feelings: some heaped lavish praise in Harvest, while others grumbled at its lumpy plot. I will nonetheless be strongly recommending Harvest to my early modern British History students because it is such a bold – though problematic - act of historical imagination.

Harvest tells the story of the last barley harvest in an English village about to be obliterated by enclosure – the controversial practice whereby landowners converted arable land into sheep pasture, displacing people from the land, because there was far more money to be made in wool than in wheat and barley. Throughout the 20C historians tried to recover the experiences of pre-modern English villagers (the ‘common man and woman’), using anthropology, folkore, archaeology and through fresh readings of sources produced by social elites. For me, none of these academic publications has conjured up early modern English village life as vividly as Crace does in Harvest. He shows us Walter Thirsk, the narrator, and his fellow villagers weaving baskets and mending tools on winter nights, making mischief with ale and magic mushrooms, electing their Gleaning Queen, living in fear constantly that the land might fail to provide. Crace gives us a community which is self-policing, supportive, claustrophobic and deeply suspicious of the world beyond the parish bounds.

However, like a lot of academic writing on early modern English rural life – books on ‘merrie Englande’ – Harvest heavily mythologies and idealises its subject matter. This book is not just an attempt to explore how ‘ordinary people’ (whoever they were) lived in the early modern period, but a novel which implies that barley-farming by a village-kingroup, tied to the land, is a particularly authentic form of human experience; humans in their ‘natural’ and prelapsarian state. Crace’s village is timeless. Whereas many historical novelists labour to convey minute period detail, Crace does not tell us where or when this enclosure novel is set, which could be at any point between the 16^th and 19^th centuries. Harvest is a historical novel which, with its picture of an ancient and timeless village culture, tries to keep history at the margins. This is also a pre-modern rural England as refracted through the prism of very modern concerns – the environment, national identity, refugees & immigration, and belonging. Villages like those of Jim Crace / Walter Thirsk seem to be a world we need to believe in – no coincidence, perhaps, that Harvest was published in the same year that the BBC broadcast its successful historical-reality TV series, Tudor Monastery Farm. As one of its presenters said ‘it’s a bit of fantasy, really’. Perhaps historical imagination alone (however vivid) is not enough to see the past; we also need highly self-reflective, self-aware, and critical forms of historical imagination.

An Evening with Thomas Wyatt

Thomas Wyatt, by Hans Holbein the Younger
Wikipedia Commons

One of the most interesting events I attended last term was a slightly belated book launch (viewable here) for the Wolfson Prize-winning Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest, by my former undergraduate tutor Susan Brigden. It was organised by a new institution which has rather burst upon the scene here – TORCH, or The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities, an interdisciplinary enterprise based in the refurbished 18C Radcliffe Infirmary.

Events relating to new books normally take one of two forms in Oxford – seminar or party. At a seminar, the author presents a précis of the work in a formal academic setting in the form of a paper, and is then politely grilled by an audience of peers and students. At a party, plenty of wine and nibbles are served in some smart college room, discounted copies of the book made available, and brief speeches made by a bashful author and an eager publisher.

TORCH has however been pioneering a new kind of book event, which steers a middle way between these two models. At the Heart’s Forest evening, in a rare assembly of historical talent, a panel consisting of Diarmaid MacCulloch, Chris Stamatakis, David Starkey and Susan Brigden herself sat on the stage in St. Anne’s auditorium. The panellists each gave a speech – something in between an encomium and a personal reflection on the nature of 16C England. Susan, in her response, talked frankly about the intimacy with which a biographer lives with their subject (his loves, spiritual crises and felonies), and reflected on what she might change in the book, having finally achieved ‘closure’ on Wyatt. The panel – three of them once fellow doctoral students under the legendary G.R. Elton – then launched into an informal but eye-opening discussion about why Tudor England mattered, and how strong our grasp of that period is. Starkey saw in Henry’s court the heroic origins of a modern English identity; McCullough insisted that Tudor England was still entirely on the margins of Europe; they argued about the role of Reformation theology and of loyalty to the Tudor dynasty. And then we all had a glass of wine.

It is hard to entice academics into a space where they can address the big questions in their field, speak about the personalities who have moulded their own careers, articulate something of the emotional rollercoaster of writing a big book, and reflect on cutting-edge interdisciplinary methodology – let alone all at once. Perhaps by innovating with the form and shape of academic meetings, organisations like TORCH can also encourage new patterns of thought, and provide new templates for scholarly conversations… without losing the celebratory conviviality of the traditional launch party.

Ghost Books

The news today is of course full of JFK commemorations, memories and ‘what if’ analyses. As the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy has been creeping up on us, I’ve been reminded during my teaching this term – somewhat depressingly - of professional historians who have also died young, before achieving what it was anticipated they would achieve.

When I was an undergraduate at Lincoln College, Oxford, one of the very first books we were set was The English Face of Machiavelli, by Felix Raab (1962). The foreword, by Hugh Trevor Roper, explained that Raab had been a brilliant graduate student, set to transform an entire field, before he fell to his death in the Alps just before his doctoral viva. This cast something of a pall over the Machiavelli essay we had to write; among my undergraduate history friends at Lincoln, ‘Felix Raab’ became a short-hand for ‘doomed golden youth’. That haunting preface remained fresh in our minds, long after we had forgotten Raab’s actual argument.

One of the most useful books I came across when writing my doctoral thesis was Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts in the Diocese of Canterbury by Brian L. Woodcock (1952). This was a strikingly clear-headed, intelligent reconstruction of church courts in late medieval England, posthumously published – Woodcock had fallen ill while writing up his research, and the work was completed by his wife as a tribute to her husband. This term, when teaching early modern witchcraft, my students’ faces fell when I told them that the author of a landmark, feisty study of Scottish witch trials, Christina Larner (Enemies of God, 1981), had died in an accident shortly after the publication of this classic work.

Historians are obviously as mortal, as subject to accidents and illness, as anybody else, but as with politicians and celebrities who die young, it is hard to separate this fact from their work  - an air of tragedy seeps into these monographs. As with JFK, even those born many years after the deaths of these scholars are left wondering what more might have been. However, as David Rundle has argued in the case of Felix Raab, in such cases an author’s life-story can overshadow their work, or make its frank critical appraisal difficult. The books written by these lost historians, which live on in the academic landscape, make for unquiet ghosts.

Holiday Reading

Sintra - a 15C Portuguese castle, a 19C Portuguese myth?
Photo by Antonio Garcia

            Another holiday-related blog for high summer. The very first lecture I attended as an undergraduate was given by the Regius Professor, J.H.Elliot, on ‘Studying history at Oxford’. His main message, as he stood in his gown in front of an audience of 300 nervous teenagers, was that a historian simply had to travel, and see as much as possible.

        Nearly 20 years on, that advice seems ever more sensible. And one of the reasons why those interested in history should travel is not just because of all the out-of-the-way, below-the-radar, off-the-beaten-track historic sites waiting to be found, but also because of the bookshops usually attached to them. Behind the postcards and nick-knacks in the shops of very minor French chateaux, or Maltese Roman villas, or Polish archdiocesan museums, there are usually obscure local history books for sale – some dusty, some glossy – which, as my husband has impressed on me, you will probably never see again. 

            I buy these books because it’s useful to read about a place after you’ve visited it (enhancing the experience retrospectively), and because they are packed with pictures of unusual Renaissance sites and sights which I might use in teaching and lecturing. However, some of them are works of inspirational scholarship by local historians, illuminating the history of a wider region, or period, in brilliant microcosm. If you happen to be near Lisbon this summer, I’d recommend the official guide to the late medieval royal palace at Sintra by Jose Custodio Viera da Silva – a thoughtful, evocative essay on the methodological difficulties of working out the form of the original castle, and the changing popular perceptions of Sintra, as it inspired Portuguese myth-making in the 19C. And if you’re in Frejus, in Provence, and read French, a must-read is the little book L’imagier de Frejus by Georges Puchal and Colette Dumas. A study of the 14C paintings in the city’s cathedral cloister, it is a marvellous piece of detective work, a case-study in how visual and literary motifs could be transmitted across Europe, to produce such striking, peculiar works of art in a given locality. These are portable, worthy holiday souvenirs which score high on historical imagination. And you'll also get a big smile from the gift-shop staff if you buy them.

Frejus - how did those monsters get on the ceiling?
Cathedral cloister, photo by Guido Agostini

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.

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.

Can You Feast on Books?

Food magnets in Little Italy, New York.
Photo by su-lin

There was a photo from this year’s Hay-on-Wye literary festival, which showed a banner strung across the street saying ‘Kindle free zone’. I know that some 15C observers had anxieties about the arrival of the printed book (the fate of scribes and scriptoria, the perceived non-durability of printed pages), but I wonder if the products of the early printing industry were ever actively boycotted, on ideological grounds, by manuscript lovers in quite the same way that e-readers are now.

All this talk about the printed ink-and-paper book as seriously endangered has made me increasingly sensitive to the sensory experience of dealing with ‘real’ (‘traditional’?) books. This week, I received a number of publishers’ catalogues in the post and it was like ripping open envelopes to look at catalogues of toys – they have evocative and idiosyncratic historical pictures on their covers (an early modern fleet in a mountainous harbour, a golden city). Inside, dozens and dozens of goodies are set out, colourful miniature book covers, hundreds of little windows on the past. The experience of browsing a catalogue, or the contents page of a book you’ve long wanted to read, reminds me of perusing a restaurant menu – the extent of choice and possibility is exciting, there is lots of anticipation, and you half-scan for things you already know you like (pineapple, sesame seeds… early modern zoology, woodcuts, Jagiellonians). With books, there is the certainty that you can’t order, read or remember everything; that you can only select prize pickings from this cornucopia of knowledge. I recently decided to bring myself up to date with the most recent Reformation historiography by ordering a big box of books from Amazon. Opening them was like breaking open a hamper of gourmet goodies, but the real enjoyment came from then spreading them out, like a mosaic, on the coffee table in my Somerville room, from the way the light catches on their glossy covers, and the heady smell of fresh ink.

In a new book, Stephen Poole claims that we fetishise food too much; perhaps we are guilty of the same with printed books. But if they do end up going the way of medieval illuminated manuscripts, becoming a tiny luxury market for the moneyed connoisseur, we may as well enjoy the colours, smells and comforting feel of shiny paper under our fingers while we still can.

Nostalgia & Central Europe

Iasi, Romania
Photo by Valyt

A little while ago, a Lithuanian reader of this blog commented on a post I’d written about Vilnius. He suggested that historians (including, I think, me) should be wary of nostalgia for the Central European past. That comment came back to me this spring in Poznań, when I was eating dinner in a ‘Jewish’ restaurant (Jewish recipes, non-kosher, apparently cooked by non-Jewish Poles), which advertised itself as offering fine food and ‘nostalgia’. This week, I finished reading Georgina Harding’s Orange Prize short-listed novel The Painter of Silence, set in Romania in the 1930s to 1950s. It is about an aristocratic girl and her deaf childhood companion, as they make the transition from rural pre-war idyll, to a country devastated by war and totalitarianism. The most memorable sections of this deeply humane novel describe the estate at Poiana. I was struck by how well this British writer has captured the way in which Central Europeans from privileged pre-war backgrounds talk about their family homes – the modest but perfectly formed manor house, orchards with an impossible abundance of fruit, enchanted lakes, the warm and devoted servants. Painter of Silence deals very much in the currency of nostalgia, that of the protagonist Safta and her class, and our own romanticised image of a timeless, Chekovian Central European countryside.

Nostalgia, for individuals and societies, is surely a (superficial?) way of processing profound loss; loss of family pasts and houses, of entire peoples and cultures. Nonetheless, I can see my Lithuanian reader’s point, that some of its manifestations are intellectually problematic and morally uncomfortable. It can lead to a saccharine reading of Central Europe’s extraordinarily violent 20C past, casting it (especially pre 1939) as a innocent land of fairy tale. The Poznań restaurant’s whistful recreation of spiced Jewish pancakes, the idealisation of pre-war Romanian aristocratic life, and perhaps even my grandmother’s magical realist stories about 1920s Vilnius are a way of keeping real history at bay – perhaps to make it easier to cope with, but also perhaps to avoid engaging with the dark reality of what lies beneath. So nostalgia is probably a gremlin that historians – not least historians of Central Europe - should keep a keen eye on.

Bring Up the Bodies

Hampton Court Palace, Anne Boleyn's Gateway
Photograph  © John S. Turner & licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence.

I’ve recently finished reading Bring Up the Bodies, the second novel in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s ‘Master Secretary’. As you’d hope for a work long-listed for this year’s Booker Prize, Bring up the Bodies is an accomplished literary novel. Mantel has an excellent eye for the poetic and poignant in historical events - there are haunting passages here, for example, about Catherine of Aragon remembering her Spanish childhood, or holding onto keepsakes of her marriage.

As in Wolf Hall, Mantel engages closely, subtly and artfully with the leading academic research on the Tudor court. She tells the reader that she is offering an interpretation ("a proposal, an offer") of the fall of Anne Boleyn, one of the most closely-researched and hotly contested issues in Henrician studies. Like a very good undergraduate, she has read the literature, knitted it together, taken what she judges to be the most plausible bits of each account (Ives, Starkey, Warnicke etc.) and put them together into her own analytical narrative.

One of the criteria for Oxford undergraduate entry is ‘historical imagination’, the ability to think creatively about the past. Bring up the Bodies and Wolf Hall are indeed wonderful ‘imaginings’ of the court of the Henry VIII. Mantel has spun a layer of fine literary prose, like gilt, over the corpus of academic literature on Anne Boleyn, Cromwell and the king. Beautiful though these novels are, however, they are not, I think, telling us anything very new historically. And this is why I find them technically impressive, but also strangely unsatisfying. Arguably, the very best historical fiction offers not just a meticulous imagining of specific historical events, but a bold, original and wholesale re-imagining of a period – as Andrea Barrett’s Voyage of the Narwhal does for 19C exploration, and Andrew Miller’s Pure (creepily!) for the French ancien regime. Mantel’s novels shed unexpected, poetic light on the fine-grained details of 16C court life (Jane Seymour’s skin, Anne Boleyn’s hand gestures, Catherine of Aragon’s silk roses), but I’m not sure that the trilogy has yet offered a panoramic, dynamic new vision of Tudor England and its meanings.

The Marriage Plot

I've just finished reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel, The Marriage Plot. I haven’t read his earlier feted books, Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, and although this latest offering is less outlandish in its subject matter (to the disappointment of some reviewers), it will probably have strong resonances for anyone studying or teaching at Oxford.

The Marriage Plot is simply an exploration of the experiences of three undergraduates at the Ivy League Brown University, respectively majoring in English literature, Religious Studies and Biology. It covers two years of their lives – their final year at university, and the first year out in the big bad world in America, France and Calcutta in early 1980s. For me, one of book’s most impressive achievements is the way it explores (or: reminds you of) what is like to be in your final year at an elite university, in an environment which is both intellectually and emotionally intense. The protagonists Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard are caught up in friendship networks which are at times hugely supportive, and at times claustrophobic and judgemental; they are making epic decisions about their personal relationships which may shape the rest of their lives, and they’re under enormous pressure to decide where to go after Brown, and to put those plans for future success in motion before they even write their final papers. And in the midst of all this, they are not only hugely intellectually engaged with their studies (carrying their Derrida and Foucault around with them like Bibles), but challenged by them, trying to apply the electrifying ideas they are exposed to in the classroom to their own lives, attempting to adjust as their intellectual sense of the wider world around them shifts day by day. If Donna Tartt’s thriller The Secret History evoked life in a small Liberal Arts college splendidly, Marriage Plot is in a different league.

I have no idea how far this story of the early 1980s, of bright graduates fleeing abroad to escape an American recession, would chime with our own students here. But I do think that for Oxford tutors, with all our pedagogic and pastoral responsibilities, this book should be highly recommended reading – a bracing fictional reminder not only of how big and deep our undergraduates' lives are outside the tutorial or classroom, but also of the enormous impact that the ideas we introduce students to can have after they have left the room, whether they agree with them or not.

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.

Adventures with Gutenberg

Missal printed for the diocese of Turku, Finland, 1488, commissioned by the local bishop
Free press photo by University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

   One of my best friends from undergraduate days, and long suffering former tutorial partner, now makes his living writing historical novels/thrillers, under the name Tom Harper. About four years ago, Tom and I by coincidence became interested at the same time in the early printing industry in fifteenth-century Europe, in contemporary perceptions of what printing might be useful for, and how people thought it would change their world. It’s been interesting to see where those shared questions have led us, in our respective professional ways of doing history.

   Tom’s Book of Secrets was published in 2009. It has a split narrative - a modern-day story line in which the New Yorker Nick Ash hunts for his missing ex-girlfriend, with a picture of a 15C playing card as his only clue, and a mid 15C thread which follows a Mainz entrepreneur as he struggles with debt and technical mishap to develop a functioning moving type press. I hope it’s not giving too much away to say that my favourite part of the novel is the haunting description of the “Devil’s Library”, a library full of heterodox and dangerous texts thought to have been lost, but which have in fact been spirited away. Tom’s account of the building in which the Devil’s Library was housed reminded me a bit of the Codrington Library in All Souls College, a series of grand vaulted rooms where you have a sense of being almost outside time. Its twisting stairwells look Escher-like to anyone crossing Radcliffe Square on a dark night. I'm not sure in the Devil's Library is a comforting thought or not to those, like me, who regularly find that early printed books they desperately want to see have been declared lost, the last known copies vanished without trace. Tom's book was about a dark side to early printing and the church's fear of the new technology.

 

  Gutenberg and early printing have taken me in a different direction, meanwhile, and I ended up writing an article, ‘From Strassburg to Trent: Bishops, Printing and Liturgical Reform in the Fifteenth Century’, which was published just before Christmas in the journal Past and Present. My article argues that we have overlooked the significant and inventive ways in which the top clergy of the Roman church used the early printing industry well before the Reformation. It explores how and why bishops all over Europe commissioned official liturgical (or church service) books from printers, and the intriguing ways in which these prelates thought a manuscript differed from a printed book. I had a lot of fun poring over dozens of incunabula in London, Oxford, Cracow and the Vatican – from tiny breviaries printed in Augsburg or Nuremberg before 1500 which would fit in your pocket, to a vellum Toledo missal in the British Library so monstrously large and heavy that I needed a special trolley to manoeuvre it to my desk. Unlike Nick Ash, I didn’t come across evidence of any terrible conspiracies around early printing, only of the more mundane ways in which historians and societies can forget whole episodes from the past. Nonetheless, following a trail of documents and incunabula from the 1470s, with their crisp pages and crumbling leather spines, at times felt every bit as exciting as (if a whole lot less dangerous than) being in a historical thriller.

  

Christmas Books

In the past few weeks, as posters advertising Christmas gifts have started to appear at railway stations in and near Oxford, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how many of them feature books, and history books in particular. On one windswept platform, the publisher Dorling Kinderslee set out their Christmas wares – glossy books on motor racing, puzzle books for children, and in pride of place History Year by Year: The Ultimate Visual Guide to the Events that Shaped the World. The cover, gleaming out at commuters, shows some thirty images of people and objects of global historical significance, from Gandhi to the astrolabe. Next to one particularly gloomy set of lifts, meanwhile, there is a large poster urging you to buy Simon Jenkins’ Short History of England. The names of Elizabeth I and Churchill feature in large font, but the poster then asks “How much do you know?”, listing underneath the Gordon Riots, the Barebones Parliaments and other less celebrated or edifying episodes of the English past. The idea that you could market a mass history book specifically by flagging up its revisionism, suggesting that the past you have been taught at school or on television might be read in a completely different way, is I’m sure pleasing to many academic historians – so much of what we write is revisionist and iconoclastic, rewriting narratives, that it’s good to know a wider public is comfortable with, and enjoys, that as an approach to history. In some countries on the European continent, books which celebrate the national past fly off the shelves, but it’s hard to imagine works which seriously challenge accepted national history doing particularly well, far less being robustly marketed as such.

            Great though both these books sound, if I were able to buy up advertising space at British railway stations this Christmas, there are two history-related books which I’d like to encourage people to buy for their friends. Neither of them are brand new, but both are imaginative, unusual and exciting books that I keep going back to, months or years after reading them. The first is Chris Lavers’ Natural History of Unicorns (Granta Books, 2009) a highly original journey through zoology, medieval iconography, Victorian travel literature and ancient Hebrew texts, as Lavers pieces together the different myths, sightings, traditions and animals which came together to create the unicorn. The second is a historical novel which won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel back in 1999, Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence. The story of an English musician who is employed by the seventeenth-century Danish monarch Christian IV, this book for me at least prefigures Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall in many ways – in its persistent use of the present tense, its lyricism, and its haunting evocation of an early modern European court. Happy Christmas - whatever books you find in your stocking next week…

Tuning In



Alan Hollinghurst - recreating historical disorientation?
Photo by Nick Lansley



I’ve recently been reminded of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, the Booker-longlisted novel which I read over summer. The novel consists of 4 parts, set in different decades spanning from 1914 to the present-day. It’s a memorable read because Hollinghurst rather mercilessly drops his reader straight into a suburban drawing room (1914?), say, or a country house weekend party (the 1920s?) and into his characters’ conversations – about music, Cabinet politicians, minor public figures, or the latest trends in interior design. Because Hollinghurst doesn’t actually give us dates, the reader is left to flounder around like a time-traveller, guessing from the small-talk which year or century they have landed in. And unsurprisingly, a lot of the initial conversation in those scenes makes no sense at all at first, because it concerns the minutiae of a particular historical moment, and you have no reference points to hold onto.

I’m on research leave this term, and spending a lot of time in the Bodleian reading a massive collection of Polish 16C political correspondence called the Acta Tomiciana. Reading The Stranger’s Child is, in many ways, like forging your way through new source material as a historian. When you’re first dropped in with the documents, up close with the fine grain of the evidence and beyond the reach of existing textbooks or earlier published research, you’re swimming in an alien world where a lot of things are totally baffling. I found this as a graduate student first dipping my toes into late medieval Polish letter collections, like the Akta Aleksandra. Who are the Nohalsky Tartars the Polish elites keep talking about, and how do they relate to the Crimean Tartars also mentioned? If a letter is written on the octave of the feast of St. Cyril, what exactly does that mean? With the Acta Tomiciana, there are now new questions: who is the humble Mr. R in Rome, and why do Polish bishops write to him so often? Who is the Cardinal of the Four Saints? Who exactly is encompassed by the troubling enigmatic but commonplace phrase ‘the enemies of Christ’? But gradually, as with Hollinghurst’s novel, you tune in. You work out who the dramatis personae are, their concerns of the moment, and roughly where the story is going. Both Hollinghurst and the Acta Tomiciana have been a sobering reminder to me that before you can say insightful or new things about the past, you first have to work out what an earth is going on at ground level. But what Hollinghurst has done very effectively, and what we as historians sometimes struggle to do because we have tuned into our sources too well, is to convey the disconcerting alienness and bracing otherness of (even the recent) past.

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.

Books on Bermuda

This dispatch comes not from Oxford, but from Paget parish in Bermuda - England's oldest self-governing colony, a speck of land in the mid-Atlantic, a chain of islands formed by the peaks of ancient submarine volcanos. When travelling, it's always a treat to go equipped with historical novels set in the place I'm visiting - I remember how memorable it was reading Tim Willock's flamboyant epic romance, "The Religion", about the 16C seige of Malta, in a hotel built into the ramparts of the very fort where much of the action is set.

I couldn't find all that much by way of appealing historical fiction set in, or even history about, Bermuda before I left the UK, but it's been salutary to see how even in this age of three-click access to a wealth of published and antique books, and exhaustive on-line catalogues, the local on-the-ground bookshop can still offer treasure-troves of publications which internet trawls fail to pick up. I walked into the National Trust of Bermuda giftshop, for example, in a little alley off the Hamilton waterfront, and was directed to a book section. It was apparently modest, 20 titles or so, but they included detailed guides to the historical architecture of every parish on this small island, memoirs of colonial life, and a gleaming volume, 'Butler's History of the Bermudas', a new edition  (2007, by C.F.E Hollis Hallett) of a 1623 account of early colonial life in Bermuda, written by one of the archipelago's first governors.

So, instead of reading Bermudian historical novels while I'm here, I'm instead enjoying this 17C historical source, which is making for lively and funny reading. This is perhaps one of the penalties of being a historian. My old tutor at Lincoln College once expressed the wish that his teenage son would not become a historian like his father 'because it's a burden'. I've often wondered what exactly he meant by that remark, but maybe it was precisely this - the inability to just let things be their present selves, the need to locate everywhere you see in time as well as space, a sense that a place isn't at all comprehensible until you can clearly picture the early 17C settlers catching cahoo birds, watching their wooden watch-towers blown down in hurricanes, and anxiously scanning the blue horizon for Spanish galleons.