The First ‘Love Island’ (1838)

                                 

          

George Sand,
painted by
August Charpentier (1838)

Fryderyk Chopin, c. 1849, by Bisson

         

         

       











               On British television, the reality dating show and pop-culture phenomenon ‘Love Island’ is nearing its finale this weekend. With over 6 million viewers, the programme places 20-somethings on the Balearic Island of Mallorca, in a converted farmhouse-villa decked out with neon signs and gaudy summer accessories. Yet perhaps few of the contestants or viewers know that tourism on Mallorca was kick-started almost two centuries ago by an earlier pair of celebrity, star-crossed lovers, in a remote lodging just a few miles away from the ITV villa.

            In 1838, the ‘most famous woman in France’, the avant-garde, aristocratic, cross-dressing, best-selling novelist George Sand (Amantine Dupin) travelled to Mallorca with the Polish composer, pianist and political refugee Fryderyk Chopin. She was 34, a divorced mother of two, he 28. Sand claimed they were seeking solitude, where she could write and Chopin compose; they were likely also fleeing from the scandal their love affair had caused in Paris. Mallorca in the 1830s was heavily agricultural, with limited infrastructure for foreign visitors – the couple could not find a functioning hotel in Palma, and ended up renting a cell in an abandoned monastery, in the mountain village of Valldemossa. The lovers’ Mallorcan tryst was bitter-sweet. Chopin’s letters praised the natural beauty, calm and ‘poetic feeling’ of the island. Sand, however, grew disillusioned, and angry at the locals who disapproved of the unmarried lovers. She later vented her feelings in her famously acerbic
memoire A Winter in Mallorca.  

            Sand’s book put Mallorca on the literary map. She joked that she had ‘discovered’ the island, and predicted that once international travel connections improved ‘Mallorca would soon prove a formidable rival to the Alps’, a new destination for the North European traveller. That prophecy was realised with the opening of an international airport at Palma in 1960, and the advent of mass tourism. Today, ‘Love Island’ producers distil Mallorca into its essential modern tourist image – turquoise waters, limestone coves, endless sunshine, endless swimming pools. Yet, as the 2019 contestants chat, court and argue on our screens, this social-media television spectacle still evokes the unquiet ghosts of Mallorca’s original, nineteenth-century ‘Love Island’ couple.

            In their villa, the current ‘Love Island’ contestants are cut off from the outside world, kept well away from the locals. They can only imagine what is being written and tweeted about them in the outside world, or what fame or infamy will greet them on their return. They come to find love, or fame, or the £50K cash prize. Chopin and Sand, too, in their damp monastery sought total privacy, but wondered what the Paris papers were saying. And they too found that that a Mallorcan hideaway holiday had an ambiguous effect on their relationship. Chopin was in 1838 already ill with bronchitis or tuberculosis, and his love affair with Sand would break down in terrible, very public recriminations a few years later. The Polish pianist died in Paris in 1849; Sand did not attend his funeral. The Mallorcan interlude had proved productive for both their careers: Sand wrote her novel Spiridion in the monastery, and Chopin composed a number of pieces at Valldemossa. But the romantic happily-ever-after which the most gossiped-about couple of 19^th-century Europe had sought in the Balearic sun had proved, ultimately, far more elusive.

History on the March...

Pilgrimage of Grace banner, 1536

       

           Last weekend, along with a million other people, I attended the Peoples’ Vote March in central London. We arrived in Park Lane, super-luxury hotels looming over us, and stood for over two hours in a tightly packed crowd. The two-mile column of humanity ahead of us was so dense, that there was no room to actually march. We eventually shuffled through London, hemmed in by hundreds of people on all sides for 5 whole hours.

Photo by @JesseJJWS

            As well as the in-the-present-moment sense of insurrectionary urgency which infused the march, the day was full of curious historic echoes, like a magic lantern show. The tallest flags, on enormous home-made flagpoles, were from the regions. High above the crowd, there fluttered Yorkshire white Roses, Lancashire red roses, the yellow Dorset cross, and the black flag of Cornwall - all held proudly aloft by protestors who had travelled by coach to London, setting out in the early hours of the morning. The Cornish flags marching on Parliament put me in mind of their most famous antecedent, the Cornish rebellion of 1497 against Henry VII, in which armed Cornish miners made it all the way to London, and the Battle of Blackheath. The roses from northern England, meanwhile, in their own distant way evoked the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace, that great early modern rising of the north, which marched under its own banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, with matching badges for the Pilgrims: begging Henry VIII to reconsider his legal breach with Rome, and save the English monasteries.

            As this great anti-Brexit carnival shuffle-marched past Green Park, a man stood on the metal railings, blowing kisses and calling out to the crowd like a preacher: ‘All you need is love! I love you all! You are looooved!’. Someone in my party said: ‘Do you think that’s how the Levellers started?’, imagining the most radical sects of the English Civil War originating as yelling mystics on the edge of a 17C political crowd. On the march, people were talking excitedly about the on-line petition to Parliament to revoke Article 50: as fellow historians have pointed out, petitions are not trivial gestures, but a tradition deeply embedded in British political culture. When James VI & I processed from Scotland to take up his new English crown in 1603, he was met outside London by a delegation of Puritan ministers who handed him the Millenary Petition, which they claimed had 1,000 clerical signatories.

Past the Ritz, and down Saint James, into London’s club-land. In the window of a cigar boutique, three tanned men smoked insouciantly, watching the noisy crowd pass by. On a balcony on Pall Mall, a family sipped champagne, as a million shouting, singing people filed past. Approaching Trafalgar Square, we spotted signs in the crowd in Polish: a bilingual placard saying ‘The Duchy of Cieszyn rejects Brexit’ – Central European regionalism here – and, more bracingly, an unfurled red-white ‘Solidarność’ banner, bringing Poland's anti-Communist resistance symbol par excellence to Britain’s anti-Brexit march. And, of course, in the crowd demanding a second referendum, there were hundreds and hundreds of blue-yellow EU flags: worn as capes, as face-paints, as antennae on children’s heads, wrapped around dogs, serving as blankets for protesters in wheelchairs. Here, a flag – the 19C medium of national identity par excellence – was repurposed for a very 21C anti-nationalist, transnational message.

This is the trouble with historians: they see deep layers of meaning, century upon century, wherever they look, as if deep time were all around them. Most commentators referred to the march as ‘historic’, by which they meant that it would be remembered, shape events, feature in future textbooks. But historian-marchers keep one eye behind them too: the People’s Vote March was also historic, because it drew together, in a carnival of protest, so many rich threads from the past of both these islands and of their European neighbours.

Three Days in Budapest

Isabella (1519-1559), Queen of Hungary, attributed to workshop of Lucas Cranach

        This month, I attended a conference in Budapest, to mark the 500^th anniversary of the birth of Isabella (1519-59), a Polish-Italian princess and Queen of Hungary. In spite of the tsunami of books and novels on Renaissance queens in recent years, Isabella’s dramatic life is still surprisingly little-known outside Hungary itself. Raised at the Cracow court at the height of the Polish Renaissance, Isabella travelled south in 1539 to marry King John of Hungary: only to find herself, just 18 months later, widowed, with a new-born son, and an Ottoman army led by Sultan Suleiman I surrounding her capital of Buda. Via many twists and turns, she came to rule the new principality of Transylvania for her son, as the Sultan’s vassal.

 

            Isabella was a highly international 16^th-century figure, continually crossing borders, and this conference, organised by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, also involved much border crossing, with speakers from Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Finland and the UK. Isabella has fallen between the cracks of different national scholarships, but an international conference like this can start to put the pieces back together. Attending the conference programme put together by Dr. Terez Oborni and Dr. Agnes Mate was like watching a new biography of Isabella write itself in real time – as chapter after chapter of her life unfolded before us, reconstructed by experts from sources and archives all over Europe. In the ornate halls of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences headquarters, a 19C academic palace on the banks of the Danube, we spent two days conjuring up Isabella’s Hungary, where great geopolitical and cultural forces clashed in the mid-16C – surrounded by paintings of medieval castles, and listening to a performance of 16C Central European music on period instruments by the Musica Historia group.

It was hard, during this wonderful conference, not to notice also the modern-day political forces at work around us. The conference coincided with an international dispute over a new poster-campaign by the Hungarian government: the posters in question, showing George Soros with Jean-Claude Juncker, were prominent all over Budapest during our stay. The conference also took place during a serious crisis for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, our hosts – the Hungarian government is poised to close or take direct control of its network of excellent research institutes, a move which has drawn international protest, including from the UK’s British Academy, as an assault on the fundamental principle of academic freedom. Staff of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have appealed for international support. Hungarian historian colleagues and friends now find themselves on the front line of this dispute, their research projects, jobs and careers suddenly uncertain. Historians are a tellingly early focus for populist regimes – as we see in clashes over the Poland’s Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, the Polish Jewish Museum (Polin) in Warsaw, and now in Hungary.

In the 30 years since 1989, we have made real progress in integrating the rich history of Central Europe into our wider histories of Europe, after decades of intellectual separation in the Cold War. Scholars working in Budapest have been key to this – both those at the Central European University (also now under sustained and grave governmental attack), and at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, who have written reams of excellent work, opening up their country’s past to international audiences. Back in Oxford tutorials, my students sat grim-faced as I explained how historians were under government pressure in Hungary, certain areas of teaching banned, and that we should seize in both hands the intellectual freedoms we have. EU expansion, migration and the Brexit crisis have, I hope, by now given the lie to Chamberlains’ infamous words of British indifference to Central Europe in 1939:  we can no longer say that this is ‘a faraway country of [whose people] we know nothing’. As Isabella, the half-Italian queen of Hungary shows, the history of Central Europe is the history of Western Europe, in the Renaissance, 20C, and today alike.

Between Two Novembers

This weekend, the world will face the bracing 100^th anniversary of 11^th November 1918 – a date with very a different meaning in the two traditions in which I grew up, British and Polish. In the UK, on their winter coats people are wearing not just red paper poppies, but elaborate enamelled flowers engraved with the dates 1918-2018. For the British, November 1918 is Armistice, a solemn national occasion of mourning and memory, in a military key. For Poland and its international diasporas, however, the 11^th November 1918 is celebration – Independence, the day on which the European empires which had partitioned and gobbled up the old Polish kingdom, and ruled it for 129 years, fell away, leaving the way open for Poles to take up arms and create their country anew (or a remembered version of it).

            This 100^th anniversary comes at a time when both these countries are debating their identities, and pasts, out aloud before the eyes of the world. In Britain, some look forward to a sharp break with the EU and a rekindled imperial trading future, while others wait for a UK-style en marche progressive wave to sweep those visions, and Brexit itself, clean away. In Poland, meanwhile, the ruling nationalist Law & Justice party, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, and ultra-far-right groups are caught in a three-way struggle over the annual Independence Day march, in a proxy fight for the meaning of the day.

       

     As a historian and British citizen, I’ve always been caught between, and within, these two national conversations, but the tensions of British-Polishness (or Polish Britishness, if you will), are in November 2018 more pronounced than ever. The rise in anti-East European xenophobia seen in the UK during and since the 2016 referendum has, and has not, caught me by surprise. In the 1990s, during an internship at the Foreign Office, a succession of top civil servants commented on my surname with disapproval, declaring: ‘we can’t have foreigners working here, can we?’ In the 2000s, habituating the riverside children’s playgrounds of Reading, I could see local parents and grandparents visibly stiffen when I spoke Polish in that public setting; and visibly relax when I took care to intersperse it with a few sentences in my impeccably middle-class English, as I have learnt to do ever since, on streets, trains and buses. After the Referendum, guests at Oxford high tables and shop workers alike felt free to announce that I was not British, à propos nothing at all. English white-on-white xenophobia is not universal, but it is a persistent daily undercurrent, encountered along the whole social spectrum - upper class, middle class and working class fellow citizens alike, in metropolises, provincial towns and rural pubs.

            And in Poland itself, people are equally quick to judge the name-accent-passport combination of their diaspora kin, in archives, hotel receptions, restaurants, conferences. Poles in these varied social situations quickly feel the need to tell the diaspora who they really are: ‘so you are not Polish’, ‘so you are Polish’, ‘so you are foreign’. This urgent need to categorise reflects a deeper set of anxieties about what, and who, ‘Polish’ is, 100 years on from independence. Whoever ends up marching, and in the name of what, in the streets of Warsaw on Sunday, the very equation ‘1918-2018’ is, historically speaking, a potentially uncomfortable sleight of hand. It tacitly equates the Poland created in 1918 by the Versailles Peace Treaty with the Poland created in 1945 by the WWII Allies. Yet, in their borders and peoples, these two countries were very different places. The Poland born on 11^th November 1918 had a highly mixed population: the 1921 census found that 30% of its citizens were Ukrainian/Ruthenian, Jewish, German or from other minorities. The Poland of 2018 is one of the most ethnically and religiously homogenous states in Europe. The celebratory slogan ‘1918-2018’ does not seem to make much room for that absent 30%.

            So, for the British-Polish and Polish-British, this will be a strange weekend, watching stately processions to the cenotaph in London, and the noisy and possibly violent Independence march in Warsaw – red poppies, red and white flags. Many histories, communities and lives do not fit the clear national stories which these 1918 commemorations try to unite their respective societies around. Yet, in the wider run of European and global history, those who cross boundaries, inhabit margins, or live in zones of overlap make up a large part of the world’s story. Perhaps one day the solemn Polish and British Novembers will also find a way to make their peace with that.

Royal Wedding as Microcosm...

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Two years ago, serendipitously, the Bodleian Library offered the Jagiellonians Project (which I lead) a spring 2018 slot for an exhibition about a Renaissance royal wedding. As the Bodleian staff, my co-curator Katarzyna Kosior and I hurried to write captions, secure an object loan, design flyers and pick 9 objects to mark the 500^th anniversary of the 1518 wedding of King Sigismund I of Poland and the Italian princess Bona Sforza, the media grew steadily more excited about preparations for the British royal celebrations. As we held a conference on Renaissance Royal Weddings, from Paris to Constantinople, the imminent Windsor wedding moved higher and higher up the news agenda. And the parallels between 16C and contemporary royal nuptials are rich.

The British royal wedding this weekend boasted impeccably 21^stcentury features: the digital clock on Windsor Council’s website, A-list celebrity culture, the tens of thousands of tweets generated. But, like royal weddings across time and space, the event was at heart a symbolic performance. It was thus in the Renaissance, when princes put on treasury-draining, eye-poppingly spectacular festivities for their nuptials. It was thus in imperial nineteenth-century Britain, when the royals invented a new traditional-looking pageantry to awe onlookers. Historians know that royal weddings perform identity because they are a chance for princes, and their subjects, to stage who think they are - or who they might like to be.

When the bride is a foreigner, from a distant land, this effect is heightened. Meghan Markle is the first foreign bride for a senior British royal since, whisper it, the abdicated Edward VIII took the American socialite Wallis Simpson as his wife. Historically, a royal marriage to an overseas bride was proof of a country’s essential cosmopolitanism – its diplomatic connections, its international power, and also of the prince’s good cultural taste and broad horizons. When, 500 years ago this spring, King Sigismund married Bona Sforza in Cracow, he was reinforcing his own reputation as a leading enthusiast for the Italian Renaissance and all its heady glamour. Prince Harry too was showing us a more global, forward-looking British monarchy, open to the future.

       

But a prince’s foreign spouse has also consistently been a touchstone for anxieties about national identity and belonging, galvanising local anger. In 1554, for example, the English noble Thomas Wyatt led a rebel army to London, to prevent Mary I from taking a foreigner, Philip II of Spain, as her husband. In Poland, the teenage Bona Sforza immediately became the subject of obscene verses, lambasted for bringing with her Italian ‘sodomites, patricides and epicureans’ who stole jobs from honest Poles. Meghan Markle, even before the wedding, became the target of hate mail. At a country house outside Reading this weekend, I heard visitors (racism alert) grumbling out loud, as they tucked into their picnic, about the inclusion of a Gospel choir in the royal wedding service because this ‘wasn’t British music’.

Foreign brides for princes have, for centuries, highlighted and even inflamed tensions between a country’s local and cosmopolitan identities. Royal weddings thus show us a society in microcosm. Royal nuptials hold up a mirror in which historians catch a glimpse of past identity crises; and in which we can today catch a bracing glimpse of Britain, with all its fissures, in 2018.

Beach / Museum

Edge of the Old World? San Sebastian, La Gomera

Summer is over and in Somerville Senior Common Room, academics are swapping tales of holidays. Many colleagues have holidayed in cultural-historic hotspots, such as Central Italy, and so I wonder if they will wince when I admit to spending a fortnight in Tenerife – an island associated, in the UK, with loud mega-resorts, high-rise hotels, beaches full of British tourists, and not much else. The lavish modern water parks and zoos built on the island, consistently rated as its top attractions, only reinforce the impression that there is nothing really to see on this remote Canarian isle. Bucket-and-spade tourism dominates, in an archipelago whose economy has a long track-record of dependence on just one industry (wine, cochineal, sunseekers).

            It is no real secret that there is more to the island – travel journalists regularly write features on ‘hidden Tenerife’, its live volcanos, pre-historic fauna, mountain villages. What interests me, however, is the way in which Tenerife and its tourism industry shrug off the past, an island refusing to wear its history on its sleeve. Yet historians of the late medieval and Renaissance worlds have long stressed how important the Canary Islands are – from John Merriman in the 1960s to Felipe Armandez Armesto in the 1980s, the archipelago has been described as a laboratory of empire, the place where Europeans learnt to colonise from the 14C, a stepping stone between medieval Christendom and global modernity. 

            Taking the ferry to the island of La Gomera, day-trippers from Tenerife dock in the tiny port of San Sebastian, cuboid houses perched on the mountainside. This is where Columbus provisioned his fleet, the port from which he set sail into the blue yonder in 1492. San Sebastian still feels remote, on the very edge of the Old World. When the Fred Olsen trimaran navigates the choppy channel between La Gomera and Tenerife, you can peer west through the salt-greased window and think of the Santa Maria sailing these same waters. All over the Canaries, you can eat papas arrugadas, rare ‘heritage’ varieties of potatoes, genetically important because these are potato strains first brought to Europe from the Americas in the 16C, preserved in their original form in this archipelago. In colonial towns in misty northern Tenerife, such as Oratava, you can visit the three-storied 17C town-houses of people who grew rich on trade, because the Canaries were an essential staging post for Spanish maritime traffic between Europe and the Americas in the early modern centuries.

            There is more than enough material, to build among the hotels of Tenerife, a magnificent Museum of the Canaries, of Atlantic History, or of the Americas, to address the richness, complexities, controversies and myths of Iberia’s global empires – launched from these very shores. So Tenerife is a useful reminder that however historically significant or evocative a place may seem to scholars, 15,000,000 people a year fly to the Canary Islands for quite different reasons. After all, who needs history, or a heritage industry, in order to prosper if you have a really hot beach? 

Academia and the End of Polite Neutrality?

The Scholar in their Study...
St. Jerome, Antonello da Massina, National Gallery.

  

It transpires, then, that you can spend quite a lot of time teaching and writing about History, and it can still turn around and bite you on the nose. Politics (read: history) has swept into Oxford, into our cafes, venerable college halls, our committee meetings and strategic planning. As I explained to a visiting colleague from Prague, until six months ago, at Somerville College lunches or with one’s students at Fresher’s Dinner, one might well discuss UK Higher Education policy, or immigration policy as it affected universities…. but rarely actual party politics. Perhaps a traditional British reserve, politeness and sense of good taste prevented it being otherwise (I was once told: no religion, sex or politics at high table). That set of mores was swept away overnight with the June 23^rd UK referendum on membership of the European Union, and again with the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. After the first result, the atmosphere in college was one of palpable collective grief, and after the second a stunned, sheer funereal silence.

            These events are rapidly redefining what it means, for an intellectual community, to be political. Before June 2016, a handful of historians in the university were openly active in party politics (addressing party meetings, leafleting for one party or another in city council elections). Yet with the sudden advent of xenophobic, anti-liberal democratic, anti-intellectual and populist politics, as if with the flick of a wand, the most basic things we do in this (or any) university have suddenly become highly political and partisan – catapulting us into the frontline of a culture war. When in tutorials we school young people in questioning and critical thought; when we lecture on how nationalism was constructed / invented in the 19^th century; when we speak up for continued access to the EU’s mould-breaking research programmes; when we defend the legal rights of our non-British-passport-holding colleagues, all of them top international scholars – all this, improbably, has now become politics with a capital P, setting us sharply at odds with the UK Government and its rhetorics, and liable to bring a torrent of online insults down on any academic publicly defending these things.

            The rules of engagement have shifted under our feet, with a bracing lurch. Academics are trained to deal in nuance, complexity, uncertainty, slow reflection and precision – skills which famously do not automatically translate into punchy public policy positions, or rhetorics. For academics – particularly those active in the publicly-visible world of social media – there are personal risks in speaking out on Brexit, xenophobia or Trump: of outright abusive messages online, or of being seen to use a university post to proclaim private political views. Yet not to speak out arguably carries a greater risk for us all, and what threatens the essential liberal values of universities is not a private matter for those employed to serve, staff and run these major national institutions. Earlier this year, Simon Schama spoke to a packed lecture theatre in Oxford’s Natural History Museum about ‘public history’: he urged Humanities scholars to be bold, and intervene in public debate to defend our values. Simon Schama gave that talk, prophetically, well before the June referendum.

            The (hostile) politicisation of our university life by external forces is unfamiliar to this generation of UK academics, but none of it is new. Down the centuries, scholars and writers have found again and again that, against all their wishes and private inclinations, they get pulled personally into big and dangerous political struggles: one need only look at the life of Niccolo Machiavelli, or Erasmus of Rotterdam. Our sources have been telling us all along how painful, frightening, and disorientating this situation is. Perhaps we have not been listening to those early modern voices as well as we thought we were; perhaps we did not, after all, entirely hear or recognise until now what they were saying. That intellectual freedom, although practised from within the quiet space of the Academy, cannot be quietly defended.

Poland, the UK and the Brexit Vote

A great Polish Anglophile: King Stanislaw August Poniatowski

     

       In 2008, Richard Unger edited a volume entitled Britain & Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795. In light of the UK’s vote for Brexit, it is worth going back to books like these, to ask where Polish-British relations have come from and where they might be heading. There are many narrative threads within the Brexit vote, but this is certainly one of them.

This is a story of intensifying contact, convergence and progressive entanglement between two European polities, one thousand miles apart. Throughout the Middle Ages and sixteenth century, contacts between these isles and the Polish kingdom were ongoing, albeit in a piecemeal, low-key way. Readers of Unger’s collection can pick up interesting morsels: the long shoes fashionable in England in the 1360s were called ‘crakows’, in the 1590s Cracow boasted its own Scottish pub. The monarchs of England and Poland exchanged infrequent, polite letters, mostly on crusading (and were often unclear even of one other’s names). It was in the 18C that mutual interest between the two countries picked up: the last king of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski, and his court were Anglophiles, with a strong interest in British literary and political culture. In 19C London, exiles from partitioned Poland were a high-profile cause celebre to many. In 1939, it was of course Hitler’s invasion of Poland which triggered the United Kingdom’s declaration of war; famously, Polish citizens played a role in the Allied war effort at RAF Northolt, Bletchley Park, Monte Cassino. It was as a result of this conflict that the first large-ish Polish diaspora settled in the UK, numbering some 200,000 people. The end of the Cold War, and Poland’s much celebrated joining of the EU in 2004, saw Polish citizens coming to the UK in astonishingly high numbers, attracted in part by the presence of an established Polish community in the country. Tabloid papers began to run stories alleging Polish vagrants roasted swans in English parks. And now we have this: a Brexit vote in June 2016, in which Leave campaigners voiced open displeasure about the presence of Polish shops on their streets, of Polish-speaking children in the school playground. Post June 23^rd, there are repeated reports of verbal abuse of Poles, and a nasty graffiti attack on the long-standing Polish Cultural Centre in west London – a place for international film, artists and theatre. A notable WWII alliance has given way to rancour and fear.

Polish shop, Oxford, 2013

But Poland is not just the Polish delicatessens on streets up and down the United Kingdom. Poland ‘over there’ is a NATO member, an EU ally, its nationalist Law & Order (PiS) ruling party currently engaged in its serious own stand-off with the EU over the rule of law. In meeting as a group of 6 self-styled ‘EU founder members’ the day after the Brexit vote, the EU west European states caused anger and dismay in Poland. Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of PiS, has quickly urged the EU to consider again a 2 speed Europe, with a new European treaty; Polish liberals fear Brexit might galvanise PiS towards a ‘Polexit’, allowing it to rule in populist style without sanction from Brussels. So the Polish government, and fraught Polish domestic politics, will play an important role in any forthcoming EU-UK negotiations on Brexit. The EU institutions in Brussels have a problem to the north with their British Brexit neighbour, and a problem to the east with openly nationalist regimes such as those of PiS (and Orban in Hungary).

Poland and Britain interacted for centuries in their very different forms: as medieval monarchies, early modern composite states, dynastic unions, and modern nation states. Now, with their very populations entangled in the 21C, Poland and the UK are interacting within a new globalised world and interconnected Europe, still speaking loudly of inviolable ‘sovereignty’, yet both in a strong mutual embrace they cannot easily escape. The Brexit vote is a British earthquake, but it is also a highly significant event in Central European history and politics. Poles, both in Lincolnshire and in the Belvedere Palace in Warsaw, are today actively shaping the UK’s history; just as the UK is shaping theirs. We shall see, to our relief or to our cost, whether in this decade the oscillating centripetal or centrifugal forces in European history will win out. 

Polish Cracower shoes - the height of 14C London fashion...
(From http://bit.ly/29o3x5E)

Strangers in London

       

The Dutch Church, Austin Friars (photo by NN)

Academics are increasingly encouraged to engage the public in their research - via ‘impact’ initiatives or through active collaboration with non-scholars in what is termed ‘knowledge exchange’. It was therefore refreshing to participate in an academic conference on the Reformation which was entirely conceived, curated and organised by the Dutch Church in the City of London (and not by early modern historians). Last week, the conference ‘John a Lasco: I am A Stranger’ heard speakers from the United States, UK and the Netherlands. Johannes a Lasco (or Jan Łaski the Younger, 1499-1560), was the most significant Reformation figure produced by Poland: nephew of a powerful Polish archbishop, furnished with the best possible foreign education, Johannes a Lasco went on to play a leading role in Protestant communities northern Germany, England and his native Poland. Here in England, it was to Johannes a Lasco that Edward VI entrusted leadership of the ‘Strangers Church’ in 1550 – a place where London’s foreign refugees and immigrants could worship together.

            It was marvellous to hear papers about Lasco and the Strangers’ Church in the very place where that church once stood. Originally part of the enormous Austin (Augustinian) Friars monastery, the building was given to the Strangers, destroyed in the Blitz, and rebuilt by the Dutch community in London. It is an inspiring, beautiful and resonant space. Thomas Cromwell’s great mansion was built just across the road (as readers of Wolf Hall will know). The speakers delivered their lectures before an enormous stained glass window showing John a Lasco, bearded and in green robes, and the two children connected with this church, the boy-king Edward VI of England, and Princess Irene of the Netherlands who laid the foundation stone of the new building in 1950.

            We heard from Michael Springer about Lasco’s magnum opus, the Forma ac Ratio, an extended ‘how to’ guide on running a Calvinist congregation, from Andrew Spicer about the foreign residents of London in the 1550s, from David Gehring about a parallel life to that of Lasco, the Elizabethan Robert Beale. Silke Muylaert spoke on how the Stranger Church in London reacted when the Netherlands erupted in religious revolt, bringing traumatised and impassioned refugees to their corner of London. The Dutch Church had however also organised this conference to pose broader and contemporary questions about refugees, immigrants and toleration. We therefore heard how in 16C eastern Germany, or 17C Prague, or 16C Poland, very different religious communities could coexist in curious, unexpected and usually precarious ways. This conference was most timely, in light of the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, and the UK’s own referendum debate about identity and migration. It was sobering to hear that in late 16C London, the government had conducted a full census of foreign residents, quizzing them in depth about their reasons for coming to England; that other Londoners complained about immigrants driving up 16C house prices and taking jobs; that the Elizabethan government deeply feared that refugees from a savage European war would bring religious and political radicalism to these shores (Andrew Spicer, Michael Springer).

It is always a pleasant surprise when research on 16C Europe speaks so directly to communities in the UK today. A Lasco was in London only three years, forced to flee by ship along with his congregation of ‘Strangers’ in 1553, when the Catholic queen Mary I ascended the throne. The Dutch Church is soon to unveil a new plaque commemorating Johannes a Lasco and his time in London: it will mark how a unique life, and a unique building, connect England, Poland and the Netherlands and their respective histories. The plaque will also be a prompt to reflect on the different experiences which foreigners, immigrants and refugees have had in our capital city (welcome, warm coexistence, expulsion) over the centuries, as the United Kingdom again finds and articulates its place in the world.

The Tudors & the EU Referendum

The English Channel; the edge of history?

         Historians have been prominent in the EU referendum debate, with George Osborne hosting a reception with Remain academic supporters last week. The question of the British Isles’ relations with the wider European continent is, however, a problem which has long underpinned the popular Oxford undergraduate course ‘British History, 1500-1700’, quietly and subversively. In teaching the history of Tudor England, Europe is a well-established ghost at the feast.

            Teaching this paper to some of the UK’s brightest students, using books written by some of our brightest scholars, is to see how deeply ingrained the idea of a separate ‘England’ and ‘Europe’ is. Students from a range of ethnic and social backgrounds instinctively write of the Tudors and their subjects as ‘we’: ‘we had a Reformation’, ‘we invaded France’. Europeans become ‘they’. This is merely a crude echo of what history students find in many books about early modern England, which breezily sketch differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – England had a sensible, state-imposed Reformation, while those continentals had wild riots, image-breaking and wars. English witchcraft trials were calm local affairs and small scale; the Europeans (and Scots) had out-of-control paranoid panics. The English ‘we’ is civilised and law-abiding, the continental ‘they’ is slightly hysterical. This kind of seductively simple picture of the sixteenth-century is possible only if one employs a rhetorical sleight of hand – to pack the entire European landmass and its islands into one homogenous ‘they’, neatly contrasted with an English ‘us’. There was of course no single European experience of Reformation (and no Protestant Reformation at all in many places), or witch-hunts or, say, the evolution of parliaments. Tudor England might have been much like Denmark or Transylvania in certain respects, but more like France or Portugal in others. Europe was in the sixteenth century a collection of kingdoms, duchies and republics, just as it is today a collection of highly varied nation states. England was distinctive, but so was every polity in Europe. (And all those polities claim, when writing their national histories, that they were unique).

            This powerful idea of a pristine historical separation between Tudor England and a chaotic Continent is of course a myth. The events which rocked the kingdom, and these islands, in the sixteenth century were not purely indigenous in origin: ideas of Reformation, state power, witchcraft, history, art and many others came primarily from abroad. The religious reformer and Polish refugee, John a Lasco, was for example a prominent Protestant in Edward VI’s London, as a major conference next month in London will recall. Books, ideas, objects, images and people crossed (and criss-crossed) the sea. This is a history of dense, ongoing connections and exchange, which is no cause for embarrassment.

            This myth of a historic separation between the British Isles and an abstract place called ‘the Continent’, however historically questionable, is one which we unfortunately still perpetuate in our teaching. At Oxford, the History B.A. offers separate papers in British and ‘General’ (European) history. At post-graduate level, cutting-edge research is discussed in two separate groups – an Early Modern Britain seminar, and an Early Modern Europe/World seminar. It wasn’t true in the sixteenth century that the British Isles had a historic experience so unique that it set them totally apart from other societies in the geographical vicinity; it still wasn’t true in the twentieth century when so many of our classic Tudor England textbooks were written; and it is not true today. Britain, and England, have always been an integral part of a rich, difficult, mutually entangled European history: in the referendum, we risk breaking crucial twenty-first century alliances, on the basis of a historical myth to the contrary. The United Kingdom, with its constituent territories, is part of Western Eurasia; it can of course pretend that it is not, but to do so on June 23^rd would be unwise.  

Winter Conversations

Engelsberg manor, in the mid-afternoon sunlight.

After an unusually busy term and Oxford History admissions week, in a final gasp of academic activity before Christmas, I flew to Sweden for a seminar on ‘Declinism’ organised by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation. One of the hallmarks of the Foundation’s seminars is that they are often held in a late 17C manor house in the village of Engelsberg, 160km north of Stockholm. Engelsberg itself is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site due to its preserved ironworks, a monument to the importance of iron ore mining in Swedish history. The aim of the seminars is to stimulate interdisciplinary debate in the Humanities – this month’s, on ‘Declinism’, was the third in a series which had begun with ‘Decadence’ and ‘Decay’.

            And so as part of a group of some ten speakers – from Mexico, the UK, the USA, Germany – we found ourselves crunching across hard frost with our suitcases, in air several degrees below freezing, towards a manor house decorated with candles, evergreen and traditional glazed stoves. We were taken into a room rigged up with television cameras, ready to film the seminar for broadcast by the Foundation. Throughout the day, we heard papers on how the notion of ‘decline’ did, or did not, play out in ancient Assyria, ancient Greek literature, in perceptions of the Ottoman or Aztec worlds, in 20C America or in modern debate on climate change. I spoke on the Jagiellonian dynasty, perceptions of its demise, and claims of its rebirth, in 16C Central Europe. The event, deep in rural Sweden in December, felt like a cross between a country-house party and a monastic-style retreat for academics.

            The discussions continued late into the night, and the interdisciplinary conversations in particular were memorable. We have various fora in the UK for talking to scholars in other Humanities (and/or social science) subjects, not least the dynamic TORCH here in Oxford. But sometimes I wonder if we are so careful to be polite to each other that we don’t say what we really think. Before Engelsberg, the closest I’d come to having very open interdisciplinary conversations (of the sort where you can look an esteemed colleague in the eye and say: ‘I just don’t understand why you do what you do’) was in the Somerville Medievalists group meetings, with my German & Italian literature colleagues. At Engelsberg, (in a smoke-filled room, with low lighting and lots of loud intellectual exchanges going on), I was able to have very frank conversations on whether it is possible to write history at all, on postmodernism, text and, indeed, truth. It is good to be challenged on the fundamentals of what you do as a scholar. I think there are some misperceptions of what historians do, or think they are doing, which suggests that there are things we could articulate better. I learnt at Engelsberg that the gaps between Humanities disciplines can be quite big, maybe bigger than we like to admit outside of a darkened room. But I also learnt that – however heated the discussions – even in the early hours of the morning they are tempered with genuine mutual academic respect and curiosity.

How to Vote

The Polish royal election of 1573, as imagined by Jan Matejko (d. 1893)

On UK Election Day (which on this occasion has been awaited for the unusually long span of five full years), what do our late medieval and Renaissance forbearers tell us about how to vote?

Although we think of it as a period of mighty monarchies, 15^th and 16^th Europe was in fact full of elections and voting. The hundreds of bishops in Latin Christendom, for example, were all elected by their cathedral chapters: the canons would hear a solemn Mass, gather in the chapter house and vote. If they were ‘inspired by the Holy Spirit’ (in practice meaning if the result had been negotiated or fixed in advance) the chapter would unanimously acclaim a single candidate. Alternatively, they could hold a ballot (‘per scrutinium’) or appoint a subcommittee to make the decision (‘per comprossimum’). Republics such as Florence or Venice, meanwhile, had a constant flow of elections to office, with elaborate voting procedures involving beans, silver balls, and giant urns.

The pope in Rome was of course elected, by cardinals who were locked in the Sistine Chapel, with the Botticelli frescos and their own make-shift beds, until they reached a majority verdict. Papal elections in the Renaissance were characterised by the electoral capitulation – a formal list of promises which the cardinals would make the successful candidate swear to deliver, before formally electing him. (Not being carved in stone or enshrined in legislation, pace the UK party leaders, these were always transgressed).

And even in monarchies, there were plentiful and often momentous elections. The kings of Poland, Hungary, Bohemia and Sweden were elected throughout the Renaissance period, as was the Holy Roman Emperor himself. A Polish royal election, for example, such as that of 1492, involved the 40 or so members of the royal council assembling at Piotrków castle with ample numbers of armed troops, ‘conferring’ for several weeks, and only when a successful candidate emerged as a result of those negotiations did the council proceed to a formal oral vote, in the castle Hall. Then there were fireworks, feasting in Kraków, and a lavish coronation.

What these varieties of 15C and 16C European elections have in common is a conviction that all the important issues had to be thoroughly negotiated, and agreed, by the key players before proceeding to a vote – the purpose of which was partly ceremonial, or symbolic. In that sense, the UK 2015 election campaign – which has been characterised by negotiations and posturing between possible allies, well in advance of the actual vote – has had something of a Renaissance echo to it.

Research & Anthropology

Are we talking the same language?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel (1563).

           The Jagiellonians Project which I lead has an anthropological strand: asking how anthropologists’ work on kinship, family and ritual can help us better understand this 15^th and 16^th century royal house. Just last week, I found myself talking over lunch at Somerville College with Dr. Jane Dyson, comparing notes on marriage practice in remote 21stC Himalayan villages and among Renaissance princes.

Eighteen months in, however, the project is also having to engage with anthropology in a broader, more immediate sense. The lands once ruled by the Jagiellonians today make up some 13 different countries and national scholarships on the dynasty. The project itself operates in a British environment, with an international team. This means that the project is talking to a range of audiences, and operating within and across a number of quite different academic cultures.

            Universities and scholarship may look superficially similar across the world, and we might use the same terminologies, but these often conceal important differences. ‘Project’ is one such term, which can imply different things in different places. In the UK, a research project is typically a team of scholars employed to work full-time on a topic in a co-ordinated way, recruited through open competition; in other places, ‘project’ is a network, an umbrella which should properly group together all the leading experts in a given field. ‘Conference’ in some academic cultures is an event at which you speak, and pay a fee in order to cover the organisers’ costs; elsewhere, ‘conference’ is an event to which scholars, as a mark of honour, are invited to speak, all their expenses generously paid, and fine meals lavished upon them.

‘Scholarship’ itself can mean different things, depending on where in the modern world you are. In some places, a particular mark of scholarly excellence is the successful identification of new sources: new archival documents or visual artefacts. In other places, scholarly excellence instead lies in fresh interpretations and analyses of evidence, either old or new. This important difference reflects, I think, the different functions which history plays within different cultures today. My sense is that in some places the basic shape and themes of national history (and its place in national identity) are already widely agreed upon, and research simply fleshes these trajectories out further. By contrast, in places where a canonical narrative of the past (for whatever reason) is less central to present-day national identity, revisionism and the rewriting of old stories by historians is applauded.

To openly acknowledge these differences is not to make judgements about the relative merits of different academic cultures. An international project such as the Jagiellonians therefore needs to be attuned to anthropology, willing to decode cultural difference – ready to accept that some, or indeed much, of what we do will (inadvertently) be baffling or annoying to scholars elsewhere; and that, vice versa, there are reactions which we will struggle to understand. The important thing is to start talking more frankly about our different experiences and expectations; and to keep talking.

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.

Oświęcim or Auschwitz?

Oswiecim castle

Earlier this month, I attended a conference in Poland on the Jagiellonians, a favourite national dynasty representing a lost golden age. The conference, jointly organised by the Universities of Warsaw and Katowice, was held in the medium-sized, southern town of Oświęcim – in the 15^th century, the capital of a small Upper Silesian duchy on the tempestuous border between the Kingdoms of Poland and Hungary.

The conference took place in Oświęcim because the event was generously sponsored and hosted by the town council and mayor. It took place in the newly opened Oświęcim Museum, housed in a fine little castle above a river. The local authorities greeted this gathering of historians enthusiastically. The conference is part of their wider endeavour to reshape the image of their town, because Oświęcim is better known across by the world by its German name, Auschwitz.

Coming from the UK, with its strong tradition of national Holocaust education, the very idea of softening the image of a place called Auschwitz can sit very uncomfortably indeed: this network of camps, one of them right outside my hotel, is arguably the defining traumatic memory of the modern west. This is a place which can seem irredeemably bleak, historically radioactive, drowning out everything else around it for miles and miles; with its genocidal past, quite simply the darkest spot in all of Europe.

Town square

People who live in the town, most of whom were born long after the war, perhaps in order to be able to live here at all, have a different perspective. Oświęcim is simply their town: it has medieval churches, shops, schools, Italian restaurants, bars. They wish visitors would come not just to the camp, but also get a flavour of local history by visiting the castle museum, or perhaps the town synagogue mueum. The camp itself has simply become a fact of life: the town archives, for example, are housed in one of the blocks in Auschwitz 1.

Oświęcim’s attempt to rebrand itself, with EU funding for its new museum, will seem heretical and deeply disrespectful to many outside Poland, an implied minimisation of the Holocaust. For local Poles, for the energetic mayor, it’s an attempt to ask the world to see this 21C community on its own terms, in a broader context. It comes down to one question – to whom does Oświęcim- Auschwitz belong? To the world, to the 1,100,000 people who were murdered in this small place, or to the Polish population who call this pretty but scarred town their home? Is it, and should it always be, 1944 in this pocket of Europe? Are the locals allowed to move on, or is the existence of normal life here some kind of affront in itself? As a British citizen from the Polish diaspora, I can hear what is said in both languages and narratives, and I can hear that they are not hearing each other at all. And that is why there is no agreement - in guidebooks, on maps - on what to even call this place, (Polish) Oświęcim or (German) Auschwitz.

Town sign: two identities, Oswiecim castle & Auschwitz camp

Composite Monarchies

A composite monarch? James VI and I, by Daniel Mytens

In 1992, John Elliott, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, published a seminal article which I ask all my students of early modern Europe read – ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’ (Past and Present, paywall). Perhaps, at this juncture, British politicians should read it too.

Elliott pointed out that late medieval Europe consisted of dozens of small states and statelets – e.g. the Duchy of Savoy, or Milan – but that in the sixteenth century there was a trend for political entities to coalesce into bigger units. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469 forged a union between the Iberian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon (‘Spain’). The French monarchy came to absorb the duchy of Brittany. Further east, the marriage of Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania to Queen Jadwiga of Poland in 1386 created a dynastic union between the two polities, which was cemented into a legal union in 1569. And, in 1603, with the extinction of the Tudor line, a Scottish monarch travelled south to claim his English throne, creating an enduring dynastic union in the British Isles. Elliott’s point was that such unions, or ‘composite states’ were a quintessential feature of European political life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a way of reconciling, as he so eloquently put it, ‘the competing aspirations towards diversity and unity that have remained a constant of European history’. Composite states were, he pointed out, both highly fruitful arrangements and inherently challenging to govern.

Composite states are a hallmark of early modern Europe, and yet, four centuries later, what is the United Kingdom, if not a composite state? With its union of three kingdoms (England, Scotland, and Ireland) and Wales, the Stuart composite monarchy was one of the more ambitious, or crowded, in Europe. Alongside Spain (a fusion of Aragon, Castile, Navarre), the UK is one of the great surviving composite monarchies of the Renaissance age. Others, such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, broke down into competing nation-states long ago – as Timothy Snyder has traced so well, into modern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Today, we are still dealing with some of the long-term consequences of that failed composite state. If the Scots vote yes tomorrow, we will be leaving early modern Europe a little further behind us, shaking off one of its powerful legacies.

And regardless of the referendum result, British politicians would also do well to read Conrad Russell’s The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637-42 (1991). In this classic work, Russell demonstrated how the English civil war was sparked by riots in Edinburgh – he charted how quickly different parts of a union can destabilise each other, and how bad policy in Scotland triggered a spiral of local reactions and events across the British Isles, which a London government proved quite unable to control. History can’t predict the future, but it can give us insightful and salutary models to think with – scholars, voters and politicians alike. Composite states are relatively easy to forge, messy to maintain, and messy to dismantle.

Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland & Grand Duke of Lithuania (d. 1572).