Ships Past



Photo by omblod



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

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

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

Spin the Wheel

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

Handy? Ramelli's bookwheel
Image from Wikipedia Commons.

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

New Books, Old Story?

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

Red Hats in the News



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



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

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

Leonardo's Polish Connection



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



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

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

A White Horse and an Open Book




'Peaks, Passes and Glaciers'
Veronica Bailey, 'Hours of Devotion' series (2007).
With kind permission from Veronica Bailey and Giles Baker Smith

  One of the highlights of late January every year – ever since I accidentally ended up with a free ticket as a graduate student – is the London Art Fair. It is one of the biggest such shows/sales in the UK, with dozens of top galleries and dealers exhibiting works from Lowry to Damien Hirst in the glassy, multi-tiered space of the Business Design Centre in Islington. This year, amidst the hundreds of photos, collages, sculptures and paintings on display, two images struck a chord with me as a historian, as works of art which captured something of the experience of researching the past.

The first was History Painting by the Australian-based artist Giles Alexander (on the website, it’s the last picture in the scroll-through gallery). In oil and resin, it’s an oval image showing an Uccello-like scene from a late medieval battlefield, all handsome horses and men in fancy hats. The painting is in the shape of an eye, and the central pupil-section shows a fragment of the scene perfectly in focus, homing in on what looks like the slaying of a commander on a white mount. Beyond the pupil, however, the entire image is foggy and out of focus. This reminded me somewhat of writing a historical monograph –  you try to hold assemble a great panorama of evidence and arguments in your mind’s eye, but for much of the process it all feels a bit out of focus and vague. It’s only when you’ve hit upon your central argument, which can make sense of the evidence, that (ideally) the moment of clarity descends and you feel you can really see the historical landscape.

The second image which stood out for me as a historian was a photograph by Veronica Bailey, entitled Peaks, Passes and Glaciers. It is part of a 2007 series called Hours of Devotion, for which the artist photographed Victorian books from the reading room of Coutts Bank. Her image, of the work standing upright and partially open, its fanned pages facing the viewer, conveys not just the materiality of the old volumes historians consult in research libraries, but their sculptural, architectural and tactile quality as objects. Giles Baker Smith (an Oxford history alumnus himself) has written that Bailey’s images stand ‘as a bold visual testament to the enduring power of the book as a resource of learning, as a cultural mirror and as an aesthetic entity in its own right’. Looking at these photos, I could almost smell their pages and feel their dust on my fingertips. Sometimes artists can tell us things we only half-realised about our own work, its tools and processes.

The Reference Chain

Lorenzo de'Medici: would he write your M.Phil. reference?
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Photo by Jim Forest.

This Friday is the deadline for applications to graduate courses at Oxford, and like a lot of tutors I have been receiving emails from current and recent students asking if I wouldn’t mind writing them a reference for a Masters or D.Phil. programme. I’ve thus been spending a fair bit of time writing these, and then battling to upload them on the on-line system shared by many UK universities. I’m also writing recommendations every week or so for doctoral students, who are competing to win scholarships or Junior Research Fellowships. I don’t mind doing this (not just because it is my job to do so...!), but because I have painful memories of what it was like being a finalist or graduate student, sheepishly writing carefully crafted emails to tutors and supervisors, trying to persuade them to send off just one more letter to persuade some higher power that research on 15C Poland was worthwhile. What’s striking about academic reference writing is not just the inter-generational debts and obligations you accrue along the way, but the ways in which it is an on-going feature of our careers – even as my students email me, I’ve been emailing colleagues and trying to coax them into writing references for the various grant applications I’ve been putting together this year. References can feel like an academic feeding chain.

If I ever do flag in writing my 1-2 page accounts of students’ strengths and potential, I could console myself by thinking about Lorenzo de’ Medici, de facto ruler of late 15C Florence in that city’s Golden Age (according to his supporters). In our Renaissance Special Subject class, we discuss with the Finalists research which suggests that the Medici’s highly ambiguous but pervasive power in Florence, where they held no official ruling office, was based on networks of patronage, which manifested themselves above all in letter writing. Lorenzo de’ Medici wrote literally thousands of letters of recommendation for his fellow citizens, for patricians and humble customs-collectors alike – no favour was too trivial - thereby creating a huge, socially diverse clientage base. I’ve come across some of these letters in my own research – minor Polish clergy passing through Florence, who acquired references from Lorenzo to help expedite their business in papal Rome. Lorenzo’s letters were often just one or two lines long, because the political weight of his name on the bottom of page alone carried massive persuasive force. Academic referees can’t really rely on similar tactics, but then in our humble letters we are merely trying to cultivate those students who will become the new generation of leading historians, rather than attempting to orchestrate European power politics.