Teaching-led research?

Not just the students who are learning...

This term, I’ve been teaching courses and giving lectures which I’ve not offered for a couple of years – a lecture series on ‘Renaissance and Reformation in Central Europe’, and first-year introductory papers on art history and historical anthropology. After even a brief interval, it is always disorientating how unfamiliar once familiar material can seem; and also how different it can start to look, in light of one’s own on-going reading and research.

I’m coming to realise how deeply courses which I’ve taught in the past have shaped my current thinking and research – especially those which were not in my own core areas of expertise, and (it must be said) those which I least enjoyed teaching when I first came to Somerville. These papers have powerfully insinuated themselves into something like an intellectual subconscious, and exerted a real influence even while seemingly lying dormant.

In particular, I’m now aware of just how deeply indebted my new European Research Council Research project is to the courses I teach in a typical Oxford Hilary term. In the ‘Renaissance and Reformation’ lectures, I’ve found very early versions of the questions which frame the project, about Renaissance dynasticism, elective monarchy, etc. – reading the original lecture notes is a form of intellectual archaeology. The ‘Approaches to History’ course, which is meant to showcase interdisciplinary ways of studying the past, has shaped the ERC project just as much. Many colleges make ‘Approaches’ compulsory for first years, so that students get a panoramic sense of how art history, anthropology, gender studies and sociology have influenced historical research. The project applies these all at once to an early modern dynasty, to see what emerges.

At Oxford, as the University continues to defend its tutorial teaching model, one often hears of the virtues of ‘research-led teaching’: the idea that students benefit from being taught by scholars at the cutting edge of their fields. However, the reverse is also surely true – that the experience of teaching a broad range of Oxford undergraduate courses can inform and shape our research agendas in surprising and fruitful ways. It forces you to look for the bigger picture. When I first started (with a certain trepidation) to teach historical anthropology, the then Regius Professor Robert Evans said: ‘It will be good for you’. More recently, I heard an eminent Oxford historian say that nothing you do in your career – no task, no matter how frustrating or seemingly fruitless at the time - is ever wasted. This term has been about realising how right they were.

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.

History by Design

One of the many tasks on my to-do list back on October 1^st, the official start-date of my new European Research Council (ERC) grant, was to procure a logo for the project, called The Jagiellonians: Dynasty, Identity and Memory in Central Europe. After some rather wobbly back-of-the-envelope sketches, it became clear I would need professional help, so I ran a small competition among the fine art students at Oxford’s Ruskin School to design the project logo.

It has been a stimulating challenge to distil the project and its mammoth 16-page research proposal into a single snappy image. The design brief given to the Ruskin students had to explain the ideas and questions behind the project to artists and designers, rather than academic historians – to tell the story of the Jagiellonians not with reference to historiographies and grand narratives, but through images, of tombs, heraldry, castles and sixteenth-century printed family trees, their tendrils packed with kings and queens.

In the end, I chose a design by Evie Kitt. Evie’s logo sets out the project key word ‘Jagiellonians’ clearly and elegantly - important as it is a long word, a Polish-Lithuanian-Anglicised hybrid, a term unfamiliar even to many scholars working on the early modern period. The key feature of Evie’s logo is the initial ‘J’. This ‘J’ resembles a letter from a Renaissance illuminated manuscript in Central Europe, circa 1500, when the high gothic illumination style was reaching its zenith, and floral, botanical motifs were a key leitmotif. The Jagiellonians were important patrons of this style, as shown in their splendid gilded, floral prayer books and missals. Evie’s J is however not a painted initial, but appears as if it has been carved out of red marble. Red ‘marble’ (hard limestone), excavated from mines near Esztergom in Hungary, was a prestige artistic material in early modern Central Europe, used in Renaissance palaces and tombs by Jagiellonian monarchs in both Buda and Cracow. Hungarian red marble is also a reminder that Jagiellonian history is not just about Poland and Lithuania, but a wider regional phenomenon.

The crown topping the J is a fairly self-explanatory reference to the Jagiellonians as a major royal dynasty, but also arguably one of the only symbols the project can safely use. The symbols employed by the dynasty themselves, from the 14^th to 16^th centuries – a mounted rider (pogon, pahonia), double cross, white eagle – have enjoyed a complex afterlife in Central Europe. The ‘pogon’, for example, which features prominently in many Renaissance depictions of the dynasty, is today one of the official symbols of the very politically different states of Lithuania and Belarus. You can buy ties and cushions with the Belarussian patriotic ‘pahonia’ online. The ERC project is intended as a new international study of the dynasty, which transcends local, national and nationalist perspectives, so these traditional, heavily resonant, politicised images present a problem, even if they were originally owned (or appropriated) by the Jagiellonians. That is why the Jagiellonians logo had to reinvent the dynasty’s visual foot-print from scratch, to re-imagine and reconfigure it. I think Evie has done a great job of this; now we have to wait and see what colleagues, and wider audiences, in Central Europe make of this visual digest of the project, and of what it is hoping to achieve.

Natural States

Step into the 19C century...
Photo by Nick Garrod

This weekend, for the first time in over 15 years, I visited the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I used to spend a lot of time there as a child, (when I had serious plans to become a zoologist), peering at stuffed quaggas, hummingbirds and bison in glass cases. Although the lay-out of this vast collection hasn’t changed very much in the intervening decades, it all looked rather different viewed through a historian’s eyes.

The Natural History Museum was split off from the main collections of the British Museum in the late nineteenth century. The first architect assigned to the project, Captain Francis Fowke, promptly died, and the successful Liverpool-born, Quaker-raised Alfred Waterhouse took over and made the design his own. With its metal and glass roof, idiosyncratic neo-Romanesque façade, terracotta cladding and sweeping staircases reminiscent of a vast railway station, the Museum feels like a Victorian fantasia – built as a temple where the complexity of creation could be venerated, and where the working man could go (after work, by the aid of gas lamps) for self-improvement. The buildings Victorian-ness is etched completely into its fabric: everywhere you look, on every column or patch of ceiling, there are 19C frescos of ferns, reliefs of dodos, fish or rams’ heads. Even empty of any collections, this building would feel as if it were creeping and crawling with natural life, as imagined over a century ago. 

Stuffed slow loris in the museum
Photo by Peter Taylor

The Museum’s collections, however, are a strange mix of the archaic and cutting edge. There is a Darwin Centre in a new wing which showcases zoological research, and a modern dinosaur exhibit with a colossal animated tyrannosaurus rex. Most of the building nonetheless still consists of long galleries of glass cases, filled with intriguing but badly faded stuffed mammals, birds and sea life, displays from another age.

In Reading, in Berkshire, there used to be a rather dilapidated green space called Forbury Gardens in the middle of the town. Using a National Lottery grant, the council transformed the park to look as it would have done in its Victorian hey-day: using plants from 19C catalogues, and flowerbed shapes from the period. As a historian, I’d quite like to see the Natural History Museum do just that – continue doing its cutting edge science in the labs which are out of bounds to the public, but recreate within Waterhouse’s extraordinary building the collections as they would have looked in the 1870s, to give us again the Victorian Natural History Museum. A Natural History Museum which brought to life Victorian England (its ideals, aesthetics, beliefs), could teach us a lesson in British social and cultural history, the history of science, and the history of museums, while keeping all that intriguing taxidermy centre-stage. That might be a novel and stimulating way of utilising, and honouring, this unique building. But as a historian, and a thwarted zoologist, I’m bound to say that.

Photo by Alh1

Posing for the Camera

Smile for the camera...
Erasmus, by Holbein the Younger (1523)

In years past, an Oxford academic might have had just one ‘official’ photo of themselves, stuck in an album, tucked away in the Senior Common Room, which college colleagues could consult if they had forgotten your name. Nowadays, photographs of academics are ubiquitous - on Departmental webpages, academic network sites like academia.edu, blogs and Twitter icons. Somerville this summer prepared a new undergraduate prospectus, for which I had to be photographed because I had no suitable image in a sufficiently high resolution – this involved standing in front of a hedge in the Fellows’ Garden, on a very warm day, facing an editor armed with a huge lens.

Producing, or choosing, an ‘official’ visual image of yourself as an academic is tricky, because it’s not entirely clear what an academic is meant to look like. I think this is true of both men and women, although with women (as Mary Beard, for example, has found in the UK) other issues quickly come into play. Doctors, lawyers and politicians have unofficial codes regarding what they wear, and what kind of demeanour they might adopt on camera. But, as the sheer heterogeneity of images of historians on academia.edu shows, the scope which academics have to depict themselves is much broader, and the messages conveyed more varied. A holiday shot might say: ‘I am a calm and relaxed person with a life outside the library, a family and dog’, or ‘I’m so committed to my subject, I visit historical sites all over the world’. Quite a few photos, of both men and women, are so glamorous, in their lighting and pose, that they look as if they have come straight from a modelling agency portfolio. Others chose images which catch them in the act of doing history – speaking at a conference, standing outside an archive, holding their newly published book. I make do with two images which I keep telling myself are temporary, until something better emerges – a photo taken by Somerville College porters for my security pass on the day I arrived in college in 2007, looking slightly alarmed & wrapped up in a very large scarf, and, yes, a holiday shot in a 16C chateau garden, in which I may actually have my eyes closed.

In the Renaissance, scholars might have had a narrower range of image-producing technologies at their disposal (the woodcut, the painted portrait, the ink sketch), but they did at least operate in a world which had a clearly established, homogenous iconography of scholarship – they knew what scholars looked like, as Dora Thornton demonstrated in in her book The Scholar in His Study(1997). A scholar, in the Renaissance, was a grave man who sat eternally at a desk surrounded by books, and he didn’t smile for the camera. Our 21C scholarly self-fashioning, for better or worse, lacks such easy orthodoxies.