The Tudor South West at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum: Part 1 – City Map

Posted on December 16, 2013 by drsang

Laura Sangha

This is the first in a week long series of posts about a new exhibition at Exeter’s museum.

Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum

I few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting a wonderful new exhibition at Exeter’s recently refurbished Royal Albert Memorial Museum. Titled ‘West Country to World’s End: the South West in the Tudor Age’, the publicity describes it as ‘celebrating the spirit of adventure and enterprise of south west people’ during the Elizabethan ‘Golden Age’. Along with some of my first and second year undergraduates, I was also lucky enough to attend a talking tour of the exhibition by one of its curators: Sam Smiles, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. It was an intriguing insight into the thought and planning that goes into such a project, and I was struck by how carefully constructed museum exhibitions are in order to allow viewers to assemble a history from the objects themselves. It led me to reflect on the way that the selection, juxtaposition and display of the objects prompts the viewer to make associations and identify themes, leading to their greater understanding of the period and the subject. The exhibition runs until 2 March 2014, and each day this week I will be offering some thoughts on objects from the exhibition, explaining what the items said to me and following up on the questions that they raised. Click on pictures for enlargements.

Mapping Exeter

Engraving of Exeter by Hogenberg, 1587.

As a naturalised Exonian, I was very taken by the large scale reproduction of a map of Exeter as it was in 1587. Placed at the start of the exhibition it immediately orientates you within the early modern city, and it is fascinating for any number of reasons. The Exeter on the map has some familiar landmarks, yet the contours are not what are not what you expect: the river has been redirected in the centuries since, the castle and city walls have largely disappeared, and of course modern Exeter is far larger, incorporating parishes that were entirely separate in the early modern period and sprawling suburbs where once there was only farmland. The map is incredibly detailed – there are figures promenading in the streets and a couple of archers practise their skills by the Exe bridge, whilst the tenterhooks used in Exeter’s successful cloth trade are plain to see on the banks of the river. There are at least seven churches within the walls in addition to the huge cathedral, and everywhere there are wide green open spaces: a reminder that the Tudor urban environment was vastly different to our own. The map is hard to navigate for a modern too – the perspective allows the viewer to see the city in it’s entirety, but in doing so fails to indicate the very steep incline between the river and the city centre, so buildings that appear to be next to each other on the map are not experienced like that in reality.

Of course maps are never realistic in the way that they present their subject, they are designed to convey specific information to the map ‘reader’, thus the map designer chooses which aspects to emphasise and which to elide. The resulting distortion might therefore tell us more about the producers’ perceptions and intent than the place they are depicting. Thus we do not see the city ‘as it actually was’, but rather we see what the producer (or patron) wants us to. This map was made for the great city atlas edited by Georg Braun and largely engraved by Franz Hogenberg, published in Cologne in six volumes 1572-1617. Many of the images in this post can be seen at ‘Historic Cities‘ which has excellent digital reproductions of city maps of the past, present and future.

Meanwhile, just outside Oxford…

Braun and Hogenberg’s atlas contained 546 maps of cities, mainly European but there was also room for Mexico city and Casablanca. Other English cities included were London and the second city Norwich, Oxford and Cambridge, York, Canterbury, Chester and Bristol: the fact that Exeter was deemed worthy of inclusion alongside these indicates its important national status at the time. Hogenberg’s other city plans share features with Exeter’s –York is surrounded by a profusion of windmills, and in Norwich archers are also practicing their skills on the outskirts of town. There are differences too: Bristol, Cambridge and Norwich have sheep grazing in their hinterlands whilst in Exeter is surrounded by arable land, some of the maps have larger figures in contemporary dress in the foreground, indeed Oxford has what appear to be two scholars having an argument under a tree.

Either Chester was menaced by giant horses, or this map is not to scale.

The Exeter map thus tells me that Hogenberg saw the city as a Godly, thriving, well defended and well connected metropolis, relatively compact though already outgrowing the limits of it’s walls. The river was clearly a central part of it’s extensive trading and manufacturing activities, the water cluttered with boats and mills. A steady stream of people cross over the bridge towards the city gates, and within the walls there were some impressive houses suggesting wealthy citizens – this was a bustling regional centre, then as now. Surprisingly there are no cows to be seen (Cambridge, Bristol, Chester and other cities have sheep and horses grazing around about them), but there are some chaps fishing near a weir at Bonhay. The wide streets and green spaces within the city and the rolling Devon countryside which form the hinterland suggest this would be a good place to live and work, it is presented as a civilised, spacious and clean environment. As such, my suspicion is that it only tells part of the story of life in urban Elizabethan England.

In tomorrow’s post: what are images of Moses and Job doing in the Protestant south west?

‘West Country to World’s End: the South West in the Tudor Age’ runs until 2 March 2014 at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum. You can find all the details about the museum, it’s opening times, it’s wonderful café and more on their website.

Credits:

Historic Cities, a joint project of the Historic Cities Center of the Department of Geography, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jewish National and University Library.

Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, ‘Civitas Exoniae (vulgo Excester) urbs primaria in comitatu Devoniae’, in Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Cologne. Vol. VI 1617.

Little monsters part I: putting together a successful course on early modern history (or anything else for that matter)

Posted on December 2, 2013 by Jonathan Willis

Jonathan Willis

Most of the posts which appear on the many-headed monster are either related directly to historical research into the early modern period, or focus on other questions relating to historiographical concerns, methodological issues, theoretical problems or matters arising out of our experience as professional early modern historians. Nothing wrong with that, I hope you’ll agree! But in this post, I’d like to do something slightly different. There is a big aspect of life as an academic which is so far conspicuous by its absence from the pages of the monster (fellow heads, correct me if I am wrong…), and that is: teaching. How, in other words, do we prepare for the important professional task of raising little monsters?

This is something that has been on my mind for several months now. In September, I returned to a full teaching load after three years of research leave. This involved taking over and contributing to existing courses, as well as devising a couple of brand new ones. The initial shock was (just about) mitigated by the genuine pleasure of sitting down and figuring how to try to formulate courses which would be appealing to students, would develop their skills and knowledge, and which would hopefully act as a good introduction to a world which I find endlessly fascinating, exciting, and even downright fun! But writing a course is hard work, and out of all the things that academics have to do – teaching, research, writing, publishing, attracting funding, organising and presenting at conferences – it is probably the activity for which we receive the least guidance and support. It is also the foundation on which pretty much all other aspects of teaching depend: if your curriculum is over- or under-ambitious, incoherent, or just plain dull, then you are sowing all sorts of nasty seeds which you will have no choice but to reap in the fullness of time. I wouldn’t dream of saying that I have a solution to this issue, yet alone a blueprint of ‘best practice’. Instead, I just want to talk around some of the challenges I think that we probably all experience at one time or another, and I invite your thoughts on these areas and more!

Needs must…

Some modules sit in our teaching portfolio like cuckoos in the nest – definitely the product of another gene pool!

First of all, it is worth noting that we don’t all get to teach the courses we would like to teach. A permanent post tends to bring with it the opportunity to devise your own courses around your personal interests, but that is not often the case earlier in your career, although thankfully there are some exceptions to that. Still, there are at least two approaches to taking over an existing course. The first is to ask for copies of the module handbook (maybe even the lecture notes) and simply deliver the course as written. The other, more time-consuming but perhaps more rewarding option, is to ask whether there is leeway for you to tweak the course, within the existing module specifications and learning outcomes. You can’t spring a course on Elizabethan popular culture on a group of unsuspecting students who have signed up for a module on Henrician court politics, for example, but by tweaking discussion questions, reading lists, primary source exercises and topic headings you can come up with something which is a much better reflection of your interests: you’ll enjoy it more, and the students will probably enjoy it more as a result.

Horses for courses

Secondly, once you’ve been given a license to create your own course, it’s really important to sit back and give some broad thought as to where it fits in with the broader programme

How does your piece fit into the rest of the puzzle?

structure of (let’s say, for the sake of argument) your students’ undergraduate history degree. History isn’t the same as mathematics or some of the other sciences, where before you tackle a subject like fluid dynamics you probably need to be pretty damn good at the basics of adding up, algebra, basic mechanics, that sort of thing. (OK, this is maths, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, which kind of proves my point.) The seventeenth century isn’t ‘harder’ than the sixteenth century; and knowing everything that happened before a given date isn’t an absolute prerequisite for studying what happened after it, although admittedly some context is always key. But if your students have no experience of early modern history at all, is it wise to go straight in with something very learned and abstruse, which might just scare them off? Most institutions I have experience of offer broad surveys in the early years of a degree, to introduce some of the key religious, social, political, economic and cultural ideas of the period, but often only in the most general way. Also, what is the size and shape of the course you have to design? Is it ‘short and fat’ or ‘long and thin’? Is it lecture heavy with the odd seminar, a balance of the two, or mainly seminar based? Is it an individual or a group research project? Is it assessed by exams, essays, presentations, or in some other way? Often these sorts of decisions are out of our hands – the structure and assessment methods for your module may need to tally with those of other modules of the same basic type, for reasons of equity and administrative convenience. But how often do we really take the time to shape our courses to the structures through which we are expected to deliver them, however back-to-front this approach may seem, or indeed actually be? If we are offering courses at different levels of a programme, do we think about the relationships between them? And what happens if the second year module you designed to feed in to your third year class is dropped, or moved to a different place in the programme? Can you really recycle it, or do you need to rethink completely its role in the degree?

Less is more

Less…

My final thinking point is at the level of the individual

…or more?

module. To use a seasonal analogy, is an undergraduate option like one of those tastefully decorated, expensive department-store Christmas trees, or does it look better festooned with gaudy glitz and glamour? In other words, is less more, or is more more? Again this depends on the size and shape of your course, and the point at which it comes in the degree programme. But as a general principle, I’m starting to realise that however I like to decorate my Christmas tree, less is probably more in this instance. Another terrible seasonal metaphor: if you’re trying to get somebody to like Christmas pudding, given them a little to try, and give them some more if they ask for it; don’t demand that they eat a whole one, make them sick in the process, and put them off for life. If your teaching is predominantly seminar based, heavy on activity, interaction and enquiry, I think it is especially important not to try to cram too much in, but to allow time for students to really get to grips with the material. After all, surely learning in a classroom environment is at least as much about the quality of the interaction as it is about the quantity of ‘stuff’ you get through: it is about developing intellectual and analytical skills, not just imparting ‘knowledge’ or ‘facts’ (whatever they are). Knowledge is of course a pre-requisite for understanding, which is where reading, preparation and introductory lectures come in, but it is no substitute for it.

How much is too much?!

This post has turned out to be quite a general reflection on teaching, perhaps valid for most arts subjects, not just early modern history. I’m going to follow up with something a little more subject specific in a few weeks: about how we engage students with early modern history subjects in the classes we teach. But I suppose what I’m saying is that if the initial conditions aren’t right, then that noble aim becomes much harder to achieve. I’d be really interested to hear about how other people have gone about designing or adapting courses, in order to stand the best chance of turning students into proper little ‘monsters…

E.P. Thompson’s Desert Island Discs

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Brodie Waddell

Brodie Waddell

E.P. Thompson had, with one or two notable exceptions, rather boring taste in music.

Thompson has always been one of my favourite historians and I’ve been learning more about him recently as 2013 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his Making of the English Working Class. We celebrated earlier with ‘The Future of History From Below’ event and I’ll be giving talks at Oxford (Nov. 29th) and at Birkbeck (Jan. 24th) on EPT’s legacy over the next few months.

William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ (1789): Thompson’s choice of reading material

So imagine my delight when I heard – via Jonathan Healey – that Thompson had been a guest on the famed BBC programme ‘Desert Island Discs’ and that the episode was freely available online. It was broadcast in 1991, just two years before his death at the age of 69, and his health was clearly not great, but he was still very intellectually sharp and irrepressibly politically engaged.

Thompson made a couple of inspired musical choices. For instance, I was struck by the raw power of Paul Robeson, the African-American communist actor and entertainer, belting out ‘Peat Bog Soldiers’, a song composed in the Börgermoor concentration camp in 1933. Even more interesting is Thompson’s second choice. He offers a beautiful recording of Rabindranath Tragore, the Bengali poet, singing a totally transformed version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. It’s a wonderful piece of music and a wonderful encapsulation of Thompson’s close links to India. As he says in the interview, his father was a Research Fellow in Indian history at Oxford and former Methodist missionary, with close links to the Indian National Congress. Thompson recounts a childhood memory of Gandhi visiting his family home in the late 1920s or early 1930s:

‘I was just about the height of the sideboard. My main memory of Gandhi coming was the sideboard piled with all these fruits that we didn’t usually get. But there he was, and he was doing his daily stint of charkha – spinning – in the corner of our house, and it’s a very pleasant memory.’

In light of this, it is quite easy to see how Thompson’s ideas about poverty and protest emerge not only from his extra-mural teaching in the West Riding but also from his long and deep connections to South Asia.

However, almost as notable as these two striking choices of records is – to my mind – the ‘conservative’ nature of the rest of his choices. Despite being a political radical and an incredibly innovative historian, his other six records seem distinctly nostalgic and a bit earnest. There’s some eighteenth-century Irish harp music, an unbearably miserable rendition of a Yeats poem, two well-known classical pieces and an early English Baroque song. There’s nothing particularly objectionable about any of them – with the possible exception of Warlock’s composition – but they’re hardly the inspiring music one would hope for from a man like Thompson.

Where are the radical musicians of his own age, who often combined musical invention with a hard political edge? Where are the Sex Pistols or the Specials or even the Rolling Stones? Was it really possible to be an activist in the 1960s and 70s without liking rock and roll?

Sorely lacking from Thompson’s playlist.

Continue reading →

The Immersive Turn: Or, what did a seventeenth-century drinking song sound like?

Posted on November 8, 2013 by manyheadedhailwood

Mark Hailwood

I know what you are thinking: isn’t it about time for yet another historical ‘turn’? Well, you’re in luck! I think there is a really interesting one already underway in early modern studies, quietly coming together from a number of different approaches and without, as yet, a clear sense of itself. I want to give it an identity, and I’m going to start by giving it a name: the ‘immersive turn’. But I’m open to suggestions.

What I mean by this is a growing desire on the part of early modern historians to try to recover a more multi-dimensional, multi-sensory feel for the period than we conventionally derive from an analytical reading of written sources: a search for the texture of the past, not just its texts. What prompted me to pull together this line of thought into a blog post was the recent attempt by students at De Montford to create a virtual version of seventeenth-century London before the Great Fire of 1666. It is worth a look, if you haven’t seen it already.

Pudding Lane Productions (http://puddinglanedmuga.blogspot.co.uk/century) have created a virtual 17th century London.

It seems to me that the interest generated by this project is a symptom of the fact that early modern historians are increasingly attracted to the idea of ‘immersing’ ourselves more fully in the physical and sensory aspects of the world that we study: the emergence of the study of material culture, increased attention to visual sources, to ‘space’, and to the history of the senses, might all be seen as part of this same process.

Pre-Reformation worship recreated (http://reformation.modhist.ox.ac.uk/index.html)

Pre-Reformation recreated

There have been recent attempts to recreate pre-and post-Reformation church interiors, and experiences of worship, for instance, and popular history books and TV shows taking the form of ‘Time Travellers’ Guides’ invite their readers and viewers to imagine the sights and smells one would encounter on entering a medieval or early modern city. All of these approaches invite us to imaginatively transport ourselves into the shoes of our early modern ancestors, and to concentrate on the immediate experience of sights, sounds and material surroundings.

These ‘immersive’ approaches have influenced my own work, especially in relation to the seventeenth-century drinking songs that I use to examine alehouse culture in the period. I don’t just mean that I get drunk and try singing them in the pub—although, we’ll come back to that—but rather that to understand the meanings of such songs it is important to think about the ways in which they were performed. It might be easy for a historian, sat alone at their desk quietly reading such a song, to misjudge the tone of its meaning, a tone that was informed by its tune, and also the manner and context in which it was actually sung, aloud, communally.

Singers in an alehouse window – hardly the same environment as sitting at my desk.

I developed a few thoughts on this in a short article for The Appendix, a new journal that embraces these new types of immersive and experimental history. You can read it for free here, and it would make sense to do so before reading on…. but, if you don’t have the time or inclination, here is the nub of it: I argue that it is important to think about how performance might influence the meaning of a seventeenth-century drinking ballad, and I applaud some recent attempts to recreate ballad performances. But I think they can misrepresent the tone in which such songs would have been sung.

For instance, take a moment to listen to EBBA’s recording of the drinking ballad, A Messe of Good Fellows, by clicking here.

A Messe of Good Fellows (© British Library)

It’s helpful to hear it put to a tune, but surely the tone would be a little more raucous if performed by a company of intoxicated good fellows bellowing it out from the alebench?

A bit more raucous. A bit more like it?

Indeed, I suggest in the article that a modern-day football song – with a well-known tune, repetitive chorus, and an inebriated collective of (mostly) men – might actually come closer to capturing how such drinking songs would have been experienced in the alehouse. In case you haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing terrace tunefulness first hand, click here. I’ve tried to pick a relatively inoffensive one, but apologies to residents of Cardiff.

In response to the article I also received a suggestion from Phil Edwards, a Lecturer in Criminology at Manchester Met and an enthusiastic folk musician, that present day folk singing – often pub-based and communal – might be a closer descendent of the seventeenth-century alehouse song. I expect many historians would probably agree, but it is still a bit too sanitised and orderly for what I imagine performance would have actually sounded like. See what you think by listening to this ballad singaround recorded by Phil.

Are folk singarounds the key?

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on which style of performance you think is most effective at ‘transporting’ us into the experiential world of our early modern forebears, but more importantly, I suppose, I’d like to know whether you think this little experiment in ‘immersion’ is a worthwhile exercise at all. Is attempting to recreate the sounds, or the smells, or the sights/sites, of the early modern past allowing just a little too much imagination into the historical process? It is undoubtedly an imprecise science, and we will never be able to capture with any certainty the tone of ballad performances – which no doubt varied immensely anyway. Is it therefore likely to be as often misleading as illuminating? A bit of fun perhaps – a harmless thought experiment to fill a coffee break – but not to be taken as a serious part of the historian’s craft? Or is the ‘immersive turn’ the next big thing, a way of bringing history to life that can enhance the understanding of both academic historians and non-academics alike?

The intellectual value of gaming: Sid Meier’s Civilization, Oregon Trail and a streetview of London in the 1660s

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Brodie Waddell

Brodie Waddell

Some time ago I claimed that Eric Hobsbawm’s work was one the initial spurs that pushed me towards becoming a historian. However, it would be misleading to leave the impression that the long journey to my current profession was prompted solely or even primarily by such an academically reputable source. In fact, a larger part was probably played by a computer game: Sid Meier’s Civilization.

Look out, Romans! You’re about to get smashed by my English cavalry!

Continue reading →

Norwich Entertainments – Part VI: Rope dancing and nine-pins

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Brodie Waddell

Brodie Waddell

On 1 December 1677, the Norwich Mayor’s Court granted permission for a new performer to ply her trade in the city:

Mrs Saboul Rymers hath Lycence to make shew of Dauncing upon the Rope at the Redd Lion in St Stephens for a weeke from this day.¹

Rope dancing, now usually known as ‘tight-rope walking’, had already been a popular entertainment for thousands of years by the time Mrs Rymers arrived in Norwich. It was a common amusement in the seventeenth century, apparently beloved by rich and poor alike. The Duchess of Cleveland, King Charles II’s famous mistress, ‘greatly admired’ one these acrobats, and Samuel Pepys reported that he ‘saw the best dancing on the ropes that I think I ever saw in my life’ at Bartholomew’s Fair in 1664.

Continue reading →

The Past is a Foreign Country: History and Analogy, Part II

Posted on September 30, 2013 by drsang

Laura Sangha

A visual analogy of analogy.

In my previous post on History and Analogy I explored why we use the technique and the ways in analogy can be a two-edged sword (if you will). Here I want to give some examples that I have come across recently when preparing for my module on Tudor England. I didn’t have to look far for these, evidence of the ubiquity of these types of comparison. Many are taken from G.W. Bernard’s The Late Medieval English Church, the book that inspired the original post. If you have any examples of your own, please do add them in the comments below.

The short and pithy:

G.W. Bernard is unable to resist analogies, whether historical or not. How about:

Did people collect indulgences in the spirit that we collect tokens or Air Miles?[1]

Or a W.G. Hoskins comparison passed on by Brodie that is short, pithy, and controversial to say the least:

Henry VIII was ‘England’s Stalin’.[2]

The elaborate and multi-layered:

Grappling with the problem of how to perceive of early modern culture in Music and Society in Early Modern England, Christopher Marsh invites us to envisage culture as a lute, with each of it’s six strings representing:

Early modern culture made flesh.

…one of the basic socio-cultural polarities that helped individuals to understand their world and to locate themselves with it: gentle/ common, male/ female, old/ young, clerical/ lay, urban/ rural, native/ foreign. The extremes are permanently connected, and in tension, the strings form a musical staircase that allows for traffic in both directions, the sounds produced can be in harmony or might result in ugly clashes, anyone can pluck and strum as they see fit…[3]

The familiar:

If an analogy is a comparison between the familiar and unfamiliar, there is also a tendency for writers to use a concept that they know particularly well and which they would assume might therefore particularly resonate with their audience. Bernard’s comparisons of modern academic and late medieval religious institutions are a case in point, the author connects with his reader by drawing on what they have in common. In some instances, this can allow him to load his prose with a double meaning, as here:

How far were religious vocations – like those of modern academics – stultified by the piling up of administrative tasks, by the burdens of detailed administration of buildings and estates? Was there a loss, or a lack, of spiritual impetus and creative energy?[4]

The peculiarly appropriate:

In other instances, the analogy is pleasing because it is fitting, as with Alexandra Walsham’s allusion in her book on landscape:

Before we can begin to investigate the Reformation of the landscape, it is necessary to evacuate the sedimentary layers of religious association that had been deposited upon it over the course of the preceding two millennia.[5]

Religious cultures are actually slightly more complicated and layered than these sediments.

The unintended:

Technically this is not an analogy, but given Bernard’s love of comparison it was hard not to read the following as a metaphor for the life of an early career academic:

…there was no necessary connection between ordination – a relatively straightforward matter – and the security of a benefice – a relatively difficult matter, since all turned on finding a suitable post. A priest might wait years before obtaining a benefice. Meanwhile he would seek employment as an assistant, as a deputy, as a chantry priest or as a chaplain in a domestic household… for which there were many opportunities… In practice they did play a considerable part in the religious life of a parish, despite lacking any formal pastoral responsibilities.[6]

Even if Bernard had not encouraged his reader to draw such parallels, current debate about the rectitude and extent of zero-hour contracts in academia reverberates through the passage.

The mundane:

Sometimes the comparison is straightforward and passes without much notice:

Of course, monasteries were organic entities, all that grows decays, and, just as in a garden, weeding and pruning deadwood were perennial tasks.[7]

The humorous:

At other times humour provides some light relief:

The tone of many Elizabethan congregations seems to have been that of a tiresome class of schoolboys.[8]

Any modern British university historian who has lived through countless administrative reorganisations, and seen the consequences of, say, the restructuring of local governments, will hesitate before pronouncing too confidently on the shortcomings of the monasteries in late medieval England.[9]

As with historical analogy, nitroglycerine should be handled with care.

[On the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist:] the strength of conservative feeling at home, and the sensitivity of Protestant divisions abroad, made the issue the theological equivalent of nitro-glycerine: it had to be handled with care.[10]

And Patrick Collinson…

Patrick Collinson was renowned for his epigrammatic, witty and entertaining writing style, and the well-turned comparison was an important component of this. Jonathan reminded me of his special talent by passing on this wonderful bit of analysis:

When Picasso came to Sheffield to attend a peace rally, he sat on the platform making sketches and dropping them on the floor. Nobody picked them up. These preliminary sketches – Swallowfield and Terrington – can lie where they have fallen. Our subject is neither local government nor village republics, but the political culture of England at its centre and summit, in the age of Elizabeth I.

Here is a further selection, all drawn from the same chapter on the culture of Puritanism:

Traditionally, puritanism and culture have been seen as polar opposites, so that an essay on puritan culture might seem to merit no more space than the topic of snakes in that book on Iceland, which, according to Samuel Johnson, contained a chapter consisting of a single sentence: ‘There are no snakes to be found anywhere in the island’.

Shortly followed by:

But if man shall not live by bread alone, he must have bread, and perhaps some butter and even jam to spread on it; and it is not likely that puritans found all their needs supplied by ‘every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’.

Furthermore:

‘it was those local teacup storms which gave substance, a cultural or counter-cultural substance, to the very concept of ‘Puritanism’.

Now, whenever you see an okapi, you will immediately think ‘Puritanism’.

And my favourite:

That is not to say that the thing identified as ‘puritanism’ had no real or prior existence, any more than the large quadraped which Sir Harry Johnston ‘discovered’ in the Ituri rainforests in 1900 had no existence until Johnston gave it a name, ‘okapi’.[11]

And we are still only on the third page of the chapter. It seems very fitting therefore that in his obituary, John Morrill used an analogy to sum up Collinson’s lifelong interest in Puritanism:

The obsession at its heart is the role of principled disobedience within powerful institutions, a study of those committed to reform from within. And that is how Pat saw himself… He became an establishment figure who struggled to square his radical conscience with membership of establishments.

[1] G. W. Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome (London, 2012), p. 143.

[2] W.G. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder (1976), p. 232.

[3] C. Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 15-22.

[4] Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church, p. 197.

[5] A. Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), p. 18.

[6] Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church, p. 79.

[7] Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church, p. 190-1.

[8] K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England (London, 1971), pp. 191-2.

[9] Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church, p. 196.

[10] P. Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (London, 2003), p. 65.

[11] P. Collinson, ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism as Forms of Popular Religious Culture’ in C. Durston & J. Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism 1560-1700 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 32-4.

The Past is a Foreign Country: History and Analogy, Part I

Posted on September 10, 2013 by drsang

Laura Sangha

I’ve just finished G.W. Bernard’s The Late Medieval English Church, which is an excellent and well informed survey, in case you are wondering. One of the things that made it a particularly enjoyable read were the analogies that peppered the text, which were thought-provoking and on occasions mischievous. For example:

The attitude of medieval townsmen to their local cathedral was, it has been suggested, rather like that of their successors to modern universities: an ambiguous mixture of slight suspicion and considerable incomprehension was alleviated by a natural pleasure that this corporate giant might contribute to their own prestige and economic welfare.

Should pilgrim badges… be seen as sacred objects, almost ‘secondary relics’, for those who acquired them, or more like the souvenirs that day trippers buy today? … Medieval pilgrimage has been compared to modern museums, full of half-comprehending tourists, of young people having a day out, yet with serious and scholarly purposes at their core. Are the experiences of those who go church-crawling, or visit the blockbuster exhibitions in art galleries, or go to concerts at all comparable? Does the ritual of pilgrimage meet a perennial human need?… How many pilgrims took part in pilgrimages in much the same part-materialistic, part-sentimental way that many nowadays treat Christmas? [1]

The early modern pilgrim badge and its modern walking stick equivalent?

Along with Brodie Waddell’s recent post on jargon and Mark Hailwood’s comparison of early modern alehouse ballad singing with modern football chants, it got me thinking about language, and more specifically about the way that we use analogy in writing and teaching. For historians, the carefully picked parallel is a potent weapon, it provides an inference or argument from one (familiar) particular to another, in the process attaching meaning to the unfamiliar particular. Analogy enables us to grasp the new and to process the different. For the early modernist, this is especially useful, because a parallel can help us to negotiate the strangeness of our subject and to close the gap between the mysterious and murky past and the bright shiny present. This is exceptionally useful when it comes to teaching: when I challenge my students to try to understand the early modern mentality I often begin by inviting them to self-reflect on their own experience, before exploring the early modern equivalent. So you might ask students to list what they think are the main elements of ‘identity’ in the present day, before discussing how early modern people thought about the same, the comparison drawing attention to those areas of similarity and difference which then invite explanation.

Similarity as well as difference is of course key here. Historical analogies are neat, effective and pleasing, but also fraught with peril because it is unlikely that the two particulars in the analogy are exactly the same. Bernard acknowledges as much:

Another scholar has offered the metaphor of ‘faultlines in the landscape’ but, while that is suggestive, it nonetheless rests upon the underlying inevitability of the coming earthquake.[2]

Just imagine the Late Medieval Church criss-crossed with lots of these.

In similar vein, Versailles might have ‘sowed the seeds of the second world war’, but this suggests a dangerous teleology that might distort our understanding of the interwar years. Thus a facile or lazy comparison can obscure rather than illuminate. Politicians and journalists in particular play a dangerous game when they use analogy in association with events that are still unfolding, or to justify actions or simplify complexity. Recently, the labeling of the wave of demonstrations and regime changes in North Africa and the Middle East as the ‘Arab Spring’ (an allusion to the Revolutions of 1848 and the Prague Spring) has fitted rather awkwardly with subsequent developments that bear no relation to the promise of rebirth, liberation and growth usually associated with the pre-summer season and the historical precedents. One commentator notes that:

It appears that the right analogy is a different central European event — the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century — an awful mix of religious and political conflict, which eventually produced a new state order.

Analogies surely work best only when the dissimilarities of the two things are considered alongside the parallels – the analogy can in fact help you to identify both. Ruling out unsuitable analogies is also a useful strategy, as Peter Marshall does when describing the processes of the English Reformation:

The modern analogy is less with the overthrow of ancien regimes in 1789 and 1917 than with the ‘cultural revolution’ of 1960s China, in which central government worked in alliance with cadres of true believers to undermine reliable elements in positions of authority, and radically reconstruct the outlook of people as a whole.[3]

More in common than you might think?

It is always a delight when students come up with their own analogies, because it reveals their learning: their coming to terms with information and expressing their own understanding of it. When discussing oral culture, and the astonishing feats of memorisation that early moderns were capable of, one student declared that it wasn’t that surprising that people knew the Bible off-by-heart, as she felt sure that if someone named a chapter from any Harry Potter novel she would be able to recall the important events from memory. Other memorable comparisons were Henry VIII’s visitation officers as ‘Ofsted Inspectors’, Elizabeth I’s beauty ‘trending’ at court, and Charles I’s relationship with the Duke of Buckingham as a classic ‘bromance’. These are not simply throwaway comments, they reveal students grasping and reframing the past in a way that resonates with their own existing knowledge.

**I followed this up with another post with examples of different types of analogies, incorporating those suggested to me by readers.**

[1] G. W. Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome (London, 2012), pp. 159-60; 143.

[2] Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church, p. 236.

[3] P. Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (London, 2003), p. 58.

Claire Langhamer, ‘Everyday love and emotions in the 20th century’

Posted on August 28, 2013 by manyheadedhailwood

[This is the eighteenth piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). Claire Langhamer is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Sussex. Her research and publications focus on aspects of everyday life in the 20th century, and in particular on the history of love. Here she asks whether the Mass-Observation Archive can help us to write the history of emotion ‘from below’.]

What I want to talk around in this post are the intersections between History from Below and the History of Emotion. What might a history of emotion ‘from below’ look like, how do we get at it and how might it re-frame our understanding of the period I am particularly interested in – the mid-twentieth century? I’m approaching the 1940s and 1950s as decades when the meaning and status of feeling seems to be particularly contested. Tensions between a need for self-discipline and desire for self-expression, anxieties about the impact of war and secularisation on moral standards, and concern about the future of the family, coalesced into a post-war discourse of emotional instability. Within this context the correct management of emotion was a political as well as a personal matter and became a marker of effective citizenship in a rapidly changing world. And yet, I want to argue, emotion itself could drive social and political change, acting as a vehicle for the operation of agency within everyday life. It was also increasingly seen as a legitimate basis upon which to assert knowledge claims about the world and carve out a place within civil society. Continue reading →

Julie-Marie Strange, ‘Historicising the comfort of “things” in late-Victorian and Edwardian working-class culture’

Posted on August 25, 2013 by manyheadedmonster

[This is the seventeenth piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). Julie-Marie Strange is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research and publications focus on inter-personal dynamics in working-class and poor families in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Here she contributes to our conversation about the relationship between material culture and ‘history from below’ by asking how the study of ‘things’ can bring new or alternative perspectives on overlooked aspects of working-class lives.]

In The Comfort of Things (2008), the anthropologist Daniel Miller presented a series of ‘portraits’, stories of individuals and the things in their home that mattered to them, to challenge a narrative of consumption as corruption. Miller’s vignettes illuminate how objects embody people’s aspirations for sure, but, he also explores how the stories people tell about their things are intrinsic to their struggle to make their lives meaningful. For Miller, we appropriate objects to give meaning to social processes and relationships.[1] This post – a brief presentation of two case studies from late-Victorian and Edwardian working-class culture – makes a foray into how working people’s ‘stuff’ can be interrogated to explore the inter-personal dynamics of family life.

There is, of course, a rapidly growing literature on material culture and the ways in which historians might make use of it to understand the past, particularly ‘hidden’ aspects of history. What I’m going to focus on here is how things in working-class homes suggest insights into family relationships, particularly between children and their fathers. I’m focusing on fathers because they have typically been perceived by historians and contemporaries as on the periphery of family life in accounts that have privileged children’s relationships with mothers. Continue reading →