Interpreting medieval sources: Orality, aurality, and textuality

Treason trial, King's Bench 1477-8. The National Archives, Kew.

 I’m in quite a productive flow state at the moment with the research for my PhD proposal, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the methodology I'm going to use for interpreting my primary sources. I’ve already talked a bit about the political uses of language and what it might mean when a writer uses French or English in a culture where being English was increasingly being defined against French difference, but where the records of law and government nevertheless remained multilingual. Another question that is occupying me is how best to deal with the complex, multilayered nature of these types of sources that were circulated for political purposes. By this I mean that texts like the letter of the Lords Appellant to the citizens of London (as discussed in this post) were initially created as written documents, but they also circulated orally (read out in public) and so were received in aural form. In some cases, such as that of statutes, the written text was in French but was circulated in English through being orally translated as part of the process of public proclamation. Such texts might then go through another iteration of translation and circulation as they were copied into chronicles or into the rolls of parliament.

This quite complicated process of multilingual, multimedia circulation and reception generated some stimulating discussion at a lecture on politics and government that I taught last week as part of a course on late medieval England. I don’t like to talk at the students for too long, so I usually break up the lecture component with discussion of relevant primary sources as we go. In this lecture, we were talking about contemporary views of what makes for ‘good governance’ and what avenues for protest were available if people didn’t think they were getting it. One of the sources we discussed was a text that has come to be known as the ‘manifesto’ of Archbishop Scrope. Briefly, by 1405, Henry IV’s honeymoon as the new king of England was over and a group amongst the nobility (centred mainly in the north of England) was agitating for reform.[1] They had drafted up a set of articles demanding that the king take a series of measures for the restoration of ‘good governance’. To me, one of the most intriguing aspects of this uprising (which ended with the Archbishop of York Richard Scrope and the Earl Marshal Thomas Mowbray being executed for treason) was the way the leaders used the circulation of texts to engage armed support for their cause amongst the people of York and its surrounding districts. Here is how events were captured by Thomas Walsingham, the author of the St Albans Chronicle[2]:

When the archbishop saw that he was surrounded by many who were willing to fight, he had the … articles written down, published in the highways and byways of the city of York, and publicly fastened to the doors of monasteries, so that any person who wished could ascertain the nature of his case. [The archbishop also had the articles preached by parish priests.]

…

These are the articles intended to achieve correction and restoration so as to avoid dissent and disagreement, which are likely to occur in the kingdom because of a lack of justice, unless it please God of his grace and the estates of the realm to give help in these matters.

First of all, the bad governance in the kingdom must be corrected in accordance with truth and justice, and be so ordered as to deal with the insupportable burdens which affect all grades of the clergy, to make amends for injustices and calumny committed against the estates, both spiritual and temporal, for the preservation and liberty of holy Church…

Secondly, to order remedial action to be taken about subjection and annulments which lords are very likely to suffer to the prejudice of both their own persons and their inheritances, contrary to their station enjoyed by right of birth and the laws employed and made on behalf of their predecessors.

Thirdly, to order the correction of harsh regulations and insupportable taxes and aids, extortionate and oppressive demands, which rule the lives of nobles, merchants, and the commons of the realm, bringing ultimate impoverishment and ruin upon those who would be bound to be true supporters of all the estates, both spiritual and temporal, if they were well and properly governed. Further, to punish willful squandering of funds, namely expenses claimed for private individual advancement from the considerable possessions and wealth of the aforementioned nobles, merchants, and commons, and to ensure the restoration of those possessions for the good of the realm.

 Walsingham then adds:

These were the articles that were written in English, whose sense I have translated almost word for word, and have inserted them here as they were expressed, without any bias. [In other words, he has translated them from English into Latin because…] This seemed necessary to me because of the plainness and inelegance of the language, which is not easily rendered in elegant style, if the sense of the original is to be preserved.

Now, the themes of complaint represented here are rather standard for the time but there are a couple of interesting features about this text. First, it was written in English and copies nailed up around the city of York, implying that at least a decent chunk of its intended audience was presumed to be literate and they, no doubt, were then expected to read it out to their non-literate fellows. The second point is that by circulating the text in English, the archbishop and his noble supporters seem to be tapping into a rather dangerous precedent set by the 'peasant' rebels of 1381, whose supposedly seditious texts were also circulated in English.[3] It has to be said that by 1405, although England was still multilingual, there were a growing number of literary works being written in English (Chaucer, Gower etc.) and a number of these contained both veiled and explicit complaints about governance. English texts – particularly the Bible in English – were also associated with the so-called Lollard heresy, which advocated that the faithful should read scripture directly rather than receiving it through preaching. Mark Ormrod has suggested that literary and poetic works in English may not have been perceived as politically threatening in the same ways that a written English Bible was in part because they were generally circulated by being read out – that is, their orality/aurality neutralised an implicit threat perceived to reside in a written English text.[4] If this is true, then the written circulation of Scrope’s manifesto in English seems to be a deliberately provocative political move as well as having more pragmatic purposes given its intended readership.

Finally, it's noteworthy that the monastic chronicler Thomas Walsingham finds it necessary to translate the articles into Latin before copying them into his chronicle. As a conservative churchman, he may well have found the English language not only ‘inelegant’ but also theologically and politically dangerous because of its association with heresy during this period. Or, although I have not a skerrick of proof for this, I suppose it is also possible that as a cleric he was much more comfortable and fluent working in Latin than in English.

So where does this leave me with interpreting these kinds of political texts? Good question, and one to which I certainly don't have an answer yet. As a historian, the written texts are all I have left to work with and - as is clear from Walsingham's tinkering - surviving copies may have strayed far from their originals through the processes of translation and transcription. Within these texts, there may be hints of how they were heard and interpreted at the time and of what actions they precipitated, but there is really no way for me to know definitively how they were received. However, as I'm interested in understanding how these these texts shaped political struggles between living human beings, I need to figure out some way to negotiate their complicated intertwinings of orality, aurality, and textuality.

---

[1] General studies of this rebellion include W. Mark Ormrod, ‘The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope’ in Gwilym Dodd & Douglas Biggs (eds.), The Reign of Henry IV: Rebellion andSurvival, 1403 – 1413 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2008), pp.162-179; Douglas Biggs, ‘Archbishop Scrope's Manifesto of 1405: “Naive Nonsense” or Reflections of Political Reality?’, Journal of Medieval History 33, no. 4 (2007), pp.358-71; Simon Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’, Past & Present, no. 166 (2000), pp.31-65.

[2] John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss (eds.), The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham II. 1394-1422, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp.442-5.

[3] The texts included letters and poems purported to be by the rebel leaders. On this topic, see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, CA., 1994).

[4] W. M. Ormrod, 'The Use of English: Language, Law, and Political Culture in Fourteenth-Century England,' Speculum 78, no. 3 (July 1, 2003): 750–787, at 783-4.

A cultural history of politics, and the politics of cultural history

My experiences at IMC Leeds - the papers I heard and the many interesting discussions I had - along with my pre-conference meetings with a couple of Leading Scholars in my field, have got me thinking about the kind of history that I want to do, and more broadly, about how various 'types' or approaches to history get defined (and, at worst, pigeon-holed as hopelessly outdated or 'politically irrelevant'). While to those outside the field/academia, the question may seem somewhat rarefied, it is an important consideration because the way your research is perceived and ‘labeled’ can have a significant impact on opportunities for funding, publication, participation in collaborative projects etc. Broadly speaking, my thesis could be classed as political history in that it deals with the actions and motivations of those who hold the reins of power, both formally through institutions like kingship or parliament and, more informally, through bonds of personal loyalty and kinship. But, by asking questions about how perceptions of gender (and ethnicity – but I won’t go there in this post) shape the way power is distributed, applied, reproduced, and contested across these institutions and relationships, I'm also taking an approach that overtly applies 'cultural theory' (let's call it that for simplicity's sake, as I don't have the space or inclination here to go into the nuances of my feminist / postcolonial theoretical toolkit) to the analysis of late medieval politics.

So does that make me a political historian? A cultural historian? Both? Neither? Are such distinctions even useful? My thinking on this was in part prompted by a discussion on the political relevance of cultural history, started by Jon Jarrett over at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe and then expanded upon by Magistra et Mater. I agree that for medievalists, making one's research politically relevant within contemporary culture is more important than ever in these days of shrinking humanities funding and ever more stringent demands to prove one's 'impact factor'. (For those unfamiliar with the world of academia, this is basically the demand - expressed in different ways in different countries - to prove that taxes invested in higher education/ research are not being 'wasted' on 'frivolities'. Its nastier and more ignorant face can be seen in the public comments section of any major newspaper when some hapless social science or humanities researcher gets a grant for studying bogan subcultures or some other perfectly sound academic question that the Commentariat, in all its collective wisdom, considers outrageous.*)

But (getting back to the point) I am made distinctly uncomfortable by the idea that political relevance implies an overt association with identity politics, or that an absence of such overt identification and its agendas infers the 'depolitisation' of cultural history. I'm having trouble articulating this well, but I guess that as someone who is focused in part on the history of masculinities, I was brought up short by John Tosh’s claim (via Magistra) that the cultural turn in the field of gender and masculinity has detached it from the ‘men’s movement’ of the 1970s, and thus robbed it of its political edge, an argument that has also been advanced in somewhat different forms by a number of historians who identify as feminist.** I have to say, I never considered that my interest in the history of masculinities (in my case, knightly masculinity in particular) has anything to do with any kind of 'men’s movement' or with unearthing positive male role models from the past, and I’d be pretty disturbed if other people thought that was an agenda that is driving my research. I suppose I am thinking of gender in more abstract (but no less politically relevant) terms, in that I am hoping that by uncovering and unpicking the hidden gender dynamics that underpinned and supported (and also contested) particular relationships of political power in the past, I can not only shed new light on historic events and structures, but also make people look with new eyes on such dynamics at work in the modern world. There is a clearly a political agenda driving my work on medieval political history, as I believe that the first step to changing a system is to understand exactly how it works and how it preserves existing privilege. I often find that when I start explaining my research to IRL friends and acquaintances, they very quickly have an ‘a ha’ moment when they recognise parallels or resonances within a specific contemporary political context.*** (For those of you about to accuse me of shameful anachronism, I’m always at pains to emphasise that I am not positing any simplistic causal relationship between the medieval past and the present.) The way I see it, cultural history is an inherently political (and politically relevant) project, even if it is not overtly associated with any particular movement or strand of identity politics.

* Just to be clear on this, I absolutely support Dave Snell’s research and think his PhD topic was completely legitimate (and really cool!) Indeed, his investigation into the construction of identities bears a certain, if distant, relation to my own interests.

** Important disclaimer here: I have not yet read Tosh’s piece in the edited volume Magistra discusses (Sean Brady and John H. Arnold (eds.), What is masculinity? Historical dynamics from antiquity to the contemporary world (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)), so I may be completely misinterpreting this.

*** I will explore this in more detail in a future post, as I think it is best done through concrete examples rather than trying to explain it at an abstract level.

Disrupting the otherness of the medieval past

It gives me a certain amount of satisfaction to read this article on the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new Medieval and Renaissance galleries. The museum’s decision to present these collections in a single contiguous space works to destabilise the conventional narrative of historical progress from the ‘dark ages’ to a nascent ‘age of reason’ (or, literally, ‘rebirth’). According to the article:

"The V&A is managing to display some brutishly large cojones. This is not just an excellent museum addition. It is also a particularly brave one.

What is being challenged? Everything. The complete caboodle. Before we even set foot inside this theatre of delights, its title warns us of a revolution ahead. Medieval and Renaissance are, after all, two slabs of civilisation that we generally keep well apart. These two epochs are usually understood as near opposites, driven by dramatically different world-views. The medieval age is felt to have been gloomy, backward and propelled by fiery belief, while the Renaissance was enlightened, progressive and propelled by reason."

This traditional framing of discrete periods in Western history persuades us to see the present moment in time as the apogee of a linear progression in which the Middle Ages (a problematic term in itself. The middle of what?) is the brutal and intellectually stunted precursor to the increasingly enlightened Early Modern/Renaissance and Modern. In this vision, the medieval past is indeed another country, populated by the utterly strange and the irrationally violent. It’s presented as a time and place hopelessly tainted by Catholic groupthink that was then surpassed by the ‘discovery of the individual’ who, at his/her (usually ‘his’) finest, is driven by reason rather than superstition. Much more like ‘us’ in the modern West, in fact.

I have a Google alert set up for ‘medieval history’ and it’s quite depressing to see the number of links it produces with a first sentence along the lines of ‘the medieval period was a very serious, dark period of time’ or talking about ‘the savage unrestrained medieval times’. (Those are both real examples from the past week or so.) Contrived divisions between the medieval, the early modern and the modern are to some degree necessary to the discipline of history, as without any boundaries and the specialisation that goes with them, it would be virtually impossible to produce rich, accurate and detailed historical interpretations. But at the same time, when they are accepted without question as natural or logical, these standard periodisations become problematic because they help perpetuate the view of the medieval as utterly Other from the modern. This in turn underpins a teleology that says all history is a linear march of progress from a dark, barbaric and backwards past to enlightened, democratic (and implicitly westernised) modernity. The political uses of such a vision of history can be clearly discerned in those depictions of Islam and the Muslim world as ‘medieval’ that are all-too-common in the Western mainstream media at the moment.

This notion of the ‘othering’ of the medieval is something Magistra recently touched on in another excellent post in our on-going discussion about history writing, fiction and emotional engagement. Because I’m lazy, I’m going to paraphrase here something I wrote in the comments at Magistra’s blog -

We need to avoid romanticising the distant past while also resisting that still-compelling whiggish narrative of progress from the Dark Ages (or ‘medieval’ in its most pejorative sense) through Renaissance and Enlightenment to modernity, but that's a tricky path to navigate at times. That's partly why I try to avoid the standard periodisation labels when it comes to talking to people about what I'm doing (although I admit I don’t always succeed at this, because adopting the existing classifications makes things a whole lot simpler from a pragmatic perspective).

I want to disrupt and interrogate the divides that say you're either a medievalist or an early modernist/renaissance specialist or a modernist, based on a rather arbitrary imposition of dates that in itself implies a teleology of progress. The classic periodisation really only holds if you stick to a fairly narrow range of political/economic/socio-cultural indicators within quite discrete temporal and geographical limits. It starts to break down once you cross the traditional boundaries of 'England' or 'Western Europe', and when you start to look at themes like gender and sexuality, the history of non-elites and marginal groups, popular beliefs versus institutional religion and so on. That approach can reveal as many broad continuities and congruences between the medieval and the early modern or modern as it reveals big changes and ruptures. Feminist historians have been engaging with questions of periodisation since (at least) the 1970s, with work like Joan Kelly’s classic article “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” [1] providing significant new interpretations of received master narratives. More recently, feminist historian Judith Bennett’s History Matters [2] explored the question of change and continuity with her notion of patriarchal equilibrium, the merits and drawbacks of which were debated across a number of feminist history blogs earlier this year.

I find it an intellectual and emotional challenge to apply this thinking to my own historical research, because it’s tough to do without breaking all the rules about anachronism and sentimentalising, over-simplifying or distorting the past. I’m definitely one of those people who was originally drawn to medieval history precisely because I did perceive it as tantalisingly and exotically ‘other’. This process of exploring how the othering of the medieval shapes my own subjectivity at a specific moment in the historical present is an on-going one (and one that is much enriched by reading blogs like In the Middle and Modern Medieval, as well as those linked above).

1. Joan Kelly, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, Chicago University Press, 1984.

2. Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

History, politics and scholarly subjectivity

Magistra et Mater and I, along with assorted commentators, have recently been engaging in a wide-ranging discussion on historical fiction and the writing of history. (See here, here and here.) In Magistra’s latest contribution, Emotional engagement and historians’ values, she makes the point that while it may be valid for historians to use their academic work to support their social activism, they still have to adhere to the core values of honesty and accuracy. Otherwise, they’re engaging in writing fiction or propaganda, not history. In other words, historians can’t just jettison or manipulate the evidence if it doesn’t fit their particular view of the world.

Damned straight, I say. However, the deep, persistent and often problematic connections between the worlds of professional history and politics can make the noble values of ‘honesty’ and ‘accuracy’ much more difficult to pin down in practice than in theory. ‘Honest’ according to whom? (Let’s face it - we humans sometimes have trouble even being honest with ourselves.) ‘Accurate’ by what measures? These are questions I started to engage with at a theoretical level in undergrad classes in historiography, during which we discussed (sometimes heatedly) historical debates such as Australia’s so-called History Wars. The issue is becoming more immediate to me as a postgraduate student because I’m engaging in original research, actually putting something new out there with my name on it and in which I have to present my evidence and argue a position. It’s forcing me to become more self-reflexive and to grapple with questions of my own scholarly subjectivity. How does my subjectivity shape the questions I choose to ask and the ways that I present my evidence (right down to picking images to accompany the text)? Can I even be fully aware of my own subjectivity and if so, am I a fully autonomous subject?

That’s a high-falutin' philosophical tangent that I won’t pursue any further here, except to say that I don’t believe any historian can be truly objective in the purist scientific sense because our own subjectivity is always going to colour the kinds of questions we ask of the evidence - and even what we consider as evidence. For example, some historians might only see official documents - such as judicial or administrative records or state papers - as real evidence, whereas others will find literary sources or material culture (buildings, household utensils etc.) equally valid. Some scholars might read those official records purely to glean the facts (names, dates, places etc.), whereas others will apply readings more informed by literary theory to dig deeper into how and why a particular text came to take the form it did. They will look as much to what isn’t said - to the gaps, silences and absences - and to meanings that are conveyed unintentionally, in order to extend interpretation beyond the limits of the original author’s purpose (stated or implicit).

This is the point at which many historians trained in the strictly empirical traditions of ‘scientific’ history become very anxious about people manipulating the evidence to fit a theory or a particular political agenda. Certainly, this does happen, and when it does, it’s bad history. But the fetishisation of archive sources as objective evidence of the past can equally blind us to the reality that those dryly-official documents and records are still created, authored texts. As the French historian Roger Chartier said, ‘no text, even…the most “objective” (for example, a statistical table drawn up by a government agency), maintains a transparent relationship with the reality that it apprehends.’

Chartier’s argument has been resonating with me during the last couple of weeks as I’ve been reading some recent historical studies of Richard II’s reign. Historians of this period generally draw on the many surviving contemporary or near-contemporary chronicles as well as on official records and it’s quite revealing to see the different ways they treat the two types of sources. A citation from a chronicle is almost always accompanied by an attempt to corroborate the information from another source and is frequently also qualified by discussion of the chronicle writer’s known political and/or religious biases. That approach is perfectly sound, as later medieval chroniclers were generally writing in the service of patrons and they sometimes shaped and re-worked their texts quite extensively to meet the exigencies of changing political situations.

What interests me, though, is that the same qualifications are much less frequently applied to the ‘official’ sources. Instead, these are generally treated as accurate, reliable and unproblematic accounts of events as they actually happened. Nigel Saul offers one of the rare exceptions when he points out, “The parliament roll suffers from all the usual weaknesses of that source: it is highly edited; it is composed mainly of memoranda and petitions to which the king gave his reply; and it contains few reports of speeches or discussions.” [2]

Social activism and emotional engagement

I want to come back now to another aspect of Magistra’s latest post, namely the connection of history and social activism. She notes the two historians that I named as being particularly good at emotionally engaging their readers (Marcus Rediker and Judith Walkowitz) are modernists working on the 18th and 19th centuries. Thinking about this some more, I wondered if for that reason, readers could more easily make a connection between these writers’ historical subjects - broadly speaking, victims of the Atlantic slave trade and working-class women in Victorian England - and their own direct experiences of 20th century social justice movements such as civil rights and feminism.

For someone like me, with leftwing progressive political sympathies, it’s true that the history of marginal groups readily engages both my intellectual interest and my empathy as a human being. However, this is certainly not the case for many other people who study history. I’m reminded of an undergraduate paper I did on the Napoleonic Wars, when the students included both history majors and Bachelor of Defence Studies majors (all serving military). As you would expect, the course covered the military, political and economic aspects of war and empire, but it also explored broader social and cultural themes. The BDS guys were mostly either perplexed or annoyed at having to consider how war and the economic measures needed to support it affected civilian populations. For them, the life-altering impact of Napoleon’s wars on peasant communities or women or the clergy - the facet of the course that held the most appeal for me - was just not relevant, let along interesting or emotionally engaging.

I guess this comes back to a very personal question: why do history? Why does spending our lives in libraries and archives, puzzling over artefacts left by those long dead, have such appeal? (It certainly ain’t for the money.) I would argue that without some aspiration beyond simply uncovering and assembling an accurate collection of facts, we’re nothing more than modern antiquarians. For my own part, I’m driven not simply by curiosity or the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake, but by a desire to understand patterns and connections in the past that also speak to the present. On this, I’m with Michel Foucault, who believed the point of history is “to show how that-which-is has not always been,” and so to show “why and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is.” [3]

That’s idealistic, I know. Maybe it’s even a little bit utopian. But that’s the way I roll.

1. Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, p. 43.
2. Nigel Saul, Richard II, p. 222
3. Quoted in Joan W. Scott’s article 'Back to the Future' in History & Theory 47, no. 2 (2008), p. 284.

Summer of research, ridin' and relaxin'

Spring has come late to these parts, and today was one of the first days there was real heat in the sun. I sat on the front porch reading, enveloped in the scents from the jasmine and climbing roses that are running riot around the balcony, watching the fat, furry bumbler bees (as my nephew calls them) slip dozily from bloom to bloom. My coursework is done for the year, so I now have the summer ahead of me to mull over the research project that will occupy a lot of my time over the coming year.

I’ve got some broad ideas about what I want to tackle and how, but I haven’t refined the research question(s) so narrowly yet as to require really intensive reading (or to get alternately obsessed and fed up with the subject). I’m interested in taking up Joan Scott’s challenge to examine the ways that ‘gender constructs politics and politics constructs gender’, so I’m thinking I may do something around competing constructions of misrule and the gendering of dissent during the troubled reign of Richard II of England. That leads to lots of related threads - starting with that classic late medieval triangle of heresy, sodomy and treason - that could also prove rich avenues for investigation.

I love this stage of the process, where I can dip in and out of lots of different books and articles, following up any little obscure angle that intrigues me. It suits my magpie brain. I have a nice big stack of background reading, theory, and secondary sources on the period to work through over the next couple of months, and I’ll also be making a start on tracking down primary sources I may want to use. There is a huge amount of this material for Richard’s reign and its post-deposition aftermath, including a bunch of French and English chronicles and extensive judicial and administrative records. (Bonus - thanks to the prompt from Dame Eleanor Hull, I also discovered my university library has an edition of the Calendar of Patent Rolls for Richard II’s reign stashed in offsite storage, so I won’t need to interloan.)

As this project takes shape over the coming months, I will probably torture you periodically with oblique accounts of my discoveries. But for now, I’m going to go and pour myself a glass of cider, so I’ll leave you with my thoughts on other good things about summer:

• Monteiths Crushed Apple Cider served over ice in a big goblet
• Hitting the single track at Makara Peak
• Eating fish and chips on the beach, and washing away the salty, greasy goodness with a glass of crispy sauvignon blanc
• Swimming twilight laps around Oriental Bay fountain
• Breaking out the fairy lights and turning our patio into a Greek-taverna-by-proxy

To those of you facing down winter in unkindly climes, I send my commiserations.

* The image is of a 14th century music manuscript of the English round Sumer is i-cumen in.

Debating history-as-fiction and fiction-as-history

While I was busy contemplating the awfulness of Colin Farrell’s bleach job in the film Alexander, Magistra et Mater picked up on my post as the opportunity to ask some deeper questions about “the rising cultural importance of historical novels … [and] the uneasy relationship between the two genres of history and historical fiction.” What, she asks, “do authors or would-be authors of historical novels think that writing fiction allows them to do that more conventional historical forms don’t?”

Amongst the possible answers she poses is the ability to gain a much wider audience and therefore to sell more books than the lowly historian could ever dream was possible. The historical novelist may also have the ability to write more vividly than the historian, though I think this is debateable. Some best-selling 'historical' novelists write dreadfully clunky, lifeless prose (Dan Brown, I’m looking at you!), while some historians have the ability to sweep you along in stories that are more exciting than any fiction. Of course, the novelist also has the unique freedom to make things up when it suits them.

It seems to me that Magistra is also touching on some much bigger issues, such as those old unanswerable questions about the purpose of history and the historian’s role in society, and whether history is an art or a science. If we consider that the historian has some responsibility to reach out to the general public (and I do, because if historians don’t do this, then politicians have free reign to manipulate history to suit their own purposes), then we have to be concerned about developing the communication skills to engage a wider audience at least some of the time. I’m also of the school that believes that the way scholarly and academic history is written - the narrative approach used, the rhetorical constructs chosen and so on - is as much a part of the history itself as the research, the facts, the analysis and the scholarly apparatus.

I find it interesting that Magistra appears to make a very black-and-white distinction between being a writer of fiction and being an historian, as though one can be one or the other but not both. The creative writing that I do definitely enriches and improves my academic writing, and a number of the novelists I enjoy reading are qualified historians (have PhDs in history), so I see more overlap between the genres and skills than she perhaps does. To me, it’s a bit of a cop out to think conveying the facts in dull, workmanlike prose is enough just because the historian’s task is to write about ‘what really happened’. Yes, it’s true that most historians aren’t going to be able to come near what the best writers (of fiction or non-fiction) are capable of, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t take good writing as seriously as they do thorough research and well-supported analysis.

I also believe that novelists should not be the only ones aspiring to make us emotionally engage with the past. Historians like Marcus Rediker or Judith Walkowitz have the ability to tell what really happened with faultless attention to the scholarly apparatus, and to make us care about what happened and possibly use that knowledge of the past to help fuel change in the present. To my mind, that is an extremely important skill for historians to possess, particularly those who work on the histories of the marginal and the previously unconsidered (the poor, the mentally ill, migrants, slaves etc.). But it does open up the fraught question of whether academic history should also be serving the causes of social activism (as many historians believe - that was, after all, integral to the feminist history that emerged in the 1970s), or is indeed by its very nature political regardless of any claims to objectivity.

To write history that engages us on both the intellectual and emotional planes does not mean making things up. But it does require a more mindful approach and a commitment to honing one’s writing as a craft in and of itself that perhaps some (many?) academic historians either don’t have time for or don’t consider a core part of the job. In my experience, writing skills are often an under-rated, if not completely ignored, aspect of the teaching of history at university level. (For any history teachers/professors reading this, do you consider teaching the skill of writing in itself as part of your purview? Or is that something for the literature/composition teachers to worry about?)

Magistra is right in saying “Most of the books by academic medievalists/early modernists which do find a wider audience are either on conventional kings and battles topics or are lucky enough to have found sources/archives which contain a lot of information on a small group of people (such as the inquisition records for Montaillou)”. But in the case of Montaillou*, for example, it was not simply the unique nature of the evidence that made it such a popular work but Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s vigorous and accessible prose style, which is characteristic of the best of the Annales school. (It might also reflect a different and distinctly French view of the historian’s function in society, and therefore of what types of skills the profession requires.)

Having said all that, I confess I’m bothered when writers of historical fiction try to blur the boundaries and claim more for their creations than they merit. For example, this quote highlighted by Magistra really disturbs me: ‘As [novelist] Sarah Dunant puts it in History Today: ‘I want to sink the reader deep into the period, to say, “Have the confidence to follow me because I know what is true”'. My response to that is to say yes, Ms Dunant, you may have done in-depth historical research and ‘know what is true’, but when it comes to choosing between what is true and what is interesting or what best moves the story along, you’re going to pick the latter every time.

* This was a history of the lives and beliefs of peasants living in the village of Montaillou, in what is now southwest France, in the early 14th century. It was based primarily on the previously unexamined records of the Catholic inquisitor Jacques Fournier. Le Roy Ladurie's interpretation is profoundly flawed because he took Fournier's highly-mediated accounts as factual descriptions , but the book still stands as one of the first examples of 'history from below', which sought to expand academic history beyond the study of the lives of elites.

Henry VIII was a greenie??!

Yep, between busting up the monasteries and dispatching a few wives, Henry VIII was apparently driven by his green eco-sensibilities to create the 10,000-acre forest at Hampton Court . At least, that’s the story according to a recent lecture by the Prince of Wales. This and other such spurious uses of history get a lashing in The Telegraph, and are discussed with a good deal more depth and complexity in the Times Higher Education supplement.

Says Professor Pat Thane of the University of London:

"There is widespread abuse and misuse of history in public life, ranging from the silly to the downright dangerous. Bad history can create real problems by distorting understanding of contemporary issues when politicians and others use history as a rhetorical tool to conjure up past golden ages, appeal to founding fathers or simply to rewrite it for political ends.”

Further (as many of us know to our cost), “bad history can lead to bad policy analysis and bad policy”.

The strong connection between history and contemporary politics brings me back to the recent discussion we had here on the moral role of the historian in society (and, incidentally, should also answer all those people who ask ‘what’s the point of studying history?’). In the THE article, several highly respected historians weigh in on how to manage the delicate balance between past and present by using our knowledge of the past to help us understand the complexities of the modern world but without distorting history to serve specific political or cultural ends.

Crusades specialist Jonathan Phillips, for example,

"Is wary about drawing facile parallels with - or citing the past's lessons for - today's Middle East. Indeed, he believes that studying the period may help us understand "the sheer complexity of the region, then as now".

"It is far too simplistic to see the Crusades as a battle between Christians or the West and Muslims, since there were Christians fighting Christians, Muslims fighting Muslims, alliances across the religious divide - and the Greek Orthodox Church was always opposed to Crusading," he says.

But although they have to embrace complexity, Phillips adds, historians must also accept and be sensitive to the fact that "for much of the Muslim world, the Crusades have acquired a toxic meaning as part of a historical continuum - of Westerners invading, killing and conquering, as they were to do again in colonial times".

"Policymakers have come to realise that something serious underlay the Islamic response to George W. Bush's unthinking use of the word 'crusade'," he says.

The medievalist Miri Rubin thinks it is inevitable that past and present always interact, and therefore medievalists have an important role to play in shedding light on current issues.

"I find people have real misconceptions about issues of religious prejudice and the sometimes-related violence," Rubin explains. "People think of pre-modern Europe as a place where crowds - the mob, the unlettered - took to the streets in religious violence, especially against Jews.

"Such behaviour is invoked in our own times as 'medieval' and people who do such things - in the Balkans in the 1990s, for example - are deemed to be 'throwbacks' to another time. In this manner, they are classed as 'aberrant', and so can be bracketed and put aside.

"The truth is that, then as now, violence in the streets is inspired by key actors, who act knowingly, and who are informed and often linked up with privileged access to media. There are agents provocateurs - preachers, journalists, politicians - who endorse behaviour by those who respect their authority. So, rather than the product of 'ignorance' or 'age-old hatred', responsibility for violence ought to be identified along lines of communication and excitation."

The THE article goes on to deal with issues such as the troubled connections between a Whiggish history of ‘liberty, democracy and material progress’, colonialism, national identity, and contemporary ideas of citizenship.

As some tonic to the abuse of history, the THE notes that the History and Policy group, a partnership between the universities of Cambridge and London that "works for better public policy through an understanding of history” has started its own 'Bad History' series. Here, mercilessly exposed with relish and wit, are the grievous historical errors, oversights and deliberate distortions that are being used to justify current policy.

Lest we remember

I’m back from holiday and for my sins, this week I’m puppy-sitting while the pup’s owners head off on their holiday. This morning, I took the beastie for one of our favourite walks around the neighbourhood, taking in the local war memorial. The memorial sits on top of a hill, tucked into a little patch of grass and bush off the road. It has a great view over the harbour and city, so I usually stop there for a few minutes and enjoy the scenery while the pup has a bit of a run in the grass.

Pretty much every town in New Zealand has one of these 1914 – 1918 memorials. In the smaller provincial towns, it’s sobering to see how many of the soldiers listed have the same surnames and to reflect on the impact their loss must have had on their families and communities. My local memorial is no different, and the list of the dead usually elicits in me a certain wistfulness. But today, for some reason, I was struck instead by the standard war memorial admonition, ‘Lest we forget’.

Lest we forget? I think it may be more apt to say ‘Lest we remember’. While the memorials keep us focused on a romanticised image of the flower of the country’s youth falling heroically in some foreign field, we can avoid remembering the greed, egotism, racism and vicious nationalism (on all sides) that fuels most wars. And we can avoid remembering darker legacies, like domestic internment or the systematic rape and other crimes perpetrated against civilian populations as part of the ‘collateral damage’ of victory.

Then there are the smaller domestic tragedies. The children fathered by servicemen on leave who were left unacknowledged and unsupported, and were sometimes shunned by their communities for their illegitimacy. The children who were sent away from their homes in places like Belfast and London to protect them from the bombing, but who ended up in rural foster homes where they were neglected, abused, and worked like slave labour. Or even the simple, gnawing want created by a war machine that sucked up almost all available resources and made rationing a way of life, not just during the conflict but for years after it.

It was only after I finished writing this post that I realised what day it is today. I expect that the news and documentary channels will be running their usual mix of commemorative programmes and exposés of terrorism. We’ll be asked not to forget the civilian lives lost on September 11, and the US and British soldiers who’ve died since in this futile ‘war on terror’.

But I don’t expect we’ll be called upon to remember the dead and maimed amongst the Iraqi civilian population (including those raped and/or murdered by their ‘liberators’), or to remember the many private interests who have profited from this latest war to the tune of billions. And I don't expect we'll be asked to remember, or even think about, how our own fear of a Muslim 'other' who is not and can never be 'like us' prevents us from searching for any solution that doesn't involve either conquest or assimilation.

The history of violence

We had an interesting discussion in my French class this week about the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. We started by talking about Rousseau, Voltaire and the Encyclopédie, but then New Guy raised an issue that kicked off a debate I seem to be having on a regular basis lately. New Guy – who is a lawyer and struck me as rather right wing and conservative (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”) – suggested that Europe after the Enlightenment and Revolution was much more violent than it had been under the ancien régime. Therefore, he implied, these movements had been generally bad things, which had led to 20th century nightmares like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. I’m well aware that the 19th century in Europe was heinously violent, with revolution after revolution in Germany and elsewhere, but I don’t know enough to make any intelligent comment on the causal connections between those events and the rise of a Hitler or a Stalin. Nor am I trying to downplay the scale of the wars and atrocities that have scarred the world over the last century.

But I do know enough to say that the world before the 18th century was no picnic, either. I think there is a certain romanticism about the distant past – especially our ‘own’ past – that precludes many people from seeing and engaging with its less palatable aspects. The History Channel and Hollywood have a lot to answer for here, with their relentless spectacles of ‘merrie olde Englande’ and the romance of medieval chivalry. But life in general was brutish, particularly if you were female, young or poor.

When people talk about the world being more violent today, I suspect they’re only considering the carnage they’re seeing on the news every night. They’re not considering that in places like England and France, public torture and judicial murder used to be an entertaining day out for the family. (Can Grand Theft Auto really compare to seeing your neighbour being hung, drawn and quartered or burned to death as a witch or heretic?) And while domestic violence is a huge problem in our society, men no longer have the unquestioned legal right to beat their servants, wives and children. (Let’s not forget that masters could beat their apprentices, too, a form of ‘workplace bargaining’ that draconian bosses would probably love to revive.) People who say society is more violent today are also forgetting the completely arbitrary nature of justice a few hundred years ago, when a starving peasant who killed a rabbit for the pot could find himself following it to oblivion at his lord’s pleasure.

And then there’s the Renaissance, which is often portrayed as a sort of golden age when everyone sat around marvelling at the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel. It was also a period when the countries of Europe were almost constantly at war with each other and with themselves. I heard a podcast a while ago in which Thomas Laqueur was talking about the St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre of August, 1572. Over three days, something like 3000 people were killed in the city of Paris – at that time a city of perhaps 100,000 souls. Think about the impact of violent death on that scale on a population that size. If you live in an average-sized town, imagine what would happen if that many of your fellow residents were suddenly victims of the most extreme and nasty murders. There can have been very few, if any, people who weren’t directly affected by a slaughter that had the streets of Paris literally running ankle-deep in blood.

I don’t know, what do you think? Did the democratic revolutions of the 19th century bring more bad than good? Is the media making us paranoid by feeding us a constant diet of death and destruction (fear sells, after all)? Or is the world truly a more violent place now than it was a few hundred years ago?

* The illustration is a 15th century woodcut of the Dance of Death, an extremely common subject of late medieval art.

** The photo is of the Château d’Amboise. In 1560, a political plot to kidnap the young king François II was exposed here. Between 1200 and 1500 conspirators were executed and their bodies strung up from the château’s walls.

Career angst and the scholarly life

Academic, Hopeful has a post up this week asking how graduate students should react to the inevitable question “what are you going to do next?” and/or variations on the theme of “why don’t you get a real job?”.

I’m having a hell of a month, just crazy-busy, and this post came close to triggering my own little existential crisis. I’ve come to graduate study as an older student, having already had two other careers. I suspect that because of my age, I've probably missed the boat on the standard academic career trajectory to tenured professor (and given the parlous state of academia these days, I’m not entirely sure it’s a career I would want anyway). The alternatives might be finding a niche in non-tenure-track academia, working as an independent scholar, or even being a genteel lady writer of historically-accurate medieval murder mysteries (I secretly quite fancy this last option).

Generally, people react positively when I tell them I’m doing graduate study until they find out I’m not doing something ‘useful’ like an MBA or a law degree. When I tell them I’m studying history, I’ll be received with bemused silence, a stuttered ‘why are you studying THAT?’, or – perhaps the most irritating response –patronising indulgence, as if I’m engaged in a somewhat eccentric hobby but at least it's keeping me out of trouble.

My personal experience is merely a microcosm. Those of us pursuing Humanities degrees are more likely to be accused of elitist dilettantism by politicians who have become increasingly focused on universities as factories for churning out tomorrow’s happy work-bots, rather than places where the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual freedom are considered as social goods in their own right. Because my main interest is medieval history, I get really prickly at the fact medieval studies often gets a star mention in newspaper articles scoffing at the ‘useless’ things universities are teaching these days. Yes, ‘useless’ things like critical thinking (perhaps politicians would secretly prefer it if the rest of us had less training in this area?), the ability to effectively analyse and synthesise complex information, or the skills to read and research both widely and deeply and then assess all the evidence on its own merits.

I’m fortunate to have earned a scholarship that covers my tuition fees (though who knows how long that will last?), and I also make enough from part-time PR contracting to pay the bills and keep a roof over my head. Without those factors, would I still be pursuing graduate study? I don’t know, and I’m certainly conscious of the financial privilege that makes my current situation viable. But at the same time, I simply can’t imagine being content with an existence where I’m not engaging in a life of the mind that rises above the mundane issues of our day-to-day world.

It’s difficult, daunting, and sometimes-tedious work (formatting references, anyone?), but when I’m doing it, there’s a thrumming inside me, a steady stretching of both cognition and intuition that seems to reverberate through my very centre. To anyone who hasn’t had the experience, it’s difficult to describe the sensation of discovering a single paragraph in 400 pages of text that opens a door in your mind, maybe even utterly changing the way you’ve been looking at the world. Or the secret thrill of finding a group of 600-year-old legal cases that appear – finally! – to confirm a theory you’ve been quietly harbouring for ages. Or the sheer enjoyment of the robust intellectual exercise that is taken tussling over the cracks in someone else’s long-cherished theory.

Rembrandt’s scholar may be a crusty old guy wearing a ruff, but I experience deep sense of empathy when I look at him. Across the gap of centuries, I can sense the cramping in his hand as he takes yet another page of notes, and I can feel the tired itchiness of eyes and a brain that have been tightly focused for hours. In him, I see my own drive to keep reading, keep looking, keep questioning. A drive that can sometimes be stronger than those most basic human needs of sleep and food. A drive provoked by an even deeper fear (certain knowledge that is yet unacknowledged), that my days will run out before my questions do.

That is ‘why’ and that is ‘what comes next’ because for me, it is coterminous with life itself.

* Image: Rembrandt, A Scholar, 1631. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

Whoops, apocalypse! Or, ask a medievalist if you want to understand the modern world

Hi, my name is Bavardess, and I’m a medievalist. I enjoy talking to anyone who’ll listen about my various research projects on late medieval rebellions, de jure and de facto structures of medieval prostitution, and the lives of urban working women in 14th century England. But now, when my friends and colleagues respond (as they often do) with a bemused “well that’s all very interesting, but what’s the point?”, I can point them here where my fellow medievalist Dan Jones explains that it takes an understanding of the Middle Ages to understand the present (props to Modern Medieval for the link).

Sure, I think Jones has his tongue pretty firmly in his cheek when he says,

Where Geoffrey Chaucer and his fellows had the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Hundred Years War and the Mediaeval Warm Period, so we have Swine Flu, the G20 riots, Afghanistan and Al Gore. The names have changed, but the horsemen ain’t.

But his underlying point is sound. We do seem to be in another one of those periods of general crisis – endemic war, the threat of large-scale disease, social disorder and economic chaos – that so distinctively marked the later Middle Ages throughout western Europe. People who have studied those phenomena in detail in the past, analysing the ways they inter-relate to each other and to wider social, cultural, economic and political trends, have valuable insights and theoretical frameworks to offer as we grapple with the here-and-now.

Okay, if you start making direct one-to-one comparisons or sweeping generalisations, anyone with the most basic training in the theory and practice of professional history is going to pull you up pretty quickly. We’ll talk to you about contingency and context, and tell you that it’s not a simple case of history repeating itself (either as tragedy or as farce – sorry, Marx). But as those of us with research interests before the 17th or 18th century can attest, there is much to be gained by understanding how medieval world-views and idea(l)s about gender, sexuality, religion, political philosophy, science and medicine shaped and continue to shape the modern world.

My own research interests are clustering around the intersections between 14th century constructions of gender and conceptions of legitimately and illegitimately wielded political power. So for me, watching how constructions of gender played a significant role – both overtly and covertly – in last year’s US and New Zealand elections was fascinating. Just ask, and I’ll be happy to blab away about this for hours.

P.S. And who says we medievalists can’t get drunk and have a little kinky fun while we're buried in those archives?

P.P.S. The picture above is 'La Bête de la mer', a panel from the Apocalypse Tapestry at the Chateau d'Angers in France. The seven-headed panther-like beastie is being invested with power by the Dragon, which means the rest of us are in deep shit.

Patriarchal Equilibrium - 1, Pay Equity - 0

These are darkening days for the female population of New Zealand. This week, the news came out that the Department of Labour’s Pay and Employment Equity Unit has been ‘disestablished’ (that’s bureaucratic weasel-speak for binned). Earlier this year, a couple of its major investigations were scrapped based on a specious argument for ‘pay restraint’ – that is to say, the government simply can’t afford to redress gender-based pay imbalances. Sadly, the move has come as no great surprise to me. The centre-right National government elected last November has been ‘reprioritising’ government spending, and using the convenient excuse of the global financial crisis to gut programmes aimed at combating discrimination and promoting social justice. It's par for the course. The last time a National government was elected, back in 1990, its first move was to repeal the Employment Equity Act.

There was an excellent and wide-ranging roundtable across several history blogs back in March, where feminist scholars discussed historian Judith M. Bennett’s book History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. Bennett specialises in the history of non-elite women in late medieval/early modern England. Her thesis in History Matters is that when a long-term perspective is applied to the historical analysis of women’s and men’s status in society (legal rights, economic conditions and so on), it becomes clear that what she terms "patriarchal equilibrium" is at work. So while conditions for women have improved over the centuries, those for men have also improved, with the result that in absolute terms, men preserve their privileged position in society. Bennett uses the example of wage rates, pointing out that the gap between what men and women earn for the same types of work hasn’t really closed much at all since the later Middle Ages. It has drifted up and down a bit, but over the long term, women have consistently earned between about 50 and 80 percent of what men earn for the same work.

So check this out: According to recent statistics reported by the Department of Labour, New Zealand women earn 78.9% of men’s average weekly earnings, and 86.7% of men’s average hourly earnings. The graph at right, from Statistics New Zealand, shows patriarchal equilibrium in action*. Over the last few years, men and women both benefited from the country’s economic boom and hourly rates have climbed, but as you can clearly see, the gap between women’s wages and men’s wages has nonetheless remained pretty constant. Now that the boom times are over, there is going to be additional pressure on women’s lower wages. At the same time, the message coming loud and clear from the National government (all naturally rolling in fat pay packets themselves) is that as a nation, pay equity is ‘a luxury we can’t afford’. With the dissolution of the Pay and Employment Equity Unit, those at the bottom of the privilege pile are once again being asked to sacrifice themselves at the altar of economic best interests.

Once upon a time, we Kiwis could be proud of our progressive stance on women’s rights. In 1893, New Zealand became the first self-governing nation in which women won the fight for full suffrage. We’ve had two women Prime Ministers and women have held the posts of chief justice, attorney general and governor-general. But the evidence of a handful of women in senior leadership positions doesn’t nullify the argument that there are still systemic gender-based inequities in our society – although that is what National’s Justice Minister Simon Power tried to suggest this week in the face of criticism from the UN Human Rights Committee.

For those of us who’ve been around the block more than a few times and who have taken to the streets in the past to protest discrimination of all kinds, the disbanding of the Pay and Employment Equity Unit feels like the first shot across the bows. I’m fully expecting to see further retroactive moves. My guess? Restricting access to abortion will soon be back on the agenda in the interests of ‘protecting family values’, while reducing the Domestic Purposes Benefit (for single parents, most of whom are women) and/or tightening the eligibility criteria will be another ideological move made in the guise of ‘reducing government spending in these tough economic times’.

I wonder what the situation is like in other countries. Are you seeing similar retrenchments being made in anti-discrimination and broadly social justice-based programmes under cover of reining in spending in a screwed economy? And for any New Zealanders reading, am I on the money here? If so, what do you think will be next in National’s firing line?

* For more on New Zealand, check out this paper presented at the 2001 Women’s Studies Association Conference. Amongst other things, the authors discuss statistics showing continued under-representation and under-valuing of women in academia and the public sector.