While I was sleeping...

Well, not actually sleeping. More like agonising over a literature review (why is it that you ALWAYS find five articles that totally change your thinking just when you think you’ve finally nailed it??), trying to figure out if I can produce something worthwhile for the SMFS graduate student essay competition (my supervisor is very enthused about this), and getting to grips with oral history. The latter is a requirement of my last taught postgrad paper, in historical methodology. If you want to work in any kind of professional history job in this country (and there are actually quite a few, given the whole Treaty of Waitangi claims industry), it seems you need to understand the theory and methodologies of oral history. For pretty obvious reasons, it’s not relevant to my interests in medieval history, but it’s kind of fun all the same. My efforts to come up with the most interesting project for the least amount of effort have me interviewing a few friends of my partner on their experiences of ‘coming of age’ as a male in the 1980s. Not as frivolous as it sounds, because it was a period that saw big shifts in the experience of ‘manhood’ in NZ, including the challenges posed to the entrenched rugby-racing-beer culture by the huge Springbok tour protests, and the bitterly-contested passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act.

Not posting here for ages turned out to be a kind of an unintended social experiment. Everything I’ve written so far was just sitting there, waiting to be read or not read, as the case may be. I figured that with no new material, I’d probably just disappear into digital oblivion. Not quite, as it turns out. One thing that happened was the last post I happened to write, on cross-dressing, took on a bit of a life of its own, even getting linked from I Blame the Patriarchy, one of my favourite blogs ever. (Though I’ve never yet had the guts to comment there. Like the best lovers, it scares, amuses and stimulates me all at the same time.)

In other news, we’ve been watching the HBO series Carnivale on DVD. I’m a great movie lover, but in many ways I prefer series, because they get the chance to really develop complex characters and plot lines. Deadwood is probably one of my favourite entertainment experiences ever (though to be fair, I’ve had a bit of a thing for Ian McShane ever since Lovejoy). Carnivale hooked me in pretty quickly with its nasty 1930s travelling show aesthetic (reminds me of all those sinister small-town ‘museums’ we used to drive past on our trips to South Carolina or Florida when I was a kid). I love all the allusions to Gnosticism and Templar myths (cheesy as they may be - though not quite to Dan Brown proportions). But overall, this series is not quite doing it for me at the moment. It’s almost like the writers have tried to cram too much mystical weirdness in there, at the expense of a really strong central narrative drive.

So, this was a bit of a random catch-all, just to let you know I’m still here. I can’t promise to be a better poster in future, because I know I’m the kind of person who tends to be totally passionate about things for a brief period of time, and then entirely loses interest. It’s terribly flighty, but at this point in my life, I’ve accepted that it's who I am. I just make the most of the passion when it strikes. Thanks to all of you who’ve still been commenting, even on the old posts. I’m still reading your blogs, and I’ll be back to commenting soon.

Cross-dressing and other curiosities

This past weekend, we Wellingtonians hosted our round of the IRB international rugby Sevens competition. This is a huge event for the city and brings a massive influx of players and spectators from around the world. The tournament runs from Friday afternoon through to Saturday evening, but the town is basically en fête for days beforehand. Lots of locals take Friday off work (or simply fail to return after lunch). By 9am Friday morning, the pubs I passed on my way to work were all cranking and hoards of costumed fans were already spilling out into the streets of the CBD.

The costume thing has become a distinctive feature of the Wellington event. It started with a few groups of hardcore fans dressing up the first year, but now literally thousands of people dress up - perhaps as an unspoken alternative to the fun of Halloween, which we don’t really do in this country. The costumes seem to get more spectacular every year, and often show a good deal of creativity, planning and effort. This year’s offerings included a bunch of guys dressed as the components of a sandwich (two slices of bread, ham, tomato, cheese and an egg), and a massive bunch who came dressed as the 101 Dalmatians (yes, there were actually 101 of them).

What always fascinates me, though, is the number of guys for whom getting into costume is license to get into drag. This certainly taps into the carnivalesque nature of the event, as it creates an opening for symbolic transgression of gender roles and social order. I’m sure the guys heading to the rugby in their mini skirts and high heels weren’t thinking about this, but it’s fascinating to consider them as modern actors in a very old communal play. This form of ritualised inversion helps social groups ‘let off steam’ by symbolically testing the limits of communal values without actually breaking those barriers. In sixteenth century France, these young men might have dressed as kings or bishops, using parody of their ‘betters’ to offer a ritualised challenge to rigid social and political hierarchies. In modern Western societies - particularly one like New Zealand, where class boundaries are quite blurred and permeable - gender remains as a very visible stratifying system by which our social roles and behaviour get ordered.

It’s interesting that in this society, at least, a woman dressing like a man is no longer considered transgressive at all (except, perhaps, by my mother). In fact, according to the doyennes of fashion in New York and Paris, every few years it becomes positively the height of style. But going the other way is still taboo except in circumstances like the sevens tournament or fancy dress parties. I’m no sociologist but I’m sure there is a hugely complex web of factors contributing to this state. As a medievalist, though, I'm prompted to speculate about the notion from Aristotelian natural philosophy that things can move from a state of lesser to greater perfection (in medieval terms, from female to male) but not the other way around. Thus, female saints cross-dressing as males became a pretty standard trope in medieval hagiography. In these narratives, when a woman dressed as a man and, by implication, took on manly virtues, it became one sign of sanctity. But I can’t think of any examples going the other way, nor can I imagine that given the general medieval worldview on gender and natural order, a cross-dressed man could have been seen as anything other than dangerously transgressive. Anyone know of any examples to the contrary?

Here’s my favourite Sevens costume (entirely gender-neutral, unless you consider filling the chilly bin with beer is a man’s job) -

Seven things...

Having been given the hard word by Good (Enough) Woman, and with no further ado, here are seven things you wouldn’t know about me from reading my blog...

1. I’m a bit of a science nerd, and have two-thirds of a BSc degree in Exercise Science. A few years ago, I considered a career change to the sports science field, but after doing some personal training I discovered I had no patience for lazy whiners the clients.

2. Though I’m currently owned by two cats, I’ve also had dogs in the past. I always snort disdainfully at those clueless dog-owners on television programmes like It’s Me or the Dog, and say things like “I would never have allowed my dogs to behave like that!” But the truth is that one of them, in particular, was a right little scallywag despite his many obedience club certificates. My son once had to go to school and tell the teacher that yes, the dog really had eaten his homework.

3. I used to be a kickass belly dancer. I still think that my regular dancing gigs at private functions and at the local Turkish restaurant were the easiest dosh I ever made (and always in cold, hard cash).

4. I’m anxious about climate change but at the same time, I can’t shake my penchant for classic American muscle cars. I’ve owned various cars over the years (mostly squeaky Japanese sports cars) but the darling of them all was a royal blue 1965 Ford Mustang.

5. Like GEW, I’m a headbanger from way back. The first record I ever bought with my own money (yes, it was all vinyl back then kiddies!) was AC/DC’s Back in Black (and it’s still on my iPod today). Generally, I preferred the dirty and vaguely menacing products of Britain’s industrial wastelands (Black Sabbath, Judas Priest) to the shiny LA hair bands. Van Halen excepted.

6. The first time I went to university (straight out of school), I majored in Anthropology and Religious Studies. I had no clue what I wanted to do with a degree and picked these subjects mainly because they sounded interesting and my friends were doing them.

7. I’m a dreadful hoarder of books and papers, and also very lazy about tidying. This lethal combination means that my study is now so stuffed with crap, I can barely get in the door. However, instead of clearing it out and organising it, I’ve simply moved all my work-in-progress piles to the dining room table.

ETA: Oh wait. You might have guessed about number 5 from reading this post.

Sod the resolutions

For many reasons, I am not a great fan of the New Year holiday. Not the least of these reasons is the many New Year's days I've spent nursing wicked hangovers and vowing never to drink again. I managed to avoid that particular trap this year, and I also managed to avoid making any New Year's resolutions, which I know from past experience that I'd probably break within a month.

Another reason I don't like New Year is the accompanying deluge of advertising from Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and just about every gym in town, trying to convince us to part with our cash in pursuit of some mythical 'ideal self' that we could finally attain this year if only we'd just try that little bit harder. Now, I'm not against fitness or healthy eating per se (in fact, I've been known to indulge in these things myself from time to time). What bugs me is the blatant targeting of all this 'New year new you!' self-improvement crap at women, and the insidious ways women's perfectly normal human imperfections are used as the ammunition to generate guilt, fear and ultimately - of course - product sales.

I could write a very long and humourless rant on this topic, but I think this hilarious clip from That Mitchell and Webb Look really says it all.

Beaver, or a little mystery solved

Ah, I love it when I find the answer to one of the mysteries of modern life in the Middle Ages.

This happened to me recently in relation to an ad from this series for a new brand of tampons. It shows a young woman spending the day with a cute furry beaver, buying it treats and, presumably, sharing girly secrets. The punch line is “You only have one, so look after it.” I was watching a movie with some friends when the ad ran, and it sparked a lively debate over where and how the word ‘beaver’ as a synonym for vagina could possibly have originated*. Theories ran from the mundane (“Um, they’re both furry?”) to the more bizarre. (I wondered if there might be some connection between the beaver’s giant teeth and the mythical vagina dentata, but clearly I watch too many B-grade horror flicks.)

A few days later I was reading Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero’s Premodern Sexualities (at the hairdressers. Hint: If you are one of those people who would rather read than make banal chitchat with the hairdresser, take something like this along with you. I promise you will not get asked any more than a single question about it.) Anyway, I was up to Elizabeth Pittenger’s chapter “Explicit Ink”, which examines the connections between sexuality and Latin grammar in Alain de Lille’s twelfth century classic De planctu Naturae (The Complaint of Nature), and I experienced a little thrill of discovery when I came across this passage:

“Apocope [a Latin term meaning to lop off the end of words] serves as a figure…more curiously, for the beaver’s habit of chewing off its own genitals (Pr. 1, 103). The image is generated from the pun of the signifier “castor,” “beaver,” and its proximity to castration.” (p. 234).

Apparently, this whole ‘beaver = castration’ pun was considered the height of wit amongst later medieval Latinists, and what could be more symbolic of the feminine than losing your balls? I have no idea whether this really is the derivation of our modern slang term, but it’s better than any of the ideas my friends and I came up with. If you have a more convincing explanation, I’d like to hear it. (Really, I would! I’ve always been fascinated by the history of slang terms and argot.)

Always reliable on subjects like this, Got Medieval has more bizarre medieval beaver lore here.

* Is this a UK/Australian/New Zealand term? Or do North Americans use it too?

Image: A beaver castrating itself, from a mid-10th century Byzantine materia medica (Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.652).

(Also, apologies for the disconcerting change of font styles in this post. Obviously, Blogger is not liking me at the moment but I am in no mood to wrestle with the stupid HTML tags.)

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.

History and fiction: The good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain dull

Now that my university coursework is over for this year, I’m planning to spend some time over the summer doing some creative writing. Yes, I am one of those students of history who also harbours a secret longing to write historical fiction. Medieval mystery/crime fiction, to be exact. (I confess, I’m a walking cliché.) I have a few chapters written and a vague plot outline but I don’t really expect to produce anything as substantial as a complete first draft any time soon. For me, fiction writing is primarily a form of relaxation, a way of escaping the constraints and conventions of the academic and business writing that consumes so much of my time. (This blog is another such outlet, where the rules don’t apply.)

Having said that, I do take my fiction writing seriously in the sense that I’m aware of, and try to avoid, most of the dreadful clangers discussed so passionately here. Many historians find historical fiction hard to read (or watch) not necessarily because the authors may bend the facts a bit to suit their plot, but because of their tendency to have their 14th or 16th or 18th century characters act, think, and believe in thoroughly 21st century modes. Thus, you get 14th century serving wenches espousing the values of third-wave feminism and 16th century atheists who declare their rational faith in science instead of God. (The renowned French historian Lucien Febvre wrote a fascinating and very readable book, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, in which he argued that 16th century French language did not contain the words or constructs - as he put it, ‘l’outillage mentale’ - to even *think* an idea like atheism as we know it today.)

Personally, I don't mind a bit of anachronism in my historical fiction, whether literary or cinematic, provided it's well-written or well-acted and, as Maximus said, I am entertained. Topping my list of execrable historical films is Kingdom of Heaven. On paper (and barring Orlando Bloom), this film had all the elements to make for top-notch cinema. Ridley Scott, crusading knights, Saladin, a leprous king and dirty dynastic dealings over a disputed crown (Ha! I could have said ‘diadem’ there, but enough alliteration for one day)… even if you took no liberties at all with the historical record you’d have a rollicking story. I just don’t understand how it could turn out so absolutely lifeless. Poor old Jeremy Irons spent most of the movie looking like he wished he were anywhere else. Running a close second is Alexander, although it must be said that this film at least had some unintentional humour value. I laughed out loud at Colin Farrell’s appalling bleach job, which made him look like a regular at Hair Jude in Levin. And why on earth did everyone have fake Irish accents? It was like something out of Monty Python.

On the positive side of the ledger I put The Name of the Rose, which manages to pull off an almost impossible mélange of papal and royal intrigue, Aristotelian science versus ‘dark ages’ superstition, apocalyptic prophecies, witchcraft, heresy, demonic possession and a visit from celebrity Inquisitor Bernardo Gui. Oh, and there are a bunch of gruesome murders to be solved by Sean Connery, playing the kind of monk one perhaps wishes hadn’t taken a vow of celibacy. And from the land of the small screen comes my current Sunday night indulgence, The Tudors. I’m not sure how historically accurate this series is (any Tudor scholars out there care to weigh in on this?), but the extremely high production values and the quality of the writing and acting lift it out of the usual run of historico-romantic television schmaltz.

Speaking of schmaltz, I’ve had a kind of hankering lately to watch Shogun again, although I suspect my present self would probably be aghast at it’s mixture of Anglo-centric superiority and rampant orientalism. Whereas my past self was too busy being dazzled by Richard Chamberlain’s samurai swashbuckling. Ah, the early 80s, when Richard Chamberlain reigned as indisputable king of the historical mini-series. Actually, that must have been a pretty new television genre back then. Anyone know what the first historical mini-series was? My memories reach back as far as the mid-70s television phenomenon that was Roots, but was there anything before that?

Anyway, back to my obsession with The Tudors. I'm watching the third series and I’m liking the way the writers have managed to incorporate the complexities of European politics and religious upheaval during this period, instead of just doing the standard romanticised 'six wives' story. They’re not shying away from showing Henry VIII's sociopathic bullying and his anxieties about failing to measure up to François Ier in the Renaissance prince stakes, either. Also, without suddenly making Henry wear a fat suit or start dribbling, the director has managed to convey his increasing dissipation and hint at the horrors to come (which can't be easy for the crew, given Henry is played by the rather dishy Jonathan Rhys Meyers).

Incidentally, I’m no fan of the psychohistory (that is, seeking the answers to questions about complex historical change in the personality quirks of so-called ‘great men’), but out of curiosity I looked up ‘sociopath’ and found these amongst the signs listed in the DSM. If the shoe fits, Henry…

1. Inability to make or keep friends, or maintain relationships such as marriage - check. (In no small part because he keeps having his nearest and dearest executed.)
2. Apparent lack of remorse or empathy; inability to care about hurting others - check. (See under 1, above.)
3. Impulsivity and/or recklessness - check. (“Have you got me my divorce yet? Screw the pope, let’s make ME head of the Church of England!”)
4. Poor behavioural controls — expressions of irritability, annoyance, impatience, threats, aggression, and verbal abuse; inadequate control of anger and temper - Uh, check, check, check, check and check.
5. Narcissism, elevated self-appraisal or a sense of extreme entitlement -check. (But I’m inclined to give him a pass on this one. He is King of England, after all…)
6. Tendency to violate the boundaries and rights of others - check. (See under 1, above. See also, ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’.)

Francophilia: Asterix in Paris

Two of my favourite French cultural icons are being brought together with an exhibition of Asterix and friends at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. The show, appropriately, is being housed in the museum’s frigidarium, a part of the building that has survived since the Romans ran Gaul.

In the typically irreverent style of Asterix’s creators Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny, the show features some great cartoon parodies of classic artworks.

I love this version of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV -


And here is their take on Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, with a fish (what, no roast boar?!) standing in for the human corpse -


It’s interesting to hear how Uderzo and Goscinny incorporated historical research into their artistic process. The exhibition’s curator Emmanuelle Héran says that ‘while neither spoke Latin (they relied on dictionaries for quotations) and weren’t experts on Roman or Gaulish history, they did plenty of school-book research. The exhibition shows them devouring Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars and you can see notes Goscinny scribbled in biro on pieces of exercise book paper as preparation for Asterix and the Olympic Games. “No pine trees, cypresses” […] “From 776 B.C. the Games are held for 5 days between the end of June and the first days of September”’.

Apparently, historians were sometimes distressed by their gleeful anachronisms. (I can just imagine the kind of wizened carrot-up-his-bum scholar that would take issue with Asterix. It’s a cartoon, people.) Luckily, Goscinny and Uderzo were more interested in having a laugh than providing accurate depictions of the past. Otherwise, we might never have witnessed the joyous concurrence of a 16th century square-rigged pirate ship and a Viking longboat.

Strangely, while I enjoy reading the Asterix cartoons in French, I think they’re actually funnier in English. I don’t know, maybe the English language is more suited to puns and word play. For instance, the drug reference makes Getafix a much wittier name for a druidic pharmacologist than the original Panoramix. And isn't Cacophonix a more suitable moniker for the no-talent Bard than the French Assurancetourix (which sounds like rental car insurance)?

In French class last term, my classmates and I could get away with drinking wine and waffling about movies, rugby and what we did over the weekend. This term, we have to read French novels and come to class prepared with lots of intelligent things to say about them whilst exhibiting the ability to ‘think in French’. At the moment, I’m leavening my reading of Les Liaisons Dangereuses with liberal doses of Asterix en Hispanie (but don’t tell my teacher).

Torture museums and public history

When I posted recently on the use of scold’s bridle in early modern England, a number of you commented that you felt as chilled as I did when contemplating the role these devices played in the brutal enforcement of gender and class order. Several of you also mentioned you had seen these devices in museums in the UK and Europe, and that set me off on another train of thought.

On the one hand, it’s essential that museums, as educators and interpreters of public history, tell the full story about the past even when it’s unpalatable for the tourists. But on the other hand, I can’t help but be disturbed by the gruesome voyeurism and the titillation that is sometimes enabled (and even promoted) by museums. It seems that as cash-strapped museums struggle to make themselves more appealing to the tourists, the temptation to go for the sensational in the quest to make a buck may just be getting to be too much for some of them.

Something like the London Dungeon is probably an extreme example that, judging by the way it promotes itself, happily blurs the line between museum and ghoulish entertainment. The Dungeon urges schools to “Put aside the textbooks, bring the past to life and give your class a history lesson to remember with a visit to the Dungeons! … Our teams of live actors blend carefully researched historical fact with outstanding special effects to provide your class with an exciting, educational and unforgettable journey into the depths of history that is, above all, seriously scary fun!” Not only that, but with the Dungeons Resource Pack, teachers can “Take history's horrible bits back to your classroom and allow your pupils to build on their new found knowledge and enthusiasm. …Combine the Dungeons' usual dose of interactive fun and gore with national curriculum topics of study.”

The London Dungeon’s shtick promotes a vicarious experience of London’s ‘dark underbelly’, complete with the usual relish in displaying medieval instruments of torture and recounting the ‘fun history’ of sexual sadists like Jack the Ripper*. As another example, the organisers of this major touring exhibition of historical torture devices don’t baulk at promoting the titillation factor, promising, “Students too, will have the chance to satisfy their curiosity on … Tortura’s more flashy and fleshy attraction.” Can you imagine if this same sensibility - or rather lack of it - was applied to museum representations of more recent history? Say, Cambodia’s Killing Fields or Srebrenica? No? So why does it seem perfectly acceptable to make slick ‘multimedia entertainment’ out of it just because the victims and perpetrators lived in the ‘distant’ past?

I hate seeing topics like the European witchcraft persecutions and the Inquisition treated in ways that cynically exploit our seemingly insatiable desire for images of violence and torture as entertainment (images that are often sexualised in highly problematic ways)**. I certainly don’t believe museums should avoid or sanitise topics like this. But whether they succeed in making people think more deeply - both about the past and the present - or merely give passive viewers a cheap thrill depends very much on how things are presented. Put into their wider social, political and cultural context, such subjects can be powerful prompts to question the forces that shape individual lives and wider society, both historically and in our own time. But too often, these types of exhibits never rise above gratuitous displays of torture implements, presented shorn of all context and achieving little but to elicit gasps of voyeuristic horror.

As museums begin to utilise new technologies to make their exhibits more interactive and engaging (read, more effective at competing for the tourist dollar), I think this is going to become a much more sensitive issue. When you replace dusty old glass cases and typewritten index cards with fully sensory, 3D experiences, the line between education and entertainment is bound to get even more blurred. I think that is going to make it even trickier for museums to deal appropriately with the dark side of history.

** As an aside, Judith Walkowitz’s The City of Dreadful Delight does a fine job of locating the Jack the Ripper episode within its much broader and more complex historical and cultural context of class conflict, sexual politics, racism and the role of the media in Victorian England. It’s a scholarly work (careful footnoting of sources, full bibliography etc.) but Walkowitz’s clear and dynamic writing style also makes it very readable for the layperson.

** Do a Google image search on ‘inquisition museum’. I rest my case.

Women, know your limits!

From The New York Times comes one of the few half-decent analyses of a recent study showing that women are less happy than men and that our unhappiness has been steadily increasing since the 1970s. It may be no surprise to you to hear that conservative pundits are gleefully using said study to ‘prove’ women are unhappier because of feminism. No indeed, it’s not that we’re unhappy because we still have to put up with crap like this. It’s because getting the vote has cruelly raised our expectations beyond our capabilities, and now we aspire to ridiculous things like having fair access to education and equal pay for equal work. If we’d just heed biology’s dictates and go back to having babies and keeping house like we’re designed to, we’d all be blissful.

This subject would usually trigger a great long rant from me, but luckily for you I have a final exam to get to (Advanced Historiography - one question, three hours – should be fun). So instead, I’ll leave you to enjoy this documentary, er, I mean, comedy gem.

Could 'Wolf Hall' be historical fiction that works?

I’m chuffed Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker prize for her latest novel Wolf Hall. The book is described as a “Tudor corridors-of-power saga” that “turns the historical figure of Thomas Cromwell — Henry VIII's shadowy political fixer — into a compelling, complex literary hero.” It comes hard on the heels of the saucy television series The Tudors, high on of my list of must-watch television indulgences. In this show, everyone is gorgeous (and clean!), and even pious saint-to-be Sir Thomas More is a brooding hottie in a hair shirt and velvet breeches.

I haven’t read Wolf Hall yet, but it’s on my pile of books for the summer holidays. I know many historians find it painful to read historical novels, probably because the mantras we’ve learned about reliability of evidence and avoiding anachronism at all costs are so deeply ingrained. I’ve been interested in history since I was a child, and I’ve always enjoyed reading historical whodunits by the likes of Paul Doherty and Ellis Peters, but even I find I’m much more critical of historical fiction than I used to be.

That said, if anyone can make this work, Mantel can. She has long been one of my favourite authors, with an incredible ability to really get inside your head and make you experience being her characters. In my opinion, Beyond Black is her best book It’s about a psychic who is stalked by abusive ghosts from her childhood as she works the seedy pubs and halls of a bleakly suburban post-Thatcher England, and it manages to be poignant, funny and terrifying all at the same time. Beyond Black is one of those rare stories that linger and haunt you long after you’ve turned the last page.

But much as I love Mantel’s writing, I was more than a bit peeved by this weird opinion piece, in which she sets up a false comparison between historians and historical novelists. She obviously has little respect for and less understanding of what historians actually do and how they work, saying:

“The past is not dead ground, and to traverse it is not a sterile exercise. History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. The most scrupulous historian is an unreliable narrator; he brings to the enterprise the biases of his training and the vagaries of his personal temperament, and he is often obliged, in order to make his name, to murder his forefathers by coming up with a different take on events from the one that held sway when he himself learned the discipline; he must make the old new, because his department's academic standing depends on it.”

This makes the historical profession sound like it’s nothing more than the idiosyncratic pursuit of personal follies and academic rivalries. The way Mantel puts it, writing history is basically the same as writing fiction, though perhaps with a bit more focus on the collection of dull old ‘facts’ and less conjecture about people’s personal feelings.

I can understand that Mantel is probably fed up to the back teeth with pedantic critics pointing out errors or distortions of fact in her novels. But seriously folks, there's a whole lot more to writing history than this!

History played for laughs

My chickens are coming home to roost this week as I’m coming to realise how much I have to get done by early September. For school, that includes two research essays and a seminar presentation, and for work a major website project for which I am writing all the content and coordinating the design and development teams (herding cats). Oh, and I need to fit a couple of weeks of skiing in there, too. And it’s nearly the END of JUNE! So it was either turn to drink or find a little light relief.

An article this week on the Blackadder series – “the most successful historical television sitcom yet conceived” – reminded me how much this show made me laugh when it first came out. Here’s a scene from one of my favourite episodes in which, after the murder of Thomas Becket, the king has made his venal and slithering son Prince Edmund Blackadder the Archbishop of Canterbury. Blackadder and his henchmen immediately set about figuring out how they can make some cash out of the gig, and I think their take on the booming late medieval trade in indulgences and false relics would have brought a smile to Geoffrey Chaucer’s lips.

'Twilight'? No fangs!

Well, that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

How can the undead be so unutterably dull? Perhaps hanging around in the Pacific Northwest for a couple of hundred years bleaches you of all personality, as well as of skin colour. But it wasn’t the execrable acting, the lousy pacing or the goofy special effects that bugged me the most about this film. In fact, the cheapo effects actually made for some pretty funny moments, including lead vampire dude speed-running on the end of a cable that made him look like a puppet escapee from Team America.

What bothered me most was a barely hidden subtext about the dangers of female sexuality, although I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me as the author is apparently a big-time God-botherer. For what feels like hours, the two protagonists brood at each other and force themselves to resist temptation. Naturally, the human female is weaker and is all ‘damn the torpedoes, let’s go for it’, and vampire-bloke proves his superiority by manfully resisting her. The wages of sin in this case is not just death, but un-death (and losing your mortal soul along with your purity ring). This subtext is even less subtle on the book, which has cover art depicting a woman’s hands hold a shiny red apple. Yes, Eve, we all know what that means.

The other thing that disturbed me was when vampire-dude admitted he’d been hanging out in his girlfriend’s bedroom every night watching her sleep. She seems to think this is sweet. I think it’s stalking. When this sort of creepy male behaviour is portrayed to millions of adolescent girls as normal and even desirable, it’s no wonder they have problems reporting harassment and stalking until things get extreme.

A wicked winter storm is howling through here this evening, so I think I’ll expunge Twilight from my brain with a dose of real vampire action: Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic Dracula, washed down with an appropriately rich, dark and spicy Peter Lehmann shiraz.