"The king's name is a tower of strength": Richard III's (Possible) Bones, Roundup

Detail from a late 16th century painting
of Richard III, artist unknown.

.
"Richard III dig: Results expected in January," BBC, November 19, 2012

The remains were found underneath a Leicester car park on the former site of the Greyfriars church in September.

Prof Lynn Foxhall, from the University of Leicester, said the team has got to be sure of its facts before it confirmed whether it was the monarch.>>>

Anthony Faiola, "Unverified remains dig up the twisted legacy of England’s Richard III," Washington Post, November 24, 2012

Underneath a drab parking lot 90 miles northwest of London, archaeologists have unearthed what may become one of this nation’s finds of the century — half-a-millennium-old bones thought to be the remains of the long-lost monarch. But if the discovery has touched off a feverish round of DNA tests against his closest living descendants, it has also lurched to the surface a series of burning questions in a country where even arcane points of history are disputed with the gusto of modern-day politics.>>>

"History could be rewritten if remains of Richard III have been discovered, say Leicester historians," University of Leicester News and Events, November 9, 2012

For Professor Norman Housley and Dr Andrew Hopper of our School of Historical Studies, if the remains found by the University of Leicester are Richard III's, it would rewrite history by bringing closure to the fate of the mysterious king. In addition, by observing that Richard's deformity may have been a result of scoliosis, the idea of him being a 'hunchback' will fade away.>>>

Martin Hickes, "Should Richard III - the last Yorkist king - be reburied in Yorkshire?" Guardian, September 18, 2012

Two major organisations which have exhaustively researched and promoted the 'true' name and history of Richard, which they assert is at odds with the traditional Shakespearean 'evil hunchback' depiction, are expecting much debate at their forthcoming conferences.>>>

Books & Culture Podcast on Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

Last week over at the Books & Culture site John Wilson and Stan Guthrie did a podcast on Historically Speaking.  They discuss the new issue and highlight some of the contents.  Wilson praises our forum on Brad Gregory's new book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). (Alexandra Walsham, Bruce Gordon, Carlos Eire, and Euan Cameron offered comments.) Wilson sees the book as "one of the most interesting, provocative, learned works of history that I've read in the last several years and it's good to see that Historically Speaking is devoting attention to it." 

Gregory introduces his lead piece to the forum as follows:

The Unintended Reformation is a work of historical analysis that takes the present as its point of departure. . . . While disclaiming comprehensiveness, the book aims to be as explanatorily powerful as possible while making as few theoretical and methodological assumptions as necessary. Secondarily, the book addresses some major contemporary concerns based on its historical analysis. These remarks will speak mostly to the first ambition and briefly to the second.

I endeavor in The Unintended Reformation to answer a basic but very big question: How did contemporary ideological and institutional realities in North America and Europe come to be as they are? The book intends to characterize these realities matter-of-factly. Ideologically, they include an open-ended range of secular and religious truth claims made by individuals about matters pertaining to human meaning, morality, purpose, and priorities, including some religious truth claims articulated with great intellectual sophistication by theologians and philosophers of religion. Insofar as the present is the product of the past, any adequate history must be able to account for all these claims. The modern liberal institutions variously characteristic of all contemporary Western states permit this ideological heterogeneity through the legal and political protection of individual citizens to believe and live as they please so long as they obey established laws.   

Read more of the forum and the rest of the issue at Project Muse, or subscribe to the print version today.

Singing the News in 18th-Century Paris: An Interview with Robert Darnton

Randall Stephens

Over a month ago I interviewed Robert Darnton at this blog on the ongoing discussions about a Digital Public Library of America. Of course, in addition to being a spokesperson for a national digital library and director of Harvard libraries, he is also an accomplished historian. He's written or edited a variety of books, including The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979); The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 1984); Berlin Journal, 1989-1990 (W. W. Norton, 1991); The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (W. W. Norton, 1995); and The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). His most recent book, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), examines how songs sung on 18th-century Paris streets "provided a running commentary on public affairs . . . during a period of rising discontent. He uncovers a complex communication network, illuminating the way information circulated in a semi-literate society."*

I spoke with Darnton back in April about his research for the book, the surprising story he found, and the importance of oral sources for the study of history. (Thanks to Carissa Schutz, my admin assistant for transcribing the interview.)

Stephens: In Poetry and the Police you write about the transfer of information and the spread of news and gossip in the 18th century. What do historians know about literacy in France during this age?

Robert Dartnon: Yes, of course, it’s very difficult to know exactly what the literacy rates were 250 years ago, we have dubious sources, notarial archives, registers of people signing baptisms and marriage, that sort of thing. On the whole we have rough estimates. Urban France was more literate than rural France. It turns out that northern France was more literate than southern France, and so on. But the fact is that this was a society where people were largely illiterate, and those who could read often had only a primitive capacity to do so.

So, think of Paris around 1750. How did people know the news? How do they get information about current events? Well, they did so through oral means. There are certain places where they’d go to gossip about what was actually happening. And there were no newspapers in the modern sense of the word. The Gazette de France was heavily censored. All periodical literature actually was censored. So you could say for printed versions of the news, it hardly existed.

What I argue in this book is that they found out about current events through oral exchanges and in particular through songs. Paris was full of street singers, many were beggars, they had fiddles. They would set up shops, so to speak, at a street corner, fiddle away and ball out a song. The songs that they sung were news essentially. That is to say Parisians were improvising new words to old tunes every day. It’s astonishing what the production was. And it wasn’t terribly difficult to compose these songs. They were very simple ballads mostly. There’s some intrigue in the government, or the king has a new mistress, or the price of bread is shooting up, or it might just be the weather. People were discussing this in music through new verses to old tunes. And I came upon a wonderful run in the archives of manuscript, little sheets of paper, on which people jotted down the new verses and then carried them around in their pockets, traded them for other bits of paper, on which there were other verses.

Stephens: It was like an underground press in a way?

Darnton: It was like an underground press, but the fascinating thing is that they were then sung. Not just by the beggar and then street singers, but by ordinary people in market places, sometimes in cafes, often in public gardens. I mean, Paris was full of song. And of course historians haven’t paid much attention to this because oral information doesn’t get recorded by and large. What I did was to try and figure out what the messages were so I went through vast collections, hundreds and hundreds of these songs and I have statistical estimates of how many there were. I could prove, for example, that there were at least three new songs composed every week around 1750, but that’s just from the evidence that has survived in the archives. I would say that we’ve got a dozen new songs almost every day being composed.

The question then is, what did they sound like? Because the music, the tunes, could’ve actually reflected the meaning of these songs and when you see the references to them in the archives, there are scrapbooks called Chansonnier that you can go through. This notes “sung to the tune of” and name of a tune that I, at least, had never heard of such as “La Béquille du père Barnabas,” or, in English, “The Crutch of Father Barnabas.” Well no one has ever heard of that tune I think today. And then I found that in the music department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, they have keys to the tunes. So I can look up “The Crutch of Father Barnabas” and there I get the musical annotation.

A friend of mine Hélène Delavault is a cabaret singer in Paris and she agreed to record the songs. Therefore, the book I wrote has the texts of a dozen of these songs as examples of what was actually flowing through the streets of Paris around 1750. The reader can read the original French and then my translation of it and at the same time tune in to Hélène Delavault recording online which is available free of charge. (Listen to them here.)

Stephens: That’s available on the Harvard University Press website?

Darnton: That’s right. There’s a Harvard Univ. Press website but it’s open access, it’s free, and it’s a way of , so to speak, hearing the past. I mean, recovering sounds from the past. Not perfectly because this cabaret performer Hélène Delavault has quite a beautiful voice actually and the street singers were pretty coarse, but still you can get at the way tunes carried meanings, which were largely political.

In fact in April in 1749 the government fell. There was a big political crisis and all the contemporaries agreed about the cause of the crisis. In one word: songs. It sounds strange, and that’s a little too simple, but in fact there’s lots of evidence that the government fell because of a particular intrigue that took the form of a nasty song about the king and Madame Pompadour. So there’s no question that songs could actually be a factor in political crisis.

Stephens: Could royal authorities do anything about that? Could they squelch the singers? Was there an official attempt to do so?

Darnton: There was, yes, because this was such a powerful political force that the royal authorities paid attention to it. And actually I begin the book with a sort of detective story because the head of the Parisian police received an order from the top person in the government: Find me the author of the song that begins with, and they just had the first line: “Monstre dont la noire furie” (Monster whose black fury). That’s all they knew. The monster was Louis XV. They had to somehow find the author to this song. So they had spies in cafes and they fanned out and eventually one of the spies actually found a student who had recited this song/poem and he is arrested through a kind of ambush. It’s very amusing to see how they staged the arrest, because they didn’t want the word to spread that they were cracking down. They wanted to find accomplices, other people who were connected. So his name was François Bonis. He was interrogated in the Bastille. He said where he got the song. That person was arrested; so A got it from B, B got it from C, C got it from D, then D says “yup, I got it from E,” but meanwhile I got three other songs or poems from X, Y, and Z. And they’re all arrested. And they got poems and songs from other people so soon the police were trailing six poems and songs through overall networks of diffusion in Paris. And you can map the way the songs work into Parisian society with tremendous precision. So it’s possible, thanks to this police force, to actually do a very serious sociological study of oral diffusion.

Stephens: It sounds like one of the lessons of this is that even if a state pursues censorship, there will be ways that people will communicate, gossip with one another.

Darnton: Yes that’s one of the things I find fascinating because the state around 1750 could definitely control the printed word. If gossip escapes from their control, they crack down on it. They understand that it’s important, but they can’t stop it. So they really do have spies in all of the major cafes. In a separate run of documents I found reports of police spies that are written in dialogue. Now whether the dialogue is perfectly accurate, I don’t know. In the document X says to Y and Y responds to X, and you can reproduce the dialogue that occurred there according to the police spies. Now I don’t know if the spies touched up things in order to ingratiate themselves to their superiors. Police archives have to be read with a lot of skepticism, but still you can find the subjects that are being discussed and it’s clear that the state is very concerned about oral means of diffusion, even though this is in principle an absolute monarchy.

It’s a fascinating moment in which you see an old form of absolutism going back to Louis XIV and the 17th century confronted with a growing sense of participation in public affairs, if only by discussion. So you could say this is an example of Jürgen Habermas’s work on the public sphere. I’m not totally convinced by Habermas’ thesis, although I think it’s an important one. Certainly it is possible to reconstruct the way political acts and ideas, public affairs are being discussed and disseminated throughout a very large public.

Stephens: And this happens at a specific point in western history when this was possible? It sounds like it was almost a transitional point before the press has more freedom and influence.

Dartnon: That’s right I think this does indeed represent an intermediate phase. It’s quite a long phase. How can you precisely date it? But certainly around 1750 in big cities, even smaller cities, but especially Paris, there’s a huge interest in public affairs. It often accompanies war so from 1740 - 48 you’ve got the War of the Austrian Succession and then 1756 - 63 the Seven Years War. People follow the war and they want information. But you could get it somewhat from the official newspaper, especially when there were victories. But when things go badly you get it by going to certain benches in the Luxembourg Gardens where gossips gather. There’s a tree in the garden of the Palais-Royal called the Tree of Cracow and everyone who was interested in what was really happening would go to this tree where people were just gossiping about politics nonstop. It reached such a level that some foreign ambassadors actually sent servants to plant gossip or to pick it up because people wanted to know what was happening. And you couldn’t do this through the printed word.

Stephens: It seems too that there’d be other examples of this in other cities. I don’t know how far back the Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park dates.

Darnton: It is fascinating to compare London and Paris. It’s not just Hyde Park but the London coffee houses and the Parisian cafés were doing very similar things. But of course working class people didn’t go to cafes so much. They went to drinking establishments, guinguettes some of them are called, which are different in character but that didn’t stop them from gossiping.

How We View the Dead

Randall J. Stephens

Were they like us? Historians and non-historians often ask that question about the people of the past. Certainly we share less with the Hittites of ancient history than we do with the city dwellers in the early modern era. Time, space, and culture shape our relationships with the dead and with dead civilizations.

(It would be interesting to ask historians which of the following eras are most like ours: Revolutionary American, the Age of Western Exploration, Imperial Rome, late-19th Century Britain, the Han Dynasty, Mayan civilization at its apex, Viking Norway. . .)

What of the men and women of the Middle Ages? Their enchanted universe is quite different from ours. Their views about cause and effect, providence, and how the natural world works is very unlike the views most westerners have now.

Paul Freedman's review of The Axe and the Oath in the TLS ("From ordalie to ordure," 22 October 2010) traces some of these questions and concerns.

Riffing off Robert Fossier's book, Freedman says, "Despite our superiority, our lives are hemmed in by the same worries, unpredictability, limitations and even diversions as those experienced by Medieval Europeans."

Scholars must think through the contingencies of the period. "For most historians," says Freedman, "the inhabitants of this different [Medieval] world are to be regarded on their own terms rather than as either progressive originators of the modern (parliaments, universities, common law) or, backwards in their living standards and superstitions."

Historians should always cultivate a bit of sympathy and humility regarding their subjects. Long ago the New Left English historian E. P. Thompson warned against "the enormous condescension of posterity." That's still useful advice.

"I hate history": Thinking of Ways to Get the Average, History-Hating Student Interested in the Study of the Past

Randall Stephens

I'm gearing up to teach a large West in the World since 1500, civ-style class. As usual, I know there will be dozens of students enrolled who care not a fig for history and think historical knowledge is, at best, useless trivia. "I'm a business major. Why do I need to know all this?" My work is cut out for me, as it is for other professors who will be teaching similar gen-ed classes in the fall.

I like to start off course like this with a general "Why study history" lecture. We study the past to know who we are and to know how history still shapes the present, I tell them. History is also our collective memory. Just as we think it is not best for a person to have amnesia, we also think it is best for a society to have a collective memory. I also usually touch on the chief contributions historians have made to our understanding of what it means to be human. And, I spend some time looking at the very different views various historians have concerning the same events.

This year, though, I was thinking about doing something a little different. I plan to pose some general questions/head-scratchers that might get them thinking historically about why things are the way they are and why history matters. So, for example:

In 1931 the historian Carl Becker said: "If the essence of history is the memory of things said and done, then it is obvious that every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history." Do you have a family history? Do things that happened in your family in the past still shape how you interact with your mother, father, sister, brother, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles?

Show the students a map of the world. Ask: Why is it that the northern hemisphere has tended to contain the wealthiest countries in the world? What light might history shed on that development? Explain Jared Diamond's thesis.

Read them a mid-19th century law on the status of women as dependents. Ask: How do we got from that point A to point B today?

Draw a long timeline, spanning back 200,000 years, the starting point of modern humans. Ask: Why it is that only relatively recently--roughly 5,000 years ago--humans began to record their history?

The historian Mary Beard says that most people today would find the "brutality toward other human beings" in the ancient world to be abhorrent. Throughout most of human history slavery and rigid social hierarchies were taken for granted. Ask: Why do modern western societies value equality and humanitarianism?

Show students some maps from the early modern era and some from the modern era. Ask: What accounts for the fundamental differences in how cartographers drew these maps? What might history tell us about the changing perceptions those in the West and those in the East had of the world?

Quote Johann Gottfried Herder: "History is geography." Ask: Is history shaped or controlled more by geography than any other force? Why or why not?

Does history have a direction? Are we heading "somewhere"? Is society getting better? Is society getting worse? How could we know one way or the other?

Needless to say . . . I'm still thinking through these.

Innovation in the Age of Exploration

The following by Anthony Disney appears in Historically Speaking (June 2010). Recently posted to Project Muse, the full issue and this article are here.

Prince Henry of Portugal and the Sea Route to India
Anthony Disney

In 1497-98 a Portuguese fleet commanded by Vasco da Gama made one of the most momentous communications breakthroughs in global history by successfully sailing from Western Europe to India via the Cape of Good Hope. Yet Gama’s breakthrough was neither surprising nor particularly sudden, for it came as the climax of a long, cumulative process of voyaging and exploration that had been set in motion some eight or nine decades before, in the early years of the 15th century. The person long regarded as most responsible for this process was Prince Henry, third son of King John I of Portugal, generally referred to in Anglophone historiography as Henry the Navigator. Henry is traditionally considered to have had more influence on the direction of world history than any other Portuguese, and he is certainly the best-known individual from his nation who has ever lived. But now, in the early 21st century, to what extent can his illustrious reputation still be sustained?

Henry’s involvement in voyages of exploration began as a by-product of a great amphibious expedition mounted in 1415 by John I against the Moroccan port city of Ceuta. While Portuguese fishermen seeking to exploit the rich fishing grounds off North Africa and Portuguese corsairs cruising in search of Muslim shipping to prey upon had probably already gained some experience of sailing in these waters before this major expedition, it was only in its aftermath that systematic, organized Portuguese voyaging off Atlantic Africa commenced. Ceuta, located on the African side of the narrow Straits of Gibraltar, was only a short sea passage from Portugal. It was both the hub of a flourishing agricultural region, and a well-known trading center serving as a clearinghouse for exotic goods from trans-Saharan and Near East caravans. Some Portuguese merchants also saw Ceuta as a potential source of wheat, which Portugal did not produce in abundance and therefore needed to import. Nevertheless, recent historiography has tended to view the main impetus for the expedition as coming less from the mercantile sector than from the Portuguese service nobility supported by elements from within the clergy. These groups saw attacking Ceuta as an extension of Iberia’s long tradition of Reconquest—a new stage in the war against Islam. In any event, in 1415 the Portuguese duly succeeded in occupying the city, and a long and draining period of Portuguese territorial involvement in Morocco then followed.

Soon after the 1415 conquest of Ceuta, Prince Henry, who had been one of the expedition’s most active participants and who remained a dedicated proponent of Portuguese expansion in Morocco for the rest of his life, began to sponsor voyages of exploration southward along the Moroccan Atlantic coast. The common assumption that, in doing this, Henry was specifically trying to reach the Indian Ocean by sailing around the southern tip of Africa, is not borne out by the evidence. Actually, his objectives are discussed in some detail in the much-cited seventh chapter of Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s classic Crónica do descobrimento e conquista da Guiné, the main contemporary source for his voyages, where they are placed into three broad categories.2 These may be summarized as (1) an economic agenda in which the pursuit of personal material gain was paramount; (2) a political-ideological agenda with the expansion of Christendom (particularly at the expense of Islam) as its principal component; and (3) a proto-scientific agenda that included, on the one hand, acquiring more geographical knowledge, and, on the other, refining ship design and improving techniques of navigation in order to make longer ocean voyaging possible. read on>>>

What is it Good for?

Randall Stephens

Standards, standards, impact, impact. In recent years historians in the UK have had the Research Assessment Exercise to contend with. (Sorry, your publications with Yea-oh University Press and Oxfort College Press don't pass muster.) Administrators and the public also push for disciplines in the humanities to prove their "usefulness" and "impact."

"As with philosophy," writes Ann Mroz in THE, "it is hard to show history's value beyond an intellectual pursuit. Any moves to make it demonstrate 'impact' risk pushing it down the heritage trail . . ." Your knowledge of Medieval tax law will help you to . . . ? Your study of child rearing in the Elizabethan Age equips you to . . . ? Start training to become a reenactor. Polish up your English Civil War "armour." Get that pike out of the closet.

Richard Overy's April 29 essay in THE, "The Historical Present," has created a stir. He throws down the gauntlet with these words:

Historians have always generated impact of diverse and rewarding kinds, and will continue to do so without the banal imperative to demonstrate added value. There is no real division between what historians can contribute and what the public may expect, but the second of these should by no means drive the first.

Nor should short-term public policy dictate what is researched, how history is taught or the priorities of its practitioners. If fashion, fad or political priority had dictated what history produced over the past century, British intellectual and cultural life would have been deeply impoverished. Not least, the many ways in which historical approaches have invigorated and informed other disciplines would have been lost.

Over at the NYRB, Anthony Grafton worries about the results of this utilitarian calculus. England's Slow Food academy has morphed into McDonald's. "Have it your way." Scholars working in fields that administrators deem useless--paleography, early modern, and premodern history, philosophy--have landed on the chopping block. "From the accession of Margaret Thatcher onward, the pressure has risen," writes Grafton. "Universities have had to prove that they matter. . . . Budgets have shrunk, and universities have tightened their belts to fit. Now they are facing huge further cuts for three years to come—unless, as is likely, the Conservatives take over the government, in which case the knife may go even deeper."

Historians working in America, too, struggle with the burdens of constrained budgets, reduction in full-time positions, eliminated raises, and the push for "relevant" curriculum. But, if the buzz in THE is any indication, what's happening in the UK is something else. Surely, the field of history won't vanish into thin air, as Overy imagines. (More doubtful are his comments on Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, who "in her 2008 book, The Uses And Abuses of History, called on her peers to reduce their commitment to theory and to write shorter sentences. To do so would be to dumb down what history as a human science is doing." Really?) Still history across the pond may suffer much in this new climate.

Roundup: Maps through Time

Randall Stephens

What better way to learn about the past, and what people once made of the world around them, than to study maps? A few days ago I read a fascinating passage in Herodotus: "If, therefore, I judge correctly of these things, the Ionians are mistaken with respect to Egypt; but if their opinion is correct, then I will show that neither the Greeks nor the Ionians themselves know how to reckon, when they say that the whole earth consists of three divisions, Europe, Asia, and Libya; for they ought to add a fourth, the Delta of Egypt, if it be not a part either of Asia or of Libya." A wonderful picture of the world.

I post here some wonderful recent on-line articles dealing with history, cartography, and cultural context. (One piece in particular got me thinking about an iPhone app I'd like to see. How about an interactive historical, walking map of 18th-century Boston? Strolling around the city, the iPhone-toting flaneur would notice that he would be under water were he at this or that place in 1770.)

Michael Church, "The Truth about Maps: How Cartographers Distort Reality," The Independent, March 20, 2010.

As a fascinating new exhibition shows, it's not always what they put in that matters – but what they leave out

What is a map? In effect, says Peter Barber, head of maps at the British Library, a map is a lie. "Unless you have a scale of one-to-one, every map is subjective, and always will be," he explains. "You have to select what you put on it." And selection involves rejection.

Throughout history, such lies have generally served purposes which have been political, religious or philosophical rather than scientific. >>>

Shirley Dent, "Literary London on your iPhone," Guardian Books Blog, March 23, 2010

A new iPhone application which brings the capital's literary heritage to life has made me a hazard on the streets of London. >>>

Cora Lewis,"Maps and Manuscripts Illustrate an Old Worldview," Yale Daily News, March 23, 2010

Napoleon Bonaparte famously had his men re-draw the world’s map to make France larger, but he wasn’t the only historic figure who tried to alter the public’s perceptions with cartography.

“Invented Bodies: Shapely Constructs of the Early Modern,” now on view at the Whitney Humanities Center, features maps and manuscripts from the 15th through 18th centuries, depicting Europeans’ interpretations of their world — from realistic renderings to fantastical imaginings. >>>

Steven Heller, "The World as Their Canvas," New York Times, March 5, 2010

There’s nothing like sitting by the fire with a good book, except maybe sitting by the fire with a good map—or better yet, a good book about maps. I’ve noticed an upsurge in cartographic interest these days, especially for maps’ value as conceptual artwork. >>>

Michael Elliott, "A World Map Under Eastern Eyes," Time, February 25, 2010

What does China really think of the U.S.? Spend some time in the Middle Kingdom, and you'll hear both protestations of admiration and plenty of disparaging comments about the West. Such attitudes have a long history. In 1602 the imperial Chinese court learned that the inhabitants of North America were "kindly and hospitable to strangers." >>>

Mea Culpa

Lisa Clark Diller

While attending the North American Conference on British Studies last weekend, I was pretty sure I heard one of the most unexpected phrases to be uttered in such settings: “I was wrong about that.” In this case, the historian in question appeared to be attempting to end a long-term feud regarding the importance of religion in the Glorious Revolution. He explained that he had changed his mind about his characterization of the events of 1688/9 as a continuation of the Protestant Reformation.

This got me thinking: To what extent do we make it possible for historians to say they were wrong? Part of the pain of publishing is setting ideas down in print with something one might later change one’s mind about. We all know that with more research we might have to revise our ideas. But sometimes we build our reputations by making very strong claims—even creating a binary within the field, which allows scholars to join one “side” or another. Young scholars decide which side of the historiographical debate they want to be part of. These binaries make it especially hard to admit when one has been wrong.

Nuance and carefully hedged assertions don’t sell books or recruit graduate students. They also don’t play as well in the classroom. But they are often more honest. In order to build our standing within our sub-fields, do we unnecessarily go further than we should? And where and how do we admit we are wrong? Later work may demonstrate that an author has changed her mind, but in few places can she admit it in black and white. Is this just part of the temperament of those who become scholars or do the structures of the academy prevent us from undermining the edifices of our academic status?

I found Tony Claydon’s words to be the most interesting part of the NACBS last week. On the “other side” of his earlier position I, of course, welcome him to what I might humbly call the more “enlightened” view of the role of religion in 1688. But I began to think about what it might take to change my own mind in the face of the evidence. My beginning assumptions, the respect for other scholars’ whose work is similar to my own, and my ideological commitments, may often keep me from admitting that my framework for a particular problem is mistaken or slightly distorted.

What does it take to change one’s mind on that scale? How much evidence is required? I’m curious about the experience of readers. Have you had to change your mind regarding the fundamental framework of the problems in your field? Would you have to look at all the primary evidence yourself or would a compelling piece of scholarship push you in another direction? Does the personality or reputation of scholars on either side of a debate affect you at all? What are the most “famous” examples of scholars changing their minds? Do we have space for those of us who are not superstars to admit our mistakes and still be taken seriously as scholars? What should we do in these situations?

Rethinking Mary Tudor

Randall Stephens

Oh, much-maligned Mary Tudor. Forever linked to the word "bloody." A little like having "the Terrible," "the Cruel," "the Incompetent," "the Dangerously Stupid," or "the Bastard" forever fixed after one's name. Scourge of hot Protestants, Mary has not fared well with historians and other critics. In 1791 a writer in the London Review vented that Mary's wicked use of the Tower of London ranked "as bloody, as cruel, and as horrid, as any of the tales of the castle known by the name of the Bastille at Paris."

Enter Peter Marshall, who reviews four recent books on Queen Mary in the TLS. The title of his piece is particularly provocative: "Not a Real Queen? What Do Historians Have against England’s Earliest Queen Regnant – a Decisive and Clear-headed Ruler?":

England is no longer a Protestant nation, but the cultural templates of the past stubbornly resist resetting. Feminist historians have almost uniformly declined the invitation to laud the achievements of England’s earliest Queen regnant (in fact, much modern scholarship, as Judith M. Richards notes in exasperation, seems almost to proceed from the assumption that Elizabeth I was the nation’s first female ruler). Meanwhile, the judgement of the Enlightenment, in the person of David Hume, that Mary was “a weak bigoted woman, under the government of priests” has proved remarkably tenacious. It continues to characterize representations of the queen in popular culture, from Kathy Burke’s skilful cameo as a gibbering simpleton in Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film Elizabeth, to Mary’s role in a recent Discovery Channel series on “the most evil women in history”. It is revealing that three of these authors begin their books with anecdotes about the negative or sceptical reactions of friends and colleagues on being told they were writing about “Mary Tudor”. >>>

See these related reviews:

Geoffrey Moorhouse, "Burning Questions: Geoffrey Moorhouse Wonders if Mary Tudor Deserves Her Reputation for Cruelty," Guardian, 4 July 2009.

Lucy Beckett, "Cardinal Values," Spectator, 17 June 2009.

Rivals in Venice

Randall J. Stephens

Theodore K. Rabb reviews the Boston MFA exhibit—Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese: Revivals in Renaissance Venice—in the May 27 issue of the TLS. ("Old Masters

at War: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese—Great Venetian Artists, but also Great Rivals, Full of Venetian Ruthlessness")

The March 15-August 16 show is stunning and well worth the fee. It's also a fascinating window on 16th-century Venice. "Venice is the ultimate Darwinian city," Rabb remarks. "Sharp elbows were second nature to its Renaissance patricians, and throughout the society animosities and feuds were endemic. Even a distinguished man of letters and a cardinal, Pietro Bembo, lost the use of a finger in a street fight over a lawsuit." These paintings bring that colorful world to life in exquisite detail.

Rabb summarizes the exhibit:

The purpose of the remarkable exhibition Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is to elucidate this context: the competitiveness that inspired the achievements of even the greatest artists. An adroitly positioned display of fifty-four canvases convinces us that, in this respect, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese were unmistakably Venetian. What is astonishing is that this is the first exhibition to approach them in this way, despite Vasari and modern accounts such as Rona Goffen’s pioneering Renaissance Rivals (2002). We know about the protean Picasso, and his uneasy connections with Braque, Matisse and others. But the old masters? >>>

For more, read Holland Cotter's review in the NYT: "Passion of the Moment: A Triptych of Masters," NYT, 12 March 2009.

See also Rabb's recent essay "Teaching World History: Problems and Possibilities," Historically Speaking (January 2009).

The New History of Toleration

Chris Beneke

The latest issue of the William and Mary Quarterly includes a forum on Stuart Schwartz’s groundbreaking All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008), which argues that a surprisingly large proportion of ordinary people within the early modern Spanish and Portuguese empires maintained that salvation was available to a wide range of believers. Drawing on his extensive archival work on both sides of the Atlantic, Schwartz contends that these two Catholic regimes, famous for their religious exclusivity, actually harbored a substantial number of religious relativists. Schwartz’s book is distinctive in another way: its subject, he notes, “is not the history of religious toleration, by which is usually meant state or community policy, but rather of tolerance, by which I mean attitudes or sentiments.” (6)

The WMQ comments are generally positive. Lu Ann Homza does find fault with Schwartz’s heavy reliance on statements drawn from inquisitorial tribunals and suggests that when “Schwartz found over and over again the phrase that ‘each could be saved in his own law,’ we must ask whether Inquisition notaries were fitting defense testimony into rhetorical formulas.” David D. Hall sets Schwarz’s book within the new, non-linear and anti-triumphalist historiography of toleration in early modern Europe, specifically Alexandra Walsham’s Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 and Benjamin J. Kaplan’s Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Hall suggests that Schwartz’s universalist-minded subjects might be evidence of “the persistence of tensions within any strong cultural system.” Marcy Norton expresses her wish that Schwartz had given more weight to the impact of religious and ethnic diversity in prompting tolerant attitudes. And Andrew R. Murphy argues that we need to devote more attention to the “borderland between attitudes and political practices” than Schwartz does in All Can Be Saved.

As engaging as it is for specialists, this WMQ forum might seem a bit esoteric to the un-initiated. Fortunately, Murphy summarizes recent historiographical developments in his conclusion. The new literature on toleration in the early modern (Anglo-American) world, he writes, is characterized by four “corollaries”:

* Intolerance was—theoretically, conceptually, and theologically speaking—as robust as tolerance.

* Elites often had “good,” or at least comprehensible, reasons for persecuting religious dissenters.

* Toleration often resulted from the intentional plans of tolerationist elites but as an unintended consequence of actions growing out of complex motivations (economic, political, strategic).

* Toleration, when it happened, was due as much to exclusionary impulses and intolerance (separatism, anti-Catholicism) as to humanistic and skeptical ideals.

The WMQ forum on All Be Saved falls on the heels of a fascinating September 2008 conference organized by Evan Haefeli, Brendan McConville, and Owen Stanwood on “Anti-popery” in the Protestant Atlantic world from 1530 to 1850, which also offered a generally non-triumphalist and socially grounded take on the extent of early modern toleration across the Atlantic world.

Beneke's essay, "America’s Whiggish Religious Revolution: An Instance in the Progress of History," will appear in the June 2009 issue of Historically Speaking.

Religious Responses to Epidemic Disease

Randall Stephens

According to the New York Times: "Health officials continue to report mild cases of swine flu throughout the United States and worldwide. The number of deaths in Mexico that officials suspect to have been caused by the flu is 159." The NYT also features a map that tracks cases by region. Schools and private companies have laid out plans of action. Churches and mosques are urging the faithful to reconsider "several traditional observances," according to the Raleigh News & Observer. "At St. Mel Parish in Fair Oaks, Calif., congregants will be asked not to shake hands during the exchange of peace or hold hands when the community recites the Lord's Prayer. The church will not offer the Communion cup during Mass."

For some historical perspective on this coverage--and perhaps to counter the shrieking, doomsday coverage of swine flu--I post here a link to a forum we ran in Historically Speaking several months ago. In the intro to “Religious Responses to Epidemic Disease: A Roundtable,” Donald Yerxa writes:

Thanks to the seminal work of William McNeill and Alfred Crosby, historians pay much more attention to the impact disease has had in history. Historians, however, have been slower to consider the nature and variety of religious responses to epidemic disease. To help readers think about this relatively neglected topic, we invited Andrew Cunningham to comment in general terms about religion and widespread disease in the West. We also asked David Arnold and Howard Phillips to explore two specific cases outside of Europe—one from India, the other from South Africa. Then we commissioned Duane Osheim to use these essays to comment on the overall topic of religion and epidemic disease in history.

The Vital “Irrelevance” of Early Modern History

Lisa Clark Diller

I’ve been reflecting lately on my fate as someone who studies early modern history. For me personally, being an early modernist means I get to study a world with few strict borders, really big personalities, and lots of mystery. For my students, apparently, enjoyment of this era is primarily connected to obsessive attendance at Renaissance Fairs. The longer I teach, the more my undergraduates’ insistent connection of everything we study with the present day weighs on my class time, my reading, and even my research into the modern period.*

However, I’m increasingly convinced that those of us who study the pre-modern world play a crucial role within our departments and the broader profession. Part of the nature of “modernity” is that we know where history is going. The world is always becoming more mechanized, specialized, literate, committed to democracy, always on the way to the nation-states we are now divided into. Our situation in the modern period means we’re consistently looking in the past for how we got to be how we are now, and it limits our imagination.

Those of us who study the pre-modern world, if we’re careful, get to bring a few more possibilities to the table. First, we frequently have fewer texts, and often less information about our subjects. This does not mean we can’t tell true stories about our past, but that the evidence for those stories requires slightly different skills than is often asked of historians who study the modern world. The people and situations we study are allowed to retain some of their shadowy characteristics. Second, those men and women before and outside the triumph of the Enlightenment did not “know” where the world was going yet. Their writings are less driven by the paradigm of progress and national identity. Their world was more steeped in mystery and they also remain a bit mysterious to us.

So the early modern historian can bring a bit of drama to the table—my sources did not know about the framework of the modern world, so I can also try to suspend knowledge, if I choose. They often leave their evidence in the form of stories, which allows me to retain my commitment to storytelling as part of the art of history. My subjects’ knowledge was contingent, and so is mine. This is also true for those who study the modern world, but perhaps early modernists’ are forced to be more aware of it.

We early modernists are important to our more numerous colleagues who study the relatively recent past because our attitudes and practices reinforce the historians’ commitment to drama, mystery, and asking creative questions of difficult sources. But we are also important because our knowledge is so often “useless.” As we collectively wring our hands over the commodification of knowledge and the future of the history professor, it is those of us who study the pre-modern world who have developed skills in explaining what we study in such a way that it seems “relevant” to the obsessively presentist mind. You need us around. Besides, who else is the world going to turn to when it becomes clear that previously frivolous fields of study such as early modern piracy in the Indian Ocean aren’t so silly and extraneous after all?

*I use “modern” here to mean roughly the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We can argue about that later, if anyone is interested.

Lisa Clark Diller is assistant professor of history at Southern Adventist University. She earned her Ph.D. in Modern British History at the University of Chicago in 2003. Diller is especially interested in the origins of religious toleration in 17th-century England.