tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27503501321147644752024-02-20T13:17:07.777-08:00Alec RyrieAlec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.comBlogger143125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-77207183785193190702020-03-24T02:56:00.001-07:002020-03-24T02:56:41.312-07:00The five stages of [insert apocalypse here]The first stage was denial: it's not really happening, it will go away, it won't affect us.<br />
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The second stage was scientific rescue fantasies: brilliant research is being done on the problem, the solutions are just over the horizon, we'll be fine.<br />
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The third stage was cheerful inevitablism: there's nothing we can do about it and we'll just let it happen, the costs of trying to stop it are unacceptably high and they won't work anyway, let's just carry on and get through it.<br />
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But then it became clear that even the damage that was already being done was pretty intolerable and that it was only going to get worse; and that action that could stop it <i>was</i> possible - difficult, but possible.<br />
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So we entered stage four, voluntarism. We were urged to take action. Lots of individuals, organisations, local governments and so forth did. Our lives changed a lot. But not enough. Large parts of society and the economy carried on more or less as before, unwilling or unable to make the changes they needed to.<br />
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Hence stage five: where government imposes actions on everyone, and - therefore - also takes on itself the costs of those actions. Of course, still in the hope and expectation that the scientists who we last heard from in stage two will come up with solutions which will ease the problem in due course. But we can't afford to do nothing while we wait.<br />
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I'm talking, of course, about the global climate crisis.<br />
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I don't mean to be flippant. The analogy between climate and COVID-19 isn't a perfect one. The timescales are very different: climate change is too slow for our political cycles, and the novel coronavirus is if anything too fast. But I think the parallels are instructive. We try to avoid action until it becomes clear that we really can't.<br />
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Specifically: in the climate emergency, we are now at stage four. Lots of people, institutions and countries are doing lots of things; lots are not; and it is not yet nearly enough. It can feel as if we are stuck here and are fiddling with LED light bulbs while the planet burns.<br />
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So here's my word of encouragement based on the COVID-19 experience so far: stage four is vital. Only when there is a large enough critical mass of people and institutions acting on their own initiative does it become politically possible to move on to stage five. Each individual initiative doesn't just save those few grammes of carbon, it also nudges the political needle another fraction of a degree, turning what was once normal behaviour into something that's first old-fashioned, then deserving of disapproval, then shameful, then outrageous. And that's when things change.<br />
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And as with COVID-19: we will in due course find out whether they've changed fast enough, and how many people have died unnecessarily along the way.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-28572341548854229662019-12-13T03:56:00.003-08:002019-12-13T03:56:43.138-08:00Reasons to be a little bit cheerfulAfter the UK's 2019 election, I am having to dig deep for these, but I do have a few. Here goes.<br />
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1. It turns out I live in a country where antisemitism is really, truly politically toxic. That makes me happy.<br />
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2. The Tories are once again (after a definite wobble during the last decade or so) fulfilling their great historic purpose: exterminating the far right. Even the Brexit Party, a pretty milk-and-water apology for a far-right party, almost disappeared. As to UKIP, the BNP, the English Democrats, and all the rest: nowhere to be seen. George Galloway got less than 500 votes. For all the nationalist spasms we've been through over the past few years, the UK remains one of the only countries in Europe without a serious far-right presence in its politics. That also makes me happy. (Some readers will say that the Tories are a far-right party, and it's true there have been real flashes of ugliness and certainly a resurgent populism, but they are still centre-right not far-right. Grieving left-leaning voters may not be inclined to recognise that difference right now, but it really matters.)<br />
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3. This has been the sort of election where one looks at the two prime-ministerial candidates and says, it's a shame they can't both lose. As a glass half-full person, I want to say: well, look, one of them did! The defeat is bad enough that Labour surely must do some proper soul-searching and decide that homespun incompetence is not a good look. A less bad defeat might have left some delusions in place (as well as left the ERG with some power).<br />
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4. How often can you say this? The results from Northern Ireland are positively cheering! An Alliance MP again; and two, count them! for the SDLP, a resurgence of constructive moderation for a party that more or less laid down its life for the peace process. Nice that nationalists will have (some) representatives who can actually represent them. Nor, from a UK political point of view, will I mourn the shrinking of the DUP contingent.<br />
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... OK, that's it. If you think that's not enough, well, how many did you manage? I'm trying here.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-90934054864189137212019-11-11T01:09:00.004-08:002019-11-11T01:09:50.771-08:00Undying in LeicesterWith apologies, faithful readers, for the long absence: but a visit to Leicester Cathedral last week included a sight that couldn't be missed, kindly pointed out by <a href="https://www.dmu.ac.uk/about-dmu/academic-staff/art-design-humanities/elizabeth-tingle/elizabeth-tingle.aspx" target="_blank">Liz Tingle</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgONFXqUX8t0Yo7DENpOJ_k9MYj7A4hw0eKD6Vm1ovpdMevCDmbSYH-E7lnheCGKUNWTyuZ1w4P4b7g-94kBATk1dNynj9QX4RCWWTXRFW6mAyCQYCSHfqzlyEb-NhYjv5Wa4feo7RLHZ1J/s1600/IMG_0069.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgONFXqUX8t0Yo7DENpOJ_k9MYj7A4hw0eKD6Vm1ovpdMevCDmbSYH-E7lnheCGKUNWTyuZ1w4P4b7g-94kBATk1dNynj9QX4RCWWTXRFW6mAyCQYCSHfqzlyEb-NhYjv5Wa4feo7RLHZ1J/s640/IMG_0069.JPG" width="480" /></a></div>
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In case the image isn't entirely clear, this is what the tomb says (spelling modernised):<br />
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'Here lieth the body of John Heyricke of this parish, who departed this life the 2 of April 1589, being about the age of 76. He did marry Marie, the daughter of John Bond of Wardend in the county of Warwick esquire, who lived with the said Marie in one house full 52 years and in all that time never buried man woman nor child though they were sometimes 20 in household. He had issue by the said Marie 5 sons and 7 daughters, viz. Robert, Nicholas, Thomas, John and William, and daughters Ursula, Agnes, Marie, Elizabeth, Ellin, Christian & Alice. The said John was mayor of thos town in Anno. 1559 and again in anno. 1572. The said Marie departed this life the 8 of December 1611 being of the age of 97 years. She did see before her departure of her children & children's children and their children to the number of 142.'<br />
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Somebody had some tough genes. The entire chapel is full of Heyrick tombs, but are you surprised? Something like half the planet must be descended from these people. Here's to you, presumed great-great-great-great-great grandma!<br />
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<br />Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-5488553689831379112019-03-27T03:27:00.003-07:002019-03-27T03:27:38.406-07:00The Hague doomsday machineSo, I have a new theory as to who is ultimately to blame for the UK's current nervous breakdown. And he wears a baseball cap. (Well, he did once. Poor bloke, this is unfair.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY3Vjf_YtsmePCHKIEI4MRjd_VWjDSuf23GP-TMScvYWydewWu0L8u4IztZDLnP6mtwWKzf1vGaN937lJW0amj_9Hj3-JHe1KYc7tZvV7cF5JSyHbMkCvZtpr0xydd6SjD4vxjjKwq8yuh/s1600/cringe-hague_2661220k_wdp.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="536" data-original-width="858" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY3Vjf_YtsmePCHKIEI4MRjd_VWjDSuf23GP-TMScvYWydewWu0L8u4IztZDLnP6mtwWKzf1vGaN937lJW0amj_9Hj3-JHe1KYc7tZvV7cF5JSyHbMkCvZtpr0xydd6SjD4vxjjKwq8yuh/s320/cringe-hague_2661220k_wdp.bmp" width="320" /></a></div>
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Here's the rationale. What makes the current moment so intractable is that we've bolted bits of direct democracy onto a representative system, with no clear rules for how the two work together. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the prime minister responsible for managing this cyborg is so often described as robotic. The referendum is the most obvious problem: a narrow but decisive vote for an extremely unclear outcome, which in law was merely 'advisory' but as a political fact has become a kind of constitutional law, impossible to overturn except, maybe, by the same means. In the meantime, Parliament has the tricky task of discerning its meaning without actually challenging it, like the priests at Delphi. We've been using referenda with increasing frequency over the past few decades, without ever really thinking about how they work, so it was probably inevitable that one would turn around and bite us sooner or later. I suspect we'll be more careful in future.<br />
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But the referendum is only one part of the problem. Another part of the constitutional doomsday machine we've built for ourselves is that both of the main political parties (plus the little ones too, like my own Lib Dems, but who cares) now have leaders chosen by the mass membership of the parties, not by the MPs. Like a referendum, this sounds obviously 'democratic', though party membership is a pretty odd <i>demos</i>. But in a parliamentary system the consequences are bizarre. Parliament is supposed to be sovereign: and yet MPs can have a leader whom most of them see as unfit imposed on them by their parties. Labour - which has long had an element of mass-membership choice in leadership elections, but which has now moved to do so exclusively - finds itself completely unable to resolve this clash.<br />
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The Tories' situation isn't much better. Their MPs can at least defenestrate a leader, but they currently don't dare do so for fear of the candidate the membership might impose on them. Since Hague introduced the current system in 1997, having been embarrassed be being elected by MPs alone, the Tories have had four new leaders: twice the MPs have in effect conspired to deny the members a choice by leaving only one candidate standing, and on one of the other two occasions the membership's choice was disastrous. I humbly suggest that this system does not work very well.<br />
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The natural next step in this de-parliamentarisation of our political parties is for some of them (the Lib Dems might do it) to consider having a leader who isn't an MP at all. That takes us into the territory of Poland's Law and Justice, where parliamentarians are in effect dictated to by an outside figure who never has to face a mass electorate. That would be bad.<br />
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So, if only William Hague had stood firm and defended his fellow MPs' rights in 1997, everything would now be all right ...<br />
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The best argument ever made for Brexit was parliamentary sovereignty (yes, yes, irony, I know). If MPs can be trusted to make laws, they ought to be trusted to choose their own leaders. By all means give party memberships a more active role in selecting or deselecting individual MPs. But once they're there, they <i>have</i> to be able to organise themselves as they see fit, or we will wind up with our cyborg constitution being managed by zombie parties.<br />
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Oh, whoops, too late!Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-22975947096416278542019-03-07T00:27:00.002-08:002019-03-07T00:28:27.140-08:00More historical BrexitsOn wise and foolish ways to win wars: two <a href="https://alecryrie.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-long-view-of-mays-long-game.html" target="_blank">further</a> cases from British history which seem to me analogous to our Brexit woes.<br />
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First: the English Civil War. In which the insurgents, who had been sniping from the sidelines but thoroughly excluded from power for a generation or more, suddenly found themselves leading an attempted revolution, forced on them by the rash behaviour of the posh bloke heading the government, whose previous experience of handling a crisis in Scotland mistakenly led him to think he knew how to handle things. They stumbled into the battle without much of a clear plan, and were badly divided amongst themselves over strategy and tactics. Arguably, that is why they won: their cause could be all things to all people, who could at least agree that they were rejecting the previous regime in the name of restoring some distant golden age. But this division is why they then go on to lose the peace. The new establishment wants a sensible compromise, a readjustment of the political structure which will be recognisably a variant on what’s gone before. But the war was actually won by the hardliners and the wild men, and they will not now accept half measures. In the short term, their ability to hold the new government to ransom means they win. For eleven years, they succeed in leading the country into their new utopia. But the Restorers never go away. In the end, the Scots march south and the country is won back surprisingly suddenly and peacefully. And the experiment remains a political fable for centuries. A rump of irreconcilables lament its passing, but it is never tried again.<br />
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A Remainer fantasy? Maybe. But it is worth remembering that the eleven-year timescale is probably wrong. Things move faster nowadays.<br />
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Secondly: the Second World War. Long before the outcome of the conflict is known – even when it still looks very likely that the enemy will win – the British establishment begins to think about more than just victory and defeat. Yes, it wants to crush toxic nationalism and to restore the old international order, but it also properly confronts the fact that a return to the status quo ante is not enough. It begins the job of seriously considering what British society might look like if and when, one day, the battle is won. Reimagining health care, the economy, education, welfare and all that may seem like a distraction, or an act of presumption. Surely all our efforts should be on the present conflict, not on dreams of what we might to do one day if we win? But this is wrong, for two reasons. First, if victory does come, and it might come suddenly, it is important to know what to do with it if we ever intend to entrench it. Second, what better way to spur the population on to that victory than by making it clear ‘victory’ will not mean a return to the 1930s?<br />
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I am warier of that one, since it implicitly casts Leavers as Nazis, and I really, really don’t mean that. But those of us on the Remain side have been too focused on the day-to-day fight. There is still a distinct possibility that we will win: either that a new referendum will reverse Brexit, or that a Returner government of some shade will take us back in before too many years have passed. Creative planning for how our second era of membership of the EU will be different from the first wouldn’t just be responsible contingency preparation. It would help to bring that second era to pass.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-18529201337897729042019-03-03T07:38:00.001-08:002019-03-03T07:38:11.633-08:00A long view of May's long game<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So, an English government falls unexpectedly as its plans for reconciliation with Europe collapse. Power passes by default to the last woman standing, who finds herself leading an uneasy regime in which her supposed allies – the radicals who are most firmly committed to a clean break with the Continent – don’t fully trust that she is on their side. It soon becomes clear that she has a very distinctive political style: to delay; to postpone difficult decisions for as long as possible; to suppress any discussion of the topics which she does personally not wish to address. For a great many of her subjects, especially for those who are instinctively her allies, this is first frustrating, then infuriating, then intolerable. The country is facing potential catastrophes, as it seems to them, and she will not acknowledge the fact or face up to the scale of the emergency. Does she not know that events are sliding towards catastrophe while she does nothing? Or does she not care? Some of those allies lose their cool, speak their minds, and are frozen out of power as a result. Others keep their heads down and keep quietly plugging away. Slowly, slowly, over time, as the evidence of real and potentially mortal danger becomes unmistakable, they manage to drag slivers of concession out of her one by one. At last, a crisis comes along that she is unable to dodge, she is forced to make a choice, and in the end she does what all the sensible people around her have been urging her to do for as long as anyone can remember. Her reward for this is permanently to be cast as a villain in the romantic narratives which lament the impossible, lost dream she killed.</div>
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Yes, I admit it is a tasteless comparison. Elizabeth I was being pressed to cut off her cousin’s head; Theresa May is merely being pressed to rule out a no-deal Brexit. But the sense of existential crisis is not entirely different.</div>
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I am no fan of Mrs May’s style of government, nor, it should be said, of Elizabeth’s. But especially since <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1686925/theresa-may-reveals-she-hates-her-nose-and-compares-herself-to-elizabeth-i-in-an-astonishingly-candid-interview/" target="_blank">Mrs May has made the comparison herself</a>, I wonder if it might be instructive, even as some of her party have become increasingly apocalyptic about what they see as the vacuum of her leadership. Delay, postponement and inaction are intensely annoying as political techniques, but they can work, and not just because occasionally, if you wait long enough, something turns up. Importantly, a delayer is risk-averse - sometimes pathologically so, it is true - and this makes her susceptible to pressure. She will be much more likely in the end to take the less dramatic option in order to keep the boat afloat than to go down valiantly with her ship.</div>
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And if in retrospect everything works out more or less all right – if the worst disasters are avoided, albeit the glorious hopes remain unfulfilled too – then she may win some grudging respect and even some nostalgic affection. Especially if, as seems entirely likely, she has a successor who infuriates us all so much that we decide we want to blow up Parliament entirely.</div>
Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-42356807124867585262018-08-08T07:02:00.001-07:002018-08-08T07:09:12.233-07:00Seven shades of Gray<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
Sorry about the title. Couldn’t
resist it.</div>
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Actually the shades in John Gray’s
<i><a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/283923/seven-types-of-atheism/" target="_blank">Seven Types of Atheism</a></i> are pretty
dark. He will upset quite a few people, and is not very sorry about it. The reader might be forgiven for imagining that this is an anti-religious polemic, but far from it. Gray is certainly an atheist – so much so that he
does not regard religious positions as particularly intellectually serious or
worth engaging with. His brief, by-numbers section debunking Christianity is
one of the few disappointing bits of the book: I have a hunch his publishers
might have told him he’d better put it in. He means it – for sure! – but it's not what's stoking his fires. His real targets are inadequate or flawed atheisms, and he has plenty to choose from.</div>
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The result is an engagingly
malicious travelling circus of atheism which puts a plague on every house it
visits. Virtually no-one escapes. He has a handful of admirable figures, most of
whom surface in the final two chapters. ‘There is something refreshing in
Schopenhauer’s nastiness’ (for Gray, that counts as a compliment). Spinoza
comes out of this pretty well too, along with Santayana and Joseph Conrad. </div>
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The real enemy here is not
religion, but ‘contemporary atheism’, which he sees in its various forms as ‘a continuation of
monotheism by other means’. ‘Secular thought,’ he insists – with ample evidence – ‘is
mostly composed of repressed religion.’ Above all, atheism has repeatedly
claimed to transcend Christianity’s ethical framework before proceeding
to ‘simply regurgitate some secular version of Christian morality’. Even those
who have tried hardest to break out of that framework have failed. Nietzsche gets
an hon mensh for efforts in this regard, but Gray sees him in the end as ‘an
incurably Christian thinker’.</div>
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Gray’s own preference is for the
kind of Epicurean withdrawal he finds in Lucretius: </div>
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Watching calmly as others
drowned in misery, the Epicureans were content in the tranquil retreat of their
secluded gardens. “Humanity” could do what it pleased. It was no concern of
theirs.</blockquote>
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Now Gray is a philosopher and
that’s the sort of thing philosophers do, so, fine. But from a historian’s or a
social-scientist’s point of view, this is not a view which is going anywhere.
Withdrawing to the margins is, by definition, a marginal position. We can all
enjoy watching Gray taking an intellectual scythe to contemporary fallacies,
but that neither explains them nor uproots them.</div>
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If contemporary atheism’s
greatest failure is its failure to transcend theistic morality, surely that
tells us something: namely, that contemporary atheism is largely a moral critique
of theism mounted in theism’s own terms. (<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-soul-of-doubt-9780199844616?cc=gb&lang=en&" target="_blank">As Dominic Erdozain has argued.</a>) Of
course it can’t transcend theistic morals: those morals are its whole basis. It
is in the end an ethical revolt, which is with immense moral seriousness sawing
off the branch it sits on. It is telling that one of the handful of modern
thinkers to emerge from this book virtually unscathed is C. S. Lewis – not for
his fiction or his apologetics, but for his ‘prescient’ <span lang="EN">exposé of transhumanism’s self-cannibalism in <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abolition_of_Man" target="_blank">The Abolition of Man</a></i>.</span></div>
Gray leaves you with two options. He recommends his
own brutally honest, Lucretian withdrawal, which abandons morality as we
conventionally understand it, along with any notion of ‘humanity’ (a particular
bugbear of his). Alternatively, ‘anyone who wants their morality secured by
something beyond the fickle human world had better join an old-fashioned
religion’. Well, if you insist.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-68353032103949342912018-07-20T06:22:00.000-07:002018-07-20T06:23:22.995-07:00JEH 69/3: World Christianities Prize revisited<div class="x_MsoNormal">
My usual practice with a new issue of <i>JEH</i> is arbitrarily to single out one article, but this is a special occasion. Since I took up the co-editorship in 2014, one of our concerns has been to balance out our coverage of the global history of Christianity. We are very strong on European and especially British history, which is wonderful, but there is more to the subject than just that and we’re hoping to encourage historians with a different geographical focus to think of us for placing their best articles. So amongst various other things, we decided to launch a prize, running parallel to the longer-standing Eusebius Prize for early church history. The <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/world-christianities-essay-prize#" target="_blank">World Christianities Essay Prize</a> of £500 (partly sponsored by the estimable <a href="https://www.cccw.cam.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide</a>) is awarded to the best essay on any subject relating to the history of Christianity outside Europe and North America since the year 700. Naturally we expect that the majority of submissions will concentrate on the last couple of centuries, but we are very open to early items too.</div>
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Anyway, we ran the competition in 2017 for the first time, had a very pleasing 14 entries, and the five-member panel agreed to award the inaugural prize to <a href="https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/pedro-feitoza" target="_blank">Pedro Feitoza</a> for his essay on the <i>Imprensa evangelica</i>, a Protestant newspaper in Brazil which ran from 1864-92. It’s a lovely piece on how Brazil’s tiny Protestant minority managed to insert itself into the public sphere and present a particular, modern image of itself during crucial decades in Brazilian history (covering, amongst other things, the abolition of slavery, a subject on which the <i>Imprensa evangelica</i> remained deliberately silent until the debate was almost over). That first prize essay is now in print in the July number of the <i>Journal</i>.</div>
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Just as pleasing is the fact that it was a close-run thing. Two other outstanding essays were serious contenders for the first prize, both of them due to appear in forthcoming numbers – <a href="http://irci.acu.edu.au/people/laura-rademaker/" target="_blank">Laura Rademaker</a>’s study of the Catholic mission to the Tiwi islanders off Australia’s north coast (or, as she would have it, of the islanders’ mission to their Catholic priests), and <a href="https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/2210229" target="_blank">Jason Bruner</a>’s article on hearing voices in the East African Revival. Either of them could have won.</div>
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And while I’m enjoying myself, I think I also notice an uptick in general submissions with a global outlook – I’ve not seen the stats for the current year yet so I may be imagining things, but it looks that way to me.</div>
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BUT ... one thing is inescapable: the submission rate for the 2018 prize (the result will be announced soon) was quite sharply down. So please, anyone who is interested in getting a prize on their CV and £500 in their pockets, and also with helping the Journal achieve our noble purpose, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/world-christianities-essay-prize#" target="_blank">get writing</a>. The deadline for the 2019 prize is 31 March.</div>
Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-37203322418311397272018-04-23T04:40:00.000-07:002018-04-23T04:40:37.528-07:00JEH 69/2: Nuns, but not as we know themI would like to emphasise to anyone who ever has or who ever might submit an article to <i><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history" target="_blank">JEH</a></i> that we apply the most rigorous and even-handed methods of blind peer review and level-headed assessment of papers on their academic merits. Any rumours to the effect that we use a form of sensationalism bingo to choose the papers that we publish are entirely and categorically untrue.<br />
<br />
It is therefore wholly coincidental that the April number contains an article which includes Jewish converts, the Ukrainian Hetmanate, nuns who insist they need ‘meat and men’ and who hold ‘noisy drinking parties’ in their cells, the phrase ‘several bucketfuls of wine’, and a punch-up in which (depending on which account you believe) either a drunken convent servant broke into a nun’s cell, beat her up and dragged her half-clothed across the yard, or he politely reprimanded her for her violation of discipline only to be attacked by several unruly stick-wielding nuns. Liudmyla Sharipova’s article 'Of Meat, Men and Property: The Troubled Career of a Convert Nun in Eighteenth-Century Kiev' went through exactly the same process of careful review and revision as any other piece.<br />
<br />
There is no denying, though, that she has a weird, grotesque and riveting tale to tell, and I will avoid any spoilers as to how these various elements fit together. What I will say is that the conflict that erupted around the nun and convert from Judaism named Sr Asklipiodata in Kiev in 1776 is more than just a compelling story. It is a window on a world of fluid religious identities and of monastic practices that are still scarcely known in the West, and it forces us to re-evaluate what we think we know about monasticism.<br />
<br />
One reason her story matters is that Ukraine in the late 18th century was one of the last outposts of an old style of religious life: non-communal, or ideorrhythmic, monasticism. In this system, monks and nuns bought their own cells, which could be openly luxurious, and which could be sold on or even inherited; traded on their own account; and were entitled to a share of the community’s produce. They continued to observe a common liturgy and share a burial ground, but this was not monasticism as we think we know it.<br />
<br />
You might think, indeed, that it was simply a form of corruption and that these communities had become in effect secular economic entities. But the pleasure of Sharipova’s article is that she lays bare the conflicts which ideorrhythmic living could produce while still having a lively, humane awareness of the genuine but of course tangled and compromised spiritual life that was led within this structure.<br />
<br />
My apologies for sensationalising this piece. Sharipova herself resists that temptation (although to be fair, the material doesn’t need much help); and the lasting impressing the article leaves is less of a dramatic story than of an extraordinary, combative, assertive, vulnerable and unexpectedly pious woman, who had spent six tumultuous decades ploughing her own furrow and was not about to submit meekly to a newly arrived mother superior. She deserved a memorial. I am pleased that, in a small way, she now has one.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-84086194288310207622018-03-12T06:57:00.003-07:002018-03-12T06:58:27.510-07:00Burn before readingOne of the most obvious of the many problems with the lazy science vs. religion stereotype is how many eminent scientists have also been exceptionally earnest in their faith. I knew Robert Boyle, perhaps the key founder of modern chemistry, was one of these, but until recently I didn't know the extent of this. He was decisive in the republication of the Irish-language New Testament in 1681-2, and of the first Irish-language edition of the Old Testament in 1685: the driving force behind the twin projects, and also their indispensable financial sponsor, sinking well over £300 and perhaps as much as £700 of his own money into them, not least because of his insistence that the books should be given away to those who would benefit the most.<br />
<br />
Still, I was reading through his letters on this with a faint sense of disappointment, because none of his Irish correspondents seem to have the slightest awareness that this is a scientific giant they are dealing with. And then I find the following delightful letter from Boyle to Narcissus Marsh, the provost of Trinity College, Dublin, dated 1 August 1682:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I am troubled, and almost ashamed, that I must begin this letter with the acknowledgement of a disaster, that befel yours before it came to my hands: for it being brought yesterday from the post, not directly to me, but to a servant, that was then busied about the fire, to make a chemical experiment, I had ordered him to attend in my absence, he having laid it by for a while, a kindled coal unluckily lighted on the letter, and burned it quite thorough in that part, that contained (as I conjectured) some of the most important passages of it. ... I shall venture to answer what I guess to have been the main contents of it.*</blockquote>
In the genre of epistolary excuses, that one is hard to beat. And he will have smoothed over any disappointment, since he guessed - correctly - that the letter was asking him for more money, and so he sent it anyway.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Robert Boyle, The works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (ESTC T004460. London: for A. Millar, 1744), vol. V p. 611.</span>Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-11236214886078147122018-02-19T02:23:00.001-08:002018-02-19T05:47:28.080-08:00On Callum Brown's 'Becoming Atheist'The most stimulating and enjoyable works of history, I find, are the ones that are importantly, generously, humanely, provocatively and insightfully wrong. It’s a height that not many can rise to, and is far better than the tediously, predictably correct. So it is a pleasure to discover a new one in Callum Brown’s <i><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/becoming-atheist-9781474224499/" target="_blank">Becoming Atheist</a></i> (Bloomsbury, 2017).<br />
<br />
Brown is best-known for his thesis, in <i>The Death of Christian Britain</i> (2001) that British secularisation was not a centuries-long gentle slope of inexorable decline, but a cliff that the country’s longstanding Christian culture fell off in the 1960s. There’s plenty of scope for arguing about the starkness of that argument, and especially about the clear linkage he makes between that cliff-edge and the shifting place of women in British society, but I and plenty of others who know much more about it have been compelled to accept the basic argument.<br />
<br />
Here he complements it with a detailed ethnographic study of 85 men and women in several countries, people now aged from 40 to 90, who have come to identify themselves as atheist, agnostic, humanist or as having no religion. Brown has interviewed these people sensitively and at length, and weaves their stories together into a compelling portrait of a post-religious culture.<br />
<br />
I appreciate two things this book does particularly. One is the merciless way he deconstructs the cheering stories and improving myths that are often told around secularisation by believers and social conservatives. Western secularisation is not a blip, or a result of a failure of nerve or strategy by particular churches or politicians, or an evolution of religion into a different form. It is an epochal, generational change, affecting multiple national and religious cultures. Those who profess no religion are still a minority, of course, and the fact that they are a rapidly expanding one does not mean that they will eventually become dominant or normative: but for the time being, that is certainly the direction of travel, and as Brown points out, none of the various countervailing forces that have been identified actually amount to very much. In a subject with a lot of soft soap, this book is a splash of cold water, shocking or refreshing according to taste.<br />
<br />
The other is his unashamed personal engagement with his subject. Whether or not either of them would appreciate the comparison, this book is a kind of humanist mirror to Eamon Duffy’s <i>The Stripping of the Altars</i> (1992): in both cases, the authors use their own inhabiting of a particular religious (or, as here, non-religious) tradition in order to give them a lively insight into their subjects. It is not and does not pretend to be impartial history, but any losses in objectivity are generally more than made up in humanity. The empathetic warmth with which the book is written is one of its delights. Naturally I am in sympathy with this as an approach. It is not unlike what I tried to do in my <i>Being Protestant</i> (2013), pleasing some readers and outraging others.<br />
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But as my outraged readers pointed out: it is an approach not without costs. Even the most fair-minded historians are susceptible to blind spots where their own sympathies are concerned. And so we come to the final chapter of Brown’s book, on the moral framework of his interviewees.<br />
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His core finding is a striking and important one: these people, for all their disparate backgrounds, share a remarkably consistent set of ethical assumptions. He calls this ‘humanism’, and while many of his interviewees did not spontaneously choose that term for themselves, all of them, he tells us, were happy to embrace it when offered the chance. That, in fact, is what is noteworthy about this. As he puts it:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Humanism is a moral position that emerges from people without widespread intellectualizing or exposure to a humanist movement. </blockquote>
His interviewees claimed<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
without exception, that they were “humanists” before they discovered the term. Humanism was neither a philosophy nor an ideology that they had learned or read about and then adopted. There was no act of conversion, no training or induction. ... A humanist condition precedes being a self-conscious humanist. ... Humanism is a condition that many in Western society have held but few may have realised.</blockquote>
He then describes in some detail what this ‘humanism’ consists of. To summarise: first, the ‘golden rule’ of do-as-you-would-be-done-by (a principle which he is careful to point out predates Christianity), and then a linked set of principles to do with human equality and with bodily and sexual autonomy, including the right to die. These principles were not a formal manifesto imposed on his interviewees by any external authority or adopted by them wholesale. Indeed, his interviewees generally recalled embracing these ethics before they withdrew from their various religious communities, quietly and apparently spontaneously.<br />
<br />
So far I have nothing to argue with here. But this obviously raises a big question: where did this apparently widely diffused ethic come from? As Brown says,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When and how the humanist condition, in all its moral constituents, was formed will take a different type of history project to study. But the individuals’ claims to pre-forming humanism require explanation.</blockquote>
He is a good enough historian to leave that question open. But he is also a bold enough writer to suggest an answer. His interviewees testified, in what sounds like an almost mystical way, that ‘the source of these values ... lay in the individual himself or herself’. And so he suggests – admitting that ‘this is clearly a speculative case’ – that<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The humanist condition may well have had an existence across the religious periods of human history. It has a persistence grounded in a moral outlook that has existed outside or beside religious faith, fostered by doubt and humans’ relentless leanings towards rationalism, materialism and also justice. ... Further research may come to discern more of the detail of the humanist condition – ideas of goodness, fulfilment or tolerance coming from within human experience, not from authority, supernaturalism or prefigured cultural discourses. ... Reason alone may construct humanism.</blockquote>
This is in fact clearly <i>not </i>a ‘speculative case’. It is a testimony of faith, or, if you prefer, of his own moral intuition. And like many such testimonies, it goes beyond the available evidence. He points out, quite correctly, that scepticism towards the claims of various religions is a pervasive feature of human history. But this is not at all the same as his humanist condition. Its ethical markers – gender and racial equality, sexual freedom, a strong doctrine of human rights which draws a sharp boundary around the human realm – are, in a long historical perspective, very unusual indeed. And as various ethicists have pointed out, although they may seem intuitively obvious in our culture, the philosophical basis for them is, um, wobbly. ‘Reason alone may construct humanism’: well, perhaps, but it has never constructed humanism like this in any previous era, and the reasoned basis even of our modern humanism does not seem entirely sound and stable.<br />
<br />
The importance of Brown’s argument, I think, is the case he makes that this humanist ethic is the key suspect in the case of the death of the Christian West. On his account, earnestly or nominally religious people came to adopt an ethic which was in a degree of tension with their religious culture, and which certainly did not depend on it: so they either drifted away from or consciously rejected that culture. The key question, then, is why, across a whole range of mid- and late twentieth century Western societies, this peculiar and historically unprecedented humanist ethic came to seem self-evidently true to so many people. The fact that it also seems self-evidently true to Brown, and indeed to me, is not an answer.<br />
<br />
What is the answer? Well, I’m not a modern historian, so what do I know? But I think there’s a hint in Brown’s book, one which is compatible with his previous discernment of a cultural sea-change from the late 1950s onwards. ‘Since 1945,’ he says, ‘humanist values have come to dominate Western moral culture’, and more specifically he argues that ‘the legal framework [for humanism] was the notion of human rights which emerged from the Second World War’. It seems to me that the Second World War is the defining moral event of our age, the myth by which we now discern good from evil, and which exposed the religious ethical frameworks of western civilisation as inadequate. Our cultural conviction that God is good turned out to be less deeply felt than our conviction that Hitler was evil, and so we formed our ethics around that. In that context, Christianity’s ethical framework became redundant. It didn’t need to be torn down, in a Jacobin-style campaign of deChristianisation. It simply withered.<br />
<br />
Maybe, maybe not. But this much I think is clear from Brown’s work, despite his speculative conclusion. Modern western secularisation is the result of a historically specific set of cultural changes, which have driven western societies fast and hard in a novel direction within the span of a single lifetime. Opponents of secularisation should not delude themselves that that change will somehow be reversed. Fans of secularisation should not delude themselves that the new reality will prove any more stable than the old one.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-52857063344829967402018-02-02T06:05:00.001-08:002018-02-02T06:11:01.138-08:00JEH 69/1: Begging to differIn the riches of the January number of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, some readers may miss <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/article/early-modern-mendicancy-franciscan-practice-in-the-bohemian-lands/157E94C393B0E76C914B0B003059FE58" target="_blank">Martin Elbel’s wonderful article</a>, because it has ‘Bohemian’ in the title and they will think, that’s not my patch. But even if, like Shakespeare, you think Bohemia has a sea coast, you should read this one.<br />
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One of my regular gripes about a lot of academic history is that we skate over awkward practical issues: the straightforward physical realities of life in the past. We are so used, for example, to dealing with money as an accounting fiction which can be transferred electronically that we find it difficult to recall the sheer complexity of handling financial transactions when it all had to be done using actual coin. Elbel tackles one of these issues head on.<br />
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It’s well-known that Franciscans and other friars were ‘mendicant’ orders, that is, they were supposed to sustain themselves by begging for alms. But it is not nearly so well known what that actually meant in practice. Using a particularly fine set of records relating to the convent of Olomouc in Bohemia, as it was restored after the Thirty Years’ War, Elbel spells it out. Mendicancy was not a matter of a friar wandering round the marketplace seeing what he could get: it was highly organised. The region was divided into begging districts, and there was an annual cycle of tours, friars covering hundreds of miles on foot to beg in pre-arranged areas. Butter in June and July; poultry in August and September; oil in January; hay in June; and wine from south Moravia in October. They would go in pairs, accompanied by a lay volunteer who helped carry the stuff – and friars regularly tried to wriggle out of the obligation. In 1773, the convent’s total takings included 150 geese, over a ton of butter and a whopping 18,000 eggs. Which sounds like a lot, but for a community of fifty people that is not quite one egg each per day. When all this was converted into monetary value for the community’s records, they come out as genuinely poor. When Joseph II dissolved the convent in 1785, the annual stipend he gave the ex-friars was a significant increase on their former ‘income’. Henry VIII would have been turning in his grave.<br />
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Of course, there is much more to this article than counting eggs: the real point is to think about how the huge web of relationships implied by all that regularised begging worked, the sacral services which the friars offered in return (they were mocked for having mastered the ‘art of transmuting little images, square bits of paper, amulets and other similar trifles, into wine and meat’), and the connections it gave them to the structures of secular power, who helped them to deal with monetary gifts while preserving the formal rule that they weren’t allowed to handle cash. It’s a fascinating article with some important conceptual consequences. But like an ill-shod friar lugging home a basket of eggs, it always keeps its feet on the ground.
Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-35868551424177043852017-11-17T03:44:00.002-08:002017-11-17T03:47:24.930-08:00Ada PalmerSo today, a new experience: reading a scholarly article which is so interesting and so well-written that you end by asking yourself, 'who <i>is</i> this person? Has she written anything else? She should write a novel!' And then by googling her and discovering that she has indeed written <a href="https://adapalmer.com/publication/too-like-the-lightning/" target="_blank">a prizewinning novel</a>. That's one for my Christmas list.<br />
<br />
More on the novel when I've read it. The <a href="http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/693881" target="_blank">article</a> itself is enough for now. It is one of those articles which takes a narrow seam of evidence, carefully spends thirty pages drilling into it and inserting charges, and then at the end detonates them spectacularly - although, because she is not so austere a writer as some, she does give us enough of a hook at the start that we have some sense of what's coming.<br />
<br />
The argument, in a nutshell, is that Renaissance humanists celebrated ancient pagan philosophers for their perceived ability to come close - <i>very</i> close - to the truths of Christianity despite not having received the Christian revelation. This was partly a means of reproaching Christians' weakness of faith and morals - look, these pagans have done better than you! - and partly a means of circumventing the morasses of scholastic theology by demonstrating that clean, classical philosophy could fulfil many of the same tasks more elegantly.<br />
<br />
But if philosophy in the abstract could get you to the truth almost as well as (even, in some incautious panegyrics, better than) revealed faith and Scripture ... then perhaps it made sense to seek wisdom through reason alone? In which case, perhaps the Christ-event is no longer the crux of history, and, as some English radicals would say, what happened to a man outside Jerusalem centuries ago is not supremely important?<br />
<br />
This move away from revelation to reason is a well-known early modern trajectory, of course, but Palmer's article crystallises a couple of aspects of it for me. First, crucially, its unwitting nature. She is very clear that these humanist celebrations of philosophy were mostly pious, earnestly Christian topics undertaken in faith that reason <i>must</i> lead to or at least point to the truth which these men already embraced, since, after all, truth is one. The theme of her article is not that humanism was irreligious, but rather that its very search for piety was a time-delayed solvent of religion. This is a big theme. The more I read about early modern unbelief, the more it is the search for truer and purer faith that seems to me to drive it.<br />
<br />
Second, that one of the mainstays of this subject - the opposition between 'rationalism' and 'mysticism' in radical movements of the 17th century - does not work. Her humanists are like Dirck Coornhert, whose 1586 <i>Ethics</i> was deliberately written without any scriptural citations, in order to show that his truth could be reached even without scriptural support, and so not-quite-unwittingly showed that Scripture was dispensable. But her humanists are also celebrating Pythagorean mysticism, as (bizarrely) the ideal ancient synthesis of Greek and Jewish thought. They are very like the radicals who claimed to find Christ within. When Gerrard Winstanley (whom Palmer does not cite) called God 'Reason', how different was he from the mystics?<br />
<br />
She concludes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Humanists ... celebrated, and relived through empathy, the experience of ancient thinkers, whom they imagined wandering in the dark night of genuine ignorance, groping toward distant knowledge without streetlights ahead. By extolling this experience, maturing humanism exhorted students to imitate how people without revealed answers had sought them out by reason’s light alone. Humanists were sure that practitioners of their new method would end up where they believed the ancients had ended up: at the light, the good, God, truth, the source and center of all things. ... Yet, as the sixteenth century became the seventeenth, it became clearer that Epictetus did not agree with Saint Paul, that Stoic divinity was fully immanent, that Pythagoreans were serious about reincarnation, and in general that the philosophical religion of antiquity was larger and stranger than what Petrarch had expected. ... Humanists had celebrated the ancient acolytes of Philosophia because they believed Philosophia had led her sages—and could lead others—to the Christian truths that were so bafflingly difficult to reach using the tools of scripture and the corruption-ridden church. Yet, in the hands of much later generations, the enthusiasm for Philosophia that humanist teachings had rekindled outlived Philosophia’s loyalty to Lady Theology. Herein lay the secularizing potential of the pious Renaissance.</blockquote>
Kapow. It's a terrific article. I'm looking forward to the book.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-91687748653352126182017-10-04T06:12:00.001-07:002017-10-04T06:16:28.366-07:00JEH 68/4: Pray the friendly skiesJEH covers all aspects of the history of Christianity, and that unashamedly includes the legal, administrative and financial minutiae of church life. These topics have a reputation for being dull. Perhaps sometimes they are. But it is always worth reading the article before jumping to the conclusion.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/article/how-formal-anglican-pewrenting-worked-in-practice-18001950/47C40BCF419E9161A60FE5899CC7E7E6" target="_blank">‘How Formal Anglican Pew-Renting Worked in Practice, 1800-1950’</a> is, you have to admit, not a title to send punters rushing to the newsstands. But John C. Bennett’s article is not only fascinating, it is much more fun than it has a right to be as well. The overall message is that pew-renting was rare and frowned upon before the 1810s; boomed thereafter, but rarely raised the sums of money it promised to; and faded away fairly quickly in the early twentieth century, both because the mismatch between supply of and demand for space in churches made the bottom fall out of the market (sorry about that), and because it had always been stirring up bad feeling anyway.<br />
<br />
The bad feeling was in part intensely practical, and turned on a question akin to that which dominates the modern airline business: just how tight can you pack people in and get away with it? Twenty inches was the standard space allotted to parishioners in many churches; Glaswegian churches apparently had a local standard of seventeen to eighteen inches; one Brighton church went for sixteen. Bennett quotes a bean-counter from Tunbridge Wells (you couldn’t make it up) worrying that the 20-inch allocation left nine inches of surplus (and unrentable) space at the end of each pew, but if they dropped it down to 18½ inches they could squeeze in one more customer. (Sorry: worshipper.) Children’s sittings were as small as thirteen inches, ‘which,’ as Bennett drily comments, ‘can hardly have promoted proper church behaviour.’ For the business class experience, you’d be advised to head for one Bristol church where adult sittings were up to fifty-six inches: almost enough space to lie down.<br />
<br />
But also as with airlines, a lot of the resentment came down to money. He cites a poem published in a collection of Yorkshire dialect verse in 1898:<br />
<br />
A’a! it’s grand to ha plenty o’ brass!<br />
Then th’ parsons’ll know where yo live;<br />
If yo’re poor, its mooast likely they’ll pass,<br />
An call where fowk’s summat to give.<br />
Yo may have a trifle o’ sense,<br />
An yo may be booath upright an trew,<br />
But that’s nowt, if yo can’t stand th’ expense<br />
Ov a whole or a pairt ov a pew.<br />
<br />
All that’s missing from this article is some smartphone footage of thuggish sidesmen beating up a parishioner and dragging him out of the pew.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-73891919856474546922017-09-04T01:37:00.001-07:002017-09-04T01:58:10.899-07:00Psychedelic rhino<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2750350132114764475" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>So Anne Southwell, the poet, in her commonplace book at the Folger Shakepeare Library, has amongst other things a page and a half of notes
from Edward Topsell’s bestiary <i>The historie of foure-footed beastes</i> (1607). What is fun about this is how she distills Topsell’s 750-page book into a few lines. Here, for example, is how she summarises his 2200-word description of the rhinoceros:<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2750350132114764475" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>Of the Rhinoceros.<br />
<br />
The Rhinoceros is of a monstrous shape and of a Beautifill couller for he is yellowe speccled with purple his feet are like an Elaphants so is the shape of his bodie, his eares like a swine his Bodie is all ouer as if he weare in compleat armour, his head is like a horsses and out of his nose there comes a horne which is longe, strong and sharpe with which he fights, his naturall envye is against an Elaphant he is taken only by virgins, and vpon a virgins lapp he will fale asleepe, and so is taken.*<br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2750350132114764475" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
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Yellow speckled with purple! Wouldn’t it be worth seeing that? What a shame that Topsell’s version of the famous picture is in black and
white: but with the eye of faith you can see the speckles.<br />
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<br />
Perhaps that’s how she got there from his less exciting statement that ‘his back is distinguished with certaine purple spots vpon a yellow ground’. Topsell also relates – with a little more caution than she does – the story about the virgins, but does not mention that a rhino will fall asleep on a virgin’s lap: a recipe, one might imagine, for squished virgin.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Folger MS V.b.198 fo. 68r.</span>Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-12441280768024650512017-07-10T01:04:00.000-07:002017-07-10T01:04:00.517-07:00Servus servorum DeiThe estimable Michelle Beer, whose <a href="http://royalhistsoc.org/publications/studies-history/" target="_blank">forthcoming book</a> on the courts of Queens Catherine of Aragon (in England) and Margaret Tudor (in Scotland) I’m overseeing for the Royal Historical Society’s Studies in History series, draws my attention to a telling little detail from 1535.<br />
<br />
By then Catherine of Aragon, her marriage to Henry VIII now unilaterally annulled by an English court, was fighting a rearguard action for every scrap of the royal status she refused to relinquish; and Henry VIII was working hard to thwart her at every turn. This much I knew. I did not know about the skirmish in this battle that took place around Maundy Thursday 1535, that date being a traditional occasion for a public display of queenly charity and almsgiving. Catherine made it known that she wanted to hold her Maundy in the traditional way.<br />
<br />
Incidentally, this appears to have included washing poor women’s feet herself. It’s well established that English and Scottish kings washed male paupers’ feet on Maundy Thursday: by a lovely piece of detective work, Beer has shown it’s very likely that their wives did so too. We’ve no direct testimony of the fact, but she shows that both Catherine and Margaret’s households were ordering towels exactly like those their husbands were ordering in advance of the ceremony. Didn’t I say this was going to be a good book?<br />
<br />
Anyway, the king gave a clear and direct reply to Catherine’s demand, conveyed to Cromwell in a now-damaged letter. He insisted that she celebrate her Maundy as a royal widow (that is, the widow of Henry VIII’s older brother Prince Arthur), not as queen, and that she do it in private in her chamber. If she did it as the queen she still claimed to be, she was to be told that not only she herself, but ‘all such poore people, as shulde receyve her maundy’ would incur the danger of high treason.*<br />
<br />
So Henry VIII was proposing to treat paupers as traitors for accepting alms. Always classy.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*BL Cotton MS Otho C/X (LP 8:435).
</span>Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-75405504938142275912017-06-16T08:59:00.006-07:002017-06-16T08:59:56.320-07:00JEH 68/3: Lighten our darknessI studied the early Frankish kingdom for a term as an undergraduate: enough to be able to bluff my way through a 90-second conversation on the difference between Merovingians and Carolingians, which for casual conversational purposes is usually enough. But one of my abiding impressions of the period was of its bracing obscurity. The depth of our ignorance, and the fragility of the evidence base for the knowledge we do have, about basic matters of political chronology is, to an early modernist, profound. Everyone ought to spend some time studying a subject where ‘facts’ as basic as who ruled in what order are open to dispute and can be upended by new discoveries.<br />
<br />
So although it is well outside my patch, I can’t resist picking out the article on sixth-century Francia from the July number of <i>JEH.</i> Gregory Halfond’s ‘<a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022046916001470" target="_blank">Ecclesiastical Politics in the Regnum Chramni: Contextualising Baudonivia's Vita Radegundis, ch. 15</a>’ has an alarming title for those, like me, who may not immediately know what it is referring to, but it is a wonderful demonstration of what’s possible in this period.<br />
<br />
Halfond begins with a passing reference in a seventh-century Life of the sixth-century saint Radegund. A nobleman named Leo fell prey to a malady of the eyes en route to an ecclesiastical council convoked by two named bishops. He stopped at Radegund’s convent, where his own daughter was also a nun. While there, he prostrated himself before one of Radegund’s vestments, prayed to the Virgin, and was eventually healed; he continued to the council and there gave thanks.<br />
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An unremarkable enough medieval story, you might think. But Halfond shows what can be done with this sort of thing. First, he is able to use passing architectural detail in the account to nail the date of the event to the period 552-561. This matters, because there was no known ecclesiastical council during that period. The council has previously been thought to be one which took place between 561 and 567, but it can’t be, because that one was specifically convened in order to elect the successor to one of the bishops who convened this one. He is compelled to the conclusion that this is a stray account of ‘an otherwise-unattested synod, with no details about its agenda, acts, or even precise date or location’ (478).<br />
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And that’s only where the fun begins. He is then able to make a very compelling case that this mystery council must have assembled in Acquitaine during the (as it turned out) shortlived kingdom established by Chramn, the rebellious son of the Frankish king Chlothar: a rebellion which we know took place and was afterwards described as violent and disruptive, but that’s about it. Halfond is able plausibly (though not conclusively) to identify Leo as one of Chramn’s key supporters; to date the council to the period 555-558; and to suggest that its agenda was sacralising Chramn’s rule and securing his support for existing episcopal prerogatives.<br />
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It’s a virtuoso piece of dogged historical deduction. And as he concludes, ‘it is perhaps rather fortunate,’ at least for us, ‘that Leo’s eyesight happened to fail him as he rode past the convent of Holy Cross’.
Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-43228542342351724902017-06-13T02:07:00.001-07:002017-06-13T02:07:49.160-07:00We all fall downI’ve just finished examining an outstanding Australian MPhil thesis which, amongst other things, put me in mind of James Cameron’s <i>Aliens</i>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bring out your dead!</td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/about-the-centre/researchers/olivia-formby/" target="_blank">Olivia Formby</a> of the University of Queensland has written a terrific thesis, building on Keith Wrightson’s <a href="http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300174472" target="_blank">microhistory</a> of a Newcastle scrivener in the 1630s, on the emotional history of plague epidemics in 1630s England. She studies two outbreaks in particular, in Louth in 1631 and Hull in 1637: both took around 800 lives, which in Louth’s case amounted to 44% of the population of the town.<br />
<br />
44%! Try to imagine that for a moment. ... Now what do you come up with? As she points out, there are a series of highly excitable images of utter social collapse, despair and descent into barbarism to be culled from contemporary plague literature, and a lot of historians have swallowed this ‘dystopic vision’ wholesale. Whether because we simply believed it, or because the quotes make good copy for our textbooks. But as she points out – and proves with a careful reading of wills and parochial documents, but really, the point is self-evidently true once she has made it – that’s not really what happened. English towns didn’t collapse into a Hobbesian world of desperation as the death toll mounted; they kept calm and carried on. They didn’t even tend to
suffer panics of scapegoating or paranoia about deliberate plague-spreaders or witchcraft. Instead they made wills, conducted funerals, regulated trade, listened to sermons and prayed for it all to end.<br />
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It seems to me that what Formby has done is diagnose a weakness, not simply of our accounts of plague in early modern England, but in our collective imagination. This is why I started thinking about movies, the principal medium for modern dystopias. We love 'em. But they tend either to be absolute: near-extermination, total collapse, zombie takeover, world utterly
transformed – or averted: after a desperate brush with near-calamity the world goes back to how it’s always been.<br />
<br />
Well, fair enough, our imaginations like absolutes, but this is lazy. Lazy and cowardly. It is the attitude of the marine in <i>Aliens</i> (I did promise) who, when the
shuttle is destroyed and the band on the surface are left without an apparent means of escape, whimpers ‘Game over! Game over!’ – because in the world of video games, we are used to the idea of total disaster, crash and burn, pull out and start again, no consequences. But reality ain’t like that.<br />
<br />
Most disasters are not absolute. They are real, devastating, and consequential, but they do not wipe the slate clean. Human beings are
resilient and are also creatures of habit. You can panic, but you can’t keep panicking, and once you’ve finished, you tend to carry on, because what else is there? The real catastrophes of the West in the past century (world wars, the Spanish flu) have been of this kind: even as the principal imagined one (nuclear war) is of the absolute variety.<br />
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We need to learn to be better at imagining serious but non-terminal disasters, the kind which are actually going to hit us. (For a recent cinematic example, the excellent and chilling <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/" target="_blank">Contagion</a></i>.) That way, when we confront such things, we will be less tempted simply to say ‘Game over!’ and to attempt to reboot reality, and will instead try to work out how to deal with real, permanent but not unlimited damage. Plus, doing the work of imagination beforehand may also give us a more prudent attitude to the risks we recklessly run.<br />
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And look, I did that whole thing without saying a word about climate change!Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-35835217557218383562017-06-09T11:53:00.002-07:002017-06-09T11:53:18.367-07:00Really surprisingly cheerfulPerhaps you don’t need reasons to be cheerful. After all, everyone lost, so everyone also won.<br />
Hurray!<br />
<br />
But while you amuse yourself with trying to work out how we can possibly now get a functioning government, and who in any of the parties could be a credible prime minister, let’s not lose sight of three big, permanent, positive things that happened last night, in descending order of certainty.<br />
<br />
1. UKIP. It is over. We’ve never had a serious far-right party in this country: and we still don’t. Nuttall in Boston succeeded in getting over a tenth of the vote of his Tory opponent. The Tories are faithfully fulfilling their main historic purpose: squeezing the nasty people out. Would someone please sit the Daily Mail down quietly and tell them?<br />
<br />
2. Peak Nat. This is over too. I wish that Ruth Davidson’s surge hadn’t taken out my old friend Eilidh Whiteford, but the law of gravity has caught up with the SNP. No indyref2. For those of us who like being British, this is good news: we get to keep our country.<br />
<br />
3. There is now neither a parliamentary majority nor a democratic mandate for a hard Brexit. How those facts translate into stopping one is another matter, but they will I imagine have a stubborn significance.<br />
<br />
Plus a fourth thing. It’s nice that turnout, especially among the young, was up, and that will have all sorts of salutory effects, but I am more taken by the fading of regionalisation. A few years ago we were talking of the north and south of England as if they were different countries, and of Scotland as if it were a different continent. The 2010 election – in which England and Wales sloshed all over the place, and Scotland saw not a single seat change hands – implied political cultures that were really drifting apart. Now we have stronger Tory surges in their traditionally weak areas – the north of England and especially Scotland – and stronger Labour surges in their traditionally weak areas in the South. No uniform swings, of course, that would be tedious: but it is just possible that we may still actually be a single country.
Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-50646606100397456812017-05-20T07:31:00.000-07:002017-05-20T07:35:27.947-07:00Religio mediciSo, at our History of Christianity seminar this week we had a fascinating paper from <a href="https://www.dur.ac.uk/history/staff/profiles/?id=15231" target="_blank">Mark Hutchinson</a> on how Protestant theology influenced political concepts of liberty across England and Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, which was too subtle and sharp for me to summarise here. But he also brought this with him, which was too good to miss:<br />
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There has been lots of good tat produced around the Luther quincentenary (the Playmobil figure seems ubiquitous) but this is the best I've seen. In case it's not clear on the image, the 'medicine' is a series of little scrolls with apposite Luther quotes on them. The accompanying leaflet keeps the metaphor going: I particularly liked the note that the active ingredients were 90% Lutheran and 10% Reformed.<br />
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But it did leave me wondering what sort of medicine different theologies were. The title <i>Lutherol</i> suggests a painkiller, and I'm not sure that's right. A painkiller would work better for Catholicism, I think. Lutheranism seems to me more like a kind of decongestant, like one of those sprays that takes instant effect. Calvinism, by contrast, is more of a purgative. Certain other Protestant groups are perhaps more psychoactive. Anglicanism is undoubtedly a depressant. Or, sometimes, a placebo. Other suggestions on a postcard please.<br />
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<br />Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-70785699536918068872017-04-10T14:26:00.003-07:002017-04-10T14:26:43.621-07:00Incarnation at the MetIn the midst of my somewhat dazing trip to the US last week to promote the new book, I was able to take a couple of hours to visit the <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/" target="_blank">Metropolitan Museum of Art</a> - which, having not been to New York since I was a child, I don't believe I've ever been to before. I'm something of a philistine when it comes to the visual arts, but this was moving even to me, especially the Renaissance and early modern Netherlandish materials (I hurried through all that quasi-classicist eighteenth-century French stuff as quickly as I could). But here is one item that particularly struck me:<br />
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<br />
That is an anonymous Lutheran family painting from Hamburg, probably dated to the 1570s.<br />
<br />
But here's the thing. The family are intensely, immediately real. OK, the older son's horse-shaped teenage face looks a little odd, but within the range; and the younger son is a bit blank-faced. But the daughter and, most especially, both parents, could simply step out of that, and if you ever saw them again, you'd recognise them, wouldn't you?<br />
<br />
... And then there is Jesus, who looks like no human being who has ever lived.<br />
<br />
I do appreciate that painting Jesus is difficult for anyone, and especially so for a Protestant, even a Lutheran. But the 'solution' here, of presenting him as an alien creature in such a way as almost to deny the doctrine of the Incarnation, is, um, problematic. It leaves me wondering: is this purely an artistic problem? Or does it speak to some deeper difficulty in this culture about imagining that Jesus is as real, and as human, as the people we bump into every day? Just asking.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-79178893324242481582017-03-20T10:09:00.001-07:002017-03-20T10:09:24.664-07:00The basket of inedibles<div>
Only a medieval theologian. I have read and heard the various versions of the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand (or four thousand) innumerable times, but this point had literally never occurred to me. I learn today* that Nicholas of Lyra’s difficult question about this story was not, how were the hungry fed? (obvs, it was a miracle) – but, where did the baskets come from? Did the people borrow them from a local farm? Did someone happen to have a dozen industrial-sized baskets with them just in case? Were there, in fact, no baskets, but simply enough waste to have filled a dozen baskets if anyone had had any?</div>
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It mattered to Nicholas because the credibility of the entire narrative seemed to turn on such details. (As such, he was content not to answer the question, simply to raise some plausible explanations.) And when you put it that way, it makes sense to worry about it. You can imagine, for example, that kind of question being produced triumphantly in court during a dramatic cross-examination. (There would be a certain Al Capone-ish drama in discrediting a miracle narrative with reference, not to the loaves and fishes, but to the humble old baskets.)</div>
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Why, though, does the question strike us (all right: me) as so distinctively medieval, and indeed as faintly ridiculous? Is it the ability to swallow the elephant while carefully calculating the parameters of the gnat? Is it that we’re more accustomed to the notion that narratives need to be taken in their own terms rather than as courtroom testimony? Or is it because, on some deep level, Nicholas of Lyra believed that this event really happened in the cold light of day; and, on some deep level, whatever we may profess, we don’t?</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*From Lesley Smith’s essay ‘Uncertainty in the Study of the Bible’ in <i>Uncertain Knowledge. Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages</i>, ed. by Dallas G. Denery II et al. (Turnhout: Brepols 2014), 135-159.</span></div>
Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-43862638301810015962017-03-17T04:03:00.000-07:002017-03-17T04:03:02.440-07:00Don't judge a book ...Like buses, suddenly a clutch of new books come along at once. After the <a href="http://alecryrie.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/you-only-live-twice.html" target="_blank">last one</a>, my big history of Protestantism is out next month in the <a href="https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780007465033/protestants" target="_blank">UK</a> and the <a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311515/protestants-by-alec-ryrie/9780670026166/" target="_blank">US</a>, and also in a <a href="http://www.hollandsdiep.nl/boek/?T_ID=9330" target="_blank">Dutch</a> translation. I've never prepared different national editions of a book before. It's been a strange experience.<br />
<br />
I wrote it in British English, naturally, but the Americans were the lead publishers in editorial terms, and so the text was Americanised by them and then had to be re-Anglicised. It was an unexpectedly far-reaching process. Spellings I had expected, but there's more. Dates get flipped: I knew about 24/8/72 versus 8/24/72, naturally, but I had never properly noticed that that extends to 24 August 1572 (British) versus August 24, 1572 (American). There is First World War vs. World War I (and I was told that most Americans aren't familiar with the label 'the Great War' at all, which makes perfect sense from an American point of view). And my American editor also helpfully pointed out that where the British edition refers to people emigrating from Europe to the United States, the American one ought (of course!) to refer to them immigrating.<br />
<br />
As well as language, there were deeper cultural issues. In secular old Britain, this is being marketed as a history book; in America, more more as a religious one. That's been reflected in several different ways. The American edition, to my regret, hasn't included any pictures (though there is a map), while the British one has 32 plates, which I am rather pleased with. But the pictures aren't a procession of glowering portraits of theologians, being chosen to illustrate aspects of Protestant life: the Americans feared that they might alienate pious readers. The clearest sign of this difference is the slightly different subtitles: America gets <i>Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World</i> whereas Britain has <i>Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World</i>.<br />
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The covers are a different story again. The Americans were first out of the trap, and an early draft looked like this:<br />
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What's interesting is that the Americans who saw that all just thought: plain, striking, aniconic, good! Whereas every British person I know who looked at that thought immediately of images like this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTKyYYwTv8sJ9OyiOOqwNBw0JH9VLVJv_so72YyKUW15jDZ8DmnLY6Afrlh4URIV03ef3DuN4nGt0JfAGCpTTV5GJz1Oee4Tep5ZcTCsr75vidsh6mGRUbp8t0l7NxNBfORMHCjbmCsgHw/s1600/1935_Nazi_Flag_Maker_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTKyYYwTv8sJ9OyiOOqwNBw0JH9VLVJv_so72YyKUW15jDZ8DmnLY6Afrlh4URIV03ef3DuN4nGt0JfAGCpTTV5GJz1Oee4Tep5ZcTCsr75vidsh6mGRUbp8t0l7NxNBfORMHCjbmCsgHw/s320/1935_Nazi_Flag_Maker_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Which isn't really the marketing strategy we had in mind. Why that set of patterns and colours triggered this association on one side of the Atlantic and not the other, I'd love to know.<br />
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So we toned it down and made it even simpler:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3ds4cYoEpNLKIzY27EugUYk4VcXHcGZDIqJHUPxfdDuA4f647CbdJEG_0HWxo_tGSvggWTMLFt6s6OGx18RaG6-MGAy3PrJxg5fue4up0dDoz3XGX3kVewB38_ByEIZejOn1d8cZU-TvM/s1600/41KX5xK6ovL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3ds4cYoEpNLKIzY27EugUYk4VcXHcGZDIqJHUPxfdDuA4f647CbdJEG_0HWxo_tGSvggWTMLFt6s6OGx18RaG6-MGAy3PrJxg5fue4up0dDoz3XGX3kVewB38_ByEIZejOn1d8cZU-TvM/s320/41KX5xK6ovL.jpg" width="211" /></a></div>
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Whereas the Dutch publisher solved the problem in a different way:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd2iEEFe0LCfnKg4bDaopUdNWZFVYsEaECeZ0o5diQQR4_Y1v3wzoUJcw14tK3O1i_SoO5fRq7xaCcJ-g1kUZeoPu_BEjsfB2trTvj6a2Y35kBK2pV8EMSGyI0GELlkDaQ427QrXqTcoll/s1600/9789048825257_240%25402x.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd2iEEFe0LCfnKg4bDaopUdNWZFVYsEaECeZ0o5diQQR4_Y1v3wzoUJcw14tK3O1i_SoO5fRq7xaCcJ-g1kUZeoPu_BEjsfB2trTvj6a2Y35kBK2pV8EMSGyI0GELlkDaQ427QrXqTcoll/s320/9789048825257_240%25402x.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>
<br />
Removing the cross from the capital P, and smacking an ecumenical fish in the middle of the page, serves to dispel any hint of Nazi chic.<br />
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The British publishers, meanwhile, produced something completely different - less Presbyterian severity, more hints of medievalism. I'm not really sure what it's supposed to symbolise, but it's pretty.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8ZOh2fnwYvEs5Y0ShZMzwMsua-9b6eJUm8aNqFWVIwd-J0274TN_M4ANILsYdCvitWuklVZUBW-D0C4q9-Ln9r_5DA4oLt2QIy69HIsFhvSfLRSP71yhPXBcomesF4CBNMnPKHjRHTfo6/s1600/9780007465033_jpg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8ZOh2fnwYvEs5Y0ShZMzwMsua-9b6eJUm8aNqFWVIwd-J0274TN_M4ANILsYdCvitWuklVZUBW-D0C4q9-Ln9r_5DA4oLt2QIy69HIsFhvSfLRSP71yhPXBcomesF4CBNMnPKHjRHTfo6/s320/9780007465033_jpg.png" width="209" /></a></div>
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Complete, of course, with a prominent endorsement from Diarmaid MacCulloch: one of the many people without whom this wouldn't have happened. Thank you all. And feel free to buy copies of all three editions so you can compare.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-32774686556702745942017-03-10T01:16:00.000-08:002017-03-10T01:16:42.272-08:00You only live twiceA new experience for me: the second edition of my 2009 textbook The Age of
Reformation is out.<br />
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<a href="http://208.254.74.112/books/details/9781138784642/" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj5C5k7XeImJmWOUAC01K_4MzeL3b6hm_tvtNlRwz_gwnuLcDuc2ymgtcNMITcfA4ccTYf1oWp0IMmExWV981PsZcpUIXjhVF0-aWLjVmsd3nNIIxipduzanDl5c2p7VfA6bKWvVO9va0N/s320/61jTh6JqrOL__SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
<br />
I’ve not prepared a second edition of anything before,
and I don’t know of any handbook to the experience. I did it because they asked,
obviously!, but I’ve got my doubts about the process. I struggle to think of
second editions of academic history textbooks that are improvements on the
original. The most promising model is probably that taken by, for example, Eamon
Duffy’s <i><a href="http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300108286" target="_blank">Stripping of the Altars</a></i>, in which the text was left alone and a new
extended introduction added. But that requires having a new body of thoughts,
and I’m also not sure I could get away with expecting libraries to restock just
for an introductory essay. Others have added new substantive chapters while
again leaving the rest alone. The worst case I can think of is A. G. Dickens’
<i><a href="http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-00798-2.html" target="_blank">The English Reformation</a></i>, whose second edition, 25 years after the first, ended
up doubling down on the points in the first which had been heavily criticised.
The result was that a venerable but dated book ended up looking merely grouchy
and wrong. I think it even, like an ill-considered sequel, ended up devaluing
the original by a kind of blowback.<br />
<br />
A different kind of example is suggested
by Fletcher’s <i><a href="https://www.routledge.com/Tudor-Rebellions-6th-Edition/Fletcher-MacCulloch/p/book/9781138839212" target="_blank">Tudor Rebellions</a></i>, which is now in its sixth edition and
has been taken over by Diarmaid MacCulloch. This is almost a case of the
proverbial broom with the new head and handle. It works, in large part because
that series centres around primary sources and there is always scope for
refining and (this is the other secret) extending those. <br /><br />
So what I ended up
doing was a thorough but not heavy rewrite. I kept the structure the same – no
new chapters – but revised every page: no changes on some, fiddly and obsessive
minor tweaks on some, and some pretty substantial changes. This includes
recanting some ghastly errors – in particular, which I should have known better,
my use of some of George Bernard’s material on the young Henry VIII’s religion,
which Richard Rex has <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/historical-journal/article/the-religion-of-henry-viii/E9A46207CD664360B001892A4BE12138" target="_blank">helpfully and conclusively demolished</a>. I put in a fair bit
more Irish material, thanks to Henry Jefferies; a fair bit more on several
rebellions, especially on the new material suggesting overlaps between the 1549
‘Prayer Book rebellion’ and the more generalised ‘camping time’ of the same
year; some new stuff on the prehistory of the dissolution of the monasteries; et
cetera.<br /><br />
Inevitably the result is a bit longer: closer to 130,000 than 120,000
words. But it’s printed in smaller and more congested type, so slightly fewer
pages. A handsome new cover to make up for it. I had to point out when cover
proofs came through that it might be wise to have ‘Second Edition’ somewhere on
the cover.<br /><br />
... And that’s it. I am still not entirely sure it’s a good idea:
perhaps rather than dressing mutton as lamb, it would be better to let it age
gracefully. My honest advice to anyone looking to buy a survey of the English Reformation is to go for Peter Marshall's about-to-be-published <i><a href="http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300170627" target="_blank">Heretics and Believers</a></i>, which is a really heavyweight and compelling narrative. Still, I’d be interested to know if anyone has thought seriously about the
second-edition phenomenon. And while you mull that, please rush out and buy a copy,
or they’ll never commission a third edition.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2750350132114764475.post-47921710302094406452017-01-13T08:06:00.000-08:002017-01-13T08:06:02.690-08:00JEH First View: Lost BoysI'm accustomed now to posting something each time a new number of the <em>Journal of Ecclesiastical History</em> is published, and I'll be doing the January one when it appears shortly: but that will be the last, because we're entering a brave new world. Well, 'tis new to me. Using Cambridge University Press' 'First View' service, from now on we'll be publishing articles online in advance of print publication: they'll go up on the website as soon as they're edited and ready. We'll be putting them up in batches every so often. And the <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/firstview" target="_blank">first batch</a> has just appeared. Hurrah!<br />
<br />
All of it good stuff, of course (I'm even pleased with my own contribution, a review article which singles out <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/firstview" target="_blank">one of the most important books I read last year</a>). But since I need to pick one out, I'll pick Jesse Zink's piece on Sudanese child refugees during the civil war of 1983-2005. I'm not aware that we've published an article that's strayed into the current century before, so that's worth noticing in its own right. And the fact that it is so firmly within living memory means that the grim events he is describing have a visceral immediacy: I defy you not to be gripped by it. But that's not what makes it an important article. The Christianisation of Africa is one of the most important stories in world history in the past half-century, and it is a process which has gone on largely out of sight. What Jesse has done - and his article is based on extensive fieldwork in Sudan and a lot of interview material - is to lift the bonnet on an extraordinary part of this process. His deep sympathy with the converts he is describing is plain enough, but he is clear-eyed about the process. The refugee camp emerges as a vital site for Christianisation. <br />
<br />
I'm reminded of a comment in Michael Cook's provoking and underrated <a href="http://books.wwnorton.com/books/A-Brief-History-of-the-Human-Race/" target="_blank">A Brief History of the Human Race</a>, to the effect that, at certain historical moments, it not only makes sense to abandon your inherited religious tradition and adopt a foreign one, but that it is almost inevitable: whatever your problem is, the new religion is part of the solution. Cook was talking about Ethelbert of Kent in the sixth century, but Zink's work implies that the same is true for much of Africa today.<br />
<br />
Of course, since South Sudan's independence, civil war has returned with a vengeance. Christianisation has not brought peace, and it seems unlikely that war will stop Christianisation. If anyone out there wants to write a follow-up article, we will, now, be able to publish it online with appropriate speed.Alec Ryriehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07153150214110931659noreply@blogger.com1