Perhaps you don’t need reasons to be cheerful. After all, everyone lost, so everyone also won.
Hurray!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Friday, 9 June 2017
Saturday, 20 May 2017
Religio medici
So, at our History of Christianity seminar this week we had a fascinating paper from Mark Hutchinson 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:
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.
But it did leave me wondering what sort of medicine different theologies were. The title Lutherol 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.
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.
But it did leave me wondering what sort of medicine different theologies were. The title Lutherol 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.
Monday, 10 April 2017
Incarnation at the Met
In 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 Metropolitan Museum of Art - 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:
That is an anonymous Lutheran family painting from Hamburg, probably dated to the 1570s.
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?
... And then there is Jesus, who looks like no human being who has ever lived.
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.
That is an anonymous Lutheran family painting from Hamburg, probably dated to the 1570s.
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?
... And then there is Jesus, who looks like no human being who has ever lived.
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.
Monday, 20 March 2017
The basket of inedibles
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?
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.)
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?
*From Lesley Smith’s essay ‘Uncertainty in the Study of the Bible’ in Uncertain Knowledge. Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages, ed. by Dallas G. Denery II et al. (Turnhout: Brepols 2014), 135-159.
Friday, 17 March 2017
Don't judge a book ...
Like buses, suddenly a clutch of new books come along at once. After the last one, my big history of Protestantism is out next month in the UK and the US, and also in a Dutch translation. I've never prepared different national editions of a book before. It's been a strange experience.
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.
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 Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World whereas Britain has Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World.
The covers are a different story again. The Americans were first out of the trap, and an early draft looked like this:
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:
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.
So we toned it down and made it even simpler:
Whereas the Dutch publisher solved the problem in a different way:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World whereas Britain has Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World.
The covers are a different story again. The Americans were first out of the trap, and an early draft looked like this:
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:
So we toned it down and made it even simpler:
Whereas the Dutch publisher solved the problem in a different way:
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.
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.
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.
Friday, 10 March 2017
You only live twice
A new experience for me: the second edition of my 2009 textbook The Age of
Reformation is out.
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 Stripping of the Altars, 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’ The English Reformation, 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.
A different kind of example is suggested by Fletcher’s Tudor Rebellions, 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.
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 helpfully and conclusively demolished. 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.
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.
... 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 Heretics and Believers, 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.
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 Stripping of the Altars, 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’ The English Reformation, 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.
A different kind of example is suggested by Fletcher’s Tudor Rebellions, 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.
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 helpfully and conclusively demolished. 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.
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.
... 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 Heretics and Believers, 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.
Friday, 13 January 2017
JEH First View: Lost Boys
I'm accustomed now to posting something each time a new number of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History 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 first batch has just appeared. Hurrah!
All of it good stuff, of course (I'm even pleased with my own contribution, a review article which singles out one of the most important books I read last year). 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.
I'm reminded of a comment in Michael Cook's provoking and underrated A Brief History of the Human Race, 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.
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.
All of it good stuff, of course (I'm even pleased with my own contribution, a review article which singles out one of the most important books I read last year). 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.
I'm reminded of a comment in Michael Cook's provoking and underrated A Brief History of the Human Race, 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.
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.
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