Scurvy knaves

Like most people, I learned the cautionary tales about scurvy as a child: how, before the nineteenth century, sailors, and sometimes even aristocrats, would develop symptoms moving from loss of appetite to skin spots, bleeding gums, loss of teeth and hair and eventual horrible death - and how various heroes, chiefly Captain Cook, solved the problem by prescribing such unsavoury diets as (depending on which children's book you read) a lemon a month, a raw onion a month or (which seems to have been more accurate) a regular dose of sauerkraut. No wonder Jellicoe couldn't beat the German navy.


But now, from a lovely book by Karen Ordahl Kupperman* on a forgotten, doomed colonial venture (the Puritan-sponsored colony on Providence Island, off the Honduran coast, from 1630-41) I learn about an alternative, earlier cure. A scandal arose in the colony in 1634, when a man named Floud, an indentured servant to Captain William Rudyerd, the colony's muster-master, was discovered to have died following a truly vicious whipping. Indentured servants were Englishmen and not slaves: you weren't supposed to do that sort of thing. The accusation was that Floud had complained to the colony's governor about the mistreatment he had already suffered at Captain Rudyerd's hands, provoking the further 'discipline' which killed him.


But Captain Rudyerd had an explanation: it was not a punishment at all. Floud, apparently, was developing scurvy (like many of the colonists). The whipping was intended as treatment.


The point is that one of scurvy's first symptoms is lethargy and difficulty in movement, later exacerbated by painful joints. At least, that's the way round we put it nowadays. Apparently many in the 17th century, perfectly logically, reversed the causation: scurvy is simply an extreme form of laziness, in which the moral defect has become so severe that the body breaks down. When you have a lazy servant, then, rigorously correcting his fault will both ensure you are better served, and also potentially save his life by reintroducing him to the virtues of hard labour. Rudyerd explained that he had 'used all fair means to prevent the Scurvy which through laziness was seizing upon him'.


In this case, the treatment was successful but the patient died. Whether this regime of treatment was more or less popular with victims than was sauerkraut is a subject on which we clearly need further research.


*Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630-41: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, 1993), p. 157.

The poetry of history

Molière's gentleman discovered that he'd been speaking prose all his life, but I think I may have discovered that I've been trying to write poetry. That, at least, is what I take from a lively paper at a conference yesterday hosted by Durham's Hearing the Voice project. Jules Evans spoke about poetry as a kind of shamanism, with reference to Ted Hughes in particular: the point being the experience that Hughes and other poets (not only poets) describe, that of entering an inner state of ecstasy, reverie or something similar, in which they can access voices or depths not normally available. These voices are not under the poet's control and are experienced as something other - an inspiration. What's more, poets, like shamans, are 'masters of both worlds': neither stuck lumpishly in this one, nor vanished so far into the inner world that they cannot come back. The poet is able not only to access these insights, visions or whatever, but also to bring them back to the everyday world and to fashion the experience into something that can be effectively communicated to others through an artistic medium. And the most accomplished wordsmith who does not travel into some inner world is not really a poet.

He concentrated on poetry, partly because of Hughes, partly because of Shelley's claim that poets are the world's unacknowledged legislators (which still sounds like sour grapes to me, but never mind). Still, at the end he asked if this poetic role was being taken by other media, film most obviously, which can invite the viewer into someone else's inner world.

I find this an appealing way to understand art defined very broadly, including the sort-of art-forms which I am involved with. The sermon can be understood in this way, I think, but I want to make a more outrageous claim: so can the best academic monographs. It made me realise that what I was trying to do in my most recent book, amongst other things, was to give voices to the dead: to converse with them and hear their critique of me and my own age, as well as to give mine of them and theirs.

No doubt I failed miserably, but I think this is part of what a good historian should be trying to do: to be master of both worlds. There is no substitute for the hard graft of scholarship: reading, deciphering, collating, checking, hunting, cross-referencing. History is after all a craft, and a rigorous one. But the history which I think is most worth reading, and the history which (however laughably) I aspire to write, is more than a craft. It genuinely hears the voice of its subjects, and draws its readers into their world - whether that world is a church, a battle, a parliament or a field.

Like all inspiration, this is not just hard to do: it can't actually be done at all. At best you can cultivate it. It happens or it doesn't; and then you make good use of it or you don't. We aren't used to thinking of scholarly achievement in those terms, and we don't train students to do so. Reverie and daydreaming don't have good presses. But I do recall as a doctoral student staring up blankly at the Bodleian Library's roof and seeing, again and again: Dominus illuminatio mea.

Church Times 'Best Christian Books'

So I am told, as a Church Times reviewer, that they're doing a feature this autumn on 'the best 100 Christian books of all time'. And they want suggestions. The criteria are:

Works should be of enduring value, influential in their time or after it. The list will encompass fiction and nonfiction, theological scholarship and popular titles, authors ranging from St. Augustine to Eamon Duffy to C. S. Lewis. (The only suggestion we will not consider is the Bible, divinely inspired authorship constituting an unfair advantage.) Among the categories to consider: mission and ministry, church history, theology, prayer and spirituality, the Old and New Testaments, liturgy and worship, literature and apologetics.

Now, there's a fun parlour game! What to nominate? I passed over the Prayer Book (which won't be short of friends) and Pilgrim's Progress (likewise). Here is my initial suggestion and rationale:

Philip Jacob Spener's Pia Desideria (1675). It's a short call to arms - or rather, to renewed piety: it was the book which kick-started Pietism, and is therefore indirectly (no, actually, pretty directly) responsible for modern Evangelicalism. What makes it so wonderful is that it combines two things which are almost never brought together. First, a moving call for moral and spiritual renewal: its insistence (which both Pietists and Evangelicals have too often forgotten) that to be a Christian means to follow Christ, not to be able to win doctrinal arguments. Against the hair-splitters and heresy hunters of his day, he warned that at the last judgement ‘we shall not be asked how learned we were’, but rather ‘how faithfully and with how childlike a heart we sought to further the kingdom of God’. And he added that if St. Paul were to try to follow one of the theological debates of the age, he would ‘understand only a little of what our slippery geniuses sometimes say’. BUT, he combines this preacherly idealism with a level-headed practicality about what should be done. In particular, he makes the revolutionary suggestion that Christians should not leave their spiritual fate in the hands of their ministers, nor of the political powers who usually dominated their churches, but rather take matters into their own hands. He recommended ‘the ancient and apostolic kind of church meetings’, that is, Bible study and discussion groups for mutual support and encouragement. Methodist bands and classes got the idea directly from him. It seems so normal now that it's hard to grasp how empowering and revolutionary it once was.

I think Spener deserves top-100 billing. But maybe just because I've been working on it these last couple of months. What other obscure gems want rescuing?

Surviving shortlisting

Back in the day, when I was trying to get my foot on the first rung of the academic jobs ladder, a more senior friend told me: once you start getting interviews, you’re OK, because then you know your number will come up sooner or later. And it’s true, more or less. But how do you get onto those shortlists?

I’m shortlisting for four different posts this month. Typically there are twenty, forty, a hundred applicants who needed to be whittled down to four for interviewing. How do you make the cut? Some suggestions.

1. Apply for the job that is advertised. No two academic jobs are exactly the same. Don’t just send a CV and a generic covering letter, which does not engage with the specifics of the institution you’re applying for and the particular requirements of the post. That’s one of the quickest ways to the bin.
2. Write good English. I’m sorry, but it needs to be said. Most academic jobs have ‘effective communication’ or something of that kind in the person specifications. If a shortlisting panel is looking for reasons to exclude people (and usually, we are), this makes it easy for them. If English is not your native language, this is especially important. We can’t easily judge how fluent a non-native speaker will be, and for any job that requires communication with students this may be decisively important. If your written English is not flawless, have someone proofread your letter and CV for you.
3. Remember that, in CV terms, less is often more. There are different CV cultures: in the USA, the comprehensive CV is often favoured, whereas in Britain we still tend to like the more selective one. But in any case, don’t include things for the sake of it. Maybe you have published thirty book reviews: if so, tell us that and perhaps list the journals for which you have reviewed, but don’t spend two pages giving us the full list. Or again, if you have non-academic achievements to highlight, be cautious. Make sure it’s relevant: often it is, often it isn’t.
4. In particular: don’t fill your CV so full of detail that readers miss the good stuff. I have seen people who present lists of publications in purely chronological order, so you have to read down through all the book reviews and short notes to spot that, half-way down page 2, there is a major Yale University Press monograph. Make it easy for your readers to see what you need them to see.
5. Don’t be ambiguous. Remember that panellists are suspicious and will interpret any ambiguity in the worst possible light. The most common case is where a publication is simply described as ‘forthcoming’. Forthcoming where and how? Is it something you are thinking of writing one day, is it appearing on a fixed date next month with a major academic press, or somewhere in between? Be precise: ‘under review with the Journal of Nonsense’, ‘under contract and due for submission on 31 December’, ‘in proof’, or whatever.
6. Help readers to understand how good your work is. Panellists reading lists of publications are trying to work out if any of this stuff is any good. Where there are signals that you can send (such as publication in a major journal or by a major academic press), do so. If those signals need amplifying, do so: for example, if you have published in a competitive journal which some of the panel may not be familiar with, make sure that they know that that’s what it is. And if you want to quote from reviews, article referees’ reports, or whatever, do so: a nice phrase or two under an article can help persuade a panellist that this might be a quality application worth spending a tiny bit more time on.
7. The same goes for your teaching. It is common to see CVs listing the names of courses or modules that applicants have taught. But those tell us very little. If you can, add something which indicates how good you were (feedback scores from students, for example) or which indicates the scale of what you were doing (so we know the difference between taking a few auxiliary classes and designing a whole lecture course from scratch).
8. Don’t leave unexplained gaps. If there is a period in your CV of more than a few months when your movements are unaccounted for, people spot it and wonder – even though they shouldn’t. If you had a career break for family reasons; if you were in non-academic work for a period; or anything like that, say so. If you have something that you don’t want to reveal (like an extended period of ill health, a spell in prison, or what have you), then find a way of explaining the missing years which is not actively deceptive. But if we see someone who got their PhD ten years ago and spent eight years of the intervening time not publishing, the application will be binned unless the gap can be explained.
9. Photos. Increasingly you see academic CVs with a cheesy photo of the applicant at the top. I know this is common in the business world. I really don’t like it: not just because some academics are off-putting to look at, but because it invites the panel to join the applicant in playing subliminal games of gender, age and racial politics. I don’t think it ever helps an application.
10. And do try not to be actively weird or unintentionally funny. Most piles of applications contain one like this. One that springs to mind is the candidate who listed contact details for four referees, as requested, but added after one of the names: ‘(deceased)’. And then gave this person’s full postal address. Such moments help to brighten the committee’s day, but the CV that makes us laugh almost never makes the list.

Good hunting …

UPDATE: See also my notes on how to survive the job presentation and on how to then self-destruct during the interview.

American dystopia

This year's slice of pre-Christmas cinematic tosh was the second Hunger Games film, which was better than you had any right to expect, and immeasurably better than the tedious second Hobbit.

I confess to a liking for post-apocalyptic dystopias, as long as they make some sort of sense (goodbye, The Road). And this one does, as long as you can swallow the implausibility of a dictatorship transmitting its oppressed people live on television to one another. (The regime appears to have misunderstood the phrase 'reality TV'.)

What struck me with this instalment, however, is how profoundly American this particular dystopia is. I don't simply mean the echoes of the American Revolution: thirteen (yes, it turns out there are thirteen) hardworking districts being oppressed by the brutal, decadent Capitol. Nor the patterns of American political conservatism that can be seen here: the conviction that what tyrants do is deny their people weapons. Plus the nicely-judged decision, ever so slightly flavoured with anti-UN paranoia, to call the brutal, faceless paramilitary police 'Peacekeepers'. Because in fact this story is not so easily politically pigeonholed: the final part of the trilogy makes plain that the revolution is not necessarily much better than the regime it replaces.

The most remarkably American feature of the story, however, is what is not there: the rest of the world. The stories are plainly set in some future North America. Now you would expect a tyrannical regime of this kind to use external threats (real or invented) to bolster its control; and you would expect rebels to be seeking foreign help. But there is, to my recollection, not a single hint in either books or films that the remainder of the planet even exists.

That gives the story a certain simplicity and even innocence. But it also seems to me to speak to an underlying theme in American political thinking, which is impossible but at the same time also admirable and enviable: the conviction that, in the state of nature as it were, the US is and ought to be a world to itself, whose character is itself a kind of Monroe doctrine, neither colony nor coloniser, free of entangling alliances. I appreciate that if you were the Marquis de Lafayette, you might be a little sore about that. But as national myths go, what's not to like?

Glimpses of North Korea

The kind of history I'm used to doing involves people who've been safely dead for a few centuries. But this project on global Protestantism comes right up to the present, and so sometimes close to the bone. I've just been finishing my chapter on Korean Protestantism, which is a remarkable story, but the really chilling and compelling stuff relates to what's happening north of the 38th Parallel.

Of course, we know almost nothing about religion in North Korea. Even a decade or so ago it was possible to believe the official line: that there was an 'opening' in the late 1980s, with two churches built in Pyongyang, hundreds of house churches, and representatives sent to the WCC. But the accounts given by the increasing numbers of refugees to make it out contradict that line too consistently and too profoundly to be ignored. Their testimony is that these are sham organisations created as magnets for foreign aid; and that public profession of Christianity (seen as an imperialist front), possession of a Bible, or any known contact with missionaries is lethally dangerous.

From the testimonies I've read, two elements stood out. First, Kim Yong's detailed account in Long Road Home: Testimonies of a North Korean Camp Survivor (Columbia University Press, 2009). This account left me with the sheer lawlessness of the North Korean gulag, which makes its Stalinist cousin look like a model of due process. There are no crimes, charges, trials or sentences, merely arrests. Kim was suddenly imprisoned midway through a successful career in the regime's bureaucracy because it was discovered that his birth family (he had been adopted at a young age) had been deemed to be traitors during the 1950-3 war. He spent much of the 1990s in Camp No. 14, mining coal for twelve or more hours per day, and only very occasionally saw daylight. Sixty workers shared a bare concrete room with insufficient space for them all to lie down at once. After a day’s mining came an hour’s ‘political struggle’, that is, written self-accusation and criticism of other prisoners’ conduct. ‘There was really nothing to confess, but we all had to come up with something in order to avoid severe punishment.’

Meanwhile all of them were slowly starving to death: their food rations were simply insufficient. It is unclear whether this camp and those like it were deliberately designed as death-by-labour institutions, or whether that is merely their effect. One sign of the extremity is that the camp was almost free of rats. Once, Kim was lucky enough to catch one, in the mine. He killed and ate it ‘head to tail, raw, without skinning it. The meat tasted like honey.’ He was eventually, and very unusually, transferred to a less severe camp: he is, in fact, the only prisoner ever known to have left Camp No. 14 alive. The more lenient regime of his new camp was marked by the prisoners' being given permission to gather grass to supplement their diet: and its lower security eventually allowed him to escape, in the bottom of a coal truck.

Second, the research in a report produced by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2008. As well as interviewing 'ordinary' refugees, they interviewed former members of the Northern security services who had escaped. Their stories largely confirm the extent to which religion in general, and Protestantism in particular, is seen by the Northern regime as an existential threat, and suppressed ferociously. This includes the deliberate creation of fake underground churches in order to trap would-be converts, and of course to foment distrust amongst believers. This much is perhaps predictable, and fits into the agenda which one might imagine USCIRF would be keen to hear (not that I doubt it). But there are some glimpses of something more complicated. One former security official described a remarkable visit to a high-ranking official’s house, at which the two of them and a third official ‘worshipped together in his house with the curtains drawn’. They read the Bible aloud and prayed for Kim Jong Il. The newcomer asked how they reconciled their faith with their official position:

They said that it was a heartbreaking job to catch Christians while they, too, were Christians, but they had to stay in their positions because their situation could turn even worse if an evil-minded person was in that position to ferret out believers. So they keep their positions and sometimes advise people to run away.

Not heroic: but there is a certain kind of plausible courage there. These are the sorts of perilous compromises which are made under those circumstances. In practical terms, there is virtually nothing outsiders can do about these horrors. But it would seem appropriate - and indeed, deeply subversive - to pray.

Bedtime at Bishop

A long day at Bishop Auckland again on Friday, much of it on the nuts and bolts of the redevelopment, which is all exciting but not terribly blogworthy.

But then, at the end of the day, a glimpse of a truly jawdropping object, just acquired: the Paradise Bed, which now seems, pretty clearly, to be the bed made for the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York in 1486. It would be nice to say it was the bed in which Prince Arthur and Henry VIII were conceived - and it might be. But it clearly dates from that era, is very high-quality workmanship, and is topped with separate white and red York and Lancaster roses. The united Tudor rose only became a viable symbol once the marriage was made and the prince born.

Best of all, though, is the headboard:

Adam and Eve for a marriage-bed might seem obvious enough, if not subtle. It's been suggested that Adam and Eve's faces are carved to resemble the royal couple, which is possible if not exactly conclusive. But the best bit is the text on the cartouche: 'The sting of death is sinne / The strength of sinne is the law' (I Cor 15:56). Romantic, eh?