Wednesday 31 July 2013

RUINS AND NOSTALGIA

We went camping recently in Dorset in a field beneath the wonderfully romantic ruins of Corfe castle.
Robert Brook on wikicommons

It's a rather magnificent Norman castle which finally fell during the Civil War in the seventeenth century.  But it got me wondering what it is about such a ruin that makes it so beautiful and so romantic - after all, what it represents is a particularly brutal kind of power. And why don't modern ruins evoke the same kinds of feelings?
This is an image of Hashima island, recently written about rather interestingly in the Guardian.  

It would seem that our fascination with medieval ruins dates to the eighteenth century - though I think that this interest in ruins could actually be traced much earlier, witness the fifteenth century fascination with antique ruins.  Rosemary Sweet's book on Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain offers some really interesting material on this delight in ruins.

She opens by discussing the ways in which we have tended to mock and denigrate those obsessed with objects from the past as antiquarians and really rather pedantic old fools. Coincidentally, I'm just reading Walter Scott's The Antiquary which takes as its central figure just such a man: he's not depicted unsympathetically, but nevertheless he is a prejudiced, dusty old man, obsessed with remnants of the past, endlessly quoting learned tomes just for the sake of it, and pathetically proud of his collection of relics.

Sweet's book demonstrates though that Walter Scott's portrayal of the eighteenth-century antiquarians is unfair - that these were (usually) men whose interest in the past did not preclude a lively engagement with the present.  She explains that delight in ruins was not just 'nostalgic conservatism', and that 'there was no simple dichotomy between the enlightened world of conjectural history and the tedious pedantry of antiquarianism'. Eighteenth-century study of the past was part of the Enlightenment project - it was a genuine attempt to engage with the present, to throw critical light on current problems and to seek to understand human nature and society.

This is important for two reasons.  First - it reminds us not only that history is important, but that the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts of historical research are just as important as the big ideas.  

Second, I think it's an important reflection on the nature of nostalgia, a topic I'm really interested in at the moment.  Nostalgia isn't just longing for the past, as the eighteenth-century antiquarians show - it can be a response to change and a way of addressing the future.  This gives a different spin to our attitude to ruins.  Maybe we love sites like Corfe just because we're ill-informed and overly romantic, but perhaps we can turn that nostalgia into a dialogue between past and present, reflections on the overlaps between beauty and violence, and a critical reflection on our own attachment to symbols of power.

Monday 29 July 2013

STEREOTYPES

As my students know, I'm rather wedded to the idea of criminological labelling theory! It's a ridiculous mouthful - but the idea behind it is very simply: that if you repeatedly label someone as deviant, or stupid, or even exceptionally successful, then that person is more likely also to behave in that way.

Liber ethicorum by Henricus Alemannia, late C14th
It first struck me in the context of the classroom before I even started studying history, that if you repeatedly label a particular child as naughty and deviant, you create a situation wherein that child can only really affirm his or her identity by misbehaving in such a way. The obvious riposte is that such labels don't tend to arise in a vacuum.  People generally label others because they have misbehaved in the first place - but, I think, the case still stands, that you do thereby shape the ways they're likely to behave in the future.  

I've found it a rather useful way of thinking about the misbehaviour of students in the Middle Ages, the topic of my current research project.  These students were constantly being stereotyped by those around them as noisy, drunken, brutal and sexually immoral.  And certainly a noisy minority behaved in precisely such a way.  But surely this misbehaviour was shaped by the fact that the perpetrators knew that they were being constantly categorised as deviant.  In a sense, the choice of behaviours open to them was limited by the railing of preachers, parents, chroniclers and so on.  And sometimes, the students responded in quite explicit ways to the stereotypes.  My favourite example is a naughty student who signed off a letter requesting money from his guardian with the words 'From one who eats well, drinks better and sleeps the best': he was cleverly mixing the negative stereotypes with the language used to describe a model student.  We can then begin to analyse the particular gestures of naughty students by thinking about how they might, ironically, have been encouraged in their often very imaginative use of violence, by the very comments which sought to condemn it - they seemed often to take a certain pride in their actions.

I was therefore particularly interested to read in The Spirit Level that stereotyping students and children has been shown to directly affect their academic performance: they cite a study by Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in the 60s, who told her students that it was scientifically proven that blue-eyed children were more likely to succeed than their lazy brown-eyed counterparts - sure enough, the children then fulfilled this prophecy in the test she set them; when she then informed them that she'd got the thing muddled up, and actually it was blue-eyed children who were lazy, the results dramatically reversed.  Wilkinson and Pickett comment that 'When we expect to be viewed as inferior, our abilities seem to be diminished' (p. 113).

The effects of stereotyping can't explain all underachievement and misbehaviour, but the historical evidence, as well as these more recent sociological studies, indicate that the ways in which talk about others carry a big responsibility.

Friday 26 July 2013

POMPEII AND HERCULANEUM

Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum - follow the link for details of the exhibition

A couple of weeks ago, I took my little boy up to London, and we met up with a friend and then visited the exhibition on Pompeii and Herculaneum at the British Museum.  The exhibition is truly outstanding - it contains a wonderful range of objects and paintings, and some artefacts of incredible beauty.

My responses to the exhibition are threefold.  

First - I was just bowled over by the sheer elegance of even the most everyday objects.  Medieval art is very beautiful (more on this anon, of course), but the grace of this stuff does make me a little envious of classicists.

Second - I found it all very moving, and, like many people I expect, was particularly touched by the baby's cradle on display:


It provided such an emotional insight into the lives of people who suddenly seemed very much like us. And at the same time, as Mary Beard pointed out, many of their attitudes and interests were so very very different.  Perhaps the point is that it's all the more extraordinary to realise that even in intensely contrasting cultures, there is much that is constant, not just in practical but in emotional terms - we all love our children, we all suffer from the sleepless nights, and we all treasure their tiny achievements.

My third response was a more troubled one.  I find it problematic looking at corpses (though these were casts) on display.  In particular, as one leaves the exhibition, an important section on the human cost of the eruption is pretty hard-hitting.  It's very important to include constant reminders that, however amazing the remains, this was a terrible human tragedy.  But is it right to look at the corpses of the victims? - the visitor is presented with a family in its last moments - a small child lies oddly with its tendons contracted, another struggles to escape from its mother's knee, and the mother and father are clearly in agony.  

I'm sure that many think I'm over-reacting.  After all, these weren't the actual corpses - they're casts of the bodies found in the ash - and in any case, they're just bodies.  But they weren't able to give permission, and so many cultures have a long history of complex attitudes towards the dead body.  

I've just been re-reading the fascinating article by Elizabeth Brown (Viator, 1981, pp. 221-70) about the 1299 bull Detestande feritatis issued by Pope Boniface VIII, against the practice of dismemberment of corpses - a practice popular both because one could increase the number of post mortem prayers for one's soul by putting bits of one's body in different churches, and because it seemed like a nice way to ensure physical proximity to lots of different family members.  Boniface's bull was extremely controversial, and in many ways, Brown argues, only lent distinction to the practice, as the elite could request special dispensation and further demonstrate how special they were in that the usual rules didn't apply.  Philip IV, king of France obtained permission from Clement V to allow his body to be eviscerated, boiled, split or divided as he wished (and, in due course, it was).  It wasn't really until the fifteenth century that practice began to recede.  What this suggests to me is that, across cultures, humans care enormously about their bodies after death and find it very hard to let go of the idea that it matters what happens to them.  Thirteenth and fourteenth-century theologians and popes could point out that there was no rational reason to divide the body after death (rational taken in the sense of their own frameworks of belief), but they could not overcome a kind of popular attachment to the sense that one would want to ensure physical continuation in some form.

So... I loved the exhibition, but I felt uncomfortable towards the end.  I guess that the ranks of teenagers eating sandwiches opposite the dead family didn't help...

Wednesday 24 July 2013

SUFFOLK

I have just returned from a wonderful week in Suffolk by the sea - my little boy discovered the joys of waves...


... and I discovered the joys of this -

fifteenth-century carving of sloth, Blytheburgh Church 

and this -
fifteenth-century carving of gluttony, Blytheburgh Church 

It was also an opportunity to visit some of the outstandingly beautiful medieval churches of Suffolk - they stand as a reminder of just how much the economics of a region can change, as they indicate the former wealth and prosperity of what are now very quiet and tranquil regions.

I was particularly struck by the church at Covehithe.


This is a lovely thatched seventeenth-century Church nestling inside the ruins of a much larger and grander building of mainly fifteenth-century origin.  It was during the Middle Ages that Covehithe prospered as a result of its coastal location.  By the seventeenth century, the fishing and trade which sustained the town had significantly receded, as had the coast - this is an area which suffers from pretty extreme erosion.

There is something very lovely about the former glory of what is now a tiny hamlet somehow sheltering its more modest subsequent life.  And it shows not only fluctuating fortunes, but a genuinely reciprocal relationship between past and present that I find rather inspiring.  We often criticise those in medieval and early modern period for their looting of classical ruins for example, but there's another way of looking at this: the use of the old building at Covehithe (material from the medieval Church was used to build the new one) is about adaptation and acknowledgement of changing needs and altered circumstances.  The distant past stands beside the more recent past and the present nudges only very gently.

Monday 22 July 2013

EQUALITY AND VIOLENCE

I'm so sorry for the long gap...  examining, sunshine, playing with my son...  Anyway, I have lots of thoughts I want to share here, and lots of exciting trips to talk about.


A few weeks ago, I went to a brilliant conference on 'European Perspectives on Cultures Violence' at the University of Leicester.  Since violence is the subject of my book, it was of obvious interest to me, and a great opportunity to think about cultures and roles of, and responses to, violence across a variety of societies and periods.  It was everything a conference should be - some excellent and thought-provoking papers, a healthy level of disagreement, and really stimulating discussions over coffee...   I came away with so much to think about.

The conference concluded with a talk by Peter King on levels of violence and how we might explain them.  He took on the idea that the apparent decline in violence over time (diachronic) is connected to the trio of modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation, and challenged it by considering whether it could explain differing levels of violence across space (synchonic).  On the face of it, more modernised countries have lower levels of violence.  But, when you look within those countries, historically, you find that the areas with the lowest levels of industrialisation and urbanisation tend to be the least violent.  Of course, all these things are hard to measure, but the evidence looked pretty convincing.  So, what other explanations might work?  

King suggested that the most reliable marker of levels of violence, both historically and in the modern world, is inequality.  Societies which can be deemed most unequal, according to a variety of criteria, tend to be the most violent (usually measured in terms of homicide rates).  The most equal societies (and I'm afraid that the UK is not one of them) have the lowest rates of violence.

This is a correlation rather than an explanation.  But surely the idea that inequality breeds hostility and tension is a no-brainer.  Coincidentally, I've just been reading Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, and the mass of evidence is pretty overwhelming - poverty alone isn't the issue - it's inequality.  

Which makes it all the more extraordinary that we seem to be content to live in a society which is becoming ever more unequal (though in more insidious ways).  And we look for ever-more complex ways to justify this.  Or at least I thought we did.  The other day when we took our son swimming at a beautiful lake: there was a special deal to park for £5, rather than the usual charge per head - I overheard a mother of two small children complaining that it was too crowded: 'They really should stick with the higher price to limit the number of people who come here'.  Amazing.

Thursday 4 July 2013

GUILTY AS CHARGED?

I'm going to bore you with one more post on law, and then I'll write about what I got up to last week...

One of the oddest things, I think, in practice about court cases nowadays, is the strategic use of pleas. In other words, pleading innocent or guilty is not just about whether one believes oneself to be innocent or guilty - it's a way of attempting to shape the jury and the judge's response - it's a bargain in many cases.  And one of the alarming predicted consequences of changes to the legal aid system, given that lawyers will be paid a flat fee, seems to be that more people will be persuaded by their lawyers to plead guilty in the hope of a swift outcome.  This makes the notion of 'innocent until proven guilty' extremely problematic, as it rests on the assumption that some people just seem guiltier than others.  And that means that outcomes will more than ever be shaped by stereotypes, labels and reputations.  This is an extremely medieval approach, as in late medieval legal practice, the reputation  or 'fama' of a person could be the element which brought them to court in the first place - it was enough to initiate a case ex officio.  A few years ago, there was a popular knock-knock joke:

Knock-knock
Who's there?
O.J. Simpson
O.J. Simpson who?
Right - you're on the jury.

It was proving almost impossible to conduct a legal process without jury members already being extremely prejudiced against the defendant, because the case was so notorious.  In the Middle Ages, the joke would have been pretty much the other way round - one wanted jury members who were aware of the prior reputation of the defendant, as that was part of the case.

Given that stereotypes and reputations are unreliable, often class dependent, and reflect the prejudices of observers as much as the behaviour of the subjects, it seems to me an unequivocally good thing to have left such a system behind.  But have we really?



I thought I'd turn to Montaigne to have a look at what he says on the subject of law.  In his essay on laws and customs, he tells a brilliant story of a young woman who nurses a calf.  She carries the calf around when it's very tiny, and, by force of habit, barely notices how big it gets, and is still carrying it around when it's a fully grown cow.  Given how heavy my little boy is getting, I particularly like the tale!  Typically for Montaigne, the story must be tongue-in-cheek and he not as credulous as he pretends to be.  But it has an important point.  Custom deadens us to the ridiculous, and it deadens us to the unacceptable.  Many of the recent changes to the legal system in recent years have been much talked about - eg. 40 day detention without trial - but many haven't stimulated all that much discussion - eg. changes to legal aid.  It's these little, almost imperceptible changes, which add up in what can add up to some pretty alarming conclusions.

Wednesday 3 July 2013

MAGNA CARTA AND NOW

I'm afraid that my aim to publish a post on the subject of law each day last week went overboard in the flurry of conferences and examining.  However, there was still lots of time for thinking.  I'd also like to thank those who've sent comments to previous posts - either on Twitter or here - they've been provocative and useful, and I'd love to hear more...

Illustration of a judge From Peniarth 28 manuscript c. 1250

And it occurs to me that using the much vaunted Magna Carta in order to critique modern day applications of law is perhaps only part of the story.  Because, much as we might hold up Magna Carta as the ultimate expression of constitutional freedoms, it isn't!  So perhaps the more useful thing to do is to think about the shortcomings of Magna Carta and the ways in which we are so conspicuously failing to address those shortcomings 800 years later.

Most obviously, there was no supreme court in the thirteenth century.  So the rights and privileges enshrined in Magna Carta were all very well, but ensuring that they meant something in practice was trickier.  Are we in a similar situation now? - where the politicisation of law - eg. detention without trial - lacks the checks and balances of a supreme court?  At the time of Magna Carta, the enforcers were the king's own servants, so the idea of reining in the power of the monarchy was deeply flawed. Again, have we established sufficient safeguards now? - imprisonment without trial is effectively in the hands of the same political establishment as any who might be able to limit its use.

It's also useful to flip things around and think about it from the perspective of the litigants.  We tend to assume that Magna Carta defended the rights of the users of law, and upheld the principles which protected them.  But from the point of view of those users, although they clearly cared about the principles, the integrity of Magna Carta over the years was, to a great extent, challenged by the fact that, really, people wanted to win.  In each individual case, winning, understandably, tended to mean more to people than defending abstract ideas of justice - when it's your own livelihood which is at stake, things look a bit different.  And I wonder whether this is also something to worry about now - moral principles about law must compete with the users' very justifiable desire for a positive outcome.  Our highfalutin discussions ultimately mean little in most cases unless members of society feel sure and safe.  And this is a tension which is all to easy for politicians to exploit.