Festive news

With Christmas approaching the news are definitely getting more festive by the minute. Just read an article in the Telegraph about a scientist who has studied the anatomy and physiology of angels and fairies and come to the surprising conclusion that they can’t fly. There’s research money put to good use here, as a fellow Twitter user commented!

More research apparently is being done on the giving of Christmas presents. The Times Higher Education Supplement on 17 December recommended a range of scholarly articles from ‘Gift selection for easy and difficult recipients’ to ‘Is it better to give than receive?’ and even  ’A guide map to the terrain of gift value’.

And as religion always tends to sell nearer to Christmas The Times put in an article for good measure claiming that cryptic signatures in the visitors’ book at the Venerable English College in Rome dating from Shakespeare’s so-called ‘lost years’ in the 1580s prove that the Bard was actually ‘a secret Catholic’.

Time to think

Higher education policy has become a hot topic in the European press with the ongoing financial crisis and the Bologna reforms putting pressure on university resources, academic staff and students. While the financial crisis means that more people are going into higher education because there are fewer jobs on the market (and some return to education because they have been sacked), universities struggle to meet the needs of an increasing student population. Most governments can’t afford to raise higher education spending. Some even have to cut down, like Italy early this year or the Latvian government, which saw students taking to the streets on Tuesday to protest against spending cuts in the education sector. And standards are dropping.

There’s not enough staff to teach the ever-increasing bulk of students, there are not enough rooms, computers and books in the library. There are funding applications to be written and sponsors to be found. But there’s not enough money to go round. And nobody ever seems to have time.

Time is an important factor in academia. Scholars need time for research, time for writing, time for attending conferences, time for networking, time for teaching and preparation, and time for their students.

Students need time to choose the subject they’re interested in. They might even want to try out different subjects to make sure they get it right. Students need time to find their feet at university, time to read, write essays, revise for exams, and time to see their tutors.

Yet, time is something students and academics have less and less of. Especially since they have been burdened with the EU reforms of the Bologna process. Don’t get me wrong. I love Europe, it’s a great idea, and higher education standards have to become more comparable and compatible if we want to make the project work. And introducing the three cycles of qualification – BA, MA and PhD – across the board is a good way to achieve this, as is the introduction of a European Credit Transfer System. They help students to move from one country to another during their degree and so encourage them to study foreign languages and broaden their minds.

French Revolutionaries & English Republicans: A bridge to the Continent

As its subtitle announces Rachel Hammersley’s French Revolutionaries and English Republicans (Woodbridge, 2005) is a study of the Cordeliers Club in Paris between 1790-1794. It traces the Club’s radical policies and associated writings in the years following the rebellion of 1789 and its attempts to influence the National Assembly as it forged a new constitution for France.

What makes the Cordeliers so interesting for scholars of early modern English political thought, however, is their use of C17th English authors in the shaping of their political arguments. In his attempt at advocating republican structures in C18th France, the Cordeliers’ secretary Théophile Mandar, for instance, translated Marchamont Nedham’s The Excellencie of a Free State (1656) – assembled from editorials of the Commonwealth newsbook Mercurius Politicus – into French. This translation is not only remarkable for what it transmits into French, but in particular for what it changes and decides to omit.

Thus, Mandar, who was an admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s republicanism, used Nedham to promote Rousseau’s ideas of liberty and popular sovereignty, making Nedham in the process much more radical and democratical than he actually was. So Mandar decides to turn Nedham’s advocacy of relative equality into a call for the ‘greatest equality among all the citizens’ (p. 73); and while Nedham clearly didn’t aim to include the rabble or the ‘confused promiscuous body of the people’ into the number of active participants in political life, Marat simply cut the respective passage from Nedham ‘thereby suggesting that he entertained no such restrictions on who was to be included among “the people,” ‘ (p. 74).

Besides Nedham, Marat also employed arguments from Algernon Sidney for his purposes, translating into French and publishing the last six chapters of Sidney’s Discourses concerning government in his own Des Insurrections of 1793.

Worden’s ‘Roundhead Reputations’: Every age writes its own history

I’ve just finished reading Blair Worden’s Roundhead Reputations (London, 2001), which had been cautiously recommended to me as more a ‘popular history’ book than a scholarly account. Popular it might be but it does not lack any of the accurate scholarship one is used to find in Worden’s work. Roundhead Reputations tells the fascinating story of three C17th English radicals, Edmund Ludlow, Algernon Sidney and Oliver Cromwell, whose public image has undergone considerable change over the course of the last few centuries. In particular, for most of the first half of the book,Worden is concerned with the work of the ‘Whig history factory’ (p. 147) and its main editor John Toland, who ‘polited’ the writings of regicides and republicans for a post-revolutionary audience after 1689 to promote the cause of political liberty in a typically English non-offensive way. In the process, Ludlow the regicide became a defender of constitutionalism, while the plotter Sidney turned into a politically detached country gentleman.

In the first four chapters Worden pays particular attention to the editorial process of Ludlow’s Memoirs that had been published from his own manuscripts in 1698. Having been taken at face value by scholars since the C18th, the surprise find of part of the original manuscript at Warwick Castle in the 1990s revealed the true extend to which the Memoirs had been doctored. The original manuscript, entitled A Voyce from the Watch-Tower, it turned out was more of a spiritual work, full of religious references and endless digressions, the work of a true Puritan and religious enthusiast. Ludlow’s title itself, Worden explains is an allusion to the Old Testament books of Isaiah (21.5-12) and Habakkuk (2.1), ‘where prophets stand on watch towers in God’s service’ (p. 45).

However, with ‘religious enthusiasm’ and ‘Commonwealth’ becoming dirty words after 1689 the ‘true Whigs’ of the late C17th had something else in mind. Toland’s edition was so secularized that a reader of the Memoirs ‘could be forgiven for wondering whether Ludlow had religious convictions’ at all (pp. 44-5).

The discovery of a C17th logbook and the neutrality of history

A logbook documenting the arrival of William of Orange in Ireland before the 1690 Battle of the Boyne has been found in Belfast. According to an article in the Irish Examiner, it was uncovered during recent renovation work at City Hall. The book of William’s Paymaster General Thomas Coningsby contains a “detailed record of every soldier and regiment in the 35,000-strong army that accompanied Protestant William III to Ireland to do battle with deposed Catholic English monarch King James II”, writes the Examiner’s David Young.

I’ve heard of old masters being found in elderly ladies’ spare bedrooms, of manuscript autobiographies by Civil War radicals turning up in old castles and many other stories. Yet, I was still surprised to hear about this recent find. Surely someone at Belfast City Hall must have come across it earlier?

Now call me overly suspicious, but I’ve been wondering whether they thought it wise to keep it under lock and key for the past decades to avoid upsetting the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland while religious conflict was still a big issue or whether they just had better things to do than worry about dusty documents. 

Trust the people – the British will eventually come round

So David Cameron has – yet again – promised the British people a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, should they elect him prime minister next year. And it seems he would get a lot of support for a ‘No’ campaign.

Maybe I should not be too surprised about the aggressive euroscepticism of the British Conservatives in a country where you can still buy “stamps for Europe” at the Post Office, where university language departments are closing faster than car plants, and where the Continent (with a capital “C”) seems sometimes further off than the US or Australia.

But what really worries me, is this: what is Britain going to do when everybody else has agreed on European reform and the little islanders with PM Cameron no longer get invited to the parties and “Europe” decides to do its own thing without asking them?

Of course, a British ‘No’ vote in a referendum could make the whole Lisbon project fail. But it wouldn’t stop the others from working together and from resenting the British for their stubborn refusal to join in with the fun.

The Irish ‘Yes’ to Lisbon was a historic act

The Irish have finally voted in favour of the Lisbon Treaty – and with an overwhelming majority. Some 67.1 percent said ‘Yes’ to European reform, with only 32.9 percent voting against. Turnout was high at 58 percent compared to 53.13 percent in June 2008 when some 53.4 percent of Irish people rejected the Treaty. The economic and financial crisis did its bit to change the minds of the Irish who over the past 16 months have come to realise how much they need the support from Brussels.

Especially farmers have been changing their minds since the last referendum, and with unemployment and emigration figures hitting new heights, Ireland seems to have understood that the bureaucrats in Brussels are not there to punish them with new rules, but to help. With special conditions put into place to protect strict Irish laws on abortion, even the Catholic Church came out in favour of the Lisbon Treaty. Or at least the bishops said that the Irish would now be able to decide either way without compromising their consciences as good Catholics.

Political leaders all over Europe have hailed the Irish referendum as a great success. Above all, the recently re-elected EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso who said on Saturday the ‘Yes’ vote was a “sign that Ireland recognises the role that the European Union has played in responding to the economic crisis”, and of course Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Brian Cowen of Fianna Fáil who would have been likely to lose his job had the vote gone the other way.

So is all well now?

Hello World!

Having worked both in academic history and in journalism I have come to realise one thing: how important the past is for our understanding of the present, and how our cultural memory shapes our interpretation of current affairs. In this blog I shall try and bring the two together.

Watch this space!

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