History Today 06-2016

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axemans mask
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Revolutionaries
in Siberia
June 2016
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What makes
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Grabbing historical
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Unlikely ally:
President de
Gaulle at the
Bastille Day
Parade, Paris,
1959.
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18,161 Jan-Dec 2015
THE REFERENDUM on whether the United Kingdom should leave or remain

in the European Union (EU) takes place on June 23rd. Martyn Rady and Richard
Overy, both distinguished historians of Europe, gather the historical arguments
for Leave and Remain respectively on pages 6 and 7, demonstrating that both
sides can appeal to rationality and reason as well as the past. Interestingly, a
number of prominent Brexiteers have found succour in an unlikely source, the
great if anglophobic French statesman, Charles de Gaulle:
England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her interactions,
her markets and her supply lines in the most diverse and often the most distant
countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight
agricultural ones. She has, in all her doings, very marked and very original habits and
traditions.
This quote, taken from a speech de Gaulle made in 1963 in opposition to the
UKs entry into what was then the European Economic Community, has been
repeated with approval by, among others, the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan
and the biographer of Margaret Thatcher, Charles Moore, both of whom are
historically literate and eloquent Eurosceptics.
Though there is some truth in the Generals assertions Britain was the
worlds foremost maritime power and suspicious of standing armies, it did
privilege the industrial over the agricultural and its system of common law was
at odds with that of the Continent it shared a monarchy with a substantial part
of France for 400 years (around the same length of time as the current, fragile
Union between England and Scotland), while its Hanoverian monarchs ensured
that Britain took great interest in the affairs of central Europe. When Britain did
periodically turn its back on the Continent, it often met with criticism similar to
that of de Gaulles. In August 1764, Frederick the Great, spurned by his capricious
ally, complained that Britain is not interested in anything but naval dominance
and her possessions in America guided by these sentiments she will not pay any
attention to Continental European affairs. He was wrong. She did and will do so
again, even if she votes to leave the EU. For, as both sides of the current debate
remind us, the EU is not Europe.
Paul Lay
2 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016
HistoryMatters
New World Arrival Celebrity Spiritualist European Union
Pocahontas
in England
Exploitation of
Pocahontas began
during her short
lifetime and her visit
to England in 1616 was
a part of it
Arriving as Rebecca Rolfe

in 1616, Pocahontas trip
to London was used to
raise support for Britains
struggling colonies.
Jane Dismore
FOUR HUNDRED years ago, Pocahontas arrived in England with her
husband John Rolfe. Bold, vivacious
and smart, her story has become
mythologised, not least the supposed
romance that developed between
her and Captain John Smith after she
saved his life, famously depicted in the
1995 Disney film. Historical inaccuracies did not spoil the films commercial
success, nor the profits it earned from
merchandising, but exploitation of
Pocahontas had already begun during
her short lifetime and her visit to
England in 1616 was a part of it.
At this time, Rolfe was a successful
tobacco farmer near Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America. Pocahontas
was born around 1596, a daughter of
Powhatan, chief of the Algonquianspeaking tribes and overlord of the
vast Chesapeake lands. Powhatan
played fast and loose with the settlers
who, inexperienced and increasingly
desperate, courted trouble. They had
been sent by the Virginia Company,
set up by charter from James I, to find
a suitable site for settlement. In May
1607, 104 men and boys arrived on
three ships under the command of
Christopher Newport. Other notables
included John Smith and George Percy,
son of the 8th Earl of Northumberland.
It was not a promising start. The
settlers were too reliant on the
cooperation of the Indians. Smith was

captured by Powhatan and thought he
would be killed. Years later he said Pocahontas saved his life and, although his
claim is now disputed, he was correct
in saying she preserv[ed] the Colonie
from death, famine and utter confusion.
After a brief period of mutual goodwill,
a gunpowder accident saw Smith leave
Virginia in 1609 and the goodwill deteriorated. Percy wrote of men destroyed
with cruell diseases ... and by warres,
but most died of meere famine.
Rolfe was bringing supplies and
settlers on Sea Venture when it was
wrecked off Bermuda. Indeed, the hurricane that shipwrecked Rolfe is said to
have inspired Shakespeares The Tempest,
although, unlike his friend Ben Jonson,
Shakespeare never met Pocahontas;
Society woman:
Pocahontas by
Simon van de
Passe, 1616.
he died six weeks before she arrived

in London. By the time Rolfe arrived
in Virginia in May 1610, 600 colonists
had been reduced to fewer than 70 by
famine, disease and skirmishes. The
Anglo-Powhatan wars began. New
governor Sir Thomas Dale oversaw the
building of a new city, Henrico, where
Rolfe began his farm. There he met
Pocahontas, who was being held
hostage by the English to encourage
peace negotiations with her father.
Living at the chaplains house, and
already having learned English, she was
taught to dress and behave as a lady
and, crucially for Englands religious
agenda, given Christian instruction.
Rolfe sought Dales consent to marry
Pocahontas by letter during 1614, saying
he was not led by carnall affection: but
for the good of this plantation [and] our
countrie ... and for the converting to the
true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ,
an unbelieving creature. Seeing the
chance for peace, Dale and Powhatan
approved. Pocahontas converted, taking
the name Rebecca on baptism. The
couple were married at Jamestown
around April 5th, 1614.
News of the peace treaty and Pocahontas conversion were welcomed in
England. The Bishop of London, Dr John
King, was among those who fervently
wanted a Protestant colony in the New
World and saw their holy mission as
converting the savages. However, the
early problems had discouraged investors in the Virginia Company, which
JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 3
HISTORYMATTERS
badly needed funds. A group of officers
representing clergy and merchants
received permission to hold lotteries and
proposed plans for a religious school for
the children of settlers and Algonquian
Indians. When Dale suggested a visit
by Pocahontas it was eagerly accepted.
Her status as daughter of a chief would
equate her with royalty and gain her
entry into London society. Crucially, it
might also encourage investment in the
struggling Company.
With their son Thomas, born in 1615,
the Rolfes left Virginia in May 1616 and
arrived in Plymouth on June 3rd, with
Dale and an entourage, including maids
to emphasise Pocahontas importance.
In London she is thought to have lodged
Pocahontas status
as daughter of a chief
would equate her with
royalty and gain her
entry into London
society
at La Belle Sauvage in Ludgate Hill. The
bishop hosted her; Samuel Purchas,
rector of St Martins, was present:
Doctor King entertained her with
festival state and pompe, beyond what
I have seene in his hospitalitie afforded
to other Ladies. She accustome[d] her
selfe to civilitie and still carried her selfe
as the Daughter of a King, and was
accordingly respected [by] persons of
Honor, in their hopefull zeale by her to
advance Christianitie.
Some saw artifice in the presentation. When society engraver Simon
de Passe made her portrait, chronicler
John Chamberlain wrote of it: with her
tricking up and high style and titles you
might think her and her worshipfull
husband to be somebody, if you did not
know that the Virginia Company out
of their povertie [only] allow her four
pound a week for her maintenance.
Others were fascinated. Ben Jonson
met her at an inn, referring to it in his
play The Staple of News. It may have
been at the Three Pigeons in Brentford,
which Jonson frequented: the Rolfes
had moved to Brentford to escape the
London air, which gave Pocahontas
respiratory problems. It was also where
George Percys family owned the Syon
estate. Smith wrote: [H]earing shee was
at Branford [Brentford] with divers of
my friends, I went to see her. It was a
difficult meeting, for until they arrived in

England she had believed him dead.
On Twelfth Night 1617 at the Banqueting House, Whitehall, Pocahontas
attended Jonsons masque The Vision
of Delight and was received by royalty.
Chamberlain observed: The Virginian
woman Pocahontas, with her fathers
Counsellor hath been with the King, and
graciously used. Tradition has it they
also visited Heacham in Norfolk, where
Rolfes family lived, before setting sail in
March 1617 for Virginia. Returning was
sore against her will, but Rolfe was
now secretary to the colony.
None of Pocahontas views were
directly recorded but her wish to stay in
England was fulfilled in tragic circumstances. At Gravesend she was taken ill
and died on March 21st, aged 20, possibly from tuberculosis. She was buried
in St Georges Church. Her husband,
fearing for sickly Thomas, left him to be
raised in England. Rolfe died in Virginia
in March 1622 shortly before a massacre:
the peace had been short-lived. Thomas
later settled there and had children.
Regarded by many as the mother of
modern America, attempts have been
made to find her remains and take them
home. She could not prevent the impact
of colonisation on her people. Her tribe,
the Pamunkey, was only finally recognised by the US government in 2015.
Pocahontas continues to hold our
interest, though it is important to note
that, in accounts of her voyage to her
own brave new world, a crucial voice is
missing: her own.
Jane Dismore is a freelance journalist and

biographer.
Alternative Histories by Rob Murray
The Medium
Goes to
America
The forgotten story
of celebrity medium
Eusapia Palladino and
her seance tour of the
United States.
Simone Natale
ON NOVEMBER 14TH, 1909, journalists
of several New York papers, including
the New York Times, gathered at the
Lincoln Square Theater to attend a
rather unusual press conference for the
arrival of the Italian spiritualist medium
Eusapia Palladino on American soil.
Before an audience of newspapermen
and theatrical impresarios, the medium
gave a demonstration of her seance
phenomena on the stage. Local celebrities added to the sensational event:
the Broadway actress Grace George
and her husband, William A. Brady, also
a theatre actor, sat around the seance
table together with Palladino, her
manager and three journalists.
While it might seem puzzling
that such prominence was given to a
medium, Palladino was at the time an
international celebrity. Like a theatrical star, she had toured numerous
countries, performing seances in Italy,
France, England, Poland, Russia and
Germany. She had gained the attention
of eminent personalities including
the world-famous Italian psychiatrist
Cesare Lombroso and the Nobel Prize
laureates Marie and Pierre Curie and
was a constant source of interest for the
popular press.
In the months following her
demonstration with the press, Eusapia
Palladino gave seances in different cities
along the Eastern coast. Influential
scientists participated in heated debates
about her alleged powers, and the
press competed to report stories of her
successes and accusations of trickery.
William James, considered the founder
of American psychology and one of the
leading thinkers of his time, agreed to
HISTORYMATTERS
Caught in the
act: a seance
with Eusapia
Palladino, early
20th century.
Original
photograph in
the Museo di
Antropologia
Criminale,
University of
Turin, Italy.
publish a cautious endorsement in the

Cosmopolitan, where he stated that her
phenomena probably are genuine, and
that, if proven true, they may break the
bounds which science has hitherto set
to natures forces.
More sceptical was James former
protg, German-born psychologist
Hugo Mnsterberg, the director of the
psychological laboratory at Harvard
University. At a seance conducted by
Palladino in Boston in January 1910,
Mnsterberg brought with him a collaborator, whose relationship with him
was concealed. During the sitting, while
Mnsterberg distracted the medium,
his accomplice succeeded in catching
Palladinos foot in his hands as she was
trying, with a contortionist move, to
lift the seance table. Palladino reacted
with a scream as, at last, her glory was
shattered. As Mnsterberg wrote in
his report of the events published in
the Metropolitan Magazine, her greatest
wonders are absolutely nothing but
fraud and humbug; this is no longer a
theory but a proven fact.
The scene repeated almost verbatim
a few months later, as Dickinson Miller,

a professor of philosophy at Columbia
University, convinced Palladino to
conduct a series of seances in his New
York apartment. The invitation was, in
reality, nothing but a trap. Miller set up
an investigation committee that included several professors and lecturers of
Columbia, as well as three stage magicians, James L. Kellogg, John W. Sargent
and Joseph F. Rinn, who had specialised
in exposs of spiritualist mediums. At
the beginning of the seance, Miller
asked to test Palladinos powers through
an electroscope, a device with which
she was already familiar. However, this
was only a diversion to distract Palladino
while Joseph Rinn and an accomplice
hid themselves under the seance table.
During the sance, the sitters made
efforts to appear friendly and sympathetic toward the medium in the hope
that she would feel more comfortable
and less vigilant. When the table started
to move, Rinn and Pyne could observe
how she was using her feet to produce
the alleged spirit phenomena. As she
realised she was being framed, the
medium reportedly lost control and in

very rapid Italian, yelled so loud that the
noise was heard in the street.
Reports of the exposures appeared
in the main newspapers and magazines,
dealing a terminal blow to Palladinos
reputation in the United States. In a
public letter, her manager Hereward
Carrington confessed that she had
cheated, only to claim that this did not
prove anything, as Eusapia herself says
that she will cheat if allowed to, and
begs her sitters to prevent her from
cheating. Carringtons demand for a
new series of tests, however, went
unheard and the medium quietly returned to Europe.
At the end of Palladinos stay, the
psychologist James H. Hyslop published
a perceptive article in the Journal of the
American Society for Psychical Research,
where he reflected on the dynamics of
the tour. He observed that its scientific
significance was jeopardised by the
vaudeville methods that Palladino and
her manager had adopted from the very
beginning. The medium had never really
entered the scientific laboratory;
she had instead appealed to the judgment of the public and the popular
press. What was interesting, Hyslop
noted, was that the men of science
had followed Palladino through this
path. In testing her seance phenomena,
Mnsterberg and the other scientists
adopted the same behaviour of which
they accused Palladino, wriggling
under the table like ordinary cheaters.
They participated in the controversy
by writing and giving interviews in
the same papers that Carrington and
Palladino published their claims. They
were apparently oblivious of the fact
that the publishers interest is in selling
his goods, rather than ascertaining
the truth. Ultimately, the scientists
had joined the medium in appealing to
the verdict of the public rather than to
the authority of science. In this sense,
Palladinos tour was an occasion for the
booming American society to challenge
and redefine the borders and the
mutual relations between scientific
authority and the public sphere.
Simone Natale is the author of Supernatural

Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise
of Modern Media Culture (Penn State, 2016).
HISTORYMATTERS
To leave or not to leave?

Two historians take opposing sides as Britains referendum on EU membership approaches.
Leave
Martyn Rady
Martyn Rady is Masaryk Professor
of Central European History at
University College London.
EUROPE is not the same as the European Union (EU), which is only an
episode in the Continents history. The
two, nevertheless, are frequently treated
as if they were identical. It is, however,
entirely possible to be a Europhile, in
the sense of valuing and engaging with
Europes cultures, peoples and history
and yet be opposed to the EU and thus
to Britains continued membership of it.
Britain and continental Europe share
much. Cultural, religious, philosophical
and political movements and ideas have
spilled across from one to the other. It
would be strange if they had not, given
their proximity. Nevertheless, exchanges
of this kind are hardly sufficient to justify

political union. The histories of Poland
and Russia are similarly entangled, but
no one would now suggest that they
should unite.
The way that ideas have spread in
Europe is important. One of the
strengths of the Continent has
been its diversity. The separate
experiences of Europes countries
have acted as inspirations and
warnings to others. The example
of British manufacturing in
the 18th and 19th centuries,
underpinned by the free trade
philosophy of Smith and Ricardo,
overturned the regulatory
and protectionist regime that
prevailed across much of Central
Europe. Bismarcks early welfare state
and Swiss federalism had their own
emulators. Across large parts of Europe,
the lesson of the French Revolution
stimulated the politics of conservatism
and of gradual change.

The high modernist ideology that
underpins the EU is predicated on the
erosion of differences between countries. It would seek to impose single
solutions that are blind to complexity
and inimical to the sort of local
experimentation that has been
one of the driving forces in European history. Not only, therefore,
are the EU and Europe different
things, but by putting its stress
on political, economic and social
convergence, the EU may also be
antithetical to Europes dynamic.
The history of multinational
ventures in Europe is not a
good one. Over 400 years, the
Habsburg Empire was unable to
cement a workable enterprise. It only
held together in the 19th century by
striking bargains between the various
national groups and by keeping them
all, in the words of one Austrian prime
The histories of
Poland and Russia
are similarly
entangled, but no
one would now
suggest that they
should unite
minister, in a condition of even and

well-modulated discontent. It is the
same in the EU today. The European
Council brokers between national
governments. European policy is not
European at all, but an amalgam and
compromise between contending
national policies.
The Habsburg Empire was not alone
in being divided by local identities.
Before Bismarck, the German lands
were split between states with their
own different political complexions,
religious affiliations and regional allegiances. They were successfully brought
together after 1870 because a larger
pan-German sense of belonging had
taken root, having been actively promoted in literature, folklore collections
and scholarship. In the German lands,
poets, historians and lexicographers
made political union possible.
France went down a different route
in the 19th century. At its start, less
than half of Frances population spoke
French. The Marseillaise, sung in 1792 by
volunteers from the Provenal south,
was incomprehensible to most Parisians.
Over the course of the century, the
French state made a nation of French
people, coercing a sense of national
belonging and a single language
through the schoolroom, bureaucracy
and army. A similar pattern of cultural
impressment took place in 19th-century
Bohemia. Peasants from Moravia and
Austrian Silesia were made into Czechs.
A political union will prosper only
if its peoples feel a common sense of
belonging that makes them willing to
make sacrifices for one another. This
is lacking in the EU: Germans will not
make financial sacrifices for the Mediterranean countries; other states put
up barriers to keep migrants on their
neighbours soil. Without the ambitious
cultural project on which German unity
was built or the drive towards cultural
homogenisation undertaken in France,
the EU will remain a discordant assemblage of competing national voices,
unwilling to share burdens.
So the EU offers the worst of both
worlds. Its regulatory regime and policies of convergence threaten Europes
historical experience of learning through
diversity. Yet the European Union lacks
the cultural underpinnings to construct
an enduring political union, based on
a sense of common identity. To adapt
the satirist Karl Kraus verdict on the
Habsburg Empire, it has already become
a grand experiment in failure.
Remain
Richard Overy
Richard Overy is Professor of

History at the University of Exeter.
IN THE current wave of anniversaries
commemorating the two World Wars
it is striking how much emphasis there
has been on Britains contribution to
the process of building a free and liberal
Europe. It is an important component
of contemporary British identity that its
soldiers, sailors and airmen fought and
died not just to defend Britain, but to
ensure that all Europeans should share
the prospects of greater economic security, an end to tyranny and a common
democratic culture. This was the ideal,
popular with broad elements of Britains
wartime population, which accepted
the sacrifices made if the promise at the
end of the war was a continent
cleansed of nationalism, racism
and political repression.
The historical reality was
rather different. Britains liberal
credentials were compromised
by the existence of an Empire in
which the freedoms fought for in
Europe in two world wars were
denied to non-white peoples.
British identity until the middle of
the last century was schizophrenic: one part composed of
the belief that British political evolution
represented the progressive development of a free and tolerant society, the
other composed of popular memory of
centuries of warfare, violent imperialism
and national self-assertion. The post1945 order saw the rapid eclipse and
disintegration of the imperial project
for Britain and all the other European
empires, changing forever the nature of
Britains place in Europe and of British
identity. Then the wartime ideal of liberating Europe was undermined by the
coming of the Cold War, which divided
the continent once again into rival blocs,
potentially as dangerous as the ideological confrontations of the 1930s. Few
people looking forward from 1945, or
even 1985, would have imagined a continent-wide European Union in which
national, ideological and racial rivalries
had been transcended in a common
commitment to shared, economic,
social, cultural and security interests.
Britain is an essential element of that
new Europe. That strand of historical
identity which emphasised Britains
place in encouraging the development

of parliamentary institutions, economic
freedoms and a tolerant, liberal society
is the one that matters, not the memory
of military and imperial glories, or the
belief that there is something historically unique or special about Britains
past that separates its experience from
the rest of Europe. If these values were
worth fighting for in ten years of bitter
warfare in Europe between 1914-18 and
1939-45, they are worth defending in
todays Europe. But that can only be
done from the inside. British involvement in Europe is not solely about
this or that economic advantage. It
represents a commitment to ensuring
that the narrow nationalism, ideological
divisions, imperial jealousies, economic
rivalry and overt racism that plagued the
emergence of modern Europe from the
late 19th century will never be repeated.
The referendum debate has focused
too much on economic fears
or advantages that remaining
in or leaving might bring. The
European project is much more
than the sum of its economic,
social, medical and security components. Some of those strands
that undermined European
societies in the 20th century
a self-interested nationalism,
racism, social intolerance are
never far below the surface. A
British presence in Europe is
about ensuring that the core values of
free and liberal societies are protected
by common endeavour, not as before
through occasional violent intervention. The EU is not a perfect system,
though it is infinitely preferable to the
way Europe looked for much of the
last century. But rather than struggling
to avoid any commitment to making
that union better by leaving it, Britain
can sustain that strand of its identity
built on its liberal and democratic past
by working within the EU to achieve
reforms that reflect those traditions.
A British withdrawal from the EU
can only be interpreted from outside
as a rejection of those traditions, a
desire to reinstate a narrow national
self-interest in place of a collaboration
that has displaced centuries of conflict,
a wish to wallow in a sentimental and
ahistorical image of Britains past and a
rejection of the belief embedded in the
current wave of military commemoration that Britain had, and still has today,
something positive to contribute to the
evolution of modern Europe.
The EU is not
perfect, though
it is infinitely
preferable to
the way Europe
looked for much of
the last century
MonthsPast
JUNE
By Richard Cavendish
JUNE 20th 1791
Louis XVIs
flight from
Paris
IF ANY KING could have coped with
the French Revolution it was not Louis
XVI. He was 19 when he succeeded his
grandfather, Louis XV, in 1774. At 15 he
had married the Austrian Habsburg
princess Marie-Antoinette, who was 14.
Louis was initially unable to consummate the marriage and, deeply unsure
of himself, he hid his lack of confidence
behind a haughty demeanour.
The revolution is generally reckoned
to have begun when an angry mob
stormed the Bastille in Paris in July
1789. The fortress was a symbol of royal
authority and the deputy mayor of Paris
remarked that the city had conquered
its king. From then on royal authority
was steadily undermined. In October
the royal family had to evacuate to
the Tuileries Palace after Versailles had
been attacked by another mob. They
increasingly felt themselves prisoners
and by 1791 they decided that they must
Flight of fancy:
Louis XVI and his
family attempt to
flee Paris. French
caricature, 1792.
escape the capital. Louis believed that

most people in the countryside were
still loyal to him and the idea was to
head north-east to Montmdy, near the
frontier with the Austrian Netherlands,
where they could be protected by troops
led by royalist officers.
The royal partys escape began
in darkness around midnight to an
ingenious plan organised mainly by Axel
Fersen, a Swedish officer in the French
army who was a devoted admirer of
Marie-Antoinette. The Chevalier de
Coigny had for some weeks been a frequent visitor to the palace wearing
a plain coat and hat, which Louis would
wear when the time came so that the
guards would take him for the chevalier.
The royal children were all dressed as
girls and the accompanying governess
pretended to be a Russian aristocrat in
charge of the group, while the role of
governess was played by Marie-Antoinette herself, dressed in plain black. The
king himself would pretend to be a valet.
Fersen had wanted the party to use
light coaches to cover the 200 miles to
Montmdy as speedily as possible, with
the king and queen travelling separately,
but Marie-Antoinette insisted they must
all be together so, after they had passed
through the city gate, Fersen met them

with a large heavy coach, drawn by six
horses. It was a crucial mistake.
Louis would not let Fersen travel all
the way with them. He did not want
to escape ignominiously conducted by
a foreign soldier, so Fersen presently
dropped out and they proceeded on,
changing horses at points along the
way. Even so, they were hours too late
to join up with the military escorts that
had been meant to guard them along
the route. By the time they reached
Sainte-Menehould, news of their flight
had reached the town and the national
guard had been alerted.
The local postmaster, Jean-Baptiste
Drouet, had seen Marie Antoinette
when he was in the army and he
recognised her. He checked the face of
the partys valet against the kings on a
paper currency note and they fitted. He
rode quickly on to Varennes, the next
stop, and was there when the royals
arrived at close to midnight. Drouet
insisted to the town authorities that the
travellers were Louis and Marie Antoinette and, after some delay, an elderly
citizen who had once lived at Versailles
was brought in. As soon as he saw Louis
he instinctively crooked his knee in
homage and Louis admitted that he was
the king.
The royal party were held until next
day when orders arrived to send them
back to Paris. Louis said There is no
longer a king in France and thousands
of national guardsmen and armed
citizens accompanied the royal carriage
slowly back. It was widely believed
that the Austrians had organised the
royal escape and evidence was found
in the Tuileries after the palace was
stormed by a murderous mob in August
1792. The royals were sent to prison
and the National Assembly proclaimed
France a republic. Louis and MarieAntoinette were tried for treason and
both were found guilty. He went to
the guillotine in January 1793 and she
met the same fate in October.
Political pianist:
Ignacy Jan
Paderewski with
part of his Chant
du Voyageur.
JUNE 29th 1941
Ignacy Jan
Paderewski
dies in New
York
THE IDOLISED Polish concert pianist

was also a composer and, more
surprisingly, was briefly Polands
prime minister. He was born in 1860,
when Poland was part of the Russian
empire, in a village that is now in
Ukraine. His father ran the estate of a
rich local landowner, but his mother
died when he was a baby. A piano
tutor was hired for him as a child and
the results were impressive enough
for him to be sent to music school
in Warsaw in 1872, when he was 12.
Critics have questioned whether
Paderewski was really as superb a
pianist as he was made out to be, but
there is no doubt that he had a colossal personality that took audiences
by storm. His favourite composers
were Chopin, Bach, Beethoven and
Schumann and his early concerts
in Paris, London and New York City
at the turn of the 1880s and 90s
were a blazing success. He settled in
Switzerland in 1898 and the following
year married Helena Gorska, Baroness
von Rosen, of an old Polish family.
They had a large farm on the shore of
Lake Leman, where they profitably
raised sheep, pigs and chickens. In
1904 Helena accompanied him, his
grand piano and their pet parrot on a

triumphant tour of Australia and New
Zealand.
Paderewski was also a leading
Polish nationalist, who looked back
to the glory days of the independent
kingdom of Poland centuries before.
The Polish National Committee in
Paris sent him to the United States
during the First World War to urge
President Woodrow Wilson to back
independence for Poland. A new
Polish Republic was duly created in
1918 and Paderewski was appointed
prime minister and foreign minister.
He signed the Treaty of Versailles for
Poland, but office displeased him and
he resigned at the end of 1919, went
back to Switzerland and never set
foot in Poland again.
Paderewski continued to give
triumphant concerts in Europe and
the United States, where he travelled
around in his own railway carriage,
and starred in a 1937 film biography
called Moonlight Sonata. Years later it
would win him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He died in New
York City, aged 80, and was buried
in Arlington National Cemetery. His
body was moved to Warsaw in 1992.
than 1891 to make him seem even more

astonishingly precocious than he was
anyway.
Intelligent, charming and homosexual, he wrote many songs while at university at Yale and then Harvard. In 1919 he
married a rich American divorce called
Linda Lee Thomas. Despite his homosexual affairs, the marriage was mutually
supportive and they lived in sumptuous
luxury (one house had platinum wallpaper and zebra-skin upholstery) among
a star-studded roster of celebrity friends
while he wrote Broadway musicals and
films.
Things went wrong for him in 1937
when he had an accident out riding that
required more than 30 operations and
eventually the amputation of his right
leg in 1958. He grew more closed in on
himself, though he had one final success
in 1948 with the music for Kiss Me Kate,
an adaptation of Shakespeares The
Taming of the Shrew, for which he won
the Tony award for Best Musical.
After Porters wife died in 1954 he
lived mainly in seclusion in his luxury
apartment in New York until his death
of kidney failure in 1964 at the age of 73
in Santa Monica. He was buried in Peru,
between his wife and his father.
JUNE 9th 1891
Birth of Cole
Porter
BIRDS DO IT, bees do it, even educated
fleas do it, lets do it, lets fall in love
No popular songwriter ever quite
matched the wit and sophisticated ingenuity of the lyrics Cole Porter wrote for
his delectable tunes. Besides Lets Do It
his hits included Night and Day, I Get
a Kick Out of You, Its De-Lovely, Ive
Got You Under My Skin and countless
others.
Born to a wealthy family in the small
town of Peru in Indiana, which then
had a population of just 7,000 or so, his
childhood was dominated by his mother.
She not only encouraged, but ruthlessly
pressured, her son to use his musical
talents to succeed, even pretending
that Cole had been born in 1893 rather
Youre the Top:

Cole Porter
arriving in Paris,
September 27th,
1951.
ARISTOTLE
Aristotle is so synonymous with learning

that he has been known simply as the
Mind, the Reader and the Philosopher.
Admired by both Darwin and Marx,
Edith Hall explores his life and legacy.
XACTLY 2,400 YEARS AGO, in 384 bc, a boy was

born in the town of Stagira in a remote part of
northern Greece. Stagira perches on two cliff-tops
jutting into the Aegean on the easternmost prongs
of the peninsula called Chalkidike, between Thessaloniki
and the Hellespont. Strategically more significant than its
size might suggest, Stagira had seen mighty conquerors and
allies, including Persia, Athens and Sparta. In 384 it was
struggling to remain independent of its rapidly expanding
neighbour, Macedon.
The babys name was Aristotle. His father was a learned
and much-published doctor called Nicomachus, descended
from an illustrious line of medical practitioners; his services
were used by the Macedonian monarch, Amyntas III, father
of Philip II and grandfather of Alexander III (the Great).
Aristotles mother, Phaestis, was from a wealthy family
with estates in the long island of Euboea, off the eastern
shore of mainland Greece. Nicomachus and Phaestis cannot
have imagined that their infant was destined to play a part
in the genesis of the largest empire yet ruled from Europe.
By the time he died, in his early sixties, Aristotle would
have changed the shape of most academic subjects forever.
Our consciousness has been shaped by his work. If you
explain the material world through rational science, based
on systematic empirical observation, you are thinking in
the way that Aristotle pioneered (one reason he was praised
by Charles Darwin). If you believe that the fundamental
building block of human society is the individual partnership or association and that economic factors are central to
historical developments, you are thinking like an Aristotelian (one reason why he was esteemed by Karl Marx). If
you suppose that humans are able to make moral choices
without appealing to divine intervention and in the face
of random factors including luck, you are deliberating and
exercising moral agency in the manner in which students
were trained at Aristotles Athenian school, the Lyceum.
Aristotle obviously enjoyed the prosperity and leisure that
allowed him to make full use of the stimuli and education
to which he was exposed. He was certainly standing on the
shoulders of Greek giants in natural science and philosophy, including Thales, Democritus, Protagoras, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato. But he was undeniably brilliant.
No other individual has ever taken so many huge strides
forward in such a wide range of intellectual fields.
Yet Aristotles intellect was undoubtedly constrained by
some of the social prejudices of his day. It is unfashionable
The Making of
The Mind
Aristotle, from
The School of
Athens (detail),
Raphael, 1509-11.
to praise Aristotle because, in the first book of his Politics,

he defends slavery (when the slaves are not Greek and,
in his view, are intellectually incapable of using freedom
responsibly). He also believed that women are biologically
incapable of rational deliberation, views which, rightly,
have been attacked over recent decades. Yet neglecting
Aristotles capacity for game-changing thought on almost
every other issue, simply because he accepted some views
which seemed self-evident to everyone in his era, produces a distorted view of intellectual history. Apologists for
plantation slavery in 19th-century America may have cited
Aristotle when defending atrocious practices, but critics of
slavery have pointed to the instruction in his will that
ARISTOTLE
none of his slaves was to be sold. They were all to be emancipated, either immediately or later by his heirs. Aristotles
low estimation of womens rationality has, similarly, been
cited by men opposing the education of females. Yet he
also, rather radically, compared the relationship between
man and wife with that between (near-)
equal citizens rather than between a
monarch and his subject.
Aristotles life was entangled with
the rise of the Macedonian empire.
Orphaned in childhood, he apparently
spent his early teenage years shuttling
between the house of a brother-in-law
in what is now north-western Turkey
and the Macedonian court. Just two
years older than Amyntas son, Philip,
Aristotle forged a lasting bond with this
ruthless but gifted prince. At 17, the
scholarly youth was sent to Athens to
study with Plato, the greatest teacher
in the Greek world, and stayed for 20
years. Aristotle soon gained a reputation
for dazzling intelligence; Plato called
him the The Mind and complained that
the Academy fell quiet in his absence.
The other students called him The
Reader. Yet when Plato died, Aristotle
was not appointed head of the Academy,
perhaps on account of his Macedonian
connections as well as his disagreement
with central Platonic doctrines. He
No.1: Nicomachean
went back to north-west Turkey to help
Ethics
a fellow student, Hermias, establish
Based on notes from his
a philosophical circle in the Greek
lectures in the Lyceum,
cities of Atarneus and Assos, of which
Aristotle posits happiness
Hermias was ruler. Aristotle married
(eudaimonia) or living well
Hermias daughter Pythias; although
as the primary goal in
she died young, the marriage was happy
human life. Named for his
and produced a daughter, named after
son, Nicomachus, the Ethics
her mother.
considers how man should
Five Key Works
best live and those virtues
RISTOTLE subsequently
which produce happiness.
moved to the nearby island
Aristotle argues that man
of Lesbos. For two years he
does not need to act to
researched marine biology,
commit a crime: omitting to
do something can be just as
laying the foundations of zoology as it
unethical.
is still studied today. But Philip, who
had ascended the Macedonian throne
in 359 bc, did not forget him. In 343,
when they were both around 40, the one-eyed autocrat
appointed Aristotle tutor at Pella to his most promising son,
Alexander, now in his early teens. For seven or eight years
Aristotle was Alexanders mentor, teacher and, presumably,
close companion.
Five years later, in 338, the Macedonian army defeated
Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea. Alexander,
who was only 18, shone in combat. Every community in
mainland Greece, with the exception of Sparta, now agreed
under the terms of a treaty to form a league. But Philip
actually intended to create a massive world-conquering
Hellenic army under his absolute command. We do not
know how Aristotle felt about this development. He will
doubtless have been relieved to be on the victorious side.
Below: Aristotle as a young man in

his study, 19th-century engraving.
Bottom: Plato, Seneca and Aristotle
(right), 13th-century English
manuscript.
But his works on political theory usually advocate the

independent, self-sufficient city state as the ideal community. When Philip had sacked Aristotles own hometown
of Stagira ten years earlier, the philosopher had persuaded
him to free the citizens he had enslaved and rebuild their
damaged buildings.
Nor was Philip content with mastery of Greece. In 336,
he ordered the invasion of Asia by a force led by his most
trusted general, taking advantage of the Persian crisis precipitated by the murder of Artaxerxes IV. Philip was himself
assassinated before he could traverse the Hellespont and
join his army. His 20-year-old son inherited the throne and
the offensive war against Persia. But before he marched
east, Alexander quelled an uprising of the Athenian League
fomented by Demosthenes, the anti-Macedonian Athenian
statesman. Aristotle seized the opportunity to return to
Athens. The city which still dominated intellectual culture
was now safe for associates of Macedonian royalty. He must
have been delighted to found his own university at last, in
the precinct, east of the city walls, of Apollo Lykeios (Apollo
in his wolfish avatar). Apollo, as god of medicine, poetry
and prophetic omniscience, was the perfect patron for a
multidisciplinary research institute. Alexander now crossed
to Asia, never to return. By 332 he had taken Egypt; two
years later he had conquered the Persian Empire; in 327 he
invaded India.
Athens provided Aristotle with a home for his sixth
decade. He received updates from Alexanders campaign,
probably including samples of flora and fauna sent by his
School of Aristotle.
Fresco by Gustav
Adolph Spangenberg, 1883-88.
great-nephew, Callisthenes, who accompanied Alexander until they became estranged and Callisthenes died
prematurely. During these years, Aristotle finally wrote
most of his 150 treatises (just a small proportion of which
survive). His prolific output later in life may have been
facilitated by his sudden ability to devote himself fulltime to intellectual labour. He must have been repelled
by rumours of the exhausting struggle at Pella between
Alexanders mother Olympias and Antipater, Alexanders
regent; he probably felt relieved to be distanced from the
wild carousals, murderous in-fighting, emotional dramas,
paranoia and superstition, which characterised Macedonian
palace life. The man in charge of Athens, on the other hand,
was now Lycurgus, a wise and experienced elder statesman.
Although he had sided with opponents of the Macedonian
conquest, Lycurgus maintained the peace, imposing the
laws strictly. He was also, like Aristotle, a former pupil of
Plato and sympathetic to philosophical pursuits. Aristotle
found new domestic stability with a woman named Herpyllis from Stagira. She bore him the son, Nicomachus, to
whom he dedicated the Nicomachean Ethics.
The philosopher now surrounded himself with loyal
disciples, including Theophrastus from Lesbos, an old friend
and the leading Greek botanist. The Lyceum was self-governing; one of its members was elected chief administrator
every ten days. Aristotle taught his students in the morning
and gave more accessible public lectures (which regrettably
have not survived) in the afternoons; he liked to walk
as he taught, which is why his followers were called the
Peripatetics, from the Greek verb
meaning stroll. An innovative
aspect of the Lyceums work was its
emphasis on amassing books and
intensive bibliographical research
into previous scholars findings.
Aristotles own book (or rather,
papyrus-roll) collection helped to
inspire the huge library which the
first Macedonian King of Egypt,
Ptolemy I, founded at Alexandria
with a Lyceum alumnus, Demetrius
of Phalerum, as consultant.
Five Key Works
No.2: Politics
When describing man as a political animal, Aristotle

argues that the polis or city state is humanitys
natural habitat. Politics, meaning things concerning
the polis, explores the best ways that man might live
in society and describes how royalty, aristocracy and
constitutional government corrupt to become tyranny,
oligarchy and democracy. For Aristotle, different species
have naturally occurring and fixed characteristics.
HE IDEA OF a community
of book-loving scholars
cooperating on research
projects, which came to
magnificent fruition at Alexandria,
originated in Aristotles visionary
Lyceum. He encouraged its
members to conduct collaborative
ventures in every branch of knowledge, to investigate authorities thoroughly and to publish textbooks. Several important works by his students have survived, revealing how
his methods, including statistics, were applied to mechanics
and diving technology, volcanoes and meteors, psychology
and aesthetics. Many Lyceum projects had direct public and
civic applications and often preserved invaluable information from ancient archives. The Constitution of Athens, for
example, researched and written by a Peripatetic and found
on a papyrus in the late 19th century, transformed our understanding of the Athenian Council. The treatise was probably written, under Aristotles supervision, as one of the
ARISTOTLE
Frege and Bertrand Russell appeared in the 19th and 20th

centuries. It remains astounding that Aristotle was able
to take the methods of philosophical reasoning, which he
found in Plato and his predecessors, and treat the actual
inferential systems as the topic of analysis themselves; that
is, he was interested not only in what made the
world function, but in the exact workings of the
arguments on which thinkers based their conclusions about the world. With Aristotles contribution, Philosophy itself had become the object of
philosophical analysis.
Aristotles study is the first
Aristotles precious last period of intense
work to bear the title, though
intellectual activity was cut short by the death
N HIS two dazzling books on ethics, Aristotle
Aristotle himself did not use the
of Alexander in 323 bc. The Athenians turned
posits happiness (eudaimonia) or living in the
term and it is thought to have
against everyone associated with Macedonian
best way possible as the fundamental goal of
been added in the first century.
rule. Aristotle sensed danger. In a politically motihuman life. The traditional translation of eudaiAristotle describes the work as
vated move, the anti-Macedonian lobby in Athens
monia as happiness has drawbacks, since that
the study of being qua being or
decided to prosecute him, as they had Socrates
noun describes an emotional state, whereas to Arthe first philosophy, in which
a lifetime before, for impiety specifically, with
istotle it is a mental state in which one is enabled,
the author examines the nature
failing to honour the citys gods. Aristotle escaped
by practising certain virtues courage, self-conof things that can be said to be.
with his family to the ancestral estate belonging
trol, liberality, fairness to aim at the highest
to his mother in Euboea. He died the year after. It
good. Eudaimonia is an activity equivalent to
is possible that he was murdered, but more likely
living rationally, in an examined and deliberated
that he died from the stomach complaint which had long
way. Aristotles political theory was an extension of this
Doric columns
plagued him. The place of his burial is unknown, although
ethical position to the whole community, since happiness is of the Temple of
Athena at Assos,
the medieval travelogue of Sir John Mandeville, first
the goal of the city state and the reason for its existence.
Turkey.
printed in 1499, claimed that there was a tomb and cult,
Aristotles writings are unified by the methods of reasas if for a saint, in Stagira. The Anglo-American archaeoloning he evolved, expressed in a group of works on logic
ogist Sir Charles Waldstein, on the other hand, claimed in
which were later assembled and named his Organon (Inthe early 1890s to have excavated the tomb of Aristotle,
strument). Aristotelian methods monopolised the entire
complete with writing styluses and a portrait statuette,
history of philosophical logic until the critiques of Gottlob
170 Constitutions of individual city states that the Lyceum is
said to have produced. Aristotle himself set about recording
the full extent of his lifes reflection and investigations. His
contribution to intellectual history is incalculable and not
only to western philosophy. His Metaphysics in particular,
when translated into Arabic, was instrumental
in the foundation of Arabic philosophy (falsafa)
in the ninth century ad; it elicited a massive
commentary by the Spanish Arab philosopher
No.3: Metaphysics
Ibn Rushd, who had studied avidly in the West as
Meaning after the physics,
well, where he was better-known as Averroes.
Five Key Works
in Euboea near Chalcis. According to the most colourful

tradition of Aristotles death, however, he drowned himself
in the narrow straits between Euboea and the Greek mainland. The suicide was allegedly motivated by frustration
that he could not scientifically understand the violent tides
there, which reverse direction four times a day, a problem
not solved until 1929. But the suicide was an invention
of Aristotles early Christian detractors, who hated his
scientific outlook and denial of Platos invisible, perfect
world of ideas of which the material and fleshly world we
inhabit is but a secondary and vastly inferior copy. The
Christian Fathers wanted to present Aristotle as a last-minute religious convert, finally acknowledging that he could
not explain the universe without God: he was supposed to
have cried out as he fell, Since Aristotle did not grasp Euripus, let
Euripus take Aristotle. Aristotles
fabricated conversion continued
to be cited by Christians until well
No.4: Poetics
into the 17th century.
Considered to be the oldest
Five Key Works
Top: the myth of Aristotle

jumping into the waves to
his death, 1786.
Bottom: Plato and Aristotle
(philosophy) tile, by Luca
della Robbia, 1337-39.
surviving work of literary

criticism, Aristotle produces
a theory of how to construct
drama through a study
of the plays of Sophocles
and Euripides and epic
poetry. Drama was central
to life in ancient Greece;
Aristotle contended its study
could offer a better moral
education than history.
Poetics is still referenced on
screenwriting courses today.
RISTOTLE WAS NOT

in fact an atheist at all.
He believed that there
was a divine being of
some kind, endowed (or even
to be identified) with absolute
intellectual power. This unmoved
mover of the universe took no
interest in human affairs and
did not reward or punish good
or bad behaviour. Humans, who
alone among animals on Earth
are endowed with a portion of
intellectual capacity similar to
that of the supreme power, needed, he argued, to study
the diverse, fascinating, beautiful material world in all its
manifestations and attempt to explain what their senses
could perceive empirically and their minds grasp in more
abstract terms. Aristotle would have enjoyed Keplers
inclusion of him, in note nine to his Somnium (1634), in a
list of martyrs of science persecuted by dogmatic believers.
But he would have been baffled by his popularity among the
more traditional scholastic medieval Christians, who after
discovering his dialectical (question-and-answer) method
in the 11th and 12th centuries enthusiastically used it to
develop their complicated theories of atonement and prove,
via the ontological argument, the existence of God. Most
famous Scholastics, up to and including Thomas Aquinas,
achieved the extraordinary feat of reconciling Aristotelian
philosophical method with their Roman Catholic theological viewpoint; this inevitably meant that the content of his
works, in Latin versions and by the 14th century in French
vernacular translations, became familiar among the educated class of Europe. Dante was only reflecting popular sentiment when in the Inferno he called Aristotle simply the
master of those who know (il Maestro di color che sanno).
It is only in the context of the overwhelming Scholastic
dominance of European scholarship that Martin Luthers
vitriolic denunciation of Aristotle in his Open Letter to the
Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) makes sense:
It grieves me to the heart that this damned, conceited, rascally heathen has with his false words deluded and made
ARISTOTLE
when the American founding fathers were formulating
the constitution, but the philosophical language in which
Jefferson phrased the citizens right to pursue happiness
in the Declaration of Independence (1776) emphasised the
founders adherence to an Aristotelian heritage.
Twenty years later, George Washingtons Farewell Address offered Americans several Aristotelian injunctions. Their republic and their liberty
No.5: On the Soul
needed to be built on the moral dispositions
and habits which lead to political prosperity and
(De Anima)
human happiness, since virtue or morality is a
Written coterminously with
necessary spring of popular government.
significant developments in
We can trace Aristotles continuing role in
scientific thought, logic and
public and academic discourse by looking for
biology, in De Anima Aristotle
the distinctive vocabulary which he pioneered
attempts to understand the
of theory and practice, potentiality and its
soul, hoping to define its
actualisation, substance and essence, tragic
essential nature and properties,
catharsis and tragic error. Yet mystery surrounds
a task he describes as one of
Aristotles direct influence in history through his
the most difficult things in the
relationship with Philip and Alexander. His role
world. To do so, he discusses
at their court can be seen as analogous to the
the souls of different kinds
contribution made by the experts in other fields
of living things: plants, lower
whom Philips wealth in timber, silver and gold
animals and humans.
enabled him to lure to Macedon from across the
Greek world his Cretan admiral Nearchos and
his engineer Aristoboulos from Cassandreia. But these men
came to Macedon to help build a world-conquering militia
and navy, a phenomenon of which it is notoriously difficult
to find much discussion in Aristotle.
He writes with remarkable approval about some aspects
of democracy; perhaps his own happiest years were those
spent during his two sojourns in Athens. Just how much
fools of so many of the best Christians. Luthers primary
the philosopher contributed to the dream of world empire,
objection was to Aristotles argument in On the Soul that
conceived by Philip but realised by Alexander, is one of
human consciousness dies with the body. All his works on
the conundrums of world history. On a more personal
science, ethics and politics needed to be discarded altogethlevel, we will never know whether he came to regard his
er, thundered Luther, although even he conceded that the
former protg as a drunken megalomaniac or a visionary
works on rhetoric, poetry and logic could help students
who dreamt of a peaceful, unified family of mankind. Was
refine their techniques of argumentation. Aristotles name
Aristotle among the many Macedonians who resented
carried such unique authority that well into the 17th cenAlexanders cultivation of Persian friends, allies and court
tury he was often simply referred to as the philosopher;
protocol (especially the belief in the divinity of the king),
a shrewd London publisher named John How exploited
as well as his politically motivated marriage to Roxana, the
the popular assumption of Aristotles incontrovertibility
Bactrian princess? Or did he believe that Alexander planned
by naming an illustrated sex-and-babies manual (first puba new kind of tolerant, multicultural arrangement, an
lished in 1684 but destined to run into hundreds of editions
ethnically diverse joint enterprise, a utopian brotherhood
all the way until the 1930s), Aristotles Masterpiece. It had no
of man based on virtue and reason? Sadly, we are unlikely
connection with Aristotle, being a pot-pourri of materials
ever to know. If Aristotle did ever commit his true feelings
from previous midwives handbooks and sensational works
on human anthropology, but it familiarised vast numbers of positive or negative about the Macedonian project to a
papyrus, it disappeared long ago.
otherwise uneducated people in Britain and America with
Aristotles name.
Edith Hall is the author of Introducing the Ancient Greeks (Bodley Head, 2015).
MONG ARISTOTLES authentic treatises the
Politics and Nicomachean Ethics have exerted the
FURTHER READING
most influence on subsequent history. The vocabJonathan Barnes, Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction,
ulary of European political theory was born when
revised edition (Oxford University Press, 2000).
the Politics was first translated into modern languages in
Edith Hall, Citizens but Second-Class: Women in
the 15th century. Its comparison of different constitutional
Aristotles Politics (384 to 322 bce), in Cesare Cuttica &
models democratic, monarchical, oligarchic has been
Gaby Mahlberg (eds) Patriarchal Moments (Bloomsbury
deployed by advocates of all three. After the execution of
Academic, 2015).
Charles I in 1649, Miltons The Tenure of Kings and MagisArmand Marie Leroi, The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented
trates, which justifies regicide under some circumstances,
Science (Viking, 2014).
uses Aristotles definition of a monarch. It is commonly said
that it was the Roman Republic that provided the prototype
Five Key Works
Statue of Aristotle
in modern
Stagira.
A
A
We might applaud the
tall, blond and ruggedly
handsome Vikings of
pop culture as being
historically accurate, but
authentic engagement
with the past requires
more than just convincing
hair and make-up, says
Oren Falk.
VID VIEWERS of Vikings, Downton Abbey or

the 300 franchise share a recurring concern: the
yearning for historical authenticity. It is the first
topic any professed historian is asked about at
a dinner party, a perennial question for the students who
take our courses and a recurring feature in media coverage.
Audiences expect to be entertained and titillated, no doubt,
but even when it comes to overtly fictional shows, films,
comics and books they also demand adherence to an
exacting standard of period-appropriate realism.
For historians, it is certainly gratifying, especially in
these times of universal disdain for the humanities in
general and for our profession in particular, to witness
such ardent care for getting things historically right. But
just what does getting things right mean? Any historical
representation is bound to be a mixed bag. Professional historians by and large acknowledge that, as Mark Twain might
have said, we can never actually get history exactly right,
but we can at least hope, every once in a while, to update
our ways of getting it wrong.
In contrast, when laypeople who prize historical authenticity articulate their desires, it becomes evident that they
long for something surprisingly straightforward: they want
the props to look genuine. Issues such as the outlandish
VIKINGS
Ragnar Lothbrok,
played by Travis
Fimmel in the
History Channels
series Vikings.
Barbaric Beauty
VIKINGS
mentalits of people in the past those outlooks with
which we can barely empathise and jokes we do not really
get hardly impinge on the popular notion of historical authenticity. Instead, historically conscious consumers focus
on concrete things, assessing authenticity by the presence
or absence of anachronistic implements (such as television
aerials in Downton Abbey) and the meticulous rendering
of period minutiae (such as 36lb chainmail in Rome). The
popular imagination, in short, identifies authenticity strictly with accuracy in the depiction of material culture.
Academics and laypeople thus are not entirely in conversation with each other over historical authenticity. How
might this gap be bridged? To engage the earnest enthusiasts on their own ground and perhaps wrestle them over
to a more critical and analytical way of spectating on the
historical arena, I use as a case study the History Channels
Vikings, the fourth season of which aired this spring. The
shows investment in historical authenticity is routinely,
and rightly, lauded: characters unapologetically mouth off
in Old Norse, Old English and Old French; saga plotlines
and Eddic mythology are cut and pasted into the script; and
Historically conscious
consumers focus on concrete
things, assessing authenticity
by the presence or absence of
anachronistic implements
lavish cinematography recreates the most purple passages
from Viking Age sources a funeral ship on fire, a pagan
temple where human sacrifices hang alongside eviscerated
oxen and fowl, a defeated leader subjected to the notorious
blood eagle. There is certainly a lot here for the authenticity
buff to like, even if the occasional complaint would surely
also be justified (why on earth arent ships rudders, their
steering boards, located on the starboard side?).
Y EXAMINATION here focuses on a specific

feature of the onscreen Vikings: the shows
representation of Norsemens own bodies, and
specifically the image it cultivates of idealised male physique in the Viking world. Modern stereotypes of Vikings fall into two distinct groups: we tend to
imagine them either as hairy, fur-clad, unwashed brutes,
or else as strappingly handsome, tall, muscular jocks. The
occasional Viking cameos on Monty Pythons Flying Circus
might illustrate the former stereotype; 1950s Hollywoods
casting of Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis as lead Norsemen
establishes the latter. The History Channel, too, errs on the
side of rugged good looks. The historical authenticity of
this view seems vouched for by Muhammad ibn Fadln, an
Arab diplomat who met some Norsemen on the Volga c.922:
he testifies that he had never seen more perfect physical
specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy. But what
did Vikings themselves consider to be a good-looking man?
On the face of it, this is still a question about material
culture: the material in question just happens to be human
flesh and bone. But the question is also dependent on what
a society holds to constitute beauty: an ideal, a mental
From top: Tony

Curtis and Kirk
Douglas in
Richard Fleischers
The Vikings (1958);
promotional
poster for The
Vikings (1958);
Floki (Gustaf
Skarsgrd),
Bjorn (Alexander
Ludwig) and Rollo
(Clive Standen) in
Vikings.
Who are the

Vikings?
Illustration
by rhallur
rinsson, 2012.
VIKING IS A catch-all term for the

people who came from Scandinavia,
what is now Norway, Denmark and
Sweden, between the eighth and
11th centuries, more properly known
as the Norse, or Norsemen.
They have long had a notorious
reputation as the raiders and pirates
of the medieval world and certainly
it is not unjustified: their raids
were fearsome and long-running.
However, they were also explorers
and skilled seafarers, managing to
spread across Europe and east into
Asia, south to northern Africa and
as far west as Newfoundland. They
established trade routes across the
known world and settled in northern
Britain, Ireland and among the
Franks, forming the Kievan Rs
kingdom on the River Volga.
The Norse were initially pagan
and targeted the wealthy Christian
monasteries in their raids, but they
later converted. A few of the
stunning stave churches they built in
Scandinavia can still be seen today.
The origins of the name Viking
are uncertain. It may derive from
the Old Norse word vk, creek, inlet,
bay, meaning the Vikings were those
who came from, or inhabited, the
edges of the land and sea. Equally,
it might be an Anglo-Frisian name,
from the Old English wc, camp,
referring to the temporary settlements they built during their raids.
They spoke Old Norse, a language
which had a striking influence on
English thanks to their settlement
in the north of England (it has given
us slaughter, to birth, cake and
happy, among countless other
words). Early records of their writing
can be found in runic inscriptions,
which are often quite mundane,
carved into objects and as graffiti
(Eyjolfr Kolbeinsson carved these
runes high up is carved above a door
in Orkney). But the main source for
their culture, beyond what is written
by the peoples they encountered,
is the sagas, which were written in
13th-century Iceland. These are the
stories of their history a romanticised mix of truth and legend.
VIKINGS
Clockwise from
left: Danish
depiction of Eric
the Red on vellum,
17th century;
Alexander Ludwig
as Bjorn in Vikings;
Gjermundbu
Viking Helmet,
10th century.
construct, a state of mind. It makes authenticity a matter of

correctly gauging the cognitive experience of past women
and men, a much more elusive objective than creating a
physical replica of weapons or gear. It allows the discussion
of historical fidelity to ooze away from object fetishism and
into the much more challenging (but, to this biased cultural
historians mind, also much more interesting) realm of
tentative reconstruction, empathetic imagination and
uncertain inference from partial data. It is a question, in
other words, that challenges us to think as historians rather
than antiquarians.
Our sources for what Nordic men actually looked like
(let alone what looks they aspired to) during the historical
Viking Age, usually reckoned from sometime in the eighth
century to sometime in the 11th, are in fact remarkably
scant. Ibn Fadlns eyewitness testimony is one of the
stronger pieces of evidence we have, supplemented by
occasional archaeological clues. The Viking Age was not,
however, just a set period in time, any more than any other
historical period: it was (and is) created by historians who
look back at events and discern a unifying pattern. Some of
the earliest of those historians were anonymous Icelandic

authors who, from the 1100s onwards, wrote about the
deeds of their forebears. These authors produced the opulent body of literature we now know as the Icelandic sagas.
HE BULK OF THE EVIDENCE here comes from

the so-called Family Sagas, several dozens of
mostly 13th-century texts set in Iceland and
the wider Norse world during the 10th century
(c.870-1030 ad). These sagas piece together the earliest
conscious construct of a Viking Age as a distinctive period.
They give highly circumstantial accounts of Icelanders
lives and deaths, including detailed descriptions of personal
appearance. We also get to hear occasional assessments
of aesthetics, be it from the mouth of narrators or from
fellow saga characters or, rarely, even from a self-critics
own mouth. In the climactic scene of Droplaugarsona saga,
for instance, the protagonist Helgi is engaged in fierce
combat against one Hjarrandi. At that moment, says the
saga, Hjarrandi lunged at Helgi, but he deflected it with
his shield, and the sword glanced into his face and landed
The Advance of the Norsemen
The extent of Norse settlement and contact across the known world
across his teeth, shearing off his lower lip. Helgi then spoke:
I never was fair-looking (fagrleitr), but youve hardly improved matters. He then reached with his hand and stuffed
his beard into his mouth and bit on it, fighting on in this
manner until his heroic demise.
Saga ideas about male beauty are

largely dictated by ones size, facial
features and colouration
Helgi Droplaugarsons dying words are typical of saga
sangfroid, but not entirely typical of the sagas character
portraiture. For one thing, as already noted, Helgi volunteers his own aesthetic evaluation; usually such opinions
are voiced in the third person. Earlier in the saga, the
narrators omniscient commentary had offered a more
appreciative glimpse of Helgi as a well-built fellow and
handsome and strong. For another, this word-portrait in
fact tells us little about Helgis appearance: we learn that
he was bearded and that he looked less appealing when

his mouth was a mangled mess of blood and hacked flesh
than when he had had a full set of lips, but not much else.
Usually, we hear something about what made a person
count as attractive or ugly; Helgi, for instance, is also featured in Fljtsdla saga, where the narrator contrasts him
with his brother Grmr: Each brother went his own way in
terms of appearances. Grmr was blond and tousle-haired
and altogether sightly (sjligr), but Helgi was a well-built
man, tawny-haired and ruddy, open-faced and exceptionally
elegant, but the most striking thing about Helgis appearance was that he had an ugly mouth.
Saga ideas about male beauty are largely dictated by
ones size, facial features and colouration; sartorial acumen
also came into play. The narrator who admires Helgis
physique, for instance, describes him as a mikill mar vexti,
which can be translated as well-built but literally means
a man grown large, and also as vnn ok sterkr, handsome and strong. The collocation mikill ok sterkr, big and
strong, is commonplace in descriptions of handsome men.
Thus Hvarar saga says of an 18-year-old lad that he
VIKINGS
became a man most likely to perform great deeds and the
prettiest-looking (frast snum) of men, big and strong.
Conversely, short stature is often associated with ugliness,
as in one sagas description of the skrlingar, Native Americans, whom the Norse encounter in the New World: They
were small men and ill-looking (smir menn ok illiligir), and
had bad hair on their heads; they had very prominent eyes
and were broad in the cheeks. When the Norsemen notice
among the skrlingar one man who was big and beautiful
(vnn) it seemed to them that he must be their chieftain.
HAT SAID, size and strength alone did not, in the

eyes of saga Icelanders, a beautiful man make. Egill
Skallagrmsson, the eponymous hero of his saga
and as big and strong as they come, is predicted
from childhood to turn out very ugly and resembling his
father. Fstbrra saga tells of a certain Butraldi, a wellbuilt man, strong of muscle, ugly (ljtr) in appearance,
harsh in disposition, a great killer of men, flare-nostrilled
and vengeful. In Butraldis case, it seems to be his visage
perhaps those gaping nostrils rather than his overall
physique that damns him.
As with Butraldi and the mealy-mouthed Helgi Droplaugarson, the sagas only seem to notice the lower halves of
mens faces when something is wrong with them: often, an
ugly set of dentures. We know that Viking Age gazes really
were drawn to mens teeth: archaeology confirms that some
underwent what must have been an excruciatingly disagreeable procedure, a kind of dental tattoo, involving filing and
perhaps inking in their teeth. Thus, what may be the most
telling anachronism in modern portrayals of Vikings no
matter how heavily made-up the actors are with fake bloodstains, rub-on grime and prosthetic scars are the perfect
orthodontic smiles they all flash.
Anglo-Saxon women found

irresistible and Anglo-Saxon
men were eager to imitate
Norsemens well-kempt
coiffures
If mens jaws only merit notice when they detract from
their beauty, however, the upper half of the head specifically, eyes and hair may count equally for or against them.
Skarpheinns eyes, as we just saw, are a redeeming feature
in an otherwise unshapely face; another champion, Bjrn
Htdlakappi, is said in contrast to be a well-built man and
beautiful and freckled, red-bearded, corkscrew-haired and
droopy-eyed and the most warriorlike man. Other attractive saga men often stand out as having the best of eyes,
very good eyes, altogether good eyes, blue and keen and
restless, and so forth. Likewise, we hear again and again of
men said to have been handsome that they had a good head
of hair (Njlls foster-son Hskuldr, for example, was both
big and strong, the prettiest-looking of men and well-haired
[hrr vel]). This may accord well with various near-contemporary witnesses who claim that Anglo-Saxon women
found irresistible and Anglo-Saxon men were eager to
imitate Norsemens well-kempt coiffures. It also reminds
From top: poster

for the National
Socialist German
Student League
reading The
German student
will fight for the
Fhrer and his
people, early
1930s; elk horn
head of a Viking
Age warrior,
c.9th-11th century.
From top: the

Oseberg ship
dating from 834,
discovered in
Vestfold County,
Norway, 1903;
Day of German
Arts procession
with Viking ship
float in Neuhauser
Strasse Munich,
July 16th, 1939;
Viking ship with
dragon prow
depicted in a
Anglo-Saxon
manuscript from
Northumbria, 10th
century.
us that combs are among the most ubiquitous finds in Viking

Age archaeological contexts, from Russia to Ireland. Some
sources may also give us an idea of Norse styling; lfric, a
10th-century Anglo-Saxon writer, speaks of Danish ways,
necks balded and eyes blinded, suggesting perhaps if it is
not just an ornate, churchy metaphor for subservience to
Satan that Norsemen shaved their napes and wore their
bangs low. Vikings evidently aims to depict such a style,
especially in the portrayal of Ragnars son, Bjorn.
Hair, often long (the sagas speak frequently of mikit hrr,
translatable as big hair, a lot of hair, or perhaps simply
mullet, but also of golden locks cascading all the way down
to the shoulders), is an essential marker of male good looks.
Norways founding king, Haraldr, vows to neglect his hair
until he should unify his kingdom; he is therefore known,
in his youth, as Haraldr lfa, Mop-Head, but after attaining
his career goal he metamorphoses into Haraldr hrfagri,
Fair-Haired. Lately, it has become customary to translate
the latter nickname as Fine-Haired, probably because when
hrr is said to be fagrt it is often associated with silk, but
Old Norse does unequivocally prefer blond(e)s. Thus, Egill
in early adulthood confirms the prophecy of his ugliness: he
already has wolf-grey and thick hair, and he soon became
bald. Elsewhere, a certain Ketill is described as an ugly man
and yet chieftain-like, dark and imposing. No such qualifiers
are necessary in order to call a fair-haired person beautiful:
he is called Helgi the White, because he was a handsome
man with good hair (vel hrr), white (i.e. blond) in colour.
This preference for fair hues extended to skin colour, too:
a villain might be described as swarthy of hair and complexion. The Native Americans derided above as small men
and ill-looking were condemned in another manuscript
as black (svartir) men. Either adjective, it seems, is fit for
characterising the skrlingar as brutish.
Vikings successfully captures many of these aspects of
Norse appearance. Pallid skin is on display; likewise, characters hair-dos merit considerable attention. The only index
on which Vikings largely departs from saga portrayals is hair
colour. Surprisingly, perhaps, we find many fewer Nordic
types in the shows leading cast than we might expect:
Bjorn is blond, as is the disposable Earl Siegfried, and the
more formidable Earl Borg might qualify as honey-blond;
but practically all the other main men Ragnar, Rollo, Floki,
Earl Haraldson, King Horik, Leif, Arne, Torstein, Kalf, not
to mention the non-Scandinavians like Athelstan and King
Ecbert are dark-haired. Only among the women do we find
a significant proportion of blondes (and even there, many
striking beauties Siggi, Gyda, Aslaug are brunettes).
INALLY, CLOTHING, TOO, often made the man,

according to the sagas. Icelanders mostly dressed in
homespun woollens, but those who travelled abroad
routinely returned as dapper gentlemen. Gunnarr
of Hlarendi, the finest-looking of all saga protagonists,
comes back from his travels so well-dressed that there were
none there [at the National Assembly] who were equally
well-dressed, and people came out of every booth to marvel
at him. Laxdla saga tells how the homecoming hero Bolli
Bollason rides in from the ship that has brought him back to
Iceland: When he returned from this voyage, Bolli was such
a sharp dresser that he would wear nothing but scarlet and
fur clothes, and all his weapons were gilded. He and his 12
companions are described as:
VIKINGS
magnificent men all, yet Bolli stood out. He wore the furs that
the King of Byzantium had given him, an outer cape of red
scarlet, and he was girt with Leg-Biter, whose hilt and runnel
were all arabesqued with gold thread; a golden helmet on his
head and a red shield at his side, on which was painted a golden
knight, and a lance was in his hand, as is the custom in foreign
lands. Wherever this company passed, the women could do
nothing but gawk at Bollis and his companions elegance.
The sagas do not mention skin art but we know from other
sources that Norsemen in the Viking Age used their own
bodies as canvasses. Ibn Fadln describes them as tattooed
from finger nails to neck with dark green (or green or blueblack) trees, figures. A little later in the 10th century, an
Andalusian traveller to southern Denmark observed that
both men and women use a kind of indelible cosmetic to
enhance the beauty of their eyes. These aspects are nicely
replicated by the History Channels make-up artists, who
give virtually everyone on set extensive tattoos.
ANY MODERN STEREOTYPES about Norse

physiques thus seem to be confirmed by the
sagas views on male beauty: beefy, blond,
muscle-bound Aryan types are held up as an
ideal. Unsavoury as it may be to contemplate, we must face
up to the possibility that this is one thing the Nazis actually
did get right. A straight line connects the male body idealised by 13th-century saga authors to countless Rassenhygiene posters from the 1930s, continuing right down to the
present and to our fantasies of authentic Vikings.
But, by way of closing, let me reverse course and complicate the picture, calling my own conclusions into question:
historical authenticity doggedly refuses to be pinned down.
A key issue here is recognising that philologically Old
Norse does things differently from modern English, and so
culturally speakers of Old Norse in all likelihood conceived
of things differently as well. Butraldi, for example, does
not have a swinish nose, he is flare-nostrilled (nasbrr);
Bjrn Htdlakappi does not have curly hair and heavy
eyelids, he is corkscrew-haired and droopy-eyed (skrfhrr ok dapreygr), and so forth. These examples are fairly
straightforward, even if modern scholars usually detect
in them a metaphorical flavour: Butraldi is hot-tempered,
Bjorn has poor eyesight. But what to do with men who
do not have good eyes but rather are, like the formidable
Skarpheinn, well-eyed (eygr vel)? This could conceivably
refer to a keen observer who sees farther and clearer than
any of his peers hardly a trivial matter in a world without
corrective lenses. Or it might be a metaphorical way of
talking about a man of discernment a visionary individual.
Or maybe it simply highlights the disarming beauty of some
mens irresistible irises and long lashes. We may speculate
and propose different answers. But the most important
thing to keep in our sights, as it were, is precisely the fact of
speculation: however we translate this awkward phrase into
passably idiomatic English, we immediately run the risk of
projecting our own biases onto the sources.
Well-eyed Skarpheinn is but an example; the sagas
complicate matters further still, for instance when they
describe the ugly Native Americans not, as I (and everyone
else) have translated, as having very prominent eyes but
rather, literally, as very much eyed (eygir vru eir mjk).
Authentic reconstruction of medieval Norsemens aesthetic
Members of the
Danish Viking
Olayers of
Fredrikssund
rehearse for
a pageant
marking the 75th
anniversary of
the Borough of
Ramsgate, Kent.
tastes remains, in these instances at least, stubbornly

beyond our grasp. We cannot hope for historical accuracy
in the representation of physical appearances until we have
run the gauntlet of wrestling with cultural cues, of struggling to decipher the attitudes that would have informed a
Viking Age gaze. And we must bear in mind that any reconstruction we offer remains inevitably tentative, bound up
as it is with our modern interpretations.
How authentic is Vikings representation of Vikings,
then? If we merely compare the characters who strut
onscreen with the imagery imparted on us by the Icelandic
sagas and the sparse Viking Age sources that supplement
them, not bad at all. These finely attired TV Norsemen are,
to a man, mikill ok sterkr, their bodies and faces tattooed
and painted, their gazes penetrating and haunting, their
hair and beards carefully kempt. But the point to drive
home is that the question itself is ill-posed and ultimately
unanswerable, because we would need to reorient our own
mental set-up in order to be able to grasp the alien mindset
to which descriptions like very much eyed, made sense.
When we find the sagas let alone present-day representations in pop culture confirming our stereotypes,
we should immediately be on guard: odds are that we are,
in fact, failing to engage with the deep past at all. We must
ask ourselves not whether the historical sources have
vouched for the accuracy of how we envision the past but
whether the historically authentic Vikings we gaze on
might merely be our own images, reflected back to us in a
tautological mirror.
Oren Falk is Associate Professor of History and former Director of Medieval
Studies at Cornell University.
FURTHER READING
William Ian Miller, Why Is Your Axe Bloody? A Reading of
Njls Saga (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Preben Meulengracht Srensen, Saga and Society, trans.
John Tucker (Odense University Press, 1993).
Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz and Matthias Wemhoff
(eds), Vikings: Life and Legend (Cornell University Press,
2014).
EXECUTIONERS HOODS
The execution of
Lady Jane Grey, by
George Cruikshank,
1840.
HERE IS AN executioners mask in the Tower of

London, with a spooky, lopsided grin. The mask
was dismissed in the 1970s as a Victorian fake,
based on a scolds bridle. The description of it in the
current Royal Armouries blog reads:
This rather gruesome painted iron mask is from the 17th/18th
centuries. It is made of three plates, roughly constructed with
openings for the eyes, nostrils and mouth. In the nineteenth
century, it was displayed at the Tower alongside a block and
axe as an executioners mask. However, it is unlikely that an
executioner would have worn an iron mask like this.
Off with his
HOOD
Through the myth of the executioners mask,
Alison Kinney explores our tortured relationship
with life, death, mortality and museums.
Harold Arthur Lee-Dillon, Viscount Dillon, soon to be appointed Keeper of the Royal Armouries, gave a private tour
of the Tower of London to members of the Royal Archaeological Institute in 1893, in which he decisively debunked
the information provided by the ordinary warder and by
the collection labels, which described the mask as a ghastly
and grotesque face-covering of black wood (it is actually
made of iron). Dillon stated that the English executioner
never wore a mask; that the executioner at the death of
Anne Boleyn was attired like any other man of the Tudor
period; and that the only known instance of concealment of
the face was at the execution of Charles I, when the official
tied a piece of crape over his face. His comments squared
with our knowledge of European executioners, as chronicled in paintings, broadsides, illustrations, legal documents,
the diaries of the 16th-century Nuremberg executioner
Franz Schmidt and the photographs of Mastro Titta, the
Papal States executioner from 1796 to 1865. The mask and
the hood were largely figments of the imagination. The few
exceptions such as Charles executioner, who faced the
extraordinary consequences of regicide only proved the
rule: agents of state violence had no need to conceal their
identities. In Paris, six generations of the Sanson family
openly held the post of executioner.
AS MARKUS HIRTE, managing director of the Mittelalterliches Kriminalmuseum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, says:
In the German-speaking legal area, the profession of an execution was mostly a public service. For that reason everyone in
town knew the executioner. Furthermore, it would have been
very complicated to behead a person wearing an executioners
mask with only small holes for the eyes.
The records show several regulations regarding the dress
code for executioners. They included regulations to wear
special robes or coloured hats, but no masks. The histori-
The Tower of Londons

executioners mask.
EXECUTIONERS HOODS
cal abuse and shunning of executioners housing segregation, physical attacks, the lack of opportunities to marry
(except into other executioners families) support this
conclusion. Without public acknowledgement of executioners identities, neither the shaming nor the endogamy
would have been necessary or possible.
The Tower mask is not the only one to have been presented by a museum as an executioners mask. Londons
Wellcome Collection has featured at least two: one, a black,
beaky iron mask that has since been identified as a somen,
or samurai mask; the other, now in the care of the Science
Museum and identified as Portuguese, suggests nothing so
much as the curly browed steel masks worn by medieval
warriors from what are now modern Russia, Mongolia, Syria
and Iran. The executioners mask of Rdesheim, held in a
museum devoted to medieval torture, is in fact a bascinet,
a pointy-muzzled helmet used across the late medieval
period. Hirte believes that the Kriminalmuseums mask,
identified in the 19th or early 20th century as that of an
executioner, was probably a shame mask used for public
humiliation. With its cloth veil, smoothly moulded cheeks
and wistful expression, it resembles a lost sibling of the
Carnival and Christmas masks of southern Germany.
HE PRESENTATION of these masks is part of

a wider story about the role the mask plays in
English life, in anybodys life and in the museums
of the 19th and 20th centuries. Those masks and
hoods were made creepy, not by the touch of real executioners, but by curators, audiences, institutions of history
and education and justice systems. They testify to the
surprising connections between museum culture
and penal culture, especially in the United States.
The history of capital punishment reform
spans centuries and continents, originating with
the Quakers and the Levellers, and proposed in
writings such as Cesare Beccarias 1746 An Essay
on Crimes and Punishments (which led to its
abolition in Tuscany). Venezuela, the state with
the worlds longest current ban, abolished capital
punishment in 1863. Historians such as Louis P.
Masur and Annulla Linders have chronicled how
the reformers, who fought for privacy, dignity,
professionalisation and human rights in their
penal systems, unwittingly helped create what
Thomas Mott Osborne, warden of the New York
prison Sing Sing from 1914 to 1916, would call the
wrong remedy: they abolished publicity instead
of abolishing executions.
Reformers and authorities around the world
collaborated in moving executions from the
public scaffold to private prison bureaucracies.
Executions became invitation-only events for
elite men who could be trusted to validate the
proceedings (unlike public audiences). Unsurprisingly, the stereotype of execution audiences
as rioters, carousers and copycat criminals also
dates roughly to the reform period; as the French
philosopher Michel Foucault pointed out, public
audiences had been known to respond to sentences they found unjust by freeing prisoners,
distributing broadsides in a prisoners defence,
killing executioners and, in Montreal in 1759,
Right: Harold
Lee-Dillon, 17th
Viscount Dillon,
c. 1916.
Below: The Block,
Axe and Executioners Mask,
by Rev. Richard
Lovett, 1890.
Moving executions out of sight

[removed] capital punishment
from public sympathy or
accountability
stealing the gallows. Moving executions out of sight was
intended partially to ensure prisoners privacy and nurture
a less bloodthirsty society, but its collateral effects included
the removal of capital punishment from public sympathy or
accountability.
What is not so well chronicled is the wave of artistic representations of the hooded or masked executioner, such as
Jean-Paul Laurens mural of the execution of the medieval
Maillotins, inside Paris Htel de Ville, and George Cruikshanks illustrations of William Harrison Ainsworths 1840
novel about Lady Jane Grey, The Tower of London, which
popularised the Tower as a visitor attraction. One illustration in Theophilus Camdens History of England (1809)
even places the Towers round mask on the executioner of
Charles I.
This century also loved its torture, punishment and
death entertainments. In 1893, Lord Shrewsburys travelling exhibit of torture instruments from the Royal Castle of
Nuremberg, including an Iron Maiden, crossed the Atlantic
to New York. In Paris, La Morgue opened to the public.
Then there were the wax museums: Madame Tussauds, the
Muse Grvin, the Boston Museum, the panoptikons of

Scandinavia and Germany. Upstairs, they displayed leaders
and celebrities; downstairs, the chambers of horrors (a
term first used by the London press in 1846) reproduced
acts of criminal and state violence, often graphic and sexualised, mingling the Middle Ages, the Spanish Inquisition,
witch trials, the Terror and contemporary executions.
The Santee Sioux

Uprising, 1862.
Engraving.
MBERTO ECO, in his Travels in Hyperreality

(1973), called this gruesome phenomenon shaggy
medievalism, the portrayal of the Middle Ages as
a time of barbaric violence: Dark par excellence.
The Middle Ages had been subject to this kind of fantasy
ever since the invention of the Renaissance, but periods
associated with barbarism have long been contrasted with
the supposedly humane, superior practices of the present.
Shaggy medievalism matters, and not just because it irritates medieval scholars; when the US Cincinnati Enquirer
gloated, in 1897, that the electric chair made hanging a
relic of barbarism in Ohio, it had real consequences. As the
art historian Robert Mills writes:
Foucault may well declare that what he terms the modern
carceral city, with its imaginary geo-politics, takes us far
away from the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gibbets,
gallows, pillories. But tell that to the people being tortured now,
in the police cells, prisons, detention centres and execution
chambers of yes the modern West.
The rhetoric gets deployed not only against the Middle
Ages, but also against other nations and peoples.
EXECUTIONERS HOODS
Medievalising al-Qaeda and the Taliban was a crucial part

of the legal strategy that led to Guantanamo Bay, medievalists Louise DArcens and Clare Monagle wrote for The
Conversation: The point being made is that they are people
from a barbaric and superstitious past, and consequently
have not matured into modern political actors.
Hence the Victorian fad for depicting executioners
outfitted in anachronistic fantasy masks and hoods. The
spooky, hooded executioner concentrated in his person all
of societys ambivalence about state killing, all its shame
and pride and all the moral responsibility, too. These figures
stepping out of the barbaric past allowed reformers, then
and now, to congratulate themselves on the superiority
of their own practices. The killing continued, though, but
behind prison walls.
In the United States, for ethnic minorities such as Native
Americans and African-Americans, executions remained
public. The largest mass execution in US history was the
hanging of 39 Dakota men and boys, staged before 4,000
spectators in Minnesota, at the end of the US-Dakota War
of 1862. Likewise, Southern states continued to publicly
execute African-American prisoners well into the 20th
century. While some scholars believe that the South ultimately implemented private executions because the public
Clockwise from
left: red coat of
Mastro Titta,
the Papal States
executioner (17961865); German executioners mask,
17th century;
Portuguese executioners mask,
probably an Asian
war mask, 16th19th centuries.
ones resembled lynchings, Michael A. Trotti has argued that

authorities finally decided that public judicial executions
did not look enough like lynchings because of the presence
of African-American witnesses, who prayed, invoked
martyrdom and otherwise resisted the penal narrative.
Southern executions moved indoors so that authorities
could stage real Jim Crow executions, which looked more
like lynchings, witnessed only by white men.
This is all to say that there has been an uneasy relationship between wardens and politicians, reformers and
witnesses, and impresarios, artists, curators and scholars,
when it comes to determining how 19th-century authorities shaped the lethal spectacles of capital punishment.
Their roles in the exhibition of pain, the objectification
of certain peoples lives and the management of public
opinion overlapped and influenced each other in surprising ways. That influence destroys the illusion of any neat
divisions between historical violence and contemporary
German mask of
shame. Carved
wood, 17th-18th
century.
death penalties, fantastic spectacles and the horror shows

of actual justice.
The Tower of London has always straddled the line
between spectacle and institutional power. It did so in the
1890s, when dozens of people were executed in England,
by exhibiting a fantasy of masked capital punishment. It
did so again at the outbreak of the First World War, when
the Tower became, once more, an execution site. According
Art, images, exhibits and rhetoric do not

stay neatly behind glass. Objects take on
a life of their own, outside the invented,
exhibited past, outside museum walls
to Historic Royal Palaces curator Sally Dixon-Smith, More
people were executed within the walls of the Tower of
London during the 20th Century than under the Tudors.
Bridget Clifford, the Keeper of Tower Armouries, said:
Arms and armour provide the means by which many chose
to impose their will on others Generally, one acknowledges that arms were intended and used to kill, but their
interest lies round all the consequences of that. Her goal

of teaching history through artefacts, without relying too
much on what she called prurient history the ooh aah,
werent they awful approach, must be squared with the
nature of an institution whose entire collection is dedicated to the dealing of death and the wielding of power.
Determining the role of heritage institutions in
meeting, or whetting, public appetite for gore may be a
chicken-and-the-egg question, but it is a crucial one for
curators. In this context, punishment spectacles, whether
enacted in prisons, museums or theatres, do not appear
only to teach history, scare viewers about the law or even
thrill the blood-thirsty public with real or fake artefacts.
The Washington, DC Crime Museum holds a medieval
guillotine (not medieval, of course, but a kind of device
used for executions in France until 1977) testifying to a
time long before the recognition of human rights, when
the death penalty was a pervasive form of punishment
throughout Europe. Nearby, the museum has installed a
video shooting range, where children on school trips can
pretend to be police attacking civilians. Art, images, exhibits and rhetoric do not stay neatly behind glass. Objects can
take on a life of their own, outside the invented, exhibited
past, outside museum walls.
EXECUTIONERS HOODS
Over the past century, many nations around the world
have restricted or abolished capital punishment, the
UK among them. In the 1970s, after a brief moratorium
imposed by the US Supreme Court decision Furman v.
Georgia, the US could have followed their lead, but did
not. When the death penalty resumed, the state of Florida
commissioned a medieval hooded mask for its executioner.
As Ivan Solotaroff chronicled in The Last Face Youll
Ever See: The Private Life of the American Death Penalty
(2001), at dawn on execution day in Florida, a corrections
officer drives to a predetermined location to pick up the
executioner, already wearing the hood, and escorts him
to the death chamber. There is no public documentation
of who made this medieval garment, whether it is made
of leather, cloth or vinyl, or even what it looks like, apart
from one Department of Corrections (DOC) statement:
it looks like something out of the past. In September, I
called the Florida DOC to verify that the hood was still
in use. The press officer said he did not feel comfortable
giving any details at all, except that the hood was, indeed,
still worn by the executioner in 2015.
The sartorial excess of the hoods may be bizarre but it
tells us something about contemporary American penal
secrecy, which distances us from the supposedly humane
killing systems we no longer witness or oversee. Like
the mask, the culture of secrecy comes straight from the
19th century, which first instituted execution witness
controls, press gags and the armed policing of prayer
vigils. One contemporary adaptation of secrecy surrounding the death penalty is the public non-disclosure of the
qualifications of executioners, medical staff and drug and
equipment suppliers. There is also the concealment of
executioner identities on payrolls and the curtaining of
death chambers from witnesses. Even the racial and class
dimensions of the 19th-century death penalty survive
today: as early as the 1840s, reformers criticised the disproportionately high number of executions of the poor
and people of colour.
The sartorial excess of the hoods says

something true about American penal
secrecy, which distances us from the
supposedly humane killing systems we no
longer witness or oversee
XECUTIONERS also wear medieval hoods in

South Carolina and Oklahoma and they probably
echo the medieval imagery of the 19th century,
which we and their designers have jointly inherited. These masks and hoods were the products of systems
that referenced museums, books, films and television for
their cultural authority, authenticity and legitimacy.
Without these images, we would have no hooded,
masked executioners pulling switches and preparing the
injections. The fictions emerged from the museums and
picture books into the penal codes, with the power not
just to represent, but also to facilitate state violence; as
many legal battles have shown, the anonymity of executioners, disguised both by real hoods and by procedure, is
crucial to the death penaltys continuation.
Florida shows us that designers, artists, curators and
educators have shocking powers to rewrite history, to get
the imaginary placed on the statute books and then to erase
all traces of violence. What does not appear on the public
tours, museum labels, DOC websites and official records
the gap between authoritative insiders and the public
begins to look like collusion. Even in nations that no longer
practise capital punishment, questions of institutional
Shame mask,
previously
thought to be
an executioners
hood.
faceless people. Indeed, the faceless,

boring bureaucratisation of capital punishment is precisely what allowed it to
continue in the US.
As Erica Lehrer and Cynthia E. Milton
asked: Is the goal of curation to settle,
or rather to unsettle established meanings of past events? Is it to create social
space for a shared experience of looking,
listening, and talking, creating alternate
relationships and publics, for constructive
meaning making and action taking?
Clifford takes that job seriously. I
would hope to encourage people to think,
question and arrive at their own conclusions. What they should ask themselves is
how they might feel facing the execution
block and axe, and begin to consider the
theatricality of public execution.
violence and hooding may still be urgent: in wartime, in

conflicts with police, in the treatment of prisoners of every
kind. The Towers mask and Floridas mask tell the same
story: one of governmental denial, of state bureaucracies
assuming procedural masks to decide what is best for the
public. Although the Victorian scholars looking at the
Towers mask could feel sanguine that no executioner ever
wore it to kill, nowadays we should not feel so comfortable
about its insulation from real state murder.
Execution masks used to be fakes, but now they belong
to an authentic tradition of witnessing and facilitating
death. We cannot necessarily ascribe good or bad faith to
todays collections: the old exhibits rewrote history and
uncovering the truth behind artefacts is painstaking work.
Issues of power and justice are implicit in all institutions, all
penal codes and all museums yet some have the luxury
of choosing to hedge or ignore them. It is a much more
complicated, fascinating and ethically engaged practice for
curators to engage with their legacies of difficult knowledge and dark history and it is also hard work to handle
this information and to keep it engaging for audiences. As
Clifford says: The colourful lives of the famous prisoners
catch the public imagination more readily than seeing the
growth of bureaucratic institutions manned by largely
Japanese samurai
mask, or somen,
misidentified as
an executioners
mask.
HIS IS NOT just about debunking,

or even urging museums and image-makers, whose predecessors
collaborated more or less in this
misdirection, to take the lead in setting
the record straight. Rather than judging
spectacles of punishment or violence as
simply inaccurate, we might think instead
about their visceral, narrative power.
These exhibits provide the nearest access
many people have to the history and
practice of institutional violence. What
they teach, or do not teach, can profoundly affect our responses; they can help us
think better, so that we question the curation and creation of the rhetoric and
practices of life and death. Let us not just
toss the masks into the curiosities aisle,
but let us use their ghastliness and their
duplicity to expose the collusion of political and intellectual
authority in creating law and entertainment.
If the collective fantasies of curators played a part in the
hooding of Floridas executioner, then perhaps museums
have not only the obligation, but also the power, to reverse
that violence: by making the invisible visible again and by
unmasking the horror of state murder in that historic realm
of suffering and spectacle that is our world in 2016.
Alison Kinney is the author of HOOD (Bloomsbury, Object Lessons, 2016).
FURTHER READING
Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton and Monica Eileen
Patterson, eds. Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in
Public Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Petrus Cornelis Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering:
Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial
Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge University
Press, 1984).
Michael A. Trotti, The Scaffolds Revival: Race and Public
Execution in the South, Journal of Social History, 451 (2011),
pp. 195-224.
TSARIST RUSSIA
Russian Civilisation, from
the British magazine Judy,
March 3rd, 1880.
For the tsarist regime, Siberia was a vast

prison without a roof, where thousands of
revolutionaries and political opponents were
exiled. It became, as Daniel Beer explains, a
laboratory of the Russian Revolution.
N A MAY MORNING in 1864, a bespectacled man, dressed

in the sort of dark frock-coat beloved of Russian intellectuals, prepared for his civil execution on St Petersburgs
Mytnaya Square. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the editor of the
radical journal, the Contemporary, had been found guilty of plotting to
overthrow the existing order. As he knelt before a crowd of between
1,000 and 2,000 spectators, a sword was ceremoniously broken over his
head and his sentence was read out. He was to be stripped of all rights
of estate and sent to 14 years of penal labour in the mines followed
by settlement in Siberia forever. In many respects, the authorities
judged quite accurately the dangers this mild-mannered journalist posed
through his steady stream of publications. His ideas were an intellectual
broadside against the ideological foundations of the tsarist order and an
inspiration to successive generations of radicals, who would conduct an
ultimately successful struggle against the state for the next half century.
Chernyshevskys demands for reform chimed with the repentant noblemen of the 1860s and 1870s, who felt a great moral responsibility
to the impoverished and downtrodden peasantry. Guilt would prove a
psychological inspiration for the coming revolution.
The Russian revolutionary movement in the reign of Alexander II
(1855-81) was a shifting cluster of parties, ideological orientations and
individuals inspired by the writings of radical thinkers. Some believed
that gradualist campaigns of agitation and propaganda among the peasantry would rouse the people from their political slumber and bring
about the overthrow of the government. Others, of a more impatient
political and psychological disposition, favoured violent action and
propaganda by deed. They believed, naively as it turned out, that the
assassination of the tsar would trigger the collapse of autocracy.
Between 1878 and 1881, the radical organisation known as the Peoples Will launched a campaign of terror that came to be known as the
emperor hunt. Revolutionaries killed two provincial governors and
staged six (failed) attempts on the life of the tsar, the most spectacular
of which was the bombing in February 1880 of the Winter Palace that
claimed the lives of 11 soldiers and wounded 56. Alexanders government
responded with a series of ad hoc laws designed to radically increase
the administrative powers of the police and of the governors to put
under surveillance, detain, imprison and exile individuals suspected
Russias
War on Terror
TSARIST RUSSIA
of involvement in, or even sympathy with, the revolutionary movement. These sweeping powers enabled the authorities to bypass the
open courts and juries, which were proving unreliable allies in this
war on terror.
The government struggled against a tide of popular sympathy with
the aims of the terrorists, if not their methods. On January 24th, 1878
a young woman, Vera Zasulich, entered the offices of the conservative governor of St Petersburg, Fyodor Trepov, and shot and seriously
wounded him. Tried in open court, Zasulich admitted responsibility
but argued that her assassination attempt was a justified response to
Trepovs order to flog a young revolutionary for his refusal to remove
his cap before the governor in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Much to the
dismay of the government, the jury acquitted her. Convinced that the
courts were now working to undermine them, on May 9th, 1878 the
tsar and his advisers introduced a new law that deprived anyone accused
of attacks on government officials of the right to a trial by jury. Such
defendants would now be tried in camera by military courts. The use of
emergency police powers to detain suspects and of military tribunals to
secure convictions proved deeply unpopular. Nonetheless, the measures
appeared to be having the desired effect: the activities of the Peoples
Will were severely disrupted by the secret police and their finances fell
into disarray. Then, on March 1st, 1881, the terrorists got their man.
Top: Russian exiles on a march in a

snowstorm, English engraving, 1882.
Above: the assassination of Alexander II,
March 1881.
After the assassination of Alexander II, the tsarist secret police, now
equipped with telegraphs, card catalogues and extensive networks of
spies and informers, hunted down and destroyed the Peoples Will.
Paralysed by the arrests and by the infiltration of its networks, the revolutionary movement was routed for a generation and would not challenge the autocracy again before the beginning of the 20th century. As
a form of propaganda by deed, the assassination was an abject failure.
VEN IN DEFEAT, however, the Peoples Will clinched a vital

victory in what was becoming a battle for hearts and minds.
During the emperor hunt, the lines between political conviction and political action had blurred and the states persecution
of all and any dissent, real or imagined, had reached paranoid proportions. In the wake of the assassination, Alexander IIIs government
promulgated the Statute on Measures for the Preservation of Political
Order and Social Tranquillity. Intended as a temporary legislation, it
remained in force right up until 1917. Described by Lenin as the de facto
constitution of Russia, the law effectively gave the government the
right to sentence anyone it suspected of seditious activity to between
three and five years of administrative exile in Siberia (extended to
eight years after 1888). The US journalist George Kennan, who travelled widely throughout Siberia in the late 1880s, explained the powers
conferred by the new legislation:
Vera Zasulich
shoots police chief
Trepov, 1878.
Exile by administrative process means the banishment of an obnoxious

person from one part of the empire to another without the observance of
any of the legal formalities that, in most civilised countries, precede the
deprivation of rights and the restriction of personal liberty ... [the exiles]
communications with the world are so suddenly severed that sometimes
even his own relatives do not know what has happened to him. He is literally and absolutely without any means whatever of self-defence.
The emergency legislation was an effective suspension of the rule of law
and it remained in place long after public revulsion at the assassination
of a popular monarch had subsided. In the decades that followed, the
state failed to distinguish between dangerous radicals and moderate
reformers. Astute observers, even those with little sympathy for the
revolutionary movement, were almost unanimous in their denunciation
of the laws. Political exiles, both those convicted of crimes by military
tribunals and those exiled administratively, underwent a moral transformation from dangerous and misguided fanatics into sympathetic
martyrs. The stage for this reinvention was Siberia.
Members of the
Peoples Will,
c.1880.
TSARIST RUSSIA
The political
exiles of the 1880s
and 1890s were
determined to take
their struggle to the
authorities
There is Life Everywhere,

Nikolai Yaroshenkos
depiction of exiles
leaving for Siberia in
closed trains, 1888.
ETWEEN 1881 AND 1904, the state exiled around 4,100 individuals for their political unreliability and a further 1,900 for
factory disturbances. The figures were not great when contrasted
with the more than 300,000 exiles located in Siberia by 1898.
Yet the numbers mattered much less than the influence and standing of
the men and women who found themselves caught up in the dragnet.
Many, if not most, were educated and some hailed from prosperous and
well-connected families. A military tribunal in Kiev sentenced Maria
Kovalevskaya, the daughter of a Russian nobleman and the sister of
one of the Russian empires leading economists, to 14 years of penal
labour in Siberia for her revolutionary activity. Sons and daughters of the
nobility, students, journalists, merchants and even state officials found
themselves exiled for little more than possessing subversive literature.
The political exiles of the 1880s and 1890s were determined to take
their struggle to the authorities. Although many, if not most, of the
revolutionaries had never been put on trial, they set about converting
the way stations, prisons and towns of Siberia into a giant public courtroom. Outraged at what they saw as the injustice of their punishments,
political exiles in Siberia engaged in a host of acts of minor defiance.
They refused to leave their cells for roll call; they refused to travel on
barges together with common criminals; they refused to remove their
hats in the presence of prison officials. The authorities frequently noted
that punishment of a single prisoner elicited a wave of protest from
his or her comrades. The authorities found themselves locked in cycles
of retaliation and escalation, which they could only win through the
imposition of brute force. But, for a government attempting to shore up
its moral authority in the age of a flourishing, if still censored, regional
and national press, such tactics carried risks of their own.
In this escalating test of strength between radicals and the state,
1889 would prove a decisive year. Two violent showdowns between the
exiles and their captors were to have far-reaching consequences in the
struggle for political power in Russia.
In addition to being a destination for political exiles, the town of

Yakutsk in north-eastern Siberia became a staging post for the exiles
deportation to the desolate snowbound settlements in the frozen wilderness of the Arctic Circle. Eager to clear a backlog of exiles that had
accumulated in Yakutsk, over the winter of 1888-89, the acting provincial governor, Pavel Ostashkin, ordered the local authorities to press
ahead with the onward deportation of the exiles in temperatures below
-20C. He also drastically cut the weight of luggage and provisions that
the exiles were allowed to take with them further north.
THE FIRST TO FACE an onward journey under these conditions was
a group of some 30 administrative exiles, including almost a dozen
women and children. On March 22nd, 1889 the exiles refused point
blank to proceed and delivered a petition insisting that the governor
rescind the order to force them to continue their journey in such lethal
temperatures. They then barricaded themselves in a large wooden
house, in the apartment of one of Yakutsks resident exiles, and awaited
the governors response. Their protests fell on deaf ears, for the Yakutsk
authorities were suspicious that the exiles wished to remain there until
the spring, simply in order to escape.
When Ostashkins instructions to surrender were ignored, the governor ordered a unit of Cossacks to surround the building and to drag
the exiles into the yard by force but in the ensuing struggle one of the
exiles produced a revolver and opened fire on the soldiers. In response,
the assembled troops began shooting at the building for several minutes
until the revolutionaries surrendered. According to some estimates,
as many as several hundred rounds were fired. By the time the exiles
capitulated and the acrid smoke had cleared from the apartment, six
exiles, a police officer and a soldier lay dead; several more, including
Ostashkin himself, were wounded.
In the aftermath, the exiles insisted that they had only fired shots
in an effort to defend themselves from violent assault by the
Siberia, circa 1890.

TSARIST RUSSIA
The relatives of exiles in

the Moscow Forwarding
Prison await voluntary
deportation to Siberia,
illustration from the
Graphic, March 1881.
soldiers; the state meanwhile insisted that what had taken place was a premeditated rebellion against the lawful authority of the governor of
Yakutsk. The state turned over the surviving exiles to a military tribunal,
which determined that all those who had signed the petition were guilty
of armed insurgency. In June it sentenced the three alleged ring-leaders
to death, a further 14 were condemned to lifelong penal labour and the
rest to 15-year terms of the same. On August 7th, 1889, Lev KoganBernshtein, Albert Gausman and Nikolai Zotov were hanged in the
courtyard of the Yakutsk prison.
ESPERATE and surrounded, without the weapons necessary

for defending themselves, the exiles in Yakutsk had been no
match for the armed force of the Russian state. The battle
fought on March 22nd, 1889 was, however, part of the wider
war for public sympathy being fought in the pages of both the Russian
and the international press. The Yakutsk Tragedy caused a scandal that
reverberated around Russia and beyond. The revolutionaries understood
the nature of this wider war for public opinion and they waged it skilfully. Even as he faced the gallows, Zotov grasped the power that the story
of events in Yakutsk could wield. Here is my testament, he declared in
his final letter to his comrades back in Russia:
Steel yourselves, and under the impression of the finale of these horrors,
this slaughter, this butchery, make use of this drama, this colossal example
of the cruelty, arbitrariness and inhumanity of Russian despotism with
all the means at your disposal Write to every corner of our motherland
and abroad to all the [George] Kennans This is the only way we can
recoup our losses in this terrible act of state vengeance.
By the autumn of 1889, revolutionary pamphlets detailing the despotic
cruelty of the Yakutsk authorities were, indeed, circulating throughout Siberia and European Russia. Political exiles in Irkutsk province
despatched a letter to Alexander III himself, denouncing Ostashkins
outrageous and bloody punishment of the political exiles.
In Europe and the US the press was no more sympathetic to the authorities. The reactionary regime of Alexander III was reviled. The Russian-language migr journal Social Democrat, published in London, declared that the exploits of the tsarist cannibals are so eloquent that they
require no commentary. The Times reported the incident on December
26th, 1889, calling it a slaughter of political prisoners in Siberia and
declaring that this tale of blood and horrors is a story which the Russian
government cannot afford to pass over. Superior to public opinion as it
professes to be, there is a point beyond which it can not go in disregarding the verdict of mankind. The New York Times followed in February
with a lengthy article entitled Men Shot Down Like Dogs: The True
Story of the Yakutsk Massacre. The tsarist state was creating a legion
of Siberian martyrs, but seemed blind to this danger. A month after its
bloody settling of scores with the survivors of the Yakutsk Tragedy,
the Siberian authorities were to be provoked into another blunder even
more damaging for the governments credibility and legitimacy.
The revolutionaries
understood the nature of the
wider war for public opinion
and they waged it skilfully
Adjutant General Baron Andrei Korf was governor-general of the

Priamursk territory in eastern Siberia, an office with direct responsibility for the political prisoners in Kara, 1,000km to the east of Lake
Baikal. Korf was a man of robustly conservative views and a critic of
what he held to be St Petersburgs excessive leniency in its dealings
with state criminals. On August 5th, 1888 Korf made an official visit
to the Ust-Kara prison and, coming across one young radical, Yelizaveta
Kovalskaya, sitting in the courtyard, he ordered her to stand in his presence. She refused. As a prisoner, she recalled, I absolutely could not
stand up before the enemy against whom I had not ceased to struggle,
even in prison. Korf was outraged by this demonstration of defiance.
Two days later, he instructed that Kovalskaya be transferred to another
prison in Eastern Siberia and be kept under the strictest conditions,
in solitary confinement. He was explicit that the punishment should
set an example to others.
FEW DAYS LATER, Masyukov, the commandant of the

Ust-Kara prison, had Kovalskaya manhandled, half-naked,
from her prison cell in the dead of night. She was made to
dress in regular convict clothing in the presence of male criminal exiles and carried out of the prison. Kovalskayas fellow women
prisoners reacted with outrage, denouncing this base mockery of a
state criminal. They wrote to the authorities in Irkutsk demanding a
formal investigation of this scandalous violation of the law, as well as
Masyukovs removal from office. Relations between politicals and the
prison authorities deteriorated sharply over the following year as the
prisoners engaged in three separate hunger strikes only to abandon
them on each occasion as death drew near.
Then, another of Karas female prisoners, Natalia Sigida, initiated
a dramatic escalation in the conflict. The 28-year-old member of the
Peoples Will had been sentenced to eight years of penal labour for operating an underground printing press. Recognising that the women
would not succeed through their hunger strike in forcing concessions
from the authorities, Sigida requested a meeting with Masyukov at
the end of August 1889. Admitted into his office, she walked up to him
and slapped him in the face. In what had become, for both the revolutionaries and the prison authorities, an attritional contest over moral
authority and political legitimacy, striking a senior prison official was
a symbolic assault on the Imperial state.
Above: a prisoner is searched before being sent to Siberia, 1880s.

Below: a group of penal labourers in Siberia, 1880s.
DETERMINED ONCE AND FOR ALL to stamp his authority on the

unruly political prisoners in his charge, on October 26th Korf ordered a
clampdown at the Kara prison. Political prisoners were to be deprived of
all of their personal possessions and denied the right of correspondence.
Most scandalous for the revolutionaries, Korf ordered that Sigida receive
100 strokes of the birch rod. The impression made by this uncompromising disregard of the traditional exemption from corporal punishment of both educated Russians and women is difficult to overstate.
Amid widespread public opposition to the use of corporal punishments
on even common criminals, to flog political prisoners drawn from the
educated ranks of Russian society was to transgress accepted moral
standards; to subject a young woman to 100 strokes of the birch rod was
to perpetrate an atrocity. The Kara physician refused either to sanction
or to attend the flogging in view of Sigidas poor health. Undeterred,
the authorities proceeded with the punishment in the absence of a
doctor on November 7th, 1889. In the moments before the flogging,
Sigida declared that the punishment was the equivalent of death and
lay down voluntarily beneath the birch.
These were not empty words. After she was returned to her cell later
that day, Sigida and her three fellow prisoners poisoned themselves.
Sigida died that evening, the others over the course of the next two
days. When news of the flogging reached the other political prisoners
in Kara, the suicidal protests spread. Within a week, seven prisoners
TSARIST RUSSIA
Unexpected, Ilya Repins depiction
of an exiles unannounced return
to his home in Moscow, 1884-88.
It was impossible to keep the

thousands of exiles dispersed across
the continents towns and villages
under effective surveillance
in the mens prison had also attempted to overdose with morphine.
More followed their example. In total, some 20 prisoners took poison
and six died.
The drama that played out in Kara was a public contest between revolutionaries and the state over control of the prisoners bodies. The radicals denied the states right to punish them physically and, in so doing,
denied the authorities the right to treat them as common criminals. By
taking their own lives, Sigida and her fellow revolutionaries used corporal punishment as a spectacle to underline the illegitimate violence
of the authorities and, by extension, the tyranny of autocracy itself.
OGETHER WITH THE Yakutsk Tragedy, the Kara Tragedy,

as it was quickly dubbed, dealt a body blow both at home and
abroad to the authority and legitimacy of the tsarist regime
in its struggle with the revolutionary movement. On March
9th, 1890, The Times reported on a very large demonstration that had
gathered in Londons Hyde Park in protest at the treatment of political prisoners, who, without trial, are exiled to Siberia, the living tomb
of countless thousands of noble men and noble women, whose only
offence is that they aspire to enjoy the political freedom which we in
England have inherited from our forefathers. Upon his return to the
United States from his travels in Siberia, Kennan lectured to audiences
on the exile system, often appearing on stage with half his head shaved
and clad in rags and chains, like a Siberian convict. His message was clear:
The Siberian exiles are not wild fanatics, they are men and women who
have given up all that is dear to them and have laid down their lives on
what we regard as the essential and fundamental

rights of a human being. The Siberian Exile Petition Association had chapters in 50 American
cities in the 1890s and gathered over one million
signatures on petitions protesting the tsarist treatment of political prisoners. At Kennans lecture in
Boston in 1890, Mark Twain rose from his seat and
tearfully exclaimed: If such a government cannot
be overthrown otherwise than by the use of dynamite, then thank God for dynamite!
Perceptive members of the government were
aware of what was happening. The GovernorGeneral of Western Siberia, Nikolai Kaznakov, reported that the exile system was only incubating
sedition in Siberia. It was impossible to keep the
thousands of administrative exiles dispersed across
the continents towns and villages under effective surveillance, he argued, and banishing them
to Siberia hardly has the effect of convincing them
of the error of their ways but rather only further
embitters them. The administrative exile of subversives, senior officials observed, served to forge
revolutionaries into a cohesive group, feeding
their conviction that they have suffered an injustice and bolstering
their spirit of resistance.
THE REVOLUTIONARIES THEMSELVES agreed. Naum Gekker, whose
own suicide attempt in the wake of Sigidas flogging had failed, looked
back on his time in the Kara prison with something approaching a sense
of pride: Entire generations of our revolutionary youth passed through
Kara, and for many dozens it was an alma mater, a higher school of
development and education. Based on his conversations with the exiled
revolutionaries, Kennan became convinced that it was not terrorism
that necessitated administrative exile in Russia; it was merciless severity
and banishment without due process of law that provoked terrorism.
In 1889 the writing was already on the wall. Social Democrat issued
a warning in its commentary on the violent showdown in Yakutsk that
year: Woe to the vanquished! that is what the government wishes to
say with its barbaric and cruel treatment of the revolutionaries who have
fallen into its hands. So be it! There will come a time when it will feel
all the merciless severity of that rule. If guilt had been the inspiration
of the revolution, vengeance would prove its lifeblood.
Daniel Beer is Senior Lecturer in History at Royal Holloway, University of London and the
author of The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars (Allen Lane, 2016).
FURTHER READING
Orlando Figes, A Peoples Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (Allen Lane,
1997).
Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and
Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Orion, 1972).
Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (Allen Lane,
2004).
W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians
(Cornell University Press, 1994).
MakingHistory
Practical details from historical sources may convince us that historical fiction is fact, but, warns
Suzannah Lipscomb, such novels are fraught with danger for one in search of the past.
Face to Face with History

HILARY MANTEL says historical
novelists have a duty to be accurate
and a responsibility to be authentic
and we would all surely nod sagely in
agreement at this.
If we can trust writers of historical
fiction to situate their stories within a
framework of accuracy, we can allow
their novels to deliver our hearts
desire: a seance with the past, a face
to face encounter with the people of
history, that we perhaps find lacking in
history books. If we can see that their
texts are rich with verbatim quotes
from historic source material as
Mantels novels certainly are (and
if we put aside the notion that the
source material was produced by
humans with all the inaccurate recall
and bias that humans always have in
recording memories), we can relax,
trustingly, into the novels historic
world, as if into a warm bath. Then
fiction can address for us all those
gaps left by history by the recorders
of events in the past because they
were so commonplace. It can tell us
what it was really like and how it
really felt to live in those days. We can
enjoy what Margaret Atwood called
the lure of time travel, because, she
adds, its such fun to snoop. Fiction
can fill our imaginative senses with
the taste of the food, the feel of the
clothes and the not-so-scented smell
of the streets. We can hear the bustle
of horses and soldiers preparing for the
battle of Towton, sneak through the
Elizabethan underworld, eavesdrop on
revolutionary France all are within
our grasp, because the novelist has
aligned him- or herself with the two
standards that Helen Cam set for
good historical fiction in 1961: it must
equate with the temper of the age
and concur with the established facts
of history.
But there is a secret, invidious
danger. If a novel bears the imprimatur

of historical accuracy sources are
quoted, the mundane details are right:
if the bodies lace up in the right way, if
the streets are muddy, if the protagonist can read print but not script it
can create the illusion that what the
novel is telling is actually the truth.
Best-selling novelist Philippa Gregory
states a convincing lie is a wicked
thing and Atwood, again, charges us
We can enjoy what

Margaret Atwood called the
lure of time travel, because ...
its such fun to snoop
to remember what it is the writers
of fiction do all day: They concoct
plausible whoppers, which they hope
they can induce the public to swallow
whole.
What the very best historical
fiction can do is convince us of two
dangerous things. The first is that
human nature does not change at all.
This seems an obvious truism but I
am not sure it is true at all. What was
in the heads of people in the past was
Real characters:
Philip II (on a cow)
with the Duke of
Alenon, the Duke
of Alba, William
of Orange and
Elizabeth I, by
Philip Moro, 16th
century.
very, very different indeed from what

is in ours. Their moral compass had
a different North. The law of Tudor
England stated that it was illegal to kill
a bull without it first being tortured
in the bull-baiting ring. When Francis
Dereham had sex with the teenage
Katherine Howard without her
consent, he was not thought guilty
of child abuse or rape; Howard was
thought to be a tart, a siren, a beguiler
of men. And it is rare to find a novelist
who writes about the 16th century
who truly understands the importance
of religion. As Robertson Davies puts
it, we all belong to our own time, and
there is nothing whatever that we
can do to escape from it. Whatever we
write will be contemporary, even if we
attempt a novel set in a past age.
The second thing fiction can
convince us of, as we step into our protagonists shoes, is about the nature of
an interiority of which we can realistically have no idea. The Cromwell
of Mantels novels is far more likeable
than the historical Cromwell surely
was. As the setting, the landscape
and the costumes are accurate, are we
fooled into believing a convincing lie
about his character? Mantels response
might legitimately be: we do not know
who her Cromwell is as she has not
finished writing him yet nor, actually,
do we know who the real Cromwell
was. For historians, too, write from
their own time, with their own biases
and use those flawed sources from
flawed humans.
So, should all historical novels
come with a warning label? THIS IS
NOT THE PAST. IT JUST LOOKS LIKE
IT. But should history books too?
Suzannah Lipscomb is Head of the History Faculty
at the New College of the Humanities, London
and author of The King is Dead: The Last Will and
Testament of Henry VIII (Head of Zeus, 2015).
JOHN DEE
The young
JOHN DEE
Although best known as Elizabeth Is court magician,

John Dee was also one of Englands most learned men.
Katie Birkwood explores his books and the wealth of
information they can provide on his early life.
John Dee performing an experiment

before Elizabeth I,
by Henry Gillard
Glindoni
(1852-1913).
OHN DEE was one of Tudor Englands most extraordinary and

enigmatic figures, an original Renaissance polymath with interests
in almost every branch of learning. He served Elizabeth I at court,
advised navigators on trade routes to the New World, travelled
throughout Europe and studied ancient history, astronomy, cryptography and mathematics.
Yet he lives on in the collective imagination largely as a result of his
interest in mystical subjects: astrology, alchemy, the world of angels
and magical mirrors. It is these seemingly arcane and occult activities
that have left us with the image of Dee as the archetypal philosophercum-sorcerer, The Queens Conjuror, as one biographer has put it.
So how did the reputation of the man who built and lost one of the
greatest book collections of his age and devoted much of life to rigorous
academic pursuits become so fixed on the supernatural? Moreover, are
there reasons other than magic to make Dee a worthy subject of interest
and discussion over 400 years after his death?
JOHN DEE
Portrait of John Dee.

Stipple engraving by
Robert Cooper, 18th19th century.
The answer to the first of these questions may lie in the main sources
for the story of Dees life. Principal among these are Dees own diaries.
These span the period from 1577 to 1607, beginning when he was already
50 and ending two years before his death: elderly, impoverished and
out of favour. They also coincide with the period during which he was
particularly preoccupied with fields of study that we today see as fantastical, especially his ongoing and, he believed, successful attempts to
contact and converse with angels. We have a few scattered notes from
earlier than this, but nothing substantial remains, if, indeed, anything
was written.
The main source for details of his early years is his own autobiographical account, known as the Compendious rehearsal. It was written in 1594
for a specific purpose: to explain Dees past and possible future value
to the crown and to secure a royal position or appointment and regular
income. Thus the account concentrates on Dees intellectual abilities,
his acts of service to the queen and his sense of grievance at perceived
ill treatment by the establishment.
T IS EASY TO SEE how Dees later diaries, filled with esoteric obsessions and the apparently self-serving, self-written life story, have
forged a portrait of the embittered, occultist outsider. However, to
form a more rounded picture of Dees life, particularly his earlier, more
conventionally successful days, it is necessary to turn to other sources.
Chief among these are the richly annotated books that once formed
part of Dees personal collection.
Dees library was one of the very greatest in 16th-century England.
He owned more than 3,000 printed volumes and 1,000 manuscripts,
housed at his home in Mortlake, on the River Thames. It was a collection greater than that of either Oxford or Cambridge universities, their
colleges or the great cathedrals.
In line with the scholarly practice of the time, Dee not only studied
his texts but annotated them, often extensively and with apparent
enthusiasm; these annotations provide an extraordinary insight into
his interests, his beliefs and his life long before the diaries begin. In the
Henry Pierrepont, 1st Marquis of Dorchester. Stipple engraving, 1801.
A shelf of books from

Dees library at the
Royal College of
Physicians.
Left: John Dees signature, Jehan Dee. 1557.

Right: John Dees signature, Johannes Dee 1559, overwritten
by Nicholas Saunder as Nich Saunder 1589.
margins of the books the workings of one of the greatest minds of the
English Renaissance are revealed.
Tragically, Dees library would not last even as long as the man
himself. In 1583 he left England to travel in Eastern and Central Europe.
Before he departed, he entrusted the care of his house and collection
to his brother-in-law Nicholas Fromond, who, he said, unduely sold
it presently upon my departure, or caused it to be carried away. This
betrayal and the destruction of his library devastated Dee and, though
he was able to recover some of its contents, many books remained lost
to him forever.
A large number of the volumes stolen from Dees library came into
the hands of Nicholas Saunder, who may have been one of Dees former
pupils. It is unclear whether Saunder stole books directly from Mortlake himself or received them afterwards, but he certainly seems to
have known that the volumes once belonged to Dee: he repeatedly

tried to remove Dees marks of ownership by washing, bleaching, scraping or cutting them away, and often replaced Dees signature with his
own. Saunders books later passed to Henry Pierrepont, 1st Marquis of
Dorchester, a devoted bibliophile. After Dorchesters death, his family
presented his entire library to the Royal College of Physicians, which
had lost its own collection in the Great Fire. It has remained at the
College ever since.
Identifying Dees former possessions is not always straightforward.
Some books bear his signature, or its traces, on the title page. His copy
of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus treatise on the geometry
of triangles, De lateribus et angulis triangulorum, for example, notes that
he bought the book on February 9th, 1553 (1554 in the modern system),
in London; thus revealing exactly where he was on a specific date, no
JOHN DEE
Extensive
marginal notes in
John Dees copy
of Quintilians
Institutionum
oratoriarum, 1540.
mean task for a man who travelled so widely across Europe.

Books that Dee did not sign can sometimes be identified by his
other annotations, which come in many forms. They include a range
of attention marks: underlined words and passages, trefoil flowers,
pointing hands (called manicules) and brackets, sometimes fancifully
shaped into human faces. The annotations, in Latin, Greek, French,
Hebrew and English, include lengthy comments on the text, rare
autobiographical details that cannot be found elsewhere and occasional beautiful illustrations. There are also traces of Dees writing
on the outsides of the books: he would sometimes write the title of
a text along the edges of its pages. In the 16th century books were
commonly shelved with the page ends, not the spine, outwards on the
shelf, so these titles would have helped him locate a specific volume
among the many.
The search for Dees books goes on, at least in part, because they
lift the veil on aspects of his life overlooked or left mysterious by other
sources. Dees student years are just one such period. He went up to
St Johns College, Cambridge in 1544, where he was tutored by the
humanist scholar John Cheke. At this time he also began his lifelong
involvement with book collecting.
Such an intense
engagement with
the text suggests
that this may
have been a book
that Dee used not
only for study but
also for teaching
Dee would claim in later life to have been an extraordinarily assiduous student, reporting that during his time at Cambridge he was so
vehemently bent to studie, that ... I did inviolably keepe this order;
only to sleepe four houres every night. It is, of course, impossible to
verify this statement, which is rather typical of 16th-century scholars.
However, there is clear evidence of Dees meticulous approach to the
texts he studied as part of the essentially medieval curriculum. His
copy of Roman rhetorician Quintilians Institutionum oratoriarum has
thorough and impeccably neat annotations on most of the pages. These
include notes in Latin and Greek and cross-references to other authors
and works. Such an intense engagement with the text suggests that
this may have been a book that Dee used not only for study but also for
teaching. Indeed, in 1546 Dee was appointed under-reader in Greek
at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he was a founding fellow.
Not all of Dees student books were serious works of history or
oratory, it should be noted. Included among them is a copy of the poet
Ovids Amatoria, a work that would have been considered too frivolous
and sexually ambiguous for inclusion on the formal syllabus. Dee
signed the title page of this compilation of love poetry and marked
several verses in red.
JOHN DEE
John Dees sketch of a ship in the margins of Ciceros Opera, 1539-40.
Many of these volumes from Dees Cambridge days are

planets visible in the night sky, was also
modest in size, not much larger than pocket books. On an
typical of early-modern Europe. Astrolaltogether grander scale is Dees student copy of the complete
ogy was a fundamental part of underworks of Cicero. A truly monumental tome: two large folio
standing the natural world and had an
volumes each standing 40cm tall and 15cm deep. As with his
important place in medical practice and
other Classical texts, Dee has worked over several sections
other areas of intellectual endeavour.
very heavily, numbering the points of interest, underlining
The disease influenza, for example,
whole sections, writing notable words in the margin and using
takes its name from the medieval Latin
his trademark manicules to highlight important passages. In
influentia, meaning visitation or influone instance, a sketch seems to resemble a Greek temple on
ence of the stars.
Manicule in the margin of Quintilians
a small island in flames: the nearby text of Ciceros De legibus
Ever the meticulous scholar, Dee set
Institutionum oratoriarum, 1540.
tells how the Persian king Xerxes set fire to the temples of the
about refining his practice of astrology
Greeks on the advice of the Persian magi. Doodled clues such
by documenting and understanding the
as this were used in some systems of reading as a means of interpreting
natural world and relating these records to the movements of the heavand remembering the contents. In an age before comprehensive indexes,
enly bodies. He visited the Low Countries in 1547, meeting with many
let alone hyperlinks, Dee is developing a visual shorthand to allow him
of the greatest names from the history of science, including Gerard
to revisit and interpret his books with ease.
Mercator, the celebrated map-maker.
A rather more spectacular instance of scholarly doodling is found in
He returned the following year to the University of Louvain, where
the same volume. In his De natura deorum (On the nature of the gods)
he studied mathematics, geography, astrology, astronomical observation
Cicero quotes some lines from the Roman tragic poet Lucius Attius:
and, for recreation, civil law. Evidence of his celestial investigations is
preserved at the end of a small collection of astronomical texts. On one
So huge a bulk glides from the deep with the roar of a whistling wind
of the spare flyleaves at the back of the book is a list of all the days in
Waves roll before, and eddies surge and swirl
the month of August 1548 beneath the heading, in Latin, Observations
Hurtling headlong, it snorts and sprays the foam
made of the various conditions and changes of the air at Louvain. Next
This verse is accompanied by an intricate drawing of a vessel at sea.
to each date Dee notes the meteorological conditions using a series
Though the perspective may not be perfect to our modern eyes, it
of symbols, apparently of his own invention, explained on the facing
page. These symbols predate regular meteorological records by centuremains an impressive piece of draftsmanship.
ries. From these notes we learn, for example, that on the ninth of the
Dees pervading interest in astrology, the belief that actions and
events on earth are influenced by the movements of the stars and
month it was totally cloudy until 12 oclock, when it cleared somewhat.
Clockwise from
above: magic disc,
owned by John
Dee; astrological
charters in the
margin of
Girolamo
Cardanos, Libelli
quinque, 1547;
Edmund Bonner,
the bloody
bishop of London,
18th-19th century.
A gentle wind blew from the south until 7 oclock and afterwards from
the south-west.
Dee also drew up astrological charts: what we would call today
casting horoscopes. These charts show the positions of the planets and
constellations at a precise moment. This moment might be the date of
someones birth, but could also be any other significant point. Charting
the stars for a specific time helped determine favourable conditions for a
particular course of action, be that medical treatment, marriage, sowing
crops or any important endeavour.
Dee owned a copy of the Italian astrologer Girolamo Cardanos compendium of astrological practice, Libelli quinque, published in Nuremberg in 1547. This book is filled with example charts and explanations
of their significance. Dee filled the margins and the blank diagrams
to practise the procedures and draw up charts for use. These notes
are a rare opportunity to see a Tudor astrologer at work: charts and
records were not often kept, as documentary evidence of predictions or
recommendations could have unfortunate repercussions, if they proved

to be wrong, or if the astrologer fell foul of the authorities. Dee, mindful
of the precarious position of the astrologer, does not identify the
persons or circumstances to which his sketched charts refer, leaving
us to wonder for whom and for what purpose the horoscopes were cast.
HILE ASTROLOGY was, in the main, a respectable

pursuit, it accounted in some measure for Dees rather
chequered relationship with the royal court. In early life
he ascended to prominence under the rule of Edward VI,
years later recalling the time with fondness and describing Edward as an
incomparable king of England: Angliae Rex inco[m]parabilis.
However, after Edwards death his continued communication with
Princess Elizabeth and his continued interest in subjects astrology,
astronomy and particularly mathematics that were increasingly seen
by some as magical, made him easy prey for attack under the rule of
Mary I. In May 1555 Dee was arrested on the orders of the Privy Council
for allegedly casting horoscopes for the queen and her family without
permission and practising witchcraft against his enemies.
Dee was accused along with three others: the mathematician and
astrologer John Feild, Sir Thomas Benger and Christopher Carye, one of
Dees mathematics pupils. Their accusers were the poet George Ferrers
and John Prideaux, who originally alleged that they had cast the nativities, or birth charts, of the queen, king and Princess Elizabeth, an act
seen as tantamount to treason on account of the secret and privileged
information it was believed could be revealed. Shortly after the arrests,
two of Ferrers children were taken ill and the charges were increased to
include witchcraft, used against the queen and Dees enemies.
After interrogation by the lord chief justice of the court of common
pleas, Dee was released in August into the custody of Edmund Bonner,
the so-called bloody Bishop of London. One book in the Royal College
of Physicians collection bears powerful witness to this most testing
period in his life. A slim volume of mathematics, the Mathemalogium
prime partis by Andreas Alexander, includes numerous annotations and
a longer inscription on the last page of text.
Translated from the Latin, Dee writes: Read through in the year
1555 between the 18th and 24th September in Fulham in the house of
my singular friend, reverend in Christ father Edmund Bonner Bishop
of London. This is the only conclusive historical evidence that has been
found to place Dee in Bonners house at this time. Dees use of the
phrase singular friend is intriguing: should we take it at face value, or
does he mean it ironically? At this distance, it is almost impossible to
JOHN DEE
tell. It could be that, after Bonner had been convinced of Dees religious
orthodoxy, he and Dee did enjoy a friendship. Potential evidence for this
comes from the 1563 first edition of John Foxes Actes and monuments
(also known as the Book of Martyrs), in which Dee is mentioned during
the interrogation of John Philpott as being Bonners chaplain and is
described as that great conjuror. It is perhaps unwise to trust as biased
a writer as Foxe with too many details about the associates of a man as
vilified as Bonner. What is known for certain is that no further charges
were pressed against Dee, though he continued to protest his innocence
for the rest of his long life. Others will prefer to read Dees words as a
first flowering of sarcastic wit, describing Bonner, his effective judge and
now imprisoner, with such a delightfully ambiguous term.
Bearded faces,
doodled in the
margins of an
alchemical book.
In any case, the whole incident appears to

indicate that Dee either had the gift of persuasion or the necessary influence at court to
avoid the lethal fate that befell so many others
accused of similar wrongdoing. Indeed, in the year immediately following his arrest, Dee was already seeking support from the queen for
a new scheme that he had devised: nothing less than the creation of a
national library.
Dees book-collecting was not a selfish pursuit. He amassed his
library for the benefit of all scholars and welcomed many into his home
in Mortlake to consult, and even to borrow, books and manuscripts.
The value of his collection lay not only in its size, but also in its quality:
many of the titles were very rare and exceptionally hard to acquire
in England. Dees ambitions for his library extended beyond his own
network of students and fellow intellectuals; he wanted to create a
centre for research to serve the whole country.
In 1556 Dee wrote a petition to Mary bemoaning the destruction of
so many and so notable libraries during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530-40s. He requested that the queen establish a national
library to preserve the texts of the famous and worthy Authors, whose
works were currently at risk of being scattered and destroyed.
Here we find evidence of Dee operating as a courtier in the widest
sense of the term: a man concerned with the operation of the court
and, by extension, the kingdom of which it was the effective ruling
body. Dees engagement with public policy, be it in regard to the
establishment of a national library, which was not successful, or in

making the case for the teaching of mathematics at universities, advising on navigation or setting out an intellectual basis for Englands
imperial ambitions, is another neglected element of his contribution
to Tudor life. Could it be that these essentially practical preoccupations
simply do not sit easily with the image of Dee as that great conjuror
which we have grown used to?
F DEES ROLE as magician is imaginatively located in any place, it is

often at the court of Elizabeth. Henry Gillard Glindonis magnificent
Victorian history painting has the magus performing an experiment
before the Virgin Queen. His appearance, largely unchanged from a
portrait owned by Elias Ashmole centuries earlier, is ostensibly that of
a 16th-century scholar, though it has now passed into the iconography
of sorcery, while the experiment itself resembles a 19th-century stage
magicians trick. Yet Dees relationship with Elizabeth is more longstanding and complex than this confected image might have us believe.
Once more his books give us a clue as to where the story begins.
Near the end of the same volume of Cardanos compendium of astrological advice that reveals horoscopes in Dees hand and hints at his
family history, a series of faint annotations are surviving proof of Dees
early connection to the Elizabethan court.
On the last page of text, Dee writes (translated): Anne Compton,
born on the 18 March 1523, second wife of W.H. and I entered into the
service of . Anne Compton was the second wife of William Herbert, first
Earl of Pembroke, and this inscription is the only firm evidence we have
that Dee was in the Earls service in the 1550s.
William Pembroke and another of Dees patrons, Robert Dudley, Earl
of Leicester, introduced Dee to Elizabeth. It was Dudley who sought
Dees advice on a date for Elizabeths upcoming coronation. Using his
vast learning, Dee cast astrological charts, now sadly lost, but no doubt
similar to those we find elsewhere among his papers. From these charts
Dee selected Sunday January 15th, 1559 as the most auspicious day for
the queens inauguration. It is a tribute to the esteem in which both
astrology and Dee were held that the coronation did indeed go ahead
on that date.
This John Dee, the real Renaissance man, was respected not as a
magician but as a meticulous scholar, just as astrology was heeded as
a legitimate and powerful, if potentially dangerous, branch of knowledge. The John Dee who took his place at the new queens court may
have been a young man, still only in his early thirties, but was a man
of wide learning in many fields: a polymath in the process of amassing
the greatest library in the land, ready to advise and guide on topics from
empire to alchemy, medicine to mathematics, and trusted enough to
choose the very date of queens coronation.
So much more than a mere court conjuror.
Katie Birkwood is the rare books and special collections librarian at the Royal College of
Physicians, London and curated its exhibition Scholar, Courtier, Magician: the Lost Library of
John Dee.
FURTHER READING
Nicholas Clulee, John Dees Natural Philosophy: Between Science and
Religion (Routledge, 1988).
Deborah E. Harkness, John Dees Conversations with Angels: Cabala,
Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Glyn Parry, The Arch-Conjuror of England: John Dee (Yale University
Press, 2011).
Benjamin Woolley, The Queens Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr
Dee (HarperCollins, 2001).
Daisy Dunn on Hellenistic kingdoms Edith Hall lauds a history of Athenian democracy
George Goodwin welcomes a new life of Frederick the Great
REVIEWS
REFORMATION EUROPE
The Early
Modern
Refugee
Crisis
The plight of people
seeking asylum overseas
is not an issue confined
to our age, says a
new study, which
challenges inherited
assumptions about
the Reformation.
THE MOVEMENT and plight

of people compelled to leave
their own countries and to seek
asylum overseas is ever present
in our television broadcasts and
newspaper headlines. Casualties
of the wars and conflicts that
beset our troubled world, refugees are a symbol of global instability and the subject of urgent
domestic and international
attention and policy-making. In
this stimulating, wide-ranging
study, Nicholas Terpstra seeks
to investigate the early modern
origins of exile as a mass phen56 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016
omenon and simultaneously to

offer an alternative interpretation of the European Reformation. Central to this vision is the
idea that, from the 15th century
onwards, governments and
communities became increasingly preoccupied with ideas of
purity, contagion and purgation.
This manifested itself in a wide
range of initiatives to control,
repress and eliminate contaminating others. Starting with
the forcible expulsion of Jews
from the Iberian peninsula in
1492, it drove a series of official
initiatives to cut off the diseased

limbs of the corpus christianum
(the medieval Christian world)
that continued well beyond 1700.
These acts of radical surgery
were accompanied by countless
decisions taken by individuals
to migrate voluntarily, a process
that Terpstra terms expelling
the self. Stretching beyond the
mutually antagonistic groups of
Christians that have dominated
accounts of the period, he ably (if
a little unevenly) integrates the
adherents of Islam and Judaism
into his analysis.
Taking the body as its organising metaphor, Terpstras book

begins by describing how European Christians defined themselves
and their relationship with God,
together with the growing threat
that heretics, witches and other
deviants presented to its health
and integrity. It then turns to
dissect the various discourses
and practices of discipline and
exclusion that gathered pace,
alongside state formation, in
the 16th and 17th centuries: the
impulse for separation from the
world embodied in late medieval monastic observantine
movements; the containment
of female religious in enclosed
religious houses and of potentially dangerous marginal groups
in ghettoes, institutions and
hospitals; the prosecution of
deviants and criminals by the
Catholic Inquisition and Protestant ecclesiastical tribunals; and
the purgation of those whose
presence was deemed to be intolerable. Chapter three examines
the experience of exile from the
perspective of selected individuals and the destinations to which
refugees typically fled. Eschewing a thorough investigation of
the competing theologies that
underpinned these developments, chapter four assesses
ideas about rites of initiation,
such as baptism and circumcision, divine presence in the guise
of the sacrament of the Eucharist, and the authority of the
scriptures through which God
spoke to human beings. Building

fruitfully upon Terpstras earlier
research, its later sections also
explore charity as a particular
variety of boundary marking and
of purificatory discipline. The
final chapter is concerned with
the mental and physical world,
which this refugee Reformation
brought into being; with the
cultural processes of identity
formation and confessionalisation; and with the empowering
myths and narratives that gave
the experience of exile significance and meaning. This latter
discussion might usefully have
been placed earlier in the book.
It remains unclear why so many
refugees were able to overcome
the widespread worry that flight
was an unjustified surrender
and abandonment of the ideal of
Christian community which they
held dear.
To expand [the
Reformations]
chronological
and geographical
parameters can only
be applauded
Untrammelled by footnotes,
Religious Refugees in the Early
Modern World is a fluent and
imaginative introduction to
the Reformation era that will
inspire students and surely find
an enduring place on university
reading lists. It is an original
synthesis that should also foster
debate among senior scholars.
Terpstras self-conscious
emphasis less on the positive
legacies of the Reformation than
its darker dimensions contrasts
strikingly with the stress on tolerance and peaceful coexistence
that has emerged in recent work
by Benjamin Kaplan and others.
He notes but does not wholly
explain the paradox that these
tendencies emerged in tandem.
Inflected by the themes of exclusion and repressive authoritarianism, the picture he paints
has much in common with R.I.
Moores influential The Formation of a Persecuting Society
(1987). It is also more than

faintly reminiscent of the sinister
story of punitive discipline and
coercion told by Michel Foucault.
The repressive programmes on
which Terpstra focuses are likewise driven from the top rather
than the bottom and they leave
little room for the agency of
individual people. The religious
outlook and practice of the
majority is described as lacking
much intellectual substance and
as operating on the level of a
more basic animism.
Despite his determination
to give exile a human face, we
seldom hear the voices of those
who chose this route and at
times they are rather eclipsed
from view. Purgation is arguably
the more dominant theme and
the claim that refugees shaped
not only the cities and settlements to which they went, but
also the Reformation itself,
in profound and culturally
creative ways, might have been
more fully developed. So, too,
might the suggestion made in
the books final pages, where
Terpstra provocatively rejects
the traditional tendency to date
the Reformation from Luthers
protest against indulgences in
1517 as a Northern European
conceit and asserts that starting
with the earlier initiatives of
European Christians to expel the
Jewish and Muslim Other gives
a more acute view of the roots
of some modern global realities.
While not all the threads of this
ambitious overview are successfully woven together, it certainly
injects important new insights
and sets some fresh agendas
for our discussion of religious
change in early modern Europe.
Terpstras concluding call for an
expanded conversation in which
younger transnational scholars
will challenge inherited assumptions about the Reformation
and expand its chronological and
geographical parameters can only
be applauded.
Alexandra Walsham
Religious Refugees in the Early
Modern World: An Alternative
History of the Reformation
by Nicholas Terpstra
Cambridge University Press 353pp 23.99
The Medieval
Islamic Hospital
Medicine, Religion, and Charity

by Ahmed Ragab
Cambridge University Press
282pp 64.99
MEDIEVAL HOSPITALS used to be
represented as hell holes: overcrowded reservoirs of infection
lacking medical facilities; places
in which to die, not recover.
Scholarship of recent decades
has done much to modify this
depressing picture. We now
know that there were many hospital doctors and nurses doing
their best by the standards of
the time. In Florence and some
other Italian city-states, indeed,
the highest-paid physicians
shuttled between elite clients
and hospital practice. Even the
smallest hospitals aimed to
Medieval hospitals
used to be
represented as hell
holes ... places in
which to die, not
recover
provide the clean sheets and the
nourishing diet that were as important as elaborate medication.
Still, much of this revisionist
scholarship applies to the later
Middle Ages and the European
hospital remained what it
always had been since its invention in the fourth century: a religious and charitable institution
in which healing the soul took
precedence over healing the
body. If we want hospitals that
seem more secular, that accepted patients of different faiths,
that took a relatively enlightened view of patients that most

European hospitals excluded,
such as the insane that is,
that look quite modern then
we turn to Baghdad and other
centres in the Islamic world from
as early as the ninth century.
This is where Ahmed Ragabs
valuable book comes in. Like
those revising our idea of European hospitals, he stands on the
shoulders of several giants who
have been studying the Islamic
bimaristan (house of the sick)
and relating it to the history of
patronage, medicine, law and
the economy, so that despite its
apparent medical modernity it is
set in the context of its time.
This book is not a general
history of Islamic hospitals, but
a richly contextualised study
of one hospital, established by
the Mamluk sultan al-Mansur
Qalawun around 1285 in his
empires capital, Cairo, as part
of a philanthropic and religious
complex that included a mausoleum and madrasa.
This foundation is examined
against the background of its
predecessors, in Islamic Egypt
and the Levant, and in Crusader
Jerusalem, where the main hospital, though indebted to Islamic
exemplars, may also have exercised an influence of its own.
Ragab places the Mansuri
establishment within a wider
setting of rulers patronage and
piety and urban topography
and architecture, as well that of
medicine. Sometimes the contextual detail is so wide-ranging
that it overwhelms the main argument and the general reader
may be put off by the overly
discursive footnotes. Specialists may feel that the author is
not always ruthless enough in
his source criticism (no anecdote too implausible not to
be told one more time before
being set aside). Yet specialist
and non-specialist alike will be
enthralled by much of what
the author has to tell them, as
he unveils a medieval hospital
world far too little known even
to Islamicists, let alone historians of medieval Europe.
Peregrine Horden
REVIEWS
HELLENISTIC KINGDOMS
Guardians
of Greek
Identity
Hellenistic kingdoms
endured for centuries after
the decline of Greece,
drawing on its beauty and
symbolism, as this elegant
study demonstrates.
HE FOREHEAD is the
plainest part of the face.
Compared with the eyes
or the cheeks, there is little one
can do to alter it, which is why,
of all the fashion accessories of
the ancient world, the diadem is
most deserving of a revival.
When Alexander the Great
adopted the Persian diadem a
gold band that encircled the head
and sparkled above the eyes he
was aware of its potential. Not
only did it announce to all who
saw him his conquest of eastern
territories, but in its design it
could convey how enthusiastically Macedon had absorbed Hellenic culture. A diadem featured in
this book, a catalogue produced
to accompany an exhibition
of Hellenistic art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is
decorated not with the figure of
Herakles, Alexanders hero, but
with a Heraklean knot, modelled
on the tie Herakles used to
secure the Nemean lion skin
on his shoulders. One is struck
as much by its subtlety as by its
symbolism.
Alexander is the paradigm
against which all later dynasts
of the Hellenistic world are measured. In this book, the compari58 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016
son is with the often-overlooked

Attalid rulers of Pergamon,
a remote, thickly forested
kingdom in Mysia, Asia Minor,
situated 25km inland from the
west coast of modern Turkey.
It was here that Alexanders
Persian lover Barsine and their
illegitimate son Herakles are
said to have been residing at the
time of Alexanders death. It
Alexander the Great

is the paradigm
against which all
later dynasts of the
Hellenistic world are
measured
was here, too, that Lysimachos,
Alexanders former bodyguard,
deposited a weight of silver with
an eye to acquiring power and
appointed one Philetaeros, a
eunuch, to guard it. Philetaeros
decided to defect to the rival
general Seleucus, who battled
down Lysimachos, then died
himself. Philetaeros survived
and, adopting his nephew, established the Attalid dynasty, with
Pergamon as its capital.
Like Alexander before them

(and sundry rulers since), the Attalids strove to use art as a means
of legitimising their power,
which in effect meant endowing
it with the age and pedigree it
lacked. It perhaps comes as no
surprise that many of the pieces
they owned were therefore traditional (we would say classical)
in style. Several of the Hellenistic
period vases featured in this
splendidly illustrated book retain
the shape of those made in the
fifth century bc, although the
decoration is often cruder. More
impressive and more effective at
challenging our preconceptions
about propagandistic, legitimising art today is the most famous
Attalid commission of all, the
Dying Gaul. The sculpture was
made to commemorate the
Attalids victory over migrating
Galatians (Gauls) in the third
century bc. As Massimiliano
Papini argues in his introductory
essay to the Attalid defeat of
the Galatians, these sculptures,
which originally stood in the
Sanctuary of Athena Nikephoros
(Bringer of Victory) on the
Pergamon acropolis, enabled the
Attalids to present themselves
as guardians of Greek identity.
Isolated from their context, and

known today through Roman
marble copies, they stand rather
as timeless elegies of human
suffering.
No less affecting are some of
the smaller scale items examined
in the comprehensive catalogue:
a terracotta model of a cock fight,
presided over by children, and a
first century bc-first century ad
statuette of an emaciated young
man, whom, we learn, a pathologist recently diagnosed as a
victim of chronic lead poisoning.
The curators of the Pergamon exhibition have been conscious to
set the Pergamon treasures in the
broader context of the fourthfirst centuries bc, so we also
find objects from, for example,
Ptolemaic collections, including
a vase that perfectly encapsulates
the fashion for fusing Greek and
Egyptian styles; cast in faience
using Egyptian techniques, the
oinochoe (a Greek vase shape)
was inscribed in Greek For the
Good Fortune of Berenike [II].
And, from a rubbish heap near
El-Hibeh in Egypt, we see the
earliest written fragment of the
Odyssey ever discovered a piece
of papyrus from c.285-250 bc
with lines from Book XX.
It is no surprise that the
Romans were keen to gather up
as many Hellenistic treasures
as they could when the final,
heirless, Attalid bequeathed
them the kingdom in 133 bc.
Paul Zanker, in a characteristically incisive essay on the subject,
suggests that the Romans were
willing to include portraits of
the Hellenistic dynasts in their
collections because they themselves toyed with the idea of a
kingship in Rome. But perhaps
it was more that they felt that, in
many cases, the craftsmanship
and beauty of the art trumped
its original context and meaning.
Faced with a work such as the
Dying Gaul today, we may be
inclined to feel the same way.
Daisy Dunn
Pergamon and the Hellenistic
Kingdoms of the Ancient World
edited by Carlos A. Picn and Sen
Hemingway
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York 368pp 40
REVIEWS
EXHIBITION
The so-called Temple of Concordia

at Agrigento (c.440 bc) and Igor
Mitorajs Fallen Icarus (2011)
Of Greek vases and Byzantine mosaics

In 1787 Goethe wrote: Sicily will for me be an indestructible
treasure for my whole life. The British Museums new exhibition
endeavours to make claim to those riches.
Sicily: Culture and Conquest
The British Museum, London,
until August 14th, 2016
THE CURATORS of the British Museums
Sicily: Culture and Conquest, Peter Higgs and
Dirk Booms, have concentrated on two key
periods in the islands rich history, namely
that of the Greeks (734-241 bc) and of the
Normans (ad 1061-1189), with occasional
forays beyond this temporal span.
The earliest Greek settlers came to Sicily
seeking fertile land, space and opportunity, which were denied them in their then
impoverished, overcrowded homeland. The
largest island in the Mediterranean offered
untold natural riches. They set up apoikia,
or homes from home, initially around the
safe natural harbours on Sicilys eastern
coast and later all around the island. In
time these colonies became some of the
greatest Greek city states of antiquity, with
Syracuse the greatest of them all. Indeed, at
its height, Syracuse was so strong that, in
413 bc, its navy defeated the Athenians in
the citys Great Harbour, as so memorably
described by Thucydides. Other cities, such
as Selinous (Selinunte) and Akragas
(Agrigento) boasted some of the most beautiful Doric temples ever built, which would
have been richly adorned with a multitude
of votive offerings. These included bronze
and marble statuary, beautifully painted
vases and simple moulded terracotta effigies of the gods, such as Demeter, goddess
of the harvest, whose approbation it was essential for farmers to nurture and maintain.
Sicily: Culture and Conquest shows a broad
range of such offerings, as well as stunning,
A rich array of tasters,

rather than a banquet, but
definitely worth visiting.
The banquet is Sicily itself
intricately detailed coins and jewellery,
although the very best Sikeliote (Greek
Sicilian) vases are not on show, but remain
in Agrigento and Syracuse.
After touching on the Romans (Sicily
was a chief conduit through which Rome
became Hellenised), the exhibition skips
1,300 years to the Normans, who landed on
the island in 1061, led by Roger dHautville
and his brother Robert, a brilliant strategist.
Barely 1oo years later, the Normans had left
a cultural mark every bit as splendid as that

of the ancient Greeks. Their greatest legacy
was architectural, including the great cathedrals of Cefal and Monreale, and Palermos
jewel-like Palatine Chapel, their interiors
resplendent with Byzantine mosaics. Key
Norman buildings were largely built by
resident Muslim (mainly Fatimid) builders,
often incorporating pre-existing edifices.
Sicily: Culture and Conquest focuses on the
multi-ethnic court in which these buildings
were produced. After militarily wresting
control of the island from the factious,
infighting Muslim leaders (who had first
arrived in ad 827), Count Roger of Sicily
was politically astute enough to realise that
keeping Muslims in charge of tax-collecting
and general administration worked well,
as, too, did their careful husbandry of the
land and sophisticated irrigation systems.
The show admirably highlights the Muslim
contribution to Norman rule in Sicily.
With French ecclesiastics, Greek officials, Muslim administrators and Al-Andalus intellectuals making up Rogers court
and, even more so, that of his son, Roger II,
Norman Sicily became the Mediterranean
superpower. The art produced in this period
reflected this cultural diversity, which
Sicily: Culture and Conquest brings to life.
One intriguing exhibit is an inlaid tombstone for a noblewoman who died in 1148,
which bears inscriptions in Arabic, Greek,
Hebrew and Latin. In mosaics, the Norman
kings are portrayed as Byzantine emperors,
whereas at court they preferred Arab-style
dress, as shown in the surprisingly effective
backlit reproduction of part of the Palatine
Chapels stunning painted wooden ceiling.
However, Norman kings also wore their hair
long and grew beards, arguably to be seen
as more Frankish (or deliberately resembling Christ, perhaps?). The exhibition also
shows that Norman kings adopted personal
symbols of power which were commonly
used in the Eastern Mediterranean, such as
the Tree of Life and lions rampant.
The beautifully produced catalogue,
with over 200 excellent colour images, fully
develops all of the shows central themes.
Also rooms 90-91 at the BM are showing
some charming, complementary drawings
of Sicilys Greek sites by 18th-century
English gentleman archaeologists.
Sicily: Culture and Conquest offers a rich
array of tasters, rather than a banquet, and
is definitely worth visiting. The banquet is
Sicily itself, and go there too, if you can.
Philippa Joseph
REVIEWS
ANCIENT GREECE
The birth
pangs of
democracy
Thomas N. Mitchells
in-depth study of how
Athenians made their first
strides towards an
innovative democracy also
throws light on our own
failure to elect mature,
upstanding leaders.
HE FIRST democracy that

we can study arguably
the first in world history
was established in Athens by a
series of reforms that took place
between 507 and the 460s bc.
Any discussion of democracy is
enhanced by engaging with the
classical Athenians experience.
Thomas Mitchell has written an
ambitious and substantial history
of the Athenians and their
polity. He begins three centuries
before the 507 revolution led
by Cleisthenes and takes the
main narrative through to the
dissolution of the independent
Athenian government by the
Macedonians in 322 bc. But the
author never allows his reader to
forget that the story he is telling
of the Athenians intense,
trial-and-error creation of the
most egalitarian community the
world had yet seen is important
because, as Thucydides suggested, human nature being what it
is, learning about the experience
of people in the past can benefit
their descendants in the future.
Complete with maps and
well-chosen glossy illustrations,
the book is lucidly, if somewhat
discursively, written and elegantly produced. It is arguably
too dense and expansive for the

beginner in Greek history or
political theory, but provides a
rewarding workout for the reader
who already has knowledge of
the basic outlines of the classical
Athenian experience.
Mitchell opens with a
valuable discussion of what we
mean by democracy. The current
Thinking about
... our ancestors
history has sadly
never prevented us
from making their
mistakes
definition, which emphasises the
electoral process by which people
select their governors and confer
power upon them, only after
candidates for government have
competed for the peoples votes,
emerged surprisingly recently.
No ancient Athenian would have
agreed with our notion that the
essence of democracy lay in
open, free and fair elections; for
them, the essence of democracy
was that executive power (kratos)
lay in the hands of the mass of
people (the demos) rather than
in the hands of a ruling class or

dynasty with superior financial
resources or education.
The Athenian citizens who
constituted the demos did elect
leaders, usually members of
upper-class families. But elections were annual rather than
quadrennial or quinquennial and
accountability was rigorously enforced. This meant that the demos
could quickly rid itself of unpopular generals or magistrates.
Moreover, the citizens did not
elect parliamentary representatives; they each voted in person
for every measure that was put
to their parliament, the ekklesia
or Assembly. They were also all
eligible to serve on the crucial
institution of the Council, which
was drawn from across the geographical and class spectrum. The
Councillors amassed evidence
and deliberated motions before
they were put to the vote. The
Council was perhaps the most
inspiring achievement of the
democracy, since it required in its
ordinary citizen members a grasp
of fiscal, financial, military and
administrative affairs that would
put to shame most modern parliamentarians, let alone regular
members of the populace.
Mitchell de-clutters his pages

by relegating his (thorough and
helpful) textual references, and
suggestions for further reading
to the endnotes, while sustaining
a narrative voice notable for its
good sense and humanity. Some
will complain that the women,
slaves and resident foreigners,
who were all excluded from
agency in the central political
processes of the Assembly,
Council and law-courts, are
treated too little and too late;
others will notice that Mitchell
is no less vague than most of his
predecessors on the topic of the
thetes, the lowest class of voting
citizens. But his judgment is excellent and his enthusiasm clear
for the undoubted achievement
of the developed democracy,
which succeeded in including a
sizeable proportion of the inhabitants of Athens in its deliberative
and executive procedures.
Mitchell demonstrates
carefully how long it took the
Athenians to make even their
first strides towards their innovative democracy, despite severe
inequalities and extreme vested
interests. He stresses that their
system was no worked-out ideal
imposed effortlessly from above,
but a continuously evolving
organic response to a series of
specific and concrete problems.
In these emphases, the most
profound point the book makes
about our contemporary world
is the folly of expecting often
recently created states, with
no experience of even fledgling
democracy, to produce a mature
civil society that can maintain
free and fair elections within
months of all-out war. The
ultimate message of thinking
with Mitchell about Athenian
democracys protracted birth
pangs is that investigating our
ancestors history has sadly never
prevented us from repeating
their mistakes. But what such
investigations can surely do is
enable us to understand just how
predictable some of our own
mistakes have been.
Edith Hall
Democracys Beginning: The Athenian
Story by Thomas N. Mitchell
Yale University Press 368pp 25
REVIEWS
Pericles and the

Conquest of History
A Political Biography
by Loren J. Samons II
Cambridge University Press
342pp 19.99
PROFESSOR SAMONS is no
stranger to what he (but not all
of us) call the age of Pericles,
having edited a Cambridge
Companion to that supposed
entity and devoted a careful
monograph to the finances of
imperial Athens, through much
of which Pericles (c. 495-429 bc)

lived and which he did much
to further. But in 2004 Samons
wrote Whats Wrong With Democracy? From Athenian Practice
to American Worship. It is quite
hard to reconcile that attempted
demolition of democracy with
the much more measured presentation here of the Athenian
democracy under Pericles.
Yet not entirely impossible.
What the Athenians called
misthos (political pay) was introduced on the proposal of Pericles
to enable even the poorest
Athenian citizens to take
time off to serve on the juries
that were an essential organ
of political self-governance
within the framework of what
the Athenians understood by
demokratia. Yet, for Samons, Pericles measure was but a policy
that had a debilitating effect on
Athenian (and later) democratic
practice and ideology. A standard ancient and modern
accusation against the Athenians version of direct democ-
racy was that it encouraged

demagogues and self-interested rabble rousers. Some ancient
writers, notably Thucydides,
sought to drive a wedge
between Pericles and the demagogues; others, including the
later biographer, Plutarch, drew
no such distinction. Samons goes
with Thucydides; for him, Pericles was no mere demagogue,
manipulating the populace and
playing on the electorates hopes
and fears in order to empower
himself. But, alas, Samons for
some reason fails to acknowledge a fundamental 1962 article
by Moses Finley, Athenian demagogues, reprinted in his no-less
fundamental and no-less uncited
Democracy Ancient and Modern
(1985). Demagogues were, as
Finley demonstrated, a structural feature of the Athenians
style of democracy. Pericles was
a demagogue, inevitably.
It is against that ideological
backdrop that the present book
must be judged. The reading is
well worth the effort. Biography
as a genre and the prehistory

of Pericless illustrious career
(his family had produced the
earliest version of Athens democracy) are usefully canvassed
before Samons embarks on his
subjects opposition to Kimon,
his collaboration with Ephialtes
and his domination of Athenian
politics from c.450 to his death.
Two themes rightly colour the
landscape more than others:
Athenian imperialism and
Athens-nurtured high culture
and Pericles respective personal
contributions to each. The secret
of his success is ascribed finally
to his empathetic understanding of the collective Athenian
psyche. Yet, for all its merits,
this study suffers by comparison
with that of V. (not A.) Azoulays
Pericles of Athens (2010). Samons
strictures notwithstanding,
this is a study that properly
questions and historicises both
the age of Pericles label and the
validity of any claim to write a
political biography of Pericles.
Paul Cartledge
REVIEWS
EXHIBITION
The Last Judgement, Jheronimus Bosch c.1495-1505.
Naked greed and human frailty exposed

Jheronimus Bosch died in 1516, yet his works on the morality of
life continue to speak to our sense of human vulnerability.
Jheronimus Bosch:
Visions of Genius:
Het Noordbrabants Museum
FROM FEBRUARY TO MAY 2016 the town
of sHertogenbosch (Den Bosch) attracted
thousands of visitors to its anniversary exhibition Jheronimus Bosch: Visions of Genius.
The atmosphere was carnivalesque, with
banners and posters decorated with Boschs
distinctive creatures, plants and machines.
The town truly embraced its most famous
son, born in a house on the market square
as Jheronimus van Aken in c.1450, who
only later in life began to sign his paintings as Bosch. The exhibition at the Het
Noordbrabants Museum expertly displayed
100 items, paintings and sketches, never
before seen side by side. There was a sense
of pride about a provincial painter, who had
travelled little, was not much known in his
lifetime, but whose works were collected
by kings soon after his death and later by
the worlds leading museums.
Jheronimus Bosch: Visions of Genius was
underpinned by the Bosch Research and
Conservation Project led by some of the
Netherlands finest art historians. This
work involved research on the artists life,

re-attribution of works to his workshop
and much conservation work on several of
the 45 surviving paintings. The Bosch who,
since the 1960s, symbolised countercultural expression of repressed desires
his works were popular as posters in
student digs emerged in a wholly new
light. Hence a large section of the exhibition offered Bosch in sHertogenbosch:
Jheronimus Van Aken was a respectable
burgher with a thriving painting workshop and he became member of the elite
Boschs works symbolised

counter-cultural expression
of repressed desires ...
[and] were popular as
posters in student digs
Brotherhood of Our Lady, who celebrated
his passing with a solemn mass in 1516.
He was considered a skilled painter whose
work was displayed in the church now the
cathedral of St John of sHertogenbosch.
While Bosch was a man of local
professional horizons, his imagination was
fed by the universal culture of late medieval
European Christianity. The exhibition

included several printed books of Boschs
times vernacular bibles, books of the genre
ars moriendi (The Art of Dying), Schedels
Weltchronik which show how much he
learned from these early best-sellers. Away
from great centres of artistic production
such as Antwerp, Bruges or Cologne he
was able to develop a distinctive style in
composition and iconography, which even
those he trained in his workshop found
hard to emulate successfully. An interesting
section, Bosch as Draughtsman, displayed
several drawings that revealed the stages
of creative imagining preceding the touch
of paint. Non-invasive techniques showed
the process of painting and change: in front
of the stunning Saint Wilgeforts Tripytch
(c.1495-1505) Bosch hesitated, repeatedly
re-painting the beard on the delicate face of
this female martyr.
The most exciting section of the exhibition was the display of the well-known
altarpieces on the morality of human life:
the Wayfarer constantly assailed by moral
choices (c.1500-10); human inconstancy
captured in the rickety vessel of the Ship of
Fools panel (c.1500-10); and the Haywain
(c.1510-16), where members of all classes
are shown in their naked greed, desperately pulling at handfuls of golden hay, a
biblical metaphor for material transience.
All this leads them to Hell and, in imagining it, Bosch is at his most creative. Bosch
presents Christian life like Netherlandish
adherents of the devotio moderna saw it as
a personal struggle of individual conscience
to salvation, within a world beset by unpredictable cosmic struggles.
From the distance of 500 years, Boschs
vision still has the power to disturb in a visceral, immediate manner. The Last Judgment
(c.1495-1505), now securely attributed to
him, shows peaceful paradise on the triptychs left wing and hell on its right. But it
is the central panel that most intrigues, for
chaos, pain and cruelty prevail in it. These
are captured most directly by the scene of
abject suffering when human bodies
straddling a sharp knife are whipped by a
servant from Hell. Images such as these
lead us to question the distance between
now and then: the art of 16th-century
religious sensibility speaks to our sense of
human vulnerability. This exhibition led
us to reflect on Europes aesthetic, cultural
and urban heritage in challenging and
worthwhile ways.
Miri Rubin
REVIEWS
MEDIEVAL SPAIN
The learned
Alfonso X,
El Sabio
Did the celebrated
13th-century king of Castile
really anticipate the
Renaissance, or were the
great works produced
during his reign created in
spite of him?
ROM THE vantage point

of today, the patronage of
Alfonso X El Sabio (the
Learned) of Castile (r. 1252-84)
seems extraordinary for its time.
Alfonso initiated what appears to
have been a coherent programme
of scholarship in the principal
vernacular language of his kingdoms, Castilian, with a variety
of works, dated or dateable to his
reign, that bear his name. These
include a magnificent illuminated compilation on astronomical
and horological instruments, a
translation of treatises on the
virtues of stones, legal compilations and chronicles and a
Castilian translation of the Book
of Mohammeds Ladder, which
may have inspired passages in
Dantes Divine Comedy. Alfonsos
role as patron of these works is
established not only by reference
to him in the prologues, but also
by several images that depict him
as the author.
Other aspects of Alfonsos
reign, by contrast, were characterised by considerable political
turbulence both at national and
international level. His unsuccessful attempts to be crowned
Emperor of the Romans were
financially draining. In Castile,
his early efforts to consolidate

royal authority upset the noble
class, a number of whom decamped to serve the Muslim king
of Granada in 1273. Alfonsos
later plan to divide his kingdom
between two grandsons and his
second son Sancho ultimately
sparked his de facto deposition
in 1282. Such an eventful reign
and such a wide-ranging literary
One work produced

in Alfonsos reign ...
may have inspired
passages in Dantes
Divine Comedy
legacy have ensured that the
figure of the Learned King continues to fascinate historians.
Doubleday follows recent
Spanish scholars, Francisco
Mrquez Villanueva and H. Salvador Martnez, in seeing Alfonsos
cultural patronage as a deliberate
policy of cultural renewal for a
kingdom that comprised vast
areas of lands that were recent
conquests from Muslim rulers.
Yet Alfonso provided scarcely
any institutional support for
learning and the evidence of the
manuscripts that bear his name

suggests they were intended to
reinforce his royal authority and
imperial ambitions before the
elite of Castile. Much has been
made of Alfonsos contribution to
the cultural heritage of Europe,
but knowledge of the works he
patronised beyond Castile seems
to have circulated in spite of the
king rather than because of him.
Latin, not Castilian, was the
language of international scholarship and, as Doubleday implies,
the contents of Alfonsine
scientific texts travelled abroad
more as a result of the efforts of
scholars employed by Alfonso
than at the direct behest of the
king himself. Sometimes the argument that Alfonso anticipated
the Renaissance comes across as
rather forced.
On the other hand, this
biography imaginatively seeks
to provide emotional depth to
an account of Alfonsos reign by
using themes present in Alfonsine literary works to elaborate
upon episodes in his life. For
example, Doubleday considers
the aphrodisiac properties of
stones described in the Lapidario,
a work initially translated when
Alfonso was still a prince, in the
context of what is known of his

sexual life as a young man. Later,
when citing a letter written
by Alfonso to his young son
Fernando, Doubleday unpacks
the nature of medieval parenthood, bringing his arguments
alive with reference to childrens
toys excavated at the Tower of
London and giving them depth
by citing contemporary ecclesiastical writers on the subject.
This can be illuminating and
readers will no doubt enjoy the
broad range of sources, Christian
and Muslim, which Doubleday
cites. But while he is at pains to
stress the heavy political agenda
that underlies later chronicles of
Alfonsos reign, he makes little
reference to the equally heavy
political agenda that underlay
the works the king himself
commissioned. As a result, he
sometimes reduces complex
texts to simple ones. The poems
and miniatures of the Cantigas
de Santa Maria have an intellectually significant relationship,
in which the images gloss the
verses with deeper levels of
theological meaning (in particular, they reinforce the doctrine
of the Eucharist). The literal
readings Doubleday provides,
while lively, do this relationship
a disservice.
The works cited in the
end-notes reflect contemporary scholarship but these are
not signalled in the main text,
leaving the reader to guess at
their presence. However, the
detailed family trees which open
the volume are an excellent inclusion. Lastly, Doubledays text
might have benefitted Alfonsos
editorial eye, to correct a number
of anachronistic references,
including that he sought to be
crowned Holy Roman Emperor,
a title which came about only
in the 16th century but which
is used throughout. Nor would
Alfonso have referred to the
Almohad minaret in Seville as
the Giralda, as its weather-vane,
or giraldilla, was added in 1568.
Kirstin Kennedy
The Wise King: A Christian Prince,
Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the
Renaissance by Simon R. Doubleday
Basic Books 336pp 20
REVIEWS
The Work
of the Dead
A Cultural History of Mortal

Remains by Thomas W. Laqueur
Princeton University Press
736pp 27.95
DO THE DEAD MATTER? This
is the central question in this
meticulously researched, allencompassing exploration of
our mortal remains. At its heart
is Diogenes suggestion that his
body should be thrown to the
beasts after his death. Since
his body would be of no use to

him, it is irrelevant to him what
happens afterwards. If it does
not matter what we do with our
dead once life has ceased, then
why do we take so much care
over corpses?
In this intimate and often
very personal reflection, Laqueur
asserts that we need our rituals
to serve the dead to smooth
over the rent that is caused in
the passing of those we love.
The dead make us face our own
death, which both horrifies us
and separates us. Most profoundly, he says: It matters
because we cannot bear to live
at the borders of our mortality.
Covering the western world
from the enlightenment to the
current day, but delving into
deep time, Laqueur takes an
anthological perspective to
show how the caring for our
corpses is what defines us as
civilised. An array of complicated
practices help us come to terms
with death and give it meaning:
funerary meals, death masks,
headstones and memorials. But

our methods of disposal of the
dead have changed over time,
reflecting our shifting attitudes
towards them. Burials would
take place in medieval churchyards (implying a closeness to
God); then in the 19th century
celebration of the dead in huge
We remember our
beloved dead as we
cannot bear their loss
... but we also cannot
bear to be forgotten
landscaped crematories (with
bodies moved to the outskirts
of town); then to the early
20th-century crematoria, with
their chimneys hidden among
the skyline of factories (hygienic,
total annihilation of the dead).
Burial near relics of bones
might save a dead person from
purgatory or help them in
the afterlife. The bones of the
special dead, such as saints,
were believed to be imbibed

with miraculous powers and
thus worshipped. Against such
idolatry, Calvinistic reformers
smashed shrines and scattered
bones: on one occasion they
were proved right when the
supposed bones of St Anthony
were found to be a stags penis.
In the 20th century the incessant
naming of the dead became a
notable obsession our need to
commemorate in great lists and
memorials the war dead, those
who died of AIDS, those who died
in the Holocaust.
This thought-provoking
tome, erudite and finely-written,
seemingly encapsulates all past
uttering on the dead in our fleetingly short lives. It is also about
our own mortality. As Vladimir
Nabokov said, our existence is
but a brief crack of light between
two eternities of darkness. We
remember our beloved dead as
we cannot bear their loss. But we
remember our dead as we also
cannot bear to be forgotten.
Julie Peakman
REVIEWS
FREDERICK THE GREAT
Prussias blooming
and its legacy
Tim Blanning produces a scholarly but highly
readable biography of the famously autocratic,
expansionist and complex monarch.
IM BLANNING offers a
telling comparison at the
beginning of this magisterial and insightful new biography.
In 16th-century Brandenburg,
the Reformation brought a
windfall of land to its ruler and,
in contrast to England, the new
landholding was retained. The
long-term consequence was that
the Electorate of Brandenburg
was transformed into the strong
monarchy of Prussia, as Frederick
the Greats two important predecessors (his great-grandfather
Frederick William, the Great
Elector, and his father, Frederick
William I) brought even more
land under their direct control.
The king personally owned a
quarter of his own kingdom and
produced half of the national
revenue. Prussia had widely
dispersed territories, yet it was a
highly centralised state.
Its nobility was a disciplined
military and administrative class
at the service of their king. But
Frederick William I demanded
an even greater and submissive
loyalty from Frederick, his eldest
son. When young Frederick
reacted against the harshness of
his fathers discipline by trying

to flee Prussia, the reaction was
brutal in the extreme. Frederick
William forced his son to witness
the beheading of his best friend
and possible lover. There followed
years of humiliation until Fredericks self-abasement earned him a
form of independence. However,
as Blanning shows, he never
escaped his fathers shadow.
Certainly the new King
Frederick was, on a personal
level, free to enjoy the art, music,
literature and philosophy that
his father detested and he did
so with a French-speaking cercle
intime that was, in Blannings
words, both homosocial and
homoerotic and, for Frederick
himself, probably homosexual
too. But, as a ruler, he was
yoked to an autocratic style of
government. As Blanning makes
clear, Frederick found a route to
repairing the damage inflicted by
his father: to do what the latter
desired most, but to do it better.
Whereas Fredericks father
hesitated to unleash the force
of the Prussian state for further
territorial expansion, Frederick had no such compunction.
Within months of becoming

king, he seized the resource-rich
province of Silesia from Austria
and Europe was plunged into
conflict. Throughout his 46-year
reign Prussia was either at war
or preparing for it. Frederick
achieved crushing victories but,
as Blanning describes, quoting
from the kings own surprisingly
candid writings, he was prone to
gross tactical misjudgements on
the battlefield and in diplomacy.
Blanning does not spare Frederick. He reveals a man who was
callous towards his sadly loyal
queen and capable of vindictiveness towards anyone, including
his brothers, who he felt had in
any way failed him.
In everything, Frederick sought control. Rising at
daybreak, he went straight to
his desk to direct government
business. It was the same with
his cultural interests: the grand
opera house at Berlin was built to
his specifications and its music
played to his exact direction.
Frederick was an autocrat,
not a despot. He demanded civil
obedience and loyalty, but did
not interfere with the individual
beliefs of his subjects. Frederick was dedicated to his own
enlightenment, but his control
meant that he could introduce
religious toleration as a matter
of policy. Yet, if his own rural
subjects and Protestants across
Europe wished to regard him as
their champion, he was happy
to take political advantage, even
though he regarded all religion as
nonsense.
As to Fredericks own greatness, Blanning demonstrates an
acute understanding of 18thcentury statecraft to show that
the Prussian king, with daring
and some fortune, created a
wholly new European power and
with lasting consequences. For,
though Napoleon tried, he failed
to destroy Fredericks legacy:
Prussia would bloom again.
This is a remarkable portrait
of an exceptionally complex
man, as readable as it is scholarly.
George Goodwin
CONTRIBUTORS
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis
Profesor of Greek Culture
emeritus at the University
of Cambridge and author
of Democracy: A Life (Oxford
University Press, 2016).
Daisy Dunn is author of
Catullus Bedspread: The Life of
Romes Most Erotic Poet and
The Poems of Catullus: A New
Translation (both William Collins,
2016).
George Goodwin is the author
of Benjamin Franklin in London: the
British Life of Americas Founding
Father (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2016).
Edith Hall is Professor in the
Classics Department and Centre
for Hellenic Studies at Kings
College London.
Peregrine Horden is Professor
of Medieval History at Royal
Holloway, University of London.
Philippa Joseph is Reviews
Editor of History Today and a
tutor at the Oxford University
Department for Continuing
Education.
Kirstin Kennedys doctorate
studies the manuscripts of
Alfonso X El Sabio of Castile.
She is now a curator at the
Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.
Julie Peakmans most recent
book is Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of
a Whore (Quercus, 2015). She
also edited Sexual Perversions,
1670-1890 (Palgrave Macmillan,
2009).
Miri Rubin is Professor of
Medieval and Early Modern
History at Queen Mary,
University of London.
Alexandra Walsham is
Professor of Modern History at
the University of Cambridge.
Frederick the Great: King of Prussia

by Tim Blanning
Allen Lane 672pp 30
HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters
Moving Map
I found Dale Kedwards article
The World From on High
(History Matters, May) deeply
moving. It was a vivid reminder
that, despite all the extraordinary technological and scientific
advances that have been made
since the Industrial Revolution,
mankinds sense of wonder at
its place in the Universe remains
largely unchanged since the days
of the Ancients. What is even
more remarkable is how people
700 years ago could create a
vision of our world that is still
recognisable to us today. History
humbles us.
Jayne Pelham Hughes
via email
Mandate for Murder

Rhys Griffiths in his Grand Tour
to Kolamskop in Namibia does
not mention the approximately
75,000 Africans murdered by the
Germans when they conquered
and ruled the Herero and Nama
peoples between 1890 and 1915.
More of them died when, at
Britains request, South Africa
defeated the German occupiers
during the First World War.
Apartheid South Africa then
ruled Namibia as a mandate until
the Herero and Nama achieved
independence in 1990 after
much prolonged fighting.
Marika Sherwood
Institute of Commonwealth Studies,
Periodical Patriarch
Asa Briggs (Social History
40 Years On, May 2016 and
From the Editor, March 2016),
whose death was announced in
March, played an active role on
the editorial advisory board of
History Today. It was something
that was evidently important
to him. He helped develop what
at its founding in 1951 was an
entirely new concept: a serious
periodical devoted to history for
the ordinary reader. He and the
Email p.lay@historytoday.com
Post to History Today, 2nd Floor,
9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH
founding editors, Alan Hodge

and Peter Quennell, did so in a
manner that allowed readers to
both confirm and reshape their
understanding of a world that
had been so deeply and traumatically challenged during the 1930s
and 1940s. In more recent times
he supported editors unreservedly and offered both insights,
connections and gravitas. In so
many ways, he was history today,
both with capital letters and
without.
In 2001, on the occasion of
History Todays golden jubilee,
Briggs, aged 80 and recovering
from flu, insisted on coming
up to London and stood at the
lectern to deliver a fascinating
20-minute reminiscence of
Hodge, Quennell, Brendan
Bracken and others associated
with History Today in its early
days, then partied until late. (We
invited readers who had been
subscribing continuously since
1951, and several came, which for
me made it a particularly special
event.) For Asas 85th birthday
he came up to town again, this
time for a warm and laughterfilled lunch that was attended
by all the staff, the owners and
many of the advisory board (only
the second time it had ever met,
if I recall). For me, both occasions
were special expressions of
History Today as an extended
family, with Asa as its patriarch.
Peter Furtado
Oxford
Place of Error
I am writing to draw attention
to an error in the photograph
caption on page 2 of the April
issue of History Today.
Sights should at best read
Sites. It would be in rather bad
taste, in the context of the Holocaust, if sights is deliberate, in
the sense of Lets go and see the
sights ...!
The German word Ort on
the pictured panel translates
as place and therefore a more

accurate translation of Orte des
Schreckens would be places of
horror/terror.
John Margettsa
via email
Incorrect Correct
Before I opened my copy of
Aprils History Today, I was
reading a review of Matthew
Plampins 2015 novel Will & Tom.
The reviewer noted:
As ever with present-day book

production, there are small
misprints and editorial infelicities
which irritate: beings for begins
(p. 59); gentlemen for gentleman
(p. 154); underway for under
way (p.157); the gravestones were
presumably tilting not lilting
(p. 212); and so on.
After I had finished reading the
review I opened History Today
and started reading Letter from
the Editor, in which you write
about the museum in Berlin, the
Typography of Terror, rather
than the Topography of Terror,
a computer auto-correct. This
put me in mind of the American, Jim, who returned home
after a business trip. First he
greeted his wife and then had a
look in his email inbox. There,
he found a mail from his friend
and neighbour, Bob, who wrote:
While you were away I had a few
problems at home and used your
wife. Im a bit embarassed that I
cant tell you to your face, but if
you let me know the cost Ill pay
you straight away. Jim picked
up his gun and went to confront
Bob. As Bob opened the door to
greet him, Jim pulled his gun and
shot Bob dead. Returning home,
he looked in his mailbox again
and found a second mail from
Bob saying: I expect you spotted
the auto-correct and realised it
should read wi-fi not wife!
Peter Robert Adamczyk-Haswell
via email
Connect with us on Twitter

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Ahistorical Anarchists
By implicitly reinforcing the
distorted popular image of
Anarchists as shady bomb-carrying loners, Bernard Porter writes
ahistorically (Too Tolerant
of Terror, History Matters,
January).
Yes, there was a comparatively brief period in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries when
some members of specific and
largely unrepresentative sections
of a much more thoughtful, venerable and otherwise peaceful
movement turned in desperation
to Propaganda of the deed .
The first of those four words is
the significant one.
Yet in truth Anarchism is a
mature, non-coercive movement
with a belief in the efficacy of
balance and freedom for human
and planetary progress, which
it is possible to substantiate.
The philosophy has very little
to do with the black beards and
tattered raincoats so eloquently
imagined by Joseph Conrad in his
classic 1907 novel The Secret Agent
and is one which does infinitely
less harm than the governments
and corporations without which
Anarchists want to live.
Mark Sealey
via email
Borrow Revived
I am writing as Chairman of the
George Borrow Society to express
our thanks to Colin Sowden for
his letter about Borrow published in the March 2016 issue of
History Today. He writes at the
end: Fortunately, interest in this
talented and idiosyncratic writer
is beginning to revive. In fact,
the small but thriving George
Borrow Society is celebrating
its 25th anniversary this year.
Readers interested to know more
about this remarkable figure are
invited to visit our website at
http://georgeborrow.org.
Dr Ann Ridler
Wallingford, Oxfordshire
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Research
Reassuringly intelligent.
Comfortingly rational.
Coming Next Month

Tragic, Wasteful, Futile?
In the 100 years since the

battle was fought, the popular
perception of Douglas Haig as
butcher of the Somme has
stuck. Haig is considered an
inept, callous technophobe who
sent his men to be slaughtered.
There is no such consensus
among historians. As Gary Sheffield writes, Haig faced the same
dilemma of every military commander in history: to achieve objectives,
he had to put his own troops in harms way. Under his command the
Somme was tragic and wasteful but not futile.
What the Civil Wars Did for Medicine
Some estimates claim that three per cent of the population died during
Britains Civil Wars, making them one of the most traumatic experiences
in the nations history. Yet it was during this conflict that Parliament
first assumed responsibility for the welfare of sick and injured soldiers,
yielding a legacy that included improved medical treatment, permanent
military hospitals and a national pension scheme. Eric Gruber von Arni
and Andrew Hopper consider the medical legacy of the Civil Wars.
The Bride of the Desert
Subscribe
www.historytoday.com/subscribe
Two millennia before the destruction visited on it by ISIS, the ancient

Syrian city of Palmyra held a key position on the trade networks that
connected the Chinese, Persian and Roman Empires. Unusually located
in a wide expanse of desert, it enjoyed a high level of independence.
Raoul McLaughlin describes how Palmyras unique position brought it
prosperity, fortune and, ultimately, ruin.
Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, From the Archive,
Pastimes and much more.
The July issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK on

June 23rd. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.
Aprils Prize Crossword
The winner for April is Diane Archer, Macclesfield.
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
EDITORS LETTER: 2 Bettmann/Getty Images. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 Mary Evans/Alamy;

5 Courtesy Museo di Antropologia Criminale Cesare Lombroso, University of Turin (Italy); 6
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images. MONTHS PAST: 8 Lebrecht/Alamy; 9 top Mary Evans/
Alamy; bottom Bridgeman Images. ARISTOTLE: 11 Scala, Florence, 2016; 12 top Bridgeman
Images; bottom MS Hunter 231 University of Glasgow/Bridgeman Images; 13 akg-images;
14 Alamy; 15 top Trustees of the British Museum; bottom Mary Evans Picture Library;
15 Edith Hall. BARBARIC BEAUTY: 17 Jonathan Hession/HISTORY; 18 top Tony Curtis and
Kirk Douglas in The Vikings, 1958. Produced by Jerry Bresler. Directed by Richard Fleischer.
Distributed by Bryna Productions/United Artists. Photograph Moviestore/Alamy; middle
Bryna Productions/United Artists/The Kobal Collection; bottom Jonathan Hession/HISTORY;
19 Neil Price. Illustration by rhallur rinsson, 2012; 20 Clockwise from left: Bridgeman
Images; Jonathan Hession/HISTORY; AISA/Bridgeman Images; 21 Map by Tim Aspden;
22 top akg-images; bottom Alamy; 23 top, middle and bottom akg-images; 24 akgimages. THE MAP: 26-27 National Library of Australia. OFF WITH HIS HOOD: 28 Trustees
of the British Museum; 29 Royal Armouries Museum; 30 top National Portrait Gallery,
London; bottom Ken Welsh/Bridgeman Images; 31 Peter Newark/Bridgeman Images; 32
Clockwise from left: Courtesy Museo Criminologico, Rome, Italy; akg-images; Science &
Society Picture Library; 33 akg-images; 34 Mittelalterliches Kriminalmuseum in Rothenburg
ob der Tauber, Germany; 35 Science & Society Picture Library. RUSSIAS WAR ON TERROR:
36-37 Courtesy Daniel Beer; 38 top Alamy; bottom Topfoto; 39 top Alamy; bottom
State Historical Museum, Moscow/Bridgeman Images; 40 Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/akgimages; 41 Map by Tim Aspden; 42 Bridgeman Images; 43 top and bottom Topfoto; 44
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/Bridgeman Images. MAKING HISTORY: 45 Bridgeman Images.
THE YOUNG JOHN DEE: 46-47 Wellcome Library, London; 48 top and bottom Royal College
of Physicians; 49 top Royal College of Physicians; below left and right: Photography Mike Fear,
Royal College of Physicians; 50-51 Photography Mike Fear, Royal College of Physicians; 52
top and bottom: Photography Mike Fear, Royal College of Physicians; 53 top left Trustees of
the British Museum; top right: Photography Mike Fear, Royal College of Physicians; bottom
National Portrait Gallery, London; 54 Photography Mike Fear, Royal College of Physicians.
REVIEWS: 59 Kate Butler; 62 Photo Rik Klein Gotink and image process Robert G Erdmann for
the Bosch Research and Conservation Project/Noordbrabants Museum; 63 The Renaissance of
Venus by Walter Crane, 1877 Tate, London 2015. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 British artillery in
the Battle of the Somme, July 1916 Peter Newark/Bridgeman Images. GRAND TOUR: 70 top
compass rose Antiquarian Images/Mary Evans Picture Library; bottom Lothar Rbelt/NB/
picturedesk.com. THE QUIZ: 71 The Yellow River by Ma Yuan (1160-1225). Beijing Palace Museum,
China. Wikimedia/Creative Commons. We have made every effort to contact all copyright
holders but if in any case we have been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.
PASTIMES
GR A ND TOUR
H I S T OR IC A L ODDI T I E S F ROM A ROU N D T H E WOR L D
Schneepalast
(Snow Palace)
Today, the worlds largest indoor ski
resort is on the edge of a desert in the
United Arab Emirates where, despite
temperatures reaching a high of around
41C, Ski Dubai boasts 6,000 tonnes of
real snow, fir trees and alpine-style chalets.
Indoor skiing has come a long way since
the opening of Schneepalast thought to
be the worlds first indoor ski slope in
Vienna, in 1927. Housed in the citys thenempty Nordwestbahnhof train station,
Schneepalast featured a slope constructed
on scaffolding covered with coconut
matting and artificial snow produced using
soda. An English chemist had found a way
to produce fake snow as soft and slippery
as the real thing, allowing visitors to
ascend the 20-metre slope and ski or
toboggan to the bottom. Skiers who
ended up face down in the snow reported
being able to taste the soda. With a little
imagination, you can believe you are
somewhere in the mountains, stated a
report covering the attractions opening
on November 26th, 1927.
The event was overshadowed by an
unsuccessful assassination attempt on Karl
Seitz, the mayor of Vienna. Following the
Anschluss in 1938, Nordwestbahnhof was
the venue for an exhibition of degenerate
art. The original building was bombed
during the war and eventually demolished
in 1952.
Rhys Griffiths
WHERE:
WHEN:
Vienna, Austria
Opened in 1927
Prize Crossword
Fleet; common-law wife of George
Johnston (6,8)
DOWN
1 Mary ___ (1759-97), author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792) (14)
2 Johann Heinrich ___ (1728-77),
Swiss mathematician and
astronomer (7)
3 Robert ___ (1833-99), US lawyer
known as The Great Agnostic (9)
4 Go down, ___, way-down in Egypt
land African-American spiritual (5)
5 Opening words of the Lords Prayer
(in English) (3,6)
6 Portuguese city, captured by the
Moors in 716 (5)
7 Claire ___ (b.1933), biographer of
Pepys, Hardy, Austen and 1 down (7)
8 Nine Lollards executed in Suffolk
between 1515 and 1558 (7,7)
14 On a ship, a projection attached to
reduce rolling (9)
15 ___ Cavendish, Duchess of
Devonshire (1757-1806) (9)
17 Epistle To the ___, book of the New
Testament (7)
19 Sands Of ___, 1949 war film
starring John Wayne (3,4)
21 Vivien ___ (1913-67), Academy
Award-winning British actress (5)
22 Anglicised term for a viceroy under
the Mughal rule of India (5)
The winner of this

months prize
crossword will receive
a selection of recent
history books
Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London
WC1V 7QH by June 30th or www.historytoday.com/crossword
The Quiz
14 Matthew Webb was the first

recorded person to do what in
1875?
1 What are considered to be the

Four Great Inventions of ancient
China?
15 Who, by his own estimation,

belonged to the fag-end of
Victorian liberalism?
3 Which famous student of Charles

Mortons dissenting academy was
jailed for bankruptcy in 1692?
4 The name of which Greek philosopher means the best purpose?
5 Who opined, the food of the true
revolutionary is the red pepper and
he who cannot endure red peppers
is also unable to fight?
6 The Charming Nancy brought the
first what to America in 1737?
7 What has been known

historically as Chinas sorrow?
11 What are Wilberforce,

Humphrey, Sybil, Larry and Freya?
8 The words glitter and cake

derive from which language?
12 Zamrock describes a style of

music that originated in which
country in the 1970s?
9 Who was the US Republican

partys first presidential candidate?
10 Who was the last emperor of
the Holy Roman Empire?
13 A nabob was an 18th-century

term for a man who had returned,
with ample fortune, from which
country?
ANSWERS
2 The Eastern Depot was a Ming

dynasty spy group. What was
unusual about it?
1. Paper, gunpowder, printing and the

compass
2. It was composed of eunuchs
3. Daniel Defoe
4. Aristotle
5. Mao Zedong
6. The Amish
7. The Yellow River
8. Old Norse
9. John C. Freemont, in 1856
10. Francis II
11. Cats specifically, the last five Chief
Mousers to the Cabinet Office
12. Zambia
13. India
14. Swim the English Channel without
artificial aids
15. E.M. Forster
ACROSS
1 Farnham-born journalist and agricultural reformer (1763-1835) (7,7)
9 French city ravaged by Edward, the
Black Prince, in 1370 (7)
10 Term for a proposed IsraeliPalestinian agreement outlined by
George W. Bush in 2002 (7)
11 Bring me my ___: O clouds,
unfold! Blake, Jerusalem (1815) (5)
12 Orkney anchorage in which the
German fleet was scuttled in 1918
(5,4)
13 Member of a tribe originating
north of the Black Sea, led by King
Ermanaric in the fourth century (9)
15 Ejup ___ (b.1946), President of
Bosnia and Herzegovina 1997-99
and 2000-01 (5)
16 Barrymore, Waters or Rosenberg,
say (5)
18 ___ is essentially the rage of the
literati in its last stage Jacob
Burckhardt, 1929 (9)
20 Revolution or ___?, 1987 work on
the English Civil Wars by G.E. Aylmer
(9)
23 Hans ___ (1919-2003),
Archbishop of Vienna accused of
sexual molestation (5)
24 Marjory ___ (1803-11), child
diarist of Kirkcaldy (7)
25 In the Catholic church, to recognise a persons entry into heaven (7)
26 London-born convict (d.1846),
transported to Australia with the First
Set by Richard Smyth
HENRY VIII
FromtheArchive
Lauren Johnson revisits an article from 2000, which paints a picture of the newly prosperous and
peaceful England that welcomed Henry VIII to the throne. It would not last.
Everlasting Glory For a While

THE DAWN OF Henry VIIIs reign was
greeted by court writers with almost
hysterical optimism. The 17-year-old
was hailed as the everlasting glory of
[his] time, equal to Adonis and Achilles and 1509 was to mark the [end]
of our slavery, the beginning of our
freedom. As Steven Gunn explored in
his article Portrait of Britain in 1500
(2000), Henrys accession coincided
with a period of revitalisation for his
country. Living standards were comparatively high, Gunn noted: England
was under-populated, pastoral farming was thriving,
serfdom withering, literacy
expanding and an English
builders wage in the 1500s
bought more food than in
any decade until the 1880s.
After 50 years of royal depositions, two murders and a
death in battle the peaceful succession of an (almost) adult male to his
father was remarkable. The last time it
had occurred was 1413.
For all this celebration, life at the
beginning of the 16th century was not
quite the idyll it appears. Gunn reported that enclosure bred strife in 1500,
which is to put it mildly. Court records
reveal contests over enclosed lands
spiralling into violence, triggering lawsuits that dragged on for decades.
Global horizons had expanded with
the discovery of the New World, but
the English remained fiercely protectionist. The devious and crafty means
of the foreigners were suspected
of undermining native industries.
Anti-immigrant violence, such as the
1493 siege of the German steelyard in
London, suggest that labour shortages
and a thriving economy did not put a
stop to anxiety.
Religious non-conformity was also
of concern. Repression of the heresy of
Lollardy in 1510-2 saw so many public
burnings that one contemporary
joked that the price of firewood had

rocketed. For Lollard-hunters, such as
the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield,
literacy among the low born was not a
symbol of progress but a warning sign
of heresy and damnable books were
dangerous items to be destroyed.
Unrest was triggered by food shortages as harvests failed in the 1520s and
disease killed far more than hunger.
The chronicler Edward Hall lamented
that in 1509 the plague was great and
reigned in diverse parts of the realm.
Knowing the turbulence

to come, perhaps the
1500s did represent a
golden age
This could have been the old diseases
of dysentery and smallpox, or perhaps
it was the new scourge, sweating
sickness, which struck down the
healthy and wealthy with horrifying
speed. The medical knowledge of
the 16th century was no match for
epidemics, which were symptoms of
moral malaise for which the highest
remedy was penance and confession.
Though the poet John Skelton
celebrated Henry as the symbol of
the rose both white and red, there
were still many survivors of the old
conflicts between York and Lancaster:
over-mighty subjects such as the Duke
of Buckingham, or Yorkists like the
imprisoned Marquess of Dorset and
impoverished Margaret Pole.
Nor was the literary flurry at
Henrys accession a sign of Tudor popularity. His fathers financial manipulation, local interference and network
of questmongers (spies) had bred
resentment. That the young monarch
was aware of this troubled inheritance
is clear in the two days of subterfuge
that began his reign, during which his

fathers death was kept secret while
a coup was launched against his chief
ministers, Empson and Dudley.
In this period of uncertainty,
communities banded together. The
ritual year gave an opportunity for
expressions of community pride and
self-identity, expressed through guildbased performances, civic processions
and congregations at parish churches.
Knowing the turbulence to come,
perhaps the 1500s did represent a
golden age. By the mid-16th century,
as Gunn points out, charitable
provision could not cope with the
needs of the destitute. By that time
welfare support from guild and parish
was undermined and the rhythm of
the ritual year shattered by Henrys
religious reforms. His reign was to see
England severed from the universal
church of Rome. The next 40 years
saw plague, rebellion, military loss
and debased coinage. Few today would
consider Henry the everlasting glory
of [his] time.
Lauren Johnson is the author of So Great a
Prince: England and the Accession of Henry VIII
(Head of Zeus, 2016).
VOLUME 50 ISSUE 8 AUG 2000

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