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A night of Dido, drama, and dinner with a difference
Stuart Gillespie | 19 Sep 13 | 0 comments
The clocks will be turned back 430 years at Christ Church on Saturday.A little-known but fascinating Elizabethan play, rustled up to entertain the Polish ambassador Albert Łaski on his visit to Oxford in 1583, was the inspiration for this weekend's special event.
The evening of drama, served up alongside a banquet in Christ Church hall, is being organised by the University's Early Drama at Oxford (EDOX) project, run by a team of scholars and specialist film-makers.
Central to the sold-out event will be the performance of William Gager's Dido, translated from its original Latin by classicist and English scholar Elizabeth Sandis. The play will be staged in its original venue – once again in front of a representative of the Polish embassy, the Deputy Head of Mission, Dariusz Łaska.
Gager, who was a law student at Christ Church at the time, will be competing for top billing with Christopher Marlowe, whose Dido, Queen of Carthage will also be staged on the night.
And the 16th-century feel will be completed by an authentic Elizabethan banquet, featuring such contemporary delicacies as vegetable and herb soup, roast pork belly with cinnamon gravy, spiced orange and wine jelly, and frumenty, a wheat-based 'porridge' traditionally served with venison or porpoise.
Elizabeth, a DPhil candidate at Merton College specialising in the academic drama of Christ Church and St John’s College in 17th-century Oxford, said: 'At EDOX we're trying to give people a chance to get to know dramatic material, some of it in Latin, that they may be unfamiliar with or find intimidating. The Christ Church event is the second in our series, after Magdalen last year, and next year we are thinking about a similar event at Merton.
'William Gager got really involved in the drama scene at Christ Church in the 1580s, so when the Polish ambassador was visiting at short notice and they needed to entertain and impress him, Gager was the person they turned to.'
The result was Dido, an adaptation of Virgil's epic Aeneid in the original Latin.
Elizabeth said: 'I've injected a few of the Latin verses back into my translation to give people the chance to hear how it would have sounded in 1583 – iambic senarii and lyric metres, and the Virgilian vocabulary.'Gager was able to take entire sections of Virgil and incorporate them into his work. It was Elizabethan-style plagiarism but of a wholly acceptable kind because he was able to show off his skills as a Latinist and transpose Virgil's canonical lexicon into something new.
'At the time, everyone would have been familiar with the story of Dido and the fall of Troy, so it was a challenge for the playwright to dramatise that and do something clever with it.'
One example of Gager's playfulness involves a scene in which Aeneas's son, Ascanius, is brooding on the collapse of his home at Troy, having heard his father’s tale of the city’s fall the previous evening at dinner.
Elizabeth said: 'Dido asks him what the matter is, and he replies that he is thinking about his father's story from the night before and is beginning to imagine Troy in the features of a giant pudding on the banquet table – for example, the river Simoeis and the place where the wooden horse was brought in.
'It would have been a large marzipan dessert, and we’ll be recreating it on the night.'
The authentic Elizabethan menu to be enjoyed by the 240 guests was created by Christ Church head chef Chris Simms.
Gager's Dido will form part of a double bill on Saturday, sharing the stage with Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. Both will be performed by all-male casts, just as they would have been in the late 16th century. Attendees will be able to compare and contrast the two adaptations ahead of a conference, titled 'Performing Dido', to be held by EDOX the following day.
EDOX was formed around 18 months ago by Elizabeth, Dr James McBain and Professor Elisabeth Dutton, who is directing Dido. The project, partly funded by the British Academy, is undertaking a systematic study of plays written and/or performed in the Oxford colleges between 1480 and 1650.
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An exhibition conceived in Oxford
Stuart Gillespie | 12 Sep 13 | 0 comments
Francis Bacon Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone begins at the Ashmolean today (12 September). But the exhibition's origins lie more than 40 years ago in the Oxford of the early 1970s.Co-curator Richard Calvocoressi had recently begun studying English at Oxford when he attended a lecture held by the Critical Society that made a huge impression on him.
Mr Calvocoressi, director of the Henry Moore Foundation, said: 'The lecture which made the deepest impression on me was given to members of the society on 13 February 1970 by Francis Warner. A fellow and tutor in English literature at St Peter's College, Francis was energetic and inspiring.
'The subject of Francis's slide talk that evening was "Francis Bacon and Henry Moore". What I recall most clearly about it was Francis's conviction that both artists, having lived through two world wars (in Moore's case seeing active service in the first) and having experienced the Blitz (during which Bacon served in Air Raid Precautions), were engaged in a similar enterprise: restoring the human body, not to a state of perfection or even wholeness, but to a kind of dignified, animal resignation in the face of isolation and suffering. 'Conscious of mortality, each manages to convey an irrepressible sense of life. Their perspectives, of course, were different: Moore still clinging to a belief in humanism, Bacon closer to a bleaker, posthumanist world view.
'In expressing their complementary visions of humanity, Bacon worked from the outside in, Moore from the inside out: flesh and bone.
'Since Francis Warner's lecture, it has always seemed to me perfectly natural that anyone would choose to think and talk about the work of Moore and Bacon together – a view enthusiastically shared by my collaborator, Martin Harrison.'
Fifty years after their first joint exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone places the work of these two great artists in close relation once again.The exhibition features 20 paintings by Bacon and 20 sculptures and 20 drawings by Moore. The pieces have been borrowed from public and private collections, selected by Mr Harrison, editor of the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonée, and Mr Calvocoressi.
Supported by Pictet & Cie, Sotheby's, and the Friends of the Ashmolean, the exhibition explores themes such as the treatment of the human figure and the artists' responses to the violence of the 20th century.Professor Christopher Brown, director of the Ashmolean, said: 'This is one of the most ambitious and exciting exhibitions we have mounted since we reopened in 2009. It compares the two greatest British artists of the 20th century and promises to be both visually thrilling and immensely thought-provoking.'
Francis Bacon Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone runs from 12 September 2013 until 19 January 2014 at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Images
1: Second Version of Triptych 1944 (c) The Estate of Francis Bacon
2: Oxford University Critical Society poster
3: Reclining Figure (c) The Henry Moore Foundation
4: Study for Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c) The Estate of Francis Bacon
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Keeping language up to date can be hard twerk
Stuart Gillespie | 28 Aug 13 | 0 comments
If you've sat in the sun this summer and enjoyed some street food washed down with a pear cider, perhaps even taking a selfie of the occasion to post on a social networking site, then you've unwittingly been contributing to the latest quarterly update to Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO).
Apols for the laboured intro – the examples above are just a few of the most recent words to make it into common usage. They've been added to ODO, Oxford University Press's free online dictionary of current English.
Anyone who has seen the now-infamous clips from this year's MTV Video Music Awards will know how to twerk, while fans of political satire The Thick of It may be pleased to learn that omnishambles has made the cut.
Technology and fashion are well represented, from bitcoins and unlike to geek chic and double denims, while higher education gets a mention in the form of MOOCs (massive open online courses).
The recent rise in popularity of home baking sees new entries for blondies and cake pops – two things that are guaranteed to make anyone with a sweet tooth squee. But don’t eat too many, or you risk ending up with a food baby.
Angus Stevenson of ODO said: 'New words, senses, and phrases are added to ODO when we have gathered enough independent evidence from a range of sources to be confident that they have widespread currency in English. Publishing online allows us to make the results of our research available more quickly than ever before. Each month, we add about 150 million words to our corpus database of English usage examples collected from sources around the world. We use this database to track and verify new and emerging words and senses on a daily basis.
'On average, we add approximately 1,000 new entries to ODO every year, and this quarter's update highlights some fascinating developments in the English language. Portmanteau words, or blends of words, such as phablet and jorts, remain popular, as do abbreviations, seen in new entries such as srsly and apols.'
If you have a FOMO (fear of missing out) on the latest updates from Oxford Dictionaries, follow the team on Twitter @OxfordWords
Ten new words added to Oxford Dictionaries Online:
apols, pl. n. (informal): apologies.
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blondie, n.: a small square of dense, pale-coloured cake, typically of a butterscotch or vanilla flavour.
cake pop, n.: a small round piece of cake coated with icing or chocolate and fixed on the end of a stick so as to resemble a lollipop.
food baby, n.: a protruding stomach caused by eating a large quantity of food and supposedly resembling that of a woman in the early stages of pregnancy.
omnishambles, n. (informal): a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterised by a string of blunders and miscalculations.
phablet, n.: a smartphone having a screen which is intermediate in size between that of a typical smartphone and a tablet computer.
selfie, n. (informal): a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.
squee, exclam. & v. & n. (informal): (used to express) great delight or excitement.
twerk, v.: dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance.
vom, v. & n. (informal): (be) sick; vomit. -
Strong language, violence, and reckless optimism
Stuart Gillespie | 06 Aug 13 | 0 comments
The playwright Mark Ravenhill is now in his second year as Writer in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). His latest play, Candide, 'inspired by Voltaire', is currently in rehearsal and opens at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon on 29 August, where it will run until 26 October. The play is directed by Lyndsey Turner and the advance publicity warns that performances will include 'strong language, violence, and reckless optimism'. Nicholas Cronk, director of the University of Oxford's Voltaire Foundation, went to watch an early rehearsal and talk to the writer himself.
Nicholas Cronk: The RSC invited you to write a new play on any subject. What made you choose Candide?
Mark Ravenhill:
Candide is one of those books I read when I was young and that I come back to regularly. It's a book that makes me laugh and think – it would be very hard to like someone who didn't enjoy Candide! Also, everyone thinks they know Candide – you hear people described as ‘Panglossian’. So if Candide appears on a poster, it feels familiar.NC: Candide has often been rewritten as a narrative, for example George Bernard Shaw's Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, but less often successfully reworked for the stage – with the notable exception of Bernstein's Candide. What are the challenges of rethinking this work for the stage?
MR: There is a remarkable nimbleness of style, a balancing act of tone, in Voltaire, which is hard to bring off on stage. When you speak the words out loud, the effect is very different from when you read them. So one needs to do something new with a stage performance, not simply 'tell the story'. When I was asked by the RSC to write a new play, I was already thinking about ideas of happiness and optimism in modern society. The American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has written about this in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. She talks about the happiness industry, the rise of medication to make us happy and of self-help books, and the influence of all this on religion. In many ways religion has become another form of self-help. We all suffer from over-exposure to positive thinking.
NC: I like the idea of Voltaire as agony aunt. There is a novel by Dinah Lee Kung, A Visit from Voltaire, in which the ghost of Voltaire turns up to sort out the problems of a modern-day American family living in Geneva. This is Voltaire as the inventor of the self-help manual.
MR: In the business world, the idea of positive thinking is absolutely entrenched. The financial crisis happened because no one could actually say out loud how bad things were.
NC: Voltaire's novel makes fun of Pangloss and the Leibnizian idea that evil doesn't really exist. And you feel we are living in a culture that can't face up to the existence of evil? That makes Panglosses of us all?
MR: We are now so far advanced in our denial of evil that we want to rationalise it away. Twenty years ago, when you bumped into someone and asked how they were, they would say, 'mustn't grumble' or 'getting by'. Now they feel obliged to say 'just great!'. In both cases, the reply is just a social nicety, but the framework has changed; it's as if it's become a social duty to express happiness. Optimism and happiness are not the same thing, but they are becoming interchangeable, and it seemed to me that Voltaire's Candide gave me a way into something important happening in modern-day culture.
NC: Are there other ways in which the text has contemporary echoes for you?
MR: Re-reading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world rather than some other. Voltaire's novel offers us parallel universes – the possibility of entering into alternative worlds existing side by side – and this is something quite modern. Nested narratives and parallel universes are popular at the moment in many different art forms.
NC: Candide itself is a very self-referential text, full of spoofs of other fictions. When Candide is driven crazy by his love for Cunégonde, he rushes round carving her name on the bark of trees, like a character in a Shakespearean comedy.
MR: Yes, even within single sentences, there are sudden changes of register. And when the travellers go to Venice, they see a play by Voltaire! This is a novel which has narratives within narratives, such as when Cunégonde recounts her story.
NC: And these nested narratives and parallel universes shape your new play?
MR: I have not chosen to create a linear story, but a series of different narratives. In the end there are five plays that almost, but don’t quite, add up to one play. I start with the story of Candide, being performed as a play within a play, to bring the audience up to speed with the story. Each scene exists in a different universe and moves between different genres. The fourth scene invites us to join Candide in Eldorado and explores life as it could ideally be – this is proto-sci-fi, rather like what happens in Gulliver's Travels. And in the fifth and final scene, we move slightly into the future, as Pangloss finds success as the purveyor of optimism.
NC: How easy is it to stage contemporary characters engaging in philosophical debate?
MR: Theatre within theatre, when characters see themselves on stage, always raises philosophical questions of choice and free will. And then there is the question of language. Although the play is not written in strict verse form, there is an underlying beat of rhyming couplets, with echoes of Pope and the tradition of 18th-century philosophical verse.
NC: For members of the audience who would like a refresher course in Candide before the first night, you have produced a special new version of Voltaire’s novel.
MR: Yes, I have adapted the whole book into tweets of 140 characters, and these are being sent out daily, at the rate of eight tweets per day [from 26 June to 29 August @TweetCandide].
NC: It tells us something remarkable about Voltaire's style that his novel lends itself so well to this exercise. You have invented a completely new way of translating Candide – I hope one day we can publish it on the website of the Voltaire Foundation!
MR: Yes, translating Candide into tweets has really deepened my appreciation of his writing – it wouldn’t work so well with 19th-century authors. Every single sentence in Voltaire seems to advance the story and yet stand alone as a soundbite.
Images showing rehearsals for Candide copyright Manuel Harlan.
Image of Mark Ravenhill copyright Simon Annand.
Image of Candide poster copyright RSC.
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A new interdisciplinary take on an old Bodleian treasure
Stuart Gillespie | 22 Jul 13 | 0 comments
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It was once described as 'a very odd map of China'. Today, the 17th-century Selden Map – which London lawyer John Selden bequeathed to Oxford in 1657 – is one of the treasures of the Bodleian Library.
David Helliwell, curator of Chinese collections at the Bodleian, explained: 'We don't know exactly when the map was made, nor do we know exactly where it was picked up in the Far East, but we imagine that it was probably made in 1620. It was acquired by a merchant of the East India Company and brought to London, where it passed into the hands of Selden. But we don't know exactly how, and we don't know exactly when.'
The newly-launched Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), which seeks to promote interdisciplinary collaboration, invited a number of scholars from different disciplines to cast their eye over the map. The resulting short film throws up a wide range of intriguing, interrelated perspectives.
Dr Kate Bennett, an English lecturer with a research interest in antiquarianism, was one of the academics invited to have their say. She said: 'What we can certainly say is that Selden knew a very interesting potential source of study and scholarship when he saw one. His works were things that he had collected to help his own scholarship, which was formidable.'
Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China, hailed the value of the Selden Map in providing historical context for our understanding of the region today. He said: 'One of the things that has emerged from the research I have done is that things that we consider to be natural circumstances – the idea perhaps that China and Japan might be in conflict or hostile with each other – are actually often historically determined and often rather short-lasting. In other words, looking at the map gives you that longer-term view – a reminder that the kind of understanding we have of this immensely important region has to be informed by an understanding that trade routes, relationships, commerce and people engaging with each other has a long history. The map is a marvellous example of that.'
Ros Ballaster, professor of 18th-century studies, added: 'There was a lot of enthusiasm in the late 17th and early 18th centuries to find ancient cultures other than Greek and Roman classical culture, and that's a strong line in talking about China through the 17th and 18th centuries – as an alternative classical culture. I think that's what Selden is, in a way, trying to collect.'
As well as being an interesting object from a historical perspective, the Selden Map is also an important piece from an artistic point of view. Ros Holmes, a researcher in contemporary Chinese art, said: 'One of the most interesting things for me about the Selden Map is the sheer richness of the detailing itself. What first appears to be a 17th-century map about Chinese trade routes is actually a more complicated art historical object that attests to cross-cultural flows of knowledge and an exchange of ideas – not just about pictorial representation but about how China visualised itself in relation to the rest of the world.'
Mr Helliwell agreed about the visual impact of the map. 'It was probably a map that almost had a half aesthetic function and it was probably displayed in the house of a rich merchant,' he said. But for Mr Helliwell the most striking aspect of the map lies in its scope, and what it tells us about commerce in this period. The map extends to the whole of the Far East, with China only in the top half and the South China Sea at the centre. He said: 'This is a map drawn by ordinary people. It’s drawn by tradesmen – tradesmen who simply wanted to illustrate the routes on which they plied their trade.'
Image of the Selden Map courtesy of the Bodleian Library.
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Museum of Natural History 'Goes to Town'
Stuart Gillespie | 05 Jul 13 | 0 comments
What does a museum do when it has to temporarily close its doors? The answer, for Oxford University's Museum of Natural History, was that if the public couldn’t come to the museum, the museum would go to the public.
That is exactly what the Parks Road attraction has done with its new Goes to Town project. The museum is closed this year for essential repairs to its 150-year-old glass roof – but that hasn't stopped staff coming up with a creative and playful way to ensure the public can still enjoy its myriad exhibits during the closure.
On Monday (1 July), 12 of the museum's specimens were installed at various locations around the city, where they will remain in residence for the next six months. Exhibits include a Utahraptor dinosaur, a king penguin, a snowy owl, edible insects and a part-subfossil model of the museum’s iconic dodo. The exhibition's mobile website – at goestotown.com – offers more detailed information about each specimen, including audio recordings made by museum staff and University scientists, as well as details of where the specimens can be found.
The exhibition also takes the form of an interactive treasure trail – available to everyone, the trail can be completed using mobile technology or as a paper version for those without smartphone or tablet devices. Each exhibit carries two ratings, one for danger and one for rarity. Anyone who can identify which specimen has the highest rating in each category may enter a competition via the Goes to Town website and be in with the chance of winning a prize when the museum re-opens in February 2014.
Scott Billings, communications co-ordinator at Oxford University's Museum of Natural History, said: 'We thought about what we were going to do while the museum was closed and we came up with this idea that if the city can't come to the museum then the museum will have to go to the city.
'The nice thing about this is that people will stumble upon the specimens. You may be deliberately trying to follow the trail, but you may just be walking down the street and see one of these strange creatures in a shop window.
'There are 12 to find as part of the main trail and there’s also a Toumaï figurehead for the exhibition.'
Goes to Town is combining mobile technology, real museum specimens and local partners. It takes the museum's approach to inspirational learning into the heart of Oxford city centre.
The roof repairs are being documented on the museum’s blog.
The adjoining Pitt Rivers Museum remains open.
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Irish historian vindicated 300 years on – thanks to Oxford professor
Stuart Gillespie | 01 Jul 13 | 0 comments
More than three centuries ago, in 1686, Irish historian Roderick O'Flaherty felt slighted.He had recently published his magnum opus, a comprehensive tome called Ogygia which charted the succession of monarchs in ancient Ireland and was dedicated to the future King James II.
But just months after Ogygia was published, a fellow scholar brought out his own book, which made disparaging remarks about O'Flaherty’s work in the preface – also dedicated to James.
O'Flaherty attempted to set the record straight, but his efforts to publish a riposte – titled Ogygia Vindicated – came to nothing in his and the king's lifetime.
Now, more than 325 years later, Oxford University historian Professor Richard Sharpe has gone some way to righting the wrong by presenting a copy of his new book – which brings together O'Flaherty’s letters – to the Irish president Michael D Higgins.
Professor Sharpe, a Fellow of Wadham College, launched Roderick O'Flaherty’s Letters 1696–1709 at an event hosted by the Royal Irish Academy before presenting it to the president the following day.Professor Sharpe said: 'O'Flaherty was driven to seek the publication of Ogygia Vindicated because, soon after the appearance of Ogygia, he felt he was mocked by Sir George Mackenzie, Lord Advocate of Scotland, in the preface to his own book addressed to James II.'
O'Flaherty – Ruaidhrí Ó Flaithbheartaigh in Irish – was born in County Galway in 1629. A learned man, his Ogygia was published in Latin in London in 1685 with a dedication to James, Duke of York, who succeeded to the throne as James II of England and Ireland and James VII of Scotland while the book was in press.
Professor Sharpe said: 'Ogygia was about the succession of kings in ancient Ireland – seriously ancient, as in the pre-Christian Iron Age before the coming of St Patrick.
'It's a difficult book that deals with ancient Irish annals, genealogies and chronological poems, and O'Flaherty was the first author in print to quote from medieval Irish manuscripts by folio.
'O'Flaherty felt that his book had been slighted by Sir George Mackenzie, who disagreed with him on the ancient lineage of the Stuart monarchy. He wrote his reply, Ogygia Vindicated, but it was not published in his lifetime – indeed, not until 1775 – and by then the preface to James II had been ripped out and was lost forever.'In one of his letters to Edward Lhwyd, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and a renowned Welsh scholar, O'Flaherty said: "I take it an essential point to make my address to the Throne, before which I was misrepresented."
'I thought that presenting a copy of my book to an Irish head of state was some vindication for O'Flaherty more than 300 years on.'
Professor Sharpe's book prints and comments on O'Flaherty's letters to Lhwyd, the Irish philosopher and politician William Molyneux, and Molyneux's son Samuel, who visited O'Flaherty in the early 18th century and was horrified by what he perceived as the wretchedness of his living conditions in the west of Ireland.
The book was launched at the Royal Irish Academy by Ruairi Quinn, the Irish minister for education and skills. Professor Sharpe then presented a copy to President Higgins, a former minister of culture and previously a member of the Dáil Éireann for O'Flaherty’s territory in Galway West.
Roderick O'Flaherty's Letters 1696–1709 was sponsored by O'Flaherty Holdings and is published by the Royal Irish Academy.
Images
Top: Professor Richard Sharpe (second from right) after presenting a copy of his new book to Irish president Michael D Higgins (second from left). Credit: Royal Irish Academy
Middle: L-R: Luke Drury (president of the Royal Irish Academy), Professor Richard Sharpe and Ruairi Quinn (Irish minister for education and skills). Credit: John Ohle
Bottom: Professor Richard Sharpe speaking at the launch of his new book. Credit: John Ohle
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Online Egyptology resource reaches 100,000 items
Stuart Gillespie | 06 Jun 13 | 0 comments
An online bibliography designed to comprehensively document the study of ancient Egypt has just passed 100,000 items.
The Online Egyptological Bibliography (OEB) was started in Oxford in January 2009 as the successor to the Annual Egyptological Bibliography.
Based in the Griffith Institute within the Faculty of Oriental Studies, the project brings together almost two centuries' worth of academic publications in Egyptology from across the globe.
John Baines, Professor of Egyptology at Oxford University, explained: 'The bibliography began in Holland in 1947 as an international undertaking. We took over at the beginning of 2009 after it became clear the project could no longer be supported in Holland.'
The move was made possible by a grant from the John Fell Fund, with a further grant of more than $600,000 from the Mellon Foundation allowing the project to incorporate the Germany-based Aigyptos database.
'When we took it on, the bibliography consisted of about 43,000 items and had only gone online in full form about 18 months before,' said Professor Baines. 'We then added a second bibliography of material published from 1822. That is a symbolic and important date in Egyptology because it is the year hieroglyphs were deciphered.'
With around two thirds of the Aigyptos database integrated into the OEB, the total number of items now stands at over 100,000. The bibliography updates daily and already has more than 250 entries for 2013.
Professor Baines added: 'The OEB covers all aspects of Egyptology, from linguistics to scientific archaeology. I don't know any other subject that is covered so fully. All academic publications in Egyptology in any language are added, and it's not limited to the main periodicals.
'The big change we made when we took on the project was to take the bibliography entirely online, which means it is much more convenient and can be edited from anywhere in the world. It used to take three or four years for an item to be added – now it happens instantly.'
The OEB is a joint project with the universities of Munich and Heidelberg, under the umbrella of the International Association of Egyptologists. It complements the Griffith Institute's previously-existing Topological Bibliography, which gathers together items published about specific locations or objects.
Image, courtesy of the Griffith Institute, shows a scene from the Middle Kingdom tomb of Bakt III at Beni Hasan, Egypt, painted by Percy Brown.
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How consorts shaped Europe
Matt Pickles | 30 May 13 | 0 comments
The cultural role of the consort in the period 1500-1800 will be studied in a new project led by an Oxford University academic.
Professor Helen Watanabe O'Kelly of Oxford University's Faculty of Medieval and Modern languages will lead the project, called 'Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities, 1500-1800', in collaboration with experts in Germany, Poland and Sweden.
Professor Watanabe O’Kelly says: ‘European culture as we know it today is the product of a series of intensive interactions between different territories, going back many centuries. These interactions often came about because the monarch took a wife from a different European territory, who then brought her culture, her language and her religion with her to her new home. She often introduced new literary, theatrical and musical forms, espoused new philosophical and scientific ideas, popularised new fashions in clothes and food.'
She adds: 'Though it has become usual during the last 40 or 50 years for the heir to the throne to marry someone from his or her own country and, even more recently, to marry for love, this is not the case in the early modern period. In that period, the marriage of a king or prince was designed to cement a political alliance, combine two territories or seal a peace treaty, so the bride was by definition a princess from a foreign territory.
'These young women had only one inescapable duty, which was to produce an heir, but they were often patrons of artists and musicians, owned considerable book collections, and brought painters and architects with them from their home territories.'
The project will examine a number of case studies of how foreign consorts shaped the culture of their new country. Professor Watanabe O’Kelly explains: 'The Portuguese princess Catarina of Braganza brought Bombay and Tangiers to Britain in her dowry in 1662 and reportedly introduced tea-drinking, but she also patronised Italian artists and maintained her Catholic faith, founding a Franciscan monastery and a convent.
'The Polish princess Katarzyna Jagiellonka brought the Italian culture she had learned from her mother to Finland and later to Sweden in the 16th century. The beautiful palace of Drottningholm in Stockholm was built by Hedwig Eleonora of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp, Queen and Dowager Queen of Sweden between 1656 and 1715, and its famous theatre was built by another foreign consort, Luise Ulrike of Prussia, in 1766.'
She adds: 'When Maria Amalia of Saxony became the first Bourbon Queen of Naples in 1738, her links to Dresden bore fruit in the founding of the porcelain factory of Capodimonte and the development of music in Naples. She was also involved in the design of three enormous palaces with her husband Charles VII, and took a keen interest in the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum.'
The project received one of only 18 three-year grants awarded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) for a study into the role of the foreign consort as agent of cultural transfer.
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Medievalist wins BBC 'new generation thinkers' award
Matt Pickles | 29 May 13 | 0 comments
An Oxford University medievalist has been named a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker.
Dr Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, an early career fellow in Oxford’s Faculty of English Language and Literature, was chosen by BBC producers after a rigorous selection process to find bright, engaging early-career academics with the potential to turn their research ideas into compelling programmes.
The New Generation Thinkers scheme, which is run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, gives winners the chance to work with radio and TV producers to develop their ideas into programmes for broadcast.
Dr Barraclough, who specialises in Old Norse-Icelandic literature and is writing a book on the sagas (to be published with Oxford University Press), says: 'I am delighted to have been chosen as one of the Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers. I have spent much of my academic life in the company of Norse saga heroes with names such as such as Erik Bloodaxe, Thorfinn Skull-Splitter, Ragnar Hairy-Breeches and Eysteinn Fart (although I'm yet to find an Old Norse manuscript containing the saga of Noggin the Nog).
'I am looking forward to bringing this vibrant, fascinating world to as wide an audience as possible.' Dr Barraclough has carried out research in Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland, as well as parts of the British Isles settled by the Vikings such as Orkney. This summer, she will be returning to Greenland to explore what was once the Norse 'Western Settlement', sailing the deserted fjords and camping by ruined medieval farmsteads before travelling up the coast to Disko Bay, where the Norsemen had their northern hunting grounds.
Dr Barraclough is based at The Queen's College, where she teaches Old and Middle English, and is currently learning Danish to help her research. Not only does this help her to cope better when on research trips but, she says, 'it gives me an excuse to watch The Killing and Borgen 'for research purposes'.'
(Full story)
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The latest news and views in the arts, humanities and culture at Oxford University. Blog is updated by Stuart Gillespie, Press Officer at Oxford University.
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