Features

A visitor leaflet about Stowe House and Gardens compiled by two Oxford students will be launched at the historic property on Bank Holiday Monday (25 August).

Alice Holohan and Eleanor Bland, who have recently completed undergraduate degrees at the University in English and History respectively, produced the leaflet while on internships in the Thames Valley Country House Partnership scheme (TVCHP), which is a collaboration between Oxford University and some of Britain’s great country houses.

The leaflet will be available for free to visitors to Stowe and tells the story of the House and Gardens in the 18th Century, while they were owned by the soldier and Whig politician Richard Temple, Lord Cobham, who developed the estate to reflect his political views. Alice and Eleanor used a variety of sources to research the history of Lord Cobham and Stowe and they have come up with an educational and interesting account of the property.

Although there are other guidebooks and leaflets about Stowe, this leaflet is the first to connect the House and Gardens. The House is owned by the Stowe House Preservation Trust and the Gardens are owned by the National Trust.

Alice and Eleanor say: 'The leaflet lets visitors see Stowe in a new light and explore the fascinating history of this glorious place.

'We're hoping this leaflet will appeal to both Stowe veterans and newcomers alike, and will help to uncover the hidden histories of political intrigue at Stowe. Although the house and gardens have evolved dramatically over the last few centuries, you may discover that the 18th Century political scene is not so far removed from the politics of today after all.'

Dr Oliver Cox, a historian and Knowledge Exchange Fellow in the Humanities Division, set up the TVCHP scheme in 2013. He explains: 'According to an October 2013 report from VisitBritain, almost one in three tourists to the UK visited an historic house or castle, which could, in part, reflect the popularity of British costume dramas seen worldwide. Even the Oxfordshire village of Bampton has found itself the centre of global fascination as the location for some of the village scenes in the hit television programme Downton Abbey. 

'The challenge is to make these properties, and the stories they contain, more accessible and relevant to a broader section of Oxford’s population. We are working with partner organisations including the National Trust, Historic Houses Association, English Heritage, Society of Antiquaries and Visit Oxfordshire, on a number of exciting, innovative and engaging projects.'

Although we encourage Arts Blog readers to visit Stowe in person, here are a few extracts from the leaflet:

Palladian Bridge

The Palladian Bridge actively demonstrates Cobham’s strong belief in free trade and empire. As the bridge crosses water, it shows the importance of expansion and exploration. This idea was strengthened by the (now lost) murals of Walter Raleigh painted inside the bridge.

Palladian Bridge (Sally Fields, Flickr)

Gothic Temple

By building the Gothic Temple, Cobham made a clear statement about the need to create a new Britain by looking back to the past, and he put himself at the centre of this vision. This style of architecture was associated with the Anglo-Saxons, who were remembered for bringing liberty and fair government to England. 

On the ceiling of the temple are heraldic shields which trace Cobham’s ancestry back to the Anglo-Saxons. This, therefore, was a bold gesture which directly aligned Cobham with those who first brought liberty to England, and strengthened the weight of his ideas.

The Gothic Temple, by Nick (puritani35 on Flickr)

Elysian Fields

The Elysian Fields was an important part of Cobham’s political nursery, as it explores his frustration with contemporary politics. The Temple of British Worthies contains noble figures from Britain’s past, and these great historical rulers highlighted the failings of contemporary leaders.

The Temple of Ancient Virtue was placed opposite the Temple of British Worthies on much higher ground, showing that British leaders should always look up to and be inspired by ancient Greece. Next to Ancient Virtue are the remains of the Temple of Modern Virtue. Built as a ruin, this signified the crumbling nature of the modern state.

The Temple of British Worthies in the Elysian Fields (Flickr: Stuart Dootson)

The latest crop of new words added to Oxford Dictionaries Online, from 'amazeballs' to 'zonkey', has been making headlines this month. Commentators have been amused, intrigued and even enraged by the addition of 'clickbait', 'side-eye', 'neckbeard', 'mansplain" and others.

Some of the new additions, like 'bedroom tax', have become a part of public discourse in the UK, while others reflect scientific discoveries: the 'olinguito' is a South American mammal first described in 2013.

But when it comes to more informal and unusual terms like 'air punch' and 'YOLO', how does the Oxford Dictionaries team track down new words, and how do they decide which ones to preserve?

Allison Wright, Editor at Oxford Dictionaries, explains: 'We never leave words out of dictionaries on the grounds that they aren't 'good English'. Similarly, if a word is used only in very informal contexts, or only by specific groups of people, or if it is offensive in some way, we make this clear in the dictionary entry.'

Oxford University Press operates two major language research programmes which serve as its hunting ground for new words: the Oxford English Corpus and the Oxford Reading Programme. The Corpus is made up of full-length documents, while the Reading Programme relies on an international network of volunteers, who submit shorter extracts. These are drawn from a variety of sources in English, from song lyrics to academic journals, and enable researchers to keep an eye on new words and meanings.

Once a new word has been identified, evidence is needed to prove that the word has been used in a variety of different sources, by more than one writer, before it can be considered for inclusion in one of the dictionaries. Evidence for new words must be recorded in writing, whether that means print books and newspapers, online sites and message-boards, or scripts for film and television.

In the past, a word needed to be in use for two or three years before it could be considered. The rapid pace of change in our digital world means that new terms can gain ground very rapidly, so this is no longer the case. But it does present another challenge to the lexicographers, since they now need to judge whether a new word is likely to stay with us or quickly fall out of usage. Once all these criteria have been considered, a word may be added to one of the dictionaries.

This recent crop of words was added to Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO), a resource which aims to provide a snapshot of the ways in which English is used by people around the world today. Words are removed when they become obsolete, and entries are arranged so that the most common definitions are listed first: the first definition of 'car' is 'a road vehicle, typically with four wheels, powered by an internal-combustion engine and able to carry a small number of people'.

In June this year, we heard that 'selfie', 'flexitarian' and 'citizen science' - among more than 1000 others - were added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Unlike the ODO, the OED is a historical dictionary, which records the origins and development of each word, tracking hundreds or even thousands of years of etymological history.

Definitions are ordered chronologically, so the first definitions of 'car' include references to horse-drawn carriages, sledges and ceremonial chariots. The criteria for inclusion are more stringent: a word must reach 'a level of general currency where it is unselfconsciously used with the expectation of being understood' -  if the writer always feels the need to gloss the word for the reader’s benefit, this indicates that word has more work to do. However, once a word has made it into the OED, even if it becomes obsolete, it will never be removed.

Only time will tell if 'YOLO', 'clickbait' and 'mansplain' develop the same staying power.

Romance isn't dead, but it might be nine centuries old, according to an Oxford University academic. Laura Ashe, Associate Professor of English at Worcester College and the Faculty of English has described the invention of romantic love in the literature of the Middle Ages.

'It's important to bear in mind that I don't think people have changed,' said Professor Ashe. 'People in every time and culture have fallen in love, but not every culture has written about love or valued it in the same way.

'In the 12th century, romantic love became something that was worth celebrating and exploring in songs and stories - and you only have to look at modern film and music to see that legacy is still with us.'

Before the Norman conquest of England, Anglo-Saxon literature had a very different focus, said Professor Ashe.

'The world of the Anglo-Saxon warrior, at least in poetry, was based on the bond of loyalty between fighting men. Love in this world means love for your fellow warriors, and the idea of sacrificing yourself for the group.

'In this setting, it's absurd that you might pursue personal happiness, because that could mean running away and abandoning your companions.'

In Classical literature, too, heroism leaves no time for a personal life. 'Of course the heroes of the Greek and Roman epics manage to do great deeds, but they still have to die heroically, or sacrifice themselves in other ways to a heroic destiny,' said Professor Ashe.

So what changed in the Middle Ages? 'There was a transformation in culture,’ said Professor Ashe. ‘A series of church reforms in the 12th century took Christianity from a rather austere view of God the Father to a new focus on Christ's humanity.

'The spiritual lives of ordinary people were recognised, and people were encouraged to have a more emotional and personal relationship with God as individuals. And romantic love - giving yourself to another person - provides a justification, in the medieval moral compass, for the pursuit of self-fulfilment as an individual.

'Even tragic love stories are based on the idea that the living individual is to be celebrated and that it might be better to stay alive after all.'

Professor Ashe explained that changing attitudes towards the roles of men and women may have played their part. 'These church reforms codified that marriage is a sacrament requiring free consent from both parties: the woman's choice was actively required,' she said.

'In addition, the rise of the aristocracy and a culture of conspicuous consumption created a courtly audience for romance literature, with many wealthy female patrons. Where once literature had been produced – and largely read – by monks, now the patrons and audience of literature were increasingly lay people, and women as well as men.'

In the years after the Norman conquest, most English writers worked in French or Latin. Professor Ashe's forthcoming book, Early Fiction in England (Penguin, 2015), will provide translated selections from the most important of these works.

'A lot of the 11th-12th century work has been neglected because it's not in English,' said Professor Ashe. 'Or else people make too much of the choice of language. I don't believe it's a political choice so much as a pragmatic one.

'It's only recently that we've begun to recognise these works as 'English' literature, and to acknowledge the impact that they had on the better-known later English writers, such as Geoffrey Chaucer.'

Love is still ubiquitous in the English literature of today. But why is it such a lasting preoccupation for us?

'The tragic love story sometimes seems like a contradiction in terms,' said Professor Ashe, 'Why is it enjoyable to read sad stories? There are many possible explanations, but I think one factor is that in a tragic story, sorrow is made into a meaningful pattern, even into something beautiful.

'If you allow that pain can be profound in literature, it creates a space for your own emotions to seem meaningful rather than chaotic. In the Middle Ages, the idea that suffering was in some way productive was very widespread.

'Our understanding of suffering has changed, but tragic stories still exist. Perhaps it's because there is some pain which we can't alleviate, and these stories make that more bearable.'

Professor Ashe presented a programme on this topic on BBC Radio 4 yesterday.

As people swoon over the 'supermoon' currently lighting up our skies you might be surprised to learn that scientists are still debating the origins of the Earth's closest companion.

This week a special edition of the journal Royal Society A is published featuring ideas about the Moon's origins discussed at a meeting held last year.

I asked Professor Alex Halliday of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, who co-edited the special edition and co-wrote the introduction, about the historical quest for the truth about the Moon and how the latest theories could be put to the test…

OxSciBlog: Why has understanding the Moon’s origins been, historically, such a challenge?
Alex Halliday: The Moon is unusual compared with other moons in our Solar System. It is the largest moon relative to the size of its host planet, it is gradually moving away from Earth, and its orbit is tied to Earth's rotation with most of the angular momentum in the Moon’s motion. It also has a lower uncompressed density than that of Earth implying a smaller iron core.

We have known these things for a while and they fit to varying degrees with a number of old theories: fission (that the Moon was spun out of Earth’s interior); co-accretion (that the Moon just formed alongside Earth); and capture (that Earth captured a wandering planetary embryo into orbit).

Since samples were returned in the Apollo missions in the Sixties and Seventies five other things have become apparent:

First, the isotopic compositions of elements like oxygen and titanium are highly diverse in meteorites and hence probably radially variable within the Solar System, providing a kind of fingerprint for where atoms have been derived from. They are almost identical between the Earth and its Moon – suggesting that the material that formed the Moon came from Earth.

Second, the Moon is much more depleted in volatile elements - not just water but also in potassium for example. This suggests that either the Moon did not come from Earth, or that the process of lunar formation was hot, and somehow depleted the material in volatile elements.

Third, the Moon formed late – isotopic techniques show that the Moon formed more than 30 million years after the Solar System, whereas other Moon-sized objects should form within the first million years or so of the formation of the swirling disk that built our Solar System.

Fourth, the oldest rocks brought back by Apollo come from the Highlands (the whitish bits when you look at the Moon at night) and appear to have formed as various concentrations of crystals that floated/sank in a lunar magma ocean – suggesting a hot fiery start.

Fifth, the trace elements (such as rare earth elements) in younger lunar basalts (the dark areas on the Moon) provide evidence that they were derived by melting a deep lunar interior that itself was made of crystals that accumulated in this magma ocean – in other words the fiery magma ocean was global and extended to deep within the Moon.

All of this led to a model of a Moon origin through a massive late collision (the 'Giant Impact') between two already formed planets – the proto Earth when it was perhaps 90% formed and another smaller planet sometimes called 'Theia' that made up the remaining 10% (so about the size of Mars). Theia struck the Earth with a highly energetic glancing blow generating the angular momentum and a debris disk of hot degassed material from Earth’s outer iron depleted parts that coalesced to form a molten ball.

This idea was finally established in 1984 in a meeting in Hawaii on the origin of the Moon. Subsequently, dynamic supercomputing simulations were able to successfully generate a Moon in this fashion. This fiery ball would have originally occupied perhaps about a third of the sky at night but has been migrating further away as a now cooled Moon ever since it formed.

OSB: What are the latest ideas about how the Moon formed?
AH: The Giant Impact theory is the least worst explanation for all of the above features, but there is a problem. Those scientists developing the computer models use a technique called smoothed particle hydrodynamics and this treats the material in the proto-Earth and Theia as made up of large numbers of equally sized large fragments (the so called 'particles') that interact with each other by gravity. The source of the fragments can be traced through the simulations. Nearly all of the fragments from Theia wind up embedded in the Earth. On this basis Earth has a composition that is a mix of (say) 90% proto-Earth and 10% Theia. Very little is lost from Earth.

However, when the scientists track the proportions of the two planets that wind up forming the Moon (which is only about 1% of Earth’s mass) they are very different. In nearly all successful simulations the Moon is mainly (>50%) made up of material from Theia. This is hard to reconcile with the isotopic evidence that the Moon formed from atoms like those found in the Earth rather than in other parts of the Solar System.

Four explanations for this have been considered and the pros and cons formed the main basis for the Royal Society’s Discussion Meeting on the Origin of the Moon in September of last year, the papers from which are now published:

1) Theia formed at the same heliocentric distance as the proto Earth so that the isotopic compositions look the same: The difficulty with this comes from explaining why the two planets stayed in a stable configuration for over thirty million years before colliding.

2) Meteorites are sampling the Solar System outboard of the Earth whereas Theia came from closer in to the Sun: It could be that Theia came from an inner region of the Solar System such as in the vicinity of Venus or Mercury where isotopic compositions look the same as those of Earth. We cannot test this without samples (rock or atmosphere) that we know came from Mercury or Venus.

3) The Giant Impact was so energetic that the atoms in the Earth were able to mix and exchange with those in the disk from which the Moon formed, eliminating original differences: This works for oxygen but is harder for some elements that are more refractory like titanium.

4) The simulations are simply wrong: A new class of simulation was published in 2012 proposing a Moon-forming impact between Theia and a proto-Earth that was already spinning very fast, perhaps with a day of just two hours. In other words the angular momentum is not generated by the Giant Impact – it was already present. Under these circumstances a Moon can be generated by a head on collision with a much smaller Theia – perhaps 2% of Earth's mass – leading to a debris disk dominated by material from Earth or at least in similar proportions. The problem with this and similar models is with how to slow down the Earth-Moon system afterwards. The authors have appealed to a tidal resonance with the Sun but some argue this is unlikely to work.

OSB: How might future missions test these ideas?
AH: A mission to Venus to sample its atmosphere or to Mercury to sample the rocks on its surface and measure the isotopic compositions would be invaluable. However, it probably requires returning the samples to Earth for measurement in the laboratory in order to achieve the precision required. It would allow us to test 2 above. Such a mission is a long way off. It is conceivable that we have samples of Mercury in our meteorite collections but do not yet know it. Some have argued for this but the case for any particular group is not entirely convincing yet.

OSB: What continues to fascinate you about the Moon's origins?
AH: The Giant Impact became, not just a model about the Moon, but an example of a mechanism by which all of the terrestrial planets formed. Other impacts did not form moons that persisted but the process is thought to be fundamental to planetary growth. As such it goes to the heart of the issue of how Earth-like planets originate. Of course Earth's spin also gives it day and night and this plus the tidal effects of the Moon affect habitable environments. Therefore, understanding how the Moon formed goes to the heart of the issues of origins and how habitable Earth like worlds are formed.

Yet, today, hundreds of years after Galileo showed the world the mountainous features of the Moon and started modern observational astronomy, hundreds of years after John Wilkins and Robert Hooke at Oxford discussed how to build a space craft to visit the Moon, and went on to found the Royal Society, and decades after Armstrong and colleagues brought back those precious samples of lunar rock, we still do not have a satisfactory explanation for how the Moon formed.

This is a scientific issue of deep significance that needs to be resolved.

Last week, Arts Blog wrote about a brilliant video of student a cappella group Out of the Blue singing a close-harmony rendition of Shakira’s ‘Hips Don’t Lie'.

We waited a few days before putting the story up so that we could record the number of times the video had been viewed after the increase had slowed down. We settled on 660,000.

We should have waited longer – as of Thursday 7 August, nearly four million people across the world have watched the video whose proceeds are going to Helen & Douglas House, a charity which cares for children, young adults and their families.

The madness began when Shakira sent her approval of the video on Facebook and Twitter. As the first person to receive 100 million likes on Facebook, this gave the boys an enormous audience.

Shakira

The video has received truly global coverage from media outlets in the USA, India, Brazil, Germany, France and many more countries. There have been hundreds of articles about the video, including pieces in French broadsheet Le Monde and India’s Hindustan Times.

Hindustan Times

Le Monde

It is lucky Oxford University undergraduates are on vacation because Out of the Blue, who are now performing at the Edinburgh Festival, have been in high demand all week. Marco Alessi and Ollie Nicholls were even interviewed on America’s National Public Radio.

Out of the Blue

The frenzy might not be over for the Oxford students. Cosmopolitan magazine suggested the group would be the ideal stars for another Pitch Perfect movie, a hit musical comedy about competing a cappella bands. Actress Elizabeth Banks, who directed Pitch Perfect II, seemed receptive to the idea.

Cosmopolitan

Elizabeth Banks

We have a feeling this story is not over. Watch this space...