Review : The Last Duel

Wait, didn't I already do this one ? Yes, I did, but that was the movie. This review is about the book, which lay a little too long on my shelf because I completely forgot that I had it.

Like the movie this will contain spoilers, so you might want to stop reading here.

The most obvious question is whether it's worth bothering with the book after the movie did such an excellent job. The answer is a definite yes : the book and movie differ considerably, with more details in the book about what is/isn't known and giving a rather different perspective. In particular, the chapter about the duel itself is absolutely thrilling and could not be improved upon. I hung on every word. With the rest of the book being completely solid, I feel I have no choice but to give this one a 9/10.

The only weakness I can find with this is that while the author (Eric Jager) says he tries to fill in the blanks where necessary, in practise he doesn't really do this at all. Instead he has a tendency to present all the possibilities in a rather peculiar way that takes some getting used to. To exaggerate slightly, he might say something like, "Marguerite travelled the five miles in a grand stately carriage, richly adorned with hangings and cushions to keep out the cold winter air. Or perhaps she had to make do with a small Shetland pony, her dainty feet trailing in the mud, which would have been far less comfortable."

It's a bit of an odd technique, first presenting a very clear, very specific description, only to do a bait-and-switch to another completely different but equally clear and specific alternative. But once you get used to this it becomes easy to factor this in and not get constantly jolted by the different options.

I'm going to keep this one very short. There are plenty of points of detail in difference from the movie : Carrouges and Le Gris are never described as being in combat together, Marguerite is never suggested to be a more able manager of the household than her husband. The movie's choice to present the whole story from three different viewpoints is not how the book is written (except, necessarily, during the trial), which only makes me admire the movie all the more. Still it's worth remembering that the movie does invent a lot of detail.

The most critical difference I think is in the description of Le Gris. In the movie, the rape scene occurs in all different retellings. In reality he denied this vehemently. At times it almost felt like he had a credible case. As a member of the clergy he was within his rights to deny the duel at all, but chose not to. He had an alibi for the time of the rape and seems to have gone to some lengths to establish this in detail. I found Jager's tone here to be pleasingly neutral, not taking sides with anyone but trying to present a reasonably critical appraisal of the situation.

The other major difference is something mentioned in the book only because it was not in fact used at the trial : the notion that a woman couldn't become pregnant if she was unwilling. In the movie this is added to the trial scene because it has some obvious resonances with contemporary American politics (!), and I think this is the correct choice. Jager notes that the reason for this belief was genealogical, that corrupting the bloodlines was so undesirable that nobody wanted to believe this could happen if they could possibly avoid it. This is a hard mentality for modern readers to buy into, but Jager does a decent job here.

His conclusions are, as in the movie, quite firmly that Le Gris did indeed rape Marguerite. She stuck to her story despite the extreme risk this entailed, Le Gris' alibi turned out to be unreliable, and, crucially, even his own lawyer privately expressed pretty strong doubts about the innocence of his client. Additionally, the presence of Le Gris' assistant Adam Louvel was a needless complicating detail that potentially opened the door to further alibis that would have been very much harder to refute. If the story of the rape was a fabrication, either because she was somehow mistaken or coerced into it by her rather boorish husband jealous of Le Gris's success, then this was a pointless and foolish risk. Moreover, while her husband did have reasons to be jealous of Le Gris, so too did the French court have political reasons to prefer its favourite to the troublemaking Carrouges.

Jager also weaves in some of the broader histories of duels. Outlawed in 1306, they had to be re-instituted because of their popularity. But this was in marked decline, ironically leading to even more brutality. As combat gave way to trials, unfortunately the widespread belief was that torture was the correct way to get at the truth - so torture actually increased as judicial combat declined. 

Finally, Jager also gives the history of the history, noting how the duel has been portrayed to suit different ends. Many authors have used it, unfairly in his view, to cite how foolish the duel was - not unfair because duelling was a sensible idea (it obviously wasn't !) but because of claims that Marguerite was in the wrong. Stories have emerged that she later retracted her claim, but he finds this is completely false, and largely based on a very few dubious second-hand assertions. The tale grew in the telling, such that the "retraction" became almost common knowledge, but by going back to the original first-hand evidence, it seems that all of these later findings are built on a house of cards.

As I say, an excellent little book, which definitely makes me want to re-watch the movie. Fascinating and gripping stuff. 

Review : The Ruin Of All Witches

Having thoroughly enjoyed Malcolm Gaskill's Witchfinders, I had really no choice but to try his latest book, The Ruin Of All Witches. And this is definitely a worthy sequel, if anything offering a stronger narrative, better prose, and more insight.

Whereas Witchfinders follows the history of notorious witchfinders Hopkins and Stearne and in so doing covers a plethora of "witches" they claimed to have found, Ruin takes the opposite approach. Here he follows the story of a single community, concentrating on three principle characters : the couple Hugh and Mary Parsons, and the rather hapless town leader William Pynchon. Hugh and Mary were accused of being witches both by the wider populace and by each other. Pynchon was a generally respected figure but, commensurate with the witchcraft allegations, accused of heresy for daring to say that God was probably quite a nice chap and not a fearful figure of vengeful wrath.

As previously Gaskill does a first-rate job of setting everything in its proper context. This is done on both the larger scales of the prevailing but shifting world view of puritanical Calvinism, the enormous instabilities and uncertainties of daily life, economic imbalance and stupendous social pressures, but also on the smaller scales : the particular pressures brought to bear on individuals, their personal aims and psychology - especially in treating them as complex individuals who don't always conform to the accepted social norms of the day*. He also shows how the mentality of the times was gradually shifting, and the prose is generally better and more dramatic than in Witchfinders without sacrificing clarity. He does still have a tendency to go into unnecessary detail from time to time, but this is rather reduced, and it's significantly less repetitive than Witchfinders. While I don't agree with a quote on the back that it's literally the best history book ever, I'm still tempted to give this a 9/10.

* Including, oddly enough, one young lad caught... manhandling himself outside church.

One significant novelty in this book is that Gaskill puts everything on a firmly environmental footing. That is, the realms supposedly inhabited by witches are ones of mist and murk, shadows in the cold dark, dreamlike states where the senses aren't always reliable - especially in a world of constant exhaustion from over-work, a strong prevailing belief in the supernatural, and more deep-rooted psychological problems caused by the monstrous teachings of Calvinism.

Strongly implicit throughout all this is the deeply interesting question : how do we really judge the truth at all ? It's not easy, for instance, to prove from first principles that the Earth goes around the Sun. Without good measuring devices and observational equipment this is astonishingly difficult. By embedding the reader as deeply as one can in the world of 17th-century Britain and America, Gaskill forces us to realise that this problem goes further, that how we decide what counts as "rational" is itself an extraordinarily difficult issue. Indeed, Gaskill does this with such refined skill that I often had to check myself and remember I was reading a history book about witchcraft, not a story about genuinely magical witches. Gaskill forces the reader to think critically for themselves about the allegations made, which is no bad thing at all.

I will not try a summary of the narrative. It's a slow burn at first but does pick up the pace, becoming ever more full of twists and turns right until the very end (it has serious mini-series potential, either as a drama-documentary or, perhaps better, as a straightforward historical drama). But there are a few general points I want to extract.

1) The role of religion

Let me start with the obvious. The idea that the belief in any sort of deity, or other supernatural aspect to the world, leads inevitably to witch hunts, crusades and all other sorts of nasties is just complete and utter bollocks. It's one of the stupidest ideas that somehow grips the minds of otherwise intelligent people, but it has no more credibility than a belief in the Flat Earth or goblins. But this is very far from saying that religion played no role in all this at all.

In particular, Protestantism. And especially above all Calvinism, which so far as I can tell is absolutely morally vacuous. This idea of absolute determinism in which God has preordained every outcome, such that at most all you can do is learn who's going to heaven and who to hell, is bad enough on its own*. As soon as you think that you don't really have a choice, you lose any semblance of responsibility for your actions. But worse was that this was coupled with a belief that God's standards were simply unreachably high, with the consequences utterly extreme.

* Gaskill mentions the cult-like Antinomians, who believed this so fervently that they felt themselves exempt from the Ten Commandments.

As one New England minister preached that year : "You husbands, wives, masters, servants : remember, if you are not good in your places, you are not good at all."

Failure... meant not not just exile from Christ but a kind of reunion with Satan. Passing this test, on the other hand, came more as relief than triumph, after years of feeling wretchedly lost. It also reminded others, as yet unredeemed, that they were eternally lost until they proved otherwise. This strained, opposing way of seeing oneself and the world, poised between flesh and spirit, self-loathing and elation, was part of daily life... caught between guilt and righteousness.

Both towns were locked in an existential battle between Christ and Antichrist. Hunger and disease were attributed to sin, Indians and demons were elided as enemies, and survival hinged on the merciful dispensations of grace. And at their beating heart was the message, which the Saints drummed in repeatedly : "the devil is amongst thee now."

... exacerbated by the Puritan equation of satisfaction with sinful pride.

This was made all the worse because the perpetual, inescapable judgement of the community. In Providence Lost, Paul Lay describes Protestantism as a "surveillance society of the soul" which inevitably fostered paranoia, and Gaskill makes this abundantly clear :

Ever the wayward servant and disappointing wife, even in this fantasy world [of her dreams] of escape from the mundane, she was being punished by her cruel husband and judgemental female neighbours.

So you have a world of constant judgement and unreachable standards, where you failed the tests if you were merely satisfied with your success, and even trying to get away from this nightmare fed suspicion :

But his sleeping out alone, away from his family, struck people as unusual, sinister even. To remove oneself from the community was voluntary exile from the binding covenant that kept it together. James I* himself had alerted his subjects to the "witch's natural melancholic humour", signs of which included, "desire of solitude."

* Elsewhere Gaskill notes, as I've seen other historians also explain, that James has been somewhat misunderstood as a witchfinder. His Daemonologie is perhaps better seen as a guide to make the procedure more rigorous rather than an attempt to encourage more witch-hunts, having the opposite outcome to its intent.

It's small wonder that eventually this created self-feeding spirals of paranoia which went completely out of control, manifesting themselves as witch hunts. At least stoicism, while it seeks a degree of emotional control which is frankly self-destructive, acknowledges the difficulties inherent in this, and doesn't come with a surveillance society or eternal damnation as the result of the most minor failure. 

The austerity of Protestant religious worship also created a tension with the desire for more wealth and success. If you didn't accrue wealth, you were a moral failure as well as a financial one. While there might be limits to how much wealth you should seek, these limits seem to have been pretty high, and wealth inequality certainly seems to have played a role as well. Quite how anyone squared the circle of a desire for austere religious worship with a moral drive to get richer, I don't know, but I'd bet that this too played a part in feeding the underlying conflicts.

2) The insanity of work

Which leads me on the second theme, the sheer mental and physical exhaustion of the lifestyle. Here I have to believe that Gaskill must be exaggerating, because if it was bad as he portrays, then I can't understand how everyone didn't simply fall over dead. The drive towards a strong work ethic is nothing bad in itself, if it means you want to apply yourself fully to do the best task you can. But this devotion to work as life, that this should be essentially all you ever do, all the time... this is mad. No. When you do something, you should do it well. This doesn't mean that your life must be nothing but toil.

There was no clear division of labour. Men might be artisans and farmers, like Hugh Parsons, and still do jobs for Pynchon. They toiled in enervating heat and bone-chilling cold, felling timber, excavating stumps, sawing planks, splitting shingles, breaking rocks, digging drains, diverting streams, shoring banks, building hedges and laying causeways. They mowed meadows, stacked hay and boxed pine trees for pitch and resin. They tended cattle and sheep, netted pigeons and caught fish on deerskin lines, as the Indians had taught them... 

At the end of the six-day week, labourers rested aching muscles and rubbed grease into cracked hands. The Sabbath, kept holy by law, began at sunset on Saturday and ended the following night - though Pynchon, preferring the 'natural Sabbath', hated people using Sunday evenings for games or 'the servile works of their particular callings'.

Hugh Parsons in particular seemed to be a man obsessed with work even by the standards of the time. Small wonder that with such people forming the bedrock of the community, the town grandees tended to exploit this, with a system of taxation and debts that only encouraged ever-greater workloads. The mentality of the time seems to have been one of the worst combinations of meritocracy and religion : that if you were a good person you'd succeed no matter the odds, and if you failed then this was because God had declared you a damned sinner. Free will, errors and accidents didn't feature in this way of thinking. This was even true of Pynchon, convinced as he was of God's benevolence.

Where I think Gaskill surely must be overstating the case is just how fucking awful life must have been back then. Oh, I don't doubt it was dreadful (literally, full of dread). I accept the sheer amount of hard physical labour must have been ghastly. I accept that natural disasters proved devastating with a frequency unknown to the modern West. I just think that it can't possibly have been as bad as Gaskill implies; he states the negatives commendably well, but any positive aspects at all - and there must have been some - are barely mentioned. To me the hardship seems so great that everyone would simply die, whereas in fact the town (eventually) flourished. Some more quantitative estimates as to just how bad the natural disasters (in particular) were would have been would helpful : okay, crops failed, but what exactly does that mean ? That nobody ate anything for the whole season ?

This minor niggle aside, the environment in which this unending labour occurred also deserves some mention :

She was born in about 1610 in the Welsh Marches, the wild borderlands... a patchwork of traditions bound by folklore and magic and anciently sunk into the landscape. Caves and mountains, ruins and springs, were sites of legends that told of miracles and murders, ghosts and fairies, kings sleeping under hills. Visions of black men and hideous dogs scared travellers, jolting them into mending their ways.

Yet residential Spingfield's southern boundary remained... a remote place, damp and misty by day, by night unnervingly dark and quiet. The land, stretching into infinite distance, still belonged to nature. This was where Hugh and Mary Parsons set up home, on the extreme edge of a town that was itself situated at the edge of New England.

One blue-black night, something crept out of the crawling mist. Hovering, dancing lights, like white flames tinged with colour, rose and fell, disappeared and reappeared... back in Wales these ghostly apparitions presaged a death.

Native religion was a backdrop to colonial witch-beliefs in a country as yet unconquered for Christ. Indian culture was spiritualised, sensitive to nature, with unseen forces sensed in everything from bees humming and birdsong, to tempests and dreams. But inevitably it was seen through an anxious Christian lens, which polarised goodness and evil. Therefore, like most colonists, Mary supposed that the natives were at least unconsciously, in league with the devil.

Yet Gaskill finds that this is only part of the story, with the main factors leading to witch-hunts being competition, overwork, and exploitation. The belief in the supernatural was not the instigating force but rather itself provided only context, with the real drive that set neighbour against neighbour being economic forces. The supernatural beliefs only shaped the way these moments of antagonism manifested themselves, rather than initiating them.

3) The mixture of mindsets

This last claim seems particularly appropriate in light of William Pynchon. His theology was far more merciful than the typical fire and bloodshed of mainstream puritanical Calvinism of the time. Actually this is something Gaskill handles well in general, making it clear that the society of Springfield and New England was not the only one present in the New World. Even among the colonies, others had founded far more liberal, tolerant approaches. There was as yet no unity at all in what would eventually become the United States (if there even is today).

Pynchon's main tack away from Calvinist doctrine was that Jesus did not suffer on the cross as a result of God's wrath. Mankind was not redeemed by Christ's suffering itself but his dutiful obedience to his father.

This was a different interpretation of the Trinity... and a dangerous one. It fundamentally changed the identity of identity of God and Christ... For this was a sermon about earthly conduct as well as salvation, about love and obedience, just as Christ's Atonement consisted in his loving obedience to God. Whatever wrath existed between men in Springfield, Pynchon taught, it came from the machinations of Satan.

In this scheme... the devil was no mere trickster, but rather a monster defined by perpetual fury and restless intrusion into daily life.

One of the weaknesses of Providence Lost was that Lay describes in detail what happened to certain heretics, but doesn't get into the mindset behind why it happened. It can be extremely difficult to comprehend why apparently minor points of theological detail should lead to brutal chastisement, and here Gaskill does a better job. Why did everyone else prefer to believe in this vengeful God ? Pynchon's implication was that Satan was far more powerful than his peers believed, potentially undermining the whole basis of the existence of God's chosen people - indeed seeming to refute the idea of God as all-powerful. In a world where survival hinged on unity, to challenge one of the community core beliefs was indeed dangerous. Incidentally, this much greater role for Satan is quite different to Witchfinders, where the devil was at most a minor side-character.

Other conflicting mindsets were also at work. The extremist Antinomians were not at all popular :

They were not therefore surprised when the Antinomian figurehead, Anne Hutchinson, miscarried : 'for as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters.'

This is a very clear case in the belief of the supernatural, almost to the degree of idealism in which mind and matter are inextricably linked. Yet there seems to be a paradox right at the heart of this world view, of God being all-powerful in creating a predetermined cosmos but in deciding to populate it with such a myriad of evil things.

Conclusions

Gaskill pains a view of 17th-century New England (not America more widely, noting again that other states did not much share this perspective) as thoroughly toxic and conflicted from head to toe. The environment was not only physically harsh and dangerous, but it also readily fostered supernatural beliefs. In a world without any real measuring equipment to speak of, dreams and reality all too easily blurred. A shadow became a wolf; a frog became an imp. Couple this with perpetual exhaustion, constant judgement, belief that the fates were unalterable and that financial success equated with moral character, and it's only a miracle that witch-hunting didn't outright explode as it did elsewhere.

Further mental conflicts were at work. Not only across America more generally, but also in New England beliefs were shifting over time. As in old England, court trials did in fact require evidence, and (without giving spoilers), courts elsewhere took a very dim few of these rather foolish-sounding provincials. The shift was hardly linear, however, with accusations remaining frequent even as convictions declined : the experts shifting more rapidly to a more modern, rational world view than the general populace, who still continued to enact, on occasion, mob justice. This even applied to individuals themselves, with Hobbes writing that, 'though he could not rationally believe in witches, yet he could not be fully satisfied to believe there were none'.

But belief in witches did eventually subside, partly due to a more materialist world view and changing theologies, and partly politics. Satan became a mere instrument of God's will rather than a rival; visions of hellfire and damnation became only figurative images, firmly rhetorical rather than literal. Whereas in Springfield Pynchon's attempts to preach for amity only made things worse, leaving no recourse to individuals who felt genuinely threatened but to seek the dangers of magic, elsewhere toleration for diverse viewpoints rendered witchcraft utterly impotent. Where toleration of views was encouraged, accusations of witchcraft were all but absent.

The Connecticut valley was more politically stable, its towns economically varied and better governed. Controversies were brief : clashing neighbours calmed by litigation. Keeping the peace was an end in itself rather than a means to appease God.... By allowing for diversity, the law nurtured the confidence to prosper, while governors felt less threatened by dissent.

In the end, the city of devils - 'pandemonium', the capital of hell - was not demolished : it could only be starved of attention by people with fewer uses for magic than their parents and grandparents. After 1800 the demonic foes of Christian civilisation were not chased away : witchcraft faded into irrelevance, and its adherents sank bank into the ether. 

The really interesting question here, of course, being if there are more general conditions under which toleration leads to confidence versus a collapsing polarisation. I leave this for another time. 

Review : The Nature of Middle Earth / Beren and Lúthien

Continuing my book-reading holiday splurge. After completing The Habsburgs, which had languished on my side-table for some weeks because its density doesn't make for good bedtime reading, I moved on to a miniature Tolkien binge.

First up was The Nature of Middle Earth. Having recently completed a five-part blog post addressing the philosophy of Middle Earth through the lens of cosmology, this has been on my wish-list for some time. Then it appeared in my local bookshop's Tolkien section, and though for some reason I hesitated to buy it, wondering if this might not be too haphazard a selection of short notes scribbled by Tolkien in the margins, I decided to buy it anyway.

This was a sensible decision as it's a wonderful book. There's little enough fiction here, but it's exactly what I was after : an analysis of both the morality and natural philosophy implicit in Middle Earth, presented by Tolkien's own papers in which he attempted to seek consistency between the worlds of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. I made so many notes on this that I'm going to have to release an appendix to the blog series, so that will cover the deeper stuff eventually. Suffice to say that I think my basic conclusions were spot on. Here, just a short review rather than a summary proper.

NOME is not for those looking for more stories, but anyone interested in Tolkien's world-building should definitely give it a go. For the dedicated nerds, it includes many pages of detailed calculations about Elven life-cycles and a robust solution explaining why the world isn't overrun with Elves. It even includes some description of atomic theory as applied to Middle Earth, and these kinds of numeric, scientific details aren't something I was expecting at all. For the philosophers, the second section of the book is pure gold, with whole swathes being exactly the kind of thing you'd find in Locke or Berkeley. For the theologians the appendix relates some of these issues to Catholic doctrine, while those who like Tolkien's occasional lapses into silliness will find discussions of why it's evil to chop the legs off squirrels and a fascinating, bizarre section of the friendliness of Númenórean bears and their adorable dances. 

Personally I think this book is outstanding. If you're trying to do a full-on scholarly analysis of the self-consistency (or lack thereof) of Tolkien's world, you'll find enough numerical details here to do the job. If you're just interested in Tolkien's changing ideas over time you'll have more than enough to go on. The only downside is that perhaps some of this gets a bit repetitive, especially as Tolkien tended to doggedly persist with ideas with minor modifications only to then make sweeping revisions that undid everything, making all the previous work null and void - it's probably worth keeping that in mind throughout. And the third section of the book is perhaps rather dry for the most part, though not entirely so. 

But overall, I have to give it a 9/10. The material is presented and edited with commendable common-sense. It reveals an interplay between Tolkien's desire for a specific story shaping the nature of the world he was creating, which created a feedback loop : any inconsistency needed changes to the story, which changed the nature of the world, and so on. After reading this, it becomes very much more understandable why he never finished it : the task of creating a ruthlessly self-consistent world, recognisable to our own but operating on fundamentally different principles, whilst making it believable to the common reader and mythologising our own history, was a truly monumental one. All the more remarkable that many of the texts presented were written on the backs of examination papers and calendars.

Next up, Beren and Lúthien. This is my favourite story from The Silmarillion, so I was curious to see how the tale had developed. And I was not disappointed. The earliest version presented dates from 1917, when the 25 year-old Tolkien had just got married, fought in the Battle of the Somme, and was convalescing in the less terrifying region of Yorkshire.

This first version was the most interesting to me. It's written far more in the style of a conventional fairy tale than the final version published in The Silmarillion (sadly, and I think this is a major oversight, that version is not included here as it's by far the best and most epic of all the iterations). Lúthien, at this point known by her later-nickname Tinúviel, begins as a Rapunzel-like figure. While Melkor (Melko in this case) is present as the supreme evil, instead of facing Sauron, our heroes have to contend with... Tevildo, Prince of Cats.

Yes, really. He's a giant cat, ruling a castle of giant cats, which is specially designed so that the cats have secure access thanks to their powerful leaps, which Elves and Men cannot match.

This sounds bizarre, and it is. Not only that, but Tevildo sets Beren the challenge of catching three giant evil mice that he's kept around for sport. What's really interesting here is that Beren, unlike most fairytale heroes, simply fails. He has to be rescued by Lúthien (and also Huan, here given the title Captain of Dogs), who though not the stunningly powerful sorceress of the final version, nevertheless has powerful magic. Instead of throwing down Sauron's fortress, she... shrinks the cats.

There are lots of echoes (if you will) for the final version here, both in the language (hinting here and there of the greater things to come) and the themes, mentioning in particular how both Melko and Tevildo, as themselves untrustworthy liars, are themselves untrusting yet easily deceived. Though undeniably strange compared to the straightforward epic of much later years, it's also genuinely charming, like a fairytale aimed at grown-ups without being the least bit cynical or base. It forms a curious, highly entertaining (and very very silly) myth to explain the origin of the enduring enmity between dogs and cats. Actually, this is one point on which Tolkien and I could never see eye to eye :

"... nor have they since that day had lord or master or any friend, and their voices wail and screech for their hearts are very lonely and bitter and full of loss, yet there is only darkness within and no kindliness."

OUCH !

The other versions presented are mainly the incomplete poetic versions. I'm not at all fussed on most of Tolkien's poems but these are more readable, albeit in the main part very simple... they remind me at times almost of Data's poetry. They do become somewhat repetitive, however, and I think perhaps removing one and replacing it with the final version would have been more useful. Still, it's fascinating to see the tale gradually morph from something charming but quite ridiculous into one of the most epic parts of all of Tolkien's canon.

There's also a good introduction and commentary by Christopher Tolkien, explaining why Tolkien initially called some of the Elves "gnomes", meaning "gnomic", "knowledgeable", which he changed on realising that hardly anyone would read it that way. There was also an early intention to have the Elves become more and more fairylike (in the modern sense) over time, but that I leave for the planned future post. Overall, a great read, with some wonderful illustrations (probably it's worth getting the hardback version if you can). I give it a solid 8/10.

Two final points. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Unfinished Tales and now these, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and this morning bought myself Christopher Tolkien's 12 volume, 5000+pages, hardback version of The Complete History of Middle Earth.

BOOKY. GOODNESS !

And secondly... Tolkien purists are hypocritical nutters. To say you prefer the original version over some adaptation or other because of the changes is just what are you even talking about. Do you want Tevildo and Tom Bombadil back ? DO YOU ? Well, go on then, go ask a chatbot to write you a revised version. Yes, if you must, object to revisions, that's fine (actually there are some changes Tolkien planned that I don't like), but don't go complaining just because adaptations don't follow the "original" text. Where Tolkien is concerned, hardly any such thing even exists.

Review : Habsburgs - Embodying Empire

I spent the last week exploring a small Dutch island and going on a hardcore reading binge, so it's time to blog up some of that.

Let's kick off with Andrew Wheatcroft's The Habsburgs : Embodying Empire. Recently I tried to broaden my range of European history knowledge with Simon Winder's Lotharingia, but it was by some margin the most pointless thing I've ever read (at least for non-fiction; The Count of Monte Cristo certainly claims the title in the fiction category). It was so stupendously bad that I couldn't even blog it properly and contented myself with a short rant here. 

Fortunately I picked up a few other titles during the same book-buying spree, which brings us to Habsburgs. This begins very well, with a good mixture of the exciting and the analytical. When he wants to, Wheatcroft can write a battle scene that would equal anything Roger Crawley comes up with - and Crawley is the absolute master of narrative military history, so this is not a comparison to be made lightly.

By the end, though, the book degenerates to something which is... decent, but weird. This actually becomes clear deceptively early on. Wheatcroft chooses to begin by describing the events of 1386, but never links this to any general narrative. It's a perfectly fine bit of narrative, but I was waiting to learn of its broader relevance. And waiting, and waiting... until I finally realised there wasn't one. This is non-linear history without a clear reason for it, something that ought to be studiously avoided.

It's also largely biographical. But not a biography of any one individual, but a haphazard attempt at a biography of the whole family. Now I did learn quite a bit from this, in particular the relations between the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg lines. And the early and middle stages of the book are okay, choosing a few select individuals and examples to go into detail without trying to cover absolutely every emperor, which would have been foolish (though even here it isn't clear how he made his selection). By the end, however, it becomes a somewhat plodding series of mini-biographies which cover far more of the final days and slow deaths of each successive emperor than saying anything about their achievements while they were alive. And I'm not sure what the point of this was supposed to be.

And it falls foul of another pet hate : excessive footnotes (dozens per chapter !) at the back of the book, mixing references and commentary. Worse, Wheatcroft claims that these are the most interesting bits, but they're really not. Oh, a few of them are worth reading, but all of those could have should have been incorporated into the main text. 

In short, it's a mess. The chapter on Charles V is pretty good, but while Wheatcroft explicitly tries to frame his final years as being a tragic failure, nothing he says gives this impression at all. Indeed, it felt to me like he'd been remarkably successful, so for Wheatcroft to arbitrarily decide the exact opposite feels like very bad writing.

Not that it's without merit elsewhere. Wheatcroft argues that the Habsburgs use of symbolism, his principle topic, came about as a response to exclusion from the great circles of power - a retreat into fantasy where they could reimagine themselves as they would wish, which, when their fortunes waxed, they were able to propagate throughout Europe. And Wheatcroft tries hard to get into the mindset of the time. For the rulers of the age, he argues, facts really didn't matter very much at all. The point of their elaborate imagery, from conventional paintings to massive, intricate woodcarvings, was to persuade, not to establish actual truth. The sense of entitlement behind it all was often breathtaking. They knew, deep down, that of course they should be in charge; if forgeries were required then forgeries would be produced without a moment's qualm.

We now enter a shadow-world... and world in which the power of the imagination could outstrip the power of the sword. It is a mental gap almost impossible for the modern mind to bridge. To our eyes the Holy Lance... looks like a broken old spearhead. But the totemic power of these relics was incalculable. In such a world the Habsburg's invisible power had a clear purpose, for it gave them a matchless weapon, a Castle Dauntless that no enemy could conquer or subvert.

Likewise, he makes the point that medieval Europe was transitioning between oral and literate, where the written word was only beginning to supplant spoken testimony. This is often overlooked, perhaps because historians deal so much more frequently in written text than in oral histories. More on the importance of this in one of the next reviews. And on later periods, he notes that while the education of the emperors wasn't at all what we might consider necessary in a rule, it probably wasn't so far off the mark considering what they would actually need to know at the time. Again, he makes a commendable effort to get into the mindset of the era.

Perhaps his most interesting, if somewhat implicit, concern is with the Romanesque imagery. I always find Roman follies in 18th century gardens very melancholy, for reasons I give in suitably melodramatic terms here*, but Wheatcroft does a decent job of trying to explain how it would have been seen at the time : not as trying to recreate a lost mental world, but in jubilantly claiming the theatrics for the then-modern times, using the ancient symbols to represent and enliven contemporary virtues. So confident was the age in its complete destruction of paganism that it could usurp the earlier symbols to create its own images : not an act of recycling but genuine creation. Likewise, when the Habsburgs increased the propagation of their symbols, this should be seen not as insecurity but the opposite : self-consciously, they needed to already feel confident of success before showing their work to a larger audience. "Methinks he doth protest too much" does not seem to apply here.

* My mum and my girlfriend have endless fun teasing my about this, but I don't care.

The way the Habsburgs used power could also be interestingly complex. Of the Emperor Joseph II :

His energy and the cascade of changes that he unleased - the decrees and instruments alone are numbered in the thousands - were in the service of "enlightened" ideals, although Joseph had read very little of the great philosophers and practitioners of "Enlightenment". He abolished serfdom, reduced censorship, restricted the rights and privileges of the nobility, instituted freedom of worship, and created a bureaucracy - of administrators and secret police - to put his programme into effect.

Which is pretty close to being a benevolent despot. There were, says Wheatcroft, no torture chambers, but the censorship even if limited was still powerful and conducive to a climate of fear. If by and large the state would only watch its citizens rather than molesting them, so intently was this done that rarely would any venture out of line, however liberal the limits might be.

When he asked in a most friendly fashion what was so disturbing about the play to warrant its suppression, the censor replied with some animation, "Oh nothing at all; but I thought to myself, 'One can never tell'."

Finally the evolution of the behaviour of the rulers towards their subjects is interesting, even if there's nothing especially Habsburg about it all :

"True greatness is broad, gentle, familiar and popular; it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters."

There is an curious mixture of being almost progressive in some aspects while being domineering and conservative in others. If the modern British monarchy is still distinctly uncomfortable with being seen close-up, and clearly chooses its self-imagery very selectively, it also can't possibly believe this is fooling anyone anymore. The Habsburgs, though they came to terms quite easily with losing their aura of mystique that differentiated the nobility from commoners, nevertheless remained firmly in charge until the end, expecting their propaganda to be successful.

When Wheatcroft tackles specific issues he generally does a good job. He clearly shows that the Habsburgs did not suffer from indecisiveness as is often supposed, but had the exact opposite fault of stubbornness. He also demonstrates that while inbreeding (a topic he overlooks too much) did cause physical infirmity, it did not cause mental problems. 

Wheatcroft's problem is not so much in finding the right words or arguments (though he can sometimes be dull and tedious; the text is often very dense) but in choosing which arguments to tackle, deciding on which bits of history to address in the first place - and, crucially, in how to structure the whole. In these aspects the book must be seen as largely a failure. Most fatally of all is the lack of context : if like me you're not all that familiar with every single period of history on a pan-European scale, you're going to miss a lot. I now know a lot of things happened but remain completely in the dark as to why or how, who was involved, or even what exactly was going on in the first place. This could certainly have been arranged in a much better way.

Overall I have to give it a 6/10. It's not bad, it contains enough bits of interest to be worth a read, but not worth recommending. The author really should have discussed the basic structure with someone a lot more before putting pen to paper.