Magistra et Mater

Bavardess has just revealed herself as another historian who either wants to or is actually attempting to write historical fiction rather than ‘straight’ history. The rising cultural importance of historical novels is reflected in the recent Booker prize shortlist, and History Today in Oct 2009 had an interesting discussion of the topic (unfortunately pay-walled). I’ve talked before about the uneasy relationship between the two genres of history and historical fiction, but I want now to go back and look at it from a slightly different angle. What do authors or would-be authors of historical novels think that writing fiction allows them to do that more conventional historical forms don’t?

1) Gain a wider audience
The fact that they reach wider audiences is an issue that sometimes gets raised by novelists who write literary historical fiction, but in a surprisingly superficial way. For example, in the History Today article, Sarah Dunant comments: ‘What I do is to sink my reader into feeling and sensation, but to slide real history in with it so you never know you’re reading it – and sell books in numbers and to people that most historians can only dream of’. But the question with any ‘published’ work (including TV and films) is not simply the size of the audience it gets. Otherwise you would simply have to conclude that JK Rowling or Dan Brown are better authors than Hilary Mantel or Sarah Waters, because they sell more novels.

Academic books do largely have tiny audiences because they discuss specialist topics in technical ways. And they do that for a reason: in order to advance original research. If you cut out the footnotes and the detailed discussion of the sources, you may get a wider audience, but you also make it harder for your fellow specialists to assess the reliability of your argument. To suggest that every history book should be accessible to a general reader is no more realistic than to suggest that every article in the British Medical Journal should be.

The standard complaint that most academic historians don’t write for a wider audience is unfair for two reasons. One is that most academic historians don’t have the time to do that. What they are paid to do (and it normally takes up well over their official working hours) is do original research and teach students. Writing more popular history is something that has to be squeezed into the edges of their time (which is one reason why blogging, which allows more popular history to be written and disseminated very easily, is potentially so useful for academics).

The other problem is that some areas of historical research are intrinsically more likely to interest a wider audience than others. One friend of mine wrote a thesis on ‘Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages’, another on 'History and Coinage in Southumbrian England, c. 750-865’. Which one do you think is more likely to get a best-selling book out of their work, regardless of the merit of either work? Most of the books by academic medievalists/early modernists which do find a wider audience are either on conventional kings and battles topics or are lucky enough to have found sources/archives which contain a lot of information on a small group of people (such as the inquisition records for Montaillou).

2) Make it more vivid
The biggest advantage that a historical fiction writer should have over a historian is the ability to write vividly. The quality of novelists, after all, is predominantly judged by their writing style, not their accuracy (the reverse is true of historians). I liked the comment of Stephanie Draven on my first post: ‘I think the job of the historian is to tell what really happened. The job of the historical novelist is to make a reader care enough to find out what really happened.’

A good novelist or writer of a screenplay can produce memorable images and scenes that most historians struggle to depict. I don’t have the kind of visual imagination that Mary Stewart clearly has, nor do I have the skills at dialogue writing that allowed Dorothy Dunnett to create early medieval characters who can joke as well as make noble speeches. I’m not convinced that historians should try to write like novelists, because it takes a lot of skill not to end up with purple prose when you try ‘fine writing’. But there are simple methods that can make any writing flow better, and it makes sense to try and learn them. (I find, for example, that I can best get a decent rhythm to my sentences if I say them in my head as I write: that’s very useful for preventing thoughts getting too long and complex).

3) Make things up
One of the most obvious things that writing historical fiction allows you to do is to make things up when you don’t know them. Particularly for earlier periods, this is an advantage that shouldn’t be underrated, because it allows writers of historical fiction to write about lives which historians can only tackle with extreme difficulty. You can’t write ‘history’ about Scara Brae, for example, but there is a well-regarded children’s novel on the subject. And writing fiction allows you to imagine the interior lives of the less powerful (women, peasants, Jews etc) in a way that historical sources rarely can.

The problem, of course, is that making things up also tempts you to bend history to the way you would like it to have been, rather than it actually was. You want a bogus anti-English story? You can write it. You feel that the clash between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots isn’t dramatic enough because they never meet? Make it so!

Katya Maddison, responding to my earlier post, asked: ‘Does it matter if we confuse our Catos?’ To which the honest answer is: if you start with that, where do you stop? What limits do you choose and what ethical implications are there? If you want to say that historical fiction is just entertainment then it’s fine to have Queen Victoria as a demon hunter. But increasingly historical novelists are claiming more than this. As Sarah Dunant puts it in History Today: ‘I want to sink the reader deep into the period, to say, “Have the confidence to follow me because I know what is true”'. Or as Hillary Mantel adds: ‘It proposes a version, but a version that comes with a guarantee: “This could be true” '.

4) Tell the truth?
Can historical novels, then, tell a historical truth that is inaccessible to factual history? It seems to me that there are three implicit claims being made by writers of historical fiction. One is that they can make historical conjectures that are more plausible than those of current historians. Another is that they can portray the culture of a period more truthfully than a historian. A third is that novelists can provide more psychologically acute studies of historical figures than historians can.

On the first issue, I wouldn’t deny that writers of historical fiction may sometimes be able to show that academic historians are wrong and that their conjecture on a particular issue is better. However, I suspect that most of the discoveries they make are relatively minor points, such as corrected chronologies. I don’t know of any major discoveries about medieval history that have first been developed by novelists and that have subsequently stood the academic test. (If anyone knows differently, please tell me). In contrast, there are significant viewpoints whose profile has been greatly increased by novelists, such as Josphine Tey’s effect on views of Richard III.

Can novelists portray particular historical cultures more truthfully than a historian can? I think this idea confuses vividness of writing with accuracy. A good novelist can create metaphors and images that make the essence of a culture linger in your mind: when I read academic discussions of the ritual significance of early medieval British kings, my mind still flashes back to the blind king in Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Mark of the Horse Lord. But these insights will normally have already appeared, if in less condensed and lapidary forms, in the works of the historians that a novelist draws on. A novelist can invent or be historically accurate: but they can’t invent and be historically accurate.

I’m also dubious that historical novelists as a group have more psychological insights into character than historians do. Again, it seems to me to be confusing quality of written expression with quality of analysis. Some novelists (whether writing historical or contemporary fiction) have an admirable ability to provide convincing characters who are not like them (of a different sex, class, race). However, even some celebrated authors don’t have this: there are few things more dismal than reading Charles Dickens’ heroines. Academic historians too, vary in their sensitivity to thinking about historical mentalities, but increasingly there are many who focus on these aspects. I’m not convinced that any novelist could provide a better psychological reading of Charlemagne than Jinty Nelson has in several of her studies, and you’d be hard pushed to find a novel that matches Michael Clanchy’s study of Abelard for insights.

I certainly wouldn’t claim to be in that league, but I have read and pondered a large number of early medieval sources, and I would expect to understand more about the people who wrote and read them than a novelist who hadn’t done that kind of extensive research. The challenge for me and other historians is to express what we have learnt from such study clearly; the challenge for historical novelists is to take what they learned from us and express it in their own compelling and idiosyncratic way.

There was a mention of Jews on the radio a day or two ago, so L asked me who they were. Fortunately, we’ve now discussed basic ideas of different religions several times, so I had a reasonably slick answer to hand. The Jews are the followers of a religion, they believe in God and in the stories in the Old Testament, but they don’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God. She then asked why the Jews didn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God, but handily answered herself by saying that they probably thought he was the son of Joseph. (If necessary, I would have told her that people don’t all believe the same things). Her final question was what the difference was between Jews and Muslims. I said that Muslims thought that God had spoken to a man called Muhammed, who had written down what he was told in a book called the Qur’an.

I’ve had variants on this discussion several times in the last year or so, as L starts to get to grips with religious pluralism. She’s doing that at a far earlier age than I did, which comes from being in a very ethnically and religiously diverse school. She’s already had a class visit to a mosque, as well as visits from Christian clergy and a Sikh story-teller, and celebrations of Eid and Diwali and Chinese New Year, alongside Harvest, Easter, Christmas and Red Nose Day. I don’t know how much they’ve done on Judaism or Buddhism yet, but otherwise she’s getting a broad spread of religious culture.

All this means that I need to come up with a coherent but not too controversial account of the world’s religions suitable for an inquiring but somewhat unformed mind. I want to try and be informative and factually accurate, because I don’t want L to feel I’m not taking her questions seriously or can’t be relied on to answer them truthfully. On the other hand, I need to keep things simple and I also don’t want to start conflicts at her school, so I’m careful not to denigrate other religions. I’m conscious that anything that I say may get repeated in a somewhat garbled form, and if a six year old’s version of Christianity meets a six year old’s version of Islam or Sikhism the result may be unexpected. So what I’m trying to do is focus on belief in God (or gods), belief in Jesus and the books taken as scriptures. I’m conscious of some large gaps in my knowledge trying to do this (I know very little Sikh theology) and I’m not sure that Buddhism can easily be fitted into this framework (I’m really hoping that L doesn’t start asking about Buddhism till she’s a few years older). But as a basic framework, I hope my explanations at least aren’t actively confuse ng.

I am also consciously making all my comments as statements of belief: we (Christians) believe that, Muslims believe that etc. And although L hasn’t asked this yet, I will tell her if/when she asks, that different people believe different things, just as different people like different things to do or different TV programmes. In other words, I’m not trying to make an explicit claim about Christianity as a true religion as opposed to other religions. I am treating religion as being a matter of opinion, not a matter of fact, at this stage. In contrast, when L last academic year got into an argument with her friends because she said the earth went round the sun and they said it didn’t, I was happy to tell her that she was right and they were wrong.

Treating my Christian religion as my opinion doesn’t mean I am ashamed of my faith, and when L is older, I’m happy to explain why I believe what I believe and think it’s intellectually justified. But as well as not wanting to stir up things with her friends, I’m also conscious of a longer-term issue. Though L is being raised as a Christian, when she is older she may leave the faith, or choose another one (At the least, she will need to find her own independent relationship to Christianity). If my relationship with her is tightly bound up with my factual claim that Christianity is true, then if she rejects that claim, it is difficult for her to do so without rejecting me as well. Bringing her up to respect other people’s religious beliefs, even if she does not share them, is in that way also a hope for the future in having my own views respected, and a message about how people with different religious beliefs (or none) can nevertheless remain friends.

I feel I should warn any readers who come along to this site that there are not going to be many updates in the next few months. This is because I am trying to finish the manuscript of a book and my available intellectual energy needs to be directed towards this currently, rather than to getting irritated with Hilary Mantel's view of historians. My (possibly unrealistic) aim is to finish the book by early 2010, at which point normal blogging can be resumed...

Meanwhile, I will try and do some posting of links to other sites of interest. My first is to the IHR's Making History site, which along with some useful statistics and biographies, includes interviews with a number of prominent British historians. These include audio as well as transcripts, so anyone who has not heard what Susan Reynolds, Eric Hobsbawm etc sounds like can now discover. I have not yet read/listened to all the interviews myself, so if anyone does discover "any obscene or libellous material that these interviews may contain" (which the IHR firmly states it is not responsible for), I would be interested to know.

Mayke de Jong’s The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814-840, which I am gradually working my way through, is Mayke’s sustained discussion of theories about Louis’ reign, theology and political discourse which she says she’s been developing for over 20 years. But chapter 1 also provides a useful summary of the events of Louis the Pious’ reign, which brings out the soap opera aspects of his ongoing struggles with his sons from 829 onwards.

After a century or more in which Louis the Pious has been seen as an archetypal ‘weak king’, in the last decades there has been a lot of debate over him (in which Mayke has played a determined role). One of the key arguments for those attempting to refute the idea of weakness is pointing out how frequently rulers struggled with rebellious adult sons. On this view, a ruler with three adult sons (as Louis had in the 830s) was bound to have trouble. But as I looked at the events again, I found myself wondering if the real crunch point didn’t come much earlier, and Louis’ problems in the 830s weren’t just the same pattern repeating itself.

I think there is a decent case for seeing Louis’ real problems as starting in 817/818. The Ordinatio imperii of 817 has traditionally been seen as problematic because it produced a succession plan for the empire at such an early stage of Louis the Pious’ reign (before one of his four sons had been born). But more significant, I would argue, is that it made no mention of Bernard of Italy (Louis’s nephew), instead leaving Italy to Louis’ eldest son Lothar I. As a result, Bernard, fearing his sons would be disinherited, revolted.

The recurrent theme of Louis’ later years was that planned divisions of the empire he made led to revolts by those of his sons he had disappointed. This, I would argue, is behaviour that could be expected. It is unrealistic for a parent to deprive a son of part of an inheritance in favour of another and not expect a bad reaction. In the same way, excluding Bernard was asking for trouble.

The subsequent events are also revealing. Louis the Pious put down the revolt and captured Bernard. He then blinded him, a mutilation from which Bernard died. It is clear that Louis over-reacted here. Five years later, at Attigny in 822 he did public penance for the death of Bernard. However much Mayke sees Louis as in control of his own penance and the situation, he had put himself firmly in the wrong. The bishops who judged him in 833 raised Bernard’s death as one of the many offences that made him unfit to rule.

But the reason why Bernard’s punishment had such long-term repercussions is best seen in a comparison with the one family revolt that his father Charlemagne experienced. In 792, Charlemagne’s eldest son Pippin (aka Pippin the Hunchback) revolted. Jinty Nelson has argued that this was because Pippin was being edged out of a future division of the kingdom by his stepmother Fastrada. The parallels seem plain here, but the consequences weren’t. Pippin was not killed, but tonsured and put in a monastery: he died there nearly twenty years later.

Charlemagne had form for this kind of behaviour: he’d similarly put his cousin Tassilo permanently into a monastery in 788, when taking over Bavaria. I don’t think it’s coincidence that none of Charlemagne’s other sons revolted after Pippin. They had too much to lose by doing so. In contrast, I would argue that Louis was unable to deal effectively with his sons after their revolts because of Bernard. Having over-reacted once, he could not again be seen as too harsh. Instead, he combined a determination to divide and re-divide the kingdom, which led to revolt, with recurrent forgiveness for his rebellious sons, thus providing no incentive for loyalty.

In terms of Carolingian standards of parenting, Charlemagne looks in control: stern action which carefully avoided the appearance of brutality to contemporaries. Louis, in contrast, seems all over the place, unable to deal effectively with the predictable consequences of his behaviour. Louis cannot simply be seen as too merciful (as in the traditional narrative), but it would not surprise any modern parenting guru that his uneasy moves between harshness and leniency were unsuccessful in producing family harmony.

Historians once largely believed what Gregory of Tours wrote in his ‘Ten Books of History’ (which is how the History of the Franks is now more accurately referred to). Gregory might be naive (all that reporting of miracles), but his artlessly gory portrayals of Merovingian life told us all we needed to know about the horrors of Merovingian society.

A more recent view of Gregory, along with many other medieval historians, is that his history reflects his own prejudices or that he is writing propaganda. Nevertheless, even though his text is not transparent, we can read through it to get useful material. We can see the outlines of particular actions by his enemies through his distorted stories about them. Alternatively, for social/cultural historians, even if his stories are not true at all, but purely propaganda, they reflect what a king or a queen or a bishop could feasibly do. Propaganda, after all, needs to be plausible.

I would have adhered to such views once, but recent events have made me less certain. If you look at many of the claims circulating in the US about Barack Obama, (such as the claim that he is not a citizen) they’re not remotely plausible, and yet they’re widely accepted. One answer is that this is simply because such stories have been pushed so hard by particular powerful interest groups. But there are implausible stories which have achieved wide circulation and belief without such long term propaganda efforts: Slacktivist has an interesting example of one.

And some claims go beyond the merely deeply implausible to a different level. Take the claim that Obama’s plan for health care involves ‘death panels’, for example. You could see this as an extreme distortion of some possible plans for living wills or not paying for heroic treatment of the terminally ill, but it’s probably better to see these statements as symbolic. Obama is an evil ruler and therefore of course he is planning death panels, because that’s what evil rulers do. And, in glorious circularity, he is planning death panels and so that is ‘proof’ that he must be an evil ruler.

I’ve just been reading Martin Heinzelmann,Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century (CUP, 2001) who argues convincingly and in great detail that Gregory is using symbolic figures in the Ten Books of History: the Good King, the Bad King, the Good Bishop etc. What he doesn’t really get into is looking at how that might affect historians who actually want to know something about the sixth century (as opposed to those wanting to understand how Gregory’s mind works). If Gregory’s stories are largely symbolic, can we take anything factual from them beyond a few names and events? Or are we faced not just with a distorted mirror on the Merovingian past, but a fantasy view of it?

What if we can’t trust Gregory? What does it mean for Merovingian history? He provides a very detailed narrative for the second half of the sixth century, but I suspect it’s possible to reconstruct a skeleton political history for the period from other sources. The biggest problem may be for social history, and especially women’s history. Most studies of Merovingian women rely crucially on Gregory for the social details of laywomen’s lives. Hagiography and letters just don’t give us that texture. But what if his stories of good and evil queens aren’t just distorted and sometimes misogynistic reactions to real women? What if they are just symbolic stories of eternal good and evil women, loosed from any anchoring in Merovingian reality? If you can’t hope to reconstruct a historical Obama from his opponents’ fantasies, will you be able to learn anything true about Hillary Clinton?