Edwin Jones' book (see last post) had got me thinking again about modern myths of Englishness. I did a piece on this in November, but his comments on the Whig view of history have given me a different take. Maybe what we have now in English mythology (especially in the right-wing newspapers) is essentially a truncated, secularised version of the Whig view. This no longer starts with Protestantism and the Spanish Armada (whose anniversary in 1988 had little contemporary resonance). Instead it is the myth of Britain resisting tyranny, essentially based round the twin poles of Napoleon and Hitler. (Even WW1 has no real resonance now - there's no nostalgic feeling of 'plucky little Belgium' to be tapped into). What is depressing about this mythology is not just that it is held to define our relationship with France and Germany forever more, but that it is essentially reactive. Unlike in the US, the Great World War Two myth is not the liberation of Europe, but the Battle of Britain, just as Trafalgar has more resonance than Waterloo. England's role in Europe is not to lead it to a better future, but to resist its encroachments. In this myth even concepts such as human rights have no real merit, since they're essentially just nasty French Revolutionary ideas (unless someone can re-popularise Tom Paine).

I don't see an easy way of getting from here to there (acceptance of the EU) and I don't think Jones has the answer. But I think it needs to be done, since the alternative is ever greater isolation. The isolationist tendency in right-wing thought is even more extreme than previously, since there's no longer any British Empire or even solidarity with Protestant bits of Europe. The Conservative Party may claim they want to be in the EU, but their policies towards it are the completely unrealistic ones of demanding that existing treaties are renegotiated. They won't get that, so will they then say the truth, which is that they want to get out? And then? Other than becoming the Fifty-First State (but we're too blue state to get accepted), the UK will exist in a strange world, seemingly comprised largely of Switzerland, Iceland and Singapore, and with about as much international influence.

More holiday reading, though of a rather more academic kind: Edwin Jones, The English Nation: the Great Myth (Sutton Publishing, 1998). This is an interesting but ultimately rather wrong-headed discussion of English history/historiography since the Reformation by a pro-European Welsh Catholic. Jones' argument is that the Reformation was a great breach in the tradition of England as a European nation, which was then disguised by Tudor and later propagandists/historians as a return to an 'original' Anglo-Saxon nation/church. This then fed into the Whig view of history about England's glorious isolation and inevitable progress, and still has potency today.

Jones is very keen to point out biases in other historians, but one irritating thing about him is his very Catholic take on the Middle Ages and Reformation. His great hero is Thomas More, which is dubious in itself. More may have made a heroic death (and was very lucky in having Robert Bolt's play to give him a good twentieth century press), but he was just as dubious a propagandist as Thomas Cromwell (he wrote one of the first hatchet jobs on Richard III) and so far from being an icon of tolerance, he was quite happy to persecute heretics. Jones also ignores the fact that there never was a Universal Church (Orthodoxy only gets a passing mention, despite its medieval significance, and Celtic Christianity is assumed just to be an offshoot of Catholicism) and he seems to presume that papal authority sprang into being in England ready-formed in 597 with Augustine of Canterbury. Whatever the papal claims, actual papal control of churches beyond Rome took a lot time to develop.

Despite these irritations, there is some interesting stuff in the book. I haven't got the background to know how sound it is on early modern English historiography, (see http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/2glenn.html for a review), but he makes a plausible argument to a non-specialist. The problem is the political conclusions he draws from it. Jones implies that if Britons just realise their long past history as being part of Christian Europe then they'll come to love the EU. But he doesn't make it clear why people should pick that medieval phase of their past to identify with, rather than the isolated period (1533-1973) he sees as being created by Tudor propagandists. In the same way that earlier English historians wanted to erase the Middle Ages as an unenlightened blot in English history, so Jones seemingly wants to cut out 400 years of English/British history as irrelevant. This ignores the fact that even if English isolation started as myth, that myth then actually influenced policy/society and changed it.

I'm also dubious about the significance of the EU as 'Christian Europe'. Other than the exclusion in principle of Turkey, what does it mean? In the Middle Ages the most universal thing it stood for was persecution of the Jews. In the late twentieth century 'Christian' was often defined largely as being against communism (in the Christian Democrats etc). Jones wants to draw on Catholic ideas of social justice and human dignity, but he ignores the fact that historically the Catholic Church (and most other churches) were hostile to the concept of human rights. (It's not yet 150 years since Pius No-No (Pius IX) declared the church hostile to modernity as whole). There's also the fact that Britain (and probably several other countries) are no longer Christian nations in any meaningful sense. The EU as based on the ideals of liberal democracy might have resonance for a lot of people: Christian Europe isn't a positive or distinctive enough concept.

After all the discoveries of the Forgotten Empire exhibition (see previous post) it was a surprise to go into the exhibition shop and see the prominence of Tom Holland's book, Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West. Judging from the blurb, this seems to be a very traditional Western view of how the heroic Athenians and Spartans held out against the might of the Persian 'tyranny' (Sparta wasn't exactly a democracy either). This started me wondering: just how vital were the Greek victories to the West? The usual disclaimers (not my millennium), but here's my thought experiment on the difference if the Greeks had been conquered in the fifth century BC.

I don't think it would have made an enormous difference to Greek culture, because the Persian empire was religiously tolerant and most Greek culture did not depend on the availability of vast wealth. The Persian empire was also multilingual and Greek was one of the many languages used. I think you'd still have got most of Greek literature, with the exception of Athenian Old Comedy (Aristophanes), which is very politically based. The Homeric epics had already been created, tragedy as a genre had been invented. Most tragedy (with the exception of Aeschylus' 'The Persians') didn't deal with current events, so I suspect would have caused no trouble. Herodotus may not have produced the Histories in the form they are now, but he lived and wrote under Persian rule for at least part of his life, so there is no intrinsic problem about secular history writing developing. Greek religion, philosophy and science could all develop under a monarchy as well as in a democracy, as the Hellenestic period showed. You wouldn't have got the Parthenon and Greek art might have developed slightly differently, but Persian art would probably also have absorbed a lot of Greek traditions. There would have been the loss of much of the experience of Athenian democracy, although probably not all political theory about it. The long term impact of Athenian democracy was pretty limited - only really significant in C19 probably, and the ideas could develop independently of the Greek example (e.g. Switzerland).

What about the long term effects? I'm assuming here that the Persian empire was relatively stable. That may seem a big assumption, but it survived for 200 years. An empire that survives that long could well survive for centuries more. If most of mainland Greece had been conquered, I don't think there'd have been an Alexander the Great. Even if Macedonia had remained independent, it wouldn't have been able to have the gradual build-up, taking over other Greek states, that gave it the resources to take on Persia. The political fragmentation following on from the collapse of Alexander's empire wouldn't have happened.

Which is where it gets really intriguing. Rome was able to conquer Greece in the third and second century BC essentially by setting one small Greek state against another. I don't think it could have conquered the Achaemenid Empire (it couldn't defeat the later Sassanids, who ruled a similar, but smaller area). So you have Rome confined to the West, probably with much lesser Greek influence on it and in the East you have a vast, religiously tolerant Persian Empire, in one small corner of which are the Jews. I think it's at least possible that Christianity could have developed and spread in the Persian Empire, in the way it did in the Roman Empire. If the empire as whole became Christianised (of course, not a necessary condition), you might have ended up with a sort of supercharged version of the early medieval Byzantine Empire, richer by far than the Roman West and culturally superior. Possibly it would have been strong enough to limit severely the Islamic invasions of the seventh century AD. The difference between defeat and victory at Marathon and Salamis may have been less about freedom versus tyranny and more about where 'the West' developed and who was left to be the barbarians outside it.

I've just been to the British Museum exhibition Forgotten Empire (http://www.british-museum.ac.uk/persia/home.htm), a very interesting exhibition on the Achaemenid rulers of Iran and the Persian Empire (522-330 BC). It runs until 8th January and is definitely worth seeing. If you've got any kind of background in Classics it's also a slightly weird sensation, like suddenly looking the right way through a telescope. This was the mighty empire (3 million square miles) that coexisted with the jumped up towns of classical Athens and Sparta. One exhibit summed it up. There are a lot of cylindrical seals shown, with small and very intricate designs. Often these show the 'Persian royal hero' fighting monsters or assorted foreign warriors. On one of them you suddenly see the opponent carrying the round shield and spear of a hoplite. What are the Greeks but just one ethnic group among many?

There's an impressive range of material on display in the exhibition (some over specially from Iran). A lot of relief sculpture from palaces, including a very impressive image of a lion attacking a bull. The paw from a free-standing sculpture of a lion (two foot long or so - how big was the lion?). Very delicate gold jewellery and great big elaborately worked gold drinking horns. The most impressive thing of all technically was the coloured pictures on glazed brick - Persian warriors in relief against a pale blue background. Compared to monumental sculpture in stone that needs so much more design and planning. (Apparently all the bricks had to be marked so they could be assembled in the right order). And everywhere there are inscriptions - often in several languages (Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian seems to be the most common combination). There are thousands of administrative documents preserved, along with a lot of monument dedications.

So why has it been forgotten? I suspect in the West because it had the misfortune to be the Other which several cultures described themselves against. It's never a good move to be the losers in the first great work of Western history (Herodotus). And although the Old Testament is more positive towards the Persians, they're still significant only for the help they give the Israelite exiles. The Achaemaenid tradition survived in Iran itself under some of the later dynasties (like the Sassanians, the great opponents of the Roman Empire), but it died out after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century AD, and only got revived by the nineteenth and twentieth century Iranian dynasties. One of the last exhibits was a bizarre and yet intriguing poster from modern Iran. It shows the monumental sculpture from one of the palaces with rows of Persian soldiers, with interspersed among them 'martyrs' from the Iran-Iraq war. Should it be seen as 2500 years of militarism - or as a country learning to accept a pre-Islamic/non-Islamic past as part of itself?

I finally got round to reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, since I was on holiday staying with someone who owned a copy. Where does a historian start in describing such tosh? The diaries of Mary Magdalene, Walt Disney as second Leonardo, English as a pure language uninfluenced by Latin or just King's College London as having amazing religious databases? (I've just finished my PhD there - no, they don't have anything like in the book). It's no wonder that entire books have been written pointing out the inaccuracies in a novel claimed to be based on fact.

I won't repeat those points, but just stick to the problem of the implausibility of the fiction. Specifically, the villainous historian Sir Leigh Teabing. What member of the British upper classes is called Leigh Teabing? (I've seen suggestions that the name is actually a partial anagram of Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh from whose book (The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) Dan Brown cribbed most of his 'facts'. This sounds more plausible than that someone could invent the name from scratch). Teabing is also a 'British Royal Historian' (there's no such post) and was knighted for writing an 'extensive history of the House of York' (Historians don't get knighted simply for writing that sort of thing, or everyone would be researching English royalty).

Teabing speaks a language which bears only a passing resemblance to the Queen's English. The best example is when he comments to Sophie: 'I schooled just down the road [from Royal Holloway] at Oxford' and then adds 'Of course I also applied to Harvard as my safety school.' An English person wouldn't talk about being 'schooled' when he meant university or about a 'safety school'. Oxford isn't just down the road from Egham and it would be very unusual to apply for US universities as well as UK ones. (I also suspect if you didn't get into Oxford, you wouldn't be likely to get into Harvard). Four or possibly five errors in one short passage.

At first I thought it was just laziness that Dan Brown hadn't bothered to produce a vaguely plausible English historian. There are eccentric upper class British historians (until recently King's had Professor Conrad Russell on the staff, who was also an earl). Alternatively Brown could have made Teabing a fabulously rich man who was an obsessive amateur Grail enthusiast. But then I realised that creating even a stereotyped character wasn't the point. Teabing isn't a character, he's a set of useful characteristics arbitrarily placed into one person. So he's an academic historian (to give credibility to the Grail story), but also fabulously wealthy (so he can smuggle Robert and Sophie out of France) and an establishment figure (so he can get out of trouble at Westminster Abbey) and on crutches (so he can disarm an unsuspecting Silas)

So why does the book work? (I read through to the end, so it does sufficiently). I think because the thriller element is fast paced enough, at least for most of the book, to enable you to skip the implausibilities. Teabing, for example, only comes in about halfway, by which time you're likely to be hooked. A lot of the puzzles aren't complex enough to hold up for any length of time (I spotted the mirror writing immediately), but they're just tricky enough to intrigue the reader. The mix works adequately as a lowbrow version of The Name of the Rose.

As a thriller the book only really falls down at the end, when the villainous Teabing is defeated several chapters too early. For some reason, Dan Brown seems to have suffered a failure of nerve. In novels the long lost historic artefact (picture, book, documents etc) either has to be revealed to an amazed public or (more commonly) destroyed (as in The Name of the Rose, Michael Frayn's Headlong etc). If the Grail documents don't need to be revealed to have their effect, then what does it matter if they're safe or not?

The copy I had also included a 'bonus' of the first pages of Dan Brown's first book 'Angels and Demons'. A mistake, I think because it confirms he's just a one trick pony - the initial scenes are basically the same. (And another gloriously clunky bit of dialogue. Someone phones up Robert Langdon out of the blue to tell him about a murder and says 'I'm a discrete particle physicist'. To which the snappy answer is surely: 'Well you seem pretty indiscreet to me.')

A couple of things I’ve read have just sparked some connections about the location of the sacred in the current world. One is Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (very interesting and I will have more to say about it later). He is stressing how there was definite move towards the feminisation of Christianity in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century and how this stressed the key role of women in Christianising the home. Women as domestic angels played a key role in Christian society up till the 1950s in Britain. [The family as the key sacred space may still have this dominant role in the US: there have been recent reports about how some megachurches are not having services on Christmas Day itself this year, but encouraging domestic worship. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/national/09church.html].

In contrast was an article in the Guardian (http://money.guardian.co.uk/work/story/0,,1663770,00.html) about how some workers were becoming ever more devoted to their jobs. Meanwhile, some companies are trying to exploit the concept of ‘spiritual intelligence’ to make work more meaningful and employees more motivated. What is interesting is that work as religion has traditionally been gendered in the opposite way to home/family as religion. The real devotees have traditionally been male. The recent article by Linda Hirshman that I was so critical of (see previous entry) can be read in one sense as an attempt to encourage women into the worship of work. (The true believer in this scheme is the ‘devoted lawyer’ who comes in for such praise in the article).

It’s not clear yet which way the battle will go between worship of work and family. However I’d say that neither should be worshipped or made the focus of a life in the way that their proponents intend. Where does the worship of work leave the devotee who’s made redundant or retires? Where does the idolisation of the family leave the single or those whose families are unhappy places? Better to stick to the worship of God: it’s a lot more inclusive.

The article by Linda Hirshman in American Prospect on ‘choice feminism’ (http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10659) is so wrong-headed that it’s difficult to know where to start with it. But since I suspect I may be one of those targeted (I definitely don’t count as an elite woman in terms of income, but maybe in terms of education), I thought I’ll try and answer at least some of the points.

The first thing to say is that her basic underlying assumption is wrong: that if more women get into positions of power that social systems will automatically become more women-friendly. Excuse me, we tried that in the UK. We had a woman Prime Minister, for quite a long time actually. Margaret Thatcher did not do an awful lot of feminism. If you have a situation where women get into high positions only be being as ruthless as men (which is what Hirshman seems to want), they’re quite likely to be happy with the system and say ‘If I can do it, why can’t every woman.’ [Ann Widdicombe MP is one of the prominent opponents of the very-limited measures suggested by the Conservative Party towards positive discrimination in choosing Tory candidates].

Hirshman’s detailed errors come under 2 headings: her attitude to work and her attitude to the home. On work, she seems to have a very limited range of what counts as ‘good work’. Basically, you only ‘work seriously’ if you make a lot of money. Money means power and power is good. I think her suggestion that young women are given better career advice is sensible, but it shouldn’t ignore people’s interests, aptitudes and values, and it shouldn’t be too narrow. One of the depressing things I heard at Cambridge University when I was there in the late 1990s was that the careers office was only useful if you wanted to be a management consultant or a lawyer. Given one of the criteria Hirshman raises for the ‘good life’, is ‘doing more good than harm’, are these really the only choices?

The sad reality is that there aren’t that many good jobs out there: there are a lot that don’t give job satisfaction and a lot that give it only at the cost of taking over your entire life. Hirshman says that many of the women who quit to have babies were ‘already alienated from their work’. Did she ask any of their husbands if they were? (Well, no, she wouldn’t have done a) because they weren’t there to ask and b) because it would be career suicide for them to admit to feeling this in the macho culture of capitalism that Hirschman so exalts).

And then Hirschman adds in passing: ‘It is possible that the workplace is discriminatory and hostile to family life?’ Hello, Earth to Planet Hirschman.

As for the home, Hirschman seems wilfully to conflate two different aspects: housework and childcare. I agree with her on housework: as Betty Friedan also says, housework is unfulfilling. But the dirty (literally) secret about housework is that it is not a full-time job or even a substantial part-time job unless you choose to make it so. Those who want to can fill up the time by impeccable standards of cleanliness, lots of baking or fancy place settings. The rest of us can fit housework round normal life. Hirschman is also right to say that a bit of creative neglect of housework does wonders to encourage men to do it. Start early here: I made it clear early on in the marriage (when we were both working fulltime, so things were equitable), that I wasn’t doing my husband’s ironing. He could do himself, he could pay someone to do it, he could wear un-ironed clothes: he had choices, just not me doing it. I’ve also avoided picking up too much housework as function creep now I’m a largely stay-at-home mum. My argument has been that I’m at home to look after L and I can only do such housework as is compatible with prioritising her. (Early on, I wasn’t necessarily even cooking tea while on my own, on the grounds that trying to cook while supervising a rampaging child got both me and L so frazzled that Edward might get food immediately when he’d get home, but he’d also get a very unhappy atmosphere.)

Childcare, however, at least of pre-school children, is undoubtedly a full-time job (and more - I always find it difficult not having a lunch break when I can just switch off). Someone has to be there all the time to ensure that the child is safe, vaguely clean and not too unhappy. You can split it between parents or have outside help (relatives, daycare) etc in various proportions, but someone must do it. Hirschman’s idea seems to be that if you’re a woman in a high-powered job, you should hire a nanny and go back to work immediately. She doesn’t answer the question: if a parent (male or female) is working 80 hour weeks, to what extent are they being a parent? Even if you merely work a 12 hour day, you will probably rarely see your toddler awake except at weekends. (The idea of quality time relies on one basic fallacious assumption: that toddlers can be scheduled effectively. You may want quality time, the child may want to sleep or watch TV or simply be with someone else). If both parents are working these kinds of ridiculous hours right from the start, you wonder why they have the child in the first place? The child is only theirs in the limited genetic sense, if they’ve missed out on the key role of helping raise them when small.

Childcare is often boring and repetitive, but it is challenging in a positive sense as well. My negotiation skills have never been so developed as with a toddler. I couldn’t cope with looking after L all the time, but combining childcare with study or part-time work does seem to me to be overall a good solution (if frustrating at times). It means that you can still have a life beyond the child, but it also gives time to instil your kind of values in a child. I think what I’m doing (and what my husband is doing) is a positive feminist experience for L. I’m showing her that girls can play with construction toys as well as dolls, can do lots of climbing and jumping around, can learn to love book and numbers. I’m also, I hope, showing her that mothers can have life beyond their families. At the moment, she just knows that I go off to London regularly: when she’s older she’ll hear about academic seminars. Meanwhile, Edward is doing as much childcare and housework as if feasible given a full-time job. (He has deliberately chosen one that does not require the excessive hours that some professional jobs do).

In contrast, if you just leave the childcare to the professionals, they will almost invariably be women, and often not very well educated women. (They have a lot of other very valuable, but undervalued skills). Nurseries are better at equal opportunities these days, but you’re still relying on someone else to install proper feminist principles in your child and they’re still likely to learn that only women look after children.

The ideal, at least for us, would possibly be for part-time work for both, but that’s tricky to obtain. It is important to encourage men to do more childcare and be more willing to do part-time/non-traditional hours. But you’re certainly not going to have this happen if you keep on repeating that childcare is boring and horrible and that it’s intrinsically demeaning to wipe someone’s bottom if you’re a member of the middle classes. (I’d have thought it was equally demeaning whatever class you are - or equally not demeaning if you take it in a different sense as necessary care for the helpless). A ‘feminist’ ideal that says that the only place for women is the workplace and denigrates mothers who actually act like caring mothers seems as unsatisfactory as a pre-feminist belief that the only place for women is the home and denigrates fathers who actually act like caring fathers. We do still need choice feminism, even if there may be a need to rebalance the equation slightly. Let’s say it together: ‘Work matters, children matter, housework doesn’t!’

From the obituary of the American historian Gordon Craig (http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1653617,00.html).

He is survived by his wife of 66 years, Phyllis Halcomb Craig, three daughters, the Rev Susan Craig, Dr Deborah Preston, Professor Martha Craig, and a son, Charles Craig.

I’ve just been back again to Cambridge Illuminations, an amazing exhibition of illuminated manuscripts at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. (If you can get to see it, go, it’s now been extended till the end of December. If not, look at the website http://www.cambridgeilluminations.org). Its centrepiece is the newly acquired Macclesfield Psalter, which they can display numerous pages of because it’s been taken apart from rebinding. This dates from about 1330, at the height of the art of illumination. (See http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/macclesfield/introduction.html). It’s an amazing work: quite small, very fine and even Gothic hand, and the most vivid and well-drawn marginalia. It has all human and animal life in it (and a lot of mixed human-animal grotesques): a rabbit and a dog jousting, St Dunstan grabbing the Devil’s nose with some pincers, a man on a hobby-duck (like a hobby horse, only with a duck head), etc, etc. The invention never tires, the often tiny drawings are beautifully modelled, the layout plays clever visual tricks, so your eyes travel back and forth across an opening. You could look at it again and again, which is of course the point for a book encouraging frequent devotion.

The rest of the exhibition has nothing else quite as fine, but it does give you a sense of the variety of manuscripts over 1000 years, all from Cambridge collections. They have one of the first books in England (Augustine of Canterbury’s gospels from the late 6th century), Hrabanus Maurus’ bizarre acrostic picture poems, Bibles, a lot of psalters, secular manuscripts and even a few charters. (There’s a lovely small C12 charter (the Pilkington Charter), where a grant of hunting rights gets illustrated round the edge with cheery little pictures of deer and the like.) But it’s also interesting in showing what I think is the artistic decline in illuminated manuscripts in the fifteenth century, which comes prior to the use of printing. The earlier manuscripts all have a very inventive and carefully thought out relationship of different levels of texts and image: the extreme example is some of the glosses they show, which look like the C12 attempt to produce hypertext. In the early C15 however, you can see the format hardening into a frame of main text/picture and then marginal decoration, now firmly separated, unlike the organic linking of the Macclesfield Psalter. By the mid C15 the separation is complete and the main area and the border barely relate to each other. It’s not surprising that the exhibition has quite a lot of single illustrations from this period: it’s now easy to cut out the ‘picture’ from a page, in a way it wasn’t with the earlier illuminations. It also makes the shift to printing (where you have complete separation of text and image) relatively straightforward conceptually. The best of the C15 work is very beautiful as individual pictures but it has lost something to me. I don’t know whether the earlier manuscript sensibility could be retrieved: even today, with computer technology, the tendency is to create/work with/store text and image separately.