Summary of Lectures

Dr Fletcher’s theme was how the different disciplines of History and English Literature can support each other – with the 14th and 15th centuries providing his examples. After the 18th and 19th centuries when literary scholars and historians usually found their disciplines mutually supportive, the disciplines distanced themselves from each other in the 20th century. Historians preferred archive-based evidence to more imaginative literary texts and viewed post-modernist literary theory with horror. Nowadays, however, most historians and literary scholars realise that each other’s work can improve their own understanding of the period and of the period’s texts. He drew persuasively on Chaucer, on Richard the Redeless and on the ’chansons de geste’ to make his case.

 

Dr John Pollard: The Rise and Rise of the Modern Papacy – Catholicism in Twentieth Century History

Dr Pollard characterised the Papacy as a homogeneous multinational with a 2000 year-old mission statement. Unlike the Islamic Caliphate and Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism weathered well the storms of the 20th century and is the largest religious group in the world. He explained how the main aim of the controversial Pius XII (‘Hitler’s Pope’) was to keep the Church safe in dangerous times and to prevent Catholics from having to choose between church and nation. Catholicism flourished in the climate of the Cold War and Christian Democratic parties became increasingly influential in Europe. While some papal policies, e.g. on sexual behaviour, have caused dissent among church members, Roman Catholicism retains a very strong sense of identity.

Professor Reynolds used Churchill as a case-study for the problems of writing historical biography. He began by pointing out the challenge of social history, of how to cover both the ‘life’ and ‘the times’. Then there is the problem of balance/bias, on the one hand the praise of a Gilbert, on the other the revisionist blame of a Charmley. Timing is another important issue. In 1931 Churchill was nearly run over and killed in New York. Had he died then his would have been essentially a failed political career. Biographers need to guard against their subjects making a pre-emptive strike to secure their reputations through their memoirs. Churchill was the pre-emptive striker par excellence, inventing and re-inventing his career through his extensive and widely read writings.

In modern nation-states politicians use history to contribute to the creation of an often mythical national identity. In 1945, the German and Japanese nations were catastrophically defeated and needed to recreate their national identity in the light of that catastrophe. Germany has coped better than Japan. In the 1960s young Germans wanted to know what had really happened and a variety of school history textbooks grappled honestly with the Nazi era. Japan is different. It blames the war on 28 war criminals. The invasion of China in the 1930s is presented as a struggle against western imperialism (and the atrocities omitted) while the dropping of the two atomic bombs has enabled the Japanese to reinvent themselves as the victims of U.S. aggression.