All in a Don's Day Read Online Free Page B
Author: Mary Beard
the Italian military censors for the address of a press agency, and the telegrams of the British consul-general, who was considered unfriendly, were blocked.
TONY FRANCIS
The history girls vs. David Starkey
5 April 2009
David Starkey (whom I have criticised before for being a trifle inaccurate on the history of the ancient world) has been sounding off in the
Radio Times
about how âfeminisedâ history has become: not a development of which he is in favour.
Heâs talking about his new TV series on Henry VIII: âOne of the great problems has been that Henry, in a sense, has been absorbed by his wives. Which is bizarre. But itâs what you expect from feminised history, the fact that so many of the writers who write about this are women and so much of their audience is a female audience. Unhappy marriages are big box office.â
If only it were true, I found myself thinking. Much as I admire the work of my male colleagues in ancient history, I think that the subject could only be improved by being a bit more âfeminisedâ. And, so far as I can see from my Cambridge vantage point, thereâs not much sign of modern British history in universities being a bastion of womenâs power and influence. In fact, itâs usually said of the gender balance in UK history departments that the further from the âcentral periodsâ of British history a subject is, the more likely youâll find a woman teaching it. Weâre let in at the margins, in other words.
But what does a feminised history mean anyway? Is it history for women, by women, about women?
Predictably enough, the papers have collected outraged responses from women who have written about women: Amanda Foreman, author of
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
,Lisa Hilton, author of
Athenais, The Real Queen of France
, and many others. These are excellent historians in their way, Iâm sure. But the point of âfeminisingâ history isnât just to pretend that women were as powerful or as influential as men, and then to write about them in the same old fashion.
The
Sunday Times
, enjoying a dig at Starkey, cited some of the famous women who had been powerful in the history of the Roman world, and who shouldnât get left out of the story: Messalina (the adulterous wife of the emperor Claudius) and Agrippina (her successor and the mother of Nero); Cleopatra and the emperor Constantineâs mother, Helena.
But hang on, I thought, isnât it a bit more complicated? Surely we have hardly any clue at all about whether Messalina or Agrippina really were powerful; what we know is that they were useful symbols on to which Roman writers themselves projected all the ills of their political system. Iâm not saying that they were demure, shrinking violets. But they were certainly convenient targets for ridicule and abuse, useful figures to blame for a whole range of disasters that afflicted the Roman imperial house. Someoneâs just died ⦠must have been poisoned by Agrippina! A history book based around Agrippina makes even less sense (and must be even more speculative) than one based around the emperor Nero.
I thought feminising history was about doing history differently, and having different assumptions about what power was. The sort of history, for example, that doesnât always start from the antics of ye olde royal family, and Tudors in tights, perhaps?
Comments
Wow. What exactly is the problem? And how exactly does history become â²feminisedâ²? By finally paying attention to women in history, perhaps? I for one am just becoming aware of the vast corpus of convent chronicles from the late medieval period and early Renaissance, and itâ²s quite clear that, once a large number of them are finally translated, they will be seen as an actual
genre
in the hulking shadow of humanist literature. By women, about women and for women. Bring it on, I say!
JOHN T
Isnâ²t most of the written
TONY FRANCIS
The history girls vs. David Starkey
5 April 2009
David Starkey (whom I have criticised before for being a trifle inaccurate on the history of the ancient world) has been sounding off in the
Radio Times
about how âfeminisedâ history has become: not a development of which he is in favour.
Heâs talking about his new TV series on Henry VIII: âOne of the great problems has been that Henry, in a sense, has been absorbed by his wives. Which is bizarre. But itâs what you expect from feminised history, the fact that so many of the writers who write about this are women and so much of their audience is a female audience. Unhappy marriages are big box office.â
If only it were true, I found myself thinking. Much as I admire the work of my male colleagues in ancient history, I think that the subject could only be improved by being a bit more âfeminisedâ. And, so far as I can see from my Cambridge vantage point, thereâs not much sign of modern British history in universities being a bastion of womenâs power and influence. In fact, itâs usually said of the gender balance in UK history departments that the further from the âcentral periodsâ of British history a subject is, the more likely youâll find a woman teaching it. Weâre let in at the margins, in other words.
But what does a feminised history mean anyway? Is it history for women, by women, about women?
Predictably enough, the papers have collected outraged responses from women who have written about women: Amanda Foreman, author of
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
,Lisa Hilton, author of
Athenais, The Real Queen of France
, and many others. These are excellent historians in their way, Iâm sure. But the point of âfeminisingâ history isnât just to pretend that women were as powerful or as influential as men, and then to write about them in the same old fashion.
The
Sunday Times
, enjoying a dig at Starkey, cited some of the famous women who had been powerful in the history of the Roman world, and who shouldnât get left out of the story: Messalina (the adulterous wife of the emperor Claudius) and Agrippina (her successor and the mother of Nero); Cleopatra and the emperor Constantineâs mother, Helena.
But hang on, I thought, isnât it a bit more complicated? Surely we have hardly any clue at all about whether Messalina or Agrippina really were powerful; what we know is that they were useful symbols on to which Roman writers themselves projected all the ills of their political system. Iâm not saying that they were demure, shrinking violets. But they were certainly convenient targets for ridicule and abuse, useful figures to blame for a whole range of disasters that afflicted the Roman imperial house. Someoneâs just died ⦠must have been poisoned by Agrippina! A history book based around Agrippina makes even less sense (and must be even more speculative) than one based around the emperor Nero.
I thought feminising history was about doing history differently, and having different assumptions about what power was. The sort of history, for example, that doesnât always start from the antics of ye olde royal family, and Tudors in tights, perhaps?
Comments
Wow. What exactly is the problem? And how exactly does history become â²feminisedâ²? By finally paying attention to women in history, perhaps? I for one am just becoming aware of the vast corpus of convent chronicles from the late medieval period and early Renaissance, and itâ²s quite clear that, once a large number of them are finally translated, they will be seen as an actual
genre
in the hulking shadow of humanist literature. By women, about women and for women. Bring it on, I say!
JOHN T
Isnâ²t most of the written
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