WEBVTT

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Hello, my topic for you today is:

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Is the past a foreign country?

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That is of course the first line
of L.P. Hartley's book "The Go-Between":

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"The past is a foreign country,
they do things differently there."

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My question for you today is: "Is it?"

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If it is, why does popular culture
always present the past

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to something so cosy
and actually not alien at all?

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If it is, finally, do can we go there?

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Do we have a visa?

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Do we have the passport that we need?

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Historians might actually go further,
say that it's a foreign country,

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that it's actually an imaginary country,
that is more Narnia than France,

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because of course the extraordinary thing
about the past is, that it was,

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and it is not.

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History is the study
of something that doesn't exist,

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and sometimes it feels like
the veil between us and the past

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is therefore great.

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Thankfully there are footprints
in the snow for us to follow,

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should we choose to go.

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History in the popular media
tends to be something

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that stresses the similarities
between us and them,

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so that they were people who ate,
people who slept, people who fell in love,

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who, you know, needed to wash,
who hoped, believed, dreamed and died,

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just as we will do.

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In fact, Julian Trevelyan said:

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"The poetry of history
is the quasi-miraculous fact,

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that once on this earth,
on this familiar spot of ground,

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walked other people,
other men and women,

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as actual as we are today,

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thinking their own thoughts,
swayed by their own passions,

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but now all gone,

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one generation vanishing after another,

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gone as utterly as we ourselves
are shortly be gone,

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like ghost at cock-crow."

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When you get to come across history
in the popular media,

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you tend to come across stories
that tell you things that you know.

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The great disaster of Titanic
is portrayed as a love story.

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The Other Boleyn Girl which has Eric Bana,
Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman,

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re-immagines Tudor History
as chick-lit sibling rivalry.

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Fahrd takes arguably a treasonous criminal
and makes him into a freedom fighter.

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A film like The Duchess, which is
the story of an 18th century aristocrat,

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had the strap line:

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"There were three in their marriage."

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It came out just a year
after the death of Princess Diana.

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Often actually what we hear about
is a story of shared emotions

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with the past.

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I used to work at Hampton Court Palace,

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as part of an exhibition there
on Katherine of Aragon, Henry the Eighth

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and Cardinal Wolsey.

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There is a doorway

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which has inscriptions of all the children
who died soon after birth,

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or were still births, or miscarriages
of Katherine of Aragon.

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One academic we worked with
said he had always known that,

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but it was only when he saw it
on this doorway,

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which looks a little bit like a tomb,

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that he really felt it,
he felt that connection to the past.

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This is history as sympathy,
this is creating connections.

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Perhaps we stress this,

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because if we feel that we can
learn lessons from the past,

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we have to assume that there is
something meaningful in those lessons.

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There can only be something meaningful,
if we are essentially like them.

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"History doesn't repeat itself,
but it rhymes," said Mark Twain.

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Dan Snow came to talk to my students
at the New College of Humanities and said,

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"The past doesn't repeat itself,
but its the best guide we've got."

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Perhaps ask why we stress
the familiarity with the past.

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Our interest in the past is because
we are really interested in ourselves.

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I'm going to put it like this:

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History ought never to be
confused with nostalgia.

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It is written not to revere the dead,

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but to inspire the living.

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It's our cultural blood stream,
the secret of who we are.

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Perhaps that's why

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"Who do you think you are?"
is such a popular program.

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This is all about our story.

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If we do look
at the differences in the past,

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the differences we tend to look at
are external, superficial ones.

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So if you look at reality TV programs
you know, 1900's House, 1940's House,

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they point to things
like they don't have electricity,

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or they have different clothes,

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or they wash with lye
rather than shower gel.

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This is the past,
there's hardship and privation.

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This is history, it's something
that's dirty and messy and painful.

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They're people like us, but they
are just in harder circumstances.

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Again the question comes to us:

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"What would we do in such circumstances?"

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This is history as progress,
this is a weakfish version of history.

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I think that explains partly
at least the fascination

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that we have with horrible histories.

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Terry Deary's Horrible Histories have
sold something like twenty million copies,

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since they launched in 1993,
have been translated into 31 languages.

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They market themselves
as "history with the nasty bits left in."

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Of course we are slightly
perversely fascinated by gore.

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But it's also about history
being to congratulate ourselves,

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to suggest that we are very humane:

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"How civilized we are,
we don't do these things to people."

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What we look for in films,
and we call it authenticity,

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that those external details
often is quite superficial.

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It might, for example,
come down to making sure

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they've got the right clothes on,

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although quite often we change that

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so it fits to present day
standards of attractiveness as well.

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Tom Hanks was the producer
on Band of Brothers and he said,

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"There are two types of authenticity,

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the one that says that you got
all the buttons right,

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that the ammunition is correct, 


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that the buildings look
as they looked in the photo."

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That is relatively easy to achieve.

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But then there's a thing
that is much harder.

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There's literally the motivations,

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and the nature of the interplay
between the characters,

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because he says,

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"If we can't be absolutely truthful
to what they said and did

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at any given time,

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we can at least be
as authentic as possible,

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so that it still adheres to the framework
of the reality of being there and then."

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I would suggest there's
a third type of authenticity,

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the one that we don't go near.

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This is the one that says the past
is so very different from our own,

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that we fail to understand it,
because we only understand our own time.

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That is because

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people in the past had different
mental and imaginative worlds to us.

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The annals historians
have called this Montallite,

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the mentalities of these people.

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Perhaps this is the difference between
popular history and academic history.

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Is popular history
more interested in the similarities,

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rather than the differences?

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You can particularly notice, when you look
at attitudes towards sex and religion.

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If you read a historical novel,
or you see a film,

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for example, Phillipa Gregory's books.

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Wonderful historical novels,
that transport you back to the past.

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But quite often the women in them
tend to be essentially proto-feminists

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and their attitudes
towards sex tend to be:

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'It's quite a good thing,
lets get on with it,'

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which before the age of the Pill,

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before there was any reliable conception,

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isn't congruent with the age of the past.

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How about religion?

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Rochefoucauld in the 17th century said,

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"There's always something ridiculous
about the emotions of people

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that one has ceased to love.

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If in modern Britain many people
have fallen out of love with God,

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we shouldn't underestimate

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quite how intoxicating a power
he had in centuries past."

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Make sure, the things you read have
that sense of reality about world views.

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This is perhaps why Hillary Mantel's books
have been so popular and so prize-winning.

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Because although she creates characters,

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historical characters
like Chromewell, for example,

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from her own imagination,
as is the novelist's prerogative,

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she does actually immerse herself
into the world of the past.

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I remember being delighted,
when I read "Wolf Hall",

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realizing that she had identified

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that to call something new
in the 16th century was not a compliment.

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We have faint echoes of these ideas now.

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The word novelty carries
something of the hostility and suspicion

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that the new had in an age,

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when the traditional and the ancient
were very powerful things,

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and had a powerful hold on the Tudor mind.

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It's only when we begin to grasp
how different the past was,

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how differently people thought in the past

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that we can begin to comprehend

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some of the more bizarre behaviours
and beliefs of the past.

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Let me give you a few examples
from the period I work on.

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In the end of the 16th century,
the beginning of the 17th century,

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across Europe 40,000 to 50,000
people, mostly old women,

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where executed as witches.

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In the 16th century in England,
beggars where whipped.

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In 1547 it was ordered
that vagabonds, the homeless,

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should be branded on the chest
with a V made with a hot iron.

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In 1572 a new statue suggested
that they should be grievously whipped

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and they should be branded
through the ear hole

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with a hot iron, an inch in diameter.

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In 17th century Vienna, a common practice,
when a criminal was beheaded,

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was for someone suffering from what
was known as the falling sickness

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to rush in with a jug,

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scoop up the hot spurting blood
down it in one, and then sprint off.

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This was thought to cure epilepsy.

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In London around the same time,
1665, during The Great Plague,

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the chamberlain of the city ordered
200,000 cats and 40,000 dogs to be culled,

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because it was thought
they spread the plague.

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Women, perhaps this
is the most bizarre one of all,

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since the time of Aristotle
through till about the 18th century,

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where thought to be deformed men.

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Their uterus where inverted peneses.

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They just hadn't had enough heat
to push them out of their body

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and of course this produced
a great anxiety.

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Occasionally, they had stories circulating
of a woman or a girl leaping over a fence

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and then gosh there she discovered
she was a man, her penis fell out.

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Of course, if it could be done like that,
it could be reversed as well.

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There was a certain anxiety
about being a man in early modern England.

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We have a tendency to look at the past
and think, they were just like us.

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What was going on inside their heads
was really, really different.

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If we are going to get any insight
from those TV reality shows at all,

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perhaps it comes when they fall down.

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In 1940's House,
the war committee as it were,

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gave them rabbits to eat
and the family refused to eat them,

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because of course they had
the mentality of today.

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In one called The Trench,

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where a group of young boys pretended

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to go to have an experience of being
on the front line in World War One,

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a Corporal brought along a grey coat
of one who had said to have fallen,

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there was something quite poignant
and completely ridiculous about the moment

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because of course, the chap hadn't fallen,
he hadn't died, he'd just left the show.

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The reality of that moment
for what it must have been like

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to lose a friend, a companion,
in World War One, was still missing.

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How we view the past matters,

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whether we see it as foreign or familiar,

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particularly, for example, it matters
in questions of moral judgement.

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Can we judge the past?

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Academic historians generally say no.

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We need to try and understand it.

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We need to give it
all the respect it's due.

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When you think
of the Holocaust and Hitler,

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when you think of slavery,
would it not be wrong to judge?

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The historian Collin Wood said,

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"To pass moral judgement on the past,
is to fall into the fallacy of imagining

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that somewhere behind a veil,
the past is still happening,

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as if it's now being enacted
in the next room,

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and we ought to break in and stop it.

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These things have been, they are over,
there is nothing to be done about them."

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We need to seek to understand the past.

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But we need not to do
just historical clothing,

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that we always call costume,
for some reason I never understand.

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We need to don their mind-set,
we need to get out our guidebooks.

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Is the past a foreign country?

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Yes, very much so.

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But it's different in ways
that we haven't imagined.

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It's a bit like saying that France isn't
so different because they eat baguettes,

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but because they think nothing odd

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about having a mistress
and a wife at a funeral.

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They just have a different mentality.

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Why do we make the past so cosy?

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I would suggest it's because the past
is not just foreign, it's also dangerous.

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We have a sense that, behind that veil,
there are glinting swords and barred teeth

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that if we actually knew

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what went on in the past
and what went on in their minds,

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we might understand a bit more
about the human condition

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than we really want to.

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But I would suggest too that,
if we wanted to get to that foreign land,

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we have to be as it said the Macbeth:
"bold, bloody and resolute."

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We need to be brave,

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we need to step through the looking glass,

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into the other side,

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and not keep on
gazing at our own reflections.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)