Hello, my topic for you today is:
Is the past a foreign country?
That is of course the first line of L.P. Hartley's book "The Go-Between":
"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."
My question for you today is: "Is it?"
If it is, why does popular culture always present the past
to something so cosy and actually not alien at all?
If it is, finally, do can we go there?
Do we have a visa?
Do we have the passport that we need?
Historians might actually go further, say that it's a foreign country,
that it's actually an imaginary country, that is more Narnia than France,
because of course the extraordinary thing about the past is, that it was,
and it is not.
History is the study of something that doesn't exist,
and sometimes it feels like the veil between us and the past
is therefore great.
Thankfully there are footprints in the snow for us to follow,
should we choose to go.
History in the popular media tends to be something
that stresses the similarities between us and them,
so that they were people who ate, people who slept, people who fell in love,
who, you know, needed to wash, who hoped, believed, dreamed and died,
just as we would do.
In fact, G.M. Trevelyan said:
"The poetry of history is the quasi-miraculous fact,
that once on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground,
walked other people, other men and women,
as actual as we are today,
thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions,
but now all gone,
one generation vanishing after another,
gone as utterly as we ourselves are shortly be gone,
like ghost at cock-crow."
When you get to come across history in the popular media,
you tend to come across stories that tell you things that you know.
The great disaster of Titanic is portrayed as a love story.
The Other Boleyn Girl which has Eric Bana, Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman,
re-immagines Tudor History as chick-lit sibling rivalry.
Fahrd takes arguably a treasonous criminal and makes him into a freedom fighter.
A film like The Duchess, which is the story of an 18th century aristocrat,
had the strap line:
"There were three in their marriage."
It came out just a year after the death of Princess Diana.
Often actually what we hear about is a story of shared emotions
with the past.
I used to work at Hampton Court Palace,
as part of an exhibition there on Katherine of Aragon, Henry the Eighth
and Cardinal Wolsey.
There is a doorway
which has inscriptions of all the children who died soon after birth,
or were still births, or miscarriages of Katherine of Aragon.
One academic we worked with said he had always known that,
but it was only when he saw it on this doorway,
which looks a little bit like a tomb,
that he really felt it, he felt that connection to the past.
This is history as sympathy, this is creating connections.
Perhaps we stress this,
because if we feel that we can learn lessons from the past,
we have to assume that there is something meaningful in those lessons.
There can only be something meaningful, if we are essentially like them.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes," said Mark Twain.
Dan Snow came to talk to my students at the New College of Humanities and said,
"The past doesn't repeat itself, but its the best guide we've got."
Perhaps ask why we stress the familiarity with the past.
Our interest in the past is because we are really interested in ourselves.
I'm going to put it like this:
History ought never to be confused with nostalgia.
It is written not to revere the dead,
but to inspire the living.
It's our cultural blood stream, the secret of who we are.
Perhaps that's why
"Who do you think you are?" is such a popular program.
This is all about our story.
If we do look at the differences in the past,
the differences we tend to look at are external, superficial ones.
So if you look at reality TV programs you know, 1900's House, 1940's House,
they point to things like they don't have electricity,
or they have different clothes,
or they wash with lye rather than shower gel.
This is the past, there's hardship and privation.
This is history, it's something that's dirty and messy and painful.
They're people like us, but they are just in harder circumstances.
Again the question comes to us:
"What would we do in such circumstances?"
This is history as progress, this is a weakish version of history.
I think that explains partly at least the fascination
that we have with horrible histories.
Terry Deary's Horrible Histories have sold something like twenty million copies,
since they launched in 1993, have been translated into 31 languages.
They market themselves as "history with the nasty bits left in."
Of course we are slightly perversely fascinated by gore.
But it's also about history being to congratulate ourselves,
to suggest that we are very humane:
"How civilized we are, we don't do these things to people."
What we look for in films, and we call it authenticity,
that those external details often is quite superficial.
It might, for example, come down to making sure
they've got the right clothes on,
although quite often we change that
so it fits to present day standards of attractiveness as well.
Tom Hanks was the producer on Band of Brothers and he said,
"There are two types of authenticity,
the one that says that you got all the buttons right,
that the ammunition is correct,
that the buildings look as they looked in the photo."
That is relatively easy to achieve.
But then there's a thing that is much harder.
There's literally the motivations,
and the nature of the interplay between the characters,
because he says,
"If we can't be absolutely truthful to what they said and did
at any given time,
we can at least be as authentic as possible,
so that it still adheres to the framework of the reality of being there and then."
I would suggest there's a third type of authenticity,
the one that we don't go near.
This is the one that says the past is so very different from our own,
that we fail to understand it, because we only understand our own time.
That is because
people in the past had different mental and imaginative worlds to us.
The annals historians have called this mentalité,
the mentalities of these people.
Perhaps this is the difference between popular history and academic history.
Is popular history more interested in the similarities,
rather than the differences?
You can particularly notice, when you look at attitudes towards sex and religion.
If you read a historical novel, or you see a film,
for example, Phillipa Gregory's books,
wonderful historical novels, that transport you back to the past.
But quite often the women in them tend to be essentially proto-feminists
and their attitudes towards sex tend to be:
'It's quite a good thing, lets get on with it,'
which before the age of the Pill,
before there was any reliable conception,
isn't congruent with the age of the past.
How about religion?
Rochefoucauld in the 17th century said,
"There's always something ridiculous about the emotions of people
that one has ceased to love".
If in modern Britain many people have fallen out of love with God,
we shouldn't underestimate
quite how intoxicating a power he had in centuries past.
Make sure the things you read have that sense of reality about world views.
This is perhaps why Hillary Mantel's books have been so popular and so prize-winning.
Because although she creates characters,
historical characters like Chromewell, for example,
from her own imagination, as is the novelist's prerogative,
she does actually immerse herself into the world of the past.
I remember being delighted, when I read "Wolf Hall",
realizing that she had identified
that to call something new in the 16th century was not a compliment.
We have faint echoes of these ideas now.
The word novelty carries something of the hostility and suspicion
that the new had in an age,
when the traditional and the ancient were very powerful things,
and had a powerful hold on the Tudor mind.
It's only when we begin to grasp how different the past was,
how differently people thought in the past
that we can begin to comprehend
some of the more bizarre behaviours and beliefs of the past.
Let me give you a few examples from the period I work on.
In the end of the 16th century, the beginning of the 17th century,
across Europe 40,000 to 50,000 people, mostly old women,
where executed as witches.
In the 16th century in England, beggars where whipped.
In 1547 it was ordered that vagabonds, the homeless,
should be branded on the chest with a V made with a hot iron.
In 1572 a new statute suggested that they should be grievously whipped
and they should be branded through the ear hole
with a hot iron, an inch in diameter.
In 17th century Vienna, a common practice, when a criminal was beheaded,
was for someone suffering from what was known as the falling sickness
to rush in with a jug,
scoop up the hot spurting blood down it in one, and then sprint off.
This was thought to cure epilepsy.
In London around the same time, 1665, during The Great Plague,
the chamberlain of the city ordered 200,000 cats and 40,000 dogs to be culled,
because it was thought they spread the plague.
Women, perhaps this is the most bizarre one of all,
since the time of Aristotle through till about the 18th century,
where thought to be deformed men.
Their uterus were inverted penises.
They just hadn't had enough heat to push them out of their body
and of course this produced a great anxiety.
Occasionally, they had stories circulating of a woman or a girl leaping over a fence
and then gosh there she discovered she was a man, her penis fell out.
Of course, if it could be done like that, it could be reversed as well.
There was a certain anxiety about being a man in early modern England.
We have a tendency to look at the past and think, they were just like us.
What was going on inside their heads was really, really different.
If we are going to get any insight from those TV reality shows at all,
perhaps it comes when they fall down.
In 1940's House, the war committee as it were,
gave them rabbits to eat and the family refused to eat them,
because of course they had the mentality of today.
In one called The Trench,
where a group of young boys pretended
to go to have an experience of being on the front line in World War One,
a Corporal brought along a grey coat of one who had said to have fallen,
there was something quite poignant and completely ridiculous about the moment
because of course, the chap hadn't fallen, he hadn't died, he'd just left the show.
The reality of that moment of what it must have been like
to lose a friend, a companion, in World War One, was still missing.
How we view the past matters,
whether we see it as foreign or familiar,
particularly, for example, it matters in questions of moral judgement.
Can we judge the past?
Academic historians generally say no.
We need to try and understand it.
We need to give it all the respect it's due.
When you think of the Holocaust and Hitler,
when you think of slavery, would it not be wrong to judge?
The historian Collingwood said,
"To pass moral judgement on the past, is to fall into the fallacy of imagining
that somewhere behind a veil, the past is still happening,
as if it's now being enacted in the next room,
and we ought to break in and stop it.
These things have been, they are over, there is nothing to be done about them."
We need to seek to understand the past.
But we need not to do just historical clothing,
that we always call costume, for some reason I never understand.
We need to don their mind-set, we need to get out our guidebooks.
Is the past a foreign country?
Yes, very much so.
But it's different in ways that we haven't imagined.
It's a bit like saying that France isn't so different because they eat baguettes,
but because they think nothing odd
about having a mistress and a wife at a funeral.
They just have a different mentality.
Why do we make the past so cosy?
I would suggest it's because the past is not just foreign, it's also dangerous.
We have a sense that, behind that veil, there are glinting swords and barred teeth
that if we actually knew
what went on in the past and what went on in their minds,
we might understand a bit more about the human condition
than we really want to.
But I would suggest too that, if we wanted to get to that foreign land,
we have to be as it said the Macbeth: "bold, bloody and resolute."
We need to be brave,
we need to step through the looking glass,
into the other side,
and not keep on gazing at our own reflections.
Thank you.
(Applause)