I’ve been watching some of the TV series ‘Rome’ and quite enjoying it, despite all the rude comments it’s gathered. Nothing in it quite lives up to the promise of the title sequence, with the ingenious animated graffiti, but overall it manages to avoid the worst problems: that of reminding you too much of ‘Up Pompeii’. I’ll say at once that I’m not enough of a classicist to say if there are any howling errors on the culture/material side. I think it does show some bravery at least in being prepared to show ‘good’ characters (Vorenus, Caesar) as exploiting slaves and hitting women and thus showing they’re no more enlightened than the rest of the age. (I always find it irritating in historical novels when characters have very distinctively twentieth-first century views on race, sexual equality etc).

There was a scathing review by the classicist Robin Lane Fox (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1606415,00.html), although as the historical advisor to the recent film ‘Alexander’, (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,,1353955,00.html on how he rode with the cavalry charges in the film) he’s possibly now in a weaker position to complain about onscreen inaccuracies. His main complaint was the correct one that you don’t really get any sense about the politics of the conflict. That got me wondering if it was realistic to expect to be able to do this. For a start, you would have to go back a lot further in time to get a clear understanding: the First Triumvirate, which I’ve seen suggested as the start of the civil war, was ten years before Caesar crossing the Rubicon. (Colleen McCullough’s long series of books on Rome goes even further back, to Marius and Sulla 50 years earlier, before getting to Caesar in about book 4). But I think there’s a more fundamental problem about the politics: how would you get people now to care about the fall of the Roman Republic?

The Roman Republic had a lot of emotional resonance until relatively recently: in the eighteenth century it was still seen as far preferable to the ‘demagoguery’ of Athens. Now though, I think Athenian democracy (despite all its flaws) has far more prestige than Roman government. More recent studies on the Republic have also shown how undemocratic it was, and how much it was a matter of patronage and faction more than ideology. For a modern audience, it’s therefore hard to see that the suppression of an oligarchy in favour of a monarchy is really so terrible. Trying to explain why Caesar’s actions so appalled someone like Cato is rather like trying to explain to a modern secular world why the Monophysite controversy mattered so much in early medieval Byzantium. The most you could do is show why it mattered to them, and even that is hard to do in a TV drama (not a good medium for the discussion of complex ideas).

A copy of the planned statement by the Pope on gay priests has been leaked prior to publication (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4463748.stm). The full text is at http://www.adistaonline.it/congregatio.PDF, but your Italian needs to be better than mine to get all the nuances. What it seems to imply is that candidates for the priesthood will not be accepted if they are gay, regardless of whether or not they are committed to/capable of celibacy. Their orientation alone is seen as preventing them being suitable for the priesthood.

I can see why the Vatican might be panicking in response to all the sexual scandals that have come out recently about abusive Catholic priests. But this ruling seems to me to be sending extremely negative signals to any gay Catholics. All the Vatican claims that they should not be discriminated about ring pretty hollow. The ruling implies that while straight priests can withstand the temptations to break the vows of celibacy, gays cannot. Gays are thus seen not only as ‘objectively disordered’, but implicitly as incapable of celibacy. This view is in odd contrast to the hardline Protestant view, in which straight men can only rarely be expected to be celibate (and hence a married priesthood must be allowed), but gays of either sex must be celibate, since they have no legitimate means of expressing their sexuality.

The Catholic church’s rejection of celibate gays also seems to me to be an historically odd view of celibacy. The point about celibacy is abstention from sex: what you abstain from is secondary. The Desert Fathers knew that women, boys and even the monastic donkeys could be a temptation. (Peter Brown, ‘The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity’ has lots of racy anecdotes, plus very sympathetic analysis of the theology). There are several medieval monks/clerics who have been frequently been suspected as being celibate gays: Aelred of Rievaulx is the most commonly mentioned example.

The real problem, in the end, may be less about sexual orientation than power. There’s an interesting article in the latest London Review of Books on the Irish scandals (see http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n23/toib01_.html). Colm Tóibín comments:

When the Ferns Report came out, I was eager to read it because I had known these three men. I had believed that the problem lay in their becoming priests. If they had gone to Holland or San Francisco, I believed, they would now be happily married to their boyfriends. But as I read the report, I began to think that this was hardly the issue. Instead, the level of abuse in Ferns and the Church’s way of handling it seemed an almost intrinsic part of the Church’s search for power.

But for the Catholic church to change its view on the power and status of priests would open a whole different can of worms.

A case is being brought by Sue Axon to challenge the right of health professionals to give sexual health information and treatment (including contraception and abortion advice) to children without their parents’ knowledge. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/child/story/0,,1637418,00.html.) She claims this breaches article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to respect for family life. This isn’t a simple repeat of the Victoria Gillick case, who argued that parental consent was necessary for giving contraception to under-age girls: Sue Axon just wants the right to know. But it’s going to be difficult to argue that a child has the right to make possibly fairly drastic decisions about their own health treatment, but not the right to decide who should know about them. And if you demand parental notification, you’re then going to get very difficult cases about whether girls are being effectively coerced into having/not having an abortion by their families. Parents have a lot of leverage over children, up to and including throwing them out of the household if they don’t do as they want, and it’s possible they may abuse it.

I can have some sympathy with Sue Axon’s point of view: she is saying that parents should be available to support a girl who is making a very difficult decision about abortion, and she’s prompted by regrets about an abortion she once had. But it seems to me that she’s wrong to try and argue for a legal remedy for this problem. (There are parallels here to Bitch PhD’s comments on spousal notification as morally obligatory versus legally obligatory ((see http://haloscan.com/tb/bitchphd/113141609567346086). The law has to be there for all cases, including the worst, and clearly there are some cases where it would be wrong or actively harmful to inform the parents (e.g. if there’s suspicion of abuse). And it’s almost impossible to think of a way of deciding judicially what such cases should be. How realistic would it be to have confidential judicial hearings, for example, for a child to argue that their right of confidentiality should be preserved? I think you have to have a right to confidentiality, and then you have to have strong guidance to health professionals (as there is already) to do everything they can to encourage children to talk to their parents. The Family Planning Association seems to have made a rather arrogant and poorly worded response in the case (judging by the report at http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1640257,00.html), but the statement on their website (http://www.fpa.org.uk/news/press/051107.htm) is better and makes the good point that fears about confidentiality would put a lot of children about seeking advice on any sexual matters.

There also seems to me a rather tragic air about the case, that there wasn’t about the Gillick one. Mrs Axon is seeking to prevent her children suffering in the way she did, but even if she got her way, it would not have altered anything in her case, since she was of age when she had an abortion. Meanwhile, it has been reported that her oldest daughter has become pregnant since Mrs Axon began bringing the case (http://www.guardian.co.uk/child/story/0,,1639368,00.html). Since the girl’s 16 it’s not clear that any supposed change would actually have affected the outcome. But I do wonder whether Mrs Axon’s concentration on the case has affected the time and energy she’s had available to give her own children. As for her argument that the pregnancy was encouraged by the availability of confidential advice, that’s pretty weak. The one thing that’s clear is that the daughter didn’t get advice about contraception or abortion (or at least didn’t follow it).

Among the many articles on the French riots, there was an interesting summary of the different approaches to immigrants that France, the US and Britain took by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1637189,00.html). The problem he mentions with affirming a common British identity (it seems to me) is at least partly due to the collapse of belief in and even interest in a lot of national myths. Such national myths may need to be debunked periodically by historians, but they’re at least a starting point for a common sense of Britishness.

I think the problem of Britishness versus Englishness is something of a side-issue. You could argue that Britishness no longer works as a concept because of devolution/Scots nationalism etc, or conversely, that the reason there’s no English identity is because it was submerged in a British one for getting on for 400 years. But given the dominance of England within the UK (just in terms of size/population), I think it’s still possible to construct an overall British national myth which comes in a few different local variants (just as in the US you can have the coexistence of an American myth/identity and a Southern myth/identity).

The real problem is that most of the previous or possible myths no longer seem to have any meaning for most of the population: they’ve either become obsolete or are unacceptable in some other way. Here’s a brief review of some possibilities:

1) The Monarchy. I’m old enough to remember the genuine excitement about the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 (an excitement also seen for Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981). The Golden Jubilee in 2002, by contrast, almost passed me by. I’m a monarchist in the sense that I’m happy to have the Queen as ceremonial Head of State, but as a medieval historian, the Windsors are never going to have the thrill to me that the Plantagenet dynasty (or indeed the Carolingians) have. But I think England (I’m less sure about the rest of the UK) did have a real sense of pride in the monarchy that is now pretty much lost. And the blame largely needs to be put on Charles and Diana. Part of the problem for the myth of monarchy is that we now know more about the private lives of the royals. [The fatal blow to Prince Charles’ hopes of any respect was probably the revelation that he his valet has to put his toothpaste on his toothbrush]. Diana’s Panorama interview was possible the key moment here. But it’s also that the younger royals have broken the psychological contract with the British people. Figurehead monarchs/members of the royal family either have to be quietly conscientious (whether in the bicycle riding way or something more extravagant) or glamorous. Prince Charles in contrast, seems to combines a lack of concern about other’s feelings (as shown especially in his marriage) with a wish to wallow in his own. There are few things more unappealing than a privileged man exhibiting self-pity. I don’t think Britain is going to be a republic any time soon, but I also can’t see the monarchy easily regaining its symbolic power.

2) Empire and Commonwealth. It’s hard in the late twentieth century to build an acceptable ideology out of the British Empire (unless you’re an extreme right-winger), but there was once a serious attempt to make something of the Commonwealth, as a now peaceful association of nations across the world. This myth did have the advantage of being multiracial, but it’s now so dead that it’s impossible to revive: apart from the Queen, I’m not sure there are any true believers now.

3) Britain in Europe. It would in theory be possible to create a great national myth of us as a European nation. You could then link the Middle Ages to the EU and say we’re now reclaiming our rightful place at the ‘heart of Europe’ (in Tony Blair’s phrase). The myth of Europe itself is somewhat problematic: historically Europe is largely white Christendom and so it’s a potentially exclusionary myth. But the bigger problem is that there is such antipathy to the EU and so little understanding of Britain’s positive historical links to the rest of Europe that I don’t see an easy way of changing general perceptions. (It’s not helped by the fact that University history departments are still often implicitly divided up into British/European/World history. Anglo-Saxonists are among the most insular).

4) British Constitution. The development of the British Constitution was a key part of the Whig narrative/myth of history as progress. As it’s an unwritten constitution, however, the bits that has been fetishised have largely not been documents (I’m not sure even I really know what’s in Magna Carta or the UK Bill of Rights), but institutions - in particular the monarchy (see above) and the Houses of Parliament. Since Parliament has itself become less relevant (partly through the growth of a presidential style of government and as a side-effect of being in the EU), it’s hard to make this myth inspiring in its current form. I think it would be productive to try and create a new more liberal/socialist myth of this in which the emphasis was on increasing human rights and democracy. You could possibly find a line via the Levellers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and Lord Shaftesbury to the Human Rights Act that was distinctively English/British. (It’s somehow very English, for example, that the group symbolising the struggle for trade union rights comes not from the industrial heartlands of Britain, but an obscure Dorset town on the River Piddle). But until this national history finds a spokesman who is as eloquent as Tony Benn, but less clearly nutty, it’s not going to get anywhere.

5) Really obsolete myths. Britain as the workshop of the world (died about 1900?), Britain as a Protestant nation (clearly dead when Prince Charles’ wedding was postponed so the Prime Minister could attend Pope John Paul II’s funeral), ‘the New Elizabethan Age’ (did this survive more than a year or two after 1953?), Our Island Story/Splendid Isolation (there are still attempts to revive this, but it clearly bears no relation to modern life).

6) What we’re left with. Depressingly, the British/English myth we’re left with is largely summed up by the English football supporters’ slogan: ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’, with the addition of hating the French. The only historical anniversaries that now seem to resonate are about WW2 and Trafalgar. (I bet in 10 years time even Waterloo won’t attract such excitement, because it wasn’t just Us against the Frogs). Defining our history largely through war seems to me to be a profoundly depressing development. (And we don’t actually have that many sporting triumphs to celebrate). Basing a national myth on victory this way also means that our identity means constant jeering at the losers. And though you could add a multicultural element to this myth (the Indians on the Western Front, the Poles in the RAF), in practice it’s normally seen as an Anglo-Saxon triumph only.
The upmarket version of this national myth is Atlanticism and the Special Relationship. The idea of an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy still seems to worry the French, but it doesn’t seem to me to offer anything much to the UK. The Special Relationship now seems to me much like the relationship between a cat and a lion: they may have common origins, but the cat’s going to get a nasty shock if it expects more favours than a few leftovers. (As for Macmillan’s ideas of the British as Greeks to the US as Romans - yes, they take our best ideas, use them to help make themselves an even more dominant power and then sneer at us as effete losers).

We need something better. I’m just not sure at the moment what we ought to be trying for or how to get it. Any suggestions?

I can’t remember how I found this quote (from http://www.loriswebs.com/lorispoetry/index.html) but it’s a classic:

Writing poetry is like giving birth. Sometimes it takes months for the seed to germinate in your head until its ready to be born; you cannot control when it will appear; you cannot force it before its time, and you cannot stop it once it decides to arrive. Sometimes the birth is painful, but it only hurts for a little while. The end result is a beautiful new creation for all your efforts.

I leave it up to others to read the poetry on the site and decide whether or not there is an argument that some poems should also be aborted.

The free parenting magazine I get (Right Start) had an article in a recent issue reporting a survey of mothers’ working hours (extract at http://www.rightstartmagazine.co.uk/?pid=3098&lsid=3098&edname=18899.htm&ped=18899). It said that the average mother was busy for 100 hours a week, which broke down as:

41 hours childcare
25 hours paid employment
9 hours cooking
6 hours cleaning and dusting
6 hours laundry
5 hours travel (including school run)
5 hours washing up/loading dishwasher
3 hours vacuuming

Some of these figures look suspicious to me. I suspect, for example, that there’s probably some double counting of housework done while also caring for children. The amount of time spent on housework also suggests that women are either exaggerating or obsessive (the survey was run by a fabric conditioning firm, so may have attracted the cleanliness fanatics). For example, to vacuum the whole of our largish house (upstairs and downstairs) would take about an hour - I don’t think most houses would need cleaning this thoroughly every other day.

In the spirit of the survey, I decided to estimate my own time patterns in a typical week:

50 hours childcare, cooking and housework (these are difficult to separate out)
25-30 hours study (at peak effectiveness when I was working on the thesis, some of this now gets diverted to blogging and other distractions)
3 hours travelling

50 hours sleeping
35-40 hours remaining

What this suggests is that I don’t work as hard as some mothers, partly probably because I’ve only got one child, but largely because I’m something of a slob who has married a man prepared to do a reasonable share of the domestic stuff and childcare. On the other hand, I still reckon I’m working harder than a childless slob in a moderately demanding job, where the breakdown might be about as follows:

40 hours work
10 hours travelling
15 hours cooking/housework

56 hours sleep
47 hours remaining

In other words I may not be working as hard as some mothers (or their claims are exaggerated), but I’m still probably working harder than I did before I had L, when I was in full time employment. I'm also paid much less (=nothing) and often more stressed. So what's this about the joys of motherhood?

I’ve been writing an article on Carolingian mirrors for princes (which is why the blog has been a bit neglected), which has got me worried about the whole concept of mirrors for princes and lay mirrors as genres. The problem is reading several articles which seems to be to define the genre so tightly as to exclude a large number of examples. Alain Dubreucq, for example, argues that a lay mirror must theorise the lay condition, which seems to me to mean that there’s only one lay mirror in the Carolingian period, Jonas of Orleans’ De institutione laicali (instead of four or five texts, which I would argue for). This got me worrying more generally about whether a modern imposition of genre labels is useful or not.

Historians are always, of course, discussing the past in terms that contemporaries wouldn’t have used. But in this case, I wonder whether it is meaningful to talk about texts as being in a particular genre/tradition if the authors’ aren’t consciously writing in this genre. It’s only when an author is conscious of writing a text that belongs to a particular category, and then chooses either to conform or modify/subvert the conventions of the genre, that the genre idea really becomes useful as an analytical tool. If you’re writing a history of science fiction, you may want to trace it back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but I’m not sure how much extra insight labelling the text as SF actually gives you.

There are some early medieval genres which authors at the period were conscious of, for example, history writing, hagiography, Biblical exegesis. But I’m not sure that lay mirrors or mirrors for princes come into this category. They seem to me to be an unrealistically simplified way to pin down something that has at least three aspects: the aim of a text, the intended audience and the form of a text. These are all aspects that are willed (if sometimes not actually realised successfully) by any author. In that sense you can partially define a lay mirror/mirror for princes as one addressed to a specific layperson or ruler and intended for their moral instruction (at least till you get to Machiavelli, the aim is explicitly morally uplifting). The problem is that, at least for princes, there are an awful lot of texts in the Carolingian period of varying forms that have this aim and audience.

What has tended to happen, therefore, is that a particular subset of these texts in form (moderately substantial prose works) have tended to be designated as mirrors for princes. Then the content of these is analysed, in the hope of finding some coherent themes. (The problem is, even then, there isn’t much commonality). Some scholars have wanted to limit the subset even further, but I think they can end up tending to put the cart before the horse and (possibly unconsciously) choosing a group of texts as the representatives of a genre and then producing a definition that includes only them.

Is the concept of ‘mirrors for princes’ useful at all? It does work as a shorthand for texts across the ages which share an audience and function, and thus allows comparative studies. (The collection I’m writing this article for looks at mirrors from antiquity to modernity). But, at least for the Carolingian period, it’s a fairly arbitrary label, and thus potentially misleading. I started doing my thesis on lay moral instruction focusing on the lay mirrors, but soon realised that it was unrealistic to exclude so many other relevant texts. So my studies expanded to fill a vast field of ‘works for a lay audience with a moral message’, and I still had to use arbitrary limits to exclude some categories of material. I worry that maybe the only purpose of the label ‘mirrors for princes’ is to produce a manageably small corpus of texts: it’s noticeable that Hans Hubert Anton’s work on the Carolingian ruler ethos, which has a fairly wide definition of mirrors, is a long book. In my article I don’t problematise the label lay mirrors or mirrors for princes - instead I try and show that some mirrors for princes have a different tone from discussions of ordinary lay morality. But I’m not sure (though I don’t say so), whether it’s just the particular texts I’ve chosen that fit this pattern, or whether if you include all the relevant texts you can detect any patterns/themes at all. The article’s due in soon and is already bumping against the word limit, so I will have to cop out of discussing these issues in it. Another on my long list of issues to consider in further research, I guess.