‘The Butcher of England’ in Ireland

I am looking forward to visiting, this coming week, the University of Cork, where I will be giving a lecture entitled ‘ “The Butcher of England”, a Renaissance man: John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester and the Yorkist discovery of humanist eloquence’. I do not seem to be able to get away from Tiptoft, Constable of England, Lieutenant of Ireland, notorious for both his bloodthirsty nature and his status as ‘a Renaissance Prince’. I am hoping to do something new in this talk, tailored to my hosts: I am going to attempt to combine codicological discussion with an overview of changes in Latin style in fifteenth-century England.  The purpose of this post is to provide those who are planning to attend  (and those who, though absent, can conjure up a concept of what the evening will be like) with a sneak preview. I have produced a few pages comprising some of the texts to which I will refer (it is a Word document) — close reading of them beforehand is not essential, and to avoid disappointment, I should emphasise that there will be brief discussion of them. Those who do look at them will, I suspect, not find it hard quickly to grasp the line of argument of the paper.

For those who are less interested in the niceties of Latin epistolography, the lecture will also provide — the gods of Powerpoint willing — some visual stimulation. The argument will be underpinned by discussion of my research into the library of John Tiptoft. It was a collection which, in the middle of the twentieth century, was lamented as being nearly completed lost. We can now identify over thirty manuscripts from the collection, and for those who are interested, they can view the present list on this website.

I hope that these resources provide some intellectual nourishment — not that a whole meal, more an amuse-bouche for this coming week.

Update: Today, 1st December, I have also upload my handout for the talk, as a pdf.

In Praise of the Simple: an open letter of C. S. L. Davies

Dear Cliff,

To review a review article might seem to be like being the flea on the back of the insect on the back of the lumbering mammal, but it is what I am about to do. I have just read your piece in the latest English Historical Review on Kevin Sharpe’s Selling the Tudor Monarchy. It is a sign of how stimulating I found it that I can not resist writing to you about my immediate reaction.

I particularly enjoyed seeing you develop further your Tudor-sceptic line, first outlined in the Times Literary Supplement. It is a salutary reminder that descent but not dynasty mattered, that what concerned these monarchs was precisely not the accident of a surname they did not use. You neatly respond to the mental  shrug of shoulders that some might have when realising the sixteenth-century English vocabulary is poorer, in effect, by one word. But, I must say, I think you still sell it short, so to speak: that the Tudors did not see themselves as Tudor, that 1485 was neither presented or remembered as a change of dynasty, should make us stop and think about our concepts of periodisation. Bosworth, which can be claimed to have seen the death of a tyrant, is itself a tyranny, dividing ‘medieval’ from ‘early modern’, with the following 118 years perceived as having some sort of internal coherence. We might need periods as a heuristic tool, and as a way of sorting out office space in university corridors, but we rarely stop at that: we begin to believe they reflect some deeper reality, and so slide back into Hegelian notions of the ‘age’ and its geist. Personally, I would prefer that we emphasised that change is a piecemeal process, that even if a paradigm shifts, life tout court does not — that there are no absolute dividing lines. But if we must order ourselves into chronological segments, at least it helps if we change their shapes as deftly as clouds change theirs. Your debunking of what we will have to call the ‘Tudor myth’ helps us to think again about what we would see as significant ‘turning-points’ — the equivalents (to echo your use of modern parallels) of 1989 or 11/9 — in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. If we take 1485 as a moment of relatively minor dislocation, with the fortuitous settling of a rekindled family squabble, we can look elsewhere for key moments when the pace of political and cultural (note that combination — to which I will return) change quickened, when innovation and concomitant destruction went hand in hand. At the latter end, we would have what you have dubbed the ‘Eltonian decade’, the 1530s; but, at the other end, how far would we retreat — to 1422 and the reality of a minority which challenged the nature of the political order, to 1399 and another non-change of non-dynasty? I would put down a marker for the 1460s, when I sense the language of English politics begins to alter in a way soon catalysed by the importing of print in the same era. But wherever we place the goal-posts, we must remember that it is a game, not a fixture.

I like even more than your de-Tudoring of the subject the line of thinking to which that led you in your piece. If not a dynasty, what was there to sell? The individual monarchs, of course, though there was, I would stress, little about this process that was ‘individual’. You pick up on the talk of ‘negotiation’ between sovereign and people, and highlight the importance of ‘reception’, particularly in its resistant or unintended modes. I am hugely sympathetic to this: we need to seek out, as it were, the graffiti artists defacing the official image — if, that is, the ‘official’ has meaning for this era. Image-making was, both of necessity and of choice, so often out-sourced, so remote from the individual it supposedly ‘projected’, that there was no officium masterminding representations. The displays at royal entries, for instance, were obviously not designed to a palace blueprint, even though the guilds and other organisers were attempting to depict what they thought would be appropriate — that, in other words, there was a straining to identify and to reinforce a shared language. This was surely less about projection than ‘imposition’, the dressing up of the monarch in garb chosen for him or her by those around and beyond, as in the image of the undressed and dressed Louis XIV discussed by Peter Burke. Image, I am arguing, was so susceptible to intervention, to redirection, as well as to misunderstanding and hostility, that it was very rarely under control. The messages that can be conveyed with any success are, in the first place, as you mention, ones that are repeated time and again, in coins, in services, in what you, and John Cooper, term the banal. But I would add the most subtle of activities can provide a message that is all headline and no fine print and this brings me to something about which I know a little: princely libraries.

Once again, I was delighted to see your brief reference to royal libraries and quite agree with your scepticism: they were not built up with an eagle eye on direct and specific political advantage that could be gained from them and their contents.  I don’t deny that some princes read some of the time, but the collecting of a library was not a private pursuit. You say that we do not know much about who had access to the books; in some cases, we certainly do, and can see those around the prince actively intervening in ‘his’ books. I think, in particular, of the collection of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester but what I say for the early fifteenth century also works for at least some of the period you are discussing. But what is as interesting as the use in the library itself is how the books got there in the first place: in a phrase from a thesis you may remember reading back in 1997, book ownership for a prince was an occupational hazard. They might — on the advice of their secretaries and other members of the household — buy books, but a large number were also presented to them. It is often imagined that if a presentation occurred, the prince presumably wanted to accept the book. I do know of a few cases where a presentation failed to happen, but more often, I suspect, the prince felt the need to accept a gift, created and provided unsolicited, for otherwise the accusation of lack of magnanimity would hang around him or her. In other words, authors were rarely commissioned; they produced works which they might think would suit a prince they may have known only through repute, and thus add to the image in partial ignorance. Any recompense to the author was usually only received after the presentation occurred, making the production, particularly of a manuscript, a ‘loss-leader’, intended to recoup costs after the event. But, what matters more in the context of what you were saying, is that the importance for the prince lay less in the book itself but in the act of presentation — a moment identifying the prince as worthy of the respect of the person kneeling before him. In that sense, the books themselves are a recollection of previous events, witnesses to that respect and to an affinity that has existed, however temporarily. The books, in their chests, had only latent power: it was, as you mention, only when they are taken out of the hiding-places, put on display, or on loan, that they made real that potency. Or, I should add, when they were given away — as, for instance, Humfrey, duke of Gloucester did when he had carried away from his palace hundreds of his books as donations to the University of Oxford. It was an outsize action with an outsize message of his generosity and his respect for learning.

And this is the explanation, as I would see it, for the existence of those libraries: they were not necessarily repositories of wisdom to inform policy decisions, but they provided a simple and helpfully vague message about a prince being associated with learning. To try to identify a more precise or nuanced ‘image’ being ‘projected’ is to fall into one of the two traps you describe in your article.  A prince could hardly avoid owning a collection and, as you point out, if a prince was bookless, they would be open to the imputation — from the relatively few — of a lack of necessary virtue. I say the relatively few but this particular audience, of peers (in every sense), of ‘opinion-formers’ domestic and foreign, mattered for a prince’s political reputation. In saying this I come to my last point: I do not see the separation you make between ‘political’ and ‘cultural’. I can not envisage a sphere — beyond perhaps the privy, but even there David Starkey would disagree — when the prince or monarch is not on display, in action, and thus political. A culture of politics suffused their existence, where even past-times were not simply play. This is not to deny the main points that you make, but rather to rephrase it: shrewd calculation of specific political benefits played no role in allowing a room in one’s palace to be given over to the books one came to own, but a library, like the palaces themselves, or the menageries and other exotica that cluttered them, was an element in the cultural impedimenta that were unavoidably part of the prince’s political existence. That owning a book collection had its use — simple, unsubtle, even banal — was an old reality of political life.

My thanks for having set me thinking and distracting me so usefully from the work I should have been doing these last hours!

Best wishes, as always,

David

Another brick in the wall of Oxford’s history

This is shamelessly an advert,  a promotion, a puff for some new pages that adorn and enhance the web. Their subject, the physical remains of Oxford’s medieval walls, may be a little removed from the humanist matters which are the usual fare of these postings but the pages are such an excellent addition that I’d hope that you would agree that they deserve as wide a public as possible. Not that this recherché site is a method for anyone to achieve fame.

But, to the point: the redoutable Stephanie Jenkins is known to some for her website that records both the present and the past of that ancient settlement of Headington, now represented on Oxford City Council by two Liberal Democrats, Ruth Wilkinson and another. Stephanie’s interests are not confined to that superior (in many senses) part of Oxford: she also deigns to add to our knowledge of the centre of the city itself. Recently, I have spied her wandering around the centre, studying in closer detail than one would imagine comfortable old stones and wishing she could clamber over people’s houses to see what their gardens hid. The result is very impressive: a photographic record of the line of the thirteenth-century walls of the city, rich in revealing annotation.

What those pages remind me is that we can take our surroundings so often for granted, paying little attention to the depth of what appears to us quotidian. I have lived here of over twenty years and still I am learning, happy to be educated by Stephanie’s expertise.

From Flanders to Florence: an artistic ‘dialogue’

I was in Florence last week, speaking at what proved to be a successful conference on the Italian Renaissance and the British Isles — the first, we hope, of several. While I was in that inspirational city, I had a couple of hours when I was able to cross to the Oltrarno and visit the Palazzo Pitti, to catch in its final days a small but impressive exhibition on ‘Firenze e gli antichi Paesi Bassi 1430 – 1530, dialoghi tra artisti.’ The artistic commerce between the Mediterranean and northern Europe has become a fashionable area of research in recent years and this exhibition demonstrated both how fruitful an area of investigation it can be and how it is ensnared with potential pitfalls.

The strengths of the show, as well as its evidential problems, are well encapsulated by the first display encountered in the gallery. It brings together three works of art, all of outstanding quality. The basic comparison is between Jan van Eyck’s small image of ‘St Jerome in his Study‘ (now housed in Detroit) and Ghirlandaio’s fresco of the same subject, usually seen in its original location of the church of Ognissanti, on the opposite side of the Arno, where it vies for attention with Botticelli’s ‘St Augustine.’ Placing the van Eyck and the Ghirlandaio together brings home the undoubted debt of the latter work to the former in the structure of its composition. Ghirlandaio must have been able to study van Eyck’s oil painting, which, therefore, can be identified with painting of that description in the Medici inventory of 1492 (priced at 30 florins). There is an undeniable and remarkable association. The question arises of how the van Eyck reached Florence, and the third painting on display tries to provide an explanation — but succeeds only in demonstrating the problems inherent in this type of research. It is another famous and powerful work, a portrait by van Eyck usually identified as Niccolò Albergati, cardinal and papal diplomat. However, the name of the sitter is provided only in a seventeenth-century description, which hardly makes it definite (though, it might be asked, why should an art-dealer two hundred years later make up such an identification). In the late twentieth century, doubts were expressed about whether this was Albergati, and other possible sitters mooted. The exhibition at the Pitti sides with the traditional identification, but on grounds that can not convince. Van Eyck’s ‘Jerome’ displays on the saint’s desk a letter on which the address is legible: ‘al reverendissimo padre e signore in Cristo, Signor Girolamo, cardinale presbitero della Santa Croce di Gerusalemme.’ It has been assumed that, as Jerome was not in fact cardinal of the church of Santa Croce di Gerusalemme in Rome, this must refer to the wearer of the red hat at the time of painting, who would have been Albergati. What this exhibition suggests is that there is a similarity between the depiction of the face of Jerome and that of Albergati in the portrait. Personally, I can not see this association: the round-faced, late-middle-aged sitter (whoever he was) has little in common with the smooth-faced, sleepy Jerome who, it might be said, is painted with less attention to detail than the books that cluster in the cupboard behind him. As for the letter sitting on his desk, its address might well refer to the saint, sometime hermit and long-time inhabitant of Jerusalem, city of the Holy Cross, without us guessing at another explanation.

In other words, one direct link – between the two ‘Jeromes’ of van Eyck and Ghirlandiao – is irrefutably established, but let us be satisfied with that, rather than imagining that we can rush ahead and find a ready explanation for the sets of quandaries the relevation naturally raises. That is a principle which is worth carrying with us when we look at other exhibits brought together in this Pitti gallery.

The second set of exhibits centres on yet another Low Countries painting of stupendous beauty: Rogier van der Weyden’s ‘Entombment of Christ‘ (Uffizi, Florence), with its statuesque scene played out on a remarkably realised carpet of leaves and flowers. It is presented in the Pitti beneath a terracotta ‘Resurrection‘ by Andrea del Verrocchio, with the suggestion that this may have been the original layout of the altarpiece in the Medicean chapel in the villa in Careggi. If this were so, it would be a notable combination of different media (leaving aside the contrast of artistic styles) which might make us think again about some aspects of Renaissance interiors. The exhibition groups with van der Weyden’s painting a 1470s missal with a full-page illuminated miniature of the same subject, but the similarities are too generic and the differences too notable to make a direct association convincing. More striking is the similarity with a scene from a predella by Bartolomeo di Giovanni (San Marco, Florence) which is, indeed, close in composition to van der Weyden’s painting — but the lines of association are complicated by the fact that, as the catalogue explains, both appear to echo another predella scene (now in Munich) by Fra’ Angelico. That reference, in fact, is a rare reference to a possible two-way exchange of ideas: though the title refers to a ‘dialogue’, it seems for the most part a one-way conversation in which the Flemish did all the talking, and the Florentines rarely got a word in edgeways.

The show goes on with an array of impressive images drawn from a wide catchment area of present locations, with again and again clear and direct links made. Only once, at the end of the display, does the level of argument slide down from proving connexions to proposing ‘influence’ — a descent into the speculative conditioned, one presumes, by the fact that the tondo on show is from the Pitti’s own collection: a fine Filippo Lippi of ‘The Virgin and Child’ in which the construction of space is said to be ‘an indicator of Flemish influence’. Too general a similarity to have much meaning, in my view. More generally, however, the quality of this exhibition persuades the visitor. For the viewer, there is a fascination in playing high-brow snap, tempered for some — on the basis of conversations I overheard — with a tinge of disappointment at catching Old Masters making ’simple copies.’ (Though, in some cases, like the Ghirlandaio ‘Christ in Benediction‘, it might arguably surpass its portotype, in this case Hans Memling’s depiction). As I have suggested, the main question which dogs the meticulous work which underpins the exhibition is the old one of what constitutes sufficient evidence to prove an association. When, so to speak, can one shout ’snap’, without risking a high forfeit.

To achieve the level of certainty we should hope we can gain, we need to move beyond the images themselves and consider their immediate context. The question is often not so much ‘did B emulate A’, as ‘could B have known the particular work of A that seems to be emulated?’. That is to say, to reach a conclusion we need to look at not at the end-point as much as at the lines of communication, the methods by which artistic motifs travelled. This exhibition does not set itself the challenge of investigating such matters, though it does display drawings by both Andrea del Verrocchio and Piero di Cosimo which show them recording for themselves northern images, something which, of course, became much easier and more frequent in the age of print. But the wider matter of the availability of images is one which would be a worthy subject for an exhibition as scholarly and as enthralling as that which I will remember for a long time having visited in the stately surroundings of the Palazzo Pitti one autumn morning late in October 2008.

The Italian Renaissance and the British Isles

I have a busy few months ahead of me. I’m hardly going on a world-tour but I have been invited to give lectures in a variety of locations, and I have listed them on a new page.

The first of these is at an event in the elegant surroundings of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, home to the Istituto Nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento. I anticipate a stimulating event, with several speakers who are always worth hearing, including Jonathan Woolfson (he of Padua and the Tudors fame, which I reviewed in Renaissance Studies), Alessandra Petrina (who shares with me an interest in Humfrey, duke of Gloucester; I reviewd her book for English Historical Review) and Michael Wyatt (author of The Italian Encounter with Tudor England, which I wish I’d had chance to review).

As these scholars and their publications suggests, the conference’s theme is the Italian Renaissance and the British Isles — a subject that appears to becoming newly fashionable. There has, of course, been a tradition of English interest in our forefathers’ engagement with Renaissance Italy, exemplified early in the twentieth century by Paget Toynbee and Mandell Creighton, and carried further in the second half of the century by scholars like Denys Hay, Sydney Anglo, Joe Trapp and David Chambers. I cite them in particular because their work is concerned directly with the interaction between Italian culture and Englishmen, rather than providing studies of northern humanism or the so-called English Renaissance — with, that is, the transmission of ideas as much as with the reception of ideas.

What has been less strong in the past, perhaps, has been Italian interest in the cultural dialogue. I exclude Roberto Weiss who wrote the seminal work on my specific area of interest, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, since he was a cosmopolitan character: an Italian count whose career was in England, and who lived in Henley-on-Thames. I remember Nicolai Rubinstein saying that Weiss always signed himself ‘Roberto’ when in England and ‘Robert’ when in Italy — he wanted always to be an exotic outsider. He was also a capable cartoonist, but this is to take us away from the point. If Weiss can not stand as an example of Italian interest in the interaction between England and Italy, I am hard-pressed to think of enough names to demonstrate a tradition of interest in Italy in the topic — until, that is, recent years. Alessandra Petrina, whom I have mentioned, stands as one talented example, as does the young scholar Diego Pirillo, who is involved in organising the conference in at the Istituto. Perhaps it is significant that these are scholars in English faculties. The present flourishing is not confined to those departments — I find especially interesting the work on the English market for Italian art by Cinzia Maria Sicca — but there may well be a link between the post-War development of English as an international language, and the renaissance of Italian interest in the encounters of their countrymen with England in the quattrocento and cinquecento.

The result includes a series of volumes recently announced by Ashgate in Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies, edited by Michele Marrapodi of Palermo University. That is only one of several ventures that could be mentioned. It appears to be a good time to working in this field.

For those of you who have not yet met Poggio

Following on from my last posting about William Shepherd’s Life of Poggio, I realise that I have been frightfully ill-mannered and have not introduced to you its ‘hero’, Poggio Bracciolini (1380 – 1457). I am sure many of you have already met him, but in case you are uncertain whether you would recognise him, I provide a portrait:

The image is, obviously, a nineteenth-century drawing. It is taken from the frontispiece of Tommaso Tonelli’s translation of Shepherd’s Lives, published in two volumes in 1825. It is a set of volumes which, through the miracle of e-Bay, I now own, sold to me by Gail Tothill of New York for a price which pleased my bank-balance but saddened my soul, to think in what low esteem such works must presently be held.

More of you will have met Poggio than think you have: as you walked through the Duomo in Florence, and turned to your left, averting your gaze from the English condottiere Sir John Hawkwood, you would have seen a statue of one of the saints which is said to have been modelled on Poggio in cadaverous old age.

And, if you have not met Poggio there, you are well acquainted with his works. He is famous for his re-discoveries of ancient texts, ‘liberating’ Quintilian and others from monastic ‘dungeons’ (aka libraries), for reviving the art of the Ciceronian dialogue and, most enduringly, for inventing the script known as littera antiqua, the humanist bookhand which was supposedly a return to ancient elegance and which you will all recognise since, when manuscripts were joined in the world by printed books, it became the basis for Roman type — the ancestor of modern Times New Roman.

Poggio also had a lively sense of humour and an eye for the ladies. He knew how to live and when you next raise a glass of Chianti, think of him.