Harvard University Press Blog

Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings, 1950

At the beginning of 1948, Harvard University Press unenthusiastically received a manuscript from Amy Kelly, a seventy-year old woman who had been a headmistress at a girl’s school and a teacher of English composition at Wellesley College. Published in 1950, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings became the Press’s first New York Times bestseller, landing first at the #10 spot and remaining on the list for months. The book, which in 1971 was in the first group of paperbacks ever to be published by HUP, is one of the 100 significant titles we’ve chosen to commemorate our first 100 years. Below, longtime HUP sales representative Patricia Nelson reflects on the book, an excerpt of which you can read at our centennial site.

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Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings bears re-reading with grace. Amy Kelly’s tightly woven prose tapestry might well have been described by Helen Sword in her practicum on Stylish Academic Writing: “serious, entertaining, straightforward, poetic, unpretentious, ornate, intimate, impersonal, and much in between.” Kelly lyrically inflects her portrait of Eleanor with sagacity, charm, gallantry, nobility, qualities the author attributes to highly stylized crowned heads carved on a Romanesque capital taken from the Langon chapel near Bordeaux and now in The Cloisters. That these are now thought not to be portrait heads of Eleanor and Henry II does not diminish the luminous restraint with which Kelly reads, beneath the stone’s wise calm, the age in which it was carved and its queen.

At perhaps fifteen, upon the sudden death of her father Count Guillaume of Poitou and Aquitaine, the Duchess Eleanor became heiress to one of the “goodliest” patrimonies of the feudal world. “The fief of the duchess was rich and desirable in itself; but its special importance was that its addition, through the marriage of its heiress to any other domain in western Europe, would raise that domain to preeminence over all others.” Her overlord Louis the Sixth married Eleanor in haste to his monkish second son and surviving heir, soon to be Louis VII. Eleanor is Queen of France in the Paris of Peter Abelard, of scholasticism and young men “consuming the last inch of candle wax to snare universals, corporeal or incorporeal.”

In the heat of civil war, Louis’ ravages and atrocities finally overcome him with remorse; the ultimately calamitous Second Crusade offers “the succor of Jerusalem.” Eleanor accompanies her husband on the years of crusade, but conflict and the lack of a male heir lead to separation. Eleanor secures an annulment, after fifteen years of marriage and two daughters, on grounds of consanguinity. Scarcely eight weeks later, Eleanor marries Henry, Duke of Normandy, a Plantagenet soon to wrest the crown of England. Her lands joined with his will create Henry’s destiny, the Angevin Empire stretching from the Pyrenees to England and Ireland, “a destiny owed not wholly to his own merit nor to Angevin contrivance, but also to some happy conjunction of the planets… It had been a lucky stroke determining the future fatefully—his unexpected capture of the Countess of Poitou.”

Historians as Storytellers

The opening-night plenary of this month’s American Historical Association conference focused, as such sessions often do, on how professional historians can bring their work to a wider audience. Titled “The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age” and chaired by AHA President William Cronon, the session featured food writer Michael Pollan, who urged historians to turn to more journalistic storytelling techniques. “Why,” he asked, “do people like me who use your work end up selling more books than you do?”

As reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Mr. Pollan, a journalism professor and author of best sellers like The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, pointed out that works of history often end up on best-seller lists. But much of the time those best sellers are not written by professional historians. And when it comes to important questions about how things came to be the way they are, he said, historians have ceded territory to other disciplines, like behavioral economics and social psychology… Write in a human voice, he encouraged. Embrace storytelling techniques like scene-setting, suspense, and personification. Pose questions of current interest, and answer them. “We need that now as a society more than ever before,” he said. “We live in this fog of presentness. Every politician would have us forget what they said yesterday.”

Now, it’s not as if legions of historians are intentionally denying us page-turners. The structural dictates of academic writing don’t always lend themselves to gripping narrative, and we shouldn’t imagine that what someone like Pollan does isn’t a distinct skill of its own. Even still, says the NYT, Pollan’s challenge struck a chord.

Of course, it’s not just best-selling books that are built on the work of professional historians; Hollywood films, too, can sport lengthy bibliographies full of academic history. Spielberg’s Lincoln, with its attendant debates, is but the most recent example. And, in fact, last week The New Republic’s Timothy Noah offered a list of the books upon which Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner says he most relied. Though Noah is oddly skeptical of Kushner’s professed collection, it’s a great bunch of books. Many of them come from university presses, and even a couple from us.

Cronon, whose essay “The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age” ran in the January 2012 issue of Perspectives on History, titled his presidential address “Storytelling.” “We need to remember the roots of our discipline,” he said, “and be sure to keep telling stories that matter as much to our students and to the public as they do to ourselves.” You can watch the full address below.

 

The Pius War

In Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII, Robert A. Ventresca gives us an authoritative and even-handed portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most caricatured figures. In Ventresca’s telling we see the development of a flawed and gifted man whose pontificate was defined by the Cold War and the church’s engagement with the modern world, not his response to Nazism. In the passage below, excerpted from the Introduction to Soldier of Christ, Ventresca recounts the decades-long battles over the legacy of Pius XII.

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In death, much more so than in life, Pius XII has become an intensely polarizing figure—to some, he is a venerable saint, and to others he is a damnable silent witness to unimaginable atrocities in the heart of Christian Europe. The incessant partisanship of the so-called Pius War has consistently sacrificed historical interpretation for polemical and political purposes. This pattern is evident even within the Catholic world, where, from the time of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, the figure of Pius XII has served as a lightning rod for both nostalgic conservatives and disgruntled liberals. For the former, Pius XII was the last truly magisterial pontiff; for the latter, he embodied everything that was wrong with the Catholic Church before the affable John XXIII (Roncalli), the “good pope,” came to air out the static, stultifying atmosphere of the church before Vatican II. This elementary division was evident even at the time of the council when Pope Paul VI (Montini) officially began the process to bring beatification and perhaps eventually sainthood to both of his immediate predecessors. Recommending the causes of both Pius XII and John XXIII, Pope Paul VI reasoned, “will be in answer to the desire that has been expressed by innumerable voices in favor of each of these Popes. In this way, history will be assured the patrimony of their spiritual legacy.”

Montini, who worked side-by-side with Pius XII throughout the tumultuous war years, was keen to craft an alternative narrative to the one taking shape in people’s minds in the wake of Hochhuth’s controversial play [The Deputy, a highly influential 1963 drama about Pius XII’s wartime activities]. Tellingly, two years before he formally opened the cause to have Pius XII made a saint, when he was still the cardinal archbishop of Milan, Montini wrote to the British Catholic periodical The Tablet to challenge Hochhuth’s reading of a history Montini himself had lived. “History,” the future Paul VI wrote, “will vindicate the conduct of Pius XII when confronted by the criminal excesses of the Nazi regime.” For Montini, history would set the record straight; it was the only effective antidote to Hochhuth’s version, which amounted to little more than the “artificial manipulation of facts to fit a preconceived idea.”

Despite Paul VI’s belief that the path to sainthood for both popes would proceed “for no motive other than the cult of their holiness,” it was clear even to outside observers that internal church politics would come into play. Referring to Pius XII, the New York Times reported that the “austere, distant and intellectual Pope has become the focus of conservative admiration.” By contrast, his successor, John XXIII, who was described as “warmly human and simple,” was said to be the “favorite” of the so-called progressives, if only because he had convened the Second Vatican Council, at which the “progressive” views seem to have prevailed.

And so it has been, back and forth, for decades now. Despite occasional lulls in the Pius War, a dogged attachment to competing caricatures of Pius XII, to say nothing of the canonization cause, means that the war of words will persist, generating point and counterpoint ad infinitum. The tendency to see Pius XII as less a man than an institution has resulted in an abundant manipulation of facts—to borrow from Montini—arranged selectively to fit preconceived notions of what this pope did or did not do; what he said or did not say; what he could have or should have done. I leave it to the reader to decide whether history has vindicated Pius XII, whatever that means. It is to history, after all, that we must turn to find Eugenio Pacelli, the man, priest, diplomat, and pope.

The vast literature chronicling Pius XII’s long and eventful pontificate has mostly centered on his seeming failure to speak out clearly and firmly during World War II to defend European Jews facing systematic persecution and murder by the Nazis. The claim that he turned his back on the Jews, and the riposte it provoked, gave life and sustenance to the “Pius War.” Yet this war of words has done more harm than good to our understanding of this central figure of twentieth-century history. With very few exceptions, studies of Pius XII have offered a distorted or highly selective picture of the subject. We have become accustomed to reading interpretive leaps, which are grounded on counterfactual or normative claims about what the pope could have or should have done rather than a reasoned assessment of what he did or did not do—and why. This is to say nothing of the fact that, as understandable as it is, such a heavy focus on Pius XII’s wartime record has obscured our view of the entire span of his active life in the service of the papacy. It is easy to forget that Pacelli’s pontificate lasted for thirteen years after the end of World War II. We know comparatively little about the Cold War years and even less about Pius XII’s prodigious teachings, which sought to address internal and external realities of Catholicism in rapidly changing times. However we might assess it, there can be no doubt that Eugenio Pacelli’s pontificate left an indelible mark on the papacy and influenced the Catholic encounter with the modern world in ways we have scarcely begun to understand.

What Was the South Seceding To?

Forgive us, please, for continuing to dwell on Spielberg’s Lincoln. It’s not often that we have a rich trove of books on the very subject captivating the nation’s conversation. Wait, strike that, it’s pretty often, actually. It’s kind of our thing.

Anywho.

The film has a scene in which Lincoln and Radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens have retreated from the grand reception of the president’s second inauguration down to a messy White House kitchen. Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln, driven to engineer the passage of the 13th Amendment, is trying to convince Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones, to temper his usually-forceful demands for racial equality, so as not to scare off the moderate votes required for the bill’s adoption. The scene, packed with quick Kushner dialogue, witty and wise, is one of the film’s great depictions of politics as art of the possible.

In the course of their volley Lincoln expresses his admiration for Stevens’s “zeal,” but explains why he’s had to act with greater restraint than the congressman had wished:

If I’d listened to you, I’d’ve declared every slave free the minute the first shell struck Fort Sumter; then the border states would’ve gone over to the confederacy, the war would’ve been lost and the Union along with it, and instead of abolishing slavery, as we hope to do in two weeks, we’d be watching helpless as infants as it spread from the American South into South America.

That reference to South America is one of the very few moments in which Spielberg gestures towards the global context of the American Civil War, and it’s all the more striking for how matter-of-factly it’s dropped into conversation. The standard popular and historical gaze back at the Civil War—embodied pretty accurately by the film, save the above—sees the coming of the conflict as territorially bounded by regions that were only delineated by the war itself. The narrative, in other words, reads the parties created by the war as those that started it.

As Walter Johnson argues in River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, a much-anticipated book whose publication is but a couple of months away, we need to ask not just what “the South” was seceding from, but what it was seceding to:

It takes no great insight (only a taste for heresy) to say that the story of “the coming of the Civil War” has been framed according to a set of anachronistic spatial frames and teleological narratives. It is resolutely nationalist in its spatial framing, foregrounding conflict over slavery within the boundaries of today’s United States to the exclusion of almost every other definition of the conflict over slavery. Because of the territorial condition of the regions under debate and the character of federal recordkeeping, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act produced tremendous archives that American historians have used to terrific effect. Yet for many in the Mississippi Valley (and for the president of the United States, who in 1852 devoted the first third of his State of the Union address to the topic), the most important issue in the early 1850s was Cuba, an issue that was related to but certainly not reducible to the question of territory gained through the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850. Similarly, for many pro-slavery Southerners, especially in the Mississippi Valley, the issues of Nicaragua and the Atlantic slave trade were more important than the question of Kansas (dismissed by many as a fight over a place where no real slaveholder would ever want to live anyway) and more important than what was happening in Congress, from which they, in any case, expected very little. The standard narrative, that is to say, projects a definition of spaces which resulted from the Civil War—no Cuba, no Nicaragua, no Atlantic slave trade—backward onto its narrative of the description of the conflict over slavery before the war.

Much of this work has been done through the category of “the South,” which serves in its dominant usage as a spatial euphemism for what is in fact a conceptual anachronism: those states which eventually became part of the Confederacy. But what the “Southern position” was on any given issue... was subject to fierce debate at pro-slavery commercial conventions of the late 1850s, which are generally seen as hotbeds of secessionism. About the only things upon which those conventions could agree was that there was something called “the South” that was worth fighting for and that the election of a Republican president in 1860 would be grounds for secession. The ultimate grounds for secession represented a sort of lowest common denominator, a platform defined by what everyone involved agreed “the South” could not be.

We recently had a chance to speak with Johnson about pro-slavery imperialism, the political economy of slaveholders, and the inherently-expansionist logic of cotton monocropping:

 

Incidentally, there’s another striking moment in Lincoln, in which the president and his Secretary of State are directly pleading for Kentucky congressman George Yeaman’s support for the amendment. “I saw a barge once, Mr. Yeaman,” Lincoln says, “filled with colored men in chains, heading down the Mississippi to the New Orleans slave markets. It sickened me, ‘n more than that, it brought a shadow down, a pall around my eyes.”

Those New Orleans slave markets are the subject of Johnson’s earlier work, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. The book—recently the focus of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Effete Liberal Book Club”—lays bare the chilling day-to-day workings of the commodification of human beings. It’s a deeply effecting work, and a must-read for anyone unsettled by the tendency to reduce the era to faceless statistics and the congressional jockeying of white men. 

Limiting the Horror of War

From our modern vantage, warfare of the past often appears barbaric. The close quarters of combat and high death counts, all conducted at the whim of rulers, can strike us as monstrously inhumane. And yet, as James Whitman argues in The Verdict of Battle, pitched battles of the past were far more effective at containing their violence than today’s sprawling wars of idealism. In the article and video below, Whitman details the evolution of warfare, and highlights some lessons of the past.

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Pitched battles are gruesome events. Consider the description of the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 given by Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross: “The poor wounded men... were ghastly pale... They begged to be put out of their misery, and writhed with faces distorted in the grip of the death-struggle...” When we read such accounts it is difficult to imagine that anybody could regard a pitched battle with anything but horror.

Nevertheless for many centuries our ancestors thought of pitched battles as a good thing—in fact, a blessing for society. A pitched battle may be nightmarish for the soldiers who fight it, but it is a contained way of settling an international dispute. If a conflict can be decided by a day of concentrated killing on the battlefield, then violence can be prevented from spilling over to the rest of society. In fact, for many centuries staging a battle was deemed to be a perfectly acceptable, and highly desirable, legal procedure. In the Middle Ages, pitched battles were regarded as “judgments of God,” lawful ways of calling upon the Almighty to decide an international dispute. In the eighteenth century, they were regarded as settlement procedures, fought under a “tacit contract of chance.” Eighteenth-century battles were a kind of lawful wager, by which the warring sovereigns agreed to allow their conflict to be settled by the “chance of arms.”

 

To modern lawyers, such attitudes seem incomprehensible and repellant. We cannot accept the idea that international disputes could be resolved by deliberately staging a mass killing on a battlefield. The modern law of war is humanitarian law. It is founded on the proposition that war is a curse, and that conflicts should be resolved through peaceful means, with war used only as a desperate last resort.

The Anarchist Odyssey of Sasha and Emma

Paul Avrich, a leading historian of anarchism, collected stories about Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman for decades. When he died in 2006, he left his unfinished manuscript on the pair in the hands of his daughter, Karen Avrich. Below, she describes Berkman and Goldman, and the story she and her father tell in Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.

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Q: Your father, Paul Avrich, wrote extensively on the history of the anarchist movement in both Russia and the U.S. How and when did he first become fascinated with the story of Sasha Berkman and Emma Goldman?

My father once said, “I’ve always wanted, even as a scholar, to write about individuals and understand what was on their minds.” Indeed, throughout Paul Avrich’s career, compelling characters animated his work. He first developed an interest in Russia as a student, and was attracted to the radical underpinnings of the country’s history. In 1960, while a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, he traveled to Moscow and Leningrad when Soviet libraries were opened to Western students. As a professor, he devoted his early books to Russian anarchism, which he thought was perhaps the purest, most uncompromising political philosophy.

In the 1970s, my father became acquainted with a number of American anarchists whose youths were spent in the thick of the action, from the meeting halls on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the utopian colonies on Puget Sound. Many went on to lead more conventional lives as academics, scientists, artists, and lawyers, yet they nevertheless retained the dangerous sparkle of the true revolutionary. My father was enchanted by their electrifying tales and audacious spirits, and interviewed them extensively. They all were brimming with stories about the brave, brilliant Alexander Berkman.

Sasha’s comrades equally admired his famous friend, the charismatic and formidable Emma Goldman. Emma achieved renown (and notoriety) as a leading radical activist while Sasha was locked away in prison, but their friendship sustained, and they remained the closest of companions their whole lives. Comrades later told my father about that unbreakable bond and deep love, a love that infuses Sasha and Emma from beginning to end.

Q: What was it like taking over this project after your father passed away?

When my father became ill, it was clear he would not be able to complete the book. I began working on the manuscript at my father’s request several months before his death. In that first difficult year, as I sorted through his notes and interviews, I was conscious of his voice and style, the strength of his professional legacy. Yet as I was drawn further into the story of Sasha and Emma and grew to understand them as people, their voices also guided my work. I read their published essays and private letters, studied their memoirs and journals, and learned about their comrades. I now realize that some of the older ladies and gentlemen who visited our home when I was a child, to whom I served tea sandwiches, lent their firsthand insights to Sasha and Emma. One wizened fellow, who brought me a box of fancy Belgian chocolates when I was five, fought alongside Emma Goldman in the Spanish Civil War.

As Paul Avrich’s daughter, anarchism was a component of my life, but one that remained on the periphery of my personal experience. As I worked on Sasha and Emma, the anarchists in the book became as vital to me as they were to my father—fascinating and complicated, estimable yet censurable, hugely influential but often overlooked. I am thrilled that this story of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman will be told, and I feel honored to have experienced my father’s life work in this manner.

Fifty Years of Vatican II

As John W. O’Malley notes in this morning’s NYT, the Second Vatican Council opened 50 years ago today. Vatican II, which O’Malley and others describe as the most important religious event of the 20th century, was an attempt to reconcile the Roman Catholic Church with a changed and still-changing world. Among the broad scope of issues debated at the council were the desire to recognize the dignity of lay men and women and to empower them to fulfill their vocation in the church, the place of Latin in the liturgy, the relationship of Tradition to Scripture, and the relationship of the church to the Jews and to other non-Christian religions.

As O’Malley’s piece today argues, the new course set by the council signaled a major turning point for the Church, even if recent history (notably Pope Benedict’s 2006 indictment of Islam, or the Church’s censuring of American nuns this summer) suggests that advances are now being scaled back. “The post-Vatican II church was not a different church,” he writes. “But if you take the long view, it seems to me incontestable that the turn was big, even if failures in implementation have made it less big in certain areas than the council intended.”

O’Malley’s 2008 book, What Happened at Vatican II, tells in a single volume the full story of the workings of the council, sessions of which he attended as a student. But in addition to relating the deliberations and decrees of Vatican II, the book is also a thorough consideration of the nature of authority more broadly, and particularly the friction between power and change. He notes three key “issues under the issues,” the questions that lay beneath the points of policy on which the council ostensibly focused, all of which relate to evolution within an authoritative structure:

• the circumstances under which change in the church is appropriate and the arguments with which it can be justified
• the relationship in the church of center to periphery, or, put more concretely, how authority is properly distributed between the papacy, including the Congregations (departments or bureaus) of the Vatican Curia, and the rest of the church
• the style or model according to which that authority should be exercised

These issues, O’Malley explains, are about identity: “how to maintain it while dealing with the inevitability of change, and then how to make it effective in new but recognizably authentic ways.” For the Church, whose authority is indexed to its infallibility, the problem of identity is that of evolution in “an institution that draws its lifeblood from a belief in the transcendent validity of the message it received from the past, which it is duty-bound to proclaim unadulterated.” That tension, which animates O’Malley’s elegant account of Vatican II, will resonate with anyone familiar with the dynamic of institutional entrenchment.

Gandhi, History and the Liberal State

Faisal Devji’s The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence, gives us a new understanding of the Mahatma as a radical political theorist with ideas powerfully relevant to present-day issues. In the piece below, which appeared originally on the blog of the book’s UK publisher, Hurst, Devji outlines Gandhi’s conception of history and the violence inherent to liberal society.

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The empire against which Gandhi fought was legitimized in historical terms, for at their most generous its supporters claimed to be holding India for the benefit of her people, who had not yet attained the political maturity to rule themselves. British imperialism, then, was conceived as a vast pedagogical project, one in which a backward country was tutored by a more advanced one in order that it might achieve the kind of freedom that only history could give it. Informed as it was by the language of progress, evolution and development through time, imperialism was a thoroughly modern enterprise, and for good or ill its logic thrives today in the practice of development as well as regime change and humanitarian intervention. Unlike some among his compatriots, however, who accepted the argument upon which imperial legitimacy rested while questioning Britain’s good faith in upholding it, the Mahatma saw historical knowledge itself as a form of violence and wanted as little to do with it as possible. Perhaps the first of his many statements on the violence of history is to be found in Hind Swaraj, the manifesto on Indian Home Rule published in 1909. Gandhi is the only political figure to disdain history in a modernity defined by utopias and revolutions that sought its fulfillment.

Gandhi pointed out that history as commonly conceived was nothing but a narrative of conflict to whose violence alone did historians attribute any real change, regardless of whether this was to be praised or condemned. Yet societies could only sustain and reproduce themselves, he argued, in nonviolent ways, by quotidian and unexceptionable practices that didn’t deserve the name of history. For it was not the violence either exercised or prevented by law and the state that provided the parameters for nonviolence but rather the reverse. Instead of trying to expand the reach of historical knowledge by including everyday life within its ambit, in other words, the Mahatma insisted upon describing the historical record as providing both an account of violence and its justification. After all, since narratives of persecution and revenge, peace and war, stood on the same historical footing and indeed overlapped one with the other, none was innocent of violence. And by this token nonviolence was not merely unable to provide a subject for history, it was incapable almost by definition of possessing a history.

Now by suggesting that nonviolence had no history, Gandhi did not mean that it was entirely removed from the world of violence. On the contrary he held that violence was present in every aspect of life, from eating to giving birth, so that even reflexive processes like blinking or digestion, which preserved life, also ended up wearing down the body and finally destroying it. Nonviolence therefore could not possibly imply the more or less successful avoidance of violence, something that the Mahatma would in any case have considered cowardly, but rather entailed an engagement with it. Violence had to be seduced from itself and converted into its opposite by acts of love and practices of sacrifice. And this had to be done not by posing one historical narrative against another but instead by disregarding such narratives altogether. Only by refusing to situate present-day moral and political action within an historical account that could only constrain it, thought Gandhi, might new possibilities for the future emerge. Nonviolence, in other words, worked by breaking up narrative histories and thus freeing human action, though it did so not by opening up some dazzling new future for it, but rather by focussing exclusively on the present as a site for moral action.

More than altering our perspective on history, Gandhi asks us to distrust it as a form of knowledge, even going so far as to recommend that we forget the past. By this, of course, he doesn’t mean that we tolerate violence and injustice, or banish all that has happened from our memory, but rather that we refuse to identify either with the victims or the perpetrators of historical violence. The Mahatma was well aware of the fact that nations, races, religions and other collective categories of belonging were in his time being forged by such vicarious identifications, which, whether true or false, all worked in some way like contemporary accounts of ‘repressed memory syndrome,’ that is to say as practices by which identity was recovered for therapeutic as much as political reasons. Repelled by the alternating forms of resentment and fear that he saw emerging from these practices of historical recovery, Gandhi determined that he would have nothing to do with them.

The "Cabul Prisoners" and the Buddhas of Bamiyan

Llewelyn Morgan’s The Buddhas of Bamiyan is the most recent installment in the Wonders of the World series edited by Mary Beard. The book mines the history and meaning of these colossal figures, which stood for 1,400 years before their destruction by the Taliban in 2001. In the post below, Morgan tells of a visit to the grave of a woman whose life story he came to know during his work on the book.

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On a grey and drizzly English day earlier this summer I found myself in a cemetery in Somerset, feeling more emotional than I should have in front of the grave of a stranger. I hadn’t had much to go on: it was somewhere in the village of North Cheriton, and it had a cross. But I had scraped the mud away from the short inscription and there she was:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF JULIA FLORENTIA MULOCK

WIDOW OF COL MULOCK CB BORN IN AFGHANISTAN

JUNE 24 1842 DIED AT NORTH CHERITON APRIL 23 1910

Julia Mulock, née Sturt, had become a minor obsession of mine as I wrote The Buddhas of Bamiyan. Aside from her remarkable early life, Julia came to encapsulate for me Britain’s long and spasmodically intense relationship with Afghanistan, a relationship as easily forgotten as this memorial in an English country graveyard.

Chapel and Graveyard at North Cheriton

Julia Florentia Sturt had been born in captivity in Kabul. Her mother was Alexandrina Sturt, a prisoner of the Afghans; her father, Lieut. John Sturt, was already dead. He had been an officer of Engineers in the British force occupying Kabul during the First Afghan War, a misguided attempted to establish a buffer zone between British India and the Russian Empire encroaching from the north. A series of tactical errors resulted in a chaotic British retreat in midwinter, under ferocious attack from all sides, through the mountain passes between Kabul and Jalalabad, one of the most notorious disasters in British imperial history. A measure of the horror of this massacre is that Sturt was said to have been “the only man of the whole force who received Christian burial.” Very few indeed survived it, but Sturt’s pregnant widow Alexandrina, her mother Lady Sale, and a number of other soldiers and dependents were taken into custody by Akbar Khan, leader of the Afghan resistance, and spent nine months as effective hostages while the First Afghan War lurched towards its messy conclusion.

In those nine months the “Cabul Prisoners” became celebrities, their predicament the object of rapt interest by the British press and public in a way that has been compared to the US hostage crisis in Tehran in 1979-81. The most celebrated of them all was Julia’s grandmother and namesake, Florentia, Lady Sale, a tough, no-nonsense army wife (her husband, Sir Robert Sale, was all this time besieged by Akbar Khan in Jalalabad) whose journals of her experiences later became a publishing sensation. On July 24 1842 (note that Julia’s grave inscription gets the date wrong), Lady Sale dryly recorded the arrival of her granddaughter: “At 2 P.M. Mrs. Sturt presented me with a grand-daughter;—another female captive.”

In the latter stages of their captivity, as a British “Army of Retribution” closed in on Kabul, the prisoners were moved up from Kabul to Bamiyan, high in the Hindu Kush. Conditions were grim, and they faced the awful prospect of being marched north, beyond the mountains, and sold into slavery. But they also had the opportunity to visit what a series of European visitors to Afghanistan over the previous decades had made a famous monument, the cliff face peppered with caves and containing the giant Buddha statues. Lady Sale’s journal was illustrated with “some very pretty and correct sketches” by another captive, Lieut. Vincent Eyre, including three images of the Buddha cliffs.

That old lady in North Cheriton wouldn’t have remembered anything about Bamiyan, or the emotional scene when a force led by Lady Sale’s husband rescued them in September 1842. But she probably did retain some memories of the amazing reception when her family visited Britain in 1844. When they first landed at Lyme Regis (from a ship which the press were delighted to discover was called the True Briton), Lady Sale, her husband, daughter and granddaughter Julia were mobbed by well-wishers: “as soon as their presence became known,” according to The Times, “the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood, and the inhabitants of Lyme, vied with each other in offering their congratulations, while the church bells poured forth their merriest strains of harmony…” There were similar scenes in Londonderry, Liverpool, Southampton, and London. Lady Sale was the heroine of the hour. At Astley’s Amphitheatre a circus performance culminated in “Lady Sale” fighting a double sword combat “with six Afghans, whom she put to flight.” This lionizing of Lady Sale isn’t so hard to analyze, a substitute victory that softened the dismay Britain had felt at the humiliating retreat from Kabul.

We catch a (slightly jaundiced) glimpse of the family group on their return journey to India at the end of 1844, in letters of Sir Henry Hardinge, the Governor General of India: Sir Robert Sale, “one of our military heroes seen to most advantage with a sabre in his hand,” the “very coarse” Lady Sale “coming out with a direct plain oath,” “Mrs [Alexandrina] Sturt pretty but unfeeling, the little daughter born in captivity.” Alexandrina Sturt could be forgiven for being emotionally withdrawn, we might think. As for Julia, incredibly, captivity in Afghanistan wasn’t the greatest trauma that she suffered early in life. On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, her mother Alexandrina was killed alongside her new husband, Major James Garner Holmes, beheaded by rebellious troops during the “Indian Mutiny.”

At 17 Julia married a military man 25 years her senior (they consistently falsify their ages in the census, not making Julia any easier to trace). Julia’s later years were no bed of roses, following her husband on his postings around the Empire. She lost two sons who followed the family tradition into the army. But it was to all appearances a happy marriage. Certainly Julia’s final years at The Old Rectory in leafy North Cheriton (a comfortable house up the hill from the graveyard where she now lies) were as far removed as it is possible to imagine from the place and circumstances of her birth.

Plastic People Riot

In fairly predictable sequence, the Western agitation over the trial and conviction of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot has itself become the subject of political scrutiny. Some commentators ask whether foreign sympathizers are aware of the scope of their cause célèbre’s views and behavior. Others denounce the hypocrisy of any Western upset over the band’s fate. The whole affair reminds us of the so-called “trial of the Plastic People” in Czechoslovakia in 1976, an episode in which various members of the underground music scene were convicted for “organized disturbance of the peace.” In the common telling, the persecution of these supposedly apolitical young people inspired the writers, politicians, and philosophers who would coalesce into Charter 77. Only, as Jonathan Bolton explains in the following excerpt from his recent Worlds of Dissent, the common telling gets a lot wrong.

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The standard account goes like this: In September 1976, the trial in Prague of a nonconformist psychedelic rock band, The Plastic People of the Universe, became one of the catalysts for the drafting of Charter 77. The band was accused of “disturbing the peace” and portrayed by the Communist regime as a group of long-haired, foul-mouthed, drug-using delinquents; but many Czech intellectuals, foremost among them Václav Havel, correctly perceived the trial as an attack on freedom of thought and creativity. The band, after all, had no interest in politics and just wanted to be left alone to play their music in their own way; the state’s attack on them, in Havel’s stirring formulation, was “an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom and integrity.” Havel helped mobilize writers, artists, philosophers, and other opposition intellectuals into a strong show of support for the band, and by December 1976, their meetings to protest the trial had evolved into something larger: the drafting of Charter 77, a document calling on Czechoslovakia to recognize the basic human rights it had solemnly (and, of course, hypocritically) agreed to uphold when it signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975. The trial of the Plastic People had galvanized the opposition, convincing everyone of the “indivisibility of freedom” and making it clear that no compromise with the Communist regime was possible.

Is that what really happened?

Well, not exactly. Czech and English sources alike commonly refer to “the trial of the Plastic People,” but in fact there was no such thing. Of the four defendants, only one—Vratislav Brabenec, the saxophonist—actually played for the band. A second, Ivan Martin Jirous, was not a musician at all; he was the Plastic People’s artistic director, but to call him a member of the band does not really capture his importance as an organizer, theorist, and cult hero of underground circles. A third defendant, Pavel Zajíček, belonged to another band, DG 307. DG 307 shared a member with the Plastics, Milan Hlavsa. But Hlavsa was not put on trial. The fourth defendant, Svatopluk Karásek, was associated with the music underground but was not a member of the Plastic People, DG 307, or any other band—he was a Protestant minister and folksinger in his own right, whose spiritual “Say No to the Devil” had given the underground one of its rallying cries.

So “the trial of the Plastic People” was not really a trial of the Plastic People. What’s more, it wasn’t the only trial of the music underground in 1976. Three young men—Karel Havelka, Miroslav Skalický, and František Stárek—had already been put on trial in Plzeň in July 1976. They were prosecuted for organizing a lecture and concert, at which Jirous had spoken and Karásek had played with another folksinger, Karel “Charlie” Soukup, the previous December. They received sentences ranging from eight months to two and a half years, which were later reduced on appeal. Both the July and September trials were the result of a large-scale police raid that had begun on March 17, 1976. During a three-week period, nineteen people were arrested, including all the members of the Plastic People, and many more besides. Only two members of the Plastics, however—only one of them a musician—were actually put on trial.

Contemporary sources did not start calling this event “the trial of the Plastic People” right away. Protests and essays from the summer of 1976 still speak of the “campaign against the Czech underground,” for example. In a July open letter, Věra Jirousová spoke of “the arrest of twenty young musicians.” An Amnesty International report from September 1976 was titled “Trial of Czech Non-Conformist Artists.” As Václav Havel walked out of the courtroom after the trial, he met an acquaintance who asked him how he was doing: “I replied, none too logically, that I had just been at a trial of the Czech underground.” None too logically, but at least, for now, accurately.