RHS Video Archive

Podcast – 10 May 2019 Mary Vincent RHS Lecture: The ‘Martyrdom of Things’: Iconoclasm and its Meanings in the Spanish Civil War

Professor Mary Vincent (Sheffield)
The ‘Martyrdom of Things’: Iconoclasm and its Meanings in the Spanish Civil War
RHS Public Lecture
10 May 2019

Click here to listen to the lecture.

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War was among the greatest explosions of iconoclastic violence in European history and, understandably, scholarly attention has focused on those killed rather than the accompanying violence against buildings and objects—the ‘martyrdom of things’. There was little attempt at the time to quantify or catalogue the losses, which was represented as ‘vandalism’ and pillage. The destruction of sacred things demonstrated their assailants’ intent to extirpate Christianity, not least as objects were always ‘innocent’.

This lecture will examine the kinds of objects that were targeted and their interactions, both with their assailants and with those looking to protect them. Objects are central both to Catholic cult and to Catholic devotion, not least the rosaries, medals, and scapulars used in the everyday practice of the faith. The veneration of images is definitional to Catholic identities, determining who is within, and who without, the fold. Yet, it was not only ‘holy’ objects that were targeted by anticlericals. In church buildings, the destruction was often undiscriminating while searches of private homes led to numerous confiscation. Many items were destroyed or defaced; others were stolen; and some were reused, as will be explored.

If martyrdom is a sacrificing of the self then, clearly, there can be no ‘martyrdom of things’ as ‘things’ have no free will. They do, however, have a materiality that makes certain demands of those who interact with them. The ‘agency of the object’ structures human actions when engaged with that object, both in ordinary circumstances and at the moment of their destruction. The different and varied ways in which religious items were treated during the ‘martyrdom of things’ tells us much not only about the iconoclasm but also the nature of Spanish Catholicism.

 

RHS Lecture: Prof. Lynn Abrams, “Pursuing autonomy: self-help and self-fashioning amongst women in post-war Britain

On 11 May, Prof. Lynn Abrams (Glasgow) presented an RHS lecture entitled ‘Pursuing autonomy: self-help and self fashioning amongst women in post-war Britain’. A podcast of Prof. Abrams’ lecture is available here, and her abstract is available below.

The 1960s has been dubbed the ‘do-it-yourself decade’. This was the era when the women of the so-called ‘transition generation’ began to discover the gap between their expectations and the realities of their lives and in most cases took it upon themselves to fill that gap with autonomous activity rather than looking to existing organisations or the state to act on their behalf. This lecture examines the place of do-it-yourself women’s organisations – the National Housewives’ Register, National Childbirth Trust and Pre-School Playgroups Association – in the emerging history of postwar womanhood in the United Kingdom and seeks to rescue them from the condescension of those who have regarded them as not being sufficiently critical of gender relations and thus not part of the postwar feminist narrative. I argue that these organisations which emerged at a grass roots level from women’s dissatisfaction and frustration, came to offer thousands the opportunity for self-development, self confidence and independence.

 

RHS Lecture: Prof. Diana Paton, ‘Seeing Women & Sisters in the Archives of Atlantic Slavery’

On 9 February, Prof. Diana Paton delivered an RHS lecture entitled ’Mary Williamson’s Letter, or: Seeing Women & Sisters in the Archives of Atlantic Slavery’. You can watch the lecture and read Prof. Paton’s abstract below.

“I was a few years back a slave on your property of Houton Tower, and as a Brown woman was fancied by a Mr Tumoning unto who Mr Thomas James sold me.” Thus begins Mary Williamson’s letter, which for decades sat unexamined in an attic in Scotland until a history student became interested in her family’s papers, and showed it to Diana Paton. In this lecture, Paton will use the letter to reflect on the history and historiography of ‘Brown’ women like Mary Williamson in Jamaica and other Atlantic slave societies. Mary Williamson’s letter offers a rare perspective on the sexual encounters between white men and Brown women that were pervasive in Atlantic slave societies. Yet its primary focus is on the greater importance of ties of place and family—particularly of relations between sisters—in a context in which the ‘severity’ of slavery was increasing. Mary Williamson’s letter is a single and thus-far not formally archived trace in a broader archive of Atlantic slavery dominated by material left by slaveholders and government officials. Paton asks what the possibilities and limits of such a document may be for generating knowledge about the lives and experiences of those who were born into slavery.

(Image used with the kind permission of Nicholas James)

Presidential Address 2017: ‘Loot’, Prof. Margot Finn

On 24 November, RHS President Margot Finn presented her first annual Presidential address, discussing the subject of ‘Loot’ in her series on ‘Material Turns in Modern British History’. You can watch the lecture, and read Prof. Finn’s abstract below.

The first of four annual addresses deploying methodological approaches associated with the ‘material turn’, this lecture focuses on the relationship between imperial warfare, on the one hand, and the writing of History in modern Britain, on the other. It does so by tracing the entangled histories of booty, plunder and prize in the Third Anglo-Maratha or Pindari campaigns of c. 1817-1819, and by examining the material afterlives of Indian loot in late Georgian and Victorian Britain. Not least among the consequences of military men’s efforts to regulate (and profit from) the vibrant indigenous and imperial plunder regimes of the East India Company era was an efflorescence of historical research conducted on the subcontinent under the Company’s aegis. Co-produced with Indian scribal and princely elites, the historical writing that flourished in the Pindari War and its aftermath was caught up in and fostered by wider processes of material exchange that saw plundered jewels, weaponry, textiles and manuscripts fuel , rationalize and reward both Indian and British combatants. The history-writing of these campaigns differed sharply from the Whig verities which were to dominate later Victorian historiography. But these earlier and later varieties of historical interpretation are viscerally related—most notably in the biography and the material possessions of the Royal Historical Society’s fourth President (1891-1899), Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff. On the eve of the Society’s 150th anniversary, it is timely to render more visible History’s connection—by blood, capital, and the spoils of war—to earlier practices of archiving, researching and writing the past born on the battlefield.

RHS Lecture: Prof. Chris Marsh, ‘Bestselling Ballads in Early Modern England’

On 22 September, Prof. Chris Marsh (Queen’s University, Belfast) delivered an RHS lecture entitled “The Woman to the Plow and the Man to the Hen-Roost”: Wives, Husbands, & Best-Selling Ballads in Seventeenth-Century England. Prof. Marsh’s lecture included musical performances by himself and the singer Vivien Ellis. You can watch the lecture and read the abstract below.

This lecture grows out of a research project that aims to identify 100 hit songs from seventeenth-century England. Two historians are working with a group of musicians to produce new recordings of the period’s most successful broadside ballads (single-sheet songs that were sung and sold on the streets), and the results will eventually appear on a website. Today, we will concentrate on ballads about marital relations, and the importance of these sources for our understandings of early modern culture and society will be assessed. The talk will feature murder, adultery and monstrosity, though it will also be suggested that a tendency to concentrate on the exotic and extreme in early-modern balladry needs to be held in check. Some of the ballads will be performed live by the singer, Vivien Ellis.

Prothero Lecture 2017: ‘Orthodoxy & Revolution’, Prof. Simon Dixon

Professor Simon Dixon (UCL) presented this year’s Prothero Lecture, ‘Orthodoxy & Revolution: The restoration of the Russian patriarchate in 1917’ at University College London on 7 July. You can watch the lecture, and read Professor Dixon’s abstract below.

At the height of the October Revolution in Moscow – a much bloodier affair than the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd – the Orthodox Church installed Tikhon (Bellavin) as Russia’s first patriarch since 1700. At the most obvious level, this was a counter-revolutionary gesture aimed at securing firm leadership in a time of troubles. It was nevertheless a controversial move. Ecclesiastical liberals regarded a restored patriarchate as a neo-papal threat to the conciliarist regime they hoped to foster; and since Nicholas II had explicitly modelled himself on the Muscovite tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, the potential for renewed conflict between church and state was clear long before 1917. This lecture will emphasise the extent to which a single individual haunted the whole debate. For, until the last moment, it was widely assumed that the new patriarch would be not the little-known Tikhon, but Archbishop Antonii (Khrapovitskii) [pictured above], whose attempts to model himself on Patriarch Nikon – the most divisive of seventeenth-century patriarchs – helped to make him the most controversial prelate of the age.

Prof. Claire Langhamer, ‘Who the hell are ordinary people?’

Ordinariness was a frequently deployed category in the political debates of 2016. Brexit was, according to one political leader, ‘a victory for ordinary, decent people who’ve taken on the establishment and won’. In this lecture I want to historicise recent use of the category by returning to another moment when ordinariness held deep political significance: the years immediately following the Second World War. I explore the range of values, styles, and specific behaviours that gave meaning to the claim to be ordinary; consider the relationship between ordinariness, everyday experience and knowledge; and map the political work ordinariness was called upon to perform. I conclude with some thoughts about how historians use the category today.

Prof. Claire Langhamer is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Sussex

‘Educating the Nation’

Over the past four years, RHS President Professor Peter Mandler has presented a series of Presidential Addresses on ‘Educating the Nation’, charting the impact of mass education on Britain since the Second World War.

I: Schools (video, text)

II: Universities (video, text)

III: Social Mobility (video, text)

IV: Subject Choice (video)

 

Prof. Sarah Pearce, ‘The Cleopatras and the Jews’

More than a hundred years after the death of Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic queen of Egypt, the Jewish historian Josephus wrote one of the most damning of all portraits of the queen. According to Josephus, almost all the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt showed great favour to their Jewish subjects and valued their loyalty; he highlights in particular the role of Egyptian Jews in fighting for Cleopatra’s powerful predecessors, Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III. By contrast, the last Cleopatra is a monstrous aberration: hostile to the Jews of Alexandria; a dangerous predator with designs on the land of Judea and its king, Herod the Great; a traitor to all. Should we trust Josephus? This lecture examines the wider context of Josephus’s claims, his apologetic interests, the influence of Herod’s memoirs on the reputation of Cleopatra, and the value of other evidence that suggests a positive account of relationships between Cleopatra VII and her Jewish subjects.

Prof. Sarah Pearce is Ian J. Karten Professor of History at the University of Southampton.