Pilgrimages, Pandemics and the Past - Tom Holland

it is absolutely fantastic to actually be inside greshan College because about two and a half years ago I came here um pressed my nose against the gates only to find that they were locked and dreamed of being inside this August place so it's an absolute thrill but I I I want to begin by talking about um a another trip another kind of walking T that was um it was less um abortive than aborted uh and it was um a pilgrimage that my brother and I wanted to undertake um early in 2020 this was our plan um to go to Stonehenge um and our aim was um very overtly political we wanted to draw attention to what we regarded as a shameful government policy the construction of a road tunnel highly destructive Road tunnel through the sacred landscape that surrounds Britain's most celebrated prehistoric monument so we knew where we wanted to go we wanted to go to Stonehenge but of course there was a problem um where were we going to start our pilgrimage now there's no question I think that Stonehenge was indeed a place of pilgrimage for people across Britain and perhaps uh even further um and the evidence for this is uh provided by durrington walls which is um a settlement about a mile or so from the stones um was inhabited for maybe 50 to 100 years and it's been posited that this was a place for the living as opposed to Stonehenge which served as a place for the dead and we know that people from across Britain had settled there because um the skeletons of animals particularly pigs have been found that came from as far a field as Northern Scotland now my brother and I did not want to start in Northern Scotland that was way too far at a journey um and obviously there was a problem because we had no way of knowing if there were particular locations say in Britain um from which pilgrims were inspired to travel to Stonehenge so what we did as uh boys who had grown up in Salsbury is that we took inspiration from um a prize exhibit in the the excellent Museum in Salsbury um and this is the so-call Asbury Archer um soall from the many arrow heads that were found surrounding uh the skeleton when it was discovered on what was then um a building site and is now uh a um cuac in out of town Asbury uh now the Asbury Archer intriguingly was not from Britain um tests on the teeth don't ask me to go into the scientific details um reveal that this man this Asbury Archer had actually seemed to have come from um the Austrian region of the Alps and so on the assumption that he probably uh took ship from the nearest point to the continent we decided that we would start our pilgrimage from do so this was the plan we were we were going to do it in April 2020 we were going to start from DOA and we were going to go head to Stonehenge but then of course on the 23rd of March a certain virus and a certain prime minister intervened and we were unable to do our pilgrimage and I found myself immured in London with no Prospect whatsoever of escaping the capital or of cramping the Kent Downs or of you know breathing in the fresh April air um the weather as I'm sure all of you will remember that April 2020 was kind of tantalizingly beautiful um and the more that beautiful day succeeded beautiful day so my sense of regret for what might have been for the pilgrimage that I might have undertaken deepened and so with my wife who is in the back bless her um we began to across London um going on kind of increasingly extensive walks and it was as part of a walk that I devised looking at um 16th century London for instance that we found ourselves pressing our noses to the B Gates of Gresham College um but the the the the the journeys that I most enjoyed were those that um kind of evoked stories evoked narrative so for instance uh this one anyone who has seen 28 Days Later where Britain gets overtaken by zombies and it begins with Killian Murphy waking up in St Thomas's Hospital finding there's no one there and walking across a deserted Westminster bridge will realize how Eerie it was to go to Westminster bridge and see it that empty um we also uh followed in the footsteps of the narrator of the War of the Worlds as he walks from his meeting with David Essex in Putney uh all the way to Primrose Hill where he discovers that the Martians have died ironically of a virus um so this and and it's full you know you the the description of his journey is so detailed that you can follow it pretty much Street by Street uh and it's full of descriptions such as South Kensington Tube Station was deserted very very eerie but perhaps the one that moved and unsettled and inspired me most was one that um took me to tbut yard in souk um and then down the old Kent Road and up to Black Heath and there I had to stop um because I had to get all the way back to our house in Brixton and I yearned to carry on with that walk I yearned to follow the road as it led onwards to Canterbury a pilgrimage that would have taken me out of London away from the pandemic hit City and out into that clear end air of Kent that I had hoped to be breathing um before the lockdown was imposed and of course by following that road to Canterbury I would have been following in the footsteps of the most celebrated pilgrims in English literature when that April with his sh Sut that April which for everyone suffering lockdown was indeed the crul month uh I've returned to reading the cany Tales which I hadn't read since I was a teenager and the Canter Tales are the work of a man who lived in the shadow of an infinitely more terrible pandemic than we were in that spring of 2020 josa was a very young boy when the Black Death arrived in England in the summer of 1348 um his family he'd been born in London his family were very wealthy very well- regarded figures in London but um his father who was in the wine business had been sent to Southampton basically to serve as a kind of Royal Wine importing agent and so he wasn't the choices weren't actually far um from Waymouth which is supposedly where the first um case of plague was reported in England and actually being in Southampton probably saved them because um in April 1349 it seems that the the the black death wipes out pretty much all of Cha's other relatives um they're all killed um and in some ways it's the making of of chosa because um his mother and his father both inherit substantial properties as the result of this horrific siing um and although there's nothing to compare with the horror of the first visit of the Black Death it returns again and again over the course of Cha's Lifetime and although as chosa reaches um maturity uh as he kind of enters uh he he he becomes um a civil servant very intimately involved in the the the business of London uh and he lives in a city that is palpably recovering from the Imp impact of the pandemic so the docks are teeing the cranes are going up everywhere houses are expanding upwards Loft conversions everywhere nevertheless despite this the the plague remains a constant and by the time that chosa comes to write um the Canterbury Tales it is endemic um it is you know it's not going to go away it is it is a feature of living in the capital um now although the Black Death therefore is a constant background presence in chorus's life it has often been pointed out that the plague does not seem to play this role in the Canterbury Tales or at least cha very rarely mentions it so there are a few references um in the tale told by the night the first of the the the tales in the Canterbury Tales the terrifying figure of of Saturn boasts to his daughter Venus my looking is the father of pestilence and in one of the very greatest of the Canterbury Tales kind of terrifying and and unbelievably moral morally complex tale told by the the the Sinister figure of the pardoner there is an even more explicit reference to to the Black Death so um the partner describes how three friends who he describes as rioter kind of lad out on the Lash um a told news of a friend um and this is the report there came a privy Thief men cpth death that in this country all the people sleth and with his spear he smot his ha at to and went his way without a word as moo he hath a thousand slain this pestilence so that is presumably it's another recurrence of the plague visitation and the riers are appalled to be told this and so they decide that they will go in search of this Sinister figure death and they boast that Death Shall be dead and they're told by an enigmatic figure um who who who many critics have thought might perhaps be a kind of Riff on the figure of the wandering jew that death is to be found under a tree and so the riers go to where the tree is and there they find a great horde of golden Florence and they decide how are they going to divy this up so one of them goes off into town um to get a cart to bring the florens away where he buys a load of poison puts it in the wine to take it back because he wants the whole lot meanwhile his two friends I use the friend the word friends lightly uh decide that they're going to kill him and share it between the two of them so they kill the guy who's come back with the poisoned wine and then they celebrate killing him by drinking the wine and they're all dead and sure enough death has been found under the tree and it is a a haunting and fabulous tale with deep roots in folklore but it is also clearly rooted in the experience of the pandemic so cha has often traveled to Italy speaks fluent Italian deeply influenced by Italian art and literature and the great Exemplar of a man writing short story is of course picachio and um in the in the in the de Cameron his Paco's great collection of short stories wild living is shown as a response to the pandemic the sense of you know drink now enjoy life because tomorrow you may be dead and this is a theme not just in Italian writing but in English writing as well so moralists are forever complaining in England that immorality um has become a symptom of the age of pestilence so Thomas wallingham um sensationally censorious uh chronicler um in the the uh The Abbey of St Albans who's very very rude about the peasants in The Peasants Revolt as well um he says of the the people in London after the plague that of all people they were the proudest the most arrogant the most greedy and these of course are the people that cha himself is living among but um if Riot you know drinking being a lad is is one uh response to plague then there were there were others of course and one of them was undoubtedly pilgrimage and that April in lockdown reading the canterbary tales I found myself aler ERT to the goal of Cha's pilgrims that Shrine of St Thomas as I had never been before to canly they W cha writes in the the opening lines of the poem The Holy Blissful martyr th to seek that hem hath hen when that they were sick when that they were sick the desire to be redeemed from the threat of illness is what motivates the entire pilgrimage and we know that cha had very very personal reasons to hold the figure of St Thomas Beckett martyred by Knights acting supposedly as they thought on the orders of the King Henry II we know that cha had particular reason to hold the uh the holy Blissful Marty in particular reverence because um the uh the Parish Church St Martin ventry where he grew up as a boy um had an altar to St Thomas and so he would have seen that every week when he went to church um and as an adult he was an experienced Diplomat he was endlessly being sent by Edward III and then by Richard II on missions that required him to cross from DOA to Cal and then onwards perhaps to Navar or to France or to Italy um and so he would have made that Journey from London to Canterbury many times he would have passed he would have crossed London Bridge and on London Bridge there was a shrine to St Thomas and this is where traditionally pilgrims setting out from London to Canterbury would um depart and of course he would have gone through Canterbury and he would have seen the Sumptuous the spectacular Shrine to St Thomas that was built there on the spot where Becket had been murdered now famously Cha's pilgrims never actually arrive in Canterbury um cha describes them reaching the limits of the city but then they never go any further and it's as though they're kind of airplanes being held in a holding pattern over he throw when there is fog or something but what I hadn't appreciated um until I started reading um around uh the Canterbury Tales was that actually they never leave the starting point either so they never get to Canterbury the shrine of St Thomas in Canterbury and they're never described as leaving the shrine of of St Thomas on London Bridge which was the traditional starting point um instead they start their pilgrimage in of all places a Tavern an in befell that in that season on a day in souk at the tabard As I Lay ready to wend and on my pilgrimage to Canterbury with full devout courage at night we come into that hosty well 9 and 20 in a company of of Sury folk by aent fall in fellowship and pilgrims were they all that toward Canterbury wooden ride the chambers and the Stables were in wide and well we were in East at best and shortly when the sun was to rest so had I spoken with them every that I was of their fellowship and on now when we went to the tabot the site of the tab uh where the Inn had stood um so Tober yard that's where it stood um it was all shut up everything was empty and deserted sorry I forgot to show you the uh the beauties of uh St Thomas being attacked but there is um there is the road leading from uh the Inn down to um through Sak that cha would have followed um and there were no you know there were no crowded bars there were no strangers meeting up uh there was no socializing of any kind everyone was having to socially distance and it struck me a new in a way that I'd never appreciated before that the Canter be Tales serve as celebration of pretty much everything that comes from not having to socially distance and I wondered a knew at that famous first line of the poem The insistence on the month of April was there something more I wondered more than just the lengthening of the days that made people in April in the late 14th century long to go on pilgrimage I mean bear in mind that cha famously specifies that it's always raining in April so it seems an oldd time to go out can't be the weather and I think that but and I think this in a way that I would not have done before um the spring of 2020 that cha did not need to specify for his readers that April was also the month traditionally when the plague that was emic in London began to Abate because we know from the records of deathbed Wills in the wake of the initial pandemic that the peculiarly lethal months in London were January February and March and this was true not just of London but for all the regions um uh across northern Europe I mean interestingly and and and kind of intriguingly uh in Italy it seems to have been different in Italy it the the plague um fatalities start to rise precipitously in the month of May and Cha who had traveled to Italy probably knew that as well so again there's this strange sense that whether you are in the South or the north of Europe April is the month when plague is at seems to have been at its least dangerous now of course the uh people in the 14th century had no notion of germ Theory but undoubtedly they understood the concept of social distancing this is what provides the entire motor for uh picachos de Cameron the the people who tell the stories have retreated from Florence to to get away from the the the the heaving crowds and the threat of infection and Retreat to uh to to a walled Villa and so I I kind of began to wonder well is this why cha chooses to specify the time of year when his pilgrims meet at the tabard and embark on their journey in Canterbury in the very first line in which case perhaps is the whole great cycle of the Canterbury Tales a eulogy to the joys in a time of endemic plague of social mixing now we don't know I don't know there's no way of knowing ultimately but what I found when I was reading the Canter Tales was that I desperately wanted to believe it I wanted to believe that cha had in some way been where I had been and where everyone in the country had been and that in a way the canary Tales were articulating an experience that we were all going through um and I think that that sense that by walking down an empty bar High Street and down the old Kent Road and seeing nobody and up onto a deserted black Heath I was in some sense getting closer to Cha I think that is not an inherently risible idea and I have sanction for thinking that um from the author of by Miles the best most recent uh biography of chosa um Marian Turner whose chorer European life is is absolutely superb um and she writes in her introduction that to try to understand the imagination of the poet throughout this book I explore the things that surrounded him the streets he walked the communities in which he participated and the structures that he inhabited but at the same time I felt with a kind of renewed ache a sense of the distance that separated me from the late 14th century because if I felt in my my kind of longing for a vaccine that would enable us all to get our lives back perhaps an echo of the yearning that the pilgrims might have had the longing to reach the shrine of St Thomas that helps the sick that you know that cures them then I guess that that only brought home to me how utterly how utterly dissolved upon the reformation and all that had followed it that age of pilgrimage had become and I realized that it was essentially my secularism my materialism that had prevented me from taking ch's pil GS and indeed cha himself perhaps seriously in the way that cha had wanted them to be taken seriously maybe I had been too seduced by the aspects of the canterbary tales that still you know in the 21st century are immediately Vivid to us the comedy the romance the sublimely deaf and and subtle characterization to recognize what was also a a Prof Prof found theme in the canterbary tales the ache of need the yearning for consolation the desire to be healed of sickness now in the the very last if I've said that you know the first line of the cany tales with its emphasis on the month does this have a peculiar significance I think it must have done then so also of course must the conclusion of the cany tales cha never finishes it in its entirety but he does write uh the inclusion that he wanted um and in it he he prayed to Christ to the Virgin to all the saints of Heaven for salvation through the benign Grace of him that is king of kings and priest over all priests that bought us with the Precious Blood of his heart so that I may be one of them at the day of Doom that shall be saved now I'd read that when I was young and discounted it as the you know dreary convention but now when I in in in the spring of of 2020 in an in an England that seemed horribly stalked by that Thief that men call death I actually found that conclusion very moving and I found it very revelatory so here is the question you know two and a half years on from that was I right um history of course is absolutely not a science every historian is shaped by the experiences that we have in the present um they inevitably inform the the perspective that we bring to uh what happened in the past so a f famous and favorite quote illustrating this is from Edward Gibbon the great historian of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire who in his autobiography wrote that the and he had served um with the Hampshire militia and he wrote that the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers the reader May smile has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire Gibbon's idea that his military service had enabled him better to understand that great military autocracy that was the Roman Empire in its Heyday and then in its decline but equally of course it is absolutely incumbent on us to respect the strangeness of the past um the way in which actually people who lived long ago were not like us and I think that the the status the canterbary tales enjoys as the you know the first Great Masterpiece of English literature is is due not to its distance from us but to its seeming closeness so the pilgrims offer us for the first time in English literature A cross-section if you like of middle England we're not getting uh the people people who traditionally had featured in medieval literature the uh the Highborn the noble uh we are getting people who have actually prospered from the devastation of the black death um it's the first time that they are given a voice and the multiplicity of perspectives that is enshrined within the Canterbury Tales the range of voices I think is appealing to um to to to to to an audience that has kind of you know familiar with novels in a way that say the allegories of I don't know Pierce Plowman simply aren't and this is why you know still today in the 21st century you think of Zade Smith or whoever um the canary Tales has an immediate uh appeal to novelists to script writers and so on and yet I do think that at the same time these seeming similarities can be very deceptive and there are two very obvious reasons I think why in the 21st century um many of us and I absolutely include myself in that may be ill qualified to comprehend the significance the resonance the tambra of the pilgrimage that Cha's companions as they set out on the road to Canterbury may have been feeling one reason is that we live in a culture that for half a millennium has been deeply Protestant The Cult of St Thomas is gone from Canterbury Cathedral the Agents of Henry VII who you know Henry VII was not the kind of man to put up with chancellors called Thomas uh you know he had a track record in getting rid of them um and he destroyed what uh what arasmus you know Thomas Moore's friend great friend had hailed as one of the greatest shrines not just in in England but in the whole of Europe of Christendom and you know nothing remains of the Holy Blissful Marty sought by ch's pilgrims those of you who may may have been to the the show that was laid on in the British museum a couple was it a year ago so ago I think um you know there was this great absence at the heart of that show the fact that all the relics of St Thomas and all the shrine had vanished but I think possibly even more saliently than the fact that we live in a a Protestant culture um we also live in a culture and perhaps especially an academic culture that is determinedly and I would say proudly materialist so I've read a fair number of books on the canterbary tales and I can't think of what one of them uh in none of these books have I ever come across um a suggestion that Miracles might actually have been performed at The Shrine of St Thomas that the hope the pilgrims had in setting out for his Shrine might actually have been been true but I mean it seems to me no doubt that cha did believe that Miracles happened at The Shrine of St Thomas um he was a man who you know for all the the kind of the Venom of his portrayal of certain figures from the church in the Canter Tales I mean that Venom IES from disappointment I think not from a a a kind of 21st century Richard Dawkins esque skepticism um cha was a man who throughout his life had enjoyed very intimate ties to a whole range of religious institutions um and when in due cause he died and was buried in Westminster Abbey this wasn't because he was a poet the idea of poets corner came much later it was because um he was counted by the monks of Westminster as you know as a friend as someone that they they valued and wanted to have buried in their Abbey uh and I think that you know if you think of the the the portrait of the pardonner which is perhaps the most venomous of all the chores portraits in the Canter Tales it it's it's precisely his disappointment that explains it and of course it's the fact that the the the pardoner gives This brilliant moral tale and yet is himself so morally contempt I that is that's expressive it seems to me of a deep religious sensibility not a skeptical one at all um and I think that pilgrimage in the canery tales is a lot more than a mere plot device and that to assume otherwise I think is absolutely to be guilty of a a pretty Grievous anacronismo so the greater the challenge becomes for us in the 21st century of making sense of kind of entering into the the minds of people who are going on pilgrimage so I I think of another a pilgrimage that I've written about um and it's it's one that happened at the beginning of the 11th century there was a great upsurge in pilgrimages then over the first three decades um and this was seen by contemporaries um as as something extraordinary so um there was a monk in the great famous burundian Abbey of Clooney and he wrote that these pilgrimages pretended nothing other than the Advent of the ACC cursed Antichrist who according to Divine testimony is expected to appear at the end of the world and what that mon recognized in these this yearning for pilgrimage was a yearning for Christ a yearning for Earth to be joined to Heaven that paralleled the yearning felt by the monks of Clooney themselves because it was the ambition of the monks in Clooney and it was a novel ambition it was one that that inspired Wonder not just across burgundy not just across France but across the whole of of Latin Christendom it was their ambition to emulate on Earth the Angelic choirs of paradise and they did this by singing hymns Psalms Praises all day to a degree that was completely at that point unprecedented um and the truest Mark of their Angelic status was that they were not beholden to a local Lord they were essentially free and that freedom was interpreted by the monks of Clooney as a kind of moral Purity um a purity that was appropriate to Angels um the only Lord they had was St Peter himself the prince of the Apostles and his far off DE Deputy the bishop of the bishop of Rome which was a long way from from burgundy now this Mass kind of enthusiasm for pilgrimage that swept uh Latin Christendom in the first three decades of um the 11th century saw its climax in 1033 when a huge mass of pilgrims from across Latin Christendom said set off for Jerusalem itself and the monk in in Clooney wrote that an innumerable multitude gathered from across the whole world greater than any man before could have hoped to see set off and what were they expecting well he he said they were expecting the Advent of antichrist and if Antichrist comes then Christ cannot be far behind and they are heading to Jerusalem because according to multiple Traditions it was in Jerusalem that this great drama was destined to play out but of course they get there and well they're disappointed are they disappointed or are they relieved certainly there is no appearance of antichrist but then there is also no joining of Heaven to Earth but that impulse I think is not you know it it isn't ended and we can see that from looking at Clooney this great ABY that yearned to emulate the purity of the angels in heaven because it endures and everything that had made its admirers seeing the monks a model of angelic behavior is still completely current and there are many across Christendom who look at this purity of the monks and think well I'd quite like a bit of that and the key place where there is this desire to emulate the purity of Clooney is actually in Rome the home of the the bishop of Rome the the one Earthly person who who who who stands superior to the Abbot of Clooney um and there a host of reformers kind of dream of doing as the monks of Clooney have done of of cleansing themselves of the kind of the greasy grubby Fingerprints of Earthly Lords um and themselves being pure and independent of all Earthly control now a project like this of course was going to need leadership and the bishop of Rome the most senior Bishop in the Christian world is ideally placed it seems to reformers and to a succession of extraordinary popes themselves to take on that role um and so um an office that in the 10th Century had been kind of at its Nader it had been either the play thing of of kind of vicious Roman Aristocrats or moving into the 11th century of domineering and overreaching Emperors over the second half of the 11th century the papacy emerged to become something very different the focus for an attempt to redraw the very fabric of the world and the result was what has been described variously as the papal Revolution or perhaps the Gregorian Revolution after the the the greatest and and most charismatic of these reforming popes Gregory iith the guy who um the pope who famously uh brings the Emperor Henry IV to kneel in the Snows before him at the The appenine Fortress of kosa and the popes and their servants embark on a great reform of cleansing the Church of any hint of Earthly control this is why the emperor has to be made humiliated in the snow this is why Kings and Lords have to be forced to let go of their traditional hold over the church this is kind of what Henry II and Beckett are fighting about and Becket as Gregory iith had done emerges triumphant from the great clash and the long-term effects of this extraordinary process of Reform are seismically enduring and still with us because what the church is doing it's casting itself as belonging to the dimension of religio which in Latin meant the bond that joined the church to the radiant eternity and purity of Heaven while Earthly rulers are cast as belonging to the dimension of the cyclum and the cyclum is um the dimension of all those who are doomed to be born and then to be swept along on the currents of time and then to to die and Gregory and his reformers do not invent the distinction between religio and the culum between the sacred and the profane if you want to put it like that between religion and the secular as over the course you know in due course it will become but they do render it something um fundamental to the future of the West in the words of AR Mo the great historian what he has termed the first European Revolution they do it for the first time and permanently and historians in the 21st century like everyone else in the west are The Heirs of this revolution the secular character of the discipline of History owes everything to it and this perhaps ironically enough may help to explain why there has been I think a certain squeamishness among Scholars when it comes to acknowledging just what the significance of the pilgrimages that marked the early years of the 11th century might have been and especially that one great pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1033 for 1033 was of course the millennial anniversary of the death and resurrection of Christ now the notion that this date might have had any significance to Christians in the 11th century has been widely seen by historians throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century as a kind of fee and flamboyant uh concoction of the Romantic Era um so the fourth Terrors of the Year 1000 is the title of one book on them um the notion that you know this is kind of On a par with Atlantis or something like that Still Remains quite deeply rooted but I think that over the past few decades the consensus on that has has begun to change quite dramatically and I think that just as the experience of um coid has provided historians with a certain correlative for the great catastrophe that was the Black Death so also have two recent developments helped to uh enable historians to wonder whether perhaps there was indeed a millennial aspect to these you know the the The Craze for pilgrimage and the yearning for Purity on the part of the Roman Church um and I think the first of these was of course the fact that we have lived through a millennium you know this only turns up once every a thousand years so it's un surprising and I think uh you know entirely to be expected that um the historians would be influenced by the experience of living through a millennium and I think the other factor that has influenced how people how historians um are now increasingly willing to see something kind of radically different in the expectations of the end of the world that that I think did haunt um Christians in the early 11th century is our own experience of climate change so when I wrote about this um back in in 2006 James Lovelock had just written a book uh in which he predicted basically that the world would have ended by 2020 so I'm quite relieved that hasn't but he he he writes about the process of of climate change our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls not knowing that the engines are about to fail and shortly before the Millennium one of the the great Abbotts of Clooney Odo wrote in almost identical terms he he he said that the vessel that bore sinful Humanity was beset All Around by gathering storm surge and he wrote perilous times are menacing us and the world is threatened with its end so the the parallels of course are are not exact I mean no no no one would say that they were but I think they are sufficiently suggest Ive that historians have kind of been able perhaps to overcome a kind of instinctive materialism and to recognize that the the spiritual anxieties and yearnings that people it seems to me indisputably experienced that these might have been vivid enough that they could indeed have powered what arar called uh the first European Revolution that they do indeed offer Reflections perhaps that do kind of Flicker and twist in a distant mirror but what if we go back even further in time back to a time before materialism before secularism before protestantism before Christianity itself so I want to end by um going back two and a half thousand years um and to undertake if not a pilgrimage then um certainly a journey to a a a fearsome and potent Shrine um and this was a journey that was uh undertaken in um classical Attica uh by young girls born in the city of Athens and every four years all the girls um girls under the age of 10 um probably between the ages of 7 and 10 would process from Athens and they would head out across the olive Graves and Fields of ateka to a shrine called Bron on the um on the eastern coast of ateka and here we see some of them the shrine of Bron was sacred to Artemis the Virgin Huntress the Mistress of beasts the the the sister of Apollo um um who was a a a a very menacing and intimidating goddess capable of inflicting absolute uh horror on a city if she was um in any way insulted and um particularly plague so when plague came often it was feared that emis had been offended and in fact according to some of the well the the the the Traditions that were preserved by uh by historians and and kept over many many centuries it does seem that the origins of this procession of girls from Athens to Bron did originate in a time of plague um because it was said that um a a group of Athenian men had killed a bear that was sacred to emus and so this was why the goddess had sent a plague to devastate um ateka and the Athenians had sent emissaries to Deli to um to consult with artemis's brother Apollo the God of Prophecy and um they these emeries were informed and I I quote from um a Byzantine history but which clearly preserves authentic um Traditions they were informed that the plague would only be brought to an end if their young daughters as blood price for the death of the bear were themselves obliged to become Bears so it was that a law of the Athenians forbad any girl being given in marriage unless she had first turned into a bear and served Artemis so what is going on here you may be wondering well there' been lots of of of explanations uh maybe it was a puberty right maybe it was an initiation right clearly an experation right in some way but obviously what no scholar I think would and if there has been one I haven't read him or her uh what no scholar today would dream of suggesting is that actually the girls might actually have turned into bears that this is what was going on and that's you know again hardly to be surprising because if if Scholars today I tend not to uh foreground the possibility that Miracles might have happened at The Shrine of of St Thomas at Canterbury then it's infinitely more unlikely that they are going to accept the reality of the goddess who is worshiped at bran and of the possibility that young girls might literally have turned into bears but I think the problem is that by refusing to countenance that possibility we immediately Place ourselves outside the lived experience of the ancient Athenians the lived experience that it is the ambition of Scholars to to try and understand Scholars are basically laying claim to an understanding and a knowledge of the classical past that is superior to those who actually exper experienced it but the problem is that how can we be sure of this how can how accurately can we possibly hope to understand the Athenians if if we kind of assume that beliefs that were so important to them have no Foundation whatsoever we are like you know a lepidopterist who has stuck a pin through a butterfly but never gets to see the Butterfly Fly um and I just want to end by quoting um a brilliant historian of ancient Athens um Greg Anderson who wrote a wonderful account of the formation of the Democracy but then went on to write um a very a most unexpected book called The realness of things past in which he essentially advances precisely this argument the fact that by not acknowledging the possibility that the gods might have existed and extraordinary things might have happened we are inevitably shutting ourselves off from potential Avenues to understanding the uh the ancient Athenians and so he's talking about the um the Athenians and their democracy what would their celebrated politer look like he Anderson asks if we no longer viewed it through the lens of conventional historicism using our standard modern an analytical template how different does the Athenians democracia appear when we try to see it more on their terms in the world of their experience and in his attempt to answer this question Anderson touches on the the Bron of the Great Festival um and he he points out uh and again I quote a general perception that Gods felt a special Affinity with human females that women and girls are closer to the Divine than men and boys and the two Salient features of the bronia are firstly that the the girls become bears and secondly that they spend time with emis in a way that no boy ever does and every you know that that that specification that that only someone who has spent time as a bear only a girl who spent time as a bear can be can then marry and the consequence of that is that every Athenian man who marries an Athenian woman knows that his wife had spent time as a bear with timus and I would suggest that that would have fostered a certain nervous respect and I think the implications of this for our understanding of Athenian democracy are quite profound um men have the vote in the democracia for the same reason that they fight because it is their duty to maintain the viability of their city in the dimension of the Earthly women perform rituals that enable them to ensure Divine protection for Athens and this I think when you see the world through Athenian eyes is actually not less important than voting or fighting and perhaps in many ways it is more important because if you offend emis she will send a plague and if you offend Athena the goddess after whom Athens of course takes its name then who knows what disasters May ensue um and that's why I I have written about the founding of the Democracy um The Cult of Athens in the the early Decades of the Democracy but actually the book I think in which I came closest to arriving at a sense of the truth of what that democracy may have been was when I wrote a book for children in which I could absolutely portray Athenian girls becoming Bears thank you very much [Applause] [Music] Tom thank you for an absolutely fascinating lecture I'm sure we can all agree that was really intriguing stuff and amazing how you wo in so many different elements I think we're going to have time for a couple of questions I'm sorry I went on far too long my pilgramage was too long um but we'll start over here so Tommy you talk about in that in your lecture you talk about what I would call affective history um on two levels firstly that historians academic historians might have a lot to learn from taking more seriously beliefs emotions states of mind and and and treating them with the due seriousness but then you also talked I mean in the beginning bit when you're talking about walking through London and being in the places where CHA had been that's another sort of Effectiveness actually in some ways isn't that why so many people who are not necessarily academic historians isn't is that sense of the livingness of the past what attracts so many people to history I think it is and I think that um there is obviously a danger in that I mean that's kind of what I was saying that I might have been overly seduced by the experience of walking in ches footsteps and experiencing pandemic and this is this is the the problem and the fascination and the frustration and the Temptation there is no way for us I think I I mean even if you're the devest Catholic to get back into the mindset of those pilgrims and to believe that this might be the best chance you have of combating a pandemic I mean that is not what how people felt in the pandemic but I think that perhaps that sense of Yearning we had to get our lives back perhaps that does kind of open I mean certainly it opened up for me a sense of what chosa might have been doing with the canary Tales and I think that that is I think it's probably a valid valid perspective it's obviously much much you as I said it's much more difficult when you come to say the you know the ancient Greeks um we cannot I mean even even if you're absolutely off your face on drugs I suggest it would be very difficult to get back to a literal belief in emis don't try it at home kids um but I think that there is a place for that kind of perhaps kind of imaginative Venture which is why I do commend Greg Anderson's book um I think it's on the reading list um it's it's a really really stimulating book by a scholar who has thought very very profoundly about these issues and I think kind of poses a a challenge to the the kind of the entire materialist framing of history as it is currently practiced thank you so we have time for please join me in thanking our speaker Tom Holland and thank thank you to yourself too [Applause] thank

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 12,081

Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge

Id: 6zgrARVn1Io

Length: 55min 12sec (3312 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023