̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Rome

First performance in 1,000 years: ‘lost’ songs from the Middle Ages are brought back to life

sjr81 — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 13:09:39 +0000

‘Songs of Consolation’, to be performed at Pembroke College Chapel, Cambridge on April 23, is reconstructed from neumes (symbols representing musical notation in the Middle Ages) and draws heavily on an 11th century manuscript leaf that was stolen from Cambridge and presumed lost for 142 years.

Saturday’s performance features music set to the poetic portions of Roman philosopher Boethius’ magnum opus ̽��ֱ��Consolation of Philosophy. One of the most widely-read and important works of the Middle Ages, it was written during Boethius’ sixth century imprisonment, before his execution for treason. Such was its importance, it was translated by many major figures, including King Alfred the Great, Chaucer and Elizabeth I.

Hundreds of Latin songs were recorded in neumes from the 9th through to the 13th century. These included passages from the classics by Horace and Virgil, late antique authors such as Boethius, and medieval texts from laments to love songs.

However, the task of performing such ancient works today is not as simple as reading and playing the music in front of you. 1,000 years ago, music was written in a way that recorded melodic outlines, but not ‘notes’ as today’s musicians would recognise them; relying on aural traditions and the memory of musicians to keep them alive. Because these aural traditions died out in the 12th century, it has often been thought impossible to reconstruct ‘lost’ music from this era – precisely because the pitches are unknown.

Now, after more than two decades of painstaking work on identifying the techniques used to set particular verse forms, research undertaken by Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Dr Sam Barrett has enabled him to reconstruct melodies from the rediscovered leaf of the 11th century ‘Cambridge Songs’.

“This particular leaf – ‘accidentally’ removed from Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library by a German scholar in the 1840s – is a crucial piece of the jigsaw as far as recovering the songs is concerned,” said Dr Barrett.

Part detective, part musical time traveller, Barrett’s scholarly groundwork has involved gathering together surviving notations from the Cambridge Songs and other manuscripts around the world and then applying them to the principles of musical setting during this era.

“After rediscovering the leaf from the Cambridge Songs, what remained was the final leap into sound,” he said. “Neumes indicate melodic direction and details of vocal delivery without specifying every pitch and this poses a major problem.

“ ̽��ֱ��traces of lost song repertoires survive, but not the aural memory that once supported them. We know the contours of the melodies and many details about how they were sung, but not the precise pitches that made up the tunes.”

After piecing together an estimated 80-90 per cent of what can be known about the melodies for ̽��ֱ��Consolation of Philosophy, Barrett enlisted the help of Benjamin Bagby of Sequentia – a three-piece group of experienced performers who have built up their own working memory of medieval song.

Bagby, co-founder of Sequentia, is also a director of the Lost Songs Project which is already credited with bringing back to life repertoires from Beowulf through to the Carmina Burana.

Over the last two years, Bagby and Barrett have experimented by testing scholarly theories against the practical requirements of hand and voice, exploring the possibilities offered by accompaniment on period instruments. Working step-by-step, and joined recently by another member of Sequentia, the harpist-singer Hanna Marti, songs from ̽��ֱ��Consolation of Philosophy have now been brought back to life.

Added Barrett: “Ben tries out various possibilities and I react to them – and vice versa. When I see him working through the options that an 11th century person had, it’s genuinely sensational; at times you just think ‘that’s it!’ He brings the human side to the intellectual puzzle I was trying to solve during years of continual frustration.”

While it’s unclear whether Boethius ever wrote Consolation’s poetry to be sung, the Roman philosopher recorded and collected ideas about music in other hugely influential works. During the Middle Ages, until the end of the 12th century, it was common for great works such as Boethius’ to be set to music as a way of learning and ritualising the texts.

There have been other attempted settings of ̽��ֱ��Consolation of Philosophy across the centuries; especially during the renaissance and the 19th century when melodies were invented to sound like popular songs of the day.

But it was the rediscovered leaf of the Cambridge Songs that allowed the crucial breakthrough in being able to finally reassemble the work as it would have been heard around 1,000 years ago.

Originating in the Rhineland in the first half of the 11th century, the Cambridge Songs makes up the final part of an anthology of Latin texts that was held in Canterbury before making its way to Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library by the late 17th century.

In 1840, a Germanic scholar cut out an important leaf and returned home. For 142 years, Cambridge presumed it lost before a chance discovery by historian and Liverpool ̽��ֱ�� academic Margaret Gibson in 1982.

During an unscheduled visit to a Frankfurt library, Gibson enquired as to whether they had any Boethius manuscripts and was told of a single leaf in their collections. Gibson immediately recognised the leaf as coming from a copy of Consolation and its likely importance for the number of neumes it contained.

Gibson then got in touch with Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� medievalist Christopher Page, then a PhD candidate, who realised this was the missing leaf from the Cambridge Songs and secured its return to the city nearly a century and a half after its disappearance.

“Without this extraordinary piece of luck, it would have been much, much harder to reconstruct the songs,” added Barrett. “ ̽��ֱ��notations on this single leaf allow us to achieve a critical mass that may not have been possible without it.

“There have been times while I’ve been working on this that I have thought I’m in the 11th century, when the music has been so close it was almost touchable. And it’s those moments that make the last 20 years of work so worthwhile.”

Saturday’s performance, 'Songs of Consolation from Boethius to the Carmina Burana', takes place at Pembroke College Chapel from 8pm-9.30pm. Tickets are £20, £15 (concessions) and £5 for students and are available from songsofconsolation.eventbrite.co.uk or from Pembroke College Porters’ Lodge.

An ancient song repertory will be heard for the first time in 1,000 years this week after being ‘reconstructed’ by a Cambridge researcher and a world-class performer of medieval music

There have been times while I’ve been working on this that I have thought I’m in the 11th century, when the music has been so close it was almost touchable.

Sam Barrett

Carmina qui quondam (excerpt) - Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy I:1

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Detail from the Cambridge Songs manuscript leaf that was stolen from and then recovered by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Disbelieve it or not, ancient history suggests that atheism is as natural to humans as religion

tdk25 — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 08:24:45 +0000

Despite being written out of large parts of history, atheists thrived in the polytheistic societies of the ancient world – raising considerable doubts about whether humans really are 'wired' for religion – a study suggests.

̽��ֱ��claim is the central proposition of a new book by Tim Whitmarsh, Professor of Greek Culture and a Fellow of St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. In it, he suggests that atheism – which is typically seen as a modern phenomenon – was not just common in ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome, but probably flourished more in those societies than in most civilisations since.

As a result, the study challenges two assumptions that prop up current debates between atheists and believers: Firstly, the idea that atheism is a modern point of view, and second, the idea of 'religious universalism' – that humans are naturally predisposed, or 'wired', to believe in gods.

̽��ֱ��book, entitled Battling ̽��ֱ��Gods, was launched in Cambridge on Tuesday 16 February 2016.

“We tend to see atheism as an idea that has only recently emerged in secular Western societies,” Whitmarsh said. “ ̽��ֱ��rhetoric used to describe it is hyper-modern. In fact, early societies were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered normal.”

“Rather than making judgements based on scientific reason, these early atheists were making what seem to be universal objections about the paradoxical nature of religion – the fact that it asks you to accept things that aren’t intuitively there in your world. ̽��ֱ��fact that this was happening thousands of years ago suggests that forms of disbelief can exist in all cultures, and probably always have.”

̽��ֱ��book argues that disbelief is actually “as old as the hills”. Early examples, such as the atheistic writings of Xenophanes of Colophon (c.570-475 BCE) are contemporary with Second Temple-era Judaism, and significantly predate Christianity and Islam. Even Plato, writing in the 4th Century BCE, said that contemporary non-believers were “not the first to have had this view about the gods.”

Because atheism’s ancient history has largely gone unwritten, however, Whitmarsh suggests that it is also absent from both sides of the current monotheist/atheist debate. While atheists depict religion as something from an earlier, more primitive stage of human development, the idea of religious universalism is also built partly on the notion that early societies were religious by nature because to believe in god is an inherent, “default setting” for humans.

Neither perspective is true, Whitmarsh suggests: “Believers talk about atheism as if it’s a pathology of a particularly odd phase of modern Western culture that will pass, but if you ask someone to think hard, clearly people also thought this way in antiquity.”

His book surveys one thousand years of ancient history to prove the point, teasing out the various forms of disbelief expressed by philosophical movements, writers and public figures.

These were made possible in particular by the fundamental diversity of polytheistic Greek societies. Between 650 and 323 BCE, Greece had an estimated 1,200 separate city states, each with its own customs, traditions and governance. Religion expressed this variety, as a matter of private cults, village rituals and city festivals dedicated to numerous divine entities.

This meant that there was no such thing as religious orthodoxy. ̽��ֱ��closest the Greeks got to a unifying sacred text were Homer’s epics, which offered no coherent moral vision of the gods, and indeed often portrayed them as immoral. Similarly, there was no specialised clergy telling people how to live: “ ̽��ֱ��idea of a priest telling you what to do was alien to the Greek world,” Whitmarsh said.

As a result, while some people viewed atheism as mistaken, it was rarely seen as morally wrong. In fact, it was usually tolerated as one of a number of viewpoints that people could adopt on the subject of the gods. Only occasionally was it actively legislated against, such as in Athens during the 5th Century BCE, when Socrates was executed for “not recognising the gods of the city.”

While atheism came in various shapes and sizes, Whitmarsh also argues that there were strong continuities across the generations. Ancient atheists struggled with fundamentals that many people still question today – such as how to deal with the problem of evil, and how to explain aspects of religion which seem implausible.

These themes extend from the work of early thinkers – like Anaximander and Anaximenes, who tried to explain why phenomena such as thunder and earthquakes actually had nothing to do with the gods – through to famous writers like Euripides, whose plays openly criticised divine causality. Perhaps the most famous group of atheists in the ancient world, the Epicureans, argued that there was no such thing as predestination and rejected the idea that the gods had any control over human life.

̽��ֱ��age of ancient atheism ended, Whitmarsh suggests, because the polytheistic societies that generally tolerated it were replaced by monotheistic imperial forces that demanded an acceptance of one, “true” God. Rome’s adoption of Christianity in the 4th Century CE was, he says, “seismic”, because it used religious absolutism to hold the Empire together.

Most of the later Roman Empire’s ideological energy was expended fighting supposedly heretical beliefs – often other forms of Christianity. In a decree of 380, Emperor Theodosius I even drew a distinction between Catholics, and everyone else – whom he classed as dementes vesanosque (“demented lunatics”). Such rulings left no room for disbelief.

Whitmarsh stresses that his study is not designed to prove, or disprove, the truth of atheism itself. On the book’s first page, however, he adds: “I do, however, have a strong conviction – that has hardened in the course of researching and writing this book – that cultural and religious pluralism, and free debate, are indispensable to the good life.”

About the book and the author

Battling ̽��ֱ��Gods is published by Faber and Faber. Tim Whitmarsh is A G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and a Fellow of St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

People in the ancient world did not always believe in the gods, a new study suggests – casting doubt on the idea that religious belief is a 'default setting' for humans.

Early societies were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered normal

Tim Whitmarsh

Wikimedia Commons

̽��ֱ��Chariot of Zeus, from Stories from the Greek Tragedians by Alfred Church. ̽��ֱ��study suggests that not all Greeks recognised the gods, and that atheism was fairly acceptable in ancient polytheistic societies.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Meet ̽��ֱ��Romans with Mary Beard

th288 — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 07:01:31 +0000

Mary Beard, Professor of Classics and Fellow of Newnham College, whose acclaimed programme Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town was broadcast in 2010, spent six weeks filming in Italy last summer.

By decoding epitaphs and piecing together the evidence from objects and archaeology, Professor Beard explores the stories of barmen, prostitutes, children, sailors, slaves and even gladiators.

In the first programme she rides the Via Appia, climbs to the top seats of the Colosseum, takes a boat to Rome’s famous Ostia port and takes us into the bowels of Monte Testaccio (‘broken pot mountain’).

She also meets Eurysaces, ex-slave and eccentric baker, who made a fortune out of the grain trade – building his tomb in the shape of a giant bread-oven; Baricha, Zabda and Achiba, three prisoners of war who went on to become Roman citizens; and Pupius Amicus, the purple-dye seller making imperial dye from murex shellfish imported from Tunisia.

In the second programme Professor Beard descends into the city streets to discover the dirt, crime, sex and slum conditions in the world’s first highrise city where most Romans lived in apartment blocks with little space, light or sanitation.

In the third programme she delves even deeper into ordinary Roman life by going behind the closed doors of the home, meeting an extraordinary cast of characters – drunken housewives, teenage brides, bullied children and runaway slaves – and paints a more dynamic, lusty picture of Roman life.

“ ̽��ֱ��idea behind the programme was to show that we really still can meet loads of very ordinary Romans face to face," said Professor Beard. "We may think of Rome as a marble city, full of posh blokes in togas. Sure there were some of those. But the funny, sardonic, touching voices of the men and women in the street still come across loud and clear. “Wine, women and bath” wrote one on his tombstone, “ruin our bodies – but they are what make life worth living!”

Episode One of Meet ̽��ֱ��Romans is on Tuesday 17 April on BBC2 at 9pm.

A three part series starting on BBC2 next Tuesday explores what life in Ancient Rome was really like for normal citizens living in the world’s first city of one million people.

̽��ֱ��idea behind the programme was to show that we really still can meet loads of very ordinary Romans face to face.

Professor Mary Beard

Rome with Mary Beard

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Doctor’s orders, Roman style

bjb42 — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:29:02 +0000

Investigating the reproductive health of people who lived 2000 years ago is not an easy task; but it is an important one. Rome under the Empire was the first mega-city, reaching around a million inhabitants at its height. Gaining insight into issues such as just how risky pregnancy and childbirth were for women in Imperial Rome, and the chances of any child surviving a year, let alone five, is crucial to understanding both the structure and the texture of Roman society. ̽��ֱ��extent to which the city’s population was sustained only through very high levels of immigration rather than by being able to reproduce itself must have had very considerable social and cultural consequences. ̽��ֱ��rates of infant mortality, on the other hand, will have impacted heavily on the practicalities and meanings of family life.

What the ancients knew

Ancient medical texts offer one avenue for research into these key issues. ̽��ֱ��most detailed discussion of reproduction and female health to survive from the Roman Empire belongs to the physician Soranus of Ephesus, who practised at Rome in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD.

Though scornful of anatomy (he considered it ‘useless’), Soranus shares the general classical view that the fetus is nourished through the vessels of the umbilical cord, and supports those who argue for the existence of two embryonic membranes, attacking those who contend there is just one. Nor is this the only ancient medical dispute he becomes involved in – his treatise is highly polemical throughout.

Soranus also offers advice (and criticism) on everything from the best time for intercourse if the aim is conception, to infant weaning and teething, covering topics like the (exacting) care to be given during pregnancy and birth, the best swaddling techniques, and how to choose and manage a wet-nurse.

A fresh dialogue

As the last point suggests, this is a work aimed at the elite of Rome; the bulk of the urban poor would not have been able to afford the time or expense required to pursue Soranus’ instructions on the diet, exercise, bathing and massage regime to be followed by a pregnant woman. And perhaps they even followed the prescriptions of his rivals. Can we move from advice to what actually happened, from ancient treatises to demographic patterns on the ground? This is beginning to happen, as new scientific techniques aimed at extracting a range of data about diet, lifestyle, disease and well-being from ancient skeletal remains are developed, the results of which can be compared with the teachings of ancient physicians. Data recently derived from isotopic and dental analysis of skeletal remains from ancient Rome, for example, have proved consistent with the written advice of the Roman doctors that encouraged mothers to introduce solid foods after six months and complete weaning soon after two years.

This kind of dialogue between ancient materials and modern techniques and models needs to be developed and expanded. Research into ancient reproductive health requires an interdisciplinary approach, a bringing together of scholars in the fields of ancient medicine and historical demography, as well as experts working with the new scientific analyses. Dr Flemming is currently helping to build up such a broad and collaborative approach in Cambridge – an approach that promises further progress in these crucial areas of understanding.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Rebecca Flemming (ref33@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Classics.

Rebecca Flemming from the Faculty of Classics works with ancient texts on health and reproduction.

̽��ֱ��most detailed discussion of reproduction and female health to survive from the Roman Empire belongs to the physician Soranus of Ephesus, who practised at Rome in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD.

Wellcome Library, London

Roman votive offering

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Academics to join British Academy Fellowship

bjb42 — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Election is an acknowledgment of "academic distinction" and is granted annually to only a small number of scholars in any field.

This year's list includes eight Cambridge academics. ̽��ֱ��newly appointed Fellows are as follows:

Professor David Abulafia has been a Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge since 2000 and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College since 1974. He has a particular interest in the economic, social and political history of southern Italy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and has written a wide variety of publications on the history and development of the Mediterranean lands.

Professor Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics and a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and her blog, 'A Don's Life' appears in ̽��ֱ��Times as a regular column. She has written widely on Classical culture and its reception in the modern world, and her latest book, 'Pompeii: the Life of a Roman Town' is soon to be adapted into a BBC series.

Professor Christopher Clark is a Professor of Modern European History and a Fellow at St Catharine's College. Born and educated in Australia, Clark became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2007. His research interests include the history of 19th century Germany and continental Europe, but his current work focuses on the outbreak of war in 1914 and political change across Europe in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions.

Dr Alan Baker was elected in 1970 as the first ever teaching Fellow of Geography at Emmanuel College and is now a Life Fellow. From 2001 until this year, Dr Baker was a Cambridge City Councillor and chaired its Planning Committee for seven years.

His research focuses upon the social, economic and cultural geography of 19th century France. In 1997 the French government recognised his "services to French culture" through awarding the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Professor Deborah Howard is Professor of Architectural History and a Fellow of St John's College. Her research interests include the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto and the relationship between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean. She recently co-ordinated a major research project on 'Architecture and Music in Renaissance Venice'.

Professor Juliet Mitchell is Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies and a Fellow of Jesus College. She is the Founder Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a Research Fellow at the Department of Human Geography. Her research looks at gender difference from a psychoanalytic and social history perspective and examines the sibling relationship in different contexts.

Dr Karalyn Patterson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences. She is currently studying the effects that brain disease and damage have upon adult language and memory. She has published her findings in a variety of scientific journals.

Dr Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is Master of Sidney Sussex College and will be Professor in the Faculty of Classics from October 2010. He is a Roman social and cultural historian with a particular interest in Pompeii and Herculaneum. He was the Director of the British School at Rome from 1995 until 2009, and was made an OBE in the New Year's Honours for services to Anglo-Italian cultural relations.

On hearing of her election, Professor Mary Beard said: "I am overwhelmed, touched, honoured and very aware of the responsibility of becoming a Fellow of the British Academy. It's a cliché to say that these are difficult times, but true all the same."

"We Classicists know what a world without Humanities is - it's the Dark Ages. My job, and all the more now, is not just to resist the forces of darkness, but to make clear why the Humanities are not an optional extra for times of plenty, but central to everything we, as a culture, do."

̽��ֱ��scholars will become the newest members of the British Academy which currently consists of over 1,000 academics. ̽��ֱ��British Academy not only recognises academic achievement, but also helps fund national and international research and organises a wide-ranging programme of public events.

̽��ֱ��British Academy has today announced the scholars elected for this year&rsquo;s Fellowships in recognition of their contribution to the humanities and social sciences.

I am overwhelmed, touched, honoured and very aware of the responsibility of becoming a Fellow of the British Academy. It's a cliché to say that these are difficult times, but true all the same.

Professor Mary Beard

Sir Cam

Senate House

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Re-interpreting Greece and Rome at ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum

bjb42 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:00:11 +0000

Scholars from ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum and Faculty of Classics have won a major Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant to undertake research that will underpin the re-display of the Museum’s Greek and Roman collections. ̽��ֱ��three-year project grant funds a full-time research assistant and aims to bring university-based research in classical art and archaeology into conversation with museum-based display practices.

Traditional museum displays of Greek and Roman material tend to privilege either a chronological or a thematic approach. ̽��ֱ��former offers a stylistic history of Greek and Roman art that plays down the original context and nature of the objects, while the latter presents these objects as though transparent evidence for ‘daily life’. Both leave out of the picture the role of collectors in shaping museum collections.

Recent research has exposed the inadequacy of seeing the history of art purely in terms of stylistic progression, and has improved our understanding of the importance of changing technology, the complexities of workshop practices, and the role of ancient markets in influencing production. ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam re-display offers an opportunity to re-assess the collections both in the light of these advances and as collections.

‘ ̽��ֱ��project will put people back into the history of art and provide an important opportunity to integrate ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam’s collections into the study of classics in Cambridge,’ explained Dr Lucilla Burn, Keeper of Antiquities and Principal Investigator. ‘It will also provide the Faculty with both the opportunity to engage with actual objects and a broader public forum in which to share and transfer their knowledge and expertise,’ added Professor Robin Osborne who, with Dr Caroline Vout and Professor Mary Beard, represents the Faculty of Classics component of the project.

̽��ֱ��research will be disseminated to the public in an online public-access catalogue and new web pages for "virtual" visitors. Talks, workshops and family activities drawing on the research will also be an important part of the Museum’s education provision for children and adults.

For more information, please contact ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum (www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk).

Recent funding will enable collaboration between classicists and museum curators, and shape a major re-display of Greek and Roman art and archaeology.

̽��ֱ��project will put people back into the history of art and provide an important opportunity to integrate ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam’s collections into the study of classics in Cambridge,

Lucilla Burn

Tasitch from Flickr

Roman marbles

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Cambridge teaching for adult learners enters cyberspace

tdk25 — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Adult learners are to be given the chance to study everything from climate change to ancient Rome online with the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, starting this month.

̽��ֱ��new initiative will allow mature students to learn part-time and at their own pace and continue their studies from anywhere in the world. They will also be able to receive guidance from academics and swap notes with their fellow students by computer in a custom-designed "Virtual Learning Environment".

̽��ֱ��courses are being run by the ̽��ֱ��'s Institute of Continuing Education based at Madingley Hall, Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��Institute already provides a flourishing programme of over 600 courses to more than 10,000 students from around the world, but this is its first foray into cyberspace.

Instead of always paying a weekly visit to Cambridge for the duration of their course, students will now be able to study some subject modules online. Dedicated tutors will be online regularly throughout the module for consultation.

Other existing courses are also being given a new electronic dimension, which will enable extra interaction between tutors and fellow-students. Participants can put together a programme of free-standing courses to work towards accreditation in the form of a Certificate of Higher Education.

Dr Lynne Harrison, associate director of eLearning, said: " ̽��ֱ��idea is to give people greater flexibility of learning. Normally tutors and students meet once a week for 10 to 20 weeks. Now we will be able to extend that exchange beyond the classroom.

"A lot of people think of online learning as being somehow remote and lonely, but one of the reasons we are going down this route is because it offers part-time students the chance to learn in a less-remote manner. This Virtual Learning Environment will give them the opportunity to interact with one another on a much more regular basis than before."

Each subject will have its own support area on the eLearning website, known as the Virtual Learning Environment. Students taking courses that are fully online will be able to progress at their own pace.

Adult learners are to be given the chance to study everything from climate change to ancient Rome online with the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, starting this month.

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