̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - France

An early medieval money mystery is solved

ta385 — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 05:00:00 +0000

Byzantine bullion fuelled Europe’s revolutionary adoption of silver coins in the mid-7th century, only to be overtaken by silver from a mine in Charlemagne’s Francia a century later, new tests reveal. ̽��ֱ��findings could transform our understanding of Europe’s economic and political development.

Cambridge and Sciences Po to enhance collaboration

ag236 — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 12:09:54 +0000

At a ceremony held in Paris on Friday November 24th, representatives from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and from Sciences Po signed a Memorandum of Agreement to formalise and strengthen the partnership between both institutions.

̽��ֱ��stated aim of the document is to develop research links in disciplines including Politics, History and Public Policy, with a strong expectation that the collaboration will develop to encompass other areas of mutual interest.

Covering an initial three-year period, the agreement includes the provision of matched funds by Cambridge and Sciences Po to enable academic workshops and symposia, and to pay for travel grants, short-term research visits, and visiting professorships at both Sciences Po and Cambridge.

Other bilateral activities within its scope include the encouragement of student mobility, and access for Cambridge PhD students to the Sciences Po Teaching Fellowships programme at Sciences Po campuses in Reims, Menton or Le Havre, where lectures are done in English.

One specific outcome of the agreement between Cambridge and Sciences Po will be the organisation of a public conference on “ ̽��ֱ��Future of Europe”, to be held in Paris in 2018, and led by specialists in European studies from both institutions.

Signing on behalf of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Professor Eilís Ferran, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional and International Relations, said: “This Memorandum of Agreement builds on strong existing relationships between our two world-leading universities. It offers us a formal mechanism to strengthen our partnership at a time when collaboration between academic institutions is more crucial than ever before.”

Mr Frédéric Mion, President of Sciences Po, said: “There is a need to maintain and deepen cooperation among excellent academic institutions in Europe. It is the right time to continue strengthening our ties with a world-class ̽��ֱ�� such as Cambridge by developing jointly this innovative and ambitious research partnership in the social sciences. ̽��ֱ��Memorandum of Agreement is built on that firm conviction. ”

Sciences Po was founded in 1872 as the École Libre des Sciences Politiques to educate the French governing class in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Today it is one of France’s leading research universities in the social sciences and humanities. It has seven campuses across France, and a record of excellent research in law, economics, history, political science and sociology.

Agreement will enable closer research ties and funding of joint projects

Sciences Po-Cambridge agreement

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Yes

‘France’s Samuel Pepys’ is elevated from the footnotes of history

amb206 — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 13:00:00 +0000

Pierre de L’Estoile has been described as France’s Samuel Pepys. Like Pepys, he lived in singularly interesting times. Like Pepys, he documented in his journals both the inner world of his household and the wider world of politics and gossip. He also compiled scrapbooks of the partisan and often scurrilous broadsheets that circulated in his Paris neighbourhood as rival factions in a religious upheaval sought to discredit each other as heretics, unbelievers or opportunists.

Born in 1546, L’Estoile lived through the eight civil wars that became known as France’s Wars of Religion, a succession of violent struggles between Catholics and Protestants that drew in all of the great powers of Reformation Europe. ̽��ֱ��troubles began with the massacre of Protestants worshipping at the village of Vassy on 1 March 1562 and the advance of the Protestant armies that followed. Ten years later, thousands of Protestants lay dead on the streets of Paris, slaughtered by Catholic militia in the infamous St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Only with the Edict of Nantes in 1598 did rival parties unite behind the Catholic convert, King Henri IV, and establish a fragile peace.

Edited extracts of L’Estoile’s journals were published following his death. Ever since, historians have scoured his records for unparalleled first-hand accounts of events that range from political scandals to everyday criminality and wondrous portents in the sky. Meanwhile, the diarist himself has appeared solely in the footnotes of histories devoted to the period. In Pierre de L’Estoille and his World in the Wars of Religion, historian Tom Hamilton places this remarkable Parisian centre stage of a narrative that sheds new light on a fascinating and turbulent period of French history.

̽��ֱ��Wars of Religion are conventionally framed as a conflict sharply divided between Catholics and Protestants, and driven by the political ambition of powerful noble families. Hamilton’s meticulous archival research into L’Estoile’s life as head of a large household (his two marriages produced 18 children, nine of whom survived to maturity), and holder of important positions in the royal bureaucracy, looks instead at the impact of the civil wars on everyday life. He reveals a society marked by ambiguous religious allegiances and conflicting political solidarities that could split families apart.

Hamilton’s book, the first in any language to concentrate on L’Estoile, examines a life that is both ordinary and extraordinary. He uses the diarist’s writing and collecting to rethink the complex flavours and textures of a world disrupted by religious and political conflict.

L’Estoile came from a wealthy Catholic family of royal office-holders. Yet his father chose a Protestant scholar as tutor and protector for his young son. ̽��ֱ��diarist recalled that his father’s instructions, given on his deathbed, were that his son (“one of the most precious gifts that God has given me”) was to be raised a pious and god-fearing Catholic. Tellingly, however, the boy was not to be nourished in “the abuses and superstitions of the Church”.

Years later, L’Estoile was to pass on his father’s moderate religious legacy to his own children, only to see his eldest son rebel and join the armies of the zealous Catholic League, dying tragically less than a year after reconciling with his family.

̽��ֱ��religious choice of the L’Estoile family, argues Hamilton, offers a new perspective on the history of Catholicism. It reveals how French (Gallican) Catholics could be familiar with Protestants, who were critical of Rome and what L’Estoile called “the rotten trunk of the papacy”, and at the same time give their allegiance to the “most Christian king” of France as the head of a national church, a distinctively French branch of Catholicism.

Social status gave L’Estoile privileged access to information and a means to sustain his family during the day-to-day struggle of life through the civil wars. Not only was L’Estoile a landowner (although he seldom visited his estates and mishandled his financial affairs), he also held positions as a royal secretary and officer in the Paris Chancery. During the final civil war, L’Estoile was privy to seditious correspondence between factions, and to add to his collection he “copied it at that very moment on one of the desks in the Chancery”. He also had a role in print licensing and got to know the printers of the rue Saint Jacques. Many became friends for life and one, at least, “printed nothing, however secret, about which he did not inform me”.

L’Estoile’s house in the neighbourhood of Saint-André-des-Arts, on the Left Bank of the River Seine, was just a few minutes’ walk from his workplace on the Île de la Cité. He lived surrounded by family and colleagues, a courtyard away from his mother. His house had been the scene of the murder of a previous occupant: he purchased it for a knockdown sum and never mentioned its grim history in his diaries. An inventory of L’Estoile’s worldly goods made on his death offers clues about the man he was. He owned few clothes, and those he did possess were shabby. Neither was there anything exceptional about the family’s accoutrements, although he differed from his neighbours in not displaying devotional paintings of the Virgin Mary or saints.

Located at the top of the house, L’Estoile’s study and cabinet of curiosities tell another story. In a space out of bounds to the rest of his family, L’Estoile amassed one of the largest libraries and painting collections in Paris. Here he wrote and edited his journals, organised his collections, and met with scholarly friends. In this respect he engaged with men of his class across Europe caught up in the growing mania for collecting. Some – including English and German diplomats – went out of their way to visit him.

While other collectors gathered learned manuscripts or items of natural history to prove their erudition, L’Estoile collected printed ephemera which he had made into volumes he called his ‘drolleries’ (trifles), mocking their risible exaggerations. ̽��ֱ��scale of these drolleries was far from trifling. By 1589, L’Estoile had collected more than 500 different publications that documented the twists and turns of the civil wars. At his death in 1611, his collection had swelled to contain thousands of volumes.

Meanwhile, L’Estoile’s journals offer a glimpse of some of the terrible privations suffered by poor Parisians as food supplies were disrupted and prices escalated. During the Siege of Paris in 1590, when the French royal army surrounded a city taken over by the Catholic League, he describes taking a walk with two relatives and spotting a desperate woman eating the skin of a dog. So shocked are the men by this sight that L’Estoile’s brother-in-law undertakes to record it himself, lest L’Estoile’s account later be dismissed as fabricated.

Remaining in Paris during a period when many moderate Catholics sought safety elsewhere, L’Estoile put his own life on the line. In 1591 the Catholic League drew up lists of people known to oppose its views, marking their names with the letters P for pendu (hanged), D for dagué (knifed) or C for chassé (exiled). L’Estoile was shown this list and saw his name marked D and those of several of his relatives marked P. Fortunately for L’Estoile and family, the League’s soldiers refused to carry out its orders.

L’Estoile’s political affiliations were avowedly royalist. He believed that only a strong king could bring peace. In his collecting, however, he amassed literature of every political hue, confessing that his collecting impulse overrode any sense of prudence. At a time of intermittent print censorship, people caught possessing or disseminating defamatory material were in danger of execution. L’Estoile himself wrote of anti-royalist prints in his collection that he “should have thrown them into the fire, as they deserved”.

Fortuitously for future historians, L’Estoile was stubbornly fixated on collecting. As a Chancery official charged with book licensing, and a cousin of the Parisian criminal lieutenant in charge of the book burnings, he claimed he was keeping exemplary copies for posterity, to preserve memories of the wickedness and confusion of his times.

Tom Hamilton is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Pierre de L’Estoile and his World in the Wars of Religion is published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press.

̽��ֱ��journals and scrapbooks of Pierre de L’Estoile have for generations provided a vivid picture of France in a time of religious upheaval. Now Cambridge historian Tom Hamilton has written the first book devoted to the life of L’Estoile as a diarist, collector and man about town.

Hamilton’s book examines a life both ordinary and extraordinary. He uses the diarist’s writing and collecting to rethink the complex flavours and textures of a world disrupted by religious and political conflict.

Francois Dubois

Painting of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre

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

Yes

Opinion: Macron’s European trap

ag236 — Wed, 10 May 2017 15:53:06 +0000

By any account, the French presidential election that ended last Sunday was extraordinary. ̽��ֱ��run-off in the second round was between two political ‘outsiders’: Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. In the first round, the mainstream left and right candidates came fifth and third respectively, with the far left Jean-Luc Mélenchon coming in way ahead of the Socialist Party candidate, Benoît Hamon. Many voters only decided late on who they would vote for, making this one of the most volatile elections on record.

̽��ֱ��scandals affecting the centre-right candidate, François Fillon, overshadowed the campaign and relegated debates about political programmes into second place. In the run-up to last Sunday’s second round vote, a fierce argument raged – especially on the left – about the rights and wrongs of abstaining or spoiling one’s ballot paper. Political celebrities – such as the Greek former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis – weighed in, urging French doubters to vote for Macron because “he is all that stands in between France and the fascism of Marine Le Pen”.

In the end, one in four of registered voters either stayed away last Sunday or spoilt their ballot paper. What prevailed in the second round was the logic of lesser evil – voting for a candidate that is ‘not as bad’ as another – which goes some way to explaining the sombre tone of Macron’s victory speech on Sunday night at the Louvre in Paris.

For all the novelty, Macron’s election victory points to one important continuity: France’s complicated relationship with the rest of the European Union and its place within the Eurozone.

When François Hollande was campaigning for the French presidency in 2012, it was the height of the Eurozone crisis with jobless figures reaching record levels and France’s economy in deep trouble. Aware of the opposition to austerity policies within France, Hollande promised to take on the German government. He would discuss “firmly and amicably” with Ms Merkel and impress upon her the need for a new ‘growth pact’ for the Eurozone. His growth pact included proposals for Eurobonds to finance infrastructure spending and a transactions tax to fund development programs. His efforts came to nothing and the idea of a “growth pact” disappeared without a trace.

Something similar is happening today. Last Monday, a day after the French election, German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech where she insisted that Macron’s victory would not change German policy in Europe. ̽��ֱ��German position is clear: France must reform its economy first, and bring its budget deficits well within the Eurozone’s rules, before there is any discussion on Eurozone reform. Even then, it is very unlikely that anything that was contained in Macron’s programme – creation of a Eurozone parliament, a Eurozone budget and a Eurozone finance minister – will see the light of day. Such changes would require treaty reform that national governments say is out of the question. Referendums have left European governments so bruised that they are unwilling to risk putting treaty changes to the vote.

There is an irony here. Macron has been an openly pro-European candidate, regularly waving the European flag and taking the Ode to Joy – the EU’s ‘anthem’ – as his own campaign song. And yet, this very pro-Europeanism is what will most constrain a Macron presidency.

Most likely as a first step is that Macron will be pushed into cutting budgets and reforming labour markets, doing so possibly by decree given the history of opposition to such measures. In exchange, he may get some mild reforms of the functioning of the Eurozone but ones that fall short of any need for ratification through referendum or by national parliaments. This outcome may be part of Macron’s strategy, where the rigidity of the Eurozone’s rules is used as a means of pushing economic reforms onto France. Either way, the bigger difficulties, to do with structural imbalances of the Eurozone, will remain untouched.

A problem Macron has never confronted is that his promises to transform France’s national growth model are made within a context where Eurozone membership which makes such a change almost impossible. Macron’s election was extraordinary in many respects but his experience of life inside the Eurozone is likely to be rather more run of the mill.

Chris Bickerton is lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations (POLIS) and a fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge

Despite its novelty, Emmanuel Macron's election victory in France points to one important continuity, argues Dr Chris Bickerton.

There is an irony here. Macron has been an openly pro-European candidate, yet this pro-Europeanism is what will most constrain a Macron presidency.

Chris Bickerton

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

Yes

Locked in combat: two French thinkers slog it out

amb206 — Thu, 31 May 2012 09:21:12 +0000

There are no goals in boxing and no red corner in football. Andy Martin’s ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre Vs Camus (Simon & Schuster, 6 June 2012) is a story about two philosophers and their intellectual tussling in the Paris of the 1940s and 1950s. They are an odd pair, mismatched. Sartre was famously ugly, Camus was in comparison an Adonis; Sartre was a Parisian insider while Camus, ‘ ̽��ֱ��Outsider’, came from a poor family in Algeria. But they had much in common: both highly competitive, both richly creative, both prone to angst or ‘Nausea’.

Spiked with seminal moments in author Andy Martin’s own life, the book opens with a small but delicious act of felony committed by the writer as a teenager in suburban Essex, and the creeping guilt that ensued: to give any more away would spoil the narrative. Suffice it to say that Martin, today a languages lecturer at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a poet-cum-screenwriter, was a boy with big questions and a vivid imagination.

Do other people exist, could they simply disappear leaving just their shoes and socks behind, does the boy Andy himself exist? These are the musings that lead Martin – and lead readers of ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper – to discover the works of Sartre and Camus. Along the way, he realises – and we too come to realise - that the clever, coffee-drinking, café-frequenting thinkers and their friends were locked in petty squabbles that subsumed their intellectual arguments in a contest of sheer bitchiness – and yet which remain resonant for us now.

̽��ֱ��guts of the book is a study of two heavyweights of 20^th century philosophy and literature – both winners of the Nobel prize, although Sartre famously rejected his. Whether or not we have read ̽��ֱ��Outsider or delved into Being and Nothingness, we quickly get to grips with the contrasting backgrounds and characters of the two protagonists and the mind-blowing ideas about the meaning of life and love that they kicked about as they sought to out-general one another intellectually.

Martin unravels the tricky concepts of the savage and the symbolic, in the process taking creative leaps of the imagination that he says may annoy his fellow academics. He talks about visiting the barber in Cambridge to tame his mad professor hairstyle. This leads him into a description of the cutting of Sartre’s own blond curls which severed him from a condition of angelic childishness into a state of being Sartre, a transformation that sees his mother rush upstairs in floods of tears. This neatly introduces us to ideas about beauty and ugliness, and the possibility of self-transcendence.

Philosophers are supposed to be gentle, cerebral beings: Martin’s double act is anything but. Sartre was a natural pugilist who wondered: “Can I take him or can he take me?” “I fought constantly,” he wrote of his schooldays in La Rochelle. He learnt to box and, as a teacher of philosophy, he sparred with his students and got into a fist-fight with another teacher over a sarcastic remark. He wanted to win – a boxing bout, he argued, was the “the incarnation of pre-existing violence”. Camus also got into fights but he was a footballer in love with the game. Growing up in Algeria, he played in goal but, despite the urban myth, he was never goalkeeper for Algeria. ̽��ֱ��goalkeeper is not quite part of the team – though vital to it.

Sartre and Camus met in Paris in 1943 where they were both friends of Simone de Beauvoir. They sat in cafes and wrote. Their friendship turned sour and their rivalry travelled far beyond the world of ideas. Late one night in Paris, they are spotted racing on all fours across the boulevard St Germain between two of their favourite bars. Though they disliked each other, they are locked together. After Camus’s death in a car crash in 1960, Sartre wrote: “We had a falling-out, he and I: but a falling-out means nothing – even if we were doomed never to see each other again – but another way of living together and without ever losing sight on what the other is up to in the small world that has been given to us.”

In weaving together anecdote and incident ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper introduces some of the basic concepts of philosophy, encouraging the reader to think about what makes us human – and especially what makes us behave badly. This is not a book that requires any specialist knowledge. ̽��ֱ��only real puzzler of a phrase is the dedication at the start: the book is dedicated not to mum or dad but to “a binary praxis of non-antagonistic reciprocity”. This line modifies Sartre’s original, with the emphasis more on the antagonistic – all of which is unfolded in the book.

What does all this mean today? Martin thinks that in the present context of a kind of nationalistic hysteria about winning (the Euros, the Olympics, standing on the podium) we need to think long and deep about failure. After all, most of us fail most of the time. “ ̽��ֱ��two great philosophers of failure were Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. They are the patron saints of losers and outsiders. Their writings teach us how to get over the notion of success and resign ourselves to failure and discontent. I think everyone would be a lot happier that way, by becoming truly philosophical.”

“Hell is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. His rival on the stage of occupied and post-war Paris was Albert Camus (“I am the world”). ̽��ֱ��two fell out but remained entangled. A book by Cambridge academic Andy Martin – ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper – is an excursion into the worlds of the Frenchmen synonymous with existentialism and absurdism.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are the patron saints of losers and outsiders. Their writings teach us how to get over the notion of success.

Dr Andy Martin

Antanas Sutkus, 2012

Jean Paul Sartre on the beach

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Yes

Can Hollande live up to expectations?

gm349 — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:31:30 +0000

No one could have been very surprised, not even M. Sarkozy, when François Hollande was elected as the second socialist president of the Fifth Republic, the first since François Mitterrand in 1981. Only a few months ago, he would have seemed a very unlikely president. What transformed his prospects was not the economic and political problems of France, and even less his own actions, but on one hand the notorious episode in a New York hotel that ended the career of French socialism’s preferred future president, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and on the other the personal unpopularity of Nicholas Sarkozy. M. Hollande comes to the presidency with a limited track record. In the short term, this may be an advantage: he has pretty clean hands, and an appearance of decency and dignity. In the long term, perhaps not: he has aroused a sudden swell of hope, but he is a novice, until now a figure of the second rank, with a reputation for indecision.

Inevitably, he has become a source of uncertainty, in France and Europe. Before his election, he was letting it be said on his behalf that he was a moderate, but moderation is not what his supporters expect. They want some sort of miracle: the end of austerity, economic growth, a return to normal. Hollande’s headline pledge to create 60,000 new teaching jobs epitomises the problem. We may all think that teaching jobs are a good thing in the abstract. But they are not going to redress France’s economy. What they really symbolise – apart from a desire to cheer up schoolteachers and job-hunting students, key Socialist supporters – is the hope that spending more money on creating public sector jobs is the best way to solve unemployment and boost growth.

This, of course, seems to be the very opposite of the nasty medicine so far prescribed for Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Germany and France itself. A statist, neo-Keynesian, tricolour flag is being raised – admittedly, a small one – against the prevailing European orthodoxy. Most people in France probably want that flag waved very vigorously, in the faces of the European Central Bank and Angela Merkel. They like the idea of France as leader of the awkward squad, putting itself forward as international leader of the forces of progress.

This is an old republican/patriotic vision, last seen when France stood up to America and Britain at the time of the Iraq invasion. This time the enemy is the unholy alliance of globalised ‘Anglo-Saxon’ capitalism, bankers, and conservative (German) politicians. Yet the small print of Hollande’s announced policy is little different from that of Sarkozy – he intends to eliminate France’s deficit a year later than his predecessor. M. Hollande’s supporters, and not only in France, expect much more: in effect, to lead an international revolt against austerity, plutocracy, and globalisation. But every educated French socialist is aware of the warnings of history: Léon Blum tried something like this in 1936; Mitterrand again in 1981. In both cases they were forced into U-turns.

Britain’s principal relationship with France concerns defence, security – and shared aircraft carriers. Both countries are alone among European states in their ambition to play a great role in the world, as was recently seen in the Libyan intervention. Both know that in the present political and financial circumstances, they need each other to give this ambition credibility. They might ideally prefer other partners, but no one else is willing, and consequently, their budding ‘special relationship’ will continue.

Europe is a more complex matter. If Hollande seemed to have pushed Europe away from austerity, it would obviously increase pressure on the British government to follow suit. On the other hand, if the French could induce the Germans to agree to more expansionary policies, it would suit Britain’s interest by increasing demand in Europe for its exports. But even the hint of disagreement between the Eurozone’s ‘big two’, and uncertainty about their policy, seems to be aggravating a crisis of confidence and bringing forward the general Euro crisis that has started in Greece. Many commentators predict that there will be a quick Franco-German compromise, and this does indeed seem indispensable. But will compromise be enough now to prevent a panic when decisive action is required? And on whose terms will it be?

If M. Hollande appears too easily satisfied, his new-found popularity may prove short lived. ̽��ֱ��crisis has strengthened extremes of both Right and Left, creating problems for a centrist like Hollande. ̽��ֱ��Right-wing Front National has increased its vote, including among young voters and even established ethnic minorities. ̽��ֱ��forthcoming parliamentary elections are therefore unusually important and unpredictable. ̽��ֱ��most sensational contest will be a head to head clash in a Pas-de-Calais constituency between Marine Le Pen, head of the populist eurosceptic Front National, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Communist leader of the scarcely-less-populist Parti de Gauche – a bold but dangerous showdown sought by the latter.

However, all this is being overshadowed by the sudden Eurozone crisis, which leaves M. Hollande suddenly facing one of the most daunting prospects of any new French president since the 1950s.

*Robert Tombs is Professor of History at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. His research is in 19th Century French political history, and especially popular political culture. Recently he has been concerned with the history of the cultural, economic and political relationship between France and Britain from the end of the 17th Century to the present day. He will be speaking in a debate on Britain’s relationship with Europe with Professors Christopher Hill and Brendan Simms on 9 June at 5.30pm as part of the Cambridge series at the Hay Festival.

As Francois Hollande takes up his seat as President of France, will he be able to live up to the huge expectations of those who voted for him or will his reputation for indecision be his undoing, asks Robert Tombs.

Many commentators predict that there will be a quick Franco-German compromise. But will compromise be enough now to prevent a panic when decisive action is required? And on whose terms will it be?

Robert Tombs, Professor of History at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Benjamin Boccas from Flickr

Hollande

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Yes

Charting the Rise and Decline of the Gothic Cathedral

bjb42 — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 09:00:02 +0000

̽��ֱ��lectures, which run from 23 January through to 12 March, begin with Dark Gothic, the origins of the cathedral in the twelfth century and examine the myth of the cathedral in the history of late 19^th and early 20^th century ideas. ̽��ֱ��series continues with an investigation into the origins of Gothic art and architecture in northern France in the twelfth century that features a close-up analysis of Abbot Suger’s new choir at St-Denis which is widely considered the first appearance of Gothic Architecture.

̽��ֱ��series examines the cathedral as a work of engineering and advanced technology; the speakers will discuss the rhetorical notions of ductus and memoria in relation to liturgy and religious experience at Chartres; and plot the changes of meaning and experience in sculptural ensembles in northern France, England and the German Empire.

Stained glass also features prominently as a didactic medium that offers a delicate balance of story-telling and moral meaning.

̽��ֱ��last two lectures weigh up the relations between cathedrals and their cities, and the incursions of royalty and the coronation in the functions and imagery of the Cathedral. ̽��ֱ��series concludes with a short postscript which speculates on why the cathedral idea failed in the later Middle Ages.

̽��ֱ��8 part lecture series is hosted by Professor Paul Crossley, Emeritus Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a Foreign Fellow of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Paul Crossley was educated at Downside School and Trinity College Cambridge. It was at Trinity College and the Jagiellonian ̽��ֱ�� in Krakow where he completed his doctorate on the history of Polish Medieval architecture. From 1971 to 1990 he was a lecturer in the History of Art at Manchester ̽��ֱ��. 1990 he joined the teaching staff of ̽��ֱ��Courtauld Institute, first as a Senior Lecturer and then as a Professor in 2002.

̽��ֱ��lectures will take place weekly at 5:00 pm on Mondays during the Full Term in Lecture Room A of the Arts’ School, Bene’t Street, Cambridge, starting on 23 January 2012.

23 January: Dark Gothic

30 January: Architecture as Spolia: Suger and St-Denis

6 February: An Architecture of Reason?

13 February: Ductus and Memoria at Chartres Cathedral

20 February: From Judgement to Atonement: Sculpture at Strasbourg, Lincoln and Naumburg

27 February: Stained Glass: From narrative to moral meaning

5 March: Royalty and the Cathedral

12 March: Cathedrals and their Cities

A comprehensive exploration into Gothic cathedrals and their place in medieval society will be the focus of a series of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Slade Lectures in Fine Art entitled ̽��ֱ��Gothic Cathedral: A New Heaven and a New Earth.

Allie Caulfield from Flickr

Normandie 0344 Rouen Kathedrale

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Yes

Reassessing the industrial revolution

bjb42 — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Writing in a new book, the eminent ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge economic historian, Professor Tony Wrigley, argues that the period needs to be reassessed - as one which has also created dangers as striking as the benefits it brought about.

Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, which is launched this week, suggests that the era not only stimulated unprecedented progress and growth, but opened a "Pandora's Box" of hazards.

While new wealth was created and entire populations lifted out of poverty, the nature of economies also changed dramatically - from forms that were naturally self-limiting, to models which involve plundering finite natural resources without heeding the attendant dangers.

" ̽��ֱ��textbook view of the industrial revolution is that it caused great misery for many people in its early stages, but improved society immeasurably in the long term," Professor Wrigley said.

"But it was also the point at which society ceased to depend on the land, which can produce indefinitely, and moved to dependence on energy sources, which could support vastly increased production but were certain to become exhausted."

Most descriptions and analyses of the industrial revolution focus on those features of the British society and economy which enabled it to transform and accelerate growth - the conditions which were conducive to what is sometimes termed "take-off".

By contrast, Professor Wrigley focuses less on how the revolution began, and more on why it did not lose momentum and grind to a halt.

Leading economic thinkers of the age, such as Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith, were convinced that society could not cope with exponential growth. All economies until then had depended on plants as the principal source both of heat energy (burning wood) and mechanical energy (human and animal muscle). Increasing pressure on a limited resource, the land, invariably accompanied economic growth.

As a result, it was widely predicted that any form of industrial growth would quickly reach a point of critical mass, where it could not be sustained any further and would necessarily decelerate.

̽��ֱ��reason that this didn't happen during the industrial revolution, the book argues, was thanks to the exploitation of coal - itself the result of plant photosynthesis but over hundreds of millions of years rather than a single year as in 'organic' economies. Once this could be converted into mechanical energy via the steam engine, a previously insuperable barrier to growth was removed.

̽��ֱ��fact that this change was not obvious at the time may explain why the term "industrial revolution" did not become common currency until decades after the process had begun. " ̽��ֱ��man in the street in the 1790s would have been in no doubt that there was a revolution underway in France, but he would have been astonished to learn that he was living through the middle of one in England," Wrigley said.

In the short term, the ability to harness a huge underground resource as a form of energy provided a solution to the self-limitation that had prevented earlier, "organic", economies from growing indefinitely.

But the book argues that the long-term consequences are less clear. A trend was set for exploiting finite resources, such as coal, gas and oil, which ultimately cannot be sustained. For present generations, the lasting legacy of the industrial revolution may therefore be a level of development and size of population which society, and the Earth itself, can no longer support.

" ̽��ֱ��balance of probability is that society will find ways of securing sources of energy which are not limited in the same way, but the outcome remains uncertain, meanwhile our continued dependence on fossil fuels as an energy source may be pushing us towards a tipping point" Wrigley added.

"This means that while we may have gained massively on the one hand thanks to the advances of the industrial revolution, the dangers we face as a consequence of those events may prove equivalently great."

Energy and the English Industrial Revolution is published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press.

It was the dawn of an age of prosperity and transformed Britain into an economic superpower but our rose-tinted view of the industrial revolution masks another side of its legacy, a new history suggests.

̽��ֱ��textbook view of the industrial revolution is that it caused great misery for many people in its early stages, but improved society immeasurably in the long term.

Professor Tony Wrigley

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Coalport China Museum - former Coalport Chinaworks - by the River Severn

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