Interview with Edward Cavanagh

Edward Cavanagh is an Isaac Newton Research Fellow in History at Downing College, Cambridge.  He works both in history, mostly in the history of ideas and in world history, and in law, with a focus on legal and constitutional history. Switching between epochs and also straddling premodern to modern times, his interdisciplinary work focuses upon scales of government from officeholding to monarchies to empires over the longue durée. For the Royal Studies Journal, he demonstrated this by incorporating rhetorics and literary scholarship into English legal history in order to explain what exactly flowers are doing in the crown – literally.

RSJ Blog: Hi Edward, thank you for doing this interview! You just published your article Flowers of the Crown in English Legal Thought. Metaphorical Assessments of Royal Power in Transitional Periods of Monarchy in the Royal Studies Journal! Often, legal history can be a bit dry, but you managed to find flowers in it – could you please elaborate a bit on that?

Edward: This is a treat for me, Cathleen, because I respect your own work on deposition and the comparative history of monarchy. You are right. Legal history does have a reputation for its dryness. It also has a reputation for the burden it can impose upon readers to grasp immediately the esoteric details of procedural and substantive aspects of the law as it was practised and understood in the past. Both reputations are fairly earned. The challenge, I think, is to approach legal history as a history of ideas. This was something that F. W. Maitland used to harp on about over a century ago, but we appear to have lost our way since then. To continue to see the history of law as the history of ideas, we are able to feel for certain patterns in both the language and the logic of the law reports. We might also be tempted to look beyond the traditional sources of law, as I attempted to do in places here, albeit I think with mixed successes.

RSJ Blog: What are you unsure about? Personally, I think, using a broader approach to sources to really understand law is quite helpful! Although, in my experience, political practice – though based on legal thought – was often times contrary, or at least different, from the ideas and debates in courts and parliaments. What is usually missing is an element of representation, and how normal people on the streets (usually of London) viewed things.

Edward: Indeed it is very sensible to insist that ordinary people experienced the law differently to those judicial officeholders whose job it was to expound that law in court. On the other hand, the case could be made for historians to expand their definitions of ‘law’ to account for both kinds of experiences. Quite whether it’s possible to uphold such an all-encompassing definition of law while attempting to sketch out the contours of a history of legal ideas is another question.

Tomb effigy, in gilt bronze, of Henry III of England (b.1206; d.1272) in the Confessor’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey; by William Torel, about 1292
English, Westminster

RSJ Blog: You are approaching legal thought through language and rhetorics and with political culture in mind as well – how difficult was it to combine these different approaches, or was this something which came naturally from the subject of research?

Edward: English legal thought did not appear from nowhere in the early modern period, of course. Its evolution had taken place over many centuries as part of a wider European phenomenon. Rhetoric was a key factor in this development. So too was the ideological clout of the institutional Church across Christendom. We are able to account for many other attributes across the ‘long’ middle ages as well.

Legal thinkers in England, as elsewhere, often prided themselves on the receptivity they showed to foreign ideas. At other times, English legal thinkers were rather protective of the borders established around their own intellectual domain. In a sense, to write the history of English law is to recount the ongoing saga of how generations of lawyers attempted to get this balance right.

By the sixteenth century, English law had become endowed with hundreds of quirky traits. Many of these derived in part or in whole from the beautifully awkward multilingualism of the country. Consider the linguistic lay of the land. As law reporters wrote down the details of common law proceedings in Law French, they seldom did so consistently. As scholars wrote in neo-Latin, they did not always do so particularly well. As scribes and chroniclers moved away from Middle English towards early modern English, they did not immediately care to follow orthographical conventions all that strictly. Once more, to come to the history of law like the history of ideas, it is often necessary (indeed, it is sometimes quite amusing) to observe the movement of concepts between these different languages. (I accept that political thought is little different in this respect to legal thought.)

RSJ Blog: Sounds like the legal scholar in you is searching for cases where the norm and the historical reality match, while the historian in you has long accepted that the norm is basically an idea depending on contexts, languages, and meanings. Does this kind of sum it up?

Edward: That may be right, but if so, then I am far more of a historian than a legal scholar.

RSJ Blog: You trace the expression of „flowers of the crown“ back to the 15th century, although it might have become much more popular under the Tudors and Stuarts. Could you pinpoint moments when the flower metaphor was used more widely, or – the opposite – not used at all?

Edward: While the crowns of English monarchs were often embedded with decorative ‘fleurons’ from the twelfth century onwards, it would not be until the early fifteenth century that the expression ‘flowers of the crown’ was appropriated for poetic, legalistic, and moralistic ends. There may be earlier instances of the expression, but I have not been able to find them. Conventional wisdom holds that the expression emerged out of the unique constitutional predicament of the Tudor-Stuart transition. The expression was indeed used more commonly into the Stuart period, but it is also to be encountered in many pamphlets and reports of the Hanoverian period. It disappears from English vocabulary during the reign of Victoria, and that, I argue, is because the crown itself was becoming a metaphor for the modern administrative state at this moment. Such is the way we are expect to dress the windows of our modern scholarly articles. Really,  the purpose of the article was to draw attention to an action brought into the Court of Common Pleas in 1430. I had found it in the Year Books, which is now a much less daunting body of source material to sort through because of the magnificent Seipp Abridgement of Professors David J. Seipp and Carol F. Lee. Chief Justice William Babington is reported to have used the expression to emphasise the temporariness of royal donations (in this particular instance, some jurisdictional privileges conferred in letters patent by Richard II and Henry IV).

RSJ Blog: Using flowers as metaphor also relates to the separation of an individual monarch, restricted by their humanity and mortality, and the everlasting crown, existing beyond and apart from individuals carrying it. In what ways do flowers help to bring this idea forward?

Edward: Of course, you are right. Lawyers had to dance very carefully around this distinction between ‘the king’s two bodies’, and the strategic use of abstract language, through the invocation of cutesy metaphors, could be handy for dullening the thump of their arguments. But the metaphor is more intriguing for me because of its situation between this dichotomy. A flower is organic and begins in the crown, and it can only be enjoyed for as long as it does not decompose, and when it appears to be decomposing, it can no longer be enjoyed and must then be replaced by a new one from the same source. Here we are to come to terms with the finiteness of time that attaches to an expression of royal favour; this does not necessarily require us to read anything else into the formula about the mortality of the individual monarch who may have expressed such a favour in the first place. What it does require, on the other hand, is some acknowledgment that judicial officeholders in courts were the best placed in England to know when to discard or to replant particular flowers.

RSJ Blog: In the end, flowers of the crown refer as such less to the one monarch wearing it, but more to the whole system of government ‘gardening’ – so to speak?

Edward: Very good, even if I am concerned that we are ‘transplanting’ a modern understanding of government into the late Middle Ages.

RSJ Blog: Are there any specific flowers symbolising specific ideas of monarchy, and if so, why are they associated with a specific idea?

Edward: The fleur-de-lis – the heraldic lily – is perhaps the most obvious candidate for consideration in this frame. By the thirteenth century, in both England and France, each of the three petals of this flower had become associated with distinct tenets of the Holy Trinity. It therefore conveyed the need to show reverence to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Long before this, however, the flower had already been imbued with a Christian symbolism, in France, to reflect the endorsement of the king by God. We might say, therefore, that it also conveyed one of the oldest and most established ideas in European political theology about kingship as a royal office holdable only of God.

RSJ Blog: Flowers connecting the sphere of the holy and the worldly powers!

Edward: And more!

RSJ Blog: Indeed – in your article, there are recurrent connections between nature and legal-political authority as well. Were such metaphors used due to an easier understanding of a mostly rural population (as the miller in Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms did), or was there also another understanding of nature behind this?

Edward: Rural folk may never have been party to high-brow discussions in the central courts or in parliament about the prerogatives of the crown, but they came face to face with kings in floriated crowns whenever they held common coins in their hands. And there were many opportunities for ordinary people to come into contact with royal iconography on town streets, at the market, or in church: I think here of seals, effigies, portraits, coats of arms, and even hearsay. On the other hand, what they knew of the virtues of kingship, they mostly experienced through the burdens of taxation, the patchiness of justice, and the vices of lordship. It may be interesting, if inevitably fruitless, to speculate on the extent to which, if at all, some association of a floriated crown with kingship in popular culture mirrored the high legalism of lords temporal, lords spiritual, judges, and serjeants.

Copyright Museums Victoria / CC BY
Photographer: Justine Philip; Museums Victoria

RSJ Blog: I am not so sure if trying to find out what the flower meant to rural or town folk is really fruitless, or, if there might not still be sources we can use to shed light on this question. But this might be a perspective from my own research where the fate of monarchs often was decided by their subjects 😊.

Edward: If we must accept that God had no such control over the fate of monarchs, then we have no choice but to accept that all royal power was determined by subjects. I would only add that some subjects (owing to their birth, education, profession, and comportment) were better suited than other subjects to curtail royal power while giving the convincing impression that such actions were all-the-while lawful. Writing this as the UK Supreme Court begins to ponder both the justiciability and the lawfulness of the Prime Minister’s request of the Queen to prorogue parliament, such a perspective would seem to provide a glimpse into the reality of constitutional monarchy today, too. Crucially, however, questions about executive misconduct and its accountability to judicial review necessitate far less engagement with the crown in the jurisprudence of the United Kingdom today than they did centuries ago in England, when the first judicial chidings of officeholding negligence are to be discovered in the Year Books.

RSJ Blog: Coming from the medieval flowers in the crown full circle to todays politics! Finally, what are you working on right now? Was this article part of a bigger project, or just a curiosity you found in your research material?

Edward: This article was a happy distraction from larger ongoing projects of mine on the development of English legal thinking about war, monarchy, and the constitutional separation of church and state. It had an unusual trajectory before publication. I had originally prepared the article to appear as a short corrective to J. W. Gough’s appearance in the Notes and Comments section of the English Historical Review. Contrary to decades of convention and the editorial policy laid out on that journal’s own website, I was informed by the managing editors that a distinct Notes and Comments section in the English Historical Review ‘no longer exists’. This had been my favourite section of that journal, where quick findings and correctives could be displayed for curious readers. I immediately thought of Notes & Queries, an outlet which has published antiquarian and historical research of exactly this kind for centuries (some of which I had even cited in my own article!). But I was told that my piece was ‘not of wide enough interest for N&Q’. Undeterred, I resolved to expand the article and try my hand with a journal more committed to interdisciplinary thematic research. The Royal Studies Journal was perfect for this end and I am very glad to have published my article here. May this journal be produced, published, and read for as long as its editorial policy remains to impose no restrictions upon authors owing to some perception of ‘audience interest’. As historians, we need outlets that discriminate on research, not on topic. I am under no illusions about the popularity of my research. If only 10 or 20 people bother to read my article, so be it.

Thank you for your engagement!

RSJ Blog: Thanks for this interview, and we’re happy to fill in an open gap left by the EHR, and especially due to our focus on all things royal – be they legal, political, representations, or flowers in the crown! We’re curious about your further research, and hope to see it then in the bookshops where it will certainly find its readership!

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Journal of the Summer: 5 Years of the Royal Studies Journal

This summer, we’re celebrating already 5 years of the Royal Studies Journal! A few more posts on this are planned, so keep your eyes on this blog, on Twitter, or Facebook. First up is an interview with the person who started all this: Elena (Ellie) Woodacre is the heart and soul of the Royal Studies Network as well as of the Royal Studies Journal which is connected to the network and its other various activities. She is also editor-in-chief of the journal, and – together with the team of the journal – brings it to life. The first issue of the journal launched in July 2014 – 5 years ago! We caught up with Ellie to learn more about the first five years, and what is planned for the next five!

Covers of all ten issues of the last five years

RSJ Blog: Hi Ellie, we’ve looked deep into our archives, and one of the very first posts on this blog was your status report in March 2014 about the upcoming launch of the Royal Studies Journal! Then, in July 2014, the first issue of the journal went online – and now it’s been 5 years, 10 issues among them 3 special issues, two different technical systems, uncountable book reviews, and hopefully many, many articles and reviews in the pipeline still. Congrats for bringing such a project to life!

Could you maybe first tell us a bit more what inspired you and your colleagues from the Royal Studies Network to publish (yet another) academic journal?

Ellie: The inspiration for starting the RSJ was the same forces that led us to start the Royal Studies Network—we had a group of scholars and researchers who were all working in royal studies, but there was no defined academic forum for the field. We started with the conference series, Kings & Queens, which led to the formation of the network as a way to build connections and collaboration in the field. There have been fantastic publications which came out from all of the K&Q conferences, like The Image and Perception of Monarchy from K&Q1, Royal Women and Dynastic Loyalty from K&Q5 in Clemson and the recent Dynastic Change volume from K&Q4. Yet these volumes can only contain a brief selection of all the exciting papers from our conferences (normally about 100 each year!). The idea for the journal was that it could provide a constant publication outlet for research in the field, which wasn’t necessarily tied to the conferences, and could feature book reviews to help people keep up with new research in the field as well. We had an exploratory meeting at a Kings & Queens conference to gauge interest in a potential journal and the RSJ just took off from there—I can’t believe it’s been five years already!

RSJ Blog: Back in 2014, you told us in an interview that you were really impressed how quick the idea of the Royal Studies Network took a life of its own, and that you were happy that already around 220 scholars from all over the globe were connected in this network. On Facebook, we just had a short notice from Dustin, the network’s secretary, that we’re now up to 500! Can you tell us a bit more about this growth, which projects the network and the journal did in the last five years, and where you still see potential – or, what you hope to do someday?

Ellie: It is incredibly exciting that we’ve passed the 500 member mark—and when you look at the membership list you can see that we’ve got a truly global reach, with RSN members spanning from Australia and New Zealand, to North America and North Africa and all over Europe. And yet, as always, I feel like we could work harder to be even more global—I’ve been really evangelizing for royal studies to be as global and as inclusive as possible. That’s where the growth is—I really want to bring in more researchers who work on monarchy in Asia, Africa, Polynesia and the Americas. There is some amazing research on these areas already, but I’d like to see it more deeply connected to the RSN and reflected in the contents of the RSJ as well. Additionally, I want to bring in more members who work on monarchy both in the Ancient/Classical world and in the modern era so that we can really get the full timespan of royal studies represented in our membership and publications. This broad spectrum is vital to moving the field forward. Looking at monarchy across time and space, as works like The Routledge History of Monarchy and A Companion to Global Queenship both aim to do and making connections between scholars working in different geographical and temporal areas gives us a very different, and much richer, perspective on monarchy and royal studies.

 

RSJ Blog: Talking a bit more about the field of Royal Studies – in which ways did it change, or where do you see current academic interests?

Ellie: Apart from the “global turn” as I’ve just been speaking about, there are a lot of exciting developments in the field. I think one of the most exciting elements is the interdisciplinarity of the field. You can see that in the programmes for the K&Q conferences—researchers from different disciplines are bringing new approaches to royal studies and I think by bringing scholars from different areas together you can get very exciting inspiration and collaborations. Researchers from history, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, art history, literature studies, law, medical history, economics and so many more fields all look at various aspects of royal studies. Crossover, or cross-pollination, from one field to another gives us fresh perspectives. Take for example current research in the study of the queen’s household—you’ve got scholars like Nicola Clark thinking about gender and space in the household of Henry VIII’s queens and their palatial accommodation, Diana Pelaz Flores using elements of social network analysis to demonstrate the connections and wide ranging influence of queens through their household in Late Medieval Castile and economic analysis of queens and their household expenses by Charlotte Backerra and Cathérine Annette Ludwig-Ockenfels in the Holy Roman Empire during the early modern era. This really demonstrates the power of bringing in different disciplinary approaches to generate new insights into the field—changing the way we look at queenship and the queen’s household.

 

RSJ Blog: Continuing on from this, do you think that the work of the RSN and RSJ has also pushed royal studies/monarchical studies more on an academic level as opposed to the popular history writing which has dominated for a long time in this field (especially in Austria and Germany)?

Ellie: Obviously there has always been a fascination with monarchy and royal figures of the past and present—we can see that in the vast output of material from popular culture, media and history works aimed at a non-scholarly audience. While I think we should embrace this material—indeed there is some exciting research in royal studies on the remembrance and representation of monarchy in popular culture and the press–we also hope that our own publications in the academic field of royal studies connects deeply with the scholarly community as well as being potentially accessible and interesting to a wider audience. I do hope that our research will continue to gain wider recognition as an academic field of study and at the moment, one of the areas that our Listings team is working on is to link the RSJ to more scholarly databases of journals so that we can further enhance our reach and scholarly standing in academia.

 

RSJ Blog: Both the network as well as the journal are great places also for doctoral candidates and ECRs – was this something planned from the start, or did it just happen along the way? In which way are ideas about these scholars at the start of their careers implemented?

Ellie: This has always been a key aspect of the RSN and RSJ, to highlight the work of graduate students and PhD/Early Career researchers and encourage the next generation of scholars in the field. I actually started the first Kings & Queens conference as a PhD student and we’ve always aimed to make the conferences, network and journal a welcoming and vibrant community for students and ECRs. We’ve done this by featuring their papers at the conferences, bringing them onto the journal staff to help them gain experience in academic publishing and by running the article prize specifically for graduate students and Early Career researchers. This is a tradition that I am absolutely passionate about continuing—the RSN should never feel like an exclusive ‘clique’ or a restricted area that only senior scholars have access to. We’re all about being on the cutting edge of research, which is showcased in PhD theses and the developing work of ECRs. Plus, by bringing junior and senior scholars together at the Kings & Queens conferences and in publications like the RSJ, you can get fantastic collaborations! What I’d like to do next is perhaps start a voluntary mentoring scheme, like some societies run at major conferences—this would be a great way to move the informal connections and support networks formed through the RSN to the next level.

 

RSJ Blog: That sounds fantastic! We’ll keep our eyes open for any announcements regarding this. Finally, what are you working on right now? Except for all the work you do for the RSN and RSJ?

Ellie: I’ve got a fair few projects on the go at the moment! In addition to editing the RSJ, I’m an editor on two book series, Gender and Power in the Premodern World (ARC Humanities Press) and Queens of England (Routledge)—both of these series are really growing at the moment with lots of new titles contracted, some of which will be out fairly soon. These series are both deeply connected to royal studies and I hope will provide yet more publication outlets for our growing field. I have a work of my own contracted in the Queens of England series, a monograph on Joan of Navarre which I have been working on for many years—I’ve given a few papers on her at past Kings & Queens conferences. I’m also deep into writing a short form monograph on queens and queenship for ARC’s Past Imperfect series which I’m very excited about. This book looks at queens and queenship across time and place, exactly what I was talking about earlier in terms of the “global turn” of the field, looking at the constants and variable of queenship over the longue durée. Currently I’m wrapping up the chapter on family—I’ve been thinking a lot about monogamous and polygamous court systems and what impact this has on the role of a queen both as a consort and a queen mother, or royal matriarch. I’m also working with Aidan Norrie, Danna Messer, Carolyn Harris and Joanna Laynesmith on a four-volume series on English consorts for the amazing Queenship and Power series at Palgrave Macmillan and have a few other “irons in the fire” as well. Never a dull moment—clearly I can’t get enough of queenship and royal studies!

RSJ Blog: We neither! Good luck, and we’re really exited about the next five years, your upcoming projects and more publications in these book series! Thank you for joining us!

Let’s talk about Royal Studies! (Video)

This little corner of the web is all about Royal Studies! The field, the network, the journal. Behind all this are amazing scholars, some of them coming together on the Kings & Queens conferences, some of them only connected via the Facebook group, following the activities on Twitter, Facebook, or the newsletter.

However, we do not only go to the Kings & Queens conferences but also to other gatherings like the IMC Leeds (for medievalists). Just recently, Kristen Geaman and Cathleen Sarti who are two of the people behind this blog and the marketing team have met for the first time in real life at IMC. Of course, we did a video.

Honestly, we’re not used to video interviews and you can see it – but if we are brave enough to post it, then so are you! Members of the RSN, get out, meet your friends from the network and talk about the network and Royal Studies! Please send any videos and questions to royalstudiesblog@gmail.com!
Under the video, you’ll find a list of possible questions to structure your videos! Although, we did also not really keep the structure – but take a look (sorry for the link, video is bigger than allowed upload size):

Kristen Geaman and Cathleen Sarti, IMC Leeds 2019

Here are some of the questions we discussed:

What brought you to royal studies, and how did you find out about the Royal Studies Network?

What do you enjoy most about the network?

Which new insights have you gained from your work connected to the network, or to royal studies?

What are you curious about?

What are you doing right now, and what are your next projects?

Kings & Queens 8 – Interview with Cinzia Recca

Cinzia Recca is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Catania. Her book The Diary of Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, 1781-1785. New Evidence of Queenship at Court has been published in the Queenship&Power series in 2017. She is a well known participant of the Kings & Queens conferences, and other activities of the Royal Studies Network, and also the organiser for this year’s conference in Catania, Sicily. We talked with her about what is coming, and how to prepare for Sicily in June!

 Please make sure to include #KQ8 on social media, and follow the conference on the same hashtag if you cannot be there!

RSJ Blog: Hi Cinzia! Thanks for giving this interview and for welcoming the Royal Studies Network to Sicily for the first time! Could you please first tell us a bit more about the upcoming conference, and who is behind all the organisation?

Cinzia: Hi Cathleen, it is a real pleasure to answer your questions. I still remember my article in the first issue of RSJ, my interview for this blog, and it is very amazing how the blog grew more and more in only five years.

I have to confess that I am very thrilled about the upcoming conference; it was during the Portuguese edition July 2015 that I shyly proposed Catania as a possible venue for a future conference and immediately with enthusiasm the proposal was accepted for the 2019 conference .

So, I had 4 years to think about the organisation of the conference; in fact the first step was thinking about a topic. I had several ones in my mind but at the end resilience was the one that fascinated and intrigued me more than others. Nowadays this word is often used as the capacity to react in a positive way to traumatic events of life and so I imagine that examining it in depth, through a royal studies perspective, could be very interesting. The call for papers was a success and a high number of proposals were very interesting.

Another aspect that has been crucial for the organisation was to create a scientific committee, Marcello Fantoni, Fabian Persson, Zita Rohr and of course Ellie Woodacre kindly accepted my invitation to collaborate, helping me to select papers and structure the programme. I am very thankful for their  help. Then I thought that creating a mini video about Catania and the University could be an attractive  idea to involve people to participate so that during the last day of the seventh edition of Kings &Queens Conference in Winchester Ellie and I officially launched the call for paper showing the video.

From an organisational point of view,  I was aware that alone I could not manage anything.  I needed an organisational machine because I firmly believe in teamwork so that with the precious help of many persons that work at the University of Catania, we created a Conference website to give all the possible information requested and to register, so they simplified my work.

And last but not least, Officine Culturali , which is an Association in partnership with the University of Catania, is managing all the bureaucratic issues and during this last period  a great group of volunteer students is helping me  define the last things.

RSJ Blog: This does sound indeed like a well-oiled organisational machine! Let’s talk a bit more about all the “extras” we come to expect – and enjoy – from the Kings&Queens series? What is planned for Sicily?

Cinzia: This year we have an intense programme with numerous panels from ancient history to the contemporary period, analysing the theme also from a multi-disciplinary point of view.  Scholars of History, Literature, Art, Drama, Philosophy, and even Psychology will present their contributions. The Conference envisages also three plenary sessions with three great historians, Charles Beem, Francesco Benigno and Munro Price will discuss the themes from three different perspectives even if they are correlated.

As far as social activities are concerned, the Conference Venue will be the Palazzo Ingrassia and the Monastery of Benedictines, respectively of The Department of Educational Science and of Humanities. The Monastery is one of the biggest European religious buildings together with the monastery of Mafra in Portugal. The Monastery of Benedictines being a department site is open for visits and guided tours can be organised. So, the Conference offers a guided tour of the Monastery of the Benedictines on the first day. Sometimes, working inside this building I forget the magnificence and magic atmosphere of the past that you can breathe walking inside the Monastery. We will also have a special opportunity to spend time inside the two cloisters, on the occasion of lunches and for the social dinner.

During the last day of the conference, we are proposing a guided tour of Catania so that before the attendees go back home they could have a general idea of the main attractions of the city.

RSJ Blog: We are definitely looking forward to hearing about royal history, but also to enjoy Catania! Can you tell us a bit more about the Italian state of research in Royal Studies in the last few years? And also a bit about the long and complicated history of Sicily under different monarchical rules – just off the top of my head, I can think of Rome, Byzantium, Arabs, Staufer, Normans, Spain, and Italy – did I forget someone?

Cinzia: The Italian interest in Royal studies in the last few years has increased more and more. Ten years ago when I started my research on Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, the interest for royal studies was already present but specific aspects of the Court/Kingdom were studied such as political, diplomatic fields, the crucial role of nobility, the magnificence of royal sites.  So the interest is gradually augmenting; this also is proved by the fact that during the first editions of King and Queens Conference I was the only Italian to participate while in the last editions the number of Italians increased. Actually, most of the scholars and historians are now expert in Medieval, early  Modern history and  History of Art.

I wish that the Kings & Queens Conference 8 in Catania could pique even more scientific curiosity and interest of royal studies from Italian historians and scholars.

The other question about the History of Sicily cannot be answered shortly. A very good example of the History of Sicily has been recently re-published by Lord John Julius Norwich, Sicily. A short History from Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra, Coronet, 2015. Lord Norwich returns to a subject that inspired his first book fifty years ago and he writes a richly nuanced Sicilian political history in a very interesting and attractive way.

More, I firmly agree with Francesco Benigno, who in the introductory chapter of History of Sicily edited with Giuseppe Giarrizzo, states that Sicily is an Isle but not isolated, it has been and it is still a bridge between Europe and Africa, between Western and Eastern. Sicily during the epochs  has been continuously a land of conquest, it was fought over by Phoenicians and Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans, Goths and Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, Germans, Spaniards and French for over a thousand years. All the rulers tried to keep it in their domains, so continuous struggles to conquer and keep the isle played a crucial role in the rise and fall of the world’s most powerful dynasties. And Sicilians belonged to all of them and every time they had to adapt to the new rulers, laws and way of life.  Resistance and resilience were of course two attitudes that the Sicilian population developed along the epochs.

 RSJ Blog: There is still so much to learn for me about Sicilian history! Aside from the conference, could you please also tell us a bit more about Catania and Sicily – there are probably a lot of people adding a few days to do some sightseeing, or just some relaxing at the beach! What should we not miss, which drinks are en vogue at the moment, what do we have to absolutely experience?

Cinzia:  During my course of History of Sicily during the early modern age, I often quote an excerpt of Journey to Italy of J.W.Goethe written in 1817:

Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the spirit. It is in Sicily that is the key to everything “[…]” The purity of the contours, the softness of everything, the soft reciprocity of colours, the harmonious unity of the sky with the sea and the sea to the land .. . those who saw them once, own them for life. 

Usually Sicily  was the last stop of the travellers who went on the Grand Tour since the mid- eighteenth centuy. There are so many attractions to see and visit in Sicily: discovering the precious ancient ruins, and see stunning sights such as in  Siracusa, Agrigento, Taormina, Piazza Armerina, Selinunte Palermo. Noto is amazing for its baroque buildings. Of course, too much to see and  probably a week could be not enough to visit everything.

But, even if the conference has an intensive programme  I should reccomend to plan time to visit Catania. Catania is the second largest Sicilian city and it has a population of around 300.000. Visiting Catania is quite easy, as the old town centre is relativley small.  An ideal starting point would be the main square, Piazza Duomo- Duomo Square and the Cathedral dedicated to Saint’Agatha, the city patron saint. The Cathedral stands with its baroque structure that incorporates some Roman columns taken from the amphitheatre, and where  three Aragonese king are buried: Frederik II, Louis and Frederik III. In the same square it is possible to observe Amenano Fountain and Elephant Palace, and La pescheria (fish Market).

Stesicoro Square with a Roman Amphitheater is also worth visiting as well as the main street of the old town Via Etnea (Etnea Street), La pescheria (Fish Market,) the old fortress of Castello Ursino, built by Frederik II of Hohenstaufen in the 13th century, Via Crociferi Street, the opera house  Teatro Massimo Vincenzo Bellini, dedicated and built to the memory of the famous composer.

For the lovers of the seaside, Catania offers several beaches, Playa with sand,  Scogliera with rocks and San Giovanni Licuti beach with lava sand and rocks.

And of course  I suggest enjoying the typical food and drinks: things such as tasting the Catanese specialities (arancino, cipollina, cartocciata, bolognese, granita …), taking a drink in the Theater quarter near Teatro Massimo Square. And if there is still time available, an excursion to the volcano Etna and the little villages close to the sea, such as Aci Trezza and Aci Castello are worth a visit, too.

RSJ Blog: Don’t forget to pack comfortable shoes! Sounds like you’ll be walking around quite a bit! Cinzia, thank you for doing this interview! Is there anything you’d like to add?

Cinzia: Thank you so much for giving me the possibility to present briefly the upcoming Conference and Catania, I wish all the participants to have a pleasant stay. See you soon!!

Interview with Brendan Cook and Jennifer Mara DeSilva

Brendan Cook is a Senior Instructor in Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida who wrote his PhD on Thomas More’s Utopia and Lorenzo Valla’s On Pleasure. Working on Renaissance texts, especially neo-Latin literature, is one of his research foci. His translation of the correspondence of the Roman humanist Lorenzo Valla was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. 

Jennifer Mara DeSilva is well known to the readers of this blog and of the Royal Studies Journal thanks to her work on ceremonial entries and on cardinals. She is an Associate Professor of History at Ball State University (Indiana, USA), and has written several articles about the papal Masters of Ceremonies and edited collections examining the reformist behaviour of early modern bishops and the coercive process of sacralizing of space in the premodern world.

RSJ Blog: Hi Brendan and Jennifer, it’s great to talk with you about your recent article in the Royal Studies Journal which constitutes also somewhat of a first for the journal: it’s a source edition. More specifically, you have translated the funeral oration for Cardinal Pietro Riario by Nikolaus of Modruš in 1474, and compared this also to the Latin transcription. Can you tell us a bit more about this source?

NIKOLA MODRU¦KI, Oratio in funere?, Rim, 1474. Source 

Brendan & Jennifer: A translation seemed especially valuable to us because this text is interesting from more than one perspective. Obviously, there is the insight it provides into the institutional culture of the fifteenth-century Catholic Church. We have a summary of the life and achievements of one of the most important figures in Rome, a cardinal and a nephew of the pope. And this story is presented by someone who is also an important part of that same institutional structure, and who is sets out very deliberately to celebrate his virtues and apologize for his perceived shortcomings. So we see how the elites in this particular organization want to present themselves. But even apart from this, the oration is fascinating as an example of how humanist rhetoric is becoming established within the Catholic hierarchy. Modruš is making remarkable use of the different elements of humanist Latin, be it diction, syntax, or rhetorical tropes. And in that sense, the text belongs to the history of Neo-Latin literature as much as to the history of the papacy. That is why we included a Latin transcription as well as the English translation. We hope that the English version can serve as a sort of commentary on the Latin for those who want to study it, giving a sense not just of Modruš’ meaning, but his style. It is a translation that tries to reproduce the effect of the original, even it sometimes employs different means.

RSJ Blog: The oration was given by the Croatian bishop Nikolaus of Modruš for the funeral of the cardinal Pietro Riario. First of all, who were these men, and why did a Croatian bishop give an oration for an Italian cardinal? What was their connection? And second, was this oration ever really given, probably at the funeral, or was it “just” written and published? What was the purpose of this speech or text?

Brendan & Jennifer: Great questions! Nikolaus of Modruš (c.1425/7-1480) was one of many educated European men, who moved from regional diplomacy to Roman curial administration over the course of his career. Through the early modern period well-traveled, educated, and intelligent royal or noble agents often found that their skills and energy suited working as a papal governor, in the court of the Rota, or in the College of Cardinals. Like many other successful humanists, lawyers, and ambassadors, he took clerical vows in order to be of further use to the pope, whose interests spanned Eurasia, and receive income streams under papal control. Although Nikolaus ended up as the bishop of Senj and then Modruš, he lived and worked in the Italian peninsula, as a familiar of both Pope Sixtus IV and his nephew Cardinal Pietro Riario, remaining close to the centre of power.

Pietro Riario’s wall tomb in the church of SS. Dodici Apostoli in Rome
Source: Wikimedia Commons

As with many publications, this oration had several purposes: memorialization of a generous patron, encouragement of future patrons, and identity-building. Undoubtedly, these three purposes were interconnected and functioned on behalf of, and were directed towards, far more people than just Pietro Riario and Nikolaus of Modruš. While the author was a witness to spectacular diplomacy and a mourner of great men, he was also a campaigner on behalf of educated men who needed income and depended on large curial households. We know that Niccolò Perotti, the bishop of Siponto and another member of Riario’s household, also wrote a eulogy that he performed during the obsequies. As there is no similar evidence for this text, we suspect that Nikolaus’ oration was meant to be a public statement, rather than a printed account of an act.

RSJ Blog: This oration was one of the earliest prints, officially still counting as incunabulum since it was printed before 1501. Can you tell us a bit more about the genre of the source, e.g. how it relates to the later funeral sermons; and about the circumstances of its publication? Italy was one of the earliest printing centres – of course after Mainz in Germany where Cathleen’s university is – but was it still somewhat unusual that the papacy took to print so quickly? In some ways, the new printing technology was a rival to traditional text production in the church.

Brendan & Jennifer: Rome has always been interested in activities that could increase authority and reputation, be it print, lavish spending, public ceremonies, or art. As you know, from the late fifteenth century the printing press played an important role in facilitating knowledge and cultural dissemination in Rome. With both a large resident population and a large transient population, print offered a way to inform and affect people whose attention was dispersed across many areas, factions, and national or institutional identities. Print could condemn schismatic cardinals, mourn a papal nephew, and encourage a new saint’s cult. While this did not entirely replace manual copyists or more expensive illuminators, it could spread a variety of information faster and farther than before.

Unfortunately, little is known about the circumstances surrounding the publication of Pietro Riario’s funeral sermon. As our introduction shows, Nikolaus of Modruš’ work was part of a larger interest in memorializing Roman elites in the late fifteenth century. However, since there are so few studies or catalogues of Roman printers’ output it is difficult to be certain about the impact of this type of text, or even its popularity among print shop customers. Nevertheless, at this time there were enough elite households with fledgling libraries and literate individuals with an interest in either Riario, Sixtus, or Nikolaus, that we might expect this sort of cultural memorialization.

RSJ Blog: Just out of curiosity – do you have any idea who read these eulogies?

Brendan & Jennifer: The oration was published seven times in twenty-five years: in Rome (five times, 1474-1500), in Padua (once, 1482), and in Rostock (once, 1476). While Rome was a diplomatic and curial hub, both Padua and Rostock were university towns and centres of regional administration. A quick internet search turns up two dozen copies preserved in libraries across Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Stefan Plannck’s reprinting in the 1480s is especially well represented. This suggests that the oration’s subject and its author had a much larger attraction than we imagine. Moreover, the fact that comparatively many copies of the text have survived, leads us to believe that the type of text (both oration and biography) and the quarto format (cheap and portable) appealed to contemporaries.

RSJ Blog: Pietro Riario was a nephew of Pope Sixtus IV (r. 1471-1484). Can you introduce us to this system of papal relatives as counsellors during the Renaissance? Why did popes choose to surround themselves with family instead of with people from within the church?

Brendan & Jennifer: Worldwide right now the topic of family support in leadership, and nepotism more broadly, is experiencing a revival of interest, but for scholars of the early modern Catholic Church it has always been a talking point. Although taking clerical vows was considered to cut one off from blood relatives, the reality was that reciprocal familial support was the bedrock of early modern society, both secular and ecclesiastical. The election of a new pope, roughly once a decade, could herald a change of leadership, strategy, and personnel. This administrative disruption coupled with an increase in wide responsibility demanded a cohort of unquestionably loyal counsellors and agents who could implement and oversee the pope’s agenda. While kinsmen attract the greatest attention, new popes depended heavily on members of their former household to fill offices, and raised up relatives to form households of their own that could recruit reliable men, who in turn would form similar bonds of loyalty that could work on the pope’s behalf. In the end, as this oration shows us, the family rose and fell together, which is why the household that supported the pope or cardinal is described as a familia (“family”) in Latin.

RSJ Blog: Editing a source, especially when translation is also part of this edition, means getting really close to it – doing a close reading, if you will. Was there anything you were surprised by, or is this oration a typical case of its genre?

Brendan & Jennifer: In some ways, it is surprising just how typical this oration is. It is surprising how completely a bishop, and a Croatian at that, has mastered so many elements of humanist rhetoric. And this is not just a matter of the presence of many familiar tropes, but even of the texture of the language itself. On a word-by-word and on a sentence-by-sentence level, this is a great example of the kind of classicizing prose that had become the standard in Rome at this time. And in one sense, we could expect that Modruš would make an effort to produce an oration like this. When you belong to an institution like the Curia, you take your cues from those above you, and Sixtus IV embraced the humanist agenda like no pope before him. But it is still a surprise to see how widely accepted certain ways of thinking and speaking have become. Modruš seems to take it for granted that this oration is partly an exercise in impressing his audience through his mastery of what would have been called the elegantiae, the graces of good Latin style. In other words, he treats elegant writing as an end in itself. He takes great care in balancing his periods in a variety of ways, and he leans on devices, such as chiasmus, that feel very natural in Latin, even if they are often hard to reproduce in a language such as English. And he calls attention to what he’s doing. All throughout the oration, he communicates his awareness of the conventions of the form with these metatextual references to the choices he has made in shaping his structure. So it is clear, on internal evidence alone, that his readers are also immersed in these conventions. This oration is the product of a culture where the conventions of humanist oratory are accepted to the point of being taken for granted.

RSJ Blog: Thank you again for you time and participation! What is next for you?

Brendan: As a full-time instructor, I publish very little. I have translated a very interesting epistle, sort of a long, autoapologetic oration by the Roman orator Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), and I would like to publish that. It would make sense to include the kind of lengthy introduction/commentary that we’ve included here.

Jennifer: My current work focuses on another papal family, the Borgia, which provided Popes Calixtus III and Alexander VI to the throne of St. Peter (1455-1458 and 1492-1503). Issues of support network and public positioning were integral to the family’s rise and continue to play a role in how we understand the Borgia today. This work expands the research that I presented at the Royal Studies Network’s Kings & Queens 7 conference in Winchester (UK) last summer.

RSJ Blog: Both projects sound very interesting and promising to uncover more about Renaissance culture. Hopefully, we get to read some of these results soon! Let us know when it’s published, and we’ll announce it in our Facebook group!

March 2019 Book of the Month

This month’s Book of the Month is an often-cited classic for Kingship studies which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year: Paul Monod’s The Power of Kings. Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589-1715 saw the light of bookshops in 1999, published by Yale University Press. It still remains influential reading for researchers of royal studies, and it definitely draws the eye with its cover image of Philippe de Champaigne’s painting of Le Vœu de Louis XIII’ (1638).

Paul Kléber Monod (Hepburn Professor of History at Middlebury College (Vermont) was inspired to write this book, according to his acknowledgements, by intense discussions with Linda Colley and David Cannadine in the late 1980s. He refers to the immense struggle of going outside one’s usual geographical range (Monod is an expert on British history, but included an astounishing range of European courts and national historiography in his work). One of the reviews by Teofilo F. Ruiz in the American Historical Review in December 2000 applauded Monod for aiming high and succeeding, and was sure that this book will be cited and discussed for many years to come. Ruiz was right about that – when I first began reading for my PhD in 2009 (10 years later), this was one of the books still forming current debates about monarchy, culture, state formation, and – of course – religion and sanctity. So, what makes The Power of Kings a modern classic work for royal studies?

One aspect is certainly the consequent (and quite early) use of visual and ceremonial sources – in addition to textual sources like publications, parliamentary debates, or private documents, Monod really looks closely at images, esp. paintings and artwork commissioned by monarchs, and at the performance of ceremonies. This approach works well both for royal as well as for church history. He identifies the long seventeenth century as a time of transformation from a sacred to a secularized legitimation of monarchy, both with over-emphasis (by monarchs and courts) of royal sacralization and broader scepticism of this by their audience.

Another aspect is probably the masterful spinning of a narrative encompassing most of European courts, incl. Russia and Poland-Lithuania, and, even more impressive, several research fields. Aside from royal studies and kingship studies, Monod included research on state formation and nationalisation, political thought, church history, and theology into his book.

Although details presented in the book, and even the overall argument and contextualisation, can be – and have been – criticised (see this review and the author’s response), the book in its entirety still inspires and stimulates, not least of all because it was one of the first books on political authority, once again taking religious feelings serious.

What are your experiences with The Power of Kings? Did it inspire your research, or do you think, it is just not current anymore? Let us know what you think in the comments below, or on Facebook. 

Interview with Stephen Lucey

Dr. Stephen Lucey is a professor of art history at Keene State College (New Hampshire, US), and teaches premodern as well as non-Western art history. His research focuses on the medieval Mediterranean world. His recent article in the Royal Studies Journal The Royal Chapel at Pyrga: Art, Agency, and Appropriation in Fourteenth Century Cyprus is an example of this.

RSJ Blog: Thank you for giving us this interview. In your article for the Royal Studies Journal, you write about the royal chapel at Pyrga on Cyprus – an architectural relic from the Lusignan rule over the island (1192-1474). Can you please introduce us (and our readers) to the problem connected with the dating of this chapel?

Stephen: I was first introduced to the chapel in a seminar at Princeton many years ago. At that time, there was very little bibliography associated with the monument and most was quite outdated. So too, I had only limited access to photographs, so it was difficult to get a sense of the fresco program as a whole. I slogged through writing a research paper upholding the 1421 date that was based on a now missing foundation inscription (recorded by a single source in the late nineteenth century) and “authoritative” stylistic studies that framed the chapel’s decoration as a “outsider” unrelated to better known and earlier examples of Cypriot painting.

Still, it was clear to me back then that there was a funerary context involved (see my argument in the article), but it was (is!) difficult to connect that with the death of Queen Charlotte de Bourbon (1388-1421/2). Though the date of her death might seem to support a connection, she is shown very much alive in the frescoes on the east wall. The dating was only one of the many unsatisfying “facts” about the chapel that appeared in the literature (and continued to be perpetrated for years to come). I am happy that I remained both vexed and tenacious – it has certainly been a long road but worth the endeavor.

RSJ Blog: So, even as a student, something about the historiographical work on this chapel struck you as somehow wrong! What struck us as most peculiar was how the mis-dating of the chapel to the early fifteenth century resulted in a completely different interpretation and assessment of the chapel’s art historical “worth” than the dating to the mid-fourteenth century. This also shows in many ways how subjective – despite all attempts otherwise – our interpretations can be, and the problem of objective judgement. Could you please expand a bit on this historiographical debate, and its meaning?

Stephen: I wouldn’t necessarily characterize it as an issue of art historical worth (for me at least) so much as affording it a meaningful context that can be supported by significant evidence – evidence that was simply lacking for the 1421 dating. So little artistic comparanda survives from early fifteenth-century Cyprus, and what there is is quite different in terms of artistic style. Scholarly interest in the chapel simply langoured until Jens Wollesen’s monograph of 2010 (see bibliography). He was the first to question the status quo. I attribute much of the apathy towards Pyrga to its Latin context – the key scholars working in Cyprus in the 1990s and 2000s were chiefly Byzantinists – and Wollesen was not of that ilk. So too, Pyrga’s ruinous state and the miserable assessment of its artistic merits were off putting – do recall that it is not part of the UNESCO set of Cypriot cultural heritage monuments.

It was a few years after the Princeton seminar that I was able to visit Cyprus and see the chapel firsthand. My immediate impression was that Pyrga’s frescoes were not at all as had been described though they are quite distressed. I have often felt that in art history it is the reading of style that can be the most subjective and misleading. So-called authoritative critiques of Pyrga’s frescoes began to seem both hyperbolic and dismissive. Even then, I was struck by how closely related the dominant style of Pyrga’s frescoes were to the great and earlier “warhorses” of Cypriot mural art – the churches at Asinou and Pelendri. Again, it took Wollesen’s work on style some years later to convince me that Pyrga was worth looking at yet again – and a number of years and numerous visits to familiarize myself with the artistic heritage of the island.

RSJ Blog: So, in a way, both the experience of your student-self that something didn’t really add up as well as the hands-on experience in Cyprus were essential for pushing this research forward, and to reach new insights. As an art historian, is it your experience that it is often the opportunity to see artworks “live” in their context that brings forth more questions and answers?

Stephen: There is no question that one must experience the actual object/monument in order to do serious research. As a teacher of global art, I am also impelled to travel and see artworks firsthand. Only then am I able to “recreate” through images (still and moving) and speech a vicarious experience for my students (with the hope that one day they too will seek to explore the breadth of human aesthetic achievement). Indeed, I am off to Peru this summer to garner “fresh” material for my “Indigenous America” lectures in my introductory art history course.

Stephen Lucey gathering material for research and teaching – it begs no question where he is this time 🙂

Back to the question at hand… I would also attribute my ability to reassess the Pyrga material to a growing bibliography on medieval Cyprus – in many ways the questions I was asking of Pyrga and Latin patronage were becoming au courant in the literature. And while I may be a scholar of the medieval Mediterranean, my “focus” is pre-second millenium CE. Still, I believe that my research on the early medieval church of Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome was a key factor in my interest in Cyprus. SMA’s fresco decoration is also in a poor state of preservation, and both the art and its audience bespeak a blending of Roman and Byzantine traditions.

RSJ Blog: What do the frescoes of the chapel, and the architecture of the chapel itself show us about Cyprus’ history?

Stephen: I think the chief lesson of the Pyrga chapel lies within the consideration of modes of “colonial” cultural appropriation as it applies to the late Middle Ages in the eastern Mediterranean. Early modern parallels (buzzword “colonial”) are difficult to sustain given the complexities of the history of the period and the cultures involved. Still, and beyond a doubt, the Lusignan court culture of Cyprus was acquisitive, varied in taste, but nonetheless very much aware of the import of its choices. I believe that the example of Pyrga presents some of the best information we have in that regard. Given a pan-Cypriot problem (plague), the rulers invoke both their own Latin Christianity and its ritual forms in conjunction with the intercessory power of indigenous, and ancient, prophylaxis and its visual manifestations à la maniera Cypria. We, or the social historians, still need to unpack how this can/cannot be framed in a larger “colonial” milieu of Crusader culture.

RSJ Blog: It is always great to end our interviews with a call to arms for more research! And in this case, there really seems to be much done in terms of de-constructing and re-constructing based on your new insights! Thank you for introducing us to some more of your research! As a final question, what are your new projects?

Stephen: For me, it’s back to early medieval Rome and a consideration of narrative cycles and their import for ritual activity: an invited chapter in Anne Heath and Gillian Elliott, eds. Art, Architecture, and the Moving Viewer: Unfolding Narratives ca. 300-1500 (Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe Series) Leiden: Brill, forthcoming.

RSJ Blog: This does sound exciting, although quite a bit different than what you did in Cyprus. I really like how you also include the broader context and framing into your work. Good luck with early medieval Rome, and we are looking forward to reading it!

 

 

Book of the Month: Queenship and Power-Series

This month, we’re celebrating an incredible book series in our feature “Book of the Month”: The book series Queenship and Power (Palgrave Macmillan) celebrates its 10th birthday this year!

Time to look a bit deeper into the series, and commemorate the books and research. The Royal Studies Journal Blog was lucky enough to get the chance for a chat with Carole Levin and Charles Beem, the editors of the series.

RSJ Blog: Thanks Carole and Charles for giving us the chance for some discussion of your book series. And congrats for your 10th anniversary! Already 56 books are published – that is amazing, and really brought research on queens and queenship forward. Could you please start by telling us a bit more about the time 10 years ago? How did you come up with the idea, and what were your first experiences?

Carole: The idea for the series was mine and I knew that for something like what I envisioned, I was to work collaboratively. I had read The Lionness Roared for Palgrave and thought it was wonderful and when I met Charles I knew he was the one with whom I wanted to co-edit the series. It was a brilliant decision. Working with Charles has been just wonderful and the series has been more than I could have imagined at the time.

Charles:  I was thrilled to have been asked to do this series with such a distinguished scholar as Carole, whose work I had long admired.  The series proposal itself was the first of many collaboration between us as we conceptualized the mission and scope of the series.  The project had a longer gestation with Carole, who knew so many junior scholars getting ready to publish their first books.  I really had no expectations, and I do not think either of us had any inkling of how successful the series would be.  One lucky break was the ability to work with our first acquisition editor, Christopher Chappell, for over five years, which allowed us to get a feel for working with the editorial and production staff at Palgrave.

Shelfie No. 1 – starting of slowly (full disclosure: this is Cathleen’s collection)

RSJ Blog: Can you tell us a bit more about the books published in the series? I also noted that a book from 2003 – so 15 years ago – is actually listed as part of the series. What is up with Carole’s, Debra Barrett-Graves‘, and Jo Eldridge Carney’s book on High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England?

Carole: Well, obviously I had been working on queens for a long time before the series – why I had the idea for the series – so our editor at Palgrave suggested that when the book came out in paperback it be part of our series. I was delighted to have it included.

Charles: Palgrave had a few titles in their catalogue that had been published in hardback that were perfect for the series, which also included Sharon Jansen’s The monstrous Regiment of Women. So we acquired these and issued them in the series as trade paperbacks, to much success I might add.   The Lioness Roared also, which was first published in 2006, was reissued in paper as the first title in the series. 

RSJ Blog: Charles, The Lioness Roared, the first „official“ book of the series was your monograph on the British queens throughout the centuries. In addition to inspiring much research going on right now, it is also a particularly longue durée study. How did you treat the challenges of this? Also, Carole and Charles, how was your experience with Charles as author and book series editor?

Charles:  My dissertation advisors tried very strongly to talk me out of this project.  As an M.A, student, I wrote a history of English boy kings for my thesis, and was already intrigued by the possibilities of the long durée approach.  The big challenge for me was mastering a number of historiographies, a process which greatly aided me as an instructor of British history.

Carole: The book had been accepted for publication before the series so it was great to have it also start off the series. Charles had since done a number of other books for the series and I have always been so pleased to have him do so as his writing and editing are exemplary.

Getting more serious with queenship studies with Shelfie No. 2

RSJ Blog: While the book series has a focus on English, or British, queens and queenship, and especially the great Elizabeth I has been covered intensely, e.g. her writing, her Italian and foreign letters, her death and her life, her foreign relations, and – the newest – Elizabeth seen through French Valois eyes, the book series covers also lots of other European and some non-European queens. Was this something you pushed for, and encouraged scholars to look into it, or more of the other way round?

Carole: When I first thought of the series I wanted it to cover as widely as possible both chronology and geographic range. And as an Elizabeth I scholar I am delighted with the great works we have published that have had to do with her, I am equally thrilled by the range we do have in the series and would love to have even more. So yes, we are encouraging scholars to do excellent work in all fields of queenship studies.

Charles: From the first, we conceptualized this series as global in perspective, although we anticipated that scholars of English and European queenship would be drawn to the series, which is in fact what happened.  I would love to be able to publish works on Asiatic and African queens, as well as queens of the ancient and classical world.

And Shelfie No. 3  proves that you might need more than one shelf for the series!

RSJ Blog: What I really enjoy about the book series is the mixture between young scholars just starting out, and established voices adding to this research field. Can you tell us a bit more about how you approach prospective authors and editors?

Carole: I really love this about the series also! So Charles and I both talk to many scholars at conferences and really encourage young scholars to work with us so we can help them produce really fine work. And we are also so proud of the major scholars in the field who publish with us.

Charles: Carole has an enviable network of scholars that literally stretches around the globe, and wherever she is, she always has time for a pitch.  I have endeavored to follow in her footsteps, making time at conferences to chat with graduate students.  Many of the conversations Carole and I have had over the years with graduate students and junior scholars were the catalyst for many books published in our series.

Shelfie No. 4: if the books don’t even fit in a picture anymore, it can only be one
queenship scholar whose collection is shown here…
(excluding the collections of Carole and Charles)

RSJ Blog: One last question: what are your plans for the future? Especially regarding the book series, but also your other projects?

Carole: Well, Charles and I are definitely planning to continue publishing a range of great projects in the series. And we are both continuing our various scholarly projects that deal with queenship.  I am doing some projects on Queen Elizabeth and Boudicca – an essay on the topic is forthcoming in Estelle Paranque’s collection Remembering Queens and Kings. I am continuing to work on my creative projects as well and so is Charles.

Charles: I am wrapping up revision for my next book Queenship in Early Modern Europe.  I also have an essay on royal minorities in an upcoming edited volume on queenship and Game of Thrones, to be published late in 2019.  Also next year  I will begin the process of looking for scholars to contribute to a volume on ancient and classical queenship.

RSJ Blog: These are great news! Especially, since we can now hope to get more performances on Kings & Queens conferences like 2018 in Winchester! And everybody reading this, and working either on African or Asian queens, or ancient and classical queenship: you know who to contact!

If you admired the shelfies of diverse royal studies network members of their books from the series, and think, you also want to add to this visual celebration: send us your shelfies with the books from the queenship and power series (no, library books don’t count; only the ones you really own)

Book of the Month: Kantorowicz: The King’s Two Bodies (1957)

There are some books which become so influential that there is just no getting around them. For researchers of royal studies and premodern political thought Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s book The King’s Two Bodies is one of them.
Even if you’ve never read it, you certainly have heard about it, and maybe also used the main argument in your own work!

 

What is the main argument of this book? Kantorowicz starts with a legal discussion under Elizabeth I’s rule about the lease of some lands under Edward VI who was still a child at the time in question. Kantorowicz uses Edmund Plowden’s Commentaries in which it is argued that a king has two bodies: a natural one (body natural) which still might be a minor, but also as king a political body (body politic) which is freed from all mortal and natural defects. Whenever the king acts with his body politic, no restrictions of his body natural are in force.
From this starting point, Kantorowics looks further back in time and traces the idea of a monarch having two bodies, and how this influenced political theory and thought. His work was so influential that not only is it still used today, but a range of researchers used this concept and expanded it. Martin Wrede discovered a third body of the king – the memoria – in his article on Königsmord, Tyrannentod. Wie man sich der drei Körper des Königs entledigt – oder es zumindest versucht (16.-18. Jahrhundert) (2013). Regina Schulte explored in an edited volume the two (or more) bodies of the queen in Der Körper der Königin. Geschlecht und Herrschaft in der höfischen Welt (2002). Quentin Skinner explored this topic in his Kantorowicz Lecture in Frankfurt/Main in May 2011 which can be read in the (only) German book Die drei Körper des Staates (2012). David A. Warner in his article on Rituals, Kingship and Rebellion in Medieval Germany (2010) again draws from this basic argument (thanks to Penny Nash (Sydney) for adding this!)

Royal Studies scholars also use this book still today – I usually use a German copy provided by my library from 1990 (and just as a sidenote – it is remarkable that an English book from 1957 by a German emigrant – Kantorowicz taught in Heidelberg and Frankfurt before going into exile in 1939 – was only translated into German in 1990)

© 1990, dtv

Ernst H. Kantorowicz:
Die zwei Körper des Königs.
Eine Studie zur politischen Theologie des Mittelalters

 

 

Michael Evans (Delta College / Central Michigan University) uses it in his courses: “I set my students Kantorowicz’s classic The Kings Two Bodies as part of a graduate class on the historiography of the western Middle Ages. I required some very intensive reading from them; usually a book a week, plus one or two articles. Given its length, we devoted two weeks to The King’s Two Bodies. (Thinking this was generous timeline, I told a colleague who responded ‘you made them read that tome in only two weeks?!’). My students were a little intimidated by the length of the book and the density of some of the prose (we held a ‘find the most verbose paragraph’ competition to keep up morale), but were intrigued both by Kantorowicz’s life story and by his ideas. We used Kantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages as an accompanying text, and challenging Cantor’s myth of the ‘Nazi’ Kantorowicz was interesting, helped by Conrad Leyser’s introduction and William Chester Jordan’s preface to the Princeton edition, and by Robert Lerner’s recent biography of EK. Students were intrigued by the core idea of the ‘two bodies’, leading to some intriguing questions: ‘what about the queen’s body?’; ‘What about a regnant queen? Does she occupy the king’s body?’; ‘What if a regnant queen is pregnant with a future king? How many king’s bodies are present?’ and so on. A focus on ‘body history’ was also valuable when we later discussed Caroline Walker’s Bynum’s Holy Feat, Holy Fast, with its focus on women’s body, and bodies in a very different context. Sixty years after its publication, the ideas in The King’s Two Bodies still resonate with today’s students.”

Milinda Banerjee (Kolkata, Munich) was deeply inspired by this work for his own work on Colonial India: “I used Kantorowicz to think about similar ideas about body politic, linking kingship and nationhood (national community imagined as the body of a sacred king; but also more subaltern/peasant imaginaries of body politic), in late 19th/20th c. Indian political thought. Also used him to understand Indian ultra-left Naxalite/’Maoist’ discourses in the 1960s-70s about a Communist sovereign (Alexei Yurchak’s Kantorowicz-inspired work on Lenin was very inspiring here). I also loved Kantorowciz’s Laudes Regiae; In The Mortal God, I discuss the Indian national anthem as an acclamation to a sacred God-King (written by Rabindranath Tagore as an anticolonial response to George V’s visit to India).”

Did the King’s Two Bodies influence your work? Share with us your experiences, stories, and show us your copy of the book! You’ll find us on Facebook in the Royal Studies Group or email us under royalstudiesblog@gmail.com.

First Roundtable on British Royal Tours

The newest issue of the Royal Studies Journal is a special issue on British royal tours of the Dominions, compiled and guest edited by Robert Aldrich and Cindy McCreery (both University of Sydney, Australia). Ten articles discuss several aspects of these royal tours, from the response by Canadian women over the relations with indigenous people to the practical side of royals spending a pretty long time on ships, and many more.

We got together with Robert Aldrich, Cindy McCreery, and Chris Holdridge (University of the Free State, South Africa, and Monash University, Australia) to discuss their ideas for the special issue, the connections of royal studies and post-colonial-studies, and their research.

Robert Aldrich

 

Cindy McCreery

 

Chris Holdridge

Cathleen, Kristen, and Elena: Robert, Cindy, and Chris, thank you for joining us for this roundtable on the special issue on British royal tours. Robert and Cindy, you already published books together on royal tours, and I quite well remember our discussions on the topic in Gießen and Madrid in 2017. Chris, you provided an afterword to this special issue – could you all please tell our readers a bit more about the idea behind this special issue, and how it relates to this field in general? Also, what do you see as most influential in the academic field of studying royal tours?

Robert:  After reading Amitav Ghosh’s wonderful novel The Glass Palace, I became interested in the monarchs – emperors, kings and queens, maharajas, sultans – who were dethroned and exiled by the British and French.  (Exile was a kind of enforced tour!)  That led to a book on Banished Potentates. But I had also started to think more generally about monarchies and colonies, and Cindy and I began to work together on that theme, and edited a volume on Crowns and Colonies for Manchester University Press.  Cindy’s fascinating research on the global tour of Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred suggested that travels by monarchs and members of royal families were part of a more general phenomenon, and that these grand tours provided initiations to international affairs for the royals, examples of ‘soft diplomacy‘ and affirmations of colonial rule.  Our edited Royals on Tour (also published by Manchester) explored some of those travels by British, French, Italian and Portuguese royals, and also colonial-era tours by royals from places such as Japan, Thailand, Indochina and the Dutch East Indies.  Given the breadth of British empire, and the significance of royal tours to Australia, where we live, Dominion tours was an obvious topic for another collection, and the contributors to our RSJ issue offered many new insights into royal travels in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, and on such issues as relations between indigenous people and the Crown, gendered experiences of royal tours, and the role of displays of military might on those occasions.

One of the key academic benefits of studying royal tours is how they provide an example of ‘connected history’ – travels in a real sense link colonial metropoles with colonies, and colonies with each other, as well as linking elites to ‘commoners‘, and Europeans with indigenous people and with settler and diasporic populations.  They involved not just an individual ‘tourist’ but many others, from vice-regal officials to servants, performers to spectators.  Royals were (and are) celebrities – it is extraordinary that perhaps a quarter of the population of Australia turned out to see the queen when she first toured the country in the 1950s.  The visit to Australia later this year of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex may not draw such crowds, but will no doubt create considerable interest.  The visit of the young couple will show how the British royal family and monarchy continually reinvent themselves – but also perhaps spark renewed debate on the future role of the British sovereign as head of state in Australia.

Cindy: As well as the influences Robert mentions above, we have been inspired – but also challenged – by much of the work which historians and art historians of early modern Europe have done on royal tours. As modernists who live and work in the global south, we are quite passionate about showcasing modern as well as non-European case studies of monarchical performance such as royal tours. So we want to emphasize that monarchies and royal tours are as much a part of the 19^th and 20^th (and indeed 21^st) centuries as, say, the 16^th!

Chris: Monarchy is an important part of the history of imperialism, and an aspect near inescapable for historians of empire. The articles in the special issue show that rather than colonial replicas of the politics of royal display in the British metropole, royal tours and their reception in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa very much relied on the local politics of these colonies or dominions. It is this attention to local politics that is for me the most stimulating direction in the study of royal tours. Debates about race, such as in Britain over the recent 2018 wedding of Prince Henry to the biracial American and former actress Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, had their much earlier precursors in the colonies. Studying royal tours is an entry point into understanding the long histories of multiculturalism and the complex changes over time to social hierarchies. It tells us a lot about the visibility or occlusion of violent settler colonial pasts and diverse colonial or dominion populations, and the impact of this on the social fabric. If anything then, studying royal tours and monarchy in general should not be a niche field. Histories of empire, and national or global histories, are enriched when we ask bigger comparative questions about the importance and connected histories of monarchy. Royal tours are but one way to go about this.

Cathleen, Kristen, and Elena: Modern royal tours show indeed the worldwide, and world-encompassing, reach and influence of monarchies, especially the British monarchy. The issue highlights the complex issues of empire, commonwealth, royal tours, independence, ceremony, racism, nationalism, colonialism vs anti-colonialism vs post-colonialism, and so on – how do you all deal with studying a subject so intertwined with these issues, which of course are also still political dynamite today?

Robert: Fortunately, royal tours produced much documentation – newspaper reports, commemorative volumes, memoirs and travelogues, images and artefacts.  (And, more recently, of course, there are television reports and now internet streaming.)  These provide a rich archive, and the tours shed light on many issues in the history of monarchy and in the history of the countries royals visited. 

One strategy to try to make sense of it all is to focus on a particular tour and to examine the dynamics of the itinerary and ceremonies, the reception of the royals, and reportage around the visits.  Such a fine-grained ‘snapshot‘ allows a researcher or reader to zoom in to a particular time and place.  Alternatively, study of a succession of visits shows how change occurred – changes in the way the monarchy presented itself, changes in the circumstances that inspired tours, changes in reactions from the diverse groups in countries that were visited.  As the articles in our issue of the RSJ show, yet another approach is to look at particular themes, for instance, the voyage itself, or the experiences of women or indigenous people, or the place of the armed forces and returned soldiers during these tours.

Cindy: Yes, and I think that as historians we need to be mindful and at times quite explicit in our work about linking past controversies with present campaigns. Jock Phillips’ article on the New Zealand Maori and Royal tours, Mark McKenna’s on Australian indigenous people’s relationship with the British monarchy and Carolyn Harris’s on Canadian women and royal tours all engage, albeit in different ways and with different methodological approaches, with issues of racial and gender equality that are very much relevant today.

Chris: There are no easy answers to historical questions about race, the nation, antic-colonialism and imperial loyalism. What makes royal tours so fascinating are the contradictions that one faces when looking at the archivalia that Robert mentioned, whether commemorative pamphlets or newspaper accounts. Looking beneath the surface, jubilant welcomes and warm receptions were often political theatre belying deeper tensions or resentments. In South Africa, as Hilary Sapire argues in her article on the 1925 royal tour of Edward, Prince of Wales, Afrikaners showed a mixture of unease or deference two decades after the end of the South African (Boer) War. Complexities are often best examined through case studies, of which royal tours are excellent examples. One way to tackle these complexities is to read against the grain of press accounts and official versions of events by elites to attempt a recovery of different voices and motivations. We hope that it is clear in the special issue how very different the meaning and possibilities of royal tours were for a white New Zealand immigrant from London compared to an Indigenous Australian or French-speaking Canadian. It is at the micro-level of these different voices that we can then pan out to challenge the often simplified and uniform broader narratives around monarch and empire.

Cathleen, Kristen, and Elena: What I really liked about your special issue in the Royal Studies Journal is the focus on modern monarchy, and the focus on non-European events. The British Empire and Commonwealth was, after all, world-spanning, and had much more influence outside of Europe than in this tiny continent. What is your impression, also as scholars from South Africa and Australia: in what ways do royal studies profit from non-European views, and how influential is European scholarship for non-European research?

Robert:  European monarchy is by its very nature a cosmopolitan institution – through dynastic traditions, intermarriage, conquests of territory in Europe and the wider world.  In the age of exploration and empire, European monarchies and non-Western monarchies came face to face, sometimes in violent confrontation, and both of these groups of monarchies were changed in the process.  European monarchies were imposed on many colonised areas, and European notions of governance survived even after decolonisation in some countries.  Malaysia, for instance, has a Westminster style of parliamentary government, but a particular sort of elective monarchy (with the head of state selected for a five-year term from among the hereditary sultans).  The monarchies of countries such as Thailand underwent a wide-ranging modernisation in part because of their contact with the West; this can be seen in transformations in political institutions and court ceremonial, and in personal links developed, for instance, by the late nineteenth-century King Chulalongkorn and his monarchical peers in Europe.  To understand modern monarchy, therefore, research on European and non-European forms of dynastic rule are complementary, and those strands of historiography need to be brought even closer together.  There are useful comparisons to be made, for instance, between the sacred nature of European and non-European rulers – the divine right of old regime monarchs in Europe, Buddhist kings as devarajas, Confucian rulers as ‘sons of heaven‘.  The ‘new imperial history‘ tends to view the colonising and the colonised countries within the same field, and studies of modern monarch may also profitably reflect on the transnational and global histories of Western and non-Western monarchies in the colonial and post-colonial age.  We need greater dialogue between specialists of European monarchies and those in Asia, Africa and Oceania in order to discuss the long-lasting effects of the cross-cultural encounters of different royal families and their traditions.

Cindy: In response to your point above, I actually think that the British Empire and Commonwealth was pretty influential in Europe as well as beyond it. If you think about, say, French, Belgian and German nineteenth-century colonisation schemes, many of their greatest advocates were inspired by the British model. And of course Belgian and German monarchs (notably Leopold II and Wilhelm II) were notorious for their determination to build empires to rival those of Britain… So I think that looking at these overseas empires is absolutely essential for improving our understanding of the European monarchies themselves. European scholarship on monarchy is very important – e.g. David Cannadine’s work on representations of the British monarchy at home is really helpful for understanding their representations in colonial Australia, which built on existing British representational models. I also think that Europeanists benefit from considering scholarship on non-European examples, whether that be responses to European royals in Asia, responses to Asian royals in Europe – or in their home countries.

Chris: I agree with what Robert and Cindy have mentioned. Global history has been one of the great benefits and spurs to new scholarship, bringing into conversation historians of early-modern Europe, for example, with historians who work on Australia, South Africa or India. These comparative conversations have always been present, but there is a renewed energy of late for global comparisons. One of the challenges, however, is to avoid an assumption that Europe brought its models of monarchy, governance, trade and ideas in a one-way flow to the rest of the world, or that unique extra-European cultures can be categorised into European models. This is what the postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty referred to as the need to ‘provincialize Europe’. Modernity is not a European invention, progress is not the preserve and responsibility of Europe, and monarchy and democracy are not necessarily European exports. Empire was a process of exchange—frequently violent and unequal—when Europe encountered societies that had their own advanced social orders, hierarchies and dynasties.

Comparison can help us better understand these complexities of monarchy. Two books by historians based in the global south come to mind as excellent examples of this approach. The first, Milinda Banerjee’s The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India, was published this year by Cambridge University Press. It is an intellectual history of the princely states in India and debates and exchanges with British imperial power over what constituted the sovereign and their authority, debates that often involved elites and peasant contesting what Banerjee terms the ‘political theology’ of monarchy. The second book, now two decades old, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention by Carolyn Hamilton, demonstrates that the Zulu King Shaka is an invention of the colonial archive, historical accounts and popular memory that relied on European conceptions as its foundation. This is an invention of Shaka’s greatness and infallibility that served as a useful foil in British imperial propaganda as much as it still serves as a central component of Zulu identity and nationalism in South Africa today.

The British Empire in 1921

Cathleen, Kristen, and Elena: Now, this is a call to arms the books for us historians! Include research and researchers from the Global South! I can also only emphasize this: I worked with Milinda Banerjee on nationalism and monarchy, and his insights as a scholar based in the Global South, but also trained in Europe were enlightening. As you might know, most of our readers are researchers of premodern periods in which there were also royal tours. Can you tell us a bit how they would compare to modern royal tours? Was it ‘just’ a change of technology and infrastructure regarding transport and media coverage, or can you pin-point some more substantial changes as well? What about the change of royal families from active rulers of their own dominions to representatives for their states, to what degree does this change play a role? In this aspect, how important is the role of ‘performance of monarchy’? 

Robert:  The pre-modern tours and ‘progresses‘ of monarchs provided templates for later travels, but certainly the new technologies and the expansion of empires were key differences between those travels and those in the age of empire.  There are, however, other differences.  By the late 1800s and early 1900s, most European monarchs were losing, or had lost, the absolute powers enjoyed by their forebears; overseas travels provided a new way to sustain and indeed re-establish their place in the nation, and to present themselves as sovereigns over ‘dominions beyond the seas‘.  Empire provided an opportunity (indeed a need) for rulers such as the British monarchs to affirm their special ties with settler populations – and there is an element of ‘race patriotism‘ in this sense – but also their paternalistic imperium over colonised people of very different ethnic, religious and social backgrounds. Colonies presented the possibility for ‘performing monarchy‘ on a global stage, and to use such performances to promote empire at home.  The incorporation of the Kohinoor diamond (the subject of a fascinating recent book by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand) is one manifestation – the diamond was effectively taken as war booty after the British East India Company annexed the Punjab and deposed its ruler, who then lived in exile in Britain as a sometime wayward protégé of Queen Victoria.  The diamond taken from him was incorporated into the British crown jewels.  When it was set into the crown of Queen Alexandra – who as the consort of King Edward VII was also Empress of India – she was, in a literal sense, wearing the empire on her head.  The ways in which the colonies were intertwined with the history of modern monarchy in Europe is an often overlooked aspect to their evolution, and we hope that our research and that of our collaborators has shed light on the place of overseas empires in the construction of modern monarchy.

Cindy: Yes, and I think another important element of modern royal tours is the way in which they frequently reflected the huge economic, political and cultural significance of the colonies – and colonists – in the overall empire. When the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York travelled around the British empire in 1901, they paid enormous attention to making sure that each colony they visited felt special, as if it was THE most important stop on the itinerary, and they spent hours shaking hands with local veterans of the ongoing war in South Africa. While they were greeted with great courtesy and honour wherever they went, there was also a sense that the colonists DESERVED this royal visit, and that such tours were now a royal duty. So the focus on satisfying the broader public, rather than say just elite audiences, probably marks a substantive difference from early modern royal tours.

Chris: Of course, as you mention, the most dramatic change over the past two centuries has involved travel and communication, in the move from sailing ships to steam power and from the printing press to the telegraph, radio, television and then the Internet. Travel times diminished greatly, and so did the dangers for royals travelling to distant colonies. This made the option far more attractive by the late-nineteenth century. To echo what Cindy has said, there was an expectation in the rising mass societies of this era that the authority of politicians should be seen, whether these were presidents or monarchs. Increased literacy and a more active public resulted in a demand to see royalty as part of the political fabric connected to and answerable to ordinary folk. And media thus transformed the reception of royalty on display as a democratised and even celebrity event that drew in a larger audience through print or on screen. Royal pageantry thus became more democratised in its wider audience beyond courtly display, to the streets of the capital and the outer reaches of empire.

Cathleen, Kristen, and Elena: Thank you for these further insights into the complex topic of royal tours, and how studying them profits us in understanding monarchy, be it modern or premodern. One last question to you all on royal tours: do you have any favorite anecdotes of royal tours you’d like to share? Or, can you recommend any additional media (images, newspapers, video, speeches, radio broadcasts, etc.) for anyone interested in modern royal tours?

Robert:  Some of my own favourite anecdotes come from the travels to Europe of Asian monarchs – the king of Cambodia, Sisowath, in visiting Paris in 1906, for instance, brought with him a group of Khmer dancers.

The young women so intrigued Rodin that spent hours sketching the dancers, and even followed the troupe from Paris to Marseille to continue drawing them.  King Sisowath meanwhile enjoyed shopping in Paris, and gave a royal medal to the manager of one department store he patronised!  Such anecdotes show the personal side of royal tours, but also how they provided occasions for two countries to ‘discover‘ each other.

There are a number of commemorative volumes on royal tours, and museums sometimes put on display artefacts from these travels.  The British Film Institute’s website, among others, has interesting documentary footage, and it is possible to find reports on other tours on YouTube.  Royals were always photogenic, so newspapers and other illustrated magazines of the time are also full of images and accounts – the modern phenomenon of royal paparazzi owed much to royal travels.

Cindy: One fun anecdote from Prince Alfred’s 1867-8 tour of Australia comes during his visit to the Hunter River region of New South Wales. A crowd of local people wait patiently for hours on the riverbank to watch him pass by on his steam launch. By the time the boat comes into view it is midday and the hot Australian sun, reflecting off the shiny paintwork of the royal launch, creates such glare that the spectators really can’t see very much. ‘Mrs Windeyer’, a middle-aged woman who was married to a prominent local landowner and later campaigned for women’s suffrage, describes the scene in a letter to her daughter-in-law, explaining that ‘I did not see Prince Alfred but he may have seen me!’ I think that beautifully sums up both the loyalty of many people in the nineteenth-century British empire but also their ongoing sense of individual pride and self-worth. The Prince wasn’t the only person worth looking at on that hot day!

 Chris: A memorable moment is when Queen Elizabeth II visited South Africa in 1995, following the election of Nelson Mandela as president the year prior. The Queen had last visited South Africa in 1947 with her father King George VI, her mother, and Princess Margaret. During the majority of the time between, Mandela had languished in prison for 27 years under the oppressive apartheid regime. Unlike when her father greeted onlookers in 1947 as head of state when South Africa was still part of the monarchy, in 1995 a black man with the office of head of state of a republic, and equally as regal in appearance as his British counterpart, stood next to the Queen. The contrast of a half-century was telling. The New York Times published a short but poignant ‘Cape Town Journal’ of the Queen’s visit. While many—especially black—South Africans saw the Queen’s royal tour as evidence of the end of South African isolation within the world and the possibility of a better life, others were more circumspect. One 64-year old coloured librarian, Vincent Kolbe, recalled waving a flag when a teenager in 1947 at the royal entourage. As he said to the New York Times reporter, “When you get old, you get nostalgic. This is like revisiting a moment in your life… But there isn’t the same kind of devotion now as there was then. She’s somebody else’s Queen now.” In my own memories of 1995 as a then nine-year old, I recall far more strongly South Africa’s victory against New Zealand in the Rugby World Cup final, and the moment Nelson Mandela lifted the trophy with the team captain, than I do the visit of Queen Elizabeth II!

1995 in South Africa

Cathleen, Kristen, and Elena: Now, sports, power and national identiy is also quite the interesting topic! Finally, what can we expect next from you?

Robert:  Cindy and I are now putting together an edited volume on monarchies and decolonisation in Asia, looking at both European colonial monarchies and Asian ones.  This is part of a larger project, with several collaborators in Australia and overseas, on the general topic of monarchies, decolonisation and royal legacies.  Meanwhile, I’m finishing a book with a geography colleague in Sydney, John Connell, for Palgrave Macmillan, that looks at several dozen places around the world that did not become independent countries – we published a volume called The Last Colonies twenty years ago, and we are looking at those places once more.  Monarchy does figure in the story.  After all, Queen Elizabeth still reigns over islands and enclaves from Bermuda to St Helena, from Gibraltar to Pitcairn.  The king of the Netherlands reigns over six islands in the Caribbean, and the Danish queen rules over the Faeroes and Greenland.  And after that, I’m writing a general book on European colonialism since 1800 with a Swiss scholar, Andreas Stucki, for Bloomsbury Publishers.

Cindy: I am currently writing a book on Prince Alfred’s world tour in the 1860s and 70s, which I describe as the first global royal tour. I am also planning a second article on the 1901 royal tour – there is so much more to say about it! – which will examine representations of race and gender in the tour. I am also planning a conference presentation on the royal tours of King Kalakaua of Hawai’i and Sultan Abu Bakar of Johore – two other nineteenth-century keen royal tourists. Robert and I are teaming up with our colleague Mark McKenna (who contributed an article to this special issue) to plan a possible museum exhibition on monarchy in Australia. Watch this space!

Chris: Besides finishing a book on settler protest and the end of convict transportation in the British Empire, I am collaborating with Wm. Matthew Kennedy on the book Captive Subjects that looks at the thousands of prisoners of war sent to India, Ceylon, Bermuda and St Helena during the South African War. Issues of sovereignty and subjecthood abound, and I have become increasingly fascinated by the post-Napoleonic history of exile to St Helena. Besides 5,000 interned Boer prisoners at the turn of the twentieth century, the British exiled the Zulu king Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo to the island in the 1890s. Boer POWs—most ardent republicans and some racist—did not take kindly to news that the Zulu King received better treatment and hospitality than they did! Like Robert, I have thus been drawn to the history of royals in exile, which is an interesting counterpoint to royals on tour.

Cathleen, Kristen, and Elena: Again, thank you all for indulging us with this interview; and good luck with your respective projects! We’re looking forward to reading them, or seeing a bit of them (in the case of the exhibition)!