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In June 1910 Dr Edward Wilson set sail from Cardiff to Antarctica on board the Terra Nova as the Chief of the Scientific Staff on the British Antarctic Expedition led by Captain Scott. On 1 November the following year a group from the Terra Nova set out from Cape Evans across the ice with the intention of reaching the South Pole. The venture ended in tragedy. The members of the British expedition perished on their return from the pole having discovered that the Norwegians had got there first.

Wilson was a talented artist as well as a doctor. He began drawing as a child and throughout his life he made meticulous sketches and watercolours of the natural world.

After his death, his final sketchbook was retrieved from the tent where he and his companions spent their last days. His watercolours were returned from the Cape Evans hut where they had been produced.

Artworks made by Wilson on both the Discovery Expedition of 1901 and the Terra Nova Expedition are testimony to the spirit of discovery and the splendour of the Antarctic.

The Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) is fortunate in holding around 1,900 of Wilson’s drawings and sketches, the majority of them given to SPRI by his wife Oriana. Nineteen of these artworks depict the albatross – several species of which Wilson shows both in close-up studies and soaring above the ocean.

Mrs Heather Lane, former Keeper of the Polar Museum, says: "Wilson is undoubtedly one of the greatest artists of the heroic age of polar exploration. He was one of Scott’s closest friends and on expeditions the person to whom others looked for stability.

"As an artist he was self-taught yet he captured with stunning accuracy both the anatomical structure and the fragile beauty of living things. He was particularly fascinated by birds."

The wandering albatross has the largest wingspan (up to 12 foot) of any bird. Its flight is so efficient that it expends as little energy soaring on currents of air (a type of flight known as 'dynamic soaring') as it does sitting on its nest. In all, there are 22 species of albatross, most of them living in the southern oceans. The majority are under threat, chiefly from longline fishing. Attracted by the bait, the birds become entangled by the hooks and drown.  Estimates put the annual death toll at 100,000 birds.

PhD candidate Tommy Clay (Department of Zoology) is contributing to a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) programme that is creating a detailed picture of their migratory movements. The research is made possible by lightweight battery-powered devices capable of tracking the birds’ movements over multiple years.

Albatrosses pair for life: Wanderers raise at most one chick every two years. They spend a whole year incubating their one egg and looking after the chick. Once the chick is independent, its parents enjoy a recovery period before they breed again, returning to the same breeding spots on remote islands in the southern ocean.

"Until relatively recently, very little has been known about the pattern of albatross movements across their lifespans, which can be more than 60 years. We’re beginning to build up a picture of what individual birds do and why they do it. We now know that in the inter-breeding period, the birds cover huge distances. One Grey-headed albatross, for example, circumnavigated the southern hemisphere in just 46 days," says Clay.

"Albatrosses are regarded as sentinel species for the health of the marine environment. Albatrosses are scavengers – they follow ships and eat the debris thrown into the water. In the North Pacific, dead birds are found with plastic in their stomachs, showing just how widespread – and destructive – is our impact on the oceans."

The long association between the albatross and the seafarer was cemented in 1798 with the publication of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the poem, which was dismissed by early critics as an extravagant cock-and-bull story, the eponymous mariner shoots an albatross in a seemingly motiveless act of cruelty.

When the ship is becalmed (Day after day, day after day,/We stuck, nor breath nor motion; /As idle as a painted ship/ Upon a painted ocean), the dead albatross is hung around the mariner’s neck by his shipmates.

The poem was famously illustrated by Gustav Doré in the 1870s and became one of the most quoted ballads in the English language. Images of the crew dying of thirst out at sea (Water, water, every where,/And all the boards did shrink;/ Water, water, every where,/ Nor any drop to drink) and the dead bird hanging around a man’s neck became embedded in the public imagination.

In the 1930s, albatross entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a word to describe an unshakeable burden.

“The indeterminacy of the mariner’s crime makes the story compelling: we don’t know what makes him pick up his crossbow and shoot a bird that the crew has befriended. Some scholars have read the poem as a Christian narrative in which evil is punished by God. Others, more recently, have argued for an environmental context in which mankind is punished for an attack on the natural world,” says Professor Heather Glen of the Faculty of English.

“Or possibly – and this is in keeping with the poem’s deliberately archaic ballad form – Coleridge is suggesting that the shooting of the albatross is a violation of a much more ancient tradition of welcome to the stranger. In the note with which he headed the poem in 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge announces that it will portray ‘how the Ancient Mariner cruelly, and in contempt of the laws of hospitality, killed a sea-bird; and how he was followed by many and strange judgements’.”

We may think that scientists inhabit a precisely focused world, far away from the messy realm of stories and the imagination, but a new film series, Novel Thoughts, from the University of Cambridge shows that there is a bridge between the two.

Reading fiction helps scientists to see the bigger picture and be reminded of the complex richness of human experience. Novels can show the real human stories behind the science, or trigger a desire in a young reader to change lives through scientific discovery. They can open up new worlds, or encourage a different approach to familiar tasks.

For psychologist Dr Amy Milton, reading Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby during her PhD had a profound effect on her work. Its bleak portrayal of the downward spiral into addiction spurred her on to complete her thesis on cocaine addiction and to deepen her research into preventing relapse.

“The book gave me a real insight into what it’s like for individuals living with addiction. It summed up how addiction, and the consequences of it, has not always been taken seriously as a disease by psychiatry,” she said.

As a teenager, Professor Carol Brayne’s love of Charles Dickens and George Eliot opened her eyes to a world in which social inequality had a powerful impact on people’s health and wellbeing. She vowed to become a doctor, and is now a leading figure in public health research at Cambridge. Her voracious reading as a young adult helped her understand the importance of seeing the bigger picture, and of finding health interventions that take account of the complexities of people’s lives.

For some, a book came along at just the right time. Professor Clare Bryant, of the Department of Zoology, read A S Byatt’s Possession at a crucial point in her early career. Its page-turning portrayal of two historians racing to uncover hidden truths reminded her of the excitement of scientific discovery, and persuaded her not to turn her back on her own research career.

Books can have a resonance throughout a scientific lifetime. For early-career researcher Guy Pearson, Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree has fascinating parallels with his own work. It may seem surprising that a story of unrequited love in a small West Country village could mirror the process of cell biology, but Pearson was struck by the similarities between the young protagonist’s pursuit of the beautiful and flighty Fancy Day, and his own pursuit of elusive molecular truths.

And Dr Juliet Foster can see that the themes explored in The Madness of a Seduced Woman by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, which she read as a PhD student, still have echoes in her current social psychology research into public understandings of mental illness.

Dr Sarah Dillon, now in the Faculty of English at Cambridge, was the first to explore some of these ideas in a project she developed at the University of St Andrews. Much has been written about science’s influence on literature – from Frankenstein to the futuristic worlds of science fiction – but she wanted to find out if the influence happened in the other direction. Did literature have an impact on the world of science?

Dillon joined forces with social scientist Christine Knight, and astronomer turned creative writer Pippa Goldschmidt to investigate What Scientists Read.

“What we found was that reading literature and ‘non-science’ books did have an influence on their work in quite surprising ways,” said Dillon. “There were lots of examples of scientists being more open to qualitative research methodologies because of valuing the knowledge that literature, even though it’s not ‘true’, gives you.”

The Novel Thoughts film series begins on 8 June with physicist Dr Paul Coxon sharing his childhood reading about the quirky adventures of a boy inventor in the novel SOS Bobomobile. New films will be released every Monday and Friday until 3 July and scientists worldwide are being encouraged to tweet their own inspirational book using #novelthoughts.

Look out for:

Professor Clare Bryant from the Department of Veterinary Medicine discussing Possession by AS Byatt on 12 June.

Karen Yu from the Department of Engineering discussing Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker by George Lucas on 15 June.

Professor Simon Redfern from the Department of Earth Sciences discussing Jamila by Chinghiz Aitmatov on 19 June.

Dr Juliet Foster from the Department of Psychology discussing The Madness of a Seduced Woman by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer on 22 June.

Guy Pearson from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research discussing Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy on 26 June.

Professor Carol Brayne, Director of the Cambridge Institute of Public Health, discussing Middlemarch by George Eliot on 29 June.

Dr Amy Milton from the Department of Psychology discussing Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Junior on 3 July.

The small army of metal detectorists who scour the countryside turn up thousands of Anglo-Saxon coins every year. But it's thanks to the work of ASNAC's Dr Rory Naismith and the late Dr Mark Blackburn that we have been able to translate these finds into a richer understanding of a period of history once referred to as the 'dark ages'.

Since the 1990s, Blackburn and later also Naismith have worked closely with metal detectorists and coin collectors. By sharing their scholarship as widely as possible through electronic databases, talks and exhibitions, they have transformed attitudes about the heritage value of early medieval coins.

As a result of their work, we have all benefited. By knowing more about the academic significance of their finds, metal detectorists now search more responsibly and record and report their finds more fully - and collectors pay more for coins with reliable find-provenance. All of which helps preserve our cultural heritage.

And this larger volume of well-recorded single finds has revolutionised academics' understanding of the Anglo-Saxon economy, helping, for example, to identify settlements or market places and revealing the years between 680-740 as a period of peak coin-use.

From threat to opportunity

Metal detectors are not new – the technology has been around for almost a century – but since the 1980s, metal detecting has become a hugely popular pastime. Driven by affordable technology and English law (which, unlike legislation in Scotland and continental Europe, allows people to search for finds provided they have the landowner's permission), metal detectorists are responsible for turning up the vast majority of Anglo-Saxon coins in England.

But this rise in popularity has been mirrored by growing concern among academics, particularly archaeologists, that important finds might go unrecorded and vital archaeological evidence could be lost. Early medieval coin specialists, however, view detectorists as an opportunity rather than a threat, a spirit of collaboration exemplified in ASNAC.

Anglo-Saxon art in the round

Relationship building between academia and the commercial world of coins has been central to Naismith and Blackburn's work. Blackburn's research led to the 'Coin Register', a list of early medieval coin finds published annually in the British Numismatic Journal since 1987.

And in 1997, with a grant from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy, he established the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds. This national online database of coin-finds from the period 410-1180 is the largest of its kind in the world. Today, it contains images and information on more than 10,000 single finds plus 50,000 coins in museum collections.

Through talks at conferences and to local societies, Naismith and Blackburn's work has reached a wide audience of coin collectors and metal detectorists. And thanks to the Fitzwilliam Museum's exhibition 'Anglo-Saxon Art in the Round', which in 2008 attracted 20,000 visitors before travelling throughout East Anglia, Cambridge scholarship on coins in the age of Bede, Beowulf and the Lindisfarne Gospels has engaged an even wider public.

As a theatre venue, two bright orange shipping containers rank among the more unusual and arresting. Kitted out as a state-of-the-art planning cell plus a strategy cell, these theatre spaces toured the UK in 2010 and 2011 as the stage for 3^rd Ring Out: Rehearsing the Future.

Developed by Cambridge theatre artist and academic Dr Zoë Svendsen of the Faculty of English, with artist and designer Simon Daw, 3^rd Ring Out invited audiences to rehearse how they might respond to a developing scenario of a climate-changed future.

In the emergency cell, 12 audience members became players in the drama, a simulation set in 2033. Seated around a map table, the action played out through a mix of immersive soundscape, live performance and video projected onto screens and the table itself.

Facing a series of events that could plausibly occur if communities do nothing to mitigate global warming, the audience – wearing headphones and pressing voting buttons – shaped the direction each performance took. Next door, the strategy cell provided a space to jointly imagine, discuss and create a future for their local area between now and 2033.

Cold War to climate change

Reflecting her practice as both an academic researcher and a theatre director, 3^rd Ring Out was not only compelling drama, but also research into the nature of rehearsal. This was a question Svendsen became interested in after coming across a series of Cold War exercises, during which 17,000 people would retreat to bunkers across the UK to practise for the ultimate disaster – nuclear war.

What, she wondered, might it mean to practise for disaster, and how might that relate to theatre? Instead of nuclear war, Svendsen decided to frame her work around climate change, offering both drama and a political edge.

Although 3^rd Ring Out was developed with input from climate change experts and planners, it provided no solutions. Instead, by pulling together large themes, it offered scripts for action and space for investigation.

Measuring the impact of a piece of theatre is not as easy. The play toured the UK – from the Norfolk and Norwich Festival in 2010 to the 2011 Edinburgh Festival via Cambridge, Ipswich, Newcastle and London, earning enthusiastic reviews and winning awards.

Making space for conversation

Even Svendsen, however, was unprepared for the impact 3^rd Ring Out had on its audience. Hungry, perhaps, for a public forum, they emerged with an astonishing desire for conversation about climate change.

Not surprisingly, the project was presented as an example of best practice in addressing climate change at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters 2013, an annual conference for theatre producers in New York. In 2015 it was selected for the Prague Quadrennial, and even though 3^rd Ring Out was last performed in 2011, it continues to attract attention from theatre directors interested in the potential of immersive performance.

In Cambridge, too, it has found applications across disciplines, from workshops for the MPhil in Public Policy to discussions with senior civil servants through the Centre for Science and Policy.

And what she learned from 3^rd Ring Out, Svendsen is now using to develop a new project, World Factory, addressing the UK's relationship with China through the lens of the global garment industry.

www.3rdringout.com

world-factory.co.uk

metisarts.co.uk

The announcement of the Booker Prize winner (this year on 13 October) is a significant event in the literary world. A panel of judges, headed by a respected literary critic, sifts a list of notable novels from the past year, ultimately crowning one of them Booker Prize winner. But cynics might suspect that the hoopla around the Booker Prize is as much (read: more) to do with publicity than it is to do with literary criticism.

Getting to put ‘Booker Prize Winner’ and, perhaps, a puff from the panel of judges on your dust-jacket is priceless. But can puffing – the practice of lauding a book’s merits in a few words, usually on its jacket blurb – be considered a kind of literary criticism, however cynically regarded it might be?

Initial signs are not encouraging. Even the definition of the ‘puff’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (which of course has its own puff: “the definitive record of the English language”) is implicitly disapproving. The puff is “inflated or unmerited praise or commendation”, “an extravagantly laudatory advertisement or review”, peddled by a “puff purveyor” or “puff merchant” or – surely worst of all – a “PUFF-MASTER GENERAL”. The puff itself doesn’t get good publicity.

As Nicholas Mason has shown in his insightful, informative book Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism (there’s a puff for free), when the term ‘puff’ first emerged around the beginning of the 18th century, it referred specifically to “publishers’ attempts to promote their books outside traditional forms of advertising”. As the scornful coinage “PUFF-MASTER GENERAL”, from the satirical 1779 play The Critick Anticipated, suggests, many have failed to be impressed by this way of attempting, well, to impress people.

One way to tarnish the credentials of a literary rival, therefore, is to suggest that his or her literary virtues have been puffed out of all proportion. In its 1848 issue the Western Literary Messenger acidly remarked of the writer, social campaigner, and friend of Edgar Allan Poe, George Lippard, that “the ‘career’ of Geo. Lippard, is an illustration of what well-directed and energetic puffing can do for an author. Without pretensions (or at least, nothing save pretensions) to either style or matter; laughed at by one half the world and pitied by the other; he contrives, by the aid of a few such publications as the Saturday Courier, Flag of Our Union, etc., to foist annually upon the public, some half-dozen volumes of the merest trash and twaddle that ever lumbered the shelves of ‘the Trade’”.

If Lippard is either laughed at or pitied by the whole world, it’s hard to imagine who actually buys and reads his books. In any case, Lippard was unlikely to have told his publicist to mine the Western Literary Messenger for a puff for one of his half-dozen books a year: “George Lippard’s latest book is ‘merest trash and twaddle’ (Western Literary Messenger).”

There are many more examples of scorn for the puff – and not just scorn, either, but the sense that it is genuinely damaging to literary culture. George Orwell, for instance, blamed the “disgusting tripe that is written by blurb-reviewers’ for the fact that ‘the novel is being shouted out of existence”. 

According to Orwell, being puffed up is not even all that agreeable to the puffee: “Nobody likes being told that he has written a palpitating tale of passion which will last as long as the English language; though, of course, it is disappointing not to be told that, because all novelists are being told the same, and to be left out presumably means that your books won't sell.” Orwell concludes: ‘The hack review is in fact a sort of commercial necessity, like the blurb on the dust-jacket, of which it is merely an extension.”

But perhaps it is possible to give a slightly more nuanced view of the practice of puffing – one that doesn’t necessarily see it as “tripe” or “drivel” (Orwell’s words). In the wonderfully titled Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil, his teeming mishmash of travel writings and reflections, Nathaniel Parker Willis ventured a tentative defence of partial (in both senses) praise for literary friends:

“As to literary puffs, we would as soon sell our tears for lemon-drops, as to defile one of God’s truthful adjectives with a price for using it. […] But if we love a man (as we do many, thank God, whom we are called upon to criticise), we pick out the gold that is inlaid in his book, and leave to his enemies to find the brass and tinsel. And if that’s not fair, we don’t very much care—for we scorn to be impartial.”

What Willis, like Orwell, spurns is the commercial aspect of puffing, rejecting the practice of payment for a puff. But Willis does imply that performing the function of critic in relation to the work of one’s friends is not only allowable, but a benefit to the reading public, since it may now see the gold inlaid in the work, discretely separated from the dross that might, in situ, surround it.

The OED’s definition of the ‘puff’ goes on to suggest, in fact, the emergence over time of a more neutral, less loaded understanding of this term. As well as being undeserved, hyperbolic praise, the puff is also simply “a review, comment, etc., regarded as constituting good publicity”. Nevertheless, there remains here a large and outstanding question. Are puffs in any way literary criticism or are they just PR? Much of the discussion around the practice of puffing concerns its impact on sales; whether they influence how a reader then reads the book she or he has bought, nobody seems much to care.

If we look at a couple of the puffs for this year’s Booker shortlist, we might be able to bring this question into focus. The claim of the unnamed reviewer in The Independent that Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread is simply “Glorious” doesn’t seem to get us very far into the realms of literary criticism. Eleanor Catton’s gnomic description of Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen as “awesome in the true sense of the word” is perhaps more critically promising: what is the true sense of ‘awesome’? why does this book in particular evoke that sense?

The answer to the question of whether the puff can be literary criticism depends, of course, on how we define literary criticism. If criticism is, as MH Abrams put it, “the overall term for studies concerned with defining, classifying, analysing, interpreting, and evaluating works of literature”, then puffs don’t qualify since they’re hardly “studies”. If, on the other hand, criticism is just “public communication on literature comprising both description and evaluation”, as Peter Uwe Hohendahl has claimed, then puffs certainly communicate, describe, and evaluate – and do so in public.

Finally deciding this question is no doubt too large a task for this short piece, but for all their implication in commercial imperatives and dubious circuits of mutual celebration, puffs are nevertheless little windows – often smeared and cracked, to be sure – onto the itself deeply imperfect terrain of literary criticism.

Ross Wilson is writing a book tentatively titled Critical Forms: Genres of Criticism from 1750 to the Present. It is about puffs, prefaces, letters, lectures, and all the other forms in which criticism has been written.

Inset images: Abbey Bookshop, Rue de la Parcheminerie (Martin Deutsch); Title page of The Critick Anticipated (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online).

Punctuation is fascinating to some … but a real turnoff to others. If you’re lukewarm about the distinction between dots and dashes, and the history of printers’ marks, then Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission (Cambridge University Press, 2015) might not immediately excite you. But do read on …

Ellipsisin English Literature looks at the history of the marks used to signify a pause or tailing off in speech. Its author, Dr Anne Toner, is not a grammarian in the conventional sense but an academic with a particular interest in how writers communicate with readers using the range of punctuation marks available to them.

Toner traces in scholarly, and often witty, detail the backstory of a contentious punctuation mark. Its origins lost in the vagaries of early manuscripts, and vilified as sloppy as it became common in printed books, the ellipsis was embraced by writers as diverse as Ben Jonson and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. Its champions have ranged from Laurence Sterne to the creators of the Superman comics.

Ellipsis, in its various forms, signifies silence – a lapse or pause or textual omission of some kind. Toner’s focus is on printed text and on authors carefully selected for their pioneering use of punctuation. The earliest ellipsis in Toner’s case studies occurs in an edition of Terence’s Andria, a play translated into English in 1588 by Maurice Kyffin. The ellipsis in Andria takes the form not of dots but a series of short dashes or hyphens (sometimes three, sometimes four), also known as breaks.

In Kyffin’s translation of Terence, the ellipsis is used to mark interruption. An ellipsis is a neat way of conveying to the actor a lapse into silence. But an absence of words usually signals a heightening of emotion or action. The ellipsis acts therefore as a form of stage direction. As such, it has proved to be a powerful and extremely useful dramatic resource. In speaking aloud, pausing is, after all, a vital aspect of the delivery of meaning: a slight hesitation speaks volumes. As Toner puts it: “not saying something often says it better.”

The ellipsis took off fast – proof, surely, of its usefulness. Kyffin’s 1588 Andria contains just three examples. In a translation of the same play in 1627, there were 29. They appear in Shakespeare’s plays and in great abundance in Jonson’s. In 1634 a schoolmaster called John Barton wrote in The Art of Rhetorick that “eclipsis” is much used in playbooks “where they are noted thus ---”. They could register the most significant dramatic events. In the first folio edition of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, to use Toner’s words, “Hotspur dies on a dash”, his last words cut short.

In early texts especially, it is not always easy to determine who exactly is responsible for marks of ellipsis, whether they originate with the author or in the printing house. The mark that was chosen would often have depended on what a printer had available. Dots also began to be used by the early 18th century for the same purposes, probably influenced by continental practice. It was only in the 19th century that the dot, dot, dot began to develop its own distinct connotations.

The ellipsis might have been useful and persistent, but not everyone approved of the incursions made by this little interloper. Some words, and some actions, are indescribable (better left to the imagination) or unprintable (too rude). For this last purpose, ellipsis marks became the tool of the censor. But authors can work censorship creatively for their own means. What can’t be said can be hinted at with an ellipsis and a well-placed ellipsis can itself convey something risqué, frisky or downright sordid.

But not only that, early on, different types of ellipsis were condemned as marks of lazy writing. The dash was slammed as over-casual and ill-disciplined – slapdash. In the 18th century, Jonathan Swift pointedly rhymed “dash” with “printed trash”, while Henry Fielding chose the name ‘Dash’ for the unlikeable grub-street writer in his play The Author’s Farce. Likewise in the 20th century, in an essay on punctuation marks, the philosopher Theodor Adorno associated series of dots with a commercialised form of writing. Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad used ellipsis points over 400 times in their relatively short novel The Inheritors, to mark unfinished sentences, as well as to create an atmosphere of the hazy, the vague and mysterious. The critics were savage. As recently as 1994, Umberto Eco decried the “ghastliness of these dots”.

The unorthodox nature of the ellipsis has posed problems for those who want language to be more governable by rules. In consequence, over the course of the 19th century, ellipsis marks began to be standardized in appearance and defined by usage. Lindley Murray’s extraordinarily successful English Grammar, first published in 1795, did much to promote the dash as a respectable mark of punctuation. Murray listed the mark alongside the primary marks of punctuation (following those heavy-weights, the period and colon), though continuing to warn against its improper use “by hasty and incoherent writers”.

Printers also preferred a uniform method of punctuating, not least to accommodate the rising rates of book production over the course of the 19th century. The creation of a printed text is a collaborative effort between writer, editor and publisher, printer and proof reader with the power of punctuation lying largely in the hands of the printing house. The journey that text makes from the author’s pen to the printed book in the reader’s hand makes it susceptible to multiple forces of intervention, particularly in matters of punctuation.

“Punctuation seems precariously exposed to non-authorial management in a way that word choices are not,” writes Toner. She continues: “Authors were encouraged to leave punctuation marks to printers because of their expertise in pointing [punctuating] or […] so that they could implement a house style […] Ellipsis points are especially vulnerable to alteration.”

Where manuscripts survive, we do have certainty about authorial intention and preference, though still complications can remain. Jane Austen, for example, made use of both dashes and series of dots when writing a number of her juvenile works which remained unpublished in her lifetime. In her printed novels, dots appear occasionally to signify incomplete sentences and interrupted dialogue. In spite of Austen's early employment of dots, it is hard to determine whether the few examples in her mature novels are hers.

Centuries before the first emoticons popped up on our screens, authors have responded to punctuation’s pictorial possibilities. Erasmus saw round brackets as crescent moons and named them lunulae. Asterisks are stars (visually and etymologically), and have been exploited as such, most notably in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in which the eponymous hero loses his way as he tries to follow those starry marks. In the 17th century, ellipses are often known as ‘eclipses’ (singular, ‘eclipsis’) – heralding a brief darkness. Journalist and broadcaster Lynne Truss sees them as black holes.

Nebulous in some contexts, the ellipsis is prescriptive in others. Theodor Adorno saw repeated dots as impressionistic, a typographical shorthand for “an infinitude of thoughts and associations” beyond the communicative powers of the hack journalist. Samuel Beckett employed those same dots in his drama as unnervingly precise instructions for delivery. One actor working with Beckett understood them as musical rests and records counting the number of dots in an ellipsis as beats in time.

Perhaps few people imagine, as Adorno did, the semi-colon as a drooping moustache. But punctuation, and how we see and use it, as always, is in flux. There are winners, there are losers. Semi-colons are, in many forms of writing, an endangered species. The apostrophe is on the wane. Increasingly, commas are used in place of full stops.

The upstart ellipsis, once so racy and suggestive, remains constricted. We avoid using dots and dashes in formal writing but in our haste to communicate the moods of our thoughts, we just can’t resist them. What next for those ghastly little dots? Watch this space …

Inset images: Terence, Andria, translated by Maurice Kyffin: London, 1588 (The British Library Board, C.13.a.6 sig. Iiiiir); Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, The Inheritors: an extravagant story: London, William Heinemann, 1901, p. 232 (Cambridge University Library).

Freedom. A word redolent with benevolence. We like the idea of being “free”. We are outraged at the thought of being “un-free”. It is often presented to us as a polarity: free expression, free choice and democracy, on the one hand – and repression, censorship and autocracy on the other. We are to guard the former from the latter.

But is that all? What is the “freedom” we are told about, think about and experience? What does it consist of? What uses do we put it to or – perhaps even more importantly – not put it to?

In the advanced capitalist polities of the West, we are repeatedly told that freedom is the defining value of our time, that it is a precious possession to preserve by almost any means, even a measure of un-freedom, say, in the form of increased surveillance or accelerated militarisation. As such, it is a word that is put to many dubious uses including, of course, the now familiar idea of “bringing” freedom and liberty to a “recalcitrant world”, as David Harvey puts it. He asks:

If we were able to mount that wondrous horse of freedom, where would we seek to ride it?

Where indeed?

Freedom ‘thingified’

Has “freedom” turned into one of those buzzwords honoured more in the invocation than in its exercise? A talismanic utterance commandeered for various agendas including offering a reinforcing platform to the rich and the powerful, even when some of those people are responsible for squashing free expression and academic freedom – and worse – in their own states?

“Free speech” – rather than being the nurturing and encouragement of real courage and the opening up of the imagination to new possibilities – is in danger of becoming one of the great banalities of our day, trotted out much more by the establishment for explaining its more degraded moves than a channel for producing meaningful dissent that could lead to material alternatives for the majority.

As something “thingified” – to borrow a word from Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism– freedom isn’t seen as a practice which requires constant, vigilant exercise on all our parts. It becomes, for example, something that must be transmitted through teaching from an already free West to the un-free zones of the world. Here’s US president, Barack Obama, addressing the British parliament about the “Arab Spring”:

What we are seeing in Tehran, in Tunis, in Tahrir Square, is a longing for the same freedoms that we take for granted here at home … That means investing in the future of those nations that transition to democracy, starting with Tunisia and Egypt – by deepening ties of trade and commerce; by helping them demonstrate that freedom brings prosperity.

Once again then, freedom carefully channelled through the checkout lane.

Gregarious tolerance

It’s often assumed that science and rationalism are “free” while religion and faith are not. Yet some of the most uncritical acquiescence to the regimes of our day comes from science and many scientists in their collaboration with the privatisation of knowledge by big corporations who determine what questions get asked and what gets funded.

More often than not, what must be opposed is not just the openly repressive or oppressive (that of course, must be done – and is done by people who show astounding courage in their daily lives under harsh conditions: Saudi bloggers, women seeking education in Afghanistan, Irom Sharmila on hunger strike for a decade against army atrocities in India). What we must all guard against is rather more subtle and creeping.

We may have to recognise that the greatest danger to our exercise of freedom is lapsing into habits of thought where we acquiesce – where it becomes easier to think of the way things are as the way things ought to be, or will always be.

Speaking of intellectuals who shy away from the task of speaking difficult truths, the late Edward Said deprecated what he called “a gregarious tolerance” for the way things are. This gregarious tolerance is rife in our society and more tragically, more inexcusably, in our universities and among our intellectuals where one of the biggest assaults on independent thinking – increasing tuition fees, bloated managerial salaries, greater corporate presence in research funding – is failing to provoke a collective resistance.

We need to guard against turning “freedom” into a weapon of smugness, cultural certainties to be wielded against apparently lesser cultures rather than a tool constantly sharpened through speaking truth about and against power. When freedom is seen as a “thing” – a value to be worshipped rather than as a practice – it atrophies into something that shores up power and the status quo ordained by it and as such becomes its opposite, an ossified, rather toothless idea.

Freedom as an idea and practice, of course, also has a very different history or histories when we think of struggles against power from below. That sense of freedom was perhaps best articulated by remarkable former slave and anti-slavery campaigner, Frederick Douglass, in his famous speech commemorating the West Indian emancipation. After noting that those “who would be free, themselves must strike the blow”, Douglass famously declared:

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.

Maintain the rage

There Is No Alternative– Margaret Thatcher’s beloved TINA – is now being carried forward through Cameron and Osborne’s austerity regimes. An unfree, repressive, autocratic and despotic idea if there was ever one, but using “freedom” as its logo, the claim there is no “alternative” immediately narrows down “freedom” to consumer choice and business transactions at the expense of all other rights.

Cameron, you’ll note, saw no irony in feting Xi Jinping, an unelected ruler from an autocratic regime, and spouting platitudes about human rights. China in many ways represents a capitalist wet dream: a constrained population offering up wage labour without meaningful rights but “free” to consume what they can afford.

Meanwhile as we’ve seen with the hysteria over the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, his once rather widely accepted ideas about social and economic justice are shrilly denounced as dangerous extremism which must be rooted out immediately – no free flourishing of alternatives there. Protest and anger? Bring out the demonising smears, the batons, the legislation, the water cannons.

How then to be free? Face them down. “Indignez vous”, as the French campaigner, Stephane Hessel, put it. Stay indignant. Protest, undermine, challenge and change. Douglass again, famously: “This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

This is an edited version of a talk delivered by the author at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Priyamvada Gopal, Lecturer, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

When we think of the First World War, we remember the many millions of men who died. But, as dangerous it was to be a soldier in the horror of the trenches, it was more dangerous to be a baby back at home. This parlous state of affairs was described by the Bishop of London at the launch of an initiative called Baby Week designed to improve infant survival rates: “100,000 babies died during the first twelve months from their birth… While nine soldiers died every hour in 1915 twelve babies died each hour.”

This bleak picture, and the urgent efforts made to redress it, is one backdrop toThe Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice a collection of essays edited by Cambridge academics Drs Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy. The book, which comes out in paperback on Armistice Day (11 November 2015) looks at the cultural and societal narrative of a Britain struggling to find itself in the wake of conflict. Part of this struggle was a national drive to increase the health of the nation and produce a generation raised on safe milk, housed in sanitary conditions and provided with a secure framework.

The book explores how selected writers, artists and composers sought to bear witness to the war and the disappointment of peace. It’s one of the few volumes to look comparatively at British, German and Austrian sources, reading Virginia Woolf alongside Arthur Schnitzler and Alfred Döblin, Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Krenek alongside Arthur Bliss, Elizabeth Bowen and Ford Madox Ford, and unpublished letters by both German and British soldiers. Contributors include Andrew Frayn, Alison Hennegan, Klaus Hofmann, Jane Potter, George Simmers, and Alexander Watson. Adrian Barlow discusses British and German war memorials.

Both Tate and Kennedy study the First World War but neither is a historian in the conventional sense. Tate is a specialist in the literature of conflict and Kennedy is a biographer with an interest in the relationship between words and music. The essays they bring together in Silent Morning look behind the practical measures taken to improve hygiene and housing to reveal the deeper cultural forces at work. Evident in art, literature and music, these ways of seeing the world shaped much more than government policies: they had a profound and enduring impact on people’s lives on both sides of the conflict.

The chapter in Silent Morning contributed by Tate is titled ‘King Baby’. It covers new ground in its analysis of underlying attitudes to child development and how these were shaped by the not-quite peace that unfolded when an Armistice was declared in November 1918. In her exploration of the literature of the period, Tate focuses first and foremost on babies. Her journey into the unconscious of the domestic sphere embraces the work of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Mansfield as well as the manuals that exerted strong influences on childcare practice.

Tate argues that, while many soldiers and civilians felt infantilised by war, babies were, in a sense, militarised. She reminds us that war traumatises – but also that peace, and the absence of the sound of guns, can be traumatic too. The uncertain and sullied cease of conflict that followed was described by the poet Eleanor Farjeon in chilling terms:

I am awful as my brother War,
I am the sudden silence after clamour.
I am the face that shows the seamy scar
When blood has lost its frenzy and its glamour.

When Woolf too describes the disappointment of peace, she turns to childhood as her point of reference. The build-up to Armistice is like the excitement of a birthday. Inevitably, the day itself disappoints yet the charade that everything’s lovely has to be maintained. “So on a birthday,” she writes, “when for some reason things have gone wrong, it was a point of honour in the nursery to pretend. Years later one could confess what a horrid fraud it seemed.”

Rather than returning as heroes, many men who came back from the First World War were broken and stripped of individual agency. Some were empty and angry; some could be violent. Many of those who went to war never came back. Bowen’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ describes a young widow, Mrs Dickinson, containing her grief for her dead husband Toppy beneath a mask of elegance and poise. The Dickinsons’ seven-year-old son, Frederick, who had been just a baby when his father died, cries and cries. His mother is embarrassed by this “great blubbering boy” who is “too big to cry”.

Perhaps poor Frederick had been raised according to the method set out by Truby King, a pioneer in modern parenting. Enthusiastically embraced in the wake of the First World War, King’s views made a perfect partner for the nationwide programmes (such as Baby Week) aimed at raising standards of hygiene and nutrition.

King recommended a strict, and largely loveless, schedule. An extraordinary man, whose career took in dairy farming and the cultivation of roses, King was also superintendent of a lunatic asylum. He observed that calves thrived when they were fed regularly. Babies, believed King, should be fed every four hours (not at night) with sleep in between. Even their bowel movements should be regulated. Over-stimulation (too much play and excitement) was to be avoided; physical contact was spoiling.

When the guns went silent, and a semblance of normality crept into the lives of those who had survived the war, a gaping absence asserted itself. “Babies born after the Armistice come into what seems like a formless, unpredictable world,” writes Tate. “In the many families which take up the Truby King method, babies’ tiny lives are vigorously regulated, thus providing a comforting structure – a ‘container’ which at least makes the adults feel more secure.”

A caption below a photo of two bonny girls in King’s book The Expectant Mother and Baby’s First Month reads: “A doctor’s children. Healthy, hardy, happy little girls, aged two and nearly four years. Good jaws and sound teeth. Nursed four-hourly from birth – never more than five times in twenty-four hours; plenty of fresh air and exercise – never any coddling.”

By mechanising babies, and raising them in a sterile environment, parents perhaps tried to make the world secure for themselves. King’s literature on the best way to bring up baby was devoured by many of the professionals seeking to improve the nation’s health. His methods were ‘scientific’. A new generation of maternity nurses was trained in the ‘Truby King method’. The Plunket nurses (named after King’s patrons Lord and Lady Plunket) helped mothers to breastfeed and guided them through their babies’ early development. Plunket nurses adhered to routine; they wouldn’t ‘give in’ to a crying child.

Tate shows how Mansfield captures the cruel effects of this detached style of parenting in her short story ‘Bliss’.  Bertha is a middle class mother who employs a full-time nanny. Her husband boasts of his lack of interest in his child. “Don’t ask me about my baby. I never see her.” When Bertha visits her daughter one evening, the child is delighted while nanny experiences the unscheduled visit as a disruption to a regime that must be maintained at all costs. Bertha suddenly realises that the situation is tragic for both for herself and her child.

The focus of Mansfield’s story is not Bertha’s marriage but her relationship with her daughter. “Many of her [Mansfield’s] stories of modern life are miniature tragedies, rooted, in many cases, in the unwitting neglect of children,” Tate writes. For Truby King, children had no point of view: a regulated regime was best for them, regardless of how much they screamed with hunger. King’s inflexible routine for baby-rearing imposed military discipline on the messy chaos that is small babies.

King did face criticism from contemporaries – among those who argued against him was Dr GD Laing who experienced the pitiful cries of little ones being ignored until the allotted hour for feeding. Research by psychoanalysts John Bowlby, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion later showed that King’s system, though it succeeded with some babies, was disastrous for many. The infants who, desperately hungry or hurting, screamed themselves into silence may well have been traumatised – and early trauma has been linked to depression.

Those who suffer terribly in war seldom speak of their experiences as there are no words to describe it. They pass on their distress in other ways. In her memoir Alfred and Emily (2008), the novelist Doris Lessing (born in 1919) revisited her childhood. Her father lost a leg fighting in the First World War; her mother was a nurse looking after the war-wounded. “Do children feel their parents’ emotions,” Lessing wonders. “Yes, they do… The Great War… squatted over my childhood. And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.”

The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice is published by Manchester University Press.

Inset images: newspaper advert for Nestle; images from Mothercraft by Truby King's daughter, Mary; newspaper advert for Cow & Gate.

The fearsome dragon is dead, its body contorted and mouth hanging open. Above it, a triumphant St George sits astride a splendid horse. He wears full armour, his legs thrust forward, spurs glinting and lance held high. Atop his helmet, impossibly elaborate plumes and feathers cascade upwards and outwards. In the background, a city perches on a mountain top, silhouetted against a glowering sky.

This opulent image, worked in black and gold on a blue background, is one of the earliest European examples of colour printing used in fine art. It was created in 1507 by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) at the request of his patron, Friedrich III, Elector of Saxony.  Artisans working for Cranach, whose initials are worked into the design, used two wood blocks (black and gold) to print his masterful design of a horse and rider on to paper pre-painted with indigo. The medieval imagery contrasts with the strikingly modern Renaissance technology.

Cranach’s print is one of 31 German Renaissance woodcuts and a single drawing currently on display at the British Museum in an exhibition of early colour printing. All come from the British Museum’s collection but few have been shown to the public before. Together, they chart the ways in which advances in early print technology opened up new avenues for artists in creating a sense of movement, depth and opulence not possible in black and white.

The exhibition German Renaissance Colour Woodcuts has been curated by Dr Elizabeth Savage (Faculty of English and Department of History of Art). Her pioneering research into archival collections in Germany and the UK, combined with her detailed grasp of the medium of woodblock printing, challenges accepted thinking about the use of colour in woodcuts, a craft-based technology associated almost exclusively with black-and-white or monochrome images.

When colour does appear in early woodcuts (for example St Dorothea and the Christ-Child, c.1450-1500) it has generally been applied by hand as a secondary process, often as a wash to draw attention to a significant aspect of the design. Given the considerable technical difficulties of colour printing using wood blocks, it was long assumed that colour printing did not develop on any significant scale until 1700, when Jakob Christoff Le Blon (1667-1741) invented a way to print all natural colours using only blue, red, yellow and black. His method became our CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow, ‘key’ (black), following his order. Scholars thus assumed that early colour prints were extremely rare and judged them to be unrepresentative ‘outliers’.

Close analysis of colour images by Savage now reveals that, throughout the 1500s, thousands (and perhaps tens of thousands) of colour prints were in circulation in European countries. Furthermore, the range of colour woodblock prints in production varied from costly images, commissioned and collected by wealthy patrons, to more affordable ‘mass-produced’ prints designed to decorate the surfaces of furniture and the interiors of homes whose owners hankered after the latest styles of intarsia and marquetry – effects created by laborious and highly skilled inlay techniques.

One reason why so many colour prints have hidden in plain sight is that colour can be mistaken for paint. When the surfaces of prints are examined by an expert eye a different story may emerge. For instance, the pressure of the press often leaves tell-tale marks like indenting the design into the paper, forcing ‘ink squash’ into a raised outline, even giving the paper an almost sculptural relief. Savage collaborated with Gwen Riley Jones, a specialist in imaging gold at the University of Manchester, to document the surface texture of the portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1519) by Hans Weiditz (c.1500–c.1536). It can now be identified as the sixth image printed with gold in early modern Europe.

The development of colour printing may have been technology-led, emerging from the workshops in the German cities of Augsburg and Strasbourg, among others, where competitive, innovative printers developed new ways to make their books stand out. But, in order to flourish, these advances required the backing of rich and powerful individuals whose status was closely tied to the conspicuous (and competitive) consumption of the latest in luxury goods, from textiles to prints.

“The British Museum holds one of the world’s largest collections of colour prints, including unique examples from late medieval and early modern Germany. Early printers vied with each other to achieve stunning colouristic effects – 500 years before the advent of Photoshop,” says Savage. “We think of prints as being exactly repeatable black outlines on white paper, but some survive in many as 30 very different palettes. Their printers developed inks in royal blues, baby pinks, dusky oranges, lush greens, rich burgundies to create endless variety and unprecedented three-dimensional effects.”

Three prints, displayed side by side, illustrate how rivalry between members of the ruling elite stimulated important developments in colour printing. When in 1507 Friedrich III in Wittenberg sent images by Cranach of “knights printed from gold and silver” to his friend and competitor collector, the imperial advisor Konrad Peutinger in Augsburg,  he created a friendly contest between two major artistic centres with artists and artisans stretching their skills to the limit in the quest for the most impressive image.

In response to the receipt of Cranach’s St George, Peutinger sent Friedrich a pair of larger colour woodcuts of St George and Maximillian I on horseback designed by Hans Burgkmair the Elder (1473–1531). With these woodcuts, Peutinger demonstrated that his Augsburg artists and craftsmen were able to outdo Frederick’s ostentatious effort. “Friedrich and Peutinger’s glittering exchange jump-started colour printing on a scale that we are only now beginning to appreciate,” said Savage. “It’s mind-boggling that one of Peutinger’s technicians corresponded directly with the Holy Roman Emperor about colour printing. Like Cranach’s nearly 24-karat gold printing ink on flimsy paper, it suggests the incredible value of these vivid breakthroughs.”

That extraordinary, short-lived, pre-Reformation heyday is thought to be the whole story, but Savage’s research recasts it as a short chapter. Dozens of colour impressions of German prints were known, by just a few artists, from the 1510s. This exhibition hints at the thousands of colour prints, circulating in perhaps tens of thousands of impressions, which were made and used across Germany. Rather than dying out before the Reformation, later European adaptions attest that the craft knowledge and market demand survived for generations and even spread abroad.

All prints are team efforts, with the artist normally considered the main producer. In the exhibition curated by Savage, the printer is the star player. Two colour impressions by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and one by Hans Holbein (c.1497–1543) are on display, but neither ever designed a colour print. Instead, printers commissioned others to design and cut tone blocks to accompany the great masters’ ‘normal’ woodcuts. As a woodcut, Dürer’s portrait of Ulrich Varnbüler (1522) is a 16th-century German masterpiece; as a colour print, it’s a triumph of 17th-century Dutch marketing.

The exhibition’s focus on printers, not artists, expands an apparently small and sporadic fine art movement into an ever-growing wave. Savage said: “People prayed with them, collected them, learned from them, decorated with them, upgraded cheap wooden furniture with them. Few were as stunning as Cranach’s golden, saintly knight, which is precisely the point. We’ve forgotten that colour woodcuts were normal, not exceptional, in the ‘golden age’ of print.”

German Renaissance Colour Woodcuts is on display in Room 90 on the fourth floor of the British Museum until Wednesday, 27 January 2016.

Inset images: Anonymous (German), St Dorothy of Caesarea and the Christ-child in an Apple Tree, c.1450-1500, British Museum 1895,0122.18, presented by William Mitchell © The Trustees of the British Museum and courtesy of the Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care, University of Manchester; Attr. Hans Weiditz, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, 1519, British Museum 1862,0208.55 © The Trustees of the British Museum and courtesy of the Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care, University of Manchester; left: Albrecht Dürer, Ulrich Varnbüler, 1522, British Museum 1895,0122.739, presented by William Mitchell, centre and right: later editions printed with new tone blocks by Willem Jansz. Blaeu, c.1620, British Museum 1857,0613.345 and 1857,0613.345, © The Trustees of the British Museum.

When BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour used the topic ‘purity’ as a talking point for a late night discussion, the themes that emerged ranged from sex to food to spirituality. The common denominator was the female body and the ways in which women feel, and are judged, as pure and impure. For most of the contributors, purity was perceived as a state experienced on a personal basis – through control and denial – often at great cost to themselves.  

In her introduction, the presenter Lauren Laverne equated chastity (“a word you don’t hear bandied about much these days”) with celibacy and she wasn’t challenged by her guests. And why would she be? Chastity has come to mean abstinence from sex and is often used synonymously with virginity. However, for members of the world’s religions chastity has a much wider meaning that is lost in the language of secular Britain. Four centuries ago the opposite was true: chastity was one of the most important virtues, not just for individuals but for the public discourses through which the period’s greatest political controversies played out.

In her book Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture, Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson (Faculty of English) describes how chastity became a cult that was as much embodied by the ceremonies and performances of the court as it was espoused by the anti-court Puritan writers working in the new world of popular print. Lander Johnson writes that chastity, as an important Christian virtue, was “one of the key conceptual frameworks through which individual men and women understood their relationship to their own bodies, to their community, to the wider Christian world and to God”. But “the same virtue that could protect the body from infection and a marriage from dissolution could eventually help to topple a government and undo a King”.

Chastity played a powerful role in both national affairs and international relations. Elizabeth I was famously the Virgin Queen of the Protestant country created by her father Henry VIII. Her unsullied state was much more than simply personal. It offered her subjects a vision of the nation itself as both impenetrable against outside invasion and purified of the ‘popery’ of Catholicism. The Protestantism of the Church of England was chaste and pure; in the vitriol of religious schisms, the Roman church was “the whore of Babylon”.

The Virgin Queen’s Stuart successors were on shakier ground. Charles I married Henrietta Maria of France, a devoutly Catholic princess who had spent her childhood in a convent and was dedicated to her mission of re-Catholicising England. She arrived in her adopted country not only with a fabulous trousseau of worldly goods, but also an entourage of friars and firm ideas about devotion and decorum. Although fiercely loyal to her husband and supportive of his power as monarch, she did not recognise his status as head of the English Church.

For England’s Catholics, living mostly in obscurity and practicing their faith illegally, Henrietta Maria became the unofficial leader of the Catholic Church in England. While the King and Queen lived harmoniously together for over two decades, the religious tensions that had only barely been kept in check since the establishment of the Protestant Church began to erupt around them. At the heart of these tensions was a debate over which of the country’s religious and political factions could lay the greatest claim to the virtue of chastity.

“Importantly, chastity was not the same as virginity,” writes Lander Johnson. “Virginity was an anatomical state that preceded sexual activity; chastity was a state, both spiritual and psychological, that could be observed through all stages of a person’s adult life.”  Sanctified by God, marriage and sexual relations between man and wife could be chaste – as could childbirth. By implication, a ‘chaste’ relationship produced a healthy child. By the same token, an ‘unchaste’ union created a monster. When the child in question was born of a royal marriage that was surrounded by accusations of religious ‘unchastity’, the outcome could have far-reaching effects.

The royal household was under intense scrutiny as religious factions tussled for ascendancy. When Charles and Henrietta Maria’s first child died at birth, suspicions about the chastity of their marriage as an inter-religious union grew. The remarkably resilient Queen went on to give birth to a further eight children, seven of whom survived.

This fecundity was celebrated in court masques and portraits. The central message of the court’s various spectacles and ceremonies was that the chastity of the royal marriage, and of the nation, was sanctified and maintained by the Queen’s prodigious fertility. For this reason, Lander Johnson argues, the Queen’s birthing ceremonies need to be considered as important events among the many forms of art, writing, and performance generated in the 1630s.

Each delivery was an elaborate performance, carefully orchestrated to draw down the greatest blessings from God, to ensure the most fortuitous outcome, and to communicate Henrietta Maria’s piety, purity and queenly authority. The Queen’s many births also became platforms for debates over the relative chastity of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Who was allowed to attend the Queen in these important and dangerous moments? Who would most safely deliver the future head of the nation and Church?

The Queen’s unsuccessful first birth was mourned across the country, and at the English and French courts. It had been attended by Chamberlen, Physician to the King, a figure viewed with suspicion by the Queen, her French cohort and her family at home in France. Chamberlen was not only Protestant but a man (something the French, with their excellent reputation for female scholar-midwives, thought particularly unchaste). But Chamberlen was also a maverick whose secret instruments (eventually revealed to be an early form of forceps) were increasingly thought to do as much damage as good to mothers and babies.

In her grief over her first child, Henrietta Maria took charge of her subsequent births, employing a French midwife and surrounding herself with nuns, Catholic nurses, pictures of the Virgin Mary and all the comforts of Catholic devotion: incense, music and gestural prayer. The second birth was a success, producing an heir both healthy and male: the future Charles II.

The Queen marked each of her births with elaborate court masques that celebrated her chastity, fertility and spirituality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Queen’s religious convictions and devotional tastes became increasingly popular in and around the court. In response, the pro-Parliamentary plain-religionists who eventually deposed the King worked harder than ever to claim the virtue of chastity for their cause and to accuse the Queen of infecting the King and the Throne with her unchaste religious practices. In a new world of public debate, dissenters made full use of mass print technology to rapidly disseminate their fiery sermons and commonwealth political theory.

Throughout the 1630s the court’s claims to chastity, primarily through the prodigiously fertile body of the Queen and her elaborate masques, were highly successful. But the young John Milton was preparing to enter the debate with his own masque of chastity. Milton’s skilful recoding of the virtue as Protestant spiritual adventure bolstered the moral strength of pro-Parliamentary arguments. Within a decade the King, Queen and their many children were dead or in hiding and the court’s depiction of chastity as familial, fertile, and spectacular was replaced with a version of chastity more at home in the written word, more masculine, and more martial: a steely and inviolate virtue fit for revolution.

Lander Johnson has written her first book in order to look in depth at chastity as a theme running through the life of the royal court, and the circles of power around it, in the first half of the 17th century – as seen through the literature of William Shakespeare, John Milton and a number of lesser known poets and playwrights, including John Ford. It is a scholarly book, aimed at an academic readership, but it touches on universal human preoccupations – how we see ourselves, how we want to be seen, how we curate our own image through private and public performance.  

“I was motivated to explore constructions of chastity, and manifestations of the virtue in literature, by a desire to recover a moral code that is rapidly disappearing from current cultural awareness but which was of the greatest importance to our predecessors and a primary consideration in our revolutionary history,” says Lander Johnson.

“I’m interested in the ways a society’s beliefs, in all times and places, can shape those words and images that have the power to sway public opinion so decisively. Today we are interested in tolerance and equality. Even if we don’t practice these modern virtues as much as we like to think we do, they have the power to grant moral strength to any public speech, debate, or Facebook post.”

Chastity in Early Stuart Literature by Bonnie Lander Johnson is published by Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/literature/renaissance-and...

How’s this for a measure of the pace of the tech revolution? Twenty years ago, you would have read this article only on paper; now it is also available on your tablet, smartphone or computer. The impact of digital media has become so pervasive that even remarking upon it feels trite. Where predictions that printed books and newspapers are dying once seemed far-fetched, the future now seems less certain.

If we do become a paperless society, we will be terminating a relationship with one of the most successful technologies of all time; one that has endured for 700 years in England, and much longer elsewhere. Our reliance on paper runs so deep that it seems strange to think of it as technology at all. Yet to a person living in 14th-century England, paper would have been an advanced new material. Most writing was on parchment (made from animal skin), and an alternative made of pulped rags represented a truly disruptive innovation.

“Paper was economical – not in the sense that it was cheap, but because it was lighter, more portable and enabled you to write more,” explains Dr Orietta Da Rold from the Faculty of English and St John's College. “Its arrival had a huge impact. People could share ideas in a way that hadn’t happened before. Paper became a pivotal technology for a subsequent explosion in the transmission of knowledge.”

Da Rold is leading a project called Mapping Paper in Medieval England, the pilot phase of which was carried out last year. The aim is to understand how and why paper was adopted in England and eventually became a dominant technology – more so even than electronic media have today.

Its historical importance goes beyond paper’s significance as a device for dissemination. Paper, Da Rold suggests, helped to precipitate the spread of literacy and literature. It could be used to teach and practice reading and writing, and it enabled the emergence of a reading public that consumed and shared the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, among others.

It is also a history that has never been fully explored. We know that England was slow to adopt paper, because paper-based manuscripts started to appear in archives only from about 1300 onwards, later than on the continent. How and why this happened, however, has never been properly studied.

In 2015, thanks to a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant, Da Rold and her team spent eight months trawling archives up and down the country in search of paper manuscripts written or based in England between the years 1300 and 1475, when William Caxton set up his first printing press. They found 5,841 manuscripts, of which 736 were paper.

“That’s not the final number because some records don’t state whether a manuscript is paper or not,” Da Rold says. The information has, however, been enough to set up an electronic database – the most comprehensive of its kind – with ambitions to crowd-source more data in the future.

Working out how the use of paper spread across England means establishing where each of these manuscripts was based, which is easier said than done because both manuscripts and scribes moved. In some cases, the dialect used in the text suggests a possible point of origin, while other documents can be specifically ‘localised’, usually because they contain a direct reference to their source.

Da Rold has tentatively begun to plot this information onto a map of England. Refining it will be part of the project’s next phase. Each sheet within a manuscript also bears a watermark – an emblem, such as an animal or a star. Tracking this watermark gives some clues as to where the paper was made, where it was used and the wider network of use.

Tentative patterns are already emerging. Some centres in the East of England, like Lincoln and Norwich, appear to have held significant stocks of paper that gradually spread westwards. “There are capillaries that go out across the country, but they don’t go everywhere,” Da Rold says.

Why this happened will be covered in a forthcoming book: From Pulp to Fiction.

Da Rold has two main theories about why paper first came into use, both of which have much wider implications for understanding how any technology succeeds. First, it appears to have undergone a phase of cultural acceptance. This did not necessarily involve people using paper to write – it was just as common in late medieval England to use it to wrap up spices or jam – but the process established paper within the culture.

Second, paper was actively championed by specific groups of people who found it useful: lawyers, merchants, secretaries and anyone who needed to record financial transactions. Paper was easier for them to use than parchment. “It became convenient because people living at the time decided that it met their needs,” Da Rold says.

Why England adopted paper so late remains unclear, but paper is thought to have emerged from China, then gradually spread westwards. England’s position at the end of this paper trail meant that it took longer for the technology to arrive, and the medieval equivalent of a tech cluster to support its development and use may also have been lacking.

Certainly, after the first attempt at establishing an English paper mill, near Hertford, failed in 1507, paper was not produced domestically until the 17th century. This contrasts with, for example, Italy, where major centres like Fabriano emerged. These paper mills, however, drew on a network of supporting industries that helped to refine the production process. It may be that these vital clusters of ideas and expertise were what appeared faster overseas than in England, thereby determining the rate at which paper was adopted and diffused.

Importantly, the paper revolution failed to end the use of parchment overnight. Indeed, there seems to have been a prolonged period of hybridisation during which time those who wrote used paper and parchment (which had different and complementary properties) side by side.

This, Da Rold suggests, has implications not just for establishing how England became a paper-based culture, but also for understanding any process of technological acquisition. It also hints that paper should not, perhaps, be written off just yet.

“The human mind is constantly preoccupied with what is new, and at the same time instinctively conservative,” she reflects. “History such as this shows that at moments of transition the most successful people are those who work with all technologies, and get the most out of everything. There is coexistence as well as friction, and sometimes there is no winner. That may explain why even though we now have iPads we are still taking notes and writing on paper.”

Inset image: A dragon-shaped watermark can be seen on the fold between the sheets of this medieval manuscript, giving clues about where the paper was made and used (credit: Cambridge University Library).

In 1857 the explorer Captain Richard Francis Burton set out from the East African coast to find the source of the Nile.  As his expedition struggled through unmapped bush, men and horses died from starvation and disease – or perished in raids from tribes whose land they crossed. Often hysterical from fever and fear, Burton reduced the baggage carried to ammunition, medicine and materials to trade with locals. But he clung to a few volumes of reading matter. He wrote later: “The few books – Shakespeare, Euclid – which composed my scanty library, we read together again and again.”

Burton wasn’t the only westerner to take a volume of Shakespeare into Africa. Others who did so included the legendary Henry Stanley, John Speke and Thomas Parke. In 1886 the aristocratic Walter Montague Kerr protested at the meagreness of the baggage accompanying him to the lakes of central Africa compared with that of “some expeditions to the dark interior of the continent” but added that he found space for “a small edition of Shakespeare, a Nautical Almanac, logarithmic tables, and Proctor’s Star Atlas”.

In the year that celebrates 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, Dr Edward Wilson-Lee (Faculty of English) takes us thousands of miles south of the poet and playwright’s very English birthplace. In Shakespeare in Swahililand, Wilson-Lee revisits the land of his own childhood to discover, on foot and by train and tuktuk, the often surprising ways in which Shakespeare is woven into the shifting cultures of East Africa.

While Victorian explorers took the complete works as a weighty talisman of civilisation, Wilson-Lee travels lightly.  With his own volume of Shakespeare in an old leather shooting bag, he flits between libraries, archives and institutes in a world of 100 million Swahili speakers. Along the way he meets a colourful cast of characters: painters, actors, soldiers, a teenage prostitute, intellectuals, readers, thinkers.

The earliest performance of a Shakespeare play in Africa is said to have taken place aboard a sailing ship during the playwright’s own life time. An article published early in the 19th century, reportedly based on a captain’s dairy, claims that the crew of the Dragon, a vessel sent in search of spices by the India Company, performed two Shakespeare plays in September 1607. While the ship was anchored north-west of Madagascar, its crew performed the ‘TRAGEDY OF HAMLET’.  

Supporting evidence for these early stagings is fragile. But, though fanciful, these reports do suggest an early and uncanny link between Shakespeare and East Africa. For hard facts, however, we jump to 1867 when the English missionary Edward Steere printed Swahili translations of four of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Written in 1807, these tales were abridged, and widely popular, versions of the plays written to help young audiences grasp some of the more complex twists and turns.

Strange and wonderful things happen when Shakespeare crosses continents. Titles are misspelt (The Merchant of Venus); plots are subverted to suit political agendas; and sometimes the players don’t realise they are performing Shakespeare at all.  Wilson-Lee applauds this fluidity with glee: it echoes Shakespeare’s own pilfering of character and storyline. “Shakespeare himself showed no hesitation in borrowing from foreign cultures,” he writes, “and he based many of his own works on stories derived from the Italians and French as well as from classical Latin and Greek culture.”

Educated in mission schools, where the study of English literature stood at the centre of the syllabus, the East African leaders who sparked the region’s independence movements had an easy familiarity with Shakespeare. According to his daughter, Jomo Kenyatta, father of modern Kenya, counted his volumes of Shakespeare among his favourite books and often recited from them. In 1948 Appollo Milton Obote, later to become Uganda’s first president, played the title role in Julius Caesar in a performance at Makerere University in Kampala.

The Indian diaspora was just as deeply touched by Shakespeare. Such was the fervour with which Shakespeare was embraced by the immigrant community, who were at the turn of the 20th century building the East African railways, and much more, that between in the 18 months from February 1915, there were no fewer than 15 Hindustani productions of Shakespeare plays in Kenya – more than in London’s West End during the same period.

When independence from colonialism came, enthusiasm for Shakespeare did not wane. As caretaker and then President of Tanganyika (Tanzania), Julius Nyerere spent his days forming a new nation and his evenings working on a translation of Julius Caesar. The puzzle of Nyerere’s choice of play lies, Wilson-Lee suggests, lies in its concern with the consequences of past upheavals, something Nyerere knew all about. He is quoted from an interview: “When hunting there is no problem… Problems start when the animal had died, that’s when the fighting starts.”

Criss-crossing East Africa, Wilson-Lee is often frustrated in his quest for material evidence of a once-thriving tradition of Shakespearean theatre. Of burgeoning colonial Mombasa, he writes: “As is so often the case, in the rush to record what seemed important at the time, much of what must have given the fledgling city its flavour was simply treated as unimportant and ephemeral, leaving future ages with a somewhat sterile version of the lives lived by these early settlers.”

With his own boyhood, “in a jumble of places filled with things from elsewhere”, Wilson-Lee has no such problem. And it’s his experience as a child growing up in Kenya, some two decades after its independence, that makes Shakespeare in Swahililand so compelling. Born to conservationist parents, he was brought up in the Nairobi suburb of Karen, a place that takes its name from Karen Blixen, author of best-selling Out of Africa. She was a huge fan of Shakespeare.

At home in Karen during the school holidays, Wilson-Lee unlocks the door to a dusty storeroom. Inside is a mishmash of belongings left by previous occupants of the house: zebra skins, animal skulls, tribal shields and masks, crested brass buttons long separated from their uniforms, and bell pulls that would once have summoned servants. He delights in this invitation to the world of make-believe. Only later, as an adult and a scholar, is he able to understand just how charged with meaning these items are.

Wilson-Lee’s book is more than travelogue-cum-memoir. Unique in its subject matter, and the way it blends history, politics and literature, his writing is rooted in Shakespearean scholarship.  With his guidance, we see the African experiences of colonialism and independence – the relationship, for example, between master and servant, the lettered and unlettered – through Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. These universal themes of power and inheritance, love and loss, clashes between old worlds and new, are, after all, what make Shakespeare resonate on a world stage.

Shakespeare in Swahililand is imbued with a sense of time running out. It is Wilson-Lee’s mission to capture, before it is too late, the vestiges of an era in which Shakespeare was performed by pupils in East Africa’s elite fee-paying schools, by students in the gleaming new university of Makerere in Uganda, and by Indian railway workers in corrugated iron sheds. Wilson-Lee argues, however, that this sense of the elusive, of knowledge just beyond our grasp, is central to the power of Shakespeare’s own poetic explorations.

Shakespeare in Swahiland by Edward Wilson-Lee is published by William Collins (2016)

On 7 January 1628, a fleet of ships weighed anchor off the coast of Kent and set sail for the Mediterranean. As fleets go, this one was small. It comprised just two vessels – the Eagle and the Elizabeth and George– fitted out for war. Aboard were around 250 men, overseen by carefully selected mariners, and some 200 barrels of gunpowder imported from Amsterdam. The mission of crew and captains was simple: to vanquish England’s enemies and return laden with prizes.

In command of the two vessels was 24-year-old Kenelm Digby, a man whose naval experience was slight. His seafaring was confined to being a passenger but Digby was a believer in the power of books, and he had just the right volume in his pocket. From a stall in London’s St Pauls’ churchyard, he had purchased John Smith’s A Sea-Grammar. If nothing else, it provided a guide to the wonderful terminology of seafaring with its belays, bonits and Drablers – and Digby was a fast learner.

Digby was a man of many parts: he was a privateer (or state-sponsored pirate), compiler of recipes, assimilator of foreign tongues (“a great student of the Arabicke language”), collector of objects (antiquities of every kind), thinker and doer. In his extensive writing, and experiments in kitchens and laboratories, he embraced philosophy and alchemy, science and magic, food and flavours.

On his death aged 62 in 1665, Digby left behind a library of several thousand books, countless letters and journals, and a fictionalised account of his adventures in elaborately flowery style. On the Greek island of Milos, scribbling furiously and barely eating for a week, he wrote Loose Fantasies, recasting himself as a romance hero in the shape of Theagenes, a character lifted from classical literature.

Drawing these sources together, Joe Moshenka (Faculty of English) has produced a masterful narrative – a blend of biography, history and imaginative reconstruction – that focuses in gripping detail on Digby’s foray into the cultural melting pot of the Mediterranean world. A Stain in the Blood: the Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digbyis the first book to dig deep into the story of an adventurer who, quintessentially English yet endlessly curious, personifies an era when seafaring was opening up routes into boundless possibilities and exotic goods of every shape and form.   

Sailing south in January 1628, Digby left behind a beloved wife and two sons, the youngest just a few weeks old. He was a man on the make. Despite being well-connected and highly educated, he had a black mark against his name. His father, Everard Digby, had been hung for treason against the crown. Revealed to be a co-conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot, Everard was subjected to the most grisly of executions. In front of approving crowds, his heart was ripped out and his genitals sliced off.

Everard Digby maintained his dignity right up to the moment he lost consciousness. He professed that he “deserved the vilest death” and made an impassioned plea that wife and sons not be punished for his crime. Everard’s fortitude became legendary but his family lived with a sense of disgrace. The blood stain in the title of Moshenska’s book is a reference to a wound cut deep into a man with an extraordinary thirst for knowledge and experiences.

Seventeenth century England was layered in complexity. Raised as a gentleman and a Roman Catholic in a country that had officially broken its ties with Rome, Kenelm Digby learned early on to tread a delicate line between faith, politics and expediency. As a practising Catholic student at Oxford, he was unable to “weare a gowne” (matriculate) and each November endured the bonfire celebrations that reminded him of his father’s death. But Digby had friends in high places and the means to travel.

Trips to Europe, the first when he was aged just 14, helped Digby to develop the worldly ease and diplomatic skills so vital to him later in life. In Italy, his nimble mind won admiration in philosophical debates. In France, his handsomeness gained the (embarrassing) attention from the older and powerful Queen Regent. Visiting Spain, he socialised with the future Charles I – and became dangerously entangled in negotiations for a royal marriage bringing two disparate nations together.

The single voyage that allowed Digby to establish himself as a loyal subject was almost derailed by those who sought to discredit him as papist. The 1620s saw England engaged in an expensive war with its Roman Catholic neighbours. When he finally got the commission he sought from the king, it gave him permission to sail wherever he chose and to take as prizes any ships belonging to enemies of England. He was empowered to undertake any action “tending to the service of the realm and the increase of his knowledge”.

A conveniently vague brief was just what Digby needed. Entering the Mediterranean, he moved dizzyingly from adventure to adventure. Half his crew perished from a “violent pestilential disease” which erupted at ghastly speed. Forced to put in at Algiers, his filthy ships were scoured and replacement crew recruited. Digby hobnobbed with local dignitaries, and feasted on partridges and “Melons of marveilous goodnesse”. Ever mindful of his reputation, he negotiated the freedom of 50 English slaves, some of the many Europeans incarcerated in warehouses filled with human chattels.

Digby’s big moment came when he reached the easternmost shore of the Mediterranean.  In the Bay of Scanderoon, gateway to the city of Aleppo, he surprised fleets of Venetian and French ships in an audacious attack. The famously agile Venetian galleases (which were guarding French ships laden with pieces of eight) were forced to admit defeat. The French hurriedly ferried their cargo ashore. But, surveying the damage his men had done, Digby was able to claim a glorious victory, one that he richly-embroidered in the fictional account of his venture.

Warfare, and the need to prove himself on a world stage, was only one strand of Digby’s character: he was also an inveterate foodie. Bobbing in the wake of his protagonist, Moshenska takes us into cosmopolitan Mediterranean ports brimming scents and flavours – and introduces the chefs of Algiers who engineered crazy confections made in sugar. Ashore in Turkey, on respite from command, Digby hunted “wilde boare” with “the countrie people”. That night, they settled by a roaring fire to feast on “goates, sheepe, hens, milke, egges, mellons, and bread baked as thinne as strong paper”.

For a man given to pondering the relationship between body and soul, the rich mix of faiths and ethnicities was enthralling. Digby reflected delightedly that his crew included “French, Venetians, Lygononces, Savoyardes, Greekes, Slavononians, Maltoses and Dutch”. He was fascinated by the shape-shifting Ambo-Dexters and Nulli-fidians who swapped religions on a whim. The same adaptability smoothed his own passage into the spaces that had fired his imagination in England, where he had immersed himself in stories of the Bible and classical world.  

Insatiable English hunger for the antiquities of Greek and Roman civilisations spurred Digby to add chunks of architecture to the treasure in his holds. Anchoring at the island of Delos, and finding it deserted, he was able to “avayle myself of the convenience of carrying away” a great many marbles, rolling the stones down to the shore. The largest objects were more problematic. When Digby’s entire crew of 300 men failed to shift one large piece, he devised a mechanism using the “mastes of ships” to lever it aboard. Displayed in a London warehouse, these looted prizes earned the approbation of the king.

Digby had many loves – but the greatest was his wife Venetia Stanley. They met when Digby was aged 14 and Venetia three years older. Both had shadows over their names; they married in secret to avoid gossip about Venetia’s supposed impropriety with other suitors. When Venetia died, Digby was inconsolable, turning to alchemy and beset by tumultuous thoughts. He lived for a while in Paris where he wandered the streets “with his beard down to his middle” accompanied by a large dog on a leash.

Returning to England, Digby became involved in politics once more. Denounced as ringleader of a plot to advance popery, he was briefly imprisoned – but managed to persuade the authorities to allow him access to a small laboratory where he (allegedly) made “artificiall pretious stones … out of Flints”. His mind ever active, he wrote “a total survey of the whole science of Bodyes”, cramming more than 200 pages with theories and memories. He counted among his friends some of the most famous figures of the era – Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes and Anthony Van Dyck – and late in life formed an unlikely friendship with Oliver Cromwell.

As much as it exults in daring exploits, A Stain in the Blood is much more than a riveting account of 17th-century derring-do. English literature, not history, is Moshenska’s primary field: he unravels the fanciful prose of Digby’s writing, and the books he absorbed, to show us what shaped a man who saw no barriers to learning or discovery. Moshenska opens up for us a world in constant flux – a place where ships sail on a “high popping sea”, sweet scents drift on the breeze, and “wyld beastes” roam the land.

A Stain in the Blood: the Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby by Joe Moshenska is published by William Heinemann. An event to launch the book will take place at Heffers (20 Trinity Street, Cambridge CB2 1TY) on Wednesday 4 May at 6.30pm. To book https://astainintheblood.eventbrite.co.uk

Inset images: Map of Algiers from Civitate orbis terrarum (Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge); Venetia Digby on her deathbed, by Anthony van Dyck (By permissions of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Library, London).

The term ‘nature writing’ didn’t exist in the 1940s when Nan Shepherd wrote The Living Mountain, a book in which she describes exploring the Cairngorm Mountains in north-east Scotland as a walker and writer.  Shepherd sent her manuscript to a novelist friend called Neil Gunn. He responded with praise (“This is beautifully done,” he wrote) but suggested that Shepherd might find it hard to get her work published unless she added photographs and a map.

The Living Mountain defies categorisation. It was turned down by the one publisher to whom Shepherd sent it. Gunn remained the book’s sole reader right up until 1977, when the book was finally published by Aberdeen University Press (with a map but no photographs). In a preface, Shepherd notes that 30 years in the life of a mountain is nothing (“the flicker of an eyelid”), but that many things had happened in the Cairngorms between her writing of the book and its publication.

She lists the ‘eruption’ of the resort of Aviemore, the growing impact of tourism and terrible tragedies of lives lost in accidents. She follows her list with a message that speaks of her intense relationship with landscape in all its moods: “All these are matters that involve man. But behind them is the mountain itself, its substance, its strength, its weathers. It is fundamental to all that man does to it or on it.”

Last month the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) announced the designs of two polymer banknotes to be issued later this year. Both feature portraits of women. The new £10 note will bear the face of the scientist Mary Somerville and the £5 note the face of Nan Shepherd.

The portrait on the new £5 note is based on a photograph taken of Shepherd as student at Aberdeen. Her calm face is framed by long hair parted in the middle and held by a headband. Shepherd was famously averse to notions of glamour (though she always walked in skirts, never trousers) and with her bold eyes, and steadfast gaze, she makes an understated heroine.

Shepherd’s appearance in the public sphere will raise the profile of an author whose work has at times risked falling from view, and whose writing helped to lay the foundations for the current flowering of writing about place, people and nature. The accolade accorded her by RBS has been welcomed by the growing number of readers who enjoy Shepherd’s prose and poetry – all of which is centred on her deep appreciation of the Scottish landscape.

Robert Macfarlane (Faculty of English) has written extensively on Shepherd, seen her poetry back into print after 80 years, and presented both television and radio programmes about her for the BBC. In an interview with the Guardian, Macfarlane called Shepherd a “brilliant, progressive choice” for the £5 note.

“She’s an incredibly inspiring figure, and an unusual one, in the sense of being a woman writing about mountains and the wilderness and nature,” he said. “She found her own path in life and in literature, and it feels like she’s so far ahead of us – we’re always only starting to catch Nan up. Philosophically and stylistically, she was extraordinary.”

Macfarlane spent many of his childhood holidays in the Cairngorms, where he developed a love for the Scottish Highlands. But he came across Shepherd’s writing only just over a decade ago. He has since read and reread her books and poetry, as well as teaching regularly on Shepherd and her work to both undergraduates and graduates.

In his latest book, Landmarks (2015), Macfarlane writes that reading The Living Mountain changed him: “I had thought that I knew the Cairngorms well, but Shepherd showed me my complacency. Her writing taught me how to see these familiar hills rather than just to look at them.” He was influenced by Shepherd’s emphasis on mountain-going as a pilgrimage rather than a conquest, and by her readiness to peer into what she calls ‘nooks and crannies’, in order to know better ‘the total mountain’.

In The Living Mountain, Shepherd describes making a similar discovery when she began walking in Scotland. She writes: “At first, mad to recover the tang of height, I made always for the summits and would not take time to explore the recesses.” A turning point came when a friend took Shepherd to Loch Coire an Lochain, a stretch of water that lies hidden in the hills. It was a September day, following a storm, and “the air was keen and buoyant, with a brilliancy as of ice”.

Dipping her fingers into the frost-cold waters, Shepherd listens to the sound of the waterfall until she no longer hears it.  She lets her eyes travel over the surface of the water from shore to shore – not once but twice. “There is no way like that for savouring the extent of a water surface,” she writes. “This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality.”

Shepherd did not talk about walking up mountains but walking into them.  Her writing is sometimes mystical but never gushingly romantic – water is “appalling” in its strength, birches are most beautiful when “naked”.  She was a keenly acute observer, each of her words chosen with such razor-sharp precision that she feared that her writing would be considered cold and inhuman.

Sensual is one of the words Macfarlane uses to describe Shepherd’s work. She herself wrote that she found “a joyous release” in walking and climbing, often toiling through foul weather. The Living Mountain begins with the observation: “Summer on the high plateau can be as sweet as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature.”

It was through a process of immersion – sleeping outdoors, wading through streams, and sometimes swimming in the burns, watching and observing – that Shepherd got to know the colours and textures of the Cairngorms. Long before ecology became fashionable, she spoke about the interconnectedness of nature in a way that sprung from feeling rather than learning.  

In an essay written to preface the 2011 edition of The Living Mountain, Macfarlane draws attention to a passage in which Shepherd experiences the vastness of life. “So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, above me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow – the total mountain.”

For Shepherd there was a kind of magic in the act of walking itself and the way in which the human body adapts to the earth’s surface. "Eye and foot acquire in rough walking a coordination that makes one distinctly aware of where the next step will fall, even when watching land and sky." Countless walkers will have felt the same thing - but few will have put it into words so neatly.

For almost all her life, Shepherd lived in the house where she had been born. She travelled widely but always returned to the hills she loved. Macfarlane suggests that Shepherd’s focus on a particular place, one not far from her doorstep, led to a deepening rather than a restriction of knowledge. “The Living Mountain needs to be understood as parochial in the best sense,” he has written.

“Because it’s there” was the climber George Mallory’s famous retort to the question of why he climbed Everest.  Shepherd’s reasons for walking the Cairngorms are imbued with the same intense ‘thereness’ but none of the high drama of conquest. She sought to know these rugged hills in a sense both quiet and fierce. “Knowing another is endless,” she wrote, “The thing to be known grows with the knowing.”

On Monday 20 June, the Vice-Chancellor and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research presented two sets of inaugural awards; the Impact Awards run by the Research Strategy Office, and the Public Engagement with Research Awards run by the Public Engagement team in the Office of External Affairs and Communications.

Research at the University of Cambridge has had profound effects on society – it is a formal part of the University’s mission.

The Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards have been established to recognise and reward those whose research has led to excellent impact beyond academia, whether on the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life.

In this, its inaugural year, there were 71 nominations across all Schools. Nominations were initially judged by School, with one overall best entry selected by external advisor Schlumberger. A prize of £1,000 was awarded to the best impact in each School, with the prize for the overall winner increased to £2,000.

The winners were announced at an award ceremony on 20 June 2016, hosted by Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz. These winners, although very diverse, illustrate only a small part of the wide range of impact that Cambridge's research has had.

This year’s winners were:

• Dr Mari Jones (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages)

Norman French has been spoken in Jersey for over 1,000 years. Today, however, this language (Jèrriais to its speakers) is obsolescent: spoken by some 1% of the population. The research of Mari Jones has sought to preserve Jèrriais and has helped raise the profile of the language within Jersey and beyond, with impacts on local and national media, language policy and education, and cultural identity and development.

• Dr Gilly Carr (Department of Archaeology and Anthropology)

The Channel Islands have long had great difficulty in coming to terms with the darker side of the German occupation. The aim of Gilly Carr’s research is to increase awareness of Channel Islander victims of Nazi persecution through creation of a plural ‘heritage landscape’ and via education. The creation of this heritage is a major achievement and will be of significant impact for the Channel Islands.

• Professor Steve Jackson (Wellcome Trust/CRUK Gurdon Institute)

Olaparib is an innovative targeted therapy for cancer developed by Steve Jackson. In 2014 Olaparib was licensed for the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency. The following year, NICE made the drug available on the NHS in England for specific ovarian cancer patients. 2015 saw promising findings from a clinical trial in prostate cancer and Olaparib received Breakthrough Therapy Designation earlier this year. Olaparib is currently in clinical trials for a wide range of other cancer types.

• Professor John Clarkson and Dr Nathan Crilly (Department of Engineering)

It is normal to be different. The demographics of the world are changing, with longer life expectancies and a reduced birth rate resulting in an increased proportion of older people. Yet with increasing age comes a general decline in capability, challenging the way people are able to interact with the ‘designed’ world around them. The Cambridge Engineering Design Centre has worked with the Royal College of Art to address this ‘design challenge’. They developed a design toolkit and realised what was by now obvious, that inclusive design was simply better design.

• Dr Nita Forouhi and Dr Fumiaki Imamura (MRC Epidemiology Unit)

Identifying modifiable risk factors is an important step in helping reduce the health burden of poor diet. Forouhi and Imamura have advanced our understanding of the health impacts of sugars, fats and foods, through both scale and depth of investigation of self-reported information and nutritional biomarkers. They have engaged at an international level with policy and guidance bodies, and have used the media to improve public understanding with the potential for a direct impact on people’s health.

In 2015, the University of Cambridge received a one-year £65k Catalyst Seed Fund grant from Research Councils UK to embed high quality public engagement with research and bring about culture change at an institutional level.

The Public Engagement with Research Awards were set up to recognise and reward those who undertake quality engagement with research. 69 nominations were received from across all Schools.

This year’s winners were:

• Dr Becky Inkster (Department of Psychiatry)

Dr Inkster’s work work explores the intersection of art and science through the prism of mental health research. Dr Inkster has successfully collaborated with The Scarabeus Theatre in a performance called Depths of My Mind and founded the website HipHopPsych, showcasing the latest psychiatry research through hip hop lyrics. Her approach has allowed her to engage with hard-to-reach teenage audiences, encouraging them to reflect on their own mental health. Beyond this work she has explored the use of social media to diagnose mental illness, and has gathered patient perspectives on ethics, privacy and data sharing in preparation for research publication.

• Dr Paolo Bombelli (Department of Biochemistry)

Dr Bombelli’s research looks to utilise the photosynthetic chemistry of plants to create biophotovoltaic devices, a sustainable source of solar power. For over five years, he has been taking his research out of the lab to science festivals, schools and design fairs; tailoring his approach to a wider variety of audiences. Through his engagement, he has reached thousands of people, in multiple countries, and is currently developing an educational toolkit to further engage school students with advances in biophotovoltaic technology. Dr Bombelli’s public engagement work has also advanced his research, namely through a transition from using algae to moss in live demonstrations.

• Dr Ruth Armstrong and Dr Amy Ludlow (Institute of Criminology and Faculty of Law)

Dr Armstrong and Dr Ludlow have collaborated on a research project addressing the delivery of education in the prison sector. Their project, Learning Together, pioneered a new approach to prison education where the end-users, the prisoners, are directly engaged with the design, delivery and evaluation of the research intervention. Adopting this shared dialogue approach has yielded positive results in terms of prisoners’ learning outcomes and has gathered praise from prison staff and government policy makers. Through continued engagement and partnership working, Armstrong and Ludlow have managed to expand their initiative across a broad range of sites and institutional contexts.

• Dr Hazel Wilkinson (Department of English)

Dr Wilkinson is investigating the history of reading and writing habits in the eighteenth century. In collaboration with Dr Will Bowers at the University of Oxford, she has developed an online public platform, journallists.org, which allows readers to engage with installments of periodicals, diaries, letters, and novels, on the anniversaries of the day on which they were originally published, written, or set. Her approach has allowed members of the public to actively participate in research. She has also inspired thousands of readers to engage with under-read eighteenth and nineteenth century texts, often for the very first time.

• Dr Paul Coxon (Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy)

Over the last ten years Dr Coxon has endeavored to engage with audiences often overlooked by traditional public engagement channels. He has given talks in venues as varied as bingo halls, working men’s social clubs and steam fairs to showcase his passion for solar research, steering clear of the “flashes and bangs” approach often associated with Chemistry. He has also designed a Fruit Solar Cell Starter Kit, used in fifty low-income catchment schools across the UK.

• Mr Ian Hosking and Mr Bill Nicholl (Department of Engineering and Faculty of Education)

Ian Hosking and Bill Nicholl are cofounders of Designing Our Tomorrow, a platform for transforming D&T education in schools. Their public engagement initiative began in 2009 and brought together research around inclusive design and creativity in education. Through production of their DOT box, Hosking and Nicholl have taken active research questions into the classroom and given students control of designing technological solutions. Engagement with teachers, students and policymakers is integral to the success of their initiative and has resulted in engineering design being included in the national curriculum and GCSE qualifications.

Dr Emily Charnock, Faculty of History

Q: Has the 2016 US election been as unprecedented as we have been led to believe?

A: In a word, yes. There have been nasty presidential elections and party splits before (1800, 1860, 1912, and more). But the invective hasn’t normally come straight from the candidates’ mouths. In the modern period, at least, we haven’t seen anything like these direct personal attacks on Clinton’s ethical standards or Trump’s basic fitness for office, not to mention any number of demographic groups.

There are other ways in which this election is unprecedented too. The first female major party candidate, for a start. And the first major candidate without any background in elected office or high military rank in nearly eighty years. The only other one was Wendell Willkie in 1940, also a businessman and former Democrat who became the Republican nominee. But that’s about as far as the parallel with Trump goes, since Willkie was a moderate and an internationalist. Some people have seen parallels with 1964, when another insurgent candidate, Barry Goldwater, won the Republican nomination and split his own party. But Goldwater was a Senator who’d spent years building up a grassroots conservative movement – he didn’t parachute in from outside.

So for its candidates, tone, and sheer unpredictability, I’d definitely put 2016 in the “unprecedented” camp.

Dr Emily Charnock is a University Lecturer in American History

***

Professor David Runciman, Head of Department of Politics and International Studies

Q: What does the 2016 US election reveal about the state of American party politics?

A: The party system in the US is grappling with the same issues as two-party systems everywhere, including the UK. Two parties are not enough to accommodate the big political divisions that go beyond left and right. Politics now divides us by gender, by age, by educational experience and by a whole host of other gulfs in social understanding. Yet all these divisions get squeezed into a binary choice: Democrat or Republican? Trump or Clinton?  The strain is showing and the system is creaking.

In the US the strain is greater because it’s a presidential system, which means the stakes are higher. It’s also been subject to widespread gerrymandering, which entrenches partisanship at the expense of compromise. It will need a shock to the system to reform it. Trump could be that shock. But that poses the dilemma of all mature democracies. What if the shock that is capable of reforming the system is also capable of destroying it? What if the price of avoiding the prospect of destruction is to put off the chance of reform? The real danger for the American party system is not that it’s currently so volatile, but that despite its volatility it may be stuck.

Professor David Runciman is the author of The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present

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Professor Gary Gerstle, Paul Mellon Professor of American History 

Q: What has surprised you most about the 2016 US election?

A: The most surprising element of the 2016 election is not Trump himself. For years, the right wing of the Republican Party has been nurturing figures like him who have bred contempt for the ordinary business of politics (compromise and coalitions), incited their supporters with vicious attacks on the integrity of their opponents, and challenged the boundaries of civility. What has been shocking is the inability of the Republican establishment—billionaire GOP donors, leaders of the Congressional Party, and even Murdoch’s influential Fox News—to corral the Trump rebellion as the Romney forces did to right-wing insurgents in 2012.

Equally shocking has been Trump’s successful assault on once unassailable Republican positions, most notably the GOP’s commitment to the free movement of capital, trade, and people and to NATO as a linchpin of American defense and a US led world order.  As in the UK, politics in America no longer looks familiar: a great political party is tearing itself apart, elites and foreigners are scapegoated, parliamentary processes are condemned as corrupt, and strong men offer themselves as antidotes to democratic haplessness.  Usually, the self-destruction of one party propels the other to power; and that might happen on Tuesday.  But these are not ordinary times.

Professor Gary Gerstle is the author of Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present

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Professor Neil Mercer, Emeritus Professor of Education

Q: What does the rhetoric deployed during this presidential campaign tell us about modern political discourse?

A: One of the striking features of the rhetoric used in the televised presidential debates has been the frequent use of ad hominem ("against the person") attacks. For example, Mr Trump claims Mrs Clinton is "crooked". She has depicted him as a misogynist. Rather than attacking the political agenda of an opponent, the speaker instead attacks their character or behaviour, with the aim of destroying the opponent’s credibility in the eyes of the electorate.

Such attacks are characterised as "logical fallacies" in classical rhetoric, because they do not really undermine the truth or value of an opponent’s  political ideas, and so should be treated sceptically by a critical, rational listener. However, as we can see from the media evaluations of the debates and polling predictions, ad hominem attacks can be very effective. People do not make voting choices purely on a logical basis, and the presidential contest is as much about personality as policy.

For many American voters, one criterion for their allegiance seems to be that a candidate is the kind of person who would win a verbal fight on their behalf – by fair means or foul. 

Professor Neil Mercer is Director of Oracy@Cambridge: the Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication

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Professor Andrew Preston, Professor of American History

Q: How will the election affect US foreign policy?

A: We haven't seen such stark differences on foreign policy in a long time. Hillary Clinton stands for the continuation of liberal internationalism, a bipartisan tradition that believes in US leadership of an integrated world system. Though they may argue about the specifics of implementation, both Democrats and Republicans have upheld this system since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt 75 years ago.

Liberal internationalism underpinned containment during the Cold War and has fuelled support for globalization over the past two decades. But Donald Trump doesn't believe in liberal internationalism, and he certainly doesn't believe in globalization. Instead, he has railed against Clinton's foreign-policy experience, but he has also attacked his fellow Republicans' worldview. He thinks the Iraq War was a mistake, that George W. Bush didn't do enough to prevent 9/11 from happening, and that international trade agreements are forged at the expense of the working class. All this makes him sound a bit like George McGovern, the left-wing Democrat who challenged Richard Nixon in 1972 on an anti-Vietnam War platform. In fact, it makes Trump sound a lot like Bernie Sanders.

But it's even more telling that Trump has borrowed the isolationist slogan "America First" from the anti-Semitic, anti-interventionist campaign of Charles Lindbergh in 1940-41. Trump's anti-war isolationism isn't akin to the pacifism of a McGovern but the nationalism of a Lindbergh. If he wins on Tuesday, it will mean a retreat of American power. While many will cheer, I have a feeling many more people around the world will fear the new world order to follow.

Professor Andrew Preston is the author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy

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Dr Kasia Boddy, Faculty of English

Q: What has American fiction had to say about a possible President Trump?

A: Over the last few months, commentators have vied with each to find the novel which best ‘predicted’ or ‘foreshadowed’ the Presidential election. Popular choices include Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935), in which "general clownishness" paves the way for The American Corporate State and Patriotic Party, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), in which "America First" means avoiding "dilution by foreign races". Lewis was thinking of the populist Louisiana governor Huey Long, while Roth, while writing about Charles Lindbergh, was also responding to George W. Bush’s rhetoric of "perpetual fear".

Perhaps it’s reassuring to imagine a similar novel today (and there have already been some attempts), because then we can think of Trump as nothing more than a "character", safely stowed in "alternate history".

There’s no story more satisfying than that of the bullet dodged.

There’s a problem, though: that particular bullet was fired some time ago, and is still the air. Shouldn’t novelists have seen it coming?

A few did. Trump, the flashy entrepreneur, has a bit part in several 90s novels, but it was Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1992) that most precisely delineated the milieu of monied braggadocio from which he emerged. The novel’s protagonist Patrick Bateman, a banker-cum-serial-killer, is obsessed with Trump and is constantly distracted by trying to spot his limo or Ivana and by fantasies of a summons to their yacht.  When a detective interrogates him about a missing colleague (his latest victim), Bateman turns the conversation to Trump’s The Art of the Deal. Mergers and acquisitions, murders and executions – it’s all about making a killing. Ellis is particularly alert to the aggressive, misogynist language of 80s Wall Street, and it will be no surprise to learn that "banter" about "hot numbers" and "hardbodies" takes place in upscale Zagat-rated restaurants rather than in locker rooms.

 In one scene, however, Bateman "snaps" when a girl calls him "honey":

     "‘What do you want me to call you?’ she asks, indignantly. ‘CEO?’ She stifles a giggle.

     ‘Oh Christ.’

     ‘No, really Patrick. What do you want me to call you?’

      King, I’m thinking. King, Evelyn. I want you to call me King."

 Perhaps on November 9 we’ll be calling Bateman’s hero The Man Who Conceded Graciously. It’s hard to imagine.

Dr Kasia Boddy is the editor of The New Penguin Book of American Short Stories

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Professor Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek Literature and Culture, Director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Q: What will guide American voters' choices on November 8?

A: An old friend of mine, when he was in charge of the British Medical Association, and negotiating regularly with the government, told me a secret: "You must always let people think they are voting with their intellects; but you must get them to vote with their feelings."

I thought then he was cynical. Now I see he was prescient.

Fifteen years ago 15% of Republicans thought that all democrats were wholly unacceptable, and a similar percentage of Democrats felt the same about Republicans. Now the figure is 65%. Politics in the United States has become not just polarised, but tribal. And with tribalism, voting with the emotions is a necessary satisfaction.

What are the consequences of this? It would seem that evidence, argument, planning are irrelevant to the raw feeling of the chant, the commitment, the certainty.

For me, the most shocking statement of the campaign has been the Republican assertion that they will object to the name of any Democratic candidate for the Supreme Court. Any candidate? This is tribalism at its most blatantly aggressive. Can government function under such conditions? Can social justice be maintained as an ideal when exclusion is built into the thinking from the start?

It is not a happy time.

Professor Simon Goldhill is the author of A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain

Handwritten letters, in a digital world, are increasingly rare. But, on 18 November 2016, John sat down to write to his friend Jakub. His message begins in capitals: “YES, JAKUB” and goes on to congratulate Jakub on the latest developments in his career.  He writes: “I now consider myself your friend, who is so proud of you.”

John’s words are inscribed in biro on lined paper: the notepaper of Her Majesty’s Prison Service. Writer and recipient of this letter could hardly be more different. A former addict, John is serving a lengthy sentence at HM Prison Grendon in Buckinghamshire. Thousands of miles away, Jakub is starting a PhD in criminology in the Czech Republic while working for the Constitutional Court in Prague. With a Masters in criminology from Cambridge University, his future looks bright.

Jakub and John are just two of more than 100 people who have been brought together by an ambitious scheme run by academics at Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology. Taught in prisons, Learning Together gives university students and prisoners the chance to study alongside each other. They sit in the same classrooms, engage with the same topics, and carry out the same assignments.

Learning Together was piloted at HMP Grendon in 2015. An-eight week criminology course was taken by 24 learners, half of them graduate students and half of them prisoners. The programme is now expanding to other prisons and subject areas. Its remarkable success stems from the passionate belief of its creators – criminologists Drs Ruth Armstrong and Amy Ludlow – in the power of education to capacitate, unlock potential and transform society for the better.

This term, prisoners at Grendon have the opportunity to sign up for a course in literary criticism led by Dr Stacey McDowell from Cambridge’s Faculty of English. Meanwhile, prisoners at HM Prison Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire are offered a course on ‘The Good Life and the Good Society’ run by Drs Ryan Williams (Centre of Islamic Studies) and Elizabeth Phillips (Divinity Faculty).

Religious, political and social differences are high on the public agenda, yet theological and religious education is often taught in a way that’s disconnected from the real world. Williams suggests that this gap between theoretic and real-life perspectives represents a valuable opportunity. “While carrying out my research, I observed that people are guided on a daily basis by ethical and theological questions of what constitutes the ‘good’,” he says.

“Our course finds a middle ground, and provides a chance for students to sharpen their own understanding of what is right and ‘good’ in their own life and in society by having meaningful contact with, and learning alongside, people from a diversity of backgrounds. Yes, we’re taking a risk in that we're exploring questions of difference often seen as sources of conflict, but we believe it’s a crucial one to take.”

Universities and prisons might seem poles apart but both communities set out to transform lives for the benefit of society. “While teaching on access-to-university courses, aimed at students from less advantaged backgrounds, we realised that the students we were meeting had a lot in common with the prisoners we’d encountered in the course of our research,” say Armstrong and Ludlow.

“Many came from similar backgrounds and had been brought up on similar streets. The access students tended to have punitive views of people who commit crime – while many prisoners thought they had nothing in common with ‘clever’ people who were destined for university. We saw the same potential brimming in many of them.”

Teaching in prisons is nothing new. However, Learning Together has a broader objective. It sets out to create enduring ‘communities of learning’ in which students from universities and prisons realise how much they have to learn from, and with, each other.

The shared endeavour of structured learning forges friendships and shatters stereotypes. As a prison-based Learning Together student called Adam put it in an article about his experiences “I had my fears about the course. Will I be judged? Will I be up to it socially? Can I really learn with Cambridge students without looking stupid?”

Adam found the learning environment to be “inclusive and enabling” and wrote that “my confidence has soared and I come out of each session buzzing with new knowledge, new friendships and knowing that I’ve contributed way more than I thought I could". Since completing the course he has won a scholarship that will enable him to take a Masters in English Literature. He has also trained as a mentor for Learning Together students.

Many prisoners have negative experiences of school and gain few formal qualifications. For their part, many university students have relatively narrow life experiences. “Going into a prison, I expected to find immaturity,” said one Cambridge student in a film made by prisoners at HMP Springhill, another prison involved in the project. “Instead, I discovered that I was the immature one.”

At the heart of Learning Together is an approach described by Armstrong and Ludlow as ‘dialogical learning’ – learning through dialogue with fellow students and teachers in an environment of trust. In a blog for an online magazine, a prisoner at Grendon called Anthony shares his thoughts about the liberating nature of this approach.

Anthony writes: “Every session … gave me the feeling that I had been free for a few hours, although not free in the sense that I had been outside the prison, but free in a deeper sense. I could be a better version of myself, which my incarceration, past and fears did not dictate to and smother. It was warmth, compassion and the exchange of ideas – alongside the acceptance of others – that created this released version of me.”

If you are interested in learning more about how your university or department could get involved in working in partnership with a local prison, please contact Ruth Armstrong and Amy Ludlow on justis@crim.cam.ac.uk

When we think of the First World War, we remember the many millions of men who died. But, as dangerous it was to be a soldier in the horror of the trenches, it was more dangerous to be a baby back at home. This parlous state of affairs was described by the Bishop of London at the launch of an initiative called Baby Week designed to improve infant survival rates: “100,000 babies died during the first twelve months from their birth… While nine soldiers died every hour in 1915 twelve babies died each hour.”

This bleak picture, and the urgent efforts made to redress it, is one backdrop toThe Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice a collection of essays edited by Cambridge academics Drs Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy. The book, which comes out in paperback on Armistice Day (11 November 2015) looks at the cultural and societal narrative of a Britain struggling to find itself in the wake of conflict. Part of this struggle was a national drive to increase the health of the nation and produce a generation raised on safe milk, housed in sanitary conditions and provided with a secure framework.

The book explores how selected writers, artists and composers sought to bear witness to the war and the disappointment of peace. It’s one of the few volumes to look comparatively at British, German and Austrian sources, reading Virginia Woolf alongside Arthur Schnitzler and Alfred Döblin, Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Krenek alongside Arthur Bliss, Elizabeth Bowen and Ford Madox Ford, and unpublished letters by both German and British soldiers. Contributors include Andrew Frayn, Alison Hennegan, Klaus Hofmann, Jane Potter, George Simmers, and Alexander Watson. Adrian Barlow discusses British and German war memorials.

Both Tate and Kennedy study the First World War but neither is a historian in the conventional sense. Tate is a specialist in the literature of conflict and Kennedy is a biographer with an interest in the relationship between words and music. The essays they bring together in Silent Morning look behind the practical measures taken to improve hygiene and housing to reveal the deeper cultural forces at work. Evident in art, literature and music, these ways of seeing the world shaped much more than government policies: they had a profound and enduring impact on people’s lives on both sides of the conflict.

The chapter in Silent Morning contributed by Tate is titled ‘King Baby’. It covers new ground in its analysis of underlying attitudes to child development and how these were shaped by the not-quite peace that unfolded when an Armistice was declared in November 1918. In her exploration of the literature of the period, Tate focuses first and foremost on babies. Her journey into the unconscious of the domestic sphere embraces the work of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Mansfield as well as the manuals that exerted strong influences on childcare practice.

Tate argues that, while many soldiers and civilians felt infantilised by war, babies were, in a sense, militarised. She reminds us that war traumatises – but also that peace, and the absence of the sound of guns, can be traumatic too. The uncertain and sullied cease of conflict that followed was described by the poet Eleanor Farjeon in chilling terms:

I am awful as my brother War,
I am the sudden silence after clamour.
I am the face that shows the seamy scar
When blood has lost its frenzy and its glamour.

When Woolf too describes the disappointment of peace, she turns to childhood as her point of reference. The build-up to Armistice is like the excitement of a birthday. Inevitably, the day itself disappoints yet the charade that everything’s lovely has to be maintained. “So on a birthday,” she writes, “when for some reason things have gone wrong, it was a point of honour in the nursery to pretend. Years later one could confess what a horrid fraud it seemed.”

Rather than returning as heroes, many men who came back from the First World War were broken and stripped of individual agency. Some were empty and angry; some could be violent. Many of those who went to war never came back. Bowen’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ describes a young widow, Mrs Dickinson, containing her grief for her dead husband Toppy beneath a mask of elegance and poise. The Dickinsons’ seven-year-old son, Frederick, who had been just a baby when his father died, cries and cries. His mother is embarrassed by this “great blubbering boy” who is “too big to cry”.

Perhaps poor Frederick had been raised according to the method set out by Truby King, a pioneer in modern parenting. Enthusiastically embraced in the wake of the First World War, King’s views made a perfect partner for the nationwide programmes (such as Baby Week) aimed at raising standards of hygiene and nutrition.

King recommended a strict, and largely loveless, schedule. An extraordinary man, whose career took in dairy farming and the cultivation of roses, King was also superintendent of a lunatic asylum. He observed that calves thrived when they were fed regularly. Babies, believed King, should be fed every four hours (not at night) with sleep in between. Even their bowel movements should be regulated. Over-stimulation (too much play and excitement) was to be avoided; physical contact was spoiling.

When the guns went silent, and a semblance of normality crept into the lives of those who had survived the war, a gaping absence asserted itself. “Babies born after the Armistice come into what seems like a formless, unpredictable world,” writes Tate. “In the many families which take up the Truby King method, babies’ tiny lives are vigorously regulated, thus providing a comforting structure – a ‘container’ which at least makes the adults feel more secure.”

A caption below a photo of two bonny girls in King’s book The Expectant Mother and Baby’s First Month reads: “A doctor’s children. Healthy, hardy, happy little girls, aged two and nearly four years. Good jaws and sound teeth. Nursed four-hourly from birth – never more than five times in twenty-four hours; plenty of fresh air and exercise – never any coddling.”

By mechanising babies, and raising them in a sterile environment, parents perhaps tried to make the world secure for themselves. King’s literature on the best way to bring up baby was devoured by many of the professionals seeking to improve the nation’s health. His methods were ‘scientific’. A new generation of maternity nurses was trained in the ‘Truby King method’. The Plunket nurses (named after King’s patrons Lord and Lady Plunket) helped mothers to breastfeed and guided them through their babies’ early development. Plunket nurses adhered to routine; they wouldn’t ‘give in’ to a crying child.

Tate shows how Mansfield captures the cruel effects of this detached style of parenting in her short story ‘Bliss’.  Bertha is a middle class mother who employs a full-time nanny. Her husband boasts of his lack of interest in his child. “Don’t ask me about my baby. I never see her.” When Bertha visits her daughter one evening, the child is delighted while nanny experiences the unscheduled visit as a disruption to a regime that must be maintained at all costs. Bertha suddenly realises that the situation is tragic for both for herself and her child.

The focus of Mansfield’s story is not Bertha’s marriage but her relationship with her daughter. “Many of her [Mansfield’s] stories of modern life are miniature tragedies, rooted, in many cases, in the unwitting neglect of children,” Tate writes. For Truby King, children had no point of view: a regulated regime was best for them, regardless of how much they screamed with hunger. King’s inflexible routine for baby-rearing imposed military discipline on the messy chaos that is small babies.

King did face criticism from contemporaries – among those who argued against him was Dr GD Laing who experienced the pitiful cries of little ones being ignored until the allotted hour for feeding. Research by psychoanalysts John Bowlby, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion later showed that King’s system, though it succeeded with some babies, was disastrous for many. The infants who, desperately hungry or hurting, screamed themselves into silence may well have been traumatised – and early trauma has been linked to depression.

Those who suffer terribly in war seldom speak of their experiences as there are no words to describe it. They pass on their distress in other ways. In her memoir Alfred and Emily (2008), the novelist Doris Lessing (born in 1919) revisited her childhood. Her father lost a leg fighting in the First World War; her mother was a nurse looking after the war-wounded. “Do children feel their parents’ emotions,” Lessing wonders. “Yes, they do… The Great War… squatted over my childhood. And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.”

The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice is published by Manchester University Press.

Inset images: newspaper advert for Nestle; images from Mothercraft by Truby King's daughter, Mary; newspaper advert for Cow & Gate.

The poet John Clare (1793-1864) was a keen natural historian who knew the countryside in all its moods. His various jobs saw him labouring in farms and gardens; his gravestone remembers him as the ‘peasant poet’. Best known for his verse, Clare also wrote prose accounts of the plants and animals he observed in his native Northamptonshire.

In a foreword to the anthology, The Poetry of Birds, broadcaster and bird watcher Tim Dee notes that Clare wrote about 147 species of British wild birds “without any technical kit whatsoever”. His records contain 65 first descriptions of birds for Northamptonshire alone. The term ‘nature writing’ had yet to be coined in the early 1800s – but Clare was undoubtedly ahead of his time in the way that he wove his detailed observations of the natural world into his writing.

Dee is one of the speakers who will be talking about ‘Clare and the Art of Bird Watching’ at a symposium held on September 15, 2017 at the David Attenborough Building. The event is a collaboration between the Centre for John Clare Studies (English Faculty) and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI), itself a partnership between Cambridge University and a cluster of conservation organisations.

CCI’s emerging programme on the arts, science and conservation is coordinated by Dr John Fanshawe, who has been seconded from Birdlife International. He explains: “Bringing together academics and practitioners is a core ambition of the community in the David Attenborough Building. John Clare, both as a poet and activist, is a perfect catalyst for exploring the close observation and in situ localism in which so much conservation is rooted.”

The symposium will bring together literary scholars with ornithologists, nature writers and artists to consider what it means to observe and record birds. How, for example, does Clare look and watch, and how does he translate what he observes into words? How do today’s artists and writers respond to his work?

“The idea is to raise questions about the act of bird watching, recording, understanding and classification, both in the early 19th century and the present day, dwelling in particular on the importance of localism and the distinctiveness of Clare’s environment and voice to his writing about birds,” says Dr Sarah Houghton-Walker from the Centre for John Clare Studies.

Academics speaking at the symposium include Dr Francesca MacKenney (Bristol), Dr Mina Gorji (Cambridge) and Dr Jos Smith (University of East Anglia). Participants will also hear from printmaker Carry Akroyd, textile artist Anita Bruce, and nature writers Alex Preston and Derek Niemann.

Clare’s work has long inspired artists whose work celebrates the natural world. Akroyd says: “John Clare is such a visual poet. He wrote outside, his eyes wide open to everything, and wrote inside with visual memory. He switches between a wide-angle bird’s eye-view of the landscape to hand-lens detail, and even now makes us see more.”

Birds soar through the lines of English poetry, but for Clare’s contemporaries they played an especially important symbolic role. “Shelley’s skylark is transcendentally a spirit. Keats’ nightingale is significant because it represents a sublime kind of not-knowing,” says Houghton-Walker.

Clare, however, insists on the real and the particular. He knows exactly how and where the birds he writes about nest; he knows how many eggs those birds lay; and he leaves behind a meticulous record of every detail, right down to the appearance of the markings on each egg.   

“He’s intensely interested in habitat, behaviour and song, but also, increasingly, in the threats to birds from his fellow men. He insists on a vital accuracy in his descriptions which continue to astonish scientific natural historians, and yet produces poetry about birds which can claim to be some of the very best in the language,” says Houghton-Walker.

“Clare’s greatest achievement is the conjunction of scientific accuracy with what he calls ‘poetic feeling’. He possesses a depth of knowledge only achievable by painstaking observation of birds’ behaviour as it changes with the seasons. He scorns those poets who don’t take the time to watch and merely recycle, often inaccurate, poetic conventions.

His patient observation is rewarded with an intimate knowledge which is exhibited throughout his prose and poetry. He’s especially fascinated by nests – something that has been discussed by many critics.”

A determination to represent nature accurately led to struggles, too.  Voicing his frustration at his inability adequately to transcribe the song of the nightingale, Clare wrote that “many of her notes are sounds that cannot be written the alphabet having no letters that can syllable the sounds”. 

MacKenney says: “Clare was extraordinarily inventive in his attempts to get the sounds of birds into his own writing. But the ‘peasant-poet’ was not naive. Throughout his poetry Clare demonstrates a profound respect for the abiding 'mystery' of birds and their songs.”

Without binoculars and with nothing but his senses to rely on, Clare gave us some of the most compelling nature writing of the 19th century.

To illustrate some of the wonders of birds and their behaviour, the symposium will include a screening of ‘Murmuration X 10’, a short film by filmmaker Sarah Wood and Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk, and a guided tour of the avian collection at the Museum of Zoology.

For more details and to book a place at the symposium ‘Clare and the Art of Bird Watching’ click here.

Inset image: Carry Akroyd's ‘Evening Crows’ linocut illustration from 'This Happy Spirit’.