1 00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:08,750 Afternoon and welcome to Torch Online. And to our first look at lunchtime event for this academic year, 2 00:00:08,750 --> 00:00:17,690 a discussion of iconoclasm as child's play written by Joe Machines school book at lunchtime is Torture's flagship event series, 3 00:00:17,690 --> 00:00:24,050 taking the form of pretty much weekly bite sized discussions of books authored by colleagues in the humanities here 4 00:00:24,050 --> 00:00:31,860 in Oxford with a range of commentators and questions from especially in these strange times all over the world. 5 00:00:31,860 --> 00:00:36,990 Please do take a look at our Web site and newsletter for the full programme for the coming term. 6 00:00:36,990 --> 00:00:40,890 My name is Wes Williams and I'm the new director here at Torch. 7 00:00:40,890 --> 00:00:49,500 Also on our very distinguished panel today are Alexander Walsham, Kenneth Gross, Matthew Beavis and Lorna Hudson. 8 00:00:49,500 --> 00:00:56,340 Our chair today. In a moment, I'll hand over to Lorna, who will introduce the book and the other members of the panel. 9 00:00:56,340 --> 00:01:02,370 This will be followed by a brief reading by Joe of elements of the book. 10 00:01:02,370 --> 00:01:09,600 Afterwards, our commentators will present their thoughts on Joe's work coming at it from their particular disciplines. 11 00:01:09,600 --> 00:01:18,140 Will then give him the chance to respond to some of the points raised before entering into what promises to be a fascinating discussion. 12 00:01:18,140 --> 00:01:22,310 The event will conclude the last 10 minutes or so with question from you, the audience, 13 00:01:22,310 --> 00:01:29,960 which I hope you will send in in the Q and A checkbox as soon as they occur to you, and I will help to moderate them towards the end. 14 00:01:29,960 --> 00:01:36,560 All that's left then for me to do now is to thank you all for coming and to introduce our chair. 15 00:01:36,560 --> 00:01:43,910 Lorna Hutson is the Merton Professor of English Literature and the director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies here in Oxford. 16 00:01:43,910 --> 00:01:51,350 She was educated in San Francisco, Edinburgh and Oxford and has more or less repeated that itinerary in her career, 17 00:01:51,350 --> 00:01:57,950 having taught at Berkeley, St. Andrews and now Oxford, where she's a professor of English literature. 18 00:01:57,950 --> 00:02:03,740 As I say, she's also a fellow of the British Academy and works on English Renaissance literature. 19 00:02:03,740 --> 00:02:10,970 She's written on usery and literature, on women's writing and representation, on poetics and forensic rhetoric, 20 00:02:10,970 --> 00:02:18,750 and most recently on the geopolitics of England's, quote, insular imagining in the 16th century. 21 00:02:18,750 --> 00:02:23,670 I'll hand over to, you know, Lorna and disappear from your screens for a while. 22 00:02:23,670 --> 00:02:31,350 Thank you very much, Wes. Hello, everybody. I feel really privileged to be included in this distinguished interdisciplinary 23 00:02:31,350 --> 00:02:37,170 panel gathered to discuss Joe Machans because iconoclasm as child's play. 24 00:02:37,170 --> 00:02:45,090 The debate about the relationship of religious iconoclasm to the emergence of the autonomous artwork rages on. 25 00:02:45,090 --> 00:02:54,480 But Joe's book really transforms this debate by introducing the anarchic figure of the playing child, the anarchic and opaque figure. 26 00:02:54,480 --> 00:02:58,200 To discuss this stimulating proposition, we have the perfect panel. 27 00:02:58,200 --> 00:03:04,830 I think we have an expert in the effective forms of the English Reformation, 28 00:03:04,830 --> 00:03:13,350 an expert in literature and puppet theatre and an expert in playful literary forms, comedy and nonsense. 29 00:03:13,350 --> 00:03:18,150 So I'm going to introduce our to Joe first and then our panel. 30 00:03:18,150 --> 00:03:25,860 And Joe will then, as we said, give a brief, brief reading and comments from his book and then I'll ask a question. 31 00:03:25,860 --> 00:03:30,540 And members of the panel will ask questions and give their comments. 32 00:03:30,540 --> 00:03:38,640 So our author, Dr. Joe Moshinsky, is associate professor at Tutorial Fellow at University College here at Oxford. 33 00:03:38,640 --> 00:03:43,440 Joe grew up in Brighton and read English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. 34 00:03:43,440 --> 00:03:50,610 He then went to Princeton initially as a visiting fellow, but stayed there to complete his P.H. deed. 35 00:03:50,610 --> 00:03:57,360 After a spell at Trinity College, Cambridge, Joe joined the English faculty at Oxford in 2018, 36 00:03:57,360 --> 00:04:02,160 where I had the pleasure of teaching with him on their Masters course. 37 00:04:02,160 --> 00:04:11,490 Joe is the author of Feeling Pleasures An Oxford 2014 and a Stain in the Blood on the Life of Sir Canon Digby 2017. 38 00:04:11,490 --> 00:04:16,830 And in 2019, Joe was awarded the Philip Libby Hume Prise. 39 00:04:16,830 --> 00:04:20,160 He's currently working on a book on Milton. 40 00:04:20,160 --> 00:04:29,310 Now our first commentator is Professor Matthew Bavis, who's professor of English literature at a tutorial fellow at Keibel College, Oxford. 41 00:04:29,310 --> 00:04:35,580 Books include The Art of Eloquence, Byron Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce and Comedy. 42 00:04:35,580 --> 00:04:42,420 A very short introduction which explores comedy both as literary genre and what not cause funny business. 43 00:04:42,420 --> 00:04:48,660 He has written a book rather unexpectedly on comedy and Wordsworth entitled Word with Fun, 44 00:04:48,660 --> 00:04:56,430 and he is currently writing about the author we perhaps most associate with Child's Play a Nonsense. 45 00:04:56,430 --> 00:05:03,240 Edward Lear. Mat's forthcoming book, Knowing Edward Lear, has evolved him in a lot of fun sounding, 46 00:05:03,240 --> 00:05:09,480 collaboration's with the BBC, the Natural History Museum and the Ashmolean. 47 00:05:09,480 --> 00:05:15,360 Our second commentator is Professor Alexandra Walsham. 48 00:05:15,360 --> 00:05:23,030 Alexander Washam is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. She studied at the University of Melbourne before coming to Cambridge for HD. 49 00:05:23,030 --> 00:05:26,700 And she's taught at the University of Exeter and Cambridge. 50 00:05:26,700 --> 00:05:34,740 Amongst her many marvellous books, I'd like to draw your attention to her magisterial The Reformation of the Landscape, 51 00:05:34,740 --> 00:05:41,130 Religion, Identity and Memory in early modern England, which I feel is particularly pertinent to this discussion. 52 00:05:41,130 --> 00:05:50,130 This book one no less than three Prises, The Wolfson Prise, an American Historical Association PRISE and the role Baynton Prise. 53 00:05:50,130 --> 00:05:57,060 Professor Walsham was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2009 and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. 54 00:05:57,060 --> 00:06:04,590 In 2013, she was appointed CBE for Services to History in the Queen's Honours. 55 00:06:04,590 --> 00:06:14,570 2017. We were also really delighted and privileged to have with us Professor Kenneth Gross, 56 00:06:14,570 --> 00:06:22,470 who's professor and director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Rochester. 57 00:06:22,470 --> 00:06:28,440 Kenneth, brochure's work ranges from Renaissance literature to romantic and modern poetry. 58 00:06:28,440 --> 00:06:38,130 In addition to the very pertinent spent Syrian poetics, idolatry, iconoclasm and magic from nineteen eighty five, it's written on Shakespeare, 59 00:06:38,130 --> 00:06:46,050 numerous essays on lyric poetry, on the relation of literature and the visual arts, on metamorphoses and animation and literature. 60 00:06:46,050 --> 00:06:54,960 And again, very pertinently, for this discussion on the strange shapes of puppet theatre, traditional and experimental. 61 00:06:54,960 --> 00:07:02,010 So there you have it. Our panels of experts on icons, iconoclasm and funny business. 62 00:07:02,010 --> 00:07:11,070 And I will now turn to Joe to ask him to read from his book and to make a few observations about it. 63 00:07:11,070 --> 00:07:14,850 Joe. Thank you very much, Lorna, for the introduction. 64 00:07:14,850 --> 00:07:19,590 And I'll try and read relatively briefly from the book, I want to hear from this wonderful panel, 65 00:07:19,590 --> 00:07:23,190 but I also wanna take a bit of extra time just to thank them. 66 00:07:23,190 --> 00:07:26,130 Thank you all for fudge for being part of this event. 67 00:07:26,130 --> 00:07:31,890 I think we all sort of agree that one of the very few positives to come out of this dreadful, wider situation, 68 00:07:31,890 --> 00:07:35,880 which we find ourselves, is that we can sort of put together gatherings like this in ways that don't rely on us. 69 00:07:35,880 --> 00:07:42,510 All things gather in person. If this couldn't have really happened otherwise and without sort of consciously putting it in this way, 70 00:07:42,510 --> 00:07:46,010 I realised thinking about the panel today that there's a sort of archaeology off 71 00:07:46,010 --> 00:07:51,900 of the book could have my sort of trajectory writing it represented in the panel. 72 00:07:51,900 --> 00:07:53,550 I started working on it in Cambridge, 73 00:07:53,550 --> 00:07:58,930 where Alex and I were had the strange experience of being elected as fellows at Trinity College on the same evenings. 74 00:07:58,930 --> 00:08:03,480 I feel like our destinies, a sort of strangely intertwined by having gone through this surreal rite of passage. 75 00:08:03,480 --> 00:08:06,180 And she was a wonderful colleague to have while I was doing the early work on it. 76 00:08:06,180 --> 00:08:11,040 And then to finish it with Martin, Lorna's colleagues has been just incredibly fortunate. 77 00:08:11,040 --> 00:08:15,090 And then this is the first time I've actually interacted with Karen face to face. 78 00:08:15,090 --> 00:08:18,240 And so it's lovely how these things become possible under the fact that his work, 79 00:08:18,240 --> 00:08:22,800 as Lorna said, to sort of trace this arc from Spencer in his early writings to toys. 80 00:08:22,800 --> 00:08:29,520 And the more recent ones made me feel like I was onto something and wasn't just sort of sort of spiralling off in some strange direction. 81 00:08:29,520 --> 00:08:35,070 What I thought I'd do today is just read a little bit from the book, which I thought summed up some of what I was trying to do in it. 82 00:08:35,070 --> 00:08:42,690 But it particularly is the bit where I thoroughly discussed the image on the cover, which I've had quite a lot of questions about. 83 00:08:42,690 --> 00:08:46,770 And so I thought it might be a nice bit to read part because it sort of moves from thinking 84 00:08:46,770 --> 00:08:51,030 about an early modern objects in the ways that we might respond to in any modern object, 85 00:08:51,030 --> 00:09:03,720 an actual object that seems to have survived an iconoclastic act towards thinking about a much more contemporary object or image of an object. 86 00:09:03,720 --> 00:09:08,940 So this is this is the very end of the chapter in the book, which is called Dull. 87 00:09:08,940 --> 00:09:14,340 And all the chapters in it have single word titles that the Jacksons will think through and around. 88 00:09:14,340 --> 00:09:21,990 This chapter starts with a with a with a with a moment from Cologne in the 16th century where a man was was 89 00:09:21,990 --> 00:09:29,330 accused of having snapped the arms from a crucifix and given it to the broken object to his children as a toy. 90 00:09:29,330 --> 00:09:31,840 And it sort of plays around with the fact that in the 16th century, 91 00:09:31,840 --> 00:09:38,520 be the word idol was sometimes spelled idee o double L and sets of attempting to see the word doll lodged for the Night-Time side. 92 00:09:38,520 --> 00:09:43,930 Doctor, that sort of relevant for the context. So I'm so I'm good, I'm talking at the start of this about Panopto. 93 00:09:43,930 --> 00:09:48,710 I'm actually the ongoing thing of showing you a picture with a camera. I apologise for this graphic grainy, but this is it. 94 00:09:48,710 --> 00:09:52,990 This is the object. I'll be discussing it. It's a broken crucifix, an almost crucifix. 95 00:09:52,990 --> 00:10:01,130 Notice the fiddles with a crucifix because it was discovered in the derelict great hall of fiddles with modern Dorsets in 1952. 96 00:10:01,130 --> 00:10:08,910 It's a modest object to more than six inches high. It's light and fragile, constructed of sparsely decorated plaster of Paris. 97 00:10:08,910 --> 00:10:14,550 And it will take no great effort to break off the arms. And since the substance of which it was made is almost worthless. 98 00:10:14,550 --> 00:10:21,050 They could not be melted down or sold for gain. The object probably dates from the late 50s through early 16th century, 99 00:10:21,050 --> 00:10:26,690 and there's no way of knowing why it survived but what sort of life it lived in the centuries before it was rediscovered. 100 00:10:26,690 --> 00:10:28,520 And although there's no evidence that it became a plaything, 101 00:10:28,520 --> 00:10:32,450 when I picture the children in Cologne, I just mentioned being given the damaged crucifix. 102 00:10:32,450 --> 00:10:35,680 This is the object that I imagined as that toy. 103 00:10:35,680 --> 00:10:40,450 It's an object that captures the ambiguous being of the idol with two ls that the object of iconoclastic 104 00:10:40,450 --> 00:10:46,360 child's play becomes as we contemplate this object in the broken form in which it survived. 105 00:10:46,360 --> 00:10:54,160 Two modes of response suggests themselves that they oscillate unstable rather than one dominating and deleting the other. 106 00:10:54,160 --> 00:10:58,480 The broken make a crucifix is a forlorn object. It could easily seem faintly ludicrous. 107 00:10:58,480 --> 00:11:04,840 A trifle. It's missing arms of abolished its symbolic silhouette and it now looks like an implement to be handled rather than revered. 108 00:11:04,840 --> 00:11:11,980 From a distance, Christ's torso and legs looking outline almost like the handle and blade of a simple toy knife. 109 00:11:11,980 --> 00:11:17,650 It's easy to imagine the forms of ordinary play that that a defaced and lowly object of this sort might inspire. 110 00:11:17,650 --> 00:11:22,600 The range of games into which it might be incorporated as it became a dull. 111 00:11:22,600 --> 00:11:29,780 Yet viewed from another perspective, the snapping off of the arms seems less like the sort of casual cruelty that might be directed at an alternately 112 00:11:29,780 --> 00:11:36,890 loved and reviled toy and more like the latest act of violence directed at the body of the suffering Christ himself. 113 00:11:36,890 --> 00:11:43,280 The gaunt abdomen, with its puncture wounds rendered more meticulously than the rather rudimentary daubing of the beard and mouth and the 114 00:11:43,280 --> 00:11:50,900 resilient downward gaze seemed to withstand the force of and patiently to endure this latest act of iconoclastic brutality. 115 00:11:50,900 --> 00:11:55,880 What is one more wound to a body already so lacerated? 116 00:11:55,880 --> 00:12:01,500 While iconoclastic actions directed against rejected dieties from all religions have a paradoxical dimension 117 00:12:01,500 --> 00:12:07,610 in that they seem to express expressed belief in and fear of the very gods that they claim to deride. 118 00:12:07,610 --> 00:12:16,580 The strangest of these acts becomes particularly apparent when are directed against the already suffering and forlorn Christ as Brunetto Toure asks, 119 00:12:16,580 --> 00:12:23,060 How could you destroy an image that is already this much destroyed? 120 00:12:23,060 --> 00:12:28,190 And then I complete the chapter then by moving from the Fiddlehead crucifix and leaping into the modern world. 121 00:12:28,190 --> 00:12:35,150 In 2001, the California artists Shelley and Pamela Jackson launched a hypertext project titled The Bowl Games, 122 00:12:35,150 --> 00:12:39,230 in which they combined images of their childhood dolls and the objects associated with them, 123 00:12:39,230 --> 00:12:43,460 placed in various poses and surrounded by various schemes of text. 124 00:12:43,460 --> 00:12:48,130 The tone of their words lurches between the obviously tongue in cheek and the seemingly sincere. 125 00:12:48,130 --> 00:12:53,720 But the whole project seems calculated to trouble the very distinction between seriousness and play. 126 00:12:53,720 --> 00:12:59,600 It also seems designed to anticipate and nullify an advance any attempt to scholarly analysis, 127 00:12:59,600 --> 00:13:06,710 since the project is framed with an introduction supposedly supposedly written by Jeff Bellweather APHC, 128 00:13:06,710 --> 00:13:11,330 which is actually intermittently insightful but clearly a pastiche written by the sisters themselves. 129 00:13:11,330 --> 00:13:21,490 But what? The site's one of his own publications, which appears in the journal Postmodern Culture Vol. mdx i x v i x. 130 00:13:21,490 --> 00:13:26,630 What distinguishes the project for me is its unusually acute grasp that what the Jacksons are investigating is in a sense, 131 00:13:26,630 --> 00:13:34,400 not that childhood games at all, but that they are impossible adult imagining of their own childhood imaginations. 132 00:13:34,400 --> 00:13:38,600 As Pamela Jackson writes, what is a doll game is important. What is a doll? 133 00:13:38,600 --> 00:13:44,330 What are two kids playing in the project? We are archaeologists, voyeurs, utopians of doll games. 134 00:13:44,330 --> 00:13:45,770 Sometimes we're embarrassed. 135 00:13:45,770 --> 00:13:53,090 The doll games are inaccessible in lots of ways, fundamentally baffling, no matter how much we scour our memories and pore over the doll box. 136 00:13:53,090 --> 00:14:00,080 But it still seems possible as we assemble the fragments that we might be able to recover them somehow or even bring them to some new life. 137 00:14:00,080 --> 00:14:08,540 We're curious what that new life would be. And I take a sort of moral fierceness of the status of the rediscovered childhood toys. 138 00:14:08,540 --> 00:14:13,880 They frame it very, very, very seriously. But what's particular germane to my interests are the miniature character 139 00:14:13,880 --> 00:14:17,910 sketches which the sisters provide alongside pictures of many of their dolls. 140 00:14:17,910 --> 00:14:22,040 They're a great read. I really suggest you go and look at the website. It's just hilarious and an interesting one. 141 00:14:22,040 --> 00:14:26,200 Felix is a willowy, gentle preteen, but perhaps lacking in depth. 142 00:14:26,200 --> 00:14:28,840 And another Harvey originally a little red riding doll. 143 00:14:28,840 --> 00:14:39,860 I'm known Mike was at once tenderly lyrical and crudely predatory, both a hapless romantic with perfumed hair on a boat lout. 144 00:14:39,860 --> 00:14:44,860 But the figure to interested me most is the one who appears on the cover. 145 00:14:44,860 --> 00:14:52,580 I think the bowl games embody the mixture of triviality and depth of integrity and dissolution of humanity and inhumanity of pleasure and anxiety. 146 00:14:52,580 --> 00:15:00,490 But as the structure and the whole book, in a way, I argue, is integral to the object that emerges in iconoclastic child's play, the Idol. 147 00:15:00,490 --> 00:15:05,620 And they seem to be sure to the version of what I'm arguing when they suspended one of their characters, 148 00:15:05,620 --> 00:15:11,620 the splendidly named Josh McPeake, who adorns the cover of the book between the Sacred and the risible. 149 00:15:11,620 --> 00:15:17,500 Josh is the Josh, they say is the doll is the doll games archetypal manly man. 150 00:15:17,500 --> 00:15:19,090 But he had a vulnerable quality. 151 00:15:19,090 --> 00:15:26,380 His legs tangled weakly from his loosely jointed hips and later began to loosen and fall off after his hands and even eventually his left foot, 152 00:15:26,380 --> 00:15:29,230 making him a source of comedy, especially in the late falses. 153 00:15:29,230 --> 00:15:34,840 This is all there was still, but also transforming him in the end into what we can only see as the doll games. 154 00:15:34,840 --> 00:15:40,720 Sorrowful, suffering Christ, not so much suspended between the sacred and the ludicrous, 155 00:15:40,720 --> 00:15:49,720 perhaps as an embodiment of the sacred image of the sacred emerging amid the ludicrus, the sacred as ludicrous. 156 00:15:49,720 --> 00:15:55,150 Thank you. So that's all I will read. I know I am eager to hear from from others. 157 00:15:55,150 --> 00:16:00,820 Thank you very much, Joe. What you've just read, Drew, 158 00:16:00,820 --> 00:16:07,960 on on the very salient insights from Townsing that you mentioned at the beginning of the defacement 159 00:16:07,960 --> 00:16:17,230 of objects sort of creating new forms of affect and sacredness rather than dissipating them. 160 00:16:17,230 --> 00:16:23,140 If I might ask a question before I ask the others, too, I just wanted to ask about gender. 161 00:16:23,140 --> 00:16:32,860 You you move in the argument from doll to puppet and you talk about doll as not being not a small humanoid that we play with, 162 00:16:32,860 --> 00:16:40,630 but the dullness is the inherent the capacity to be animated. 163 00:16:40,630 --> 00:16:47,260 And you link that to the words the interchangeability of the words for girl and doll in many languages. 164 00:16:47,260 --> 00:16:49,600 And then in the next chapter, you go on to puppet. 165 00:16:49,600 --> 00:17:01,480 And there it's really not the inherent animation, but the kind of constitutive brokenness and capacity to sort of have violence done to it. 166 00:17:01,480 --> 00:17:09,730 And that's just come out in your judgement, big. And you say in that chapter, if the human were a part that we might say she's in, 167 00:17:09,730 --> 00:17:15,640 apparently one possessed of some agency, the ability to grab the puppet strings. 168 00:17:15,640 --> 00:17:22,390 And I was just struck by your use of the feminine pronoun in that sentence about the human generally. 169 00:17:22,390 --> 00:17:31,360 And I just wondered because I think feminists of the 90s might have thought the interchangeability of the words dolen girl 170 00:17:31,360 --> 00:17:41,290 say something about the tendency of of women to be objectified rather than thinking that it's about the inherent animation. 171 00:17:41,290 --> 00:17:52,640 So I just wondered if you could say something about. I know there are male dolls, but about the fact that we tend to identify girl and doll. 172 00:17:52,640 --> 00:17:59,640 Yeah. Thank you for that. It's a really, really interesting, important question. I think I think I was. 173 00:17:59,640 --> 00:18:06,390 I tried in the book to engage that there's been a lot of really good work done on dolls in various historical and cultural 174 00:18:06,390 --> 00:18:16,830 contexts and the inculcation of of of gender norms and especially the sort of provision of dolls to girls to sort of. 175 00:18:16,830 --> 00:18:26,370 As part of their a crucial part of this sort of supposedly teleological process towards becoming a sort of adult woman. 176 00:18:26,370 --> 00:18:30,450 And I suppose. Yes, it is. I cycle this in. 177 00:18:30,450 --> 00:18:35,610 But there's a particular good article and a reading by a classicist called Funny Dolinsky or Wolanski about this in Roman culture, 178 00:18:35,610 --> 00:18:37,800 which was hugely informative. 179 00:18:37,800 --> 00:18:45,840 But one thing, I suppose one of things I was I was struck by doing this work was that the because I suppose a lot of what's survived, 180 00:18:45,840 --> 00:18:52,200 a lot of the disorder material traces we can reconstruct to the dolls that were actually played with that very often in one way or another, 181 00:18:52,200 --> 00:18:56,500 elite objects by their nature. You know, the things that have been made, constructed, 182 00:18:56,500 --> 00:19:05,070 built out of durable materials and that they're the ones that tend to do actually more closely represent or resemble humans. 183 00:19:05,070 --> 00:19:09,600 And so one thing I was sort of interested in in questioning throughout the book was how? 184 00:19:09,600 --> 00:19:15,900 I mean, you know, I'm sort of interested in that idea of play as a as a as a linear as a part of a sort of linear development of a child. 185 00:19:15,900 --> 00:19:22,850 The idea that you can that, you know, there's a sort of tellefson of an a smooth and unbroken path towards it. 186 00:19:22,850 --> 00:19:29,010 But in a sense, I, I, I was interested these things that was much harder to reconstruct. 187 00:19:29,010 --> 00:19:34,920 That had to be partly a match, but he's much more sort of rough and ready objects that sort of passed in and out of the of the realm of play. 188 00:19:34,920 --> 00:19:43,410 And I felt precisely because of their more improvised nature, were less suitable in a sense for linear narratives of development, 189 00:19:43,410 --> 00:19:46,740 including those gendered narratives where play is supposed, you know, 190 00:19:46,740 --> 00:19:51,180 playing with the with the female doll is supposed to sort of make the female woman. 191 00:19:51,180 --> 00:19:54,210 And I wanted to spend just a final thought on this is that I mean, one thing. That's one thing. 192 00:19:54,210 --> 00:19:59,730 Reason I was struck by that is actually going back to the book starts with a scene from a preacher who wrote Edgeworth, 193 00:19:59,730 --> 00:20:05,280 which which Alex originally helped put me on to and was became they actually kind of censor off the book. 194 00:20:05,280 --> 00:20:10,110 And one thing that really struck me about it. So that's the thing that actually describes this scene of iconoclastic child's play in the household, 195 00:20:10,110 --> 00:20:13,230 is that it seemed, for reasons I don't think I ever fully was able to unpack, 196 00:20:13,230 --> 00:20:20,330 but it was struck by it very deliberately seemed to involve the whole family and to actually have to play, being directed at interest. 197 00:20:20,330 --> 00:20:26,070 The across gender lines. It seems to be a father talking to a daughter and a mother talking to a son. 198 00:20:26,070 --> 00:20:31,200 I'm not. Again, I'm not sure I have a fully scrapped what I wanted to do with violence. 199 00:20:31,200 --> 00:20:37,620 But it felt interesting to me at least, that this scene is more improvised. Open-Ended uncertain play. 200 00:20:37,620 --> 00:20:48,750 It seemed to seem to have a gender dimension that was not perhaps as as as clear as those sorts of idealised narratives that you're describing. 201 00:20:48,750 --> 00:20:57,570 I think it's a really important question. Thanks very much. I'd like to invite Matt to and respond to. 202 00:20:57,570 --> 00:21:04,710 Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, T.J., for inviting me. 203 00:21:04,710 --> 00:21:14,000 Last December, my five year old daughter Rosa turned to me in a swimming pool and apropos of absolutely nothing, said Daddy. 204 00:21:14,000 --> 00:21:22,110 Let's pretend you make inventions, then let's pretend they're useless so I can have them as toys. 205 00:21:22,110 --> 00:21:30,420 Later that day, I emailed Joe and asked him whether this is an update or a new twist on iconoclasm and play. 206 00:21:30,420 --> 00:21:35,880 And I begin here because I just want to in expressing my gratitude and admiration for Joe's book, 207 00:21:35,880 --> 00:21:42,270 I just want to stress something about the way that the book lived with me after I'd finished reading it. 208 00:21:42,270 --> 00:21:49,830 I think in Joe's book, meaning is is always tied up in some sense with motion. 209 00:21:49,830 --> 00:22:00,300 Child's play becomes, amongst other things, a means of revaluing or devaluing an object he believes very encourages, 210 00:22:00,300 --> 00:22:04,680 I think, to be alert to the uses and the reuses of play things and all things. 211 00:22:04,680 --> 00:22:14,850 But for me, crucially, he really wants us to resist merely functional conceptions of play. 212 00:22:14,850 --> 00:22:25,740 The book, I think, is really wonderfully alive to how, in fact we might confiscate play through the very act of interpreting it or instrumentalise it. 213 00:22:25,740 --> 00:22:29,490 So for me, it's already questing, questioning book. 214 00:22:29,490 --> 00:22:37,170 One of the best things about it for me, in fact, is the peculiar particular timing of Joe's questions. 215 00:22:37,170 --> 00:22:40,980 Just one page. Seventy seven is. 216 00:22:40,980 --> 00:22:51,000 Was it any more absurd to try and capture God in the wooden body of a puppet than in the flashily or would imperfect body of a human? 217 00:22:51,000 --> 00:22:53,020 Think the resonance of something like that. 218 00:22:53,020 --> 00:23:02,230 The way Joe constantly in this book sort of gives you a sense of an idea being broached, but not necessarily laboured or exhausted. 219 00:23:02,230 --> 00:23:13,120 This is one of them is one of the many strengths of the book. It's not afraid to give to give us space to let us read or have thoughts on one thought. 220 00:23:13,120 --> 00:23:24,970 For me, I think that really emerged as an as I think an implication of Joe's work is that whenever we're watching another person at play, 221 00:23:24,970 --> 00:23:36,410 perhaps especially a child, part of what we might be doing is actually relishing the primacy of their need to play. 222 00:23:36,410 --> 00:23:44,110 In other words, warming to a vision of the activity as a non divulge secret or mystery. 223 00:23:44,110 --> 00:23:53,750 A secret perhaps to its participant as well as its observer players are always becoming the play things 224 00:23:53,750 --> 00:24:01,790 in some way of their unconscious than ever wholly in the know about what it is that they're playing. 225 00:24:01,790 --> 00:24:07,730 At one point, Joe draws on. I mean, the book is richly sort of intellectually capacious. 226 00:24:07,730 --> 00:24:09,260 But there's one more where he draws on. 227 00:24:09,260 --> 00:24:19,280 Walter Benjamin's awareness of adaptive developmental accounts of play often say, as a form of repetition, as my me says, for example. 228 00:24:19,280 --> 00:24:24,800 But he also stresses how repetition creates a new kind of strangeness. 229 00:24:24,800 --> 00:24:29,960 It reminded me of this another bit in Benyamin where he observes that fit for a child. 230 00:24:29,960 --> 00:24:37,550 He says repetition is the soul of play and nothing gives a child greater pleasure than to say do it again. 231 00:24:37,550 --> 00:24:41,660 But then Benjamin adds the following, he says. 232 00:24:41,660 --> 00:24:53,000 And in fact, every profound experience longs to be insatiable, longs for return and repetition until the end of time. 233 00:24:53,000 --> 00:24:59,600 When a modern poet says that everyone has a picture for which he would be willing to give the whole world, 234 00:24:59,600 --> 00:25:04,910 how many people would not look for it in an old box of toys? 235 00:25:04,910 --> 00:25:11,440 I think for me is this idea of repetition, in fact, as a kind of incompletion? 236 00:25:11,440 --> 00:25:18,110 Of an experience which itself longs to be insatiable of repetition, in fact, 237 00:25:18,110 --> 00:25:31,930 as a normed working through with something that strikes me as particularly suggestive is that it runs as a kind of subterranean thread in this book. 238 00:25:31,930 --> 00:25:36,520 For me, the book really comes together without, as it were, 239 00:25:36,520 --> 00:25:48,100 coming together to march in Joe's superb readings of Broils painting of children at play and then the Dragon in spences for Mary Queen. 240 00:25:48,100 --> 00:25:52,810 And I'll just end by glancing here at the latter because of time constraints. 241 00:25:52,810 --> 00:26:07,690 But I think what Joe's reading allows us to see is that the Dragon is is a complication of the allegory that's been set up via the Dragons, 242 00:26:07,690 --> 00:26:12,700 very sense of pleasure in its own allegorical function. 243 00:26:12,700 --> 00:26:16,360 I thought that was just an amazing moment to jump. 244 00:26:16,360 --> 00:26:22,720 Joe talks about the Dragons doggie's delight at the arrival of the Knight as though it were saying, 245 00:26:22,720 --> 00:26:30,220 You're here at last after quite a wait for both of us. And then on the law is on the last page of the book, 246 00:26:30,220 --> 00:26:38,900 I think comes my my own my personal favourite set of questions in Joe's book, which I will just read. 247 00:26:38,900 --> 00:26:44,420 How does the dragon feel about being a vast, malevolent allegory? 248 00:26:44,420 --> 00:26:54,200 How was it passing the time as it waited for Red Cross on this sunny hillside before leaping up and practically wagging its vast, terrifying tale? 249 00:26:54,200 --> 00:26:59,740 Did they get bored? Did it play its own dragon games? 250 00:26:59,740 --> 00:27:06,730 Joe then adds. What does it say about me as a reader that I can find myself asking such bizarre questions? 251 00:27:06,730 --> 00:27:17,110 I think they're just great questions. I think they're in tune with the book's emphasis throughout on the inscrutability of play, 252 00:27:17,110 --> 00:27:23,980 on the value and the threat and the thrill of that inscrutability. 253 00:27:23,980 --> 00:27:33,760 In answer to that last question, no, I feel sure or almost sure that the dragon really did play its own dragon games. 254 00:27:33,760 --> 00:27:40,660 Thank you. Thank you, Matt. I'd like to call on Alex Walsham to respond. 255 00:27:40,660 --> 00:27:44,350 Now. Thank you very much. Well, 256 00:27:44,350 --> 00:27:51,340 it's particular pleasure to be invited to participate in this discussion of Joe's remarkable book for the 257 00:27:51,340 --> 00:27:58,730 reasons that he explained that it began its life in Cambridge and it's come to fruition here in Oxford. 258 00:27:58,730 --> 00:28:08,010 But I very much recall such stimulating discussions that Joe and I had as he was working on this in its early phases. 259 00:28:08,010 --> 00:28:19,480 And I'm completely dazzled by what has emerged. It's a work of extraordinary erudition that moves effortlessly across the disciplines, 260 00:28:19,480 --> 00:28:30,130 and it's filled with very penetrating insights about the nexus between play childhood and sacred violence through the ages. 261 00:28:30,130 --> 00:28:39,500 He's already alluded to that extraordinary passage from Roger Edgeworth sermon, which has long intrigued and puzzled me, too. 262 00:28:39,500 --> 00:28:49,930 And what it opens a window into is a world in the midst of immense and revolutionary change when objects that are hallowed by 263 00:28:49,930 --> 00:29:00,550 tradition and preserved in monasteries float free of their ecclesiastical mornings and end up in the irreverent hands of children. 264 00:29:00,550 --> 00:29:07,240 And that domestic scene is an intimate one in which parents and children, as he's already said, 265 00:29:07,240 --> 00:29:18,710 collude in a game that didn't use religious materiality of its power by reducing it to a mere placing. 266 00:29:18,710 --> 00:29:27,620 Now, what Joe's book seems to me to do is to compel us to recognise the fundamental ambivalence of those kinds of transactions. 267 00:29:27,620 --> 00:29:40,250 It illuminates them and also at the same time renders them even more strange and unsettling, subversive and generative than they initially seem. 268 00:29:40,250 --> 00:29:51,110 It also and I'm drawn to this as a historian. It engages with and questions a whole series of inherited paradigms associated with the Reformation, 269 00:29:51,110 --> 00:30:00,200 paradigms of disenchantment of the alleged antipathy of Protestantism towards play of what Peter Book once 270 00:30:00,200 --> 00:30:09,830 called the Triumph of Lent over Carnival and of iconoclasm as a midwife to the birth of the category of art. 271 00:30:09,830 --> 00:30:16,590 So there's a huge amount that I'd like to discuss and I am going to have to constrain what I say. 272 00:30:16,590 --> 00:30:21,390 But so I'm going to say four broad things that I hope there'll be a little time. 273 00:30:21,390 --> 00:30:30,830 But, Joe, for you to respond to the first is that I'm really fascinated by the insight that piety and play are not opposites, 274 00:30:30,830 --> 00:30:38,420 but dynamically intertwined in both the pre reformation period and the post reformation period. 275 00:30:38,420 --> 00:30:44,120 Your observation that the kind of rough and irreverent handling of holy objects was a feature of mediaeval 276 00:30:44,120 --> 00:30:52,340 religion as well as a mode of repudiating it in the post Reformation era is is really compelling, 277 00:30:52,340 --> 00:31:01,280 as is the question that you ask about how truly transformative was it to place them in a child's hand in that context, 278 00:31:01,280 --> 00:31:08,390 given their similarity of these actions with the power liturgical play of the Middle Ages? 279 00:31:08,390 --> 00:31:19,790 I'm also as a bit of an iconoclast myself, of these paradigms drawn to your questioning of these grand narratives that present play as a casualty 280 00:31:19,790 --> 00:31:28,010 of Protestantism and of modernity and your emphasis on the coexistence of those of those impulses. 281 00:31:28,010 --> 00:31:37,100 But I do confess that as a historian, I'm compelled to ask the boring historians question about change over time. 282 00:31:37,100 --> 00:31:45,350 What, if anything, did change as a result of the Reformation? And how significant in particular was Protestantism? 283 00:31:45,350 --> 00:31:52,400 Profound theological assault on my ontological status of sacred objects. 284 00:31:52,400 --> 00:32:01,280 So it's its rejection of their capacity to operate as containers and conduits of divine power and grace. 285 00:32:01,280 --> 00:32:05,720 And just as an aside, thinking about reflecting on the book, 286 00:32:05,720 --> 00:32:18,080 I found myself thinking that the word idolatry was more absent or at least less visible than I expected it to be. 287 00:32:18,080 --> 00:32:24,530 The second thing I'd like to say is about the phrase that you alluded to in your earlier introduction to it, 288 00:32:24,530 --> 00:32:29,840 about the sacred as ludicrous that really caught my eye. 289 00:32:29,840 --> 00:32:41,720 The word ludicrous is another curious word that has a relevant etymological root whose mutations and migration's in meaning are seen, 290 00:32:41,720 --> 00:32:50,210 I think, to be just as illuminating as toy Poppit trifle fetish and dull. 291 00:32:50,210 --> 00:32:56,030 It's a word that captures both a sense of jest, but also incredulity. 292 00:32:56,030 --> 00:33:04,670 And if you look at the OED, what that reveals is a very interesting drifting its significance from something that pertains to play or 293 00:33:04,670 --> 00:33:16,340 sport and is witty or humorous to something that is suited to derisive laughter is ridiculous and is absurd. 294 00:33:16,340 --> 00:33:26,180 So where does that shift fit in your story? One might also say that the word pastime has an interesting migration in meaning to. 295 00:33:26,180 --> 00:33:34,580 It starts as something that describes the elapse and passage of time and it ends up coming to denote the activity of play, 296 00:33:34,580 --> 00:33:38,540 a pleasurable hobby, a sport, a recreation itself. 297 00:33:38,540 --> 00:33:42,740 So what's the significance of those shifts in your story? 298 00:33:42,740 --> 00:33:52,840 Thirdly, and much more briefly, I was also perhaps a little surprised that you didn't do more with the idea of play and stage playing, 299 00:33:52,840 --> 00:33:59,900 how those two things connect to each other. Ludus and Ludi Crume that, you know, this is a common root. 300 00:33:59,900 --> 00:34:06,350 And how does that work out in in the context of the story you tell? 301 00:34:06,350 --> 00:34:17,360 The final thing I wanted to say was you describe your book as a study of the adults imagination of a child's imaginative play. 302 00:34:17,360 --> 00:34:22,400 And the adult imagination of the child as a cultural process. 303 00:34:22,400 --> 00:34:31,820 You're rightly cautious about the very possibility of entering the imagination of the playing child, him or herself. 304 00:34:31,820 --> 00:34:39,080 The child, therefore, remains ultimately, as has already been alluded to, elusive in the story. 305 00:34:39,080 --> 00:34:47,900 And this story is one that explores the adult prism through which such actions then as now were viewed. 306 00:34:47,900 --> 00:34:55,700 So are we doomed to be unable to study. Child's play through the prism? 307 00:34:55,700 --> 00:35:05,510 We're always going to view it through the prism of the adult, whether as the spectator or the orchestrator of that action or perhaps as the 308 00:35:05,510 --> 00:35:12,260 actor looking back on events that happened in an earlier phase of their life. 309 00:35:12,260 --> 00:35:18,440 And so what's lost to us as a consequence of that methodological obstacle? 310 00:35:18,440 --> 00:35:25,220 So that's where I'm going to finish. Thank you very much, Alex. 311 00:35:25,220 --> 00:35:32,220 I'd just like to quote an all final panellist, Kenneth Gross. Thank you. 312 00:35:32,220 --> 00:35:39,990 Thank you. It's really lovely to be here. I'm not sure if I have much to add to what people have said. 313 00:35:39,990 --> 00:35:45,610 I was I was thinking about the experience of reading the book. 314 00:35:45,610 --> 00:35:50,620 It's it's very intricately worked out and a beautifully organised around single words. 315 00:35:50,620 --> 00:36:00,500 But the weaving of theoretical reflection and story and anecdote is very is part of its pleasure. 316 00:36:00,500 --> 00:36:06,580 I think when I when other occasions when I've talked to people about puppets or dolls, 317 00:36:06,580 --> 00:36:12,610 I always ask people in the audience to say something about their experience of a dollar, a puppet. 318 00:36:12,610 --> 00:36:18,000 It's almost always something very strange and disturbing and unsettling sometimes in adults. 319 00:36:18,000 --> 00:36:21,170 It's something good, sometimes going back to childhood. 320 00:36:21,170 --> 00:36:28,000 And one of the things that I valued in the book was the time you take over these very fragmentary 321 00:36:28,000 --> 00:36:35,350 and elusive anecdotes like the one about the child being given that it was Edgeworth. 322 00:36:35,350 --> 00:36:43,660 Yes. The sermon where the child is the horror of the family where the child was given the doll to play with or where somebody snaps, 323 00:36:43,660 --> 00:36:47,050 breaks a crucifix and gives it for a child to play with. 324 00:36:47,050 --> 00:36:54,610 You just let those stories play in your own imagination and you ask questions you ask about what we didn't know. 325 00:36:54,610 --> 00:37:04,390 And there was something in the language, even as in the passage you read from, you know, what life does this broken crucifix live? 326 00:37:04,390 --> 00:37:07,720 What life did it live in the centuries when it wasn't known? 327 00:37:07,720 --> 00:37:17,260 That's already bringing your own sort of figurative language and storytelling into the analysis. 328 00:37:17,260 --> 00:37:24,890 The. And so that that into those particular anecdotes and stories which which should have resonated 329 00:37:24,890 --> 00:37:34,220 outwardly and your general recurrent gesture in the book to simply refuse hard and fast distinctions, 330 00:37:34,220 --> 00:37:43,000 to refuse the effort to put things, to divide things, to box them, to categorise them, and not in a trivial sort of way. 331 00:37:43,000 --> 00:37:53,300 And I say trivial part, which is probably the charge word, because the other thing about the book that's very valuable is its continual meditation on. 332 00:37:53,300 --> 00:38:03,740 What is and isn't trifling, what is and isn't important. The words of each chapter tend to be words which often apply to. 333 00:38:03,740 --> 00:38:08,420 Childish or silly or irrelevant things, a toy, a puppet, a doll, 334 00:38:08,420 --> 00:38:16,550 or they're they're used as terms of disdain and abuse as contempt and the wandering between the trifling, 335 00:38:16,550 --> 00:38:22,880 the urgent and the contemporary, contemptuous or contemptible is part of it. 336 00:38:22,880 --> 00:38:24,590 Just as people were talking. 337 00:38:24,590 --> 00:38:32,150 I realised that another continual fascination in the book is something you talk about specifically, but it sort of wanders. 338 00:38:32,150 --> 00:38:41,160 Is that the same power? Is that you attribute to dolls or idols? 339 00:38:41,160 --> 00:38:49,310 Their opacity, their alienists, their volatility, their their violence, their scandalous ness, their demonic powers, 340 00:38:49,310 --> 00:38:57,170 their their infectiousness, which are things you see as proper to them and things which others attribute to them. 341 00:38:57,170 --> 00:39:04,250 All of those adjectives are also applied to the children, playing to the children, using those objects. 342 00:39:04,250 --> 00:39:12,710 And there's this continual sort of weird crossing between the life of the child and the life of the 343 00:39:12,710 --> 00:39:19,550 object that the child plays with and that adults who watch and interpret the child playing with. 344 00:39:19,550 --> 00:39:27,030 That's part of the energy of the book. If I had only one question, it would be. 345 00:39:27,030 --> 00:39:30,910 I'm curious. You won't have time to answer this on screen. 346 00:39:30,910 --> 00:39:39,120 I know the analysis of the great candidate of the last dragon in book, one of the fairy queen. 347 00:39:39,120 --> 00:39:44,610 I was thinking about the other last monster in the fairy queen proper. 348 00:39:44,610 --> 00:39:50,610 At the end of Book six, there's an even more frightening monster who is a monster of iconoclasm. 349 00:39:50,610 --> 00:39:52,020 The blatant beast, too, 350 00:39:52,020 --> 00:40:03,480 is like sort of overgrown bully child and who is shown breaking into the monasteries and destroying and defiling sacred and holy things. 351 00:40:03,480 --> 00:40:10,530 What's that particular account of the paradoxes of iconoclasm has always haunted me because on the one hand, 352 00:40:10,530 --> 00:40:16,950 it's seen as profane, as destructive as as doing violence to the sacred. 353 00:40:16,950 --> 00:40:24,390 And yet, Spencer says the monitoring is full of infected, disgusted, properly base forms of religion. 354 00:40:24,390 --> 00:40:37,830 It's both. So the blatant beast is both doing a proper work of unfolding so infected sacred work and yet seen as profaning something truly sacred. 355 00:40:37,830 --> 00:40:43,750 So that was all. Thank you. Thank you. 356 00:40:43,750 --> 00:40:51,470 And thank you, everyone. Joe, I am, too. And the problem with looking at lunchtime is that lunchtime is too short. 357 00:40:51,470 --> 00:40:56,450 And I think this is not a very long time for you to respond. Please respond. 358 00:40:56,450 --> 00:41:03,500 And in five minutes, I'll call and say something just brief in response to each of those. 359 00:41:03,500 --> 00:41:10,760 Thank you so much to each of you for those wonderfully generous and also thought provoking and searching remarks. 360 00:41:10,760 --> 00:41:17,240 I'll try to be brief and then so with Fred open for questions, but I'm so just I'll I'll go in the order that you spoke. 361 00:41:17,240 --> 00:41:22,550 Thanks. Thank you for your drawing out the strong about repetition. I think that's really. 362 00:41:22,550 --> 00:41:27,650 Yeah. It's one of the things that I don't I don't very often in the book sort of make it the focus. 363 00:41:27,650 --> 00:41:30,930 But it's constantly at stake and something I continue to think about it. 364 00:41:30,930 --> 00:41:35,990 It strikes me that it's not something or perhaps it's something that we're better in academic 365 00:41:35,990 --> 00:41:40,460 right to get talking about in the abstract than actually thinking about the experience. 366 00:41:40,460 --> 00:41:45,560 And so in the way that so much about reading a poem is actually about repeat reading and changing 367 00:41:45,560 --> 00:41:51,310 encounters with its end and not something that sense that somehow there isn't space for that in, 368 00:41:51,310 --> 00:41:55,610 you know, very often. And what in what we sort of think of as a as a reading. 369 00:41:55,610 --> 00:42:00,290 So but it just makes you think also of a wonderful book I read in the last few months. 370 00:42:00,290 --> 00:42:03,500 This is on the recommendation of Jeff Dalven and I think was hoping to join the cold. 371 00:42:03,500 --> 00:42:08,510 I don't know if these ideas I'm cold on repeat this book by musicologist about about the extremes, 372 00:42:08,510 --> 00:42:13,220 repetition full of amazing stuff by your scientific interest or actually what happens to our brain. 373 00:42:13,220 --> 00:42:17,930 And a bit of stood out for me and maybe think back to the book is this amazing psychological experiment. 374 00:42:17,930 --> 00:42:24,370 She writes that she can go and do online, which is basically I think she's with Diana Deutsch, the woman who did it. 375 00:42:24,370 --> 00:42:28,760 It's some it's a it's a spoken phrase that I won't say too much, 376 00:42:28,760 --> 00:42:34,180 but you shouldn't try to say it's a spoken phrase that you hear it and then you hear repetition and another repetition, 377 00:42:34,180 --> 00:42:39,440 unproper, 85, 90 percent of people, you suddenly start to hear part of the phrase as music. 378 00:42:39,440 --> 00:42:43,550 It sort of turns into music. So it hasn't changed. It's just the experience of being repeated. 379 00:42:43,550 --> 00:42:48,170 Your brain music realises it. And it's the most extraordinary thing. 380 00:42:48,170 --> 00:42:53,600 I did it. We that no one wants to hear it all to play it to everybody. I played it to my son's primary school class so they could all hear it. 381 00:42:53,600 --> 00:43:00,020 They all love that. And so that sense, that music that that that the repetition on the one hand can deaden, 382 00:43:00,020 --> 00:43:05,900 but repetition can literally make language sort of burst into song to seem like a sort of wonderful metaphor for how we can 383 00:43:05,900 --> 00:43:11,540 think about the different things that are different things it can do is I want to thank you for pulling us out very much. 384 00:43:11,540 --> 00:43:16,820 Alex, I won't be able to answer all your questions at all. I just wanna say one thing, which, um, because I think, um, 385 00:43:16,820 --> 00:43:21,380 I guess what I'd like to focus on is that is the question about how you can account for change over time. 386 00:43:21,380 --> 00:43:26,550 I think that's really important because I definitely am aware of that risk that that there's a you know, 387 00:43:26,550 --> 00:43:31,460 that that if you're tempted to start stressing continuity over, change it. 388 00:43:31,460 --> 00:43:36,290 Which I think is on one of the porters do we could easily fall into a way of being like, well, it was all terribly complicated. 389 00:43:36,290 --> 00:43:41,780 I mean, you know, you haven't really accounted for. For what in fact, happened. I'm trying to think we've answered this. 390 00:43:41,780 --> 00:43:47,750 It isn't sort of terribly sweeping and I won't regret. But I was thinking also about you allude to this. 391 00:43:47,750 --> 00:43:52,100 I think the way one thing one of the things about this topic that interests me is the way which. 392 00:43:52,100 --> 00:43:56,130 So the developmental narratives of human life, the moved from childhood to adulthood, 393 00:43:56,130 --> 00:44:00,570 has often been used to think about historical changes were moved from a childhood of civilisation, 394 00:44:00,570 --> 00:44:07,650 whether that's sort of idealised or also the derogated. And I wondered, as I was thinking about your question, I wondered if perhaps why I say. 395 00:44:07,650 --> 00:44:14,660 I mean, you know, there clearly are there are huge changes on underfoot in the Reformation to do with the catchphrase 396 00:44:14,660 --> 00:44:20,810 of materiality and the way in which you can effectively relate to that materiality or not. 397 00:44:20,810 --> 00:44:29,610 So I guess I wouldn't deny that there is a sort of that there is that they get that there is probably overall less of, you know, 398 00:44:29,610 --> 00:44:31,620 if it is helpful to think of these terms, you know, 399 00:44:31,620 --> 00:44:38,640 less of an of an emphasis on these forms of effectively charged material engagement as a basis for the piety. 400 00:44:38,640 --> 00:44:44,640 But why? What interests me is that a bit like narratives of each of human development. 401 00:44:44,640 --> 00:44:48,900 What I understand is that as a as a process, that is that is that, yes. 402 00:44:48,900 --> 00:44:55,500 Leads to a change of emphasis. But like, you know, when I try to say we're tempted when we think about human development, 403 00:44:55,500 --> 00:44:59,920 to want to see it as a linear progressive process in which things get left behind and moved on. 404 00:44:59,920 --> 00:45:02,670 And so if you have forgotten that X date, 405 00:45:02,670 --> 00:45:08,660 actually we're constantly living with the remnants of things that we haven't fully overcome, but tell ourselves that we have. 406 00:45:08,660 --> 00:45:11,580 And I'd say something similar about the Reformation. It's a process. 407 00:45:11,580 --> 00:45:19,740 It's a huge change of emphasis, which people are trying to convince themselves and others is an absolute change of substance. 408 00:45:19,740 --> 00:45:24,750 So it's so there that so there is change, but there's it is that there's change that has to deny the forms. 409 00:45:24,750 --> 00:45:29,400 It is often tempted to deny the forms of underlying continuity that actually exist. 410 00:45:29,400 --> 00:45:34,890 And so that's where for me it's beebees works to get us to see what it's like to live with the ambivalence 411 00:45:34,890 --> 00:45:40,320 of this is imperfect or incomplete disavowal or convince yourself that something's been fully overcome. 412 00:45:40,320 --> 00:45:44,370 That hasn't stopped. That for me is where the interests lie. So there is still there. 413 00:45:44,370 --> 00:45:48,570 I think and acknowledgement of of of change. 414 00:45:48,570 --> 00:45:53,250 But the change that's happening and the change that's supposed to be happening are not necessarily the same, the same. 415 00:45:53,250 --> 00:45:56,520 And it's that gap that interests me and that this phenomenon takes us today. 416 00:45:56,520 --> 00:46:01,510 But I think it's a really I don't know if that's a by final answer, as it were. 417 00:46:01,510 --> 00:46:06,900 I think that it's some. But thank you for the questions and cannot be very I'll be very brief. 418 00:46:06,900 --> 00:46:10,590 Thank you for asking. Spencer. I mean, the place and place is wonderful. 419 00:46:10,590 --> 00:46:16,260 And I'm I suppose for those who have read the very great I mean, it's you know, it's it's a bit to read. 420 00:46:16,260 --> 00:46:20,130 It's completely, completely wild at the end of this poem that it's sort of I mean, 421 00:46:20,130 --> 00:46:26,160 the I guess what I would say is that it was important to me that that the that the poem in its sixth book 422 00:46:26,160 --> 00:46:31,620 form ends its sixth book ends with a monster who was threatening in all the ways that you've described. 423 00:46:31,620 --> 00:46:38,400 And it's not finally contained. Right. I mean, it seems very important that the attempt to find and restrict it fails. 424 00:46:38,400 --> 00:46:41,800 And the part ends with it's still sort of on the loose. And so I think. 425 00:46:41,800 --> 00:46:46,230 I guess. I thought he wasn't consciously doing this, but I think in a way, 426 00:46:46,230 --> 00:46:51,870 in a way that does sort of that seemed to me to sort of retrospectively authorise my interest in 427 00:46:51,870 --> 00:46:57,140 the drag that Spencer wants us to think that these monsters are things that don't get dealt with, 428 00:46:57,140 --> 00:46:59,990 that don't you know, they're not you know, 429 00:46:59,990 --> 00:47:05,370 that that so killing something and going on to the next adventure doesn't mean you've solved the problem that it represents. 430 00:47:05,370 --> 00:47:09,630 And so it's a little bit linked to my answer to Alex, actually, that I think it's about. 431 00:47:09,630 --> 00:47:23,590 A rhetoric of overcoming and leaving behind versus a that sort of continued need to reckon with what lingers and what doesn't get Woodforde. 432 00:47:23,590 --> 00:47:27,150 Thank you. Thank you, Joe. 433 00:47:27,150 --> 00:47:38,010 I mean, I think we're sort of about to, if that's okay with sort of about the time now to welcome Westpac to chair questions from the wider audience. 434 00:47:38,010 --> 00:47:46,520 If people could put questions into the queue in a box, that would be great. 435 00:47:46,520 --> 00:47:53,820 Thank you. Yeah, we have one already from Jeff Tovan, who says, Matt Ray's repetition. 436 00:47:53,820 --> 00:48:01,500 Joe, I know you're interested in rhythm. Iconoclasm is surely partly a breaking of rhythm, lost regularities of liturgy and so on. 437 00:48:01,500 --> 00:48:12,450 So is there a rhythm to play? Or I guess to paraphrase him, is play always in some sense, disruptive? 438 00:48:12,450 --> 00:48:18,160 I think some. Yes, I mean, I think I think I've found it. 439 00:48:18,160 --> 00:48:22,510 I think you kind of see my interest in rhythm in my oldest works beginning to emerge. 440 00:48:22,510 --> 00:48:28,600 And so I think this is I look back at the book as wanting to find yourself big interest in things you don't fully remember. 441 00:48:28,600 --> 00:48:32,920 I think I think there is. But I think the interest to me and rhythm is precisely that. 442 00:48:32,920 --> 00:48:41,590 It is that it it encapsulates a range of more or less regular and predictable forms. 443 00:48:41,590 --> 00:48:48,490 That there has to be a certain rhythm to be recognisable as rhythm has to be somewhere within 444 00:48:48,490 --> 00:48:54,580 a spectrum of total difference of one end and total sameness at the end of the other. 445 00:48:54,580 --> 00:49:02,650 So I think. I think. Yes, I think play for me is a way of thinking about. 446 00:49:02,650 --> 00:49:14,100 The rhythms of experience in so far as. It's it's it's it's sort of embody is it to sort of embody the different possibilities of what rhythm can be? 447 00:49:14,100 --> 00:49:23,250 There's always there's sort of either the temptation or the nightmare to imagine a form of play, which is kind of always, always and never the same. 448 00:49:23,250 --> 00:49:31,800 But it also contains the possibility of rhythms as things that change and very, very to keep us interested and and for their own reasons. 449 00:49:31,800 --> 00:49:35,220 So I think it for me is a useful way of thinking about the possibilities that pull 450 00:49:35,220 --> 00:49:40,080 at that plate and contain rather than there being a sort of single defining rhythm. 451 00:49:40,080 --> 00:49:43,530 Thank you, Joe. Does anybody else want to come in there? 452 00:49:43,530 --> 00:49:52,740 If not, I have another question, which is actually one of my own, if I may put one in and that's who's listening to you all variously speak. 453 00:49:52,740 --> 00:49:57,130 I had a sort of Metcher question which comes out of your wrist. Your last response. 454 00:49:57,130 --> 00:50:04,200 Yeah. Which is about thinking the Reformation as a change of emphasis, which some people think of as a change of substance. 455 00:50:04,200 --> 00:50:10,080 And I wanted to sort of turn that back on the ways in which you work with literature. 456 00:50:10,080 --> 00:50:15,360 In other words, is the kind of work that you're doing effecting a kind of change of substance, 457 00:50:15,360 --> 00:50:22,110 of the literary experience through this, drawing attention to things beyond that. 458 00:50:22,110 --> 00:50:29,520 Shall we say? Or would you think this more as a kind of change of emphasis where all the other stuff still lingers? 459 00:50:29,520 --> 00:50:35,400 I'm just I'm really intrigued by this kind of lingering that's going on in your discussion. 460 00:50:35,400 --> 00:50:38,820 Are you talking about methodology? I am talking about methodology effectively. 461 00:50:38,820 --> 00:50:51,060 How how does your kind of bringing of a whole range of different methodological insights and procedures change the actual the toy, 462 00:50:51,060 --> 00:50:57,040 the dole, the the the fetish. That is the text. 463 00:50:57,040 --> 00:51:04,870 I think he has a weaker question and. And again, other panellist, please do jump in at point, I don't want to just just talk. 464 00:51:04,870 --> 00:51:13,460 Talk to her herself. But some interesting I mean, the that the, um, the first detailed review that the book got by Rachel Isaam Draught is going to 465 00:51:13,460 --> 00:51:17,220 be talking about the book was later in the term was sort of picks up on that, 466 00:51:17,220 --> 00:51:25,130 what she described as a sort of theoretical brick collage in the book and was slightly sort of unsure about that as a as a move which I 467 00:51:25,130 --> 00:51:31,130 which I can understand and I think is very interesting criticism that it felt like a bit of a sort of theoretical free for all in some way. 468 00:51:31,130 --> 00:51:39,410 And and I'm sort of okay with that up to a point. I think for me. 469 00:51:39,410 --> 00:51:45,410 I don't talk about this directly in the book. But he felt it was it was partly interesting to engage with theories of play because so many. 470 00:51:45,410 --> 00:51:49,880 Because it actually turned out to be a sort of common ground between lots of theoretical approaches or interesting. 471 00:51:49,880 --> 00:51:56,720 Not not common ground. What they said, but lots of them set tended to either make you solve or actually argue for a version of play as 472 00:51:56,720 --> 00:52:01,100 a as a model for critical practise or is actually something being there was up for discussion. 473 00:52:01,100 --> 00:52:04,350 And so I felt like, in a way, in the book, it sort of freed me up. 474 00:52:04,350 --> 00:52:08,930 But I think I just sort of I did allow myself to kind of avail myself of certain things. 475 00:52:08,930 --> 00:52:12,380 But, for example, it goes back a little bit, too, to Ken's comment as well, actually, 476 00:52:12,380 --> 00:52:16,550 that I felt resentful that by starting this the book with this Roger Edgerton, 477 00:52:16,550 --> 00:52:25,640 it ties in with this particular scene from from a sermon that it felt kind of in sort of indebted in some larger way to the sort 478 00:52:25,640 --> 00:52:32,330 of new historicist tactic of the arresting opening anecdote that was going to be of unfolded like a present or like a pass. 479 00:52:32,330 --> 00:52:37,370 The parcel was how many layers of presence and every layer. 480 00:52:37,370 --> 00:52:43,200 But I was interested to sort of not to sort of stay with with it and sort of not move on to the chapter, 481 00:52:43,200 --> 00:52:46,790 to the real event being had reading of Spencer. 482 00:52:46,790 --> 00:52:52,340 So I felt like it was always tempting to then sort of present what I'm doing as some kind of critical play. 483 00:52:52,340 --> 00:52:53,840 But again, I was I was sort of funny. 484 00:52:53,840 --> 00:52:59,400 Everyone was doing that, but never but not really articulating the idea of the absurdity did play they were assuming in the process. 485 00:52:59,400 --> 00:53:06,560 So. So it felt like at times like I was. 486 00:53:06,560 --> 00:53:12,060 But what was one most about doing that was it felt like there's a temptation to argue against a critical position because I 487 00:53:12,060 --> 00:53:17,340 felt like I was actually able to take certain things like the anger and actually do and try and change it into something. 488 00:53:17,340 --> 00:53:23,010 I'm trying to effect transformation more in the what you describe rather than just rushing things off, as we're sometimes inclined to do. 489 00:53:23,010 --> 00:53:32,790 Yeah, absolutely. I think, Matthew, you've got something to say here on that. Yeah, just well, partly just I was a fan of the brick, a large part. 490 00:53:32,790 --> 00:53:36,560 There's a moment in your book where I think you talk about one thing that feels weirdly 491 00:53:36,560 --> 00:53:41,100 a historical must be that all parents have said to all children throughout the ages, 492 00:53:41,100 --> 00:53:46,130 play nicely. And I like the fact that your book doesn't play nicely. 493 00:53:46,130 --> 00:53:54,150 So but the question does relate to method. I had a question that relates to this question about the way which play might linger. 494 00:53:54,150 --> 00:54:06,050 When one thought one had surmounted it, when one has become allegedly mature, the book's general sceptical CISM about certain models of development. 495 00:54:06,050 --> 00:54:07,680 And it perhaps relates to the thing you talked about. 496 00:54:07,680 --> 00:54:17,400 Were you saying about the reader or the adult as a voyeur of doll games and the book's interest in the adults imagination of the child? 497 00:54:17,400 --> 00:54:29,050 Yes, I got a sense as I was reading and maybe you do make this explicit at points, which is the sense that the child is the adult plaything. 498 00:54:29,050 --> 00:54:33,780 And the versions of Achu interpretation before art. 499 00:54:33,780 --> 00:54:41,940 I felt this very much in the in your interpretation of the Breugel was a form of plague, 500 00:54:41,940 --> 00:54:49,670 as though as though the book was surreptitiously asking, how do you know when you're not playing? 501 00:54:49,670 --> 00:54:54,680 I don't know if that makes any sense. I can see the danger just simply saying that you don't. 502 00:54:54,680 --> 00:54:57,530 There's nothing more out of that. I'm a playful critic or whatever, 503 00:54:57,530 --> 00:55:12,370 but just an actual thought about how adults themselves in in interpreting art objects are joining in with play when they think they might not be. 504 00:55:12,370 --> 00:55:18,700 Thanks. That's great. Think it speaks to the methods of women? I exactly as you say, the kind of risk of it's much more interesting to me. 505 00:55:18,700 --> 00:55:22,280 Thank you for putting it in a way that really helps me make clear something I don't think I fully thought through. 506 00:55:22,280 --> 00:55:26,500 But exactly that, in a way, the minute you say I'm a playful critic, 507 00:55:26,500 --> 00:55:33,730 you are again implicitly assuming a certain model of play that you know and a fully able to carry out. 508 00:55:33,730 --> 00:55:37,660 Only in the conscious ways that you intend to and want to. Whereas the sense that. 509 00:55:37,660 --> 00:55:42,490 Which I try. I sort of bring through that more. I think in the book, in relation to artworks or literary works, 510 00:55:42,490 --> 00:55:47,780 that we might be playing with them without realising what that is, but that there's a broader thought. 511 00:55:47,780 --> 00:55:51,340 You know, am I playing without realising? Is it really. That's that's that's wonderful. 512 00:55:51,340 --> 00:55:55,570 Thank you. If I could come in here. 513 00:55:55,570 --> 00:56:01,620 I'm aware that we're nearly up to two o'clock. But let's carry on for a little while longer if we can. 514 00:56:01,620 --> 00:56:08,700 I know that Alex in particular needs to go off to. We've saved him from some of the committee meeting, but she has to go off to another one. 515 00:56:08,700 --> 00:56:15,780 But there are some more questions. So if people are happy to carry on for five, ten more minutes, then then let's do so. 516 00:56:15,780 --> 00:56:21,030 But I should thank Alex for being here before she has to run off. 517 00:56:21,030 --> 00:56:24,840 And anyway, so you can you can pop in. But there's a question here. 518 00:56:24,840 --> 00:56:28,590 I'm gonna take the second one first. Where? Which follows on from the impulses of Alex, in fact, 519 00:56:28,590 --> 00:56:33,450 where the court the toys we've been talking about are material dolls, sometimes fantastical and so on. 520 00:56:33,450 --> 00:56:37,070 What about those instance where people become toys, where humans are mocked? 521 00:56:37,070 --> 00:56:44,820 Played within a trifling way. An example they're given is Malvolio. Who should represent a kind of Puritan iconoclasm. 522 00:56:44,820 --> 00:56:52,110 But he's actually turned into a toy for his puritanism and for his kind of reformation identity. 523 00:56:52,110 --> 00:57:00,930 So again, it is asking the question about the inhuman and the human that the borderline there, as well as the sort of agency question that the. 524 00:57:00,930 --> 00:57:06,700 Alex. I want to. Have you got time to think about that or do you want to add to that? 525 00:57:06,700 --> 00:57:12,820 No worry. That's really. And again, I think this does sort of pick up on things that both Alex and Ken said indifferently, 526 00:57:12,820 --> 00:57:18,560 like Alex's question about stage play fields germane here and Ken's point about the sorts 527 00:57:18,560 --> 00:57:26,780 of the sorts of uncertainty about where where the subject ends and the object begins. 528 00:57:26,780 --> 00:57:28,670 It is interesting to think about Malvolio as a puppet. 529 00:57:28,670 --> 00:57:36,390 I'd never actually think of the daughter offering as some sort of stringing string him or something. 530 00:57:36,390 --> 00:57:43,400 And and and especially because, as I talk about in the book and as tennis was written about as well, 531 00:57:43,400 --> 00:57:47,540 because puppets because puppetry in particular is such a tempting metaphor for the way in 532 00:57:47,540 --> 00:57:53,570 which we might be controlled by higher forces above us all the way back to Plato and so on. 533 00:57:53,570 --> 00:58:01,070 So I guess what I would say is I think I pretty would fall back on the sense of part of what play. 534 00:58:01,070 --> 00:58:05,750 I think part of the play does and it was an honour sort of too much about this before. 535 00:58:05,750 --> 00:58:12,190 But I think he had some similar was facing similar issues in his work on Wordsworth. It's a great challenge to write about play without idealising. 536 00:58:12,190 --> 00:58:16,010 And one of things I want to and also sentimentalise again. And that was a risk I was concerned. 537 00:58:16,010 --> 00:58:20,760 Thank you so much, Alex. Thank you. That was a risk I was sort of constantly trying to be aware of. 538 00:58:20,760 --> 00:58:27,980 And and so this day, this sense, I think, came through in all the remarks about my interest in the book. 539 00:58:27,980 --> 00:58:37,880 And I kind of play as a space of quite, quite genuine and potentially violent uncertainty means that means, 540 00:58:37,880 --> 00:58:41,710 you know, that that is a space for where subjects and objects get. 541 00:58:41,710 --> 00:58:48,850 And this is also a space where caring for something and and being cruel and violence is something kind of gets kind of gets confused. 542 00:58:48,850 --> 00:58:52,100 And so it's I think is actually quite important to keep that sense of it as a 543 00:58:52,100 --> 00:58:58,580 as a space of potential cruelty and and to to think what was done to my body. 544 00:58:58,580 --> 00:59:05,420 But I think it's still belonging in the realm of play. I think it really is really ethically important for that reason. 545 00:59:05,420 --> 00:59:09,010 So I was saying goodbye, but I realise maybe you're putting a hand up to speak. I'm sorry. 546 00:59:09,010 --> 00:59:12,790 Okay. I was actually wanting to say sumptuary. 547 00:59:12,790 --> 00:59:22,310 Sorry. And that was that's actually just I was just very quickly looking at your index and checking that one 548 00:59:22,310 --> 00:59:30,320 really fascinating set piece on this whole issue is Ben Johnson's Bartholemew Fair Zeil of the Land. 549 00:59:30,320 --> 00:59:37,010 Busi is exactly made into the pockets that he denounces and that, you know, 550 00:59:37,010 --> 00:59:43,970 there's another whole story there behind that that could be worth thinking about. 551 00:59:43,970 --> 00:59:47,660 Thank you. That's a really good point. I don't have a good answer to that question about states. 552 00:59:47,660 --> 00:59:54,820 I mean, I might my my first book, the one about touch, I sort of say at one point I'm not going to write about drama, but I a while to do this. 553 00:59:54,820 --> 00:59:57,350 Like, I love drama. I love teaching drama, thinking about drama. 554 00:59:57,350 --> 01:00:00,920 But I keep sort of leaving it have to be it just feels like it's such a complicated thing. 555 01:00:00,920 --> 01:00:07,280 But I think the Johnson example is actually fantastic. I guess also with the puppets, partly because of having the example of, you know, 556 01:00:07,280 --> 01:00:11,170 because Ken does so much on it in his book on the subject, the portrait. 557 01:00:11,170 --> 01:00:15,600 In a way, my puppet chapter is not that much about the literal puppets. 558 01:00:15,600 --> 01:00:21,530 So all seen what we've how we encounter religious objects in the context of these of these interesting puppetry. 559 01:00:21,530 --> 01:00:27,020 But but but yet. But the Johnson and Johnson thinks about the gender and sexuality of puppets and such interesting ways and so on. 560 01:00:27,020 --> 01:00:35,120 So there's lots to say that. But some like that reminder. The one thing I thought about earlier is that the people playing with another will end up 561 01:00:35,120 --> 01:00:41,060 realising that their play gets out of hand and they have to they they can't control the response. 562 01:00:41,060 --> 01:00:49,780 And the other manipulators like the Fool are playing games that aren't the games of. 563 01:00:49,780 --> 01:01:02,650 Sir Toby Belch and Mariah said that there are multiple attempts to control him, none of which can quite exhaust the cost of the play. 564 01:01:02,650 --> 01:01:08,660 So they also have become, if I may, they also become aware of their own capacity for cruelty, I think. 565 01:01:08,660 --> 01:01:11,440 But I seeing other people play with Malvolio. 566 01:01:11,440 --> 01:01:17,050 So, I mean, it's a sort of I think that's part of what's happening in that moment, if if I'm understanding you. 567 01:01:17,050 --> 01:01:25,060 Right. You know, the cruelty this is I remember I met years ago a young German puppeteer who said she 568 01:01:25,060 --> 01:01:31,150 really never knew how to use her puppets until she destroyed them and remade them. 569 01:01:31,150 --> 01:01:37,230 That there is something very unsettling and beautiful about that. Mm hmm. 570 01:01:37,230 --> 01:01:44,480 We have a couple more questions. One is goes from Gordon testee of you. 571 01:01:44,480 --> 01:01:53,140 I think you can see the questions as we're going along. And that's about, again, the choice he evokes the motive, Benyamin. 572 01:01:53,140 --> 01:01:57,670 Her leaving the taxi filled with choice. And it's a more general question. 573 01:01:57,670 --> 01:02:04,910 Are the toys happy or sad? Do you have a response to that, Joe? 574 01:02:04,910 --> 01:02:09,400 Thank you, Gordon. Are his toys at recess? 575 01:02:09,400 --> 01:02:15,960 I think. I think I think I'm going to say beyond happiness and sadness, I don't I don't. 576 01:02:15,960 --> 01:02:21,420 I'm not sure I have a good answer to that. But I basically think of. I do mention it briefly in the in the book. 577 01:02:21,420 --> 01:02:29,960 What makes me think of Kafka's Kafka's ultra dark, mysterious, spindly, barely human figure. 578 01:02:29,960 --> 01:02:37,540 Which which. Which. Well, again, it feels like it goes a little bit back to my original answer to Lorna's question, 579 01:02:37,540 --> 01:02:45,820 which is that the objects of interest to me in this book are the ones to whom it seems very strange to even try and attributes an emotional range. 580 01:02:45,820 --> 01:02:54,820 But but it nonetheless happens, right? I mean, this kind of is the sort of the sort of exorbitant of that attempt in the face of 581 01:02:54,820 --> 01:03:00,300 something that's so meagre and so and provides so few sort of hooks or affordance. 582 01:03:00,300 --> 01:03:07,480 It's for us to do that. So that's a that's a slight dodge of Gordon's question this century. 583 01:03:07,480 --> 01:03:16,570 Well, it raises I mean, 308, you're raising the question of. In a sense of assigning agency or humanity or some kind of affect to go right 584 01:03:16,570 --> 01:03:20,470 back to where Lorna started to something that may or may not be just as it were, 585 01:03:20,470 --> 01:03:28,720 just an object. And in a way, that's what's in the last question that we have from this president, which is to do with personification, 586 01:03:28,720 --> 01:03:35,440 deep personification and the symbolisation as a kind of essential part of iconoclasm. 587 01:03:35,440 --> 01:03:48,210 I'll give you a moment to read it. I'm obviously excited because it's about monsters, because monsters, but it's more complex. 588 01:03:48,210 --> 01:03:53,810 Goodbye, Alex. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alex. 589 01:03:53,810 --> 01:04:02,590 And friends, the ones in the category of the monstrous. And how things at. 590 01:04:02,590 --> 01:04:08,770 Tended to be terrible. Come to seem lovable. Interesting. 591 01:04:08,770 --> 01:04:13,250 This relates to the. Is this right, perhaps to the Dragon said. Yes. 592 01:04:13,250 --> 01:04:17,500 The dog. Oh, joke. The dog dragon. It's it's Amstutz. 593 01:04:17,500 --> 01:04:21,000 And I think I'll say that again. 594 01:04:21,000 --> 01:04:28,140 I'm sorry. I can't. I think a lot of this film comes with quite a bit more historical detail on on Dragons and in Spences, England. 595 01:04:28,140 --> 01:04:32,810 I think some of which some of which may have stayed in. But I kept coming across these sorts of that. 596 01:04:32,810 --> 01:04:35,700 They're very funny things about the way which resample dragons. 597 01:04:35,700 --> 01:04:43,200 Well, you know, when all that sort of St George projects and things are getting abolished, what often happens is St George goes quite early. 598 01:04:43,200 --> 01:04:46,890 But the dragon actually comes around for several decades. This is great. 599 01:04:46,890 --> 01:04:50,910 I think the one in Norwich is called Old SNOP. What kind of some description? 600 01:04:50,910 --> 01:04:57,600 I just love this somehow comes to mind. Let's for ages reading this question, I imagine this guy in a Dragon Trust, Juban, 601 01:04:57,600 --> 01:05:04,200 in late 16th century Norwich was sitting on a stone outside the cathedral's and waiting for someone else to come out and play with him again. 602 01:05:04,200 --> 01:05:08,820 And so there is there is something interesting about the kind of the sort of 603 01:05:08,820 --> 01:05:14,390 rendering loveable of the of the seemingly terrible what it eventually crushes, 604 01:05:14,390 --> 01:05:19,560 although it raises the bigger question of how how we readers fear historically. 605 01:05:19,560 --> 01:05:28,960 Right. And not fear in the grand. In the grand, you know, pity and fear sense, but sort of being spooked by things. 606 01:05:28,960 --> 01:05:35,670 Yeah. And I guess it plays back in my mind to sort of, you know, sort of Keith Thomas's work on magic and that kind of thing. 607 01:05:35,670 --> 01:05:41,520 And just and just the sort of one of the challenges about always being about what's about trying to understand the sort 608 01:05:41,520 --> 01:05:48,150 of routine mindset in which there might be these kind of superhuman forces kind of at play in the world in certain ways. 609 01:05:48,150 --> 01:05:52,080 And again, I think when I was first studying English for this period, I was you know, 610 01:05:52,080 --> 01:05:54,720 I read those things that sort of encouraged me to think about the English, 611 01:05:54,720 --> 01:06:00,030 English literary world in terms of things like dispair, you know, Calvinist despair as manifested. 612 01:06:00,030 --> 01:06:08,580 You know, I spent so I spent a Donlan blow up. But actually, I wonder about this sort of lower level of just things being a bit a bit creepy, 613 01:06:08,580 --> 01:06:12,000 a bit and a bit canny and a bit and sort of perhaps lovable as well. 614 01:06:12,000 --> 01:06:18,690 And something about the questions that takes us into that. Again, it goes back to Ted's comments on my use of my imagination in the book. 615 01:06:18,690 --> 01:06:26,370 But this sort of attempt to inhabit these these sorts of affective, smaller affective worlds that I had that are sort of harder to access, 616 01:06:26,370 --> 01:06:32,870 but perhaps to me they seem to sort of matter all the more for that reason. 617 01:06:32,870 --> 01:06:37,340 Thank you. I think we ought to draw things to a close. 618 01:06:37,340 --> 01:06:41,090 There is, as Lorna said right at the beginning, there's never enough time for these, really. 619 01:06:41,090 --> 01:06:50,060 But nonetheless, we've we've managed to discuss a pretty wide range of exciting stuff in the book. 620 01:06:50,060 --> 01:06:58,340 And I'd like to thank one last time Joe and also Lorna and the other brilliant interlocutors today who have given us at least 621 01:06:58,340 --> 01:07:06,620 a taste of what's going on in this book and urge everybody to go and reread it and repeat reading it and put it on repeat. 622 01:07:06,620 --> 01:07:11,900 Thank you all for coming and thank you for your questions as well. 623 01:07:11,900 --> 01:07:17,150 All that remains for me to do is to say, please do come back next week. 624 01:07:17,150 --> 01:07:22,820 Next week. Same time for our next book at lunchtime event, which is Commemorative Modern Isms, 625 01:07:22,820 --> 01:07:28,310 Women Writers Death and the First World War, written by Alice Kelly. 626 01:07:28,310 --> 01:07:32,900 Cheque the torch Web site to register for next week's event. If you'd like to come. 627 01:07:32,900 --> 01:07:39,376 Thank you all again. One last time. And goodbye.