Welcome to Big Tent. Live events. The Lockdown Live Online event series brought to you by Torch,
the Oxford Research Centre with Humanities as part of the humanities cultural programme itself, one of the founding stones for the future.
Stephen A. Schwartzmann Centre for the Humanities.
My name is Wes Williams and I'm a professor of French literature at the University of Oxford, a fellow and Edmund Hall.
And I'm also the knowledge exchange champion at Torch.
The Big Tent Live Event series is our way of bringing together once a week researchers and students,
performers and practitioners from across the different humanities disciplines.
We're bringing you this event programme online while we're all keeping our distance,
and we hope that you're all safe and well during this difficult time.
Our aim here is to explore together important subjects and ask challenging questions about areas such as the environment,
medical, humanities, ethics and A.I. The public, the private and the common good.
And we will celebrate storytelling and music. Performance and poetry.
Identity, history and community. If you'd like to put any questions forward to US speakers tonight.
During the event, please put them in the comments box on YouTube.
We encourage you to submit these as early as possible, and I can then ensure that they inform and enrich the Q&A part of our discussion.
In about half an hour or so. Now onto our excellent speakers.
I'm delighted to welcome into the big tent today, Marion Turner,
tutorial fellow of Jesus College, an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford,
and celebrated author Matthew Neil and embarrass them a little by saying a little bit more about them before we start the conversation.
Professor Marion Turner works on late mediaeval literature and culture, focussing especially on Geoffrey Chaucer.
Her most recent book, Chaucer A European Life, argues for the importance of placing Chaucer in multilingual and international contexts.
She traces his journeys across Europe and his immersion in global trade routes and exchanges.
It was named as Book of the Year 2019 by the Times, The Sunday Times and The Tearless, and it was shortlisted for the Woolston History Prise in 2020.
Matthew Neil was born in London. The son of two writers and the grandson of two others from his earliest years.
Matthew was fascinated by different cultural worlds, both contemporary and from the past.
After studying at Latimer Upper School in London, he read Modern History at Modelling College Oxford and after his university years,
he began travelling, seeing diverse cultures at first hand in Asia, Europe and Latin America.
Matthew's books include Inside Rose's Kingdom. English Passengers.
When We Were Romans an Atheist. History of Belief and Rome.
A history in seven seconds. His latest novel, Pilgrims', explores mediæval life shaped by religious laws as well as personal battles.
It follows a fascinating show, Syrian cast of Characters on a journey from England to Rome.
Tonight, Marion and Matthew discuss their recent books. Matthew's novel, Pilgrim, Marion's biography, Jozo A European Life.
They explore the questions raised by each of them differently accented discussions of
mediaeval travel ranging from colonialism in Wales to the expulsion of the Jews from England,
from diplomacy and cultural exchange to holy pilgrimage, both real and imagined.
What are the questions underpinning their work and indeed this conversation today is that of similarity and difference between times,
languages, genres, national, confessional and political identities between then and now.
Having read most of these two books, I'm sure we're in for a real treat.
And so without further ado, I hand over to you, Marian, to get the conversation started.
Thank you. Thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here and to be talking to Matthew.
And I really look forward to the whole discussion and the questions later. But I thought I'd start by asking you, Matthew,
why the mediæval I know you've written such a variety of different books, but I think this is your first foray.
You're really deeply into the mediaeval period.
And I wondered what it was that first drew you into the 13th century and made you want to tell a mediaeval story.
It was really. I'd been researching the history of Rome for my last book, the non-fiction book, Roman History and Sudden Sackings.
And one of the many books that I looked at was about mediaeval pilgrims, mediaeval pilgrimage to Rome.
And I think it was looking at the 13th century in particular.
And I'm always interested in journeys, but also in a journey that's made not just for an ordinary reason, but really for in pursuit of an idea.
And it occurred to me that pilgrimage was a very interesting subject.
And I was rather horrified by the thought of having to write something about the mediaeval period by which I knew very little.
Aside from what I'd just been reading to do with Rome. But I decided that it would be I'd give it a go.
And I went to I had to spend months.
So I went to the British Library in London and read everything I possibly could about mediaeval England.
And in the 13th century, I actually began, of course, with Chaucer.
First I read Chaucer.
And when I read the Prioress tale that that gave me my date because I knew that I wanted to write it just before the expulsion of the Jews.
And I must say, the whole process of learning about the mediaeval period was fantastically rich for me.
I can see why it's such a popular era, because it's there's something extraordinary about it.
Does it sort of earthiness at the same time this? I began to realise that actually it's a very modern era.
It's people. And the evidence that they had seems very different.
But the they were they were trying to understand the world on less information.
But actually, the deductions they make are as intelligence anybody's. It's just they have less basis.
Yes. And I think that often people find that the mediaeval era is not what they thought it was.
So once you find out more, you realise that I mean, anything in particular that people, rich people,
more educated people lived in a much more international way than people tend to imagine.
So I found that people were very surprised to have, for example, that Chaucer travelled very widely, but he went twice to Italy.
He went to Spain, went very often to France, but also that within England itself,
you could, for instance, buy spices that had come all the way from Indonesia,
that England was on this global trade route at this time on the peripheries of these routes that were going right across the known world.
And I think that that sense of that actually people could live very cosmopolitan lives is is often very surprising for people.
Yes. And in some ways, the island of Britain was more international,
more more cosmopolitan than it became later because it was for many, many were bilingual.
Many were trilingual with Latin, French, English.
You had a whole other diverse languages being spoken by large numbers of people, Celtic languages.
It's it's a complicated, fascinating time. Yeah, indeed.
And Chaucer, like all other educated man at the time, spoke English, French and Latin, but also, crucially, Italian.
So it is, of course. It's so important to your book.
But the fact that he spoke Italian really enabled him to make enormous changes in English poetry.
And because he spoke Italian, he was chosen to go on these diplomatic missions to Italy and was able then to read Dante Petrarch,
the cacio and reading those poets really changed what he could do in poetry and allowed him to develop new poetic forms.
And that really changed what English poetry as a whole could do.
So I think that multilingual, that multilingual environment is absolutely so important.
And as you say, I mean, that's something that actually we've we've lost so much and that.
Now, a lot of English people are renowned for that monolingual educations at Los Vesser.
We end up being very complacent about being able to speak English. But in the 14th century, in my era, people didn't think like that at all.
They knew they had to speak other languages if anyone else is going to understand them.
But I wanted to go back to your your mentioning very early on in your research,
you were rereading Chaucer and reading the piracies tale because, of course,
one of the things that separates the era of pilgrims,
your book from Chaucer's era is the expulsion of the Jews in 12 90 as a really seismic and appalling event.
That that was a marker in in English history.
So when I was when I was writing the biography of Chaucer.
One thing that I was very interested in was his trip to Novar in northern Spain now, but then an independent country, because in Navarre,
he went somewhere where he experienced a kind of multicultural society where there were significant Jewish and Muslim populations,
as well as a Christian population. And they were all, you know, rubbing along together reasonably successfully at that point.
But in England itself, the traces of the Jewish population were still there, of course, in all Jewry and so on.
But the Jews denounced any kind of anti-Semitic story that such as the IRS tale.
But the Jews had had gone. And reading your book, the which is that just pre expulsion, that is really in many ways the heart of of your book?
I think in some ways, yes. Absolutely. Yes. Yes.
But I wonder if you if you thought very consciously about the fact that you are juxtaposing voluntary travel with forced migrations in your book.
I suppose. Yes.
I mean, I think that one of the things that fascinated me about the 13th century is that it it it does seem to be I read Kath the same joke,
Mansfield's. Well, I'm going to fail to remember a book tighten up at the public penance.
If you come across that extraordinary book on on extreme religion, mostly in France,
but she looks at how really people were really controlled by the church in some ways by public shaming in terms of confession.
And also in terms of pilgrimage. So people actually were often forced to to to go on pilgrimage.
It might be only a pilgrimage to the next door next or village, or it might be as far as Rome.
But I was fascinated by this time of hyper intense Christianity when people's beliefs were so strong that a married couple would
would fear that they'd go to hell because they'd had sex on the wrong day of the week where the beliefs were so powerful.
And I wanted to reflect that. And that was one of the things I was interested in,
was also that one of the characters is actually is going to Rome because he's punched and Abbott's
on the nose and he's obliged to go because otherwise he he'll be in probably lose his property.
He'll be tried to heal. It was a at a time when pilgrimage was both voluntary.
For some, it was a kind of holiday. Really, it was an opportunity to to enjoy a break and see the world.
For others, it was really done out of fear of hell.
And for others, it was forced upon them. Yeah,
I think I think that's really interesting as well to that that sense that there's a spectrum where the
we might be easy to see that the forced migration of of the Jews as completely different from up.
Of course, a voluntary trip, but that there are lots of people who were feeling who were forced to go on these trips,
not as brutally as as the Jews on their expulsion,
but that the sense of that people weren't going out of that, out of a completely free choice, that people felt impelled to go to expiate their sins.
Of course, you've got characters who are doing it because they they feel that their sins have caused terrible illnesses and people they love.
And if they go on pilgrimage, they might get forgiven. And I think that the way that you get across that,
that people have very different motivations for their journeys is really striking
through your your really interesting range of characters in that sense,
that people they're all going for very different reasons, some of them very funny, like the cat.
One of the very serious. Yes. Yes. And I suppose I was also interested in how people negotiate the release of their time.
So for some, the beliefs of their time are absolutely hard and fast.
And they they accept them 100 percent. And others, you can.
I'm having my readings suggested that there were some people who, even though they were thorough believers in in the Christianity of the time,
nevertheless had a slight distance between themselves and the beliefs.
They felt they had a confidence. These were usually the the richer, more educated.
They had just a sense of being able to distance themselves a little bit and pursue their own motives or whatever at the same time.
Yes. And I think that across the mediaeval period, there's always lots of reform movements,
some of which turn turn into so-called heresies and breakaway groups that some of which are trying to reform the church from from within.
And, of course, it crosses time. You have Wickliffe and Longy and a lot of questioning of of different elements of church teaching,
but also very much of the corruption of church practise, which everyone is criticising church practise at the time.
And that can be a very different thing from actually challenging the sacraments.
The, you know, the corruption that that took place, particularly around things like indulgences and pilgrimage,
is is something that many people were very upset about.
And would you see a lot of people criticising pilgrimage and the idea that it's often taking advantage of of the vulnerable in various ways?
I think we also see is being done to some of the characters in your in your book.
Yes. No, I can see that. I think there was a there was always a kind of.
An idealisation of the church and the disappointment that it rarely quite met up with the ideals expected.
And one can see the Reformation appearing in ghostly form with heresies many times over the preceding centuries.
So. But I also felt that actually my impression was that Catholicism was much broader, much more open, much more flexible.
Its changes with the Reformation in these early times,
it seems to include all sorts of ideas that were excluded later on, which I also find very interesting.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true, that it kind of goes in waves, doesn't it, were various points.
This there's crackdown's and then other points. There's a much more kind of liberal and broad sense of what it's okay to believe.
And even in the 14th century,
you have this huge upsurge in vernacular mysticism where lots of people are trying different ways to have this more personal relationship with God.
And then after Longy gets going and becomes associated with with rebellion, then there's a there's a crack down in that in the 15th century.
But there is, I think, a lot of variety of belief still in interest this time.
I mean, of course, that sense of of tolerance within Christianity is then set very sharply in opposition
to the brutality that we often see being enacted against other religions as as again,
I think you you showed very, very powerfully in pilgrims.
But I think also I mean, one of the other things that I thought was really powerfully in pilgrims was that as well as writing a really
interesting me about the relationship between Jewish people and Christians within England and Europe,
you also looked at aspects of English colonialism in Wales and wrote about that kind of journeying.
So as well as the pilgrimage, which stretches your book as a whole.
There's also a kind of segment where you're looking at the kinds of the kinds of journeys that are going on across the English and Welsh border.
And I think that, again,
we often it's often easy not to think about the colonialism of this era because so much attention is given to the colonialism of later eras.
But it's very important for us to think about the different waves of of Take-Over that have happened in these islands.
And I just wondered if you wanted to talk a bit about why it was important to you to to emphasise that aspect of of Englishness?
Well, I think it was partly the timing,
because this was the year I'm writing about time so soon after the the annexation of North Wales and the kingdom.
So I think the more.
But initially, I think I was just going to refer to it through the English pilgrim characters.
But then it seemed so important that I realised that I felt I had to have a completely different perspective on it all from a Welsh Arabize.
And I think I was also drawn to it because in an earlier novel, English passengers,
I was looking at the British in Australia and I was struck that the process was rather similar in many ways.
A lot of it was less about a grand plan and more about individual careers,
which people would try and gain add to their status by going somewhere else.
And with often vast consequences for the people who happen to be in there somewhere else.
But in the early 19th century, Tasmania and the late 13th century, Wales seemed really more similar than I would ever have expectations.
Yeah, I think I find that very striking that the comparison you're making there, because I really loved your really but English passengers.
I think the way that these two books sat in very different eras do show kind of recurring patterns is extremely interesting.
I think it also reminds us of that the changing nature of borders that people tend to think about
England and Great Britain and the British Isles as much more fixed than than they really are.
So that back in back in interest this day, that was at that point the English king ruled lots of different parts of France as well.
Aquitaine Calais and those borders were changing all the time, as well as the border with Scotland, the border with Wales.
The things that go on in Ireland that these things were were changing all the time.
People didn't have a sense of a nation state that that people tended to get in in later eras.
One thing that I found was, um, when I was getting the maps drawn for my book,
it was so difficult for me to get the Europe map because I was I had to decide at what point am
I going to freeze the map because I can't have a map of this is Europe during Chaucer's life,
because it wasn't the same across his whole life. The borders changed so many times.
So you had to kind of pick a date and say, okay, well,
it's going to be after this treaty and before that treaty so that I'm going to put the borders here because they these they they changed all the time,
you know. And I felt right. That came across very strongly in in your book was the is something very familiar there.
Is there a policy, political figures who basically can whip people up against foreigners and people who
are seen to be unscrupulous foreigners causing trouble and self-serving individuals,
which seems a very modern political approach, sadly.
And at the same time, you have much more openness towards Europe than one finds in later centuries.
I would say maybe in part, I'm sure, because a large part of the ruling elite was so involved with Europe that they were coming and going.
That they, as you said, it's a it's a kingdom stretches across the channel.
And I feel that it was a very different England after the Reformation, the Spanish Armada,
the idea of a new identity becomes fixed in which Europe is purely something other and perilous and.
Threats, really? Yes. I think part of that, as you're perhaps implying with that post reformation marker,
is that Catholic Europe in particular becomes defined as very says southern
Europe broadly becomes defined as very other to become the Protestant north,
confirmed culturally. Whereas in in much the mediaeval era, there is still that that pull to Rome and to that sense of of Christendom,
which for some people are often to get very antagonistic towards Rome.
But there is that general sense of being part of that that bigger picture.
And I think that that's the sense of that being a kind of identity.
Where people did think of themselves as being Europeans is is important.
And I suppose that that in general, I'm not talking about the the peasantry, the the the ordinary people,
but the people with whom Chaucer was mixing that if you were at court throughout choices to just treacherous his lifetime,
there were three different queens in one came from. Hey, no one came from Bohemia.
One came from France. And they brought their retinues with them.
Of people who brought that poetry and their art from different places in Europe.
And when you say you travelled around Europe,
he would he would meet people that he knew from the English court and who had connexions with people that that he knew.
And when he went to Novar in northern Spain, as I was saying before,
that there were some things that must have seemed very alien to him, the fact that there were these Jewish and Muslim communities there.
But, you know, the king was a French speaking king who who had been a patron of my show.
The great French poet who was on Chaucer's great influence,
says that there's a kind of international culture that was when right across lots of different European cities.
And I think when when Chaucer was reading texture it from all over Europe, those textural connected in different ways.
One thing that I find very interesting is that when Chaucer chose to write in English,
he was following a European fashion because he was really felt wouldn't be Italian desire to write in that Tuscan vernacular.
So what seems to be a very nationalistic thing to do was, conversely, quite an international thing to do as well.
I think that's really interesting.
But I think also one of the things that I'm fascinated by is not just thinking about that highest level of culture, but to the core culture.
But that really, for Chaucer, even more importantly,
was the kind of city trading cultures that were stretching across Europe and the rest of the world,
that that's why we see so much exchange happening with the products that we're
travelling from all over the world that I find that very interesting thinking about.
Where did objects come from? Where did the metals come from?
The English money was made of Vladik. The fabrics come from that.
They were making cushions, outtalking the way that things were travelling back and forth.
And I think that's a really, really interesting thing to think about.
Yeah. That that constant exchange with English will going out all over Europe at this time.
Yes. Yes. No, it's it's fascinating. And I suppose really it's it's a time when so I'm losing myself here.
I had a thought and it's gone well, while you're getting that thought.
But one thing that I want to make sure I have time to ask you about is the way in which you researched 13th century Rome,
because I felt like I learnt so much from your Rome chapters.
And it helped me to imagine mediaeval Rome in a way that I've never been able to so vividly before.
The texture of your writing was really brilliant. I thought that I'd really be very interested to hear what you did.
You did you walk around the places. How much of the traces of mediaeval Rome can you still find that you live in Rome yourself?
Yes. Well, I'd written this book which looks at mediaeval Rome.
It's it's based on seven seconds. So I was focussing on Rome before ten eighty four when the Normans attacked Rome a bit.
And I think I just read everything I could.
There's a marvellous book by Krauthammer which on Rome from the age of Constantine, right through to be the age of the 14th century really.
And that has tremendous detail. But also Rome is spoilt.
So there's a lot of things still here. You can find them still sometimes where you wouldn't expect to find them.
So this era already, Rome was like a kind of vast sum, you mean?
It was filled with fortified towers, partly for defence, but mostly for status.
Everybody wanted one. So. One near Piazza Navona, which is still marked as the Millers Tower because it was always a successful Miller,
and if everyone else was gonna have a tower, he was going to have a tower.
And some of these towers are actually half lost in the in this the structure of major buildings.
So if you look carefully,
you'll see a corner of a 19th century building that doesn't match and you realise it's an old tower that has been surrounded by later accretions.
And so, you know, I, I just I read everything I could.
And I was particularly great on that. And just trying to reimagine what it would have been like.
Well, I love that sense of finding the the tower with the 19th century bits stuck onto it.
I mean that because one thing that I found very important for me when I was researching the biography
was to try to do some of that that kind of footstep and try to follow engrosses footsteps,
trying to to see what what still remained of the things that he had seen, the art that he'd see in the buildings he'd seen.
And I mean, one of the one of the very striking moments for me, similar to what you're describing now,
was when I went to Milan and Bonalbo vis Conti's great palace and church, there's just this little bit.
It's called something like San Giovanni in called cars, something like that.
And it's on a traffic island now. It is.
It's just that you find this kind of little room that you can go down into the crypt, but then you come up and there's just traffic roar.
And it's this kind of strange little trace. But but there is that trace still there.
But it then and you go to other places where everything seems to be so, so perfectly preserved.
You know, you really enter into the young or you feel like you're entering into that the mediaeval past.
But but much more often. I mean, as you see it very much in London, that the traces of the different eras are all piled on top of each other.
And that's very energising as well. Of the ways you can what you can pull out from under those traces.
Yes. Yes. And Rome is spoilt in that respect and that the Romans tend to leave things.
And so even though some things have been destroyed, an awful lot has survived.
Milan, I think, has had a rougher history. So there's much less.
Just just to see what it look like. You did very well in Nevada. You found a lot up.
Yeah. I mean, that was a really interesting journey. I think that that's a journey of choice.
This has been very much neglected and people hadn't thought very much about it.
One of the very striking things for me was going to early today and finding that that street
of the Jews that was leading up to the the palace where is safe conduct was was issued by.
One of the things that I that I did on that trip was I tried to.
I went to the same time of year that Chaucer went. So I went in February and I thought this was a slightly kind of silly thing to do, probably.
But then when I was in Rome, surveyor lays it in the cave, the mountain passes.
And it really helped me come imaginatively to try to enter into his his experience because there was this kind of misty little town in the mountains.
And I thought, gosh, imagine if I'd written here, you know,
over the Pyrenees and there were bears and wolves and really to try to think about what that
must have been like in winter and if the experiences that he had as a traveller that I mean,
that was what I think one extraordinary experience. Another one was that he was he was taken prisoner, one teenager and he was ransomed.
There's so many really interesting, different different kinds of journeys.
But I think that if I just move back to your book and think about the different kinds of journeys that you're talking about,
because also I think the journeys are very different, depending on the person who's going through that.
But I was really pleased to see that you focussed a lot on women, on female characters, as well as male characters in your book.
And I just wondered I wondered if you'd like to to talk a little bit about your Marjorie camp inspiration.
Yes. Well, I mean,
I think the characters were inspired by either people who reasons for going on a pilgrimage or real people who I read about and Marjorie Camp.
Obviously, she's a major figure because she's the first English woman.
First you did about an autobiography. And she's a phenomenal figure, rather irritating in many ways, but phenomenal at the same time.
I'm I'm well, I also came across. Lucy did Twain, who I used as Lucy to born, and she was just such an extraordinary figure.
I think I came across. And in various periodicals initially, and then I read everything I could about her and her life was so extraordinary,
it also said a lot about mediaeval divorce and the whole process of of mediaeval law, which was so, so different and seemed so complicated.
It's and I found that fascinating, too. Yeah.
I think it's fascinating when you do see that some mediaeval women, often the more privileged ones,
but they were able to carve out quite a lot of independence for themselves, that FEMA,
the inheritance laws were often quite good for wealthier women and things like that.
Yes. Well, the wife, I think the people, the wife of Bath.
I mean, I'm sure that she was had an eye on the fact that she could enrich herself and did so.
Yeah, absolutely. That she's able to inherit very well from her first three husbands.
And then she completes herself more with her with her late husband's,
which is it wasn't the case in all European countries over inheritance laws were different for four different women.
But I mean, I think that it'll be it'll be wonderful to go on talking forever.
I think it's time for us to see if there's any questions for us.
So I'm going to hand over to Wes, who hopefully will have some some questions for us.
Now. There are indeed many questions.
Thanks so much for starting this debate going.
And I have a whole bunch of questions. Fed through to me here from from listeners and viewers.
And I might start with where you just ended.
In other words, the question of the women's role in both of your stories, actually.
So if Chaucer is famous for one of the things Chaucer is famous for is precisely the wife of bath tale,
or that the kind of the degree to which he gives voice to women. And of course, as Marianne said, women are central to your story, Matthew.
But there's one question at Charlotte Cooper.
Davis said that she is intrigued by something that Marianne said about Bill Midge being criticised as something that was done to the vulnerable,
which may or may not include women. Can you say something more about that?
Do you remember having said that, Graham is the kind of thing that is imposed on people done to the vulnerable?
It goes to the question early on about voluntary travellers opposed to forced migration, I guess, as well as any thoughts on that.
So I think that pilgrimage was usually criticised, really, because it was it was seen as a holiday for people.
So the main way in which we see pilgrimage being criticised is the sense that
people were just they were going on pilgrimage and not because they were devout,
but because they wanted to get away from their ordinary lives and they wanted to have some fun.
And there certainly were people for whom that was true, said there are various taxers talk about women going on,
Pelc mentioned coming back pregnant and that kind of thing.
And so there are critiques of pilgrimage that say, you know, everyone's just enjoying themselves.
And, of course, a really important thing about Chaucer's pilgrimage as opposed to the pilgrimage that Narky depicts,
is that Chaucer's pilgrims don't get there. It's all about the most about the destination.
I think I think the point I was making about vulnerability was was a slightly different one.
And maybe I'd maybe I wasn't quite clear.
But there I was talking about the the idea that some people were not choosing to go on pilgrimage out of their own free will.
But the idea that some people were feeling very much like they like they have to go on pilgrimage,
that they were not going to have their sins forgiven if they didn't go on pilgrimage,
that they had no other choice, even if it was going to cause them all kinds of personal or financial difficulties, they had to go.
And there's lots of evidence of people trying to trying to get out of going and making a vow to go on pilgrimage, for instance,
when they're going through something terrible and then later on and not wanting to do this anymore or having a new husband.
You said you couldn't do that. They couldn't go. But feeling they were still bound by their found trying to work out what they could do better off.
People would sometimes pay someone else to go flat, for instance.
But apparently property pilgrims effectively. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Marty, did you want to say anything about this question about.
Yes. Yes. Well, just my impression when I was researching this was that most pilgrims were reasonably well off,
which may be part of the accusation that this was really a form of long distance holiday.
But I also think that the there were some who were much poorer, but it was quite tough.
I mean, you you could beg your way and it was acceptable to do this, but it wasn't it wasn't an easy option.
And most pilgrims who went somewhere like Rome were as as the characters in the Canterbury Tales.
They were you know, they weren't penniless, you know, or they were sponsored or,
you know, there was a kind of degree of people got together again, as usual.
Your novel shows, but also, as your book shows in relation to Chaucer and I declare an interest.
I've written a book about the 16th century doldrums where, again,
proxy pilgrims and people being sponsored by their priory or that particular area to stay with the question of vulnerability.
And then this is is part of your book as well, Matthew.
Somebody asks, how did unwell or disabled pilgrims trouble? And you have a number of unwell pilgrims in your story.
If you want to explain why you focussed, if you like,
on those on this sort of pilgrimage as cure or as in relation to disease and in relation to various kinds of unwellness.
Yes, and it was very common as it is still today. People go to church for that exact reason.
And I think because the assumption was that if you were unwell or one of your family were unwell,
it was it was their own fault, really, because they must have sinned because there could be no other explanation.
So, I mean, I was the only difficulty I had was that they going to Rome and that was the classical destination.
If you were sick, you tended. Two, you went to Rome to get rid of your to get in to reduce your time in purgatory, right?
You went there because of two to ease your sins or to get Saint Peter to charm God into letting off your letting off your time in purgatory.
So. But no, I think people would go to tremendous lengths.
Probably more. I mean, people will go to Saint Friday's. Why did Oxford do to try and find a cure through pilgrimage.
And some of the scenes in these places must have been to our eyes will be very, very distressing.
I suspect very sick people struggling to get to a destination in difficult circumstances.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I should say that the opening of the Canterbury Tales talks about the fact that people are
going to Hooghly blissful martyr for to see if that had had hope and one that they were seek.
So they're going to seek Thomas a Beckett who's helped them when they were sick, when they were L.
And there's that sense that this is both physical illness, but also spiritual moral illness.
And as Matthew is implying, those two things are often seen as going hand in hand.
So you're seeking a cure for your for your sins or for your physical ailments.
And that that is that that's seen as trying to get a rebirth.
And so that opening of the Canterbury Tales is set in the time of in April, in springtime, Easter,
the time when you can be rejuvenated, rebirth, reborn in imitation of the resurrection of Christ.
And that's that's seen as something which is curing your soul and curing your body.
And of course, there's all kinds of problems that I think we also see in Matthew's book how how awful that is for the same people who are seen as.
Yeah. Yeah. Another question has to do with sort of percentages.
And it's very hard to do this. I know. But you said right at the beginning, Mary, that there's a sort of educated elite, shall we say,
that are moving around much more than we really realised in the mediaeval period.
Do we have any notion of what percentage of people are likely to have been on pilgrimage across this period?
Well, I can't give you a number right now,
but I think that it's really important to emphasise the fact that there were lots and lots of different ways of going on pilgrimage.
So many, many, many people would have gone on a local pilgrimage to local pilgrimages within a day.
For instance, very likely, you know, there are lots. The pilgrimage sites everywhere, all kinds of little local shrines and little figures.
And so there's the very local pilgrimages. Then this pilgrimage, as you know, a little bit further afield, you know, just within England.
There's so many major pilgrimage sites here ranging from Dharam to Walsingham to Canterbury, lots lots of different sites.
And then those things,
even the great country pilgrimage is still much more accessible than the great European pilgrimages and feel to to Santiago de Compostela in Spain,
Rome and then Jerusalem and the Holy Land. There's lots of other, of course, places as well.
But those are the major ones. So, I mean, I can't give you a number, but not not that many people would be going to Jerusalem.
But no, each number of people would be going to local shrines on on local pilgrimages.
OK, so then even if we can think it, we need to rethink our understanding of who could travel in the mediaeval period.
And again, it's the same in the Renaissance.
I was amazed at how many people did travel around both local pilgrimage up and long distance pilgrimages in that period.
Yeah, this is a local shrine, whether it's a shrine for cure or for various other kind of ailments.
People clearly moved around a lot more than we imagined. Now you've got this notion of people stuck in their villages and never really going anywhere.
No. Is that what you discovered as well, Matthew, on your research? Yes.
Yes, definitely. And also, I mean, there was more organised, I would say, come in.
The Venetians had these wonderful package and they had a travel agent who I just paid upfront and everything was included.
All your meals. Now, the tour of Jerusalem on the side trip off to where it was Jericho or that was it was surprisingly modern and very efficient.
Generally, the ships didn't sink. They weren't captured by marauders.
Everything works fine. Occasionally, the genuine use had a reputation for sometimes sending their pilgrims into slavery.
But the Venetians were very reliable. Your research is under review.
Inspired you to go on pilgrimage yourselves.
And if so, has it changed your perception of the practise or have you kept your distance from the actual journeys as opposed to imagined ones?
So I haven't done a pilgrimage, but I did lots of actual journeys when I was set, when I was researching the book.
So when I was researching Chaucer European life, that was a really important part of my research for me.
And not only because luckily he went to places like Florida who certain it's like, you know, it's a tough job.
Someone's got to do it.
But I seriously, I found it extremely useful to go and try to walk those streets because because I organised the biography through places and spaces,
it was hugely important for me to try to reconstruct those those spaces in my own head and to
try to you to go into London and find the church where his daughter's monastery had been.
And that kind of thing.
And then to sit there and look around and work out what had been there in the 14th century and what what had been there was now gone.
But often those trapped, those even those local trips, as well as the ones further afield in Europe,
I couldn't quite put my finger on why it had been so important.
But something changed for me in my process of understanding Chaucer's life and his imagination when I went on those trips.
I haven't done a pilgrimage, but I must say I've I've thought about it.
I feel that when I have more time, I would I would be very.
And I think particularly doing something like walking that route to Santiago or something.
I mean, I, I can't imagine how that is a very kind of mindful thing to do.
Mm hmm. And that all you need to do is go out of your front door and you're already in Rome.
Yeah. Yes. In what respect? Yes.
No, it's, um. I've never gone on. I'm not a very religious person, so I never thought of going on a pilgrimage.
I used to love walking and I did a lot of some huge walks.
So I'm used to the same rhythm of walking. And I think in this in this case, I just knew I wouldn't have the chance of walking any of this.
So I just researched everything I could. I read accounts by people even quite recently who have done the walk to Rome.
And and I researched, obviously, all the places they're going off to.
And I was quite shocked to discover that the pilgrimage routes across France,
as far as it's known, because it's not known, is exactly as one would think.
Is pretty much the line of the trenches in the First World War.
So again and again, I would find references to splendid mediaeval town that had been blasted to bits.
By artillery. And I was it was just a very strange,
rather eerie coincidence to think that these programmes were effectively walking the trenches that would appear centuries later.
Mm hmm. That's a very nice allegory for me.
To the next question, the part about the title for today's session is Pilgrimage, Diplomacy and Colonialism.
And in a way, each of your books is about layers of place as well as make about how exactly
the same place might have had another moment become a different kind of place.
And that example you've just given, Matthew, is extraordinary. I wondered if so.
Within your novel, the colonial side of the question is principally around England and Wales.
Yes. Patient, as you said, of North Wales or what's now in North Wales, if you like, in particular.
Again,
I just sort of offering the chance to each of you to reflect a little more on colonialism and the degree to which the practise of pilgrimage overlaps,
where there is distinct from the practise of colonialism, either within Europe or more broadly.
I mean, most obviously, when it gets to the Crusades, perhaps, but more more broadly, have you thorns on that?
Let's start with Marrin this time. Yeah, I have lots of thoughts on that.
So I imagine you might. I mean, I think that the Crusaders often called themselves pilgrims and really blurred the boundary between
crusading and pilgrimage in a way that might seem extremely surprising to too many of us that they.
But once you think about, of course, you can see why with that particular motivation, they did think like that.
So I think that particularly the pilgrimage to the Holy Land was very much bound up with offer, with a militaristic mentality.
And with that sense of actually taking over those spaces in a way that, you know, other pilgrimages,
I think were often quite different to that, too, that people would not go on pilgrimage with that sense of taking the lands over.
I think that Holy Land pilgrimage was quite different. But I think that in terms of thinking more broadly about.
About colonialism, that there's there's lots of different ways in which we might think about about colonialism.
Different kinds of migration.
So, I mean, it's quite a small part of my butt, but one of the things that that I that I think is very interesting is that wanted to chose.
His first employer, Elizabeth Dibber, was married to Lionel Clarets, who then also became choice.
His employer and chosen went with him to fight in France, where he was ransomed, as I as I mentioned a few minutes ago.
Now, Lionel went on to come to a governorship in Ireland and implemented the statutes of Kilkenny,
which were notorious and appalling colonial laws in Ireland that prohibited the use of the Irish language by many people,
prohibited intermarriage and native sports and all those kinds of things.
And the one thing that I thought was very interesting when I was thinking about that moment in the 13 60s when he did that
was that English at that moment has become the colonial language that is pressing the native languages in in Ireland.
And we see, you know, Matthew demonstrates the way that was being done in in Wales, Ireland in the 13th century.
But within England, for Chaucer,
English was itself the native language that had been oppressed by the colonial languages of Latin and French in a hundred years earlier.
So I thought the fact that that's the language meant something very different in different places was really important.
The thinking about the fact that England had been a country that was repeatedly taken
over for hundreds of years and then it became the colonial aggressor in its turn.
And what what what the language meant in different places and what it means in different places in Iowa as well.
It is really finely tuned and varied. Thank you.
That's a very rich response. Matthew, do you have.
I mean, as Marianne says, English and Welsh are in a sort of conflict in your in your story and the Welsh character.
Again, I don't want to give too much away about it, but the welfare to find the kind of liberation once he is in a non English speaking world
and adopts all sorts of other identities and discovers that actually pretend to be Dutch,
let's say it is much more useful than saying I'm English. I suppose there is a question.
Is that also part of a sort of colonial understanding of the English as a particularly brutish race?
Or is that just a part of it? I I'm I'm very fond of the English.
I'm English myself. So no, I wasn't trying to have a go at the English.
I was just fascinated by this moment.
And it was that that particular moment, the the annexation of North Wales was was very brutal and it was brutally done.
And I found something that was the kind of curious and rather terrible mixture of of brutality, careers,
search for status, taking over land and romance, because this area was also the land of King Arthur.
So you had Edward the first and his queen wandering round on a tour of the Arthurian sites,
romantically enjoying these and feeling that these were really their property,
now their cultural property, because he was now the prince of Wales or that he was claiming the Welsh throne.
And I found that all rather slightly, slightly distasteful at the same time.
I mean, I suppose it's we were talking about a time when people are moving away from Latin.
And in a way, this is there is a new division occurring in Europe because Europe, Western Europe really had had a truly were Franco,
which it's never had since, which is there was no question of whether one should some one language should predominate.
There was always a language which a very large number of certainly the more
educated people could speak anywhere from Poland to France to Italy to Scotland.
And it was I mean, you can see why that was was not going to last forever.
But it must have given a unity to Europe, which has never really existed since.
It's interesting because there are two stories, which, again, one of the questions asks a version of this.
There's two stories there. One is about how there was this lingua franca and therefore a unity to Europe, and then another one is open.
English was so multicultural and multilingual that it was connected to Europe.
I mean, I'm not saying these two things are in conflict with each other,
but both of those stories suggest that somehow the Reformation was a defining moment and therefore
that your books are placed at the moment of English history before various things broke.
Obviously, in your case, the expulsion of the Jews, but also a kind of loss of a multilingual connectedness to Europe.
Is that too much of a grand narrative history for you?
That's that was the impression when I was trying to read about English at that time.
Right. That was the impression I got. I mean, there's always a tension between the local and the the international in any society, in any place.
And certainly there was in England at that time, as Marian so clearly demonstrated with with in her book.
But I think the there was and that tension may have been slightly greater in England just because it was Niland or written because it was an island.
But I do feel it was in some ways a more broader, more international looking place than it became in the next century or two.
Would you want to argue that to in or of the resistance?
I think that I think one important issue is that this works differently, depending on your class and your gender and your and your background.
So that when when people are writing, well, attacks in in Latin, then there is this wonderful way in which you can speak across across borders.
And there's obviously huge benefits to that.
When you start writing you in the vernacular, you lose some of that, but you're able to speak to a broader demographic within your own country.
So a slightly broader range of classes and usually more women as well as men.
And that's what that's what people such as the Catcher in Italy and Chaucer in England are are able to do.
But whatever linguistic choice you make, you know, some something is is lost, isn't it?
Because you're you're choosing which kinds of audiences you're going to to access.
So, you know,
I think that there were there absolutely was a was a moment now when someone such as Chaucer is able to speak and read in so many languages.
So he himself is able to connect with these. All these people within England was still a relatively small group in a manuscript culture.
And he's also able to read text written from all over Europe.
You know, he's not your your typical English person at this time.
But I think it is true that educated people at this time were able to, you know, very much to be reading texts across across borders.
And that's certainly something that that does get lost. But I think Englishness, you know, as he was saying before it,
it does start to mean something very different wants Rome becomes is perceived as as an enemy rather than as the ideal destination as it is.
Yes. Yes. Yes. No, it's different Europe, I think.
Okay. Well, again, thank you, Sarah Baber's for the question that generated a bit of a discussion.
I think we're time for three or four more questions, some of them.
Let's go for some of the more punctual, straightforward questions, if you like,
other any unexpected diaries of 13th century pilgrims that have been discovered recently, or has all this stuff been known for a long time?
Are there still treasures in the archives? I am sure there are still treasures at the archives.
I mean, I can't think off the top of my head of a of a recent discovery of a diary.
Certainly lots of documents. Interesting documents that are still discovered.
So, for instance, just in the last few years, new documents have been discovered about about muchI camp,
that the victims are women who we're talking about before, for instance.
But I'm sure there are still I mean, I'm sure there's still lots of records about Chaucer in archives around Europe that haven't been found.
Yes, I'm on pilgrimage, I think. What's surprising is that there are so few detailed sources with.
We still don't really know exactly where they. The pilgrims sort of walked on their way to Rome.
Marjorie Kamps, very valuable. But she tends to have her own priorities and she doesn't always say where she was exactly.
So, no, I was surprised to find how little information there was.
Thank you. Another sort of archival question, which is the other particular anecdotes from Charles's life, Marion.
That is your sort of favourite story that you didn't know before you started, but that you discovered afterwards?
Well, everyone's favourite story from ever is the story of the Paltalk.
I think so that the, um, the first life.
So we have lots of life records of Chaucer because he was a civil servant and the English have good bureaucracy.
And the first love, the first source that we have tells us not anything that is particularly important,
it seems just tells us that his employer bought him some clothes.
But I started to look into what these clothes were said, the Paltalk, these two coloured hoes,
these shoes that he was bought by Elizabeth Dibber when he was a page boy.
And I found out that these were scandalous items of clothing. So this is a complete surprise to me when I found out that at the time.
Lots and lots of chroniclers were writing about these outrageous items of clothing,
were saying this Gustin young man are wearing these short tunics that are exposing that buttocks and they're wearing these tight hoes along.
Frontrow even said that this was why the play could returns to England thinking these because young
men were dressing in such a disgusting and outrageous way that God was punishing the English.
And so, you know, obviously, this is a funny anecdote,
but I also thought it was really interesting because on the one hand, you have this sense of OPIS that just like us,
you know, teenagers dressing appropriately at older people, you know, tell them off about and say, you know, young people of today.
But on the other hand, this is a very unfamiliar way of living because this young boy is not choosing these clothes.
His employer is dressing him. He is being paid in clothes and food.
He doesn't own room. He doesn't have his own money. He's paid in kind.
He has to live in a public way. He doesn't have a private identity.
So for me, that really sums up what what for me is fascinating about the mediaeval period, which is that tension between familiarity and difference.
Thank you, Matthew. Perhaps a more sort of focussed question for you, which is, again,
I don't want to spoil the book knowledge because as I confessed to you earlier, I haven't quite finished it yet.
So don't tell me the end. But there is this very strong story of of the two Jewish characters in it who
connect us to the larger narrative of the expulsion of the Jews from England.
And again, one of the the question is asked because you said in your book when you were just talking earlier that once you realised,
if you like, that that was the date, then you had your date that you knew when you wanted to tell your story was just at that moment.
Can I just say a little bit more about why? Why is that the moment to focus on you?
I suppose it was. I was interested in this lost part of of the island's history, really.
And also, I suppose I was aware I mean, my mum was Jewish.
I didn't I never really feel very Jewish. But but she was she had her own history.
And I I felt this is sort of rather depressing feeling around in these days, that things that we thought we'd got rid of or resuming and returning.
And I suppose I was very aware of that. And.
And this seemed sometimes I feel it's better to look at things in a slightly roundabout way rather than just sort of wave a flag.
So. Or wave I did it. So I thought that that was that made me more interested in it all.
Mm hmm. Thank you. And again, lost perhaps the last question is around the question of voice.
And clearly, one of the things that that connects some of your different novels,
Matthew, is the question of voice and the degree to which one might adopt a voice.
Now, there aren't 20 of them in this novel, but there are still nonetheless some quite distinctive voices.
And I said right at the beginning that this is something Geoff Chaucerian about that insofar as The Canterbury Tales,
you know, tells stories from particular perspectives. Is that something that you consciously wanted to sort of make a connexion to Chaucer
or is are springing you or as you and Marian decided to talk about these things,
making things clearer to you than they were at the beginning? In other words, are you are you writing a version of The Canterbury Tales in some.
No, no, no. I mean, I think it was because I've used the same approach in this other novel, English passengers.
Yes. But I think I was very interested in what what was said in Marin's book.
What Marianne said was really that the that Charles is interested in people giving giving the reader a choice, really.
And she you contrasted that with with Dante and.
And I felt that that was in English passages, I wanted to slightly offer readers a choice.
I think if you if you let your readers and with a standpoint of viewpoint, then there's a danger that they'll just rebelle and get fed up with you.
If you if you give readers a choice, then obviously you you're going to favour certain aspects of that choice.
But nevertheless, people may feel more open to finding their way in this in what you're saying or what you're thinking about.
And that was very much what I wanted to do with this book as well.
And I was fascinated to feel to see that Marion felt that that was Johnson's approach as well.
But I think it's a valid one because nobody likes being lectured. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you're one of the cornerstones of of choices approach is to try
to get across the sense that what you see depends on why you are standing there.
That every perspective is partial and relative.
So that it's never enough just to have one perspective. And that's really the essence of the Canterbury Tales,
is the sense that we need to see things from different points of view and then make our
own decisions once we once we thought about it from more than one standing position.
Thank you. That seems like a good question to a number or point to a number.
I got one more for you. And that is that it's the difference, if you like, or the kind of voice or choice involved in writing fiction or non-fiction.
Matthew, you've written both. And I have no idea whether you have a lot of novels in your head that you haven't.
But I do know that you're interested in collaborating, for instance, with the theatre companies and so on.
So, again, just to talk to and really as a way of sort of turning our conversation into into
a broader question about to encourage you to reflect on the difference between
fiction and non-fiction precisely in the way of enabling people to stand in the
place of the other or to try to understand what it's like to be someone else,
which is effectively what both of you were talking about at the end. Matthew, first.
I think my main concern is to find an I an idea or a subject that seems worth writing about.
That's always the major problem. And after that, then sometimes I've found myself wondering whether they should be fictional non-fiction.
And in fact, the History of Rome book actually was initially briefly was tried to write it as a novel disastrously.
So I think I think there is a it's yes.
I think it's always easy to decide how to do these things, as one might think.
Hmm. Yeah. Well, I suppose I mean, I always write non-fiction, but I'm always writing about fiction.
And I don't think that I've been writing biography. So there's the first of my friend biography,
and I found that a really fruitful form for for me because you are able to do lots of different things to
think about your history and literary criticism and art history and lots of different kinds of approaches.
And I think you have to you have to do a certain amount of imaginative work when you're
trying to make those imaginative leaps into the past and into someone else's life.
But for me, there were there were real limits on what I felt was appropriate for me to do as a as a biographer, you know, as a serious biographer.
And so, you know, I was wrestling a lot with the issues of when do you say, well,
well, this must have happened and you when you don't really have have evidence for it.
And I think that you I decided really to think much more about Chaucer's imagination than about his emotional life.
And, you know, there was a moment when I decided to put a footnote in the introduction where I just kind of said,
I'm not going to write about his emotional life. You know, I don't think that when you're writing about a subject for whom you do not have
private letters and private diaries and you can't interview their grandchildren,
you when you're writing about someone from the 14th century, I just don't think I can get to the.
What did he really think about his mother kind of aspect? Also put that footnote in.
It was really liberating. I'm not doing that. And so.
Well, I. And that I was able ready to think much more about his imagination.
And so I suppose that that I think, you know,
it was a there is a real boundary for me between what what's appropriate to do when I'm writing non-fiction.
But, of course, as I say, the essence of my my interest is always in what it means for him to write fiction.
Thank you both so much. I think it's time to. Draw things to a close.
And I wanted, as I say, to to thank our two brilliant speakers, Matthew Neilan, Professor Marion Turner,
for a wonderful and really thought provoking session on a whole range of different questions this evening.
Thank you. Also to our viewers at home and listeners for watching for your comments, your questions.
I'm sorry if I didn't get to them all. But thank you again for joining in this experiment in online community.
I want to also stress that the big tent series would not be possible without the support, as it were, backstage of the amazing torch team.
So thank you all and thank you specifically once again, Marian.
And thank you, Matthew.
Everyone else, although Marion Matthew, clearly also very welcome, please join us next week for Big Tent for next week's Big Tent Live event.
Our theme next week is drama. And so on Thursday, the 30th of July, at the same time of five p.m.,
we're thrilled to be hosting an IM conversation with Professor Oliver Tamplin, emeritus professor of classics at Modelling College in Oxford.
And Oliver will be joined by BAFTA award winning actor and director Fiona Shaw CBE and much
else besides together and in the last of the current series of Big Tent online series before.
In other words, we take a short break for the month of August. Oliver and Fiona, we'll be discussing tragedy and plague.
But once again, thank you again to Matthew and Marion today. We hope you'll be able to all join us next week.
Thank you again for watching everyone. And goodbye for now.