Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this book at lunchtime event book at lunchtime is as regulars will know Torture's flagship event series,
taking the form of fortnightly bite sized book discussions with a range of commentators.
In normal times, we'd be offering you sandwiches as well. Today, we're offering you food for thought.
Please do take a look at our website, a newsletter for the full programme for next term,
and I'll come back at the end of today's event about the very next gig in the series.
My name is Wes Williams. I'm the director here at Torch. I'm also a professor of French literature with a specialism in precisely the period that
we'll be discussing today and therefore especially delighted to welcome my colleague,
Professor Neil Kennie, to speak about his book on Born On Born to Write Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in early modern France.
Also on the panel to ask him questions about it and also to have their own say about this book
are Professor Keri Sullivan and Professor Caroline Warman will be chairing the discussion.
Just a few words about the book, first of all,
Born to Write is a study of the intersection between family and social hierarchy within early modern literary production,
especially in France, from fiction to philosophy, from poetry to history.
The scope is vast and works of all kinds emerged from and through not only individual authors and publishers,
but also what Neal strikingly calls the family function. But maybe I imagine we'll hear more about that later.
In a moment, I'll hand over to Professor Woman who will fully introduce the book and the rest of the panel.
This will be followed by a brief reading by Neil Kenny. After this hour, commentators will present their thoughts on the book.
Coming at it from their particular discipline will then give Neal the chance to respond to
some of the points raised before we enter into what promises to be a fascinating discussion.
The event will then conclude with questions from you, the audience.
So please do put them into the question and answer function at the bottom of your screen.
We're going to try and get all of this done within the next hour or so.
Pretty much I better get a move on and all that's left for me to do is to thank you all for coming and to introduce briefly our chair.
Caroline Woman who might like to come on screen now, is a professor of French thought and literature here at Oxford University.
She's president of the British Society for 18th Century Studies.
She specialises in the circulation of ideas and materialist thought and amongst many publications,
has recently completed a book on digital called The Atheist Bible Detro and the Element of Physiology.
I'll hand over to you now, Caroline, and disappear from your screens for a while.
Thank you very much, Wes, and it's absolutely exciting to be here to talk about this book.
Let me first of all introduce Neal Kenny and then Keri Sullivan before we move over to hear directly from Neal,
some of the real stuff, the pages that he's actually written.
And then, yeah, I and Kerry will will will give our responses.
So Professor Neal Kenny is a professor of French Oxford University,
a senior research fellow at Also's College and a lead fellow for languages at the British Academy.
Thank you, Neal. He specialises in early modern French literature and thought, especially from the early 16th to the mid 17th century.
His current focus is on the relation of literature and learning to social hierarchy,
and previous projects have investigated different kinds of knowledge and belief.
So Professor Keri Sullivan is Professor of Literature,
Cardiff University and the author of five books on the literary features that structure early modern texts about religion,
trade, bureaucracy and rhetoric. She is the general editor of the English Association's series, Essays and Studies,
and her most recent publication is Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer.
So on that. May I ask you, Neal, to give us to read out a section from your book.
Sally, thanks very much, Caroline and Wes and also, Terry,
for kindly participating in this event to say this is part of a wider research programme on the
class dimension or the social hierarchy dimension of early modern literature and learning.
And that information has been studied in relation to Europe in a seminar at Also's College to which many people have contributed to this past decades,
and that Europe wide focus is maintained in a collective of collective for the next year with the British
Academy that but this book I'm going to write examines the past question through a more specific angles.
So one country, one social unit, and just one facet of literature that I think, namely the production of works defined very broadly.
And so this is the first of two extracts is from the preface.
Ever more is known about the lives and social conditions of any modern writers in Europe in general and the province in particular.
They were lives dominated by class or less anachronistically by social hierarchy.
But we still understand relatively little about the relation of social hierarchy
to the works of literature produced in this period or indeed any other president.
Studies tended to contribute to our understanding of that relation by focussing on one dimension of the role played by families.
So the military families of the subtitle are those that spawned more than one producer of literary and online works.
Many other families were, of course, literally in the broader sense of including more than one member who was knowledgeable about digital learning.
But they're not the focus here. So this one I connect the so this is still this extract, just summarising what's in the the first one,
I connect the production of works of literature and adding to the broader picture of heredity,
inheritance and familial transmission in the old South Asian.
Secondly, how do I quantify the role of military families within that production and map it
onto the social hierarchy of France from the late 50s to the mid 17th century?
And I survey the ways in which family shaped the production of works.
And Part three shows how even in the period itself.
Some people survey the whole field of literature in ways that gave prominence to the role of families within it.
And finally, about four or five, I returned to the starting point, three,
two case studies and then on the of family and the decline family to the second extract a little bit,
Richard gives tries to get a flavour on some of the protagonists of the book.
What kind of familial ties were there between the two since you came from the same family?
The two most common types of ties were between fathers and sons, occasionally including illegitimate ones and between brothers.
In a few cases, they were between a sister and a brother, between mothers and daughters, not just the divorce,
but also reached another talk to John Daltrey and the latter's daughter, Captain Bulbul, plus the case of her daughter's.
Or between fathers and daughters, Ella and Suzanne I year Madeleine, my show, and you can.
The same, on the other hand, to be virtually no instances of a sudden becoming a producer when his mother was born, but not his father.
It was also much rather up to both parents of a literally produce a child to be literally produces themselves, but it did happen in at least one case.
That's a community that does not have a daughter and went on to the next one and jumped in the line.
On the other hand, they were not the only husband and wife litterbugs together.
There were at least eight others and factors that seemed to favour both members of
a married couple being producers include Protestantism and especially lability.
One, on the face of it, the closest ties between literally produce to relatives whereabouts between parents, children and spouses.
In many cases, the president ties were between cousins of differing degrees, uncles and nephews, occasionally nieces.
Grandparents or great grandparents and their descendants. All great uncles and dads.
Many of these ties were explicitly or implicitly significant to the military production of the two or more relevant parties concerned.
As were alliances of marriage rather than a plot in which Clinton still likes.
Thank you very much, Neal. So let me I can be heard, Kantai, I hope that I can be heard.
Thank you very much. And so what I'm what I'm about to read follows on.
I think it sort of confirms what it is that you've just heard,
what this book shows via exceptionally careful research in archives and bibliographies via rigourously,
rigorously weighed definition's number crunching and sociological and statistical analysis is that from the late 15th to the mid 17th century,
at least one in five literary producers, probably more, was from a family of literate producers analysing the phenomenon.
Anthropologically, Neil draws out the family's practise of hunting in packs.
Looking at the content of what these families produce.
He shows that much of this family literature comes from the question of heraldry and the question of nobility in general.
Neal concludes that the producers of family literature constituted a crucial,
if overlooked, building block in the emergent edifice of national literary history.
Overlooked in favour of our modern focus on the author function and what Neil will call variously free floating atoms or atomised individuals,
that this is the case that Neil has incontrovertibly established.
It is not in doubt, and the exactitude of the scholarship we encounter on reading his book is one of its many pleasures.
There are quite a few passages I'd like to read out, along with their underpinning footnotes,
to show you this exemplary erudition in the role, as it were.
But Time forces me forwards in some nearly showing that the term literary producers is in fact just said covers editors, re editors, translators,
compilers of different sorts as well as authors,
and that not all of them wish to distinguish themselves as individuals from their other family members.
Although Neil tracks them extremely carefully and all of the cases he looks at,
whether concerning famous and less famous literary producers, are very richly detailed.
They're curious, they're sometimes hilarious or their hair raising.
So am I falling into a trap set by the book for readers in Search of Sensation.
If I draw your attention to the fact that Neil has uncovered a murder that's been hiding
in plain sight all this time in Matthew Abboud's manuscript family book Now in the BNF,
Matthew writes in Latin as follows, and I'm quoting Neil's translation My mother, Zhun, first from Ganush, died when I barely knew her.
When my father either by accident or because of my mother's infidelity, cut her vein or rather her artery.
He was a barber surgeon. Neil modestly continues that this extraordinary statement has not previously been remarked upon to his knowledge.
I'm utterly taken aback by all of this, partly by the sudden drama in the archives,
the sort of thing Nathalie's Evan Davis has drawn our attention to, partly by matchers.
Contrastingly, pedantic and explanatory tone. It's not the vein, it's the artery.
His father was a barber surgeon, which was why he would have been tinkering around with veins or arteries.
I'm also taken aback, by the way, in which Neil takes care not to let this drama get out of hand.
It has its place and that place is carefully embedded in a multilayered demonstration and analysis.
Neales caveat, moreover, is that this passage had not been noticed before, to his knowledge.
This is why we trust Neil. He's careful he won't get things out of proportion or make claims that he isn't sure or true,
even when or especially when those claims are dynamite, as indeed the whole book is in that vein.
Therefore, let us return to the claim to the book as a whole. If, as quoted before, producers of family literature constituted a crucial,
if overlooked, building block in the emergent edifice of national literary history.
What are the implications for our understanding of the same literary history as scholars, historians and teachers?
Should we think more about the extent to which literary production is revealed to be a tool for the reinforcement of social status?
Do we need to redefine literature? And what do we do with our anxious questions about elitism,
whereby what we do as academics is revealed ever more clearly to be tightly connected not just to the elite but to its replication?
Perhaps one answer, as we discover from your book, is that we need to understand much better what elite means.
The sensation I had for reading it was not one of the complacent replication of privilege, but of constant instability.
This also was surprising, but I don't want to end with those questions.
I want to return to the research. I noticed, of course, what Neil said about it being, I quote,
likely that the production of works from within families of literary producers continued to be salient,
especially up to the revolution, though that would need to be verified by further research.
So I did some thinking with my hat on and have some 18th century examples for you to comment on.
One, which is a literary work which thinks about the question of family, family structures and social status,
and another which is a case the family of a family of literary producers that very much, I think fits your model.
So the first case is details Ramos' nephew written in the 1960s and 1970s.
So you talk in your book, Neal, about the ferment in thinking about social status of the period you're looking at.
And this work also expresses and explores that ferment with the Neveu Damo.
Of course, you've got the issue in the title and the nephew, the grandson,
the descendant more generally and neatly, the two towering achievers discussed in relation to their families.
In this work, the composer Rameau and the playwright Hassin both have tree names,
branch and Root, which helpfully underscore the family tree aspect of the discussion.
And specifically what Daedra is exploring in relation to them is how inadequate RAYMO and Hassin were in terms of supporting their families.
This perhaps moves away from what Neil is looking at, towards something more connected to virtue.
But in the case of RAYMO, the nephew himself is an artistic producer, if not a literary one, and not in a prestigious genre.
He produces mimes and the instability of his social status and the concomitant necessity of toadying is a perpetual theme in the book.
Perhaps one might add also that Deidre's daughter counts as a literary producer under Neil's definition,
as she wrote A Life of her father and was also literary controller and withholder of his archive.
I was wondering if this is a new aspect of what Neil calls the family function and when does this aspect,
which continues to this day in literary estates, commence with the Pascal family?
So my second case is an awkward one, yet in many ways it fits perfectly.
An uncle who writes a famous study that in many ways is genealogical and compiled literary grafting.
It's already ancient warrior, noble family onto an even more glorious literary past.
Plus a nephew. He's certainly a very well known writer. So I'm talking, of course, about the Abbey de Sade, who wrote a much more.
Reprinted and translated study of Petrarch and his ancestor Lore Dussart, supposedly Petrarch louder, and about his nephew,
Donnacha Alpha Wasswa, Marquis de Sade, the author of a number of famous works that you have probably heard of.
The Abadazad memoir Pallavi Up Ithaka came out in 1764, was instantly popular.
There were four original French copies in Oxford alone, not counting the abridged and also very popular translation by Mrs Dobson,
which went into seven editions by seven certain preoccupations.
Neal identifies as recurrent across his corpus of family literature.
That is, the focus on nobility and its warrior values or on establishing status are just as present in the work of the Ubaid, Assad's nephew.
One might say that the violence of warrior class values finds renewed expression in Assad's work.
Neil talks of the social prestige of violence, and certainly this is what the Sadan heroes emanate and embody in the most literal way.
One might say that having lost the prestige of his nobility suffered through imprisonment.
Right? And then the revolution Assad sought to replace that lost prestige by becoming a literary producer.
Would he have become a writer without the example of his famous uncle, cherished friend of Voltaire and immediately all the Assad family?
In fact, the perfect example of Neo's thesis,
one might even say current members of the Assad family are still demonstrating the unpredictable power of the family function.
Tipo Assad, one of the brothers of the current head of the family,
wrote a post graduate thesis on his ancestor entitled Lalich to Your Political Ideology Dear Marquis de Sade 1982,
which probably has added to his status in one way or another, while the Assad family in general make energetic capital,
both cultural and financial, out of the writings of their forebears.
So in some,
I'd love to hear whether Neal thinks these 18th century cases are in a clear continuity with the earlier period he looks at or not or something else.
Again, in any case, Neal, many thanks for this opportunity to engage with your work.
And what I'll do now is ask me to come on and tell and talk about what she's her thoughts.
Thank you very much. I, I found three areas of Neales analysis of particular interest.
I come from English literature, literary criticism.
Firstly, the idea that family is a cognitive gadget, then the idea of the family as a collaborative narrative which is never finished.
And finally, a sort of contrast with the English situation. We get quite a lot of metaphorical families being claimed.
So the first the family as cognitive gadget.
You're probably aware of the buzz there is at the moment about the extended mind,
the idea that both the human mind and its environment cause cognitive processing so should have parity of status.
And cognition is not a brain bound activity, but unevenly distributed across social, technological and biological realms.
Now, you don't get behind that. I mean, if you look behind Nehal, for instance, you'll see his mind behind him.
It's all laid out in little piles behind and this is on his cupboard in his desk.
So we all have a good look at Neil's mind when he switches his camera so easy up.
But what we don't have often is case studies of how cognitive tasks can be distributed by system.
So we've got ideas about how it works for an individual, but very few case studies about a system doing it in English.
We've got Evelin triple doing it for the globe. But this is this.
This is. This is. So few and here we got one, so here we got Neil scoping family histories as a cognitive ethnographer.
He's showing how the extended family acted as an extended mind.
And specifically what he's showing is three things how they actually that actually changes the texts.
Firstly, collaboration between authors from different generations tends to call out a content
that preoccupation about how the work started with the family and travelled out.
And it's seen as the child of the family and given messages to the world outside. If the child is legitimate, it's respectful.
It talks in a register, which respectfully didactic, and if it's illegitimate, it's satirical.
Then the notion that family collectives produced works rather than individuals tended to
encourage those people who collaborated to think big on the assumption that they'd start in.
Somebody else would finish it up and keep it going, keep up the intellectual, keep up amongst a family.
And what you get is such hopes being registered in extensive texts, laying out this transgender gender and generational relationship.
And then finally, collective collabo creation tended to create a sort of bricolage very often.
So that's what a perennial showing where stuff is inserted and rearranged and reassembled is constantly fiddling.
So I was really into this. I love extended mind. This is a massive case regret.
And then I started getting a bit itchy. So this is the second angle.
This is the sense of the family as a narrative itself. Now, each family's myth, as we all know from our own families, has affordance.
You can do certain sorts of interpretations, say certain things or you can't be.
One of the tellers of those histories allows writers to place themselves as narratives of the story and as characters in it.
See that? Oh, no, that's that's well, that's a great idea. And your great, great, great idea. A great idea.
And then he said, well, the problem is that means the work is never finished.
There was always stuff to be done on the family texts and updating, editing, imitating, co-authoring, translating, prefacing.
And there's always work to be done on using the texts outside.
The family knew dedications to other patrons commenting on them in a new political situation, what have you.
So the material, he says, is free for heirs to upcycling. It will.
When I started getting twitchy, you know, this unending reworking of a text reader becomes writer, becomes character.
I mean, I know we're supposed to murmur wistfully with Yates'. How can we know the dancer from the dance?
But I've always found it very easy to tell from my seat and stools I pay, they move and then we all go ahead.
There's a move in English literature for the moment to rewrite the classics, the critical creative movement.
I'm so contemptuous of this cotton which spices up Pride and prejudice for the few zombies.
Okay, there are more sophisticated versions of it than Neil's work.
How shows how horribly free literary errors felt claimed they were acting with the deepest
respect towards their literary forebears while reanimating the remains in order to dominate them.
In other words, I think what he's showing us is an uncanny, the uncanny aspect of family piety,
that class of the frightening, which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.
Now, my third point, this, I think, is a difference between the English and French situations,
or maybe it's just an area that that's that's not commenting on English all the time,
regularly create metaphorical families for themselves from previous writers.
But we've all done that. We the orphan fantasy, if you're not my parents.
But. English writers do it, so take, for instance, the latest group of poets,
playwrights and literati around Johnson and Johnson who call themselves the tribal sons of Ben.
Now, some are intimate with him personally, meeting so regularly in the 16 twenties in the Apollo room of the Devlins Dunstan Tavern on Fleet Street
that they even get their society's social rules painted on the on the wall to get real regulars.
Others, though, while not knowing Johnson personally, was so heavily influenced by his philosophy and style that they also call themselves sons Ben.
And the group includes playwrights like Richard Broome and William Davenant and poets like Thomas Carey and Robert Herek.
Johnson celebrates his gathering's in an epistle answering to one that asked to be sealed off the tribe of Ben,
where he says his friends must be trustworthy, loyal and real.
And in return, his literary sons write poems celebrating his paternity, such as Thomas Randall's poem,
a gradually treat master Ben Johnson for his adopting of him to be his son unless his care is too poetic epistles to his noble father.
Such fantasy families are conspicuously cross-class, so I'd like to hear.
Do they exist in the early modern French literary scene? And how might members of a bloodline literary family respond to the English sense that the
family can also be an imaginative creation that crosses rather than enforces social boundaries?
Good for you. Thank you very much, Kerry, and I think Kerry, in fact, you might want to keep your yeah, yeah.
Come back so that we could we can look Baddiley at Neil as he begins to respond to some of the things that we've been talking about.
Yeah. Neal, over to you.
He said that they are clearly very self-conscious here with all my touches and it's in my mind around a bit that I so really actually teach me a lot.
Reflecting back a lot with interest, I really have to be a lot of to stop to think about putting some points better than I have done in the past.
Thank you very much.
Just adding insult and and and it's good that I had my camera and my car because you also managed to make me laugh out loud and very,
very friendly, very challenging and very, very funny points as well.
And I cannot do justice to the all. But but he goes so and.
Caroline Kennedy put it better than the trauma in the archives with that murder and.
Yeah, it's it's a very exciting discovery,
one that I neurotically checked with a whole bunch of Latinist to is Latin is better than mine to match and to make sure I'm not imagining things.
And I think, you know, in the context of this, because it's it's it's sort of there in the detail.
And so it doesn't take over everything.
But but I think I'm glad that you picked up on it, because for me, it's one of the more exciting parts of the research.
And actually through Connexions with a research group that's interested in literature and trauma.
I did have the opportunity to publish that.
But to to present it in a more sort of Latin rich format, really to explore what is, I think in that case, a very,
very indirectly felt and expressed trauma that runs on for a couple of generations from from
whether from the media or from the uncertainty as to whether it was a matter or a mixture of both.
Thank you for that. And on the question of what is an elite, it's absolutely key question,
and I'm not going to sit here and pronounce what an elitist because I think it's one of those ordinary language terms.
It depends on what context or purpose you're using it for.
I simply would say that although I'm I you're absolutely accurate in saying that.
Nobility is a big part of this, and then the mighty again.
I don't know whether England sort of contrasted points because the nobility was
much wider and much more numerous than in the English aristocracy in France.
And so a lot of this is going on and I think I estimate roughly 40 percent of these distributions from families of distributers.
When they pull in one way or another, but that does still leave the other 50, 60 percent.
So still elites, in the sense of my my argument is that this this this phenomenon of family nature actually happens.
On the whole, it's an even higher level than literally than what's happening in general.
I think that that's a probable conclusion, not a definite one. But despite that, there were quite a lot of 60 percent of combatants involved in it,
a lot of them on the cusp of instability, trying to get in there and bits.
But some of them, not one particular group actually that often had accomplished sergeants.
Was that so? The Regents, cheetahs, secretaries and so on.
And that was a group that was very difficult for communities to play socially because of its reliance on this extent of its
unusual new extent to provide something that should be different states and simply weren't quite sure what to make of that.
And and in terms of the incredible instability, social instability, a kind of melting pots that that you talked about again.
Absolutely. I suppose I qualify that by saying that.
You know, as as an historian's consti reminds us, nonetheless,
this was an extremely hierarchical society in which the vast majority of people could not move from the status into which they've been born.
However, you define that, whether the father's status or whatever it was, but the vast majority of people, that was not possible.
So I think you perhaps get. And a lot of this ferment is particularly on the cusp of certain crossover points,
in particular actually on the cusp of crossing over into the ability that group officeholders often just below,
you know, buying offices and so on and sometimes becoming the.
So there's a lot lot of movement around that. But even that may have been.
Slowed down, I think, as you got further into the 17th century and what are the barriers came up quite a bit.
Having said that, the 18th century samples are actually brilliant.
I said having said that, because still, on the question of the ability with the digital example, if a fantastic example and yes.
So I think my short answer is yes, both fit the bill in new ways entirely.
And I think that that kind of nephew shows that illustrates that problem that recurs again and again and again.
And in this book, which is part of because there's this whole system that but it's really hard to pull it off.
And typically companies with only put of the two or perhaps three generations.
And then you've got particularly some social groups, disintegration and evaporation of all that using that,
should they need to get the social back up and back to where they were before or even lower?
So I think that's that's that's really coming on.
And I suppose whether Tito's daughter, again, absolutely fundamental change is really important,
whether that's part of the family function or my colleagues or family literature and certainly is family literature,
because from the literature, I used to mean where there was some kind of.
Real calibration, coworking, whatever it coinciding at different production by different people within a family with family function.
I'm suggesting using that when to pinpoint the attributing of of that agency to a family or to family members.
So in other words, you could have a lot of things going on, but they're not visible below the radar of the family function,
which, like the author Alexis de Fuca, is the act of attributing whatever the underlying realities are.
So there's two things at the level of representation of actually attributing this work, like help to this work by my grandfather on it.
But then it's the most silent stuff, which often the women would be involved in a lot as well.
That might not come onto the family function because it's not attributed,
but it's still actually part of what I'm calling family that I'm trying to distinguish in attempts to capture that.
So the distinction and yeah, the third example, I didn't know that's that's incredible.
And and and I love the fact that people decide and this perhaps feeds into Kerrie's
anxieties about his ability to decide is still getting his own control in 1982,
writing his thesis over the whole business for his own completely separate purposes
by telling us what exactly all this all this stuff done by his ancestors,
men say I think that. But that illustrates to me nineteen point as well.
The the family function, just like you affection for Tucker is not something that it's just a historical phenomenon came to an end.
It's something that continues into the present. Whether we choose to attribute words to authors, to families tonight, to neither of them,
it's something that you can't really separate modern scholarship and scholarship from its continuing process and carry on to other points.
I mean, I take the like you're interpreting what I think in terms of extended mind,
but although his cognitive framework to some extent, I didn't particularly explicitly use extended mind.
But I think that works very well to describe what I could trying to do.
I do use a bit more the concept of 14 cents and which which you mentioned as well.
And I'm.
I think that and yes, I say that I think that there's an inherent kind of teacher facing openness and in all this material generated by companies,
whether they're trying to control or not, how future generations, including their family, use it,
it's de facto it's it's it's open and does get skewed and used for subsequent generations purposes constantly, I suppose, to try.
And I love your.
Characterisation of that kind of sinister control that might take only a mature excuse from the family way away from its original intended purpose.
For example, Protestant stuff used by Catholic descendent or vice versa and so on, as an uncanny, as horribly free,
as an uncanny aspect of the party and the class of the frightening,
I think that really brings out its energy and its real dynamism really, really well.
Much better than I've done, actually. But I suppose I'd say that someone can always come along and try to get them by falsifying some of the claims.
So there's always that vulnerability in the later uses that the claims and ability can be falsified, if you like.
So it doesn't diffuse entirely these free, often very self recounting, subsequent recycling of the material.
They can have their own vulnerability and so on.
And and in terms of your.
Your metaphors, familiar metaphors, in particular, England and tribal or sons of Ben Johnson, I think that's absolutely fascinating.
I suppose I myself situate that sort of phenomenon in the realm of what I call other activities that impinge upon family or contiguous with it,
whether household or or institutional college based on those networks and so on.
And that explains what's different about this is that some of the strong metaphorical connexions to this much stronger thing,
which I suppose you do get a little bit with, with phrases like La Familia and for for a household as well,
we do got that metaphor extension that might include household secretaries and so on in other directions as well.
I don't know of examples. I think with other people on the committee are really interested in their performance,
for example, of that, the French equivalent of the tribal sons of bad.
In that way, I suppose the closest kind of example might be in the book, something like one of my biggest case studies.
I'm not sure that allowed to be the son of the murderer.
And his his hadn't given up on the.
He gets adopted within a college institutional homosexual framework affected by this very leading scholar at that time.
And, you know, and he's not really calling his father, but there's a kind of crazy something going on there.
So you do get that sort of thing that you imagine that was probably quite community colleges.
And it may not stop in the comparative perspective looking across Europe,
perhaps the extent that varied, depending on how important colleges were culturally and in education,
so say perhaps more in some countries like Germany and and the other countries can benefit from it the way colleges,
but not quite the same same cultural importance.
And the redefined focus on that is that perhaps in the sense of interest he talks mediaevalists are there many mediaeval and tribal sons,
10 or whatever he was called in the Middle Ages? Because the phenomena phenomenon I've been trying to describe is is a fairly historically new
one in some respects because of this thing about scholars suddenly began to marry and whether
because that their their Protestants or because the figure of the late married scholar became
much more of a possibility than it had been through through so much of the Middle Ages.
So there you can imagine that that said that that twin transmission of, you know.
Procreation, but also transmission within the family became much more intense and shocking thing
in this in this humanistic period and that had often been in the in the monastery.
I'll stop that. Thanks very much, Adam.
And you, Neal, what an amazing series of, you know, coherent responses to our many points career, would you like to come back to something?
I seemed I could see that you were having some thoughts I could see or your mind was was doing a lot of stuff.
That's right. Neal Tucker, to discuss what I was thinking, just write in English.
We spend a lot of time talking about manuscript publication. You know, it's now equivalent to book publication or Ettlin.
Anyway, it's going for the right group of people. The influential group of people given manuscripts are cheaper to produce than published books does.
Would your conclusions about. Social mobility.
And what about the way these are being used to shove a family into the limelight?
Wouldn't that be varied if you considered manuscript publication as well?
In other words, would you have more of a wider range of people from different social classes or maybe from different genders?
Judges is attempting to do that shelf.
I'm sure that's right. And the. I mean, so many dimensions of this that one could actually pursue, and that's obviously one of them,
I should just, I suppose just clarify that in works is is quite broadly defined.
So I absolutely mean manuscript works amongst those. So so this is not confined to to to print.
But it's true that a lot of my examples of case studies are more print based.
But it'd be great to look at the numbers intent doing the counting the.
To find aspect of it, I have, you know,
included a manuscript work destined for some kind of seems like some kind of very limited circulation as a work in mind by my criteria.
And one example of access along with something, pick this up at the top end of the reading.
They tend to be kind of like mentioned genealogies.
So it's true that this is paid for shifting from the manuscript genealogies that a lot of, you know,
quite grand, noble families kept shifting those into print much, much more in the 17th century.
So that doesn't exactly answer your question.
And I think that that that shows a lot of work to do about the changing access relationship between printed manuscript on this point,
but doesn't really answer your questions. I don't know the answer to that about the extent to which really looking in
detail at examples of manuscript works might take you into a wider social range.
I'm sure it would. For women, I'm absolutely sure. Which we're. Yeah, no.
Yeah. I mean, you talk very well about the Margarita Diva and her have the very limited number of manuscript copies.
And so being able to read her work meant proximity to her, which is proximity to the queen.
So that that's a very neat example of that. I suppose it it changes over time.
I see that in the in the chat.
So Dave, Dave Postles has has put an example in for as of late 70s with chrysotile and produce as potential sons for very nicely.
Thank you. Yeah. I mean I suppose my only then you sort of follow up question that, that I'd like to sort of ask while I,
while I can before opening up to the to the audience generally is do you think we ought to teach differently,
teach some of these sorts of what sort of teach in relation to what you're revealing here, sort of so that a fifth, let's say,
of the works that we're teaching from the early modern period are from the from these from these families, these military families, family literature.
Oh, that would be that would be great. I think that I think a couple of sort of examples from the agricultural implications.
One is that the Dutch are going to wait until the tax cut.
But, you know, French style textbooks,
some century by century introduction to literature or dictionaries of literature separates a lot of these characters.
So, I mean, this is one that has already gone a long way beyond the.
Very, very rigid, essentially based focus,
but I think the centrally based focus that dominates a lot of teaching and still does to some extent, I suppose in France,
for example, and it's not very friendly to bringing out these often quite long, long delayed family, but still very significant family connexions.
So you even get the same really important righteous rights to the thoughts in this group claimed to love him and his son, Bookclub, Desisto.
It's not at all obvious from work from them,
from from looking at them in dictionaries that they are father and son with this incredibly antagonistic relationship.
So I think moving away from some focus can help. Nozette Really, it's part of the much wider attention to politics that history has taught us to have.
I think it's more the other way around. I think that has helped me in my research be attentive to both.
So, yeah, if capacity that can then help. Encourages all women teaching and learning to, you know, take the protests really,
really seriously rather than something to get out of the way before you get to the meat or not.
That would be great. No, thank you. Well, I think we probably should allow everybody else in now.
So I'm going to hand over to to West to to help the audience ask their questions.
Thank you. Yep, I was on mute.
Okay, thanks, Caroline. Don't disappear from the screen, Caroline or Carrie, unless you feel you really need to,
because I think questions will come to you as well as to Neal. I think, first of all, I'd like to pick up just on a comment in the in the Q&A,
which is in Latin familiar included not only relatives by blood or marriage, but also clients and even slaves.
And Neal, you talk about John O'Brien and other people's work on the family at the Montana.
And I wondered if that was a way of extending or approaching Kerry's question about fantasy families.
In other words, is there a way in which one can think of the family?
Yes. In relation to blood, but also in relation to service and patronage and a kind of larger network of people,
because I think that that's also emerging, if you like, in certainly in early modern publication history.
I wonder if anybody in the call might want to say a bit more about that Kerry or Neil or Caroline Kerry,
since you brought it up, perhaps you could say a thing or two more about that. Whether, you know, somebody called Robertson,
I think is Richard Robinson Robertson in the 1980s who claims that various people have
inspired our fathers of his work and his work is absolutely awful popular writer.
And he writes masses and he eventually gets so cross.
He writes a tract of all the people he sent his fantasy, his work to his fantasy family.
And why haven't they given him anything in return? And I wonder that sense of I very much like not to be part of your family.
Thank you very much indeed. That claims to family and family and repudiating [INAUDIBLE] sons.
Thank you, Gary Neal, to pick up on that. I think it's a really interesting line to pursue and the.
I suppose just to start with, pushing back a little bit in this period,
people were so obsessed with blogs and that kind of physiological heredity as part of all this that I think.
But but but keep something quiet, fairly specific in their minds about blood relations.
But that's certainly not the whole story, as you said.
And and the you know, the thinking about these twins,
perhaps I give you some examples of this where there is a someone is is is dedicated to to a person.
I'm saying just as my father said, your father wrote about the case on actually.
So this is the two fathers sometimes. But the relationship of one pair to the to the patient, that is actually a figure one as well.
So that it's quite complicated. So I think that does prove your point.
And another couple of thoughts on that would be the clinical level.
So really, you might throw a lot of space in the book.
You know, his relation to his very famous father is very often, you know, imagine the relation of of of a one sometimes, really.
But sometimes that is actually other father figures come to be more important to him at certain points,
particularly the French came from you very much like a father figure.
Say that. So there's a slippage. It's quite easy to make. I think he has make one because he's at his social level.
It's is not going to get what he needs from his own father. He needs another father.
And ultimately, actually, another dimension, again,
would be take a very religious turn when worldly rungs on the ladder and awful in the way it's God that takes that role as well.
So I think this can be displaced in multiple directions. I quite agree.
I'm going to take the notion that none of us get all we need from our biological fathers away from this conversation.
But within that chat, again, there's a good load of stuff going on about the extension of family into patronage and into into other fields.
So Jonathan's got a question about patronage and how you might end up Jonathan Patterson and how you might end up, in a sense, working,
producing something for the family to which you're attached and even an extension of that to the family finances,
which again, is a really interesting example. Gemma Teitelman has suggested that I sort of analogy might be Voltaire and the patriarch, the patriarch,
the felony akin to the Johnson question, although, as Gemma points out there, it's also about a contrast with the rival also.
And I mean, that may be true of Johnson as well. There's a kind of rivalry in the whole family have been seen.
And that's. Yeah. So you might you might signal a father not only for your own sake,
but also as a rival to another one within a kind of competitive literary field, I suppose.
One other question to shift the come back to the question of gender.
Again, Kerry raised jessalyn just right at the beginning to do these literary practises, produce conventions, who who uses the conventions.
And it may be used by them. And in a way, it might depend on what just mean to say by convention.
But certainly one of the things you show in your book is that satire, for example,
is one sort of generic convention that emerges from this kind of analysis.
Let's imagine that that might be what just means by convention, in other words, some sense of genre or working within a particular way.
And again, you have a notion of why that why that's useful to think about that, Neal,
I think that the examples of Sativex that Kerry hasn't mentioned really nicely,
the way I find very helpful in relation to legitimacy is a really important one.
So it's part of the sort of exceptions, very interesting exceptions to prove the rule that when things go wrong,
it's sort of turning against these family frameworks.
But also satire has a much more conventional role here as emerging from family, as in one of the biggest.
I mentioned a moment ago Lukla do not find it so late 16th century poet, but say that the time just to really get from the magistrates and.
A local leader, he Satie's, that really made very clear that that that was the wrong way to do things safely is what people in other families do,
and particularly people in and outside the network of families that inhabitants of magistrates in his part,
Normandy, that all the people who such rights are outside that.
So so it's part of this against a different kind.
The tribal metaphor is part of this is trying to be the very,
very kind of nasty and genre really for for for excluding people from from your from your tribe, if you like.
But, yeah, there are other examples, I suppose. I think certain points to what Terry picked up on the conventions about the sorts of
kinds of stuff that tends to be produced as family literature that involves massive
scale works at conventions of of cutting and pasting basically from all sorts of
previous stuff to make new uses of your family's materials that you've inherited.
So, yeah, she's no recommendations yet. The collage Kerry said and as you say in your book as well, just the Sentinel little a kind of clarification.
Yes. Generic conventions, also modes of address, salon practises, greetings in letters, attacks of various kinds and so on.
So, yeah, I also misrepresented Gemma's questions slightly.
And it might be worth just following through on that because it seems the Voltaire Rousseau competition,
if you like, is not so much between two fathers as between a father and a friend.
Let me also and the patriarch, the Voltaire.
And again, I just again, I know that friendship is part of your story and the degree to which somebody refers to, you know, I mean, Lechter and so on.
And there are a number of examples.
I wondered if you wanted to just reflect on on the sort of friendship question in relation to I want to I don't want to generate too many functions,
but we could have the friendship function as well. But there's the sort of w.
Yeah. Have you got a thought on that. I think, I think that's been really good work on that,
that I think things like for example looking at something like well like this book on the idea of perfect friendship or,
or in a more varied way the the the Festschrift for memorial volume for Philip Ford on Sodality and so on.
That and not just two examples of the a lot of really good work that's being done on this very often in this homosocial college setting,
these alternatives and certainly more for social different as well.
I think within those networks, it's the one thing that interests me that I think would be more work to be done is on certain suspension
of social hierarchy that is made possible within friendship and or of the situations of familiarities.
Yeah, that might be a temporary suspension. You can trace it to how people to trust each other, but so one should be OK.
I've said everything was hierarchical. You know, there were constant suspensions. And and so in this particular context, that's absolutely right.
Carry on nodding vigorously. Now, you want to come back in on that question.
I'm just thinking about the social conduct books which are circulating in England at that time,
which are very clear about suspending hierarchy, went to suspend and when to start again and who gives the signal to start or stop.
Thank you. As is so often the case in these discussions, questions either anticipate or pick up on something that's already been said.
And when you were talking about homosexual colleges, Neal, Jim Reed has pointed out that colleges can also function as families and in
Germany supervise your doctor farter and that this has a kind of after effect.
I should know that, as Jim was one of my undergraduate tutors, if not my Dr. FATA.
But I think I mean, obviously, the world would be a different place if they were Dr. Mutter's as well.
So the gender question around there is part of that, too.
But it's yeah, the family the college as a family is clearly a strong part of the story.
But also, I think one of the things your book shows well, what are the questions you asked is,
is this a particular historical moment which if you like the not all the literature produces a sworn to celibacy where the
tonsure is not a kind of necessary part of of literary practise in the way that it might have been earlier and so on.
Colleges come to pick up some of that dimension.
Two more quick questions, I think. And one is from Tom Hamilton, who tends to food instead of.
Well, yeah, he asks.
He says the statistical research underlying the first part of your book is extremely helpful, not only for literary scholars, but authors.
First of all, for social historians.
Could you reflect on how you decided on your categories of analysis, how you slice of the pie or the Camembert charts?
In other words, more generally,
did the statistical analysis produce finding that surprised you or changed how you conceived of the project as a whole?
Oh, yes, all of the above. I mean, I went to you go through.
Every possible answer to Tom's really good question, but very exciting stuff, and that's, for example.
Yeah, I just say, General, that for me this is a new departure and to go quantitative for part of the project,
I'm not the tool of the minority in terms of pages, but to get that sort of rough, you know, sort of scraping of the terrain.
And it's a bit of a shock to do what will be completely familiar to social historians,
to have to get really arbitrary with your definitions were not arbitrary, but very precise because you can cancel.
You have to count that you're counting the same thing.
Say for yourself, it's all kinds of challenges from literacy such as me normally if but no, you have to define a work.
You have to try what Francis and you have to define the degree of certainty with which you're classifying someone.
So you have to define how you're classifying and socially whether the top middle of watching the ability.
So that comes down to to to some monetary sum as well.
So all of that you have to do. So I wanted to simply say that that's a new thing for me.
And it made me a much more sympathetic to people who have to do that.
And I'm less likely to pick the apart because the payoff is you do get this rough picture that emerges.
But of course, one then stands by the absolute truth of the definition in relation to any particular case,
because things are always a little more interesting when you get into the detail and see the detail.
Thank you, Neal. So we've got we're running out of time, but we've got one quick question, which Sabrina Hogan asks, is that time for this?
Did you come across any twin writers or families with twins? And this has an interest in the she has a specific genetic phenomenon in.
But, yeah. Twins part of your story and some of it I think they are, but I think brothers are twins that this is so I can't remember much more.
So just when we started, I might not be able to remember everything in this one extreme case of these two brothers,
possibly twins who called the ship. And then you knew who was so extreme about them is that they in the late 16th century,
they produced these volumes, translating virtue and intolerance.
And there's no indication of dividing them up other than us as a unit, even the divorced mother daughter, you know, which means by which.
But this is not is no indication.
You did you did look at them very slightly differentiated, one of the two groups, but they're basically in individual represented in the unit.
They may be twins, but I'm afraid I have to go back to check.
Caroline, were you nodding your head as if to say I know the answer to this or just it's okay?
Um, well, I think we've yeah, we've roamed and ranged over all sorts of exciting areas,
from cognitive gadgets to cognitive ethnography through to the terrific example of the Assad family.
We could have spent a good hour talking about that alone, I think.
But so many, many thanks both to Kerry and Caroline for their rich and imaginative and critical and as Neil says,
sometimes laugh out loud, but also really profound responses to Neil's book.
And, of course, many thanks to Neil for writing it in the first place.
I think to take up the pedagogies question that Caroline asked, I really do think this is, you know,
we'll think differently about authorship and about how to teach things as a
result of this work and indeed of your larger study that you're engaged in.
Neil, you know, collaborative study about literature and social function.
And it may not seem like this is, in the jargon, terribly relevant work, but of course, it really is,
because it is absolutely about the sort of the role and the power of education and of literary work within within the social structure.
So thank you all very much indeed. One more time.
And thank you also for to our several many punters who turned up, listened, added to their questions or even were there just listening along.
You have disappeared from screens. Thanks again before before we finished,
I just wanted to say that the the next book at lunchtime is in two weeks time on Wednesday, the 9th of June, same time.
And we'll be discussing the book edited by Abigail Green and Simon Levy.
Slim called Jews Liberalism anti-Semitism A Global History.
Do come back in a couple of weeks time, if you can. Many thanks again for being here and goodbye.