Vienna, one traveller’s experience

 

The Vienna Natural History Museum, viewed from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, with the statue to Maria Theresa between them. Lots of people in the shade, not so many in the full sunlight.

Vienna is famous as one of the great examples of 19th-century urban planning. The Ringstrasse (which Wikipedia baldly translates as “ring road”, although it is hardly that) was built around the historic city, using the space created by the removal of the city walls from 1857. The planners seized the opportunity to build a large number of trophy buildings, all of monumental scale, using a wild variety of styles, including Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque, to celebrate the Habsburg Empire. They include the University of Vienna, the Opera House, the Town Hall, and the Parliament Building. The Ringstrasse is generally accepted as quite an exceptional development: for example, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This holiday, my first visit to Vienna, was based almost entirely around or within the Ringstrasse, so it did not look at any of the social housing for which Vienna is famous. The story of how the Ringstrasse was built, and funded, has been well told by several historians, notably Carl Schorske (1979).

My experience in the centre of Vienna was uncomfortable, and the Ringstrasse didn’t help. It was mid-summer, and the temperature was up to 30 degrees Celsius, in other words, hot. This was not the best weather to be looking at the outside of buildings. The Ringstrasse buildings, in all their grandeur, had to be approached in full sun with no convenient shade available.

Vienna is a city that takes its culture very seriously, so my heart sank initially at the thought of a space dedicated to multiple museums. Anyone who has approached the Kunsthistorisches Museum will recognise the deliberately overwhelming impression produced by the gigantic-scale architecture. Inside and out, the building is designed to intimidate you.

The view from the foyer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum: you can see where the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge got its ideas from.

Was this kind of grandeur ever enjoyed by the users? The Ringstrasse buildings are similar to the superhuman scale of Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris. A walk down the Champs-Elysées is not a pleasant experience, in a similar fashion. Both the Ringstrasse and the Champs-Elysées are major traffic thoroughfares. They are noisy and smelly, and do not please the eye for pedestrians, who enjoy things to look at on a small scale.

The Museums Quarter during the day

In contrast, the Museums Quarter, despite its name, is relatively small and enclosed. It is a space created to one side of the Ringstrasse, creating a square (small by the standards of the Ringstrasse itself), with a museum at each end: the Leopold Museum at one end, and MUMOK, the Museum of Contemporary Art, at the other. There are several other institutions around, such as an Architectural Institution, but they are barely visible from the main square. In the square itself there is a variety of open-air cafes, and, most importantly, both mature and young trees and plants. You can pay to sit at cafes, but there are also seats where you can just sit for free. The cafes are very relaxed, providing anything from a drink to a full meal, of many different cuisines: the café we went to provided anything from Chinese to Japanese to Italian, with several styles in between). In the evening, people walked their dog, or went out with their families, and I noticed that rarity, single people dining in the cafes, unnoticed.

The Museums Quarter in the evening: modern art, several cafes, loungers for anyone to sit.

The Museums Quarter provided a central-Vienna equivalent to some of the smaller streets, which, even if not traffic-free, had lots of street cafes and planting, with a speed limit of 10 km/h. During the day, there was quite a bit of traffic in these side streets, but in the evenings, many street cafes opened up, using a part of the carriageway, and the road surface had been changed to a tiled brick, to slow the traffic down.

One of the side streets away from the Ringstrasse. This is a road that cars could use - but few cars were seen in the evenings.

To my mind, this is what a pleasant city is all about. It’s rare in London, because there are so few traffic-free locations (don’t even think about using a London square for social events, for the most part). I love art galleries, and the opera, and grand buildings, but the Museums Quarter showed how it was possible to combine grandeur and small-scale.

The Shape of Things: the exhibition and the curators

 

Poppy Jones Water Glass and Thistle (2024)

There seem to be two or more exhibitions taking place at the Pallant House Gallery exhibition of modern British still life art. On the one hand, a presentation of the quintessential still life genre, and how it has survived and been constantly refreshed through wars, artistic movements, and changing fashions. On the other hand, there is a somewhat frantic effort by the curators, the authors of the catalogue (The Shape of Things, Pallant House Gallery, 2024) to drag the show towards displaying the history of the last hundred years of art in Britain, almost as if still life in itself were not sufficient. Linked to this is a selection of works that aim to shock, deceive or fool us. Typical of this approach is Jane Simpson’s Our Distant Relatives, a Morandi-like assembly of what looks like porcelain vases and containers, except that they are made out of rubber rather than porcelain. You can’t see this from the objects displayed, and since we can’t touch the objects, we have no idea what they are made of; the joke is rather wasted on us. What’s the point? On the subject of things that can’t be seen, “Fergusson’s still lifes often had strong sexual overtones: other examples of his blue lamp still lifes include a small pink box … which is said to have contained Fergusson’s condoms.” This is a reference to something not visible in a painting not displayed at the exhibition.

To be brutal, the show is not sufficient even at showing the classical still life tradition and how it continued into the 20th century. Cezanne is described in the catalogue as ““arguably the father of modern still life” – so why not include anything by Cezanne in this show? He painted over 200 still lifes, so there are plenty to choose from. He wasn’t British, but does it matter? Or do we need to draw a line around Britain, and only include artists who practised here?

The quiet magic of still life is perhaps insufficient for the curators, but to be fair, the artists themselves were frequently happy to condemn much of the art around them. Paul Nash, in 1931, wrote “The tyrannical reign of Nature Morte is, at last, over. Apples have had their day”. But he didn’t have any coherent description of an alternative; he called for two seemingly contradictory ideas in art, first, intensity of design, but second, “Juxtaposition of paraphernalia”. The Smithsons in 1956 described the Pop Art of their generation as “the equivalent of the Dutch fruit and flower arrangement, the pictures of the second rank of all Renaissance schools … “. There are many dreary fruit and flower paintings, but this exhibition shows some examples of what could be done with these subjects. They aren’t all dreary.

Similarly, the curators are not sparing in their condemnation of much of this show. Describing the work of Bawden, Cedric Morris and Frances Hodgkins, they state “these works became commodities in themselves and took their place on the walls of fashionable society homes, becoming, in the words of the critic R H Wilenski, “wall furniture”. Well, if it were wall furniture, we wouldn’t be looking at it with such interest today.

 

More questionable still is when the curators going off in their own directions, not always related to the work. Describing still life in the 1930s, the writers come up with a gloriously ungrammatical claim: “A genre with a fraught relation to its own gendered implications, artists worked to unravel still life’s proximity to the domestic in the wake of newly won emancipation for women”. [page 60]. This is shortly before discussing the work of Winifred Nicholson. John Bratby’s Still life with Chip Frier “problematises the masculine individual’s conflicted position in the postwar home”. The catalogue section devoted to the 1950s and 60s is more a history of Pop Art than a study of still lifes.

 

At other times, the curators are keen to detect signs of Britishness in the art, for example, Edward Wadsworth’s Bright Intervals: “in his concern with maritime instruments and depictions of nautical life, it is possible to detect … “the consciousness of an islander”. I think that reveals more about the curator than about the work.  

 

My impression from the show is that there is a magical appeal of still lifes, and towards the end the curators rather grudgingly accept this. Michael Bird tries desperately to avoid using the word “domestic”, instead using “sociable”, and describing still lifes as depicting “objective reality where order reigns”. But he catches something of the magic when he describes the “stillness, lucidity and calm” of the best still lifes.

 

Towards the end of the catalogue, there is some kind of acceptance of what I would describe as the quiet tradition of still life at its best: 

For all its mundanity and portrayal of humble objects, still life has the capacious ability to express the human condition and shared experience, a manifest of the time and society in which it was made. It is perhaps in this, that still life acquires its contemplative, reflective qualities. [Melanie Vandenbrouck, p143]

That understated subject matter, combined with exquisite detail, is seen beautifully in Poppy Jones Water Glass and Thistle (2024), bringing a fine tradition up to the present day.

Still Life at the Pallant House Gallery

 

Ethel Walker, Flower Piece no 4 c1930

The Shape of Things is the title for this charming exhibition of still life by British artists from around 1900 to the present day. Like many of the best Pallant House exhibitions, it makes considerable use of the remarkable Pallant House permanent collection, based around Nash, Nicholson, Bloomsbury, Ravilious, and a few others. Curator Simon Martin describes it (in the catalogue on page 12) with just a touch of exaggeration as “a history of modern and contemporary British art through still life”. It comprises around 150 works, of which perhaps a third are by living artists, a very healthy proportion. Commendable also was the complementary exhibition at the Pallant, of works by members of the local community, called Significant Objects, objects that have a value to the creator.

Walking around the show, I realised that still life is a term we often use but without always thinking about what it means. Several of the works in this show didn’t look like still life to me. So here is a definition – and let’s see what fits, and what doesn’t:

Still life: a genre of representational art of motionless objects, usually arranged, such as flowers or fruit, but not including the human figure. It is distinct from landscape painting, where the artist depicts a view of what they see, and from botanical illustration, which depicts for information and education, even though many early still life works are astonishing for their verisimilitude and detail.

Although still life, by this definition, has existed since earliest times, it emerged in Western art as a genre in the Low Countries during the 16th and 17th centuries. Within the overall grouping of still life there have been popular subjects and topics, for example, depictions of flowers, dead animals and game, bowls of fruit, Vanitas (expressing the vanity of human desires) and Memento Mori (reminder of death).

Still life was traditionally considered “low” art, depicting the everyday, contrasted with “high” art (of heroes and saints), but has always been popular. Some of the greatest 19th- and 20th-century artists have produced still life, including Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Matisse.

That definition enabled me to raise a few questions – for example, is there anything distinctly British about still life? The catalogue states explicitly that still life was not a British invention, and crosses many national boundaries. There is nothing specifically British about a bowl of fruit.

Yet the Pallant House director, Simon Martin, confidently and curiously asserts that the still life genre “can be seen as a manifestation of Britain’s status as a former maritime power, and the long legacy of empire” [p8]. I can read lots of things into still life, but I hadn’t expected that interpretation. His observation, or justification, is that many artists who carried out still life painting were immigrants to the UK. His long list of first- or second-generation painters includes many from Europe, which seems to defeat his argument; all in all, I don’t think it is a very helpful way of looking at still life.

Works that don’t appear to me to be part of still life include Katie Paterson’s Ending, a dial of 100 different pigments, representing nothing; and the very prominent jars by Lindsey Mendick, covered in writhing creatures. I also felt the surrealist works with imaginary items fell outside the remit of still life. 

Sickert, Still Life on a Table, 1913

It doesn’t help to be too doctrinaire on this point. Sickert’s lovely Still Life on a Table has some figures in the background, but they don’t really affect the main still life in the foreground. 

Anwar Jalal Shemza, Still Life, 1957

Anwar Jalal Shemza’s Still Life, was remarkable – a rich mix of ochres, reds and blues.

But for me, the highlights of the show were some of the flower paintings, by Winifred Nicholson, Cedric Morris, and Ethel Walker. Flowers seem to bring out the best in some painters (Ben Nicholson’s son said very aptly that his father’s paintings of flowers in vases was all about the vase rather than the flowers), and it was thrilling to see the enthusiastic brush-strokes, rather than nit-picking attention to detail, in these works. Flowers full of life like these are a wonderful inspiration; they seem free of the heavy-handed use of the skull that was still continuing in the 20th-century, and which appeared to be a clumsy and outdated attempt to convey significance. Walker’s painting seems to proclaim, “Look at these flowers! Are they not magical?” For me, the best still lifes are unpretentious (and unportentous) examples of low, rather than high life, and all the better for it. 

 

    

Santiago Rusiñol and Sitges

 

I always enjoy a trip to a seaside resort. For someone who lives over an hour from the sea, I find in a resort there is such an emphasis on pleasure, such a contrast to the drab inland towns, and so it is disappointed indeed to go to the seaside only to discover towns like Great Yarmouth or Margate that have lost all the pleasurable aspects they must once have had.

That’s why a day trip to Sitges, around 20 km from Barcelona, is such a pleasure. Of course, there is the sea, which is necessary, but not sufficient. Here it is in the form of several bays; the beaches, each one with a slightly different character; and for one of the beaches, the most central one, a long row of seaside cafes, selling everything from cocktails, tapas, to full set meals. While you eat, you can see various enjoyable public sculptures of curvy classical nudes and notable Sitges residents (not in the same sculpture, I should add) that seem to have been chosen to provide pleasurable associations while you eat and look at life on the beach.

There are probably stylish venues in Sitges, but for the most part, the town has a turn of the century charm, the air of a minor resort that was initially developed in the late 19th century, and then grew dramatically, and with considerably less charm, in the 1960s and 70s with dreary nondescript apartment blocks, which don’t have anything like the charm of the few blocks of the historic centre. 

But there is one aspect of Sitges that seems to combine the vulgar and the refined in a very charming way: the local museum, which is actually two separate collections. There is the municipal gallery, with the expected miscellany of fine and applied arts, but there is also Cau Ferrat (something like “the iron den”), the former house of Santiago Rusiñol, which provides the quirkiest and most entertaining view of the town. The Rusinol house contains a plethora of objects of all kinds: iron, glass, tiles, high and low art, all stacked several deep on every wall.

The best view from the museum is the view from the loo.  Inside the toilet at the Cau Ferret Museum, there is a plain glass floor-to-ceiling window; but there is little chance that you will be seen – the Museum is built right over the sea, and this window looks straight out to the Mediterranean. The view is like an infinity pool, with no buildings to enable you to judge the distance. The view seems to pay tribute to the magical sea, which you have the opportunity to contemplate for a few minutes.  

I’m not sure if Rusiñol was responsible for putting Sitges on the map, but he didn’t do the town any harm by his long-term association with it. Difficult to sum up Rusiñol as an artist: although not a world-shattering painter, his drawing and composition skills were excellent, and he seems to have been equally fluent in writing novels, plays, as well as painting, quite apart from being a major collector. His house in Sitges, although it has a bedroom and a kitchen, seems more suited to display than to everyday living, and doesn’t appear to be large enough for more than one person, even though it could (and did) host banquets for many. I don’t get the impression that anyone other than Rusinol stayed there, and in fact Rusiñol deserted his wife and child for several years to “live the life of an artist”, which he felt he could not do at home. Since he had inherited enough money to never have to work, it seems rather strange that he  couldn’t be an artist with his family, but whatever the case, one result is that he drew exquisite depictions of the local Sitges brass band, which I found far more appealing than conventional insipid portraits of young girls holding a carnation.

The Cau Ferrat, containing the Rusinol collection as he left it, is quite something to behold. It is a typical 19th-century art collector’s trove, where different art forms, periods and styles are all jumbled up in the most amazing cacophonous collection. The result is a jumble that makes more sense as a whole than by the individual works.  It reminded me of the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, with individual artistic creations dragged out of their context and displayed alongside completely.

The Blue Rider Movement at the Tate Modern (May 2024)

 

Kandinsky, Improvisation - Deluge (1913)

There are some great paintings in this show (at the Tate Modern), but I found the catalogue, and the interpretation provided, very unhelpful.

This exhibition should be entitled “Women and The Blue Rider Movement”. It’s not about Expressionists generally, and it doesn’t even provide an introduction to the Blue Rider movement. I had to go to other books, and to Wikipedia, to get a better idea of what was going on. For example, if  you wanted to know about the Blue Rider Almanac, the group’s only major publication, there is indeed an article about it in the catalogue, which begins:

References to the publication of The Blaue Reiter Almanac in the autobiographical writings of Wassily Kandinsky range from the egotistical to the whimsical. [p184]

Nothing about what the Almanac was. I haven’t found any general introduction to the Almanac. Instead, the catalogue tells you how egotistical and whimsical Kandinsky was, and how the Almanac only included two female artists [p184] (or three female artists [p79]). As for Kandinsky, responsible for some of the first ever abstract works, which are some of the most magical paintings in the show, he is dismissed in the following way:

Kandinsky’s confidence in his art’s power of course had to do with his privileged position. His abstract modes incorporate (appropriate)  the decorative, feminine and ‘exotic’, transforming abstraction into a supposedly universal ( read white male) mode.  [Bibiana K. Obler, p80]

I can imagine some abstract art perhaps as male, but I simply don’t see Kandinsky’s abstract works as incorporating “feminine” elements – I thought we had moved beyond that kind of simplistic assignment of “masculine” and “feminine” attributes. I think Kandinsky’s achievement is to create colourful and dynamic works that are more than simply decorative. And I certainly don’t see his works as “male”; you might perhaps interpret Jackson Pollock as male, although I think what is actually meant is “aggressive”, but not Kandinsky.

Let’s summarise from external sources about what was actually going on. The Blue Rider Movement was founded by Marc, Kandinsky and Macke, and only existed for  three years, from 1911 to 1914. It was responsible for two exhibitions and one Almanac. It ended abruptly at the start of the war, during which two of the founders died: Marc in 1916, and Macke in 1914. The Almanac contains, alongside essays, a huge variety of works including Henri Rousseau, folk art, 13 children’s paintings, Schoenberg music scores, Japanese drawings, and medieval German woodcuts. The catalogue authors criticize the Almanac for not providing attributions to the non-European works, but it seems perverse to complain about a more international scop  and wider range of art than any movement had assembled at that time; and attribution was not seen at the time as important as it might be today. I don’t think it would take long to find Picasso’s use of non-attributed African models. Is it Colonialist? Yes, of course, but by that token, so is Shakespeare nationalist and misogynistic. Better would be to concentrate on the reasons why we still look at works by Marc, Macke and Kandinsky.

And, let’s face it, some of the paintings in this exhibition are just bad, for example, the folk-religious works on glass by Gabriele Münter, and the Girl with Toddler by Maria Franck-Marc. There are many black-and-while photographs by Gabriele Münter from her visit to Tunisia in 1905, and to the US in 1900, but I simply don’t think you can make a case for them as countering “Orientalist stereotypes”.  I haven’t yet found anything in the catalogue that makes me look at these works in a genuinely enlightening way. I’ll remember the wonderful images of a non-rational, non-specifically Western, universe of the (if you like) spiritual, but I would simply describe as "non-rational".  

In summary, an exhibition with some great paintings, but unhelpful text. For a better introduction I would suggest Roger Cardinal’s Expressionism (1984). Or just look at the pictures and respond to the sheer sense of release from hundreds of years of art-historical convention.

How to read a book

Reading a new book is a bit like encountering someone new. Your view of the book, or the other person, is at first rather cautious; you don’t want to trust this new resource too much until you have a better view. Initially, you have probably heard something about the book, perhaps a recommendation from a friend, or a review, or the subject matter, or even, heaven forbid, the jacket design, appealed to you. Whatever the case, you retain an element of uncertainty before you fully open yourself to this book. You ask yourself, I will devote several hours to this book, so I want to think it will be worth it. How, in other words, do you assess a new book? Let’s take an example: The Seduction of Place (2000).  

I live in Cambridge, which for possibly accidental reasons is situated quite close to several new and planned cities: Milton Keynes, Letchworth, Stevenage, Harlow and Peterborough, to name a few. Does this conscious urban design make people happier? More broadly, what is the relationship between cities, their buildings, and their inhabitants? When there is a new development, such as a shopping centre, or a bypass, or a community garden, is there any way to measure the effect on the inhabitants? I recently visited Dundee, and in my opinion, the siting of the new Tay Bridge bringing traffic to the middle of the city centre had a disastrous effect on people’s lives.

So I was looking for a book that  examined the relationship between the built environment and people’s lives. I want a stimulating but entertaining read.

Joseph Rykwert’s The Seduction of Place (2000) struck me as a possible answer to these questions: the subtitle is “The History and Future of the City”. The blurb for the book describes how Rykwert “assesses how and why urban projects from the past succeeded or failed and what lessons can be drawn”. That sounds like the right book to me. He is a respected writer (Wikipedia describes him as “one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation”). There were no fewer than fourteen plugs (praise from reviewers) for the book on the covers and the first page, and the twenty-eight people thanked for their comments by the author before we get to page one. I had a train journey, so I took the book with me and settled down to be instructed, and hopefully entertained. 

It seems a bit churlish after all that to say I was disappointed. There is no question of the author’s learning; perhaps indeed that proved to be the challenge. 

My method for appraising a book is simple. I proceed on two fronts. The first assessment is at the macro level, the same as the appraisal of a journal article: is the author answering the question proposed by the title? One would hope, both for articles and for books, that the question may need some elucidation, despite the presence (for the journal article) of an abstract, but it seems pretty clear that this book is about “the history and future of the city”, as the strapline states. But after fifty pages, I had discovered some points about the history of the city, but almost incidentally. I wasn’t sure what the first 75 pages, around a quarter of the book, were for.

If this is a book about the history and future of the city, do we need to have a chapter devoted to the Industrial Revolution? Do we need to have a potted history of agriculture? Do we need to know the details of why Voltaire and Rousseau came to Paris, and why they didn’t like it? Do we need the details of Pugin’s Contrasts, which I have never envisaged as a study of things urban? In Rousseau’s case, his reason for coming to Paris was to earn enough money so he could leave and write his Confessions. Fascinating - but irrelevant. Here is part of the passage devoted to Rousseau, to show Rykwert’s fascinating yet rambling style:

As Rousseau admired Turin, so Voltaire admired London as the model of a truly meritocratic city. And he was right, since even the pre-Hanoverian English crown never succeeded in establishing a powerful centralizing court, though the Stuart kings tried, and one of them, Charles I, lost his head in the process. Their failure was clearly represented by the ramshackle modesty of the palaces at Whitehall and Saint James’s, which were never aggrandized, despite plans to do so and reconstruction after fires. This was the great age of European palace building when very modest sovereigns indeed, like the prince-bishops of Wurzburg, built themselves residences the British Empire would never equal (p22).

This is an aimless walk rather than an argument.

Secondly, I read a book on the micro level, examining each sentence. when I encounter a statement about which I have some knowledge, I compare what I know with what the author knows. Or, simply, I use my common sense to ask “is this statement likely?... Am I satisfied that  this author is using reasonable argument to make his point?” It’s somewhat like a conversation with a taxi driver. You exchange a few platitudes, and then the driver launches into his theory of why the country is going to the dogs  - and you bite your lip and keep quiet for the rest of the journey.

Here are a couple of examples of Rykwert’s detailed statements. On page one, the author describes the situation at the end of World War Two:

Building became the highest social priority: in the first half of the century, any young man in a Latin-speaking country, whether in Europe or South America, who needed a university degree but had not special interests, often studied law; but after 1945, many of them gravitated to architecture.

This is a strange, rather cavalier claim. I’m confident to think there was an increase in the number of students studying architecture, but moving from law to architecture? Why from one to the other? Why “young man”, not “young woman”? What is a “Latin-speaking country” anyway, and why just these countries? Does Rykwert mean Spanish, or classical Latin, which hasn’t been spoken for over a thousand years? Did people not study architecture in Japan or China after 1945?

Rykwert refers to the computer game SimCity (not Sim-city) and misrepresents it. SimCity is an exception among computer games in that money is not the only measure of success; it is an attempt, simplistic of course, to create a simulation of managing a city that takes into account multiple factors, including providing work, leisure, transport, and attempting to keep the population happy by reconciling these often conflicting goals. For Rykwert “because the computer has to quantify, success and failure cannot be measured in more complex terms”. In contrast, SimCity measures success by a range of criteria, just as a city authority has to. I don’t state that it is perfect, but it is certainly about more than money. It is a remarkable  simulation because it presents the player with difficult choices: there is no single way to build a city successfully.

Rykwert’s book is an interesting comparison with a typical journal article. STEM (science and medicine) articles make claims and attempt to provide evidence for each statement they make. By contrast, Rykwert’s style is to proceed in an ambling fashion, introducing many details that are neither to the  point nor evidenced. An example is a paragraph devoted to the epic poem Gilgamesh, on page 13. Ostensibly, this is included because it is a conflict between the “urban” Gilgamesh and the “nomad” Enkidu, leading the author to link it to examples of rulers being reminded of their rural origins. How did we get here? Before I come to terms with that paragraph, I encounter another discursion into Hesiod’s ages of gold and iron, and then to Atlantis, and so on, for a further three or four pages, until we come to a theme: “what strategies are open to citizens who wish to shape their habitats in ways that would conform more closely to their wishes”.  That question is not the same as the subject on the cover. It’s an interesting topic in its own right, but it seems to reveal the rambling, discursive technique of the author, like a long Sunday supplement article where you keep reading because you like the author’s style. Personally, I’d prefer to state the subject and stick to it, and to reduce the discursive rambling.

The Voices of Morebath: an elegy for a lost Catholic England?

 

Morebath Church, photo by Lewis Clarke (CC BY-SA 2.0). The church and tower will have been familiar to the people described, but of course the objects within have long since disappeared . 

Eamon Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath (2001) is a real gem. Using the remarkable survival of parish records for one small Devonshire village of 33 households, Duffy provides a history of the English Reformation, but not from the top, but this time from  below. In this book, we are down to counting individual sheep and altar cloths. The local saint, St Sidwell, plays a major role, before being written entirely out of the script by the end. The records exist for the 54 years when the priest, Sir (the title is apparently traditional for a priest at the time) Christopher Trychay (pronounced “tricky”) was vicar of the parish. 

Duffy is a Catholic, and for much of the book, it reads like a lament for a local community that was surprising for the extent of social activity and generosity. The author himself describes the book as exploring “the world-view which was the religion of most English people on the eve of the Reformation, and impact of radical religious change on the majority who would have liked things to stay more or less as they were.”  The parish records record the existence not just of the church wardens, roles that still exist today, but as many as six separate groups of parishioners, some of the men, and some women’s groups, all raising funds and carrying out activities for the community, but primarily to embellish the church fabric and altars. Reading it, I kept thinking of two comparisons. First, obviously, comparing tiny Morebath to present-day local groups here in the centre of Cambridge: the local residents’ association, and local politics, and the extent to which residents combine (or don’t) for some collective action. Like many historians, Duffy presents before us an image of a kind of golden age, partly created through the exceptional vicar, who captured so much of the life of the village.

Second, there is the obvious contrast between Catholic and Protestant England. The transition was very messy, with interludes (under Edward and Mary) of undoing everything that had been done by their predecessors. What makes this book exceptional is the questions it raises. To his credit, Duffy at the end moves slightly away from the simplistic vision of a local Catholic golden age , but in so doing, leaves this reader dissatisfied with the sudden reversion to the big picture. After chapters full of painstakingly documented evidence of how the village was happy to remain worshipping saints (including St Sidwell) and keeping candles burning for them, we suddenly shift to grand statements such as “a sign of the deepening gap between rich and poor which marked and darkened the hungry later years of Elizabeth”. With that sentence, the spell is broken; we want evidence, we are no longer satisfied with such wide-scale assertions. There are disturbing mentions of the introduction of a “cucking stool” late in the period, for the punishment of women, and a reference to historians who feel it indicated something wrong in the social order. 

And, indeed, this book makes you start to think about the astonishing changes during 16th-century England. In 1500, church building and church adornment was still part of every town and village activity. But at some point in the 16th century, church building in England more or less came to a halt. It wasn’t just the abolition of chantries and saints’ altars, it was a complete cessation of new sacred architecture (the only exception was tombs for the rich, something not mentioned by Duffy, probably because it doesn’t appear that the church of Morebath ever had any such grand tombs). 

For any history book to inspire the reader to see a moment of vast societal change is a great achievement. I can hardly complain if Duffy leaves me in the end unsatisfied, because I can’t help feeling there is more to the story than he reveals. The book raises so many questions! At the start of this book, this tiny village was dedicating a large portion of its surplus revenue to adorning the church building. By the end of the 16th century, condemnation of “popery” was universal and popular. How did popular opinion move so dramatically away from Catholicism? I don’t mean the major beliefs, but the seemingly abrupt change in popular feeling. And how could an entire population switch so dramatically from building and adornment for faith, to the feeling that plain walls and lack of decoration were somehow better? And how could the priest switch so decisively from promoting Catholicism to the latest version of orthodox Protestantism? It was the same vicar, before, during, and after the events. Duffy talks about the secularisation of the church accounts, but leaves me wanting much more. Sentences such as this leave me gasping for more information:

The process of secularisation of the parish was more than all this: it was in train before the break with Rome … it owes as much to the extension of strong government, and the  multiplication of responsibility within local community, as to any ideological shift. [p282]

That seems at odds with everything Christopher Trychay describes in his records, a diminishing, rather than growth, of local community.

The Reformation was clearly an enormous turning point for modern society, and is of course something that can not be explained in any single book. Perhaps the very fact that I want to know more, that I have so many other questions at the end when Sir Christopher dies, is a tribute to this fascinating book.