Oxford University Press's Blog, page 940

The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky, and Balanchine

One hundred years ago, the world was shocked by, of all things, a ballet. Le Sacre du printemps (Rite of Spring), choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky and composed by Igor Stravinsky, caused a riot when it was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 29 May 1913. Stravinsky’s composition was revolutionary; it introduced dissonance in classical music. Here, Elizabeth Kendall, author of Balanchine & The Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer, discusses The Rite of Spring’s premiere as well as Stravinsky’s productive friendship with George Balanchine, founder of New York City Ballet.

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Elizabeth Kendall is author of Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer (Oxford 2013); Autobiography of a Wardrobe (Pantheon 2008); American Daughter (Random House 2000); The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s (Knopf 1990); and Where She Danced (Knopf 1979). She is a tenured associate professor of Literary Studies at The New School. She has written for The New Yorker, Vogue, Ballet News, Dance Magazine, The New York Times, Elle, The New Republic and other journals.

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Everest, the first ascent, and the history of the world

Today, 29 May 2013, is the sixtieth anniversary of the first ascent of Everest. It’s a time to reflect not only on the achievement of which mankind is capable, but also on the power of the Earth. The crash of the tectonic plates that created the Himalaya and Karakoram mountain ranges is the largest known collision in geological history. Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay were the first to conquer this remote and dangerous range, and return to share the view from the summit. Today many mountaineers not only climb for the thrill, but also to collect vital data on geology, geography, extremophiles, and many things normally out of reach for study. We spoke with Mike Searle, author of Colliding Continents: A geological exploration of the Himalaya, Karakoram, and Tibet, about mountaineering, geology, and the history of the world captured in a rock.

Climbing K2 and unravelling geological history

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How one small rock can reveal the origins of Everest

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Mike Searle has worked for the last 30 years on the geology of the Himalaya, Karakoram, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. He combines geological field investigations with mountaineering expeditions to the greater ranges, and has published more than 130 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of Colliding Continents: A geological exploration of the Himalaya, Karakoram, and Tibet; Geology and Tectonics of the Karakoram Mountains (1991); and has co-edited four books for the Geological Society of London. He has published a Geological Map of the Mount Everest region, Nepal and South Tibet (2003, 2007) and has given numerous talks about the region.

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Why I dedicated a book about nothing to my future grandchildren

The Telegraph Hay Festival is taking place from 23 May to 2 June 2013 on the edge of the beautiful Brecon Beacons National Park. We’re delighted to have many Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year. OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Hay-on-Wye, you won’t miss out. Don’t forget you can also follow @hayfestival and view the event programme here.

Frank Close will be appearing at The Telegraph Hay Festival on Friday 31 May 2013 at 5:30 p.m. to speak about Nothing. More information and tickets.

By Frank Close

I want to say something about Nothing. Specifically, not just the book but the part that no one, or very few, read carefully: the dedication. Nothing originally appeared in hardback in 2007 titled The Void, and was dedicated thus: “For Lizzie and John”.

Back then, Lizzie, my daughter, was engaged to John. At their wedding the following year, the chaplain of Exeter College said it was the first time that she had married two people who had had a book about nothing dedicated to them. Afterwards, I explained the real meaning: The Void was dedicated “for” and not “to” the couple. This is why.

The inspiration for Nothing was an enigma that has troubled me since childhood. If you take away the Earth, Moon, stars, everything material, what remains? Before making the trivial response – “nothing” – consider that in the process we too have been removed, so there is no one to be aware that there is nothing. Is the result a universe that is like some form of empty container, or by having removed conscious awareness, has the container also gone, the concept of universe itself been done away with? In what sense does the universe exist, if full of inert matter, with no one to be aware of the fact? Does the universe still exist for us after we die?

Now this question leads into labyrinths of possibilities concerning religious opinion, so in the book I posed it another way: did the universe exist for me in 1066? For me it didn’t but for William the Conqueror it did. Go back deeper into the past. Ten billion years ago there were no conscious beings aware of the universe, and gravity’s dance played on with no one being aware. Although this epoch of “pre-consciousness” contained no life, and must have been like some grand extension of my egocentric pre-1945 universe, nonetheless the same atoms that existed back then are what we are made of today, enabling us to view evidence for that past by means of telescopes looking deep across space, and back in time.

An individual atom cannot think, yet a large number, when configured in a highly ordered and unlikely combination, can believe that they are you. The same atoms configured in countless numbers of other ways will have no such consciousness. Richard Dawkins once said “we are the lucky ones for we shall die,” reminding us that there is an infinite number of possible forms of DNA all but a few billions of which will never burst into consciousness. What is the universe for the never-to-be-born or for those not yet alive?

The book itself deals with the quest to understand the nature of nothing – the search for the vacuum, and the mysterious insights that have emerged about it. Empty space is not empty, but full of things, such as gravitation, and quantum particle of matter and antimatter bubbling in and out of existence. During 2012 physicists found the Higgs boson, the proof that the cosmos is full of a mysterious ether, known as the Higgs field. “Nothing” is definitely filled with something, though we are still trying to understand quite what this stuff is.

But back to my dedication. In 2007 I mused whether I would ever have grandchildren. If I did, their atoms already existed, somewhere in the earth, air, and water of our planet. By the miracles of biology, two machines, collections of atoms that call themselves Lizzie and John, might one day combine some of those atoms and fuel them, eventually enabling them to burst into life. So the dedication was “for” them, in the hope that they might turn some inert atoms into living something.

The miracle has happened. Today I watch Max and Jack, who run, shout, and wear T-shirts from CERN proclaiming the equations of the Higgs field and the standard model of particles and forces. As yet, they understand nothing of this. In some future their conscious atoms may create concepts that no one yet has realised. Atoms can be creative, which is yet another profound mystery.

My most recent book, published in 2012, was titled The Infinity Puzzle. It deals with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, and the ideas about the all-pervading essence – the Higgs field. The “Infinity” referred to a mathematical conundrum, that existed 50 years ago, and which was eventually solved thanks in part to the work of Peter Higgs. But the dedication alludes to that most profound mystery, and brings our tale to a close: “For Max and Jack, whose emergence out of The Void is an Infinite Puzzle”.

Frank Close is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and former head of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. During his career he has worked closely with CERN, home of the LHC. He is the author of Nothing: A Very Short Introduction, and his other recent books include The Infinity Puzzle,  Neutrino, and Antimatter. Follow Frank Close on Twitter: @CloseFrank.

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Image credits: (1) ‘The Void/Nothing dedication’  and (2) ‘The Infinity Puzzle dedication’ by Nicola Burton via Instagram. 

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Hyperconnectivity and governance

Professor Ian Goldin talks to Matthew Flatman of Pod Academy about the dilemmas our hyper-connected world faces. There are many benefits, but also many drawbacks, to our growing globalization and interconnectedness. How can we tackle these issues at a local, regional, national, and global level?

This podcast is courtesy of Pod Academy (Creative Commons License). An independent, not-for-profit platform for free podcasts on academic research, Pod Academy was set up by a group of academics, journalists and IT specialists and aims to inform public debate and uncover intriguing and challenging new ideas.

[See post to listen to audio]

Professor Ian Goldin is the Director of the Oxford University’s Oxford Martin School, Oxford University Professor of Globalisation and Development and Professorial Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. From 2001 to 2006 he was at the World Bank, first as Director of Policy and then as Vice President. He has published over fifty articles and fifteen books, including Divided Nations: Why global governance is failing, and what we can do about it.

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Important announcement from the OUPblog

Dear readers,

We’re planning to make several changes to the OUPblog this year to improve the site and your reading experience. Some of the first changes will be taking place over the next couple weeks.

We will change some of our navigation and categorization on the blog based on reader behavior: deleting, adding, shifting, and renaming several categories. For example, our current ‘dictionaries’ category will be renamed ‘language’ and sub-categories will better reflect the full range of our language publishing from lexicography to linguistics.

We will also migrate away from Feedburner, which currently delivers our RSS and email, to a new service. Feedburner has been unreliable and we believe Google is getting ready to shut down this service after they shut down Google Reader on 1 July 2013. If all goes well, your email and RSS notifications will not change. If not, please check back here and re-subscribe.

Remember you can find the raw RSS feeds on our Follow page.

You can also follow all of Oxford University Press’s academic news and information on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Tumblr, YouTube, Vimeo, Sina Weibo, and soon to come Pinterest, as well as several social media outlets for various products, series, and disciplines.

We know a few of the problems the site is experiencing and have great plans for improving it over the coming months. We of course welcome your feedback too and appreciate any comments that can be left in the box below.

Thank you for your loyal readership,

Alice Northover

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Keith Gandal on Baz Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby

By Keith Gandal

The New Yorker’s predictably elitist and conservative review of Baz Lurhmann’s new movie has David Denby concluding with the following:

Will young audiences go for this movie, with its few good scenes and its discordant messiness? Luhrmann may have miscalculated. The millions of kids who have read the book may not be eager for a flimsy phantasmagoria. They may even think, like many of their elders, that “The Great Gatsby” should be left in peace. The book is too intricate, too subtle, too tender for the movies. Fitzgerald’s illusions were not very different from Gatsby’s, but his illusionless book resists destruction even from the most aggressive and powerful despoilers.

Two things should be said immediately.

(1)      Lurhmann has not miscalculated: the box office outstripped opening-weekend expectations by 25% and as of 22 March 2013 had grossed almost $100 million domestically. The “kids” apparently do not agree with “many of their elders”—surprise!—who think “that ‘The Great Gatsby’ should be left in peace.”

(2)      The Great Gatsby has hardly been left in peace. There have been several movie adaptations. It is one of the most critically-evaluated American books in existence. It might even be said that the “most aggressive and powerful despoilers” are the very critics and teachers who have upheld standard interpretations of the novel laid down in the immediate post-World-War II era (which is to say, at a particularly conservative moment, by literary experts with little interest in a historical understanding of literature), and who don’t like to see the book “re-interpreted” by outsiders, such as filmmakers.

In fact, the kids’ excitement about the Lurhmann movie might have something to do with the way the novel has been “laid to rest” and “eulogized” by the critics. I know something about the kids’ attitudes because I teach some of them at City College in New York. What they remember from their Gatsby classes in high school may not be a “flimsy phantasmagoria,” but it is nonetheless flimsy. They recall something about “the symbolic green light,” “the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg that overlook the symbolic valley of ashes,” “new money vs. old money,” and “the disappearing American dream.”  They have a very flimsy sense of Gatsby’s historical moment; most don’t even remember that he was a soldier in World War I.

When they begin to learn about the relevant historical context, the novel comes to life for them. They learn that “new money” was often a euphemism for ethnic as well as class inferiority. They learn how a poor German-American farm boy could become an officer in the US Army in a nation that was not only xenophobic but at war with Germany because the World War I army was quietly experimenting in an historically unprecedented manner with meritocracy. Baz Luhrmann isn’t an American Studies scholar, and the movie doesn’t provide a sense of the utopian moment that poor and ethnic-American Gatsby experiences at training camp in Kentucky. Neither does it convey a sense of the culture shock that greeted men like Fitzgerald when they watched ethnic-American men like Gatsby step in front of them and become their superior officers (men whom he would have met in some lowly service or “servant” capacity before the war).

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. (c) Warner Bros

But Luhrmann’s movie—with Leonardo DiCaprio masterfully giving us a living, breathing, vulnerable Gatsby—begins to give the kids a sense of Gatsby’s drastic longing to belong. This sense is dramatized not only in the fantastic lengths to which Gatsby goes to win over Daisy, but in DiCaprio’s magical ability to project—with just about every look on his face—the pathos of his exclusion from the inner circle of upper class America now that the war is over, the training camps are closed, and American racial and class normalcy returns with a vengeance. Now that, in short, his beloved past cannot be repeated.

What do the kids feel when they see the movie? I talked to one kid in particular, my daughter, who is still a year too young in high school to have read the book. She said that at the beginning, when she saw everything Gatsby had and first met him, she wanted to be Gatsby, but that changed when she realized the real poverty he had come from and the real prejudice he was up against. She was impressed with everything he had achieved.

When the middle- and working-class New York kids—at one of the nation’s most ethnically diverse colleges—first come into my class, Fitzgerald’s novel is pretty abstract for them, and pretty distant. But when they come to understand, as Tom Buchanan indicates with his racist rants, that in the novel’s historical moment an ethnic-American man like Gatsby (born Gatz) would not have been considered “white,” they begin to relate to the book and understand it through their own personal, if historically different, experience. Along these lines, Lurhmann’s casting of the Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan as the Jewish Meyer Wolfsheim has the effect, whether intended or not, of capturing the racism with which Jews were viewed in the 1920s. The audience perceives Bachchan’s Wolfsheim as non-white, while a Jewish actor, even one with a European accent, would no longer in today’s America register as racially other.

Jason Clarke as George Wilson, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway and Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. (c) Warner Bros

The novel begins to be very meaningful to my students, not by reading in something that isn’t there, but by becoming aware of the forgotten historical context that the self-appointed “guardians” of our “great literature” either aren’t aware of or particularly interested in. It is one thing to say of the novel, as Denby does, “that Gatsby’s exuberant ambitions and his abrupt tragedy have merged with the story of America, in its self-creation and its failures. The strong, delicate, poetically resonant text has become a kind of national scripture, recited happily or mournfully, as the occasion requires.” But that is too euphemize a bit, in my opinion. It is another, and something much more concrete and immediate, to see the smug and ugly racism of Tom — and the more sophisticated racism of Nick Carraway — and to understand why The Great Gatsby was written when it was: after that first shocking if limited and short-lived American debut of meritocracy on a national scale. It was limited because, though it was open to poor and ethnic-American men, blacks were excluded.

Precisely because Fitzgerald’s novel has the status of “a kind of national scripture,” The Great Gatsby should not be left in peace, but open to new interpretations and fuller historical contextualization.

Keith Gandal is the author of the 2010 Oxford paperback, The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. He is currently working on a comic memoir on the subject of researching Fitzgerald and the other Lost Generation writers, titled Moments of Clarity, Years of Delusion: A Scholarly Detective Story.

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All images from The Great Gatsby film copyright Warner Bros. Used for the purposes of illustration.

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Why launch a new journal?

In July, the first issue of the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology (JSSAM) will come out.  The launch of a new journal is always a source of great anticipation in the academic publishing world. We face many concerns about a proliferation of unnecessary journals, reduced library budgets, and creating valuable publications in a digital world. We sat down with editors Joe Sedransk and Roger Tourangeau to discuss the challenges of launching a new journal, the latest developments in the field of survey research, and what’s coming up this year.

Why have you decided to launch a new journal of survey research?

Well, we thought the field of survey research needed a flagship journal and, fortunately for us, the two largest professional organizations for survey researchers — the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the American Statistical Association (ASA) — shared our view. These organizations have agreed to sponsor the new journal. AAPOR will make the journal available to its more than 2,000 members as part of their annual dues — that is, at no added cost to them. And ASA will offer a similar deal to the 1,000+ members of its Survey Research Methods Section.

Isn’t there a danger of journal overload? How did you make such considerations?

Articles on survey statistics and methodology have traditionally been scattered across journals that focus primarily on statistics, sociology, political science, communications, epidemiology, demography, and a range of other disciplines. We thought it was time to have a journal that would focus only on survey statistics and methodology. Of course, there are now journals devoted mainly to survey topics, such as the Journal of Official Statistics and Survey Methodology. However, as valuable as these journals are, they are sponsored by government agencies and we believe that the flagship journal for the field should have the backing of the largest, most prestigious professional organizations for survey researchers. Hence, the new journal.

How has the field changed in the last 25 years?

The field has grown up. In the United States, three programs — at the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, and the University of Nebraska — now offer doctoral degrees in survey methodology. There are also academic programs in survey methodology in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. In the United States alone, more than forty doctorates in survey methodology have been awarded.  There are now textbooks covering every aspect of survey statistics and methodology. Survey statistics and methodology has become a fully-fledged discipline and we believe the time is ripe for it to have a journal that reflects that status.

What are some of the latest developments in survey research?

This may be a pivotal time for surveys. Survey costs are spiraling upward, response rates are falling, and many of the government agencies that sponsor surveys are likely to face serious budget cuts in the coming years. Moreover, partly in response to these problems, some researchers are giving up on probability sampling, a mainstay for survey research for the last sixty years. At the same time, everyone seems to want estimates based on survey data, often for ever-smaller areas or subgroups, and to make policy decisions based on these estimates.

Despite all these worrisome developments, surveys still seem to give accurate results. Whatever their problems, the polls were able forecast the outcome of the 2012 elections with almost uncanny accuracy. Similarly, according to Census Bureau evaluations, the 2010 census may have been the most accurate census ever done.

What do you hope to see in the coming years from both the field and the journal?

We hope that authors will surprise us with articles describing good work in areas we had not anticipated and we promise to be open to such work. Most of all, we hope that journal becomes a fount of high quality research in all areas of survey statistics and methodology.

Joseph Sedransk is Professor Emeritus of Statistics at Case Western Reserve University. Roger Tourangeau is a Vice President at Westat. Before going to Westat, he headed the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland for nearly 10 years; during this time, he was also a Research Professor in the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center. Joseph Sedransk is the editor for statistical papers and Roger Tourangeau the editor for the methodological papers for the new Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology.

The Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, sponsored by AAPOR and the American Statistical Association, will begin publishing in 2013. Its objective is to publish cutting edge scholarly articles on statistical and methodological issues for sample surveys, censuses, administrative record systems, and other related data. It aims to be the flagship journal for research on survey statistics and methodology.

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Image credit: Check mark. Composición 3D. Mostrando un concepto de selección. Image by ricardoinfante, iStockphoto.

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Who wants to be a Cabinet minister?

The Telegraph Hay Festival is taking place from 23 May to 2 June 2013 on the edge of the beautiful Brecon Beacons National Park. We’re delighted to have many Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year. OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Hay-on-Wye, you won’t miss out. Don’t forget you can also follow @hayfestival and view the event programme here.

Gill Bennett will be appearing at The Telegraph Hay Festival on Thursday 30 May 2013 at 1pm, talking to Nik Gowing about six moments of crisis inside British foreign policy. More information and tickets.

By Gill Bennett

Who would want to be a Cabinet minister? Clearly, all ambitious politicians entertain some hope of high, if not the highest, office. But I am asking the question in a more rhetorical sense. For in the almost universal cynicism, if not downright hostility, to politicians generally and government ministers in particular that pervades the media and much of the general public, I think that too few people stop to consider what a difficult job it is.

No matter what the area of ministerial responsibility, there will be major problems, political hot potatoes, and budgetary black holes to deal with, even in good times; and only too often times, in economic terms, are far from good. The higher the office, the more relentless the pressure and the greater the burden of decision. Quite apart from a minister’s departmental responsibilities, he or she must also consider their constituents, Party political pressures, Parliamentary committees, prominent interest groups, the views of senior officials, their obligations under British, European and international law—and, most of all, their Cabinet colleagues, including the top dog of all, the Prime Minister.

When Cabinet meets, all these factors converge, no matter what the subject on the agenda. A discussion on, say, education policy can be derailed by an international crisis. Preparations for an international meeting become mired in budgetary wrangling. A local healthcare crisis threatens a colleague’s position. Every day brings new challenges to disrupt the best-laid plans. And one must not forget that domestic ministers often have strong views on foreign policy, just as those dealing with overseas matters do not relinquish their interest in domestic issues.

Those who aspire to Cabinet rank must, therefore, be confident, strong-minded, and full of stamina, and understand that those characteristics will be branded by commentators as arrogance, prejudice, and ignorance of ordinary people’s lives. As the veteran Labour politician Gerald Kaufman wrote in his book How to be a Minister, “If you do not very rapidly develop immunities to cocoon yourself in a protective skin, you are defeated before you have even begun.” (He also warned against two debilitating diseases, Ministerialitis and Departmentalitis.)

For the Prime Minister, and those Cabinet ministers who deal with foreign and defence policy in particular, there is the added burden of having to be aware of what is going on in the rest of the world, and how the particular issue at hand impacts on or is affected by events in what may seem remote corners of the globe. Working on my recent book I examined six policy decisions, from Korea in 1950 to the Falklands in 1982, to show the range of pressures exerted on the Cabinet ministers who had to take those decisions. When examining policy decisions it’s important to put aside hindsight as much as possible and look at what ministers could have known at the time, and the factors that affected their thinking. Of course not all decisions that governments take are good ones: but by looking at them from the inside out, instead of in the light of what we now know happened, we can understand better how they came to be taken. And even looking at policy decisions made several decades ago, it is not hard to see how many of the same factors still affect British policy-making: the close but sometimes prickly Anglo-American relationship, the ambivalence about Europe, the enduring legacy of a global role, to name but a few.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron talk on the South Lawn of the White House.

I chose to write about foreign policy because, as a historian who has worked within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for more than thirty years, that is what I know most about. But the more I investigated the policy-making process, the more convinced I became that this kind of analysis could be applied usefully to any area of ministerial responsibility. In a democratic system we elect a government to represent our interests in the world and to carry out the policies the party in power has campaigned to pursue. Despite the omnipresence of information, whether from traditional or social media, it is hard for the ordinary citizen to understand what is being done in his or her name. This is particularly true in foreign policy, which is extremely complex and fast-moving. Government ministers, whatever we may think of them, are doing a difficult job and it is only right we make an effort to understand it. I often think that if we really did understand what it is like, we might well wonder why anyone wants to be a Cabinet minister.

Gill Bennett, MA, OBE was Chief Historian of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office from 1995-2005 and Senior Editor of the UK’s official history of British foreign policy, Documents on British Policy Overseas. She is the author of Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy. As a historian working in government for over thirty years, she offered historical advice to twelve Foreign Secretaries under six Prime Ministers. A specialist in the history of secret intelligence, she was part of the research team working on the official history of the Secret Intelligence Service, written by Professor Keith Jeffery and published in 2010. She is now involved in a range of research, writing and training projects for various government departments.

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Image credit: By White House photographer Pete Souza from Washington, DC. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Aaron Minsky brings us rock cello!

Aaron Minsky is an award-winning composer who has made it his mission to persuade us that bowed stringed instruments (especially the cello) can be extremely effective in popular music. He began his career as a rock guitarist and then went on to study the cello with the finest classical teachers from The Juilliard School and other prestigious establishments. He has performed his works with orchestras around the world and on radio and television. His compositions are truly innovate and mix popular styles with classical techniques to create a unique and exciting musical blend that cellists — especially young cellists — love to play.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Aaron Minsky is an award-winning composer with several works published by Oxford University Press, including Ten American Cello Études and Ten International Cello Encores. He has premiered his original music at the First World Cello Congress, the American Cello Congress, and the New Directions Cello Festival. Selections from his published collections are now considered standard repertoire, appearing in the curriculums of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music and the American String Teachers Association. Particularly known for bridging the gap between classical and popular music for cello, Minsky founded the Von Cello Band, the first cello-fronted rock power trio, which features a unique blend of hard, alternative, and jam rock.

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Image credit: A screengrab from the Aaon Minsky video. Do not reproduce without permission.

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The five most common insults and slogans of medieval rebels

By Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers

How subversive was the speech of Flemish rebels in the later Middle Ages? Violence remained the exception in urban rebellions, whereas subversive utterances, though always risky, must have been almost the rule of daily politics in the urban centres of late medieval Flanders and in many other European towns and cities as well. Quoted below, you can find five of the most popular expressions of urban rebels in Flanders. Naive at first sight, they contain however hidden messages for those who were shouted at.

1. ‘A bad chicken was brooding’ (een quaet kiekin broedde; Ypres, 1477) was a common proverb in the Middle Ages. It meant that wicked people were hatching a malicious plan. They ‘were brooding on’ subversive plans that had to remain hidden from the authorities, until they could take action and openly call for a strike in the textile industry. Testimonies of Flemish rebels not only show that they planned their political actions in clandestine meetings, but also that even groups completely excluded from political power, as the young apprentices of the Flemish textile guilds, commonly exchanged dangerous political ideas amongst themselves without the initial knowledge of the urban rulers or the deans and masters of their guilds. When these bad eggs were hatched, subversive speech could pose a serious threat to the authorities.

2. ‘Son of a b*tch’ (hoerezuene; Bruges, 1478). Such vulgar language was not used only by rebels, as it seems to have been quite common in all social layers in town. Anyway, as today, one of the most common metaphors used to describe the strengths and weaknesses of opponents in past societies involved sexuality. Insulters targeted men and women with references to their (alleged) sexual excesses and unreliability. Furthermore, a victim’s descent was called into question when an insulter called him or her a ‘b*stard’ or a ‘son of a b*tch’. Power and status depended not only on behaviour, but also on membership in an important family through birth or marriage. Both aspects came under pressure if a man or woman was labelled as an illegitimate child, because in Flanders ‘b*stards’ had no legal rights unless the sovereign legitimized them.

3. ‘I sh*t on you’ (ic schyte in ulieden; Bruges, 1527). In 1527, the fishmonger Thomas Haghebaert had shouted to the dean and the sworn men of his guild ‘I have nothing to do with you or with the magistrate. I sh*t on you and on the aldermen and on all those who think they can harm me!’ He was exiled as well, a heavy punishment for a serious crime. More than just social status and reputation were at stake when Thomas threatened his superiors with these ‘faecal insults’. He was also challenging their legal authority. Therefore, this ‘indecent language’, as it was called in the final verdict of Thomas, not only wanted to dishonour the chiefs of the guild, as the main purpose of the defamation was to destabilize the political authority of rulers and privileged social groups.

4. ‘Liver eater’ (levereter; Ghent, 1432). This offensive term was generally aimed at corrupt officers or aldermen. The term was linked to ‘organologic’ views which compared the city with a body that could be harmed by the corrupt acts of individuals. In this case, according to rebel ideology, people who ate the ‘liver’ of the city damaged the most important part of its ‘body politic’. Medieval medicine saw the liver as the source of all necessary body fluids, but medical models aside, the basic idea of eating one’s liver is expressive enough. By accusing someone of this severe crime, rebels legitimated the punishment of those who were accused of corruption, as they claimed that it was a necessary action to cure ‘a wounded town’.

5. ‘Kill! Kill!’ (slaet doot, slaet doot; Bruges, 1477). The rhythmic structure of the Middle Dutch text, and of several other similar examples, shows that it was meant to be chanted or sung. If a mob of thousands was shouting such phrases unisono, this would obviously have an extremely intimidating effect on the aldermen hiding in the city hall. Using a rhetoric of violence targeted at the moral failings of rulers, these shouted slogans did not attack the urban government as a whole, but just those who had failed to fulfil their proper role as good governors. Rebels sought to hold up the mirror to magistrates, asking them to correct their faults and remedy the particular grievance that lay at the heart of the protest. Rebels did perhaps not fully understand what the ‘bad practices’ were that they were referring to when they collectively shouted similar slogans in public during times of commotion, but they certainly did know what was at stake and why they shouted it.

Jan Dumolyn is a lecturer in medieval history (with special research assignment) at Ghent University. He publishes on the social, political and cultural history of the later medieval Low Countries. Trained as an urban historian, Jelle Haemers wrote his first book on the Ghent revolt of 1449-53. In recent years his research interests have widened to encompass other kinds of social and political conflicts in the late medieval town, notably in the Low Countries (1100-1600). Their recent article in Past and Present — “‘A Bad Chicken was Brooding’: Subversive Speech in Late Medieval Flanders” — is available to read for free for a limited time.

Founded in 1952, Past & Present is widely acknowledged to be the liveliest and most stimulating historical journal in the English-speaking world.

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