A Conversation with Peter Burke at Emmanuel College, Cambridge

A Conversation with Peter Burke at Emmanuel College, Cambridge Jaume Aurell Universidad de Navarra https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1683-0100 [email protected] Peter Burke needs no introduction. He is one of the most influential historians alive, and he is still very active nowadays. Since I discovered his book on popular culture (1978) during my university studies, I have not stopped following his itinerary and works, as extensive as it is profound. I believe this is his best legacy: he has been able to approach many historical subjects, from different thematic, methodological and disciplinary perspectives, without losing any of his depth. I would highlight three aspects of his work. First, his syntheses have allowed him to enter with a striking simplicity into some topics that seem to me essential for any historian: Sociology and History (1980), History and Social Theory (1991), What is Cultural History? (2004) and his invaluable The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-89 (1990). Second, his monographs have also opened up relevant areas of research for us, such as early modern historiography (The Renaissance Sense of the Past, 1969), comparative history (Venice and Amsterdam, 1974), and the representation and legitimation of the power (The Fabrication of Louis XIV, 1992). Third, his latest historiographical period, from 2000 to the present, has been particularly fruitful, and he has published some original and * Conversation held at Cambridge on 7 June 2023. I would like to thank Felipe Muller for trans­ cribing the interview and Montserrat Herrero for her collaboration. ANUARIO DE HISTORIA DE LA IGLESIA (Early Access 2024) ISSN 1133-0104 / DOI 10.15581/007.34.004 1 JAUME AURELL innovative books on the history of knowledge: A Social History of Knowledge (2000), A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (2002) (with Asa Briggs), Cultural Hybridity (2009), A Social History of Knowledge Volume II: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia (2012), What is the History of Knowledge? (2015), The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag (2020) and Ignorance: A Global History (2023). I had the opportunity to regularly meet him during the late 2010s, when we were working on the long preparation of the book Comprender el Pasado (Akal, 2013), together with the Chilean historians Catalina Balmaceda and Felipe Soza. The four authors used to meet regularly in the British Library. Three of us were clearly younger than him, and of course with much less experience and historiographical projection, but I was struck by the genuine attention with which he listened to our explanations or points of view, and how he often yielded his own opinion. He often jokes with me that a historian like me, with such a passion for historians’ autobiographies,1 should write his autobiography. I usually tell him that I still have a little time to do it, and, in my turn, I also urge him to do it. So when I proposed to him to do this interview –with a clear autobiographical content– complicity soon emerged, and he generously agreed to do it. We decided that the best place to conduct the interview would be his usual place of work, Emmanuel College. It is a delightfully spring-like day. We meet at noon at the entrance of the College to have the conversation. Burke greets me like the English gentleman he is. Married to the Brazilian historian Maria Lúcia Garcia-Pallares, he has a special sensitivity for Latin American culture, tradition and historiography. We do not need much time to enter decisively into historiographic issues, even before the recording starts to work. That wise admonition of Lord Acton’s, «study problems, not periods» comes from his lips. I remain thoughtful, because that is precisely a fine summary of Burke’s historiographic itinerary, always more concerned with the big historical problems and the great questions, without enclosing them in a specific place, time, or discipline –although always so careful with the opportune contextualization of the issues and historical methods–. He invites me to lunch at the college, where there is still a separation between the professors’ table on a dais and the students’ tables. The conversation flows from the start. He tells amusing stories of the Cambridge environment in which, despite having spent a good part of his career, he still has a paradoxical insider-outsider relationship that makes him comically analyse this peculiar world with perspective, between the pride of belonging 1 2 He refers to my book Theoretical Perspectives on Historians Autobiographies, Routledge, London, 2017. AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE to such a distinguished institution and the irony that allows him to laugh at his own peculiar idiosyncrasies. At the end of lunch, we have a cup of coffee and head for his office, a large room on the third floor, where Peter climbs the stairs like lightning. I find myself in a room cluttered with books, but you can tell there is a calculated order to it. He explains to me that he has a way of arranging the books that allows him to locate them. Perhaps this reflects the interesting story he tells below, during the interview, about what he learnt from the catalogue of the Warburg Institute library, where some books lead you to thematically neighbouring ones, in a never-ending but also well-systematised chain of knowledge. The conversation goes on for four hours, during which we experience a delightful sunset. The order of the conversation emerges naturally: places, themes and methodologies of his work. I find particularly engaging the way he recounts his encounter with some of the most influential historians and scholars of the last seventy years, from Felix Gilbert to Lawrence Stone and from Reinhart Koselleck to Michel de Certeau, and dozens more. 1. Childhood Question. You were born in England in 1937, so I imagine you lived through the World War during your childhood. Answer. I am a Londoner. I grew up in London, during the Second World War. One of my first memories is being woken in the middle of the night and we went down, we had a big cellar, luckily, so we did not have to go to the air raid shelter, so we went down into the cellar. And I rather enjoyed this. I remember thinking: «Why doesn’t everybody seem to be enjoying this?» There was a thumping noise outside. When you went for a walk the next day, you would see houses which had lost a wall, and a bedroom would be perfectly preserved and you could look into it. It is very strange, the blast from the bomb. And it would leave some parts intact. That means that I grew up without my father, because he joined the army in 1939 and very rarely came back until 1945. My father regretted having been born in England because he felt he was an Irishman, and in fact he was born only few days after the boat arrived from Ireland. And he always called the English «the English». It is very funny if your father is treating the English as if they were foreigners. First, he was in Egypt, then he was in Italy and then he was in Palestine. He went into the army early in the war, knowing that that would mean he had a better chance of a good job. And he was a professional translator from French and AHIg 3 JAUME AURELL German. For this reason, they put him in the Intelligence Corps but then they never sent him to Germany, even when the Allies were in Germany. His job was reading aerial photographs: information (about which were the dangerous places) which would be circulated before the attack. And I had the map of Italy on my wall with the places where he was, and maybe that has got something to do with the fact that I became a historian of Italy, because it was the first foreign country where I knew the names of the few cities. Q. What about your mother? A. My mother was a teacher of small children. She came from a very different background. She was born in England, like my father, but her parents came from Eastern Europe. In fact, I lived with my grandparents. Because as soon as my father joined the army then we went to live in their house, in north London, much more central than Middlesex, where my parents had bought a house. My grandfather came from what is now Vilnius, but he always called it Vilna. He called himself Russian, but didn’t have a word of Russian. His Jewish family had fled during the Pogroms of the 1880s and he settled in London in business. My grandmother was from Lódz. She spoke a bit of Polish. I still have this French textbook, because she had been sent to a school where, even when at the age of seven, she was learning French. The book has French on one side, and on the other, Polish written in Cyrillic. That was because, after all, Poland was not an independent country before 1919. So, it is a record of an interesting moment. When I went to Poland in 1964, and I was learning a bit of Polish, when I came back, I went to see her, and for fun, I just said «Jak się pani ma?», «How are you?». And she answered! She looked very surprised because she thought she had forgotten everything. What they spoke before marriage, I do not know. But when she married somebody who didn’t know Polish, she wouldn’t have been practicing. So that’s 60 years of not speaking, so she thought she’d forgotten everything. But one never does. Q. Do you have more brothers and sisters? A. No. The war came. After the war, my parents did inquire whether I might like a little brother or sister. And I remember I said very firmly «No way!». It was nice of them to ask. Yes, it might have been interesting, but you know what a child thinks when he wants all the attention: he does not want a rival. So, I was the worst person to ask, in that sense. When my father came back from the war, he was bored with translating commercial documents for the British American tobacco company, so he decided he would be an independent bookseller. Only old books. And he wouldn’t have a shop, he would do it by post. He sold to universities, specialized in travel and languages. 4 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE So, I grew up in a bookshop: all these fascinating books! And I knew if I liked one, I would better read it right away, because it might not be here next week. Q. Well, maybe that’s where your proverbial ability to synthesise comes from, to assimilate so much information from so many different books in your own books. A. Ever since, it has been easy for me to both acquire books and get rid of them. If you’d come last week, the floor was covered with books that I was going to sell to David’s, the major second-hand bookseller in Cambridge. Because, otherwise, there would be no room on the shelves. And I can do this very easily, because I am used to this world: they come in, they go out. And then, when I was a little bit older, he took me to auctions. Not only books, but into Sotheby’s when they were selling paintings and so on. And if you went into the ‘view’, you could touch things. I remember, since I wanted to be medievalist, that there was a medieval manuscript on view and I was able to turn the pages myself. Not just to look at it at a museum. Being a Londoner, I had a great advantage, especially after the war, when the museums opened again. It took twenty minutes on a bus to get to the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum; I grew up with all that. But of course, everything was in a glass case. So I thought it would be nice to be a museum curator, whom I imagined might be someone with the key that could open the case! Q. Perhaps now I understand better that when we had our meetings for the joint elaboration of our textbook on historiography, Comprender el Pasado (Akal, 2013), together with Catalina Balmaceda and Felipe Soza, you always convened us at the British Library. How did your passion for history begin, more specifically? A. When I was seven, I already said to my mother, «I want to be a professor of History». Now I can’t reconstruct exactly what I thought it meant to be a professor; I knew they gave lectures and wrote books; but that was it: I had no acquaintance with the university. So, when I was about fourteen, my father took us to Oxford and Cambridge. We were already driving around, looking at Medieval cathedrals, because that became a hobby. But then it was Oxford and Cambridge and it was clearly so that I would choose to go there. My parents never went to university. My father would have liked to go. But it was difficult because it cost too much. In 1944, there was the Education Act, which gave students who got scholarships a maintenance grant; that is, they guaranteed your board, lodging and pocket money for the three years. So that made it possible. All I cost my parents was when I would go home for the vacation, and they would feed me and I had my bedroom, but otherwise I didn’t cost them anything. That was the first Labour government after the war, but the Act had been planned during the War; that is, by the Coalition government. AHIg 5 JAUME AURELL 2. Oxford Q. Your approach to reality has always been very interdisciplinary. Did you have in mind to study history, and philosophy and literature too? A. I knew that both Oxford and Cambridge would insist on one choosing a subject; or, more exactly, if one chose history, one was only going to study history. A few degrees were interdisciplinary, notably in Oxford philosophy, politics and economics, PPE. But I was sure I wanted to do history. I went to a Jesuit school, which meant that (unlike most English schoolboys) I studied some philosophy, especially Thomas Aquinas. I would have preferred a more varied diet, but I think that one philosophy is better than no philosophy. I discovered other philosophies when I was an Oxford undergraduate, because this was the golden age of Oxford philosophy. It was one of the most important subjects in the Humanities and it dominated the field. Alternative philosophies were not welcome: you could not get a job teaching French or German philosophy, let alone scholastic philosophy, in Oxford at that time. Ernest Gellner, the anthropologist, became a friend of mine when he was in his last job, at Cambridge. He began intellectually as a philosopher but he disliked the Oxford philosophy of linguistic analysis. He wrote a book against it called Words and Things. In my first term in Oxford, he was invited by the philosophy club. It was speaking in the dragons’ den: he knew all the adults in the room, not counting the students, would be against him. And he sat there, very calm, attacking people who were actually sitting only a few feet away. The discussion was superficially very polite but you could sense torpedoes under the surface, which were hitting people. And so Gellner could not make a career as a philosopher in England. Although he was Czech, he wanted to stay in England. So, he had to change to something else. I would love to know why he chose anthropology. You can tell from Words and Things that he was interested in sociology, because he included not only a philosophical attack, but a sociological description of Oxford philosophy, which is very entertaining. But anyway: he did field work in Morocco and became an authority on Islam and taught in London. And, of course, it is dangerous to be interdisciplinary sometimes, at least here in Britain; so, the philosophers always referred to him as an anthropologist, and the anthropologists sometimes refer to him as a philosopher. So, he got the intellectually best, but maybe sometimes the worst of both worlds. This can happen to you. Q. Can you tell me more about these old years in Oxford and the first scholars and masters you met there? A. When I went there, I got the scholarship to Saint John’s and that meant, in my first year, I was taught by a medievalist who no longer wanted to be medi6 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE evalist, called Howard Colvin. He became a famous historian of architecture. A few years later they made him a university reader, which meant he could choose what he did. And after that he was teaching the history of English architecture. And he was engaged on the huge study of the Kings’ Works. And on the way into his room, you saw an enormous pile of photostats, before the xerox machine, and these were the Pipe rolls! They looked incredible. I couldn’t read a word. Not only with the medieval abbreviations, but the style of handwriting, it was very neat and regular, but impossible to read. Colvin was a very shy man; he did not communicate very much. But what I got was the impression that this was somebody who writes history basically from the sources upwards. I was very impressed. But he didn’t like big questions. I mean, I said once: «Was King John a good king?» And he looks, he frowns, he thinks he doesn’t have a short answer. So, to put him back in a good humour, I remember that I said «I don’t really understand how you stood when you wanted to fire a crossbow». And then, a big smile, he demonstrates in front of the fireplace exactly how you fire a crossbow. And he took me out to see old masons’ marks on the surface of St. Johns College. For five minutes we were standing there, I couldn’t see a thing! And either the sun came out, or I got used to looking, and suddenly I could see these marks everywhere. So that was also very interesting: learning by observing artifacts. Once he took me to see a medieval church. His job was to date it. He was working for some collective research project and he complained that he had to make a decision about something that he thought was on the border of two periods. He didn’t like making decisions. So, it was more the evidence of his research that was impressive. My next tutor was Keith Thomas. I did not realise this at the time, but he arrived in the college the same day as I did. This was his first job; he had never taught before. He had already been elected to a fellowship for research at All Souls research there, but he had not taught before so he was quite nervous. He pretends now that he was quite afraid of me because I was self-confident and also because we used to have to read our essays out. The tutor gave you a question, a bibliography and then you wrote an essay, but you had to read it aloud in the tutor’s room. And then you would have a discussion. The tutor would always say ‘Thank you’, this was very formal British politeness, and they would never ask you directly whether you’d read the books on the list or not, but they would try to find out indirectly whether you had. It was quite an interesting game, that. And afterwards Keith complained that I wrote very short essays. But he said that I covered everything and then the problem for the tutor was what to do for the next forty-five minutes. AHIg 7 JAUME AURELL Q. How did you enter Oxford? A. Actually, before I had an interview at St. Johns –Jesuits are very good at training in this–, my history master was thinking how to prepare me. He knew a Jesuit who was at Oxford, who said to me ‘Before they interview you, you should read some Oxford philosophy, you should read A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, and Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind. No matter, of course, that Ayer happened to be an atheist. And then, of course, I was interviewed by two historians who never dreamt of asking me a question about philosophy, but I was quite interested in the books, I did read them before the interview. The system used to be that to get into Oxford, you took exams there, so all these 17-18-year-old students, had to pick a college, and you would sit the exam, so you would sleep in the college, eat in the college, go from one college to another for exam papers. When you arrived, they interviewed you. They asked me what I’d like to do afterwards: «Would you like to be a diplomat when you leave?» And I said: «It depends on my degree». Which was obviously code for «I want to be an academic». And they said, «Do you have any hobbies», and I said «Heraldry», which I was obsessed with at the time. But then there was a second interview. This time they were holding my exam papers and that looked quite frightening. They would ask questions such as «Why did you say this sort of thing?». But, in fact, the senior tutor just said: «If we were to say that we would give you a scholarship on condition that you did national service first, what would you say?». I thought for a second and I said: «I’d apply to Cambridge». End of story. Before I left, there was a notice put up, the people they were going to take. Two people got scholarships, me and somebody else. And then the senior tutor wrote me a letter, which my father saw, saying: «We don’t make it a condition that you do National Service first, but I strongly believe that it is your wisest course». My father saw the letter and he said: «The senior tutor must know what he’s doing, so I suggest that you go into the army first». 3. Singapore Q. Tell us more about your time in the Army in Singapore, and how it influenced your scholarship. A. If we are being chronological: first, I’m a Londoner, and the second place where I’ve lived is Singapore. The army behaved in a curious way, because there’s the basic training for three months which was in England, and they gave us forms to fill in, asking us where we would like to go, to stay in England or not, 8 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE and I put Germany. There were a lot of British soldiers in Germany at that time and I wanted to learn German. The next thing I know, I’m in a ship going to Singapore. The army liked to look more democratic than they were going to be. This is what really influenced me, really. I was not sent to a British regiment in Singapore, although there were some. I was sent to a Malayan regiment. It was almost entirely recruited from the Malay Peninsula. But I was going to be a clerk, in fact, I was going to work in the pay office. So, it’s the system of trusting the British with money while not trusting the locals. That’s why I was there. But it was totally fascinating, because the Malays came from a very different culture. Many of them were illiterate. They often didn’t know much English, though they were being taught English inside the regiment. Their job was maintaining the telegraph lines. You could see them going up telegraph poles all over Singapore. I had access to the records, so I amused myself finding out what did they do before they joined this regiment. The two most common answers were rubber tapper, paddy planter. Occasionally, shopkeeper. Those ones usually rose to sergeant or sergeant major. They had more imitative. Obviously, you need more initiative to run a shop rather than just tapping rubber. I remember I once complained to a Malayan friend about the food and he said «What are you talking about? We have three meals a day, I’ve never had this before!». That was fascinating. The weekends I just took the bus into the city of Singapore. It was and is a Chinese city. That was another set of experiences. And there were a lot of things in the open air which wouldn’t be in the open air in Europe. Weddings, funerals, and so on; street food, all this. When I started to read anthropology books at Oxford, I suddenly realised I had been doing fieldwork, I hadn’t realised it: I’d been 18 months in the regiment, I’d observed it very carefully, because it was so exotic, and I’d talked to lots of people in it, and I had also written notes in a diary. Q. Let us come back to Oxford. How was the intellectual atmosphere there? A. Most of my friends in college were not historians. What we had in common was that we got interested in Oxford philosophy. We were all devoted to Wittgenstein, and we all quoted Wittgenstein to one another. One was a mathematician, and he ended up doing research on the philosophy of mathematics. Another one was a biologist. There was a movement to try to use logic in biology, but after doing research he was invited to become the college’s Bursar. So, he stayed right to retirement in the same college. Because St. John’s owns a lot of north Oxford, that is, big Victorian houses, they’ve had a great advantage with the rise of house prices. So the college I went to in 1957 was in the middle of the road. Middle amount of money. Middle amount of intellectual distinction. Middle size. But it became one of the two AHIg 9 JAUME AURELL richest, and it became twice the size, commissioning very interesting modern architects to design three modern quadrangles. They doubled the fellowship and became much more distinguished both for research and for the undergraduate results. Oxford and Cambridge are very competitive. Every year they publish which college got the most first-class degrees. It’s kind of intellectual boat race. Q. I see that your interdisciplinary training –a specific and brilliant quality of your work– grew naturally. A. After philosophy, I started reading sociology and anthropology. I did not go to many history lectures, because it was quicker to get the information out of books. I can read fast. I went to lectures on other subjects. Out of curiosity. I remember I went to hear Roy Harrod on Economics, because he was a famous economist. And he was simply reading the lecture from notes. He was quoting the dollar exchange rate, at what it had been 20 years ago. I suddenly realized he hasn’t bothered to revise his notes for 20 years, he just gave the same, and I started to look: «Is the paper starting to go yellow or not?». I tried lectures on literature because Tolkien was still a professor of English literature. I read The Hobbit as a child. It was one of the first serious books, as opposed to children’s books, although it was partly for children, that I read from cover to cover, which must have taken me a month, because I was maybe eight or something at that point. And I discovered as a child that inside the front cover of the hard-back edition there are runes. One of the things I did for a hobby was reading about Nordic mythology and I copied out the runic alphabet. I was curious, and it turned out all the messages in Runic in The Hobbit are in English, just with runic letters. He never says anything about this, and most people just don’t notice, Tolkien obviously had a sense of humour. I went to one of his lectures and the thing was what he didn’t say rather than what he did say. He taught as if magic was real. But he never said «I believe in magic», or «Magic is real», but you could hear him assuming it, and that was to get the people into the right frame of mind to understand the Middle Ages. I liked that a lot. Q. How did you get involved in art history? A. We had to choose already in the first year the special subject we wanted to do in the third year. There was the Italian Renaissance. I already loved art, and I might have studied art history but they didn’t have such a course at Oxford at that time, as a subject you could study as a student. They had one professor but no students. The professor was Edgar Wind. He belonged to the Warburg school. He was one of the refugees from Hamburg after 1933. He was a brilliant lecturer. So, all the student-body in Oxford used to go to his lectures, it didn’t 10 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE matter what subject were studying. We all thought that art history is a history of style, but Wind was saying «But you have to interpret the meaning of the pictures». He gave courses on Renaissance art, and he explained carefully the meaning of the pictures. «Why did Leonardo da Vinci represent the Virgin Mary next to an aqueduct?». Perhaps because Saint Bernard had compared her to an aqueduct as a mediator of graces. That sort of inspiring thing, I mean. I might have studied art history, had it been there as a specific course; but it wasn’t. But I did choose the Italian Renaissance as a topic of research. And that meant that St. John’s was prepared to finance me to go to Italy in the summer to learn the language and, of course, to look at paintings, look at buildings. 4. Italy Q. Then Italy entered your life, after London and Singapore. A. 1958: this is the first location. And I spent the summer in Italy. I instantly felt in love with Italy, and I thought «I’m going to have to pick some subject of research that will be a good excuse to go back, again and again». Q. Yet, in the meanwhile, you had to continue your studies at Oxford. A. In fact, I was taught the Renaissance by a rather typical Oxford don, who was an old-fashioned English gentleman, except that his surname was Bueno de Mesquita. He was from a kind of aristocratic Sephardic family. The irony, since he was Jewish, was that his name means ‘mosque’. He was a diplomatic historian, and he wanted me to concentrate on the diplomatic negotiations before Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494. He would set an essay on Machiavelli, and that was good since I wanted to read Machiavelli, but I totally ignored the diplomatic side. The ‘set books’ were Machiavelli, Castiglione, some Lives by Vasari, and the great discovery that I had never heard before but that got me interested in historiography was Guicciardini. We were reading Guicciardini as a primary source for what happened, but of course I couldn’t help being curious about the way he wrote history, which was different from the way we were taught to write history. He invented speeches and so on. British historians were not asking that sort of literary question at that point, of course. Now they would. And so, I studied European history. I decided I wasn’t going to be a medievalist by the time I came up. And to fit in with the Renaissance I did sixteen-, seventeen-century European history with Keith Thomas, again. He really knew about English history. It was clear he didn’t know so much more than me about European history at this point. The last week of term, he AHIg 11 JAUME AURELL said «You choose your own essay subject». And I said ‘Leibniz!’. Because I had been reading some philosophy. He didn’t say anything, but sent me a postcard the next day saying: «You won’t be seeing me next week; I’ve fixed that you go and see a philosopher». He was called Herbert [Paul] Grice, I had never heard of him. I remember standing outside his room, he turned up late, this white-haired, old gentleman, he sits in an armchair, invites me to sit down, closes his eyes and says «Would you please read your essay?», which was Why do philosophers disagree. Because Leibniz had this idea of possibly reconciling all philosophies. Anyway, I thought that Grice went to sleep. I read the essay anyway. He opened his eyes, he went through it, paragraph by paragraph. He had total recall. I had never met anyone who was like that. Not only what I had said, but also the order in which I had developed the argument. We talked for two hours. He had no sense of time. But it was the best tutorial I ever had. I’m afraid I put that in the college magazine a couple of years ago. I hope Keith Thomas doesn’t mind, but he would understand: he was doing everything for the first time and Grice had been doing it for 30 years, so naturally he was more skilled. Q. How was your transfer from St. John’s to St. Antony’s College at Oxford? A. There was the question of doing research. Keith had thought that, at this point in Oxford and, probably in Cambridge too, not many people stayed to do research, especially not the doctorate. And that meant that if you stayed in your old college there were very few graduates. So, you weren’t a student, and you weren’t a professor. You were in this funny in-between place. But there were a few colleges which were only for graduate students and professors, and Keith thought that I should apply to St. Antony’s. So, I applied, got a scholarship and then I found myself in a different kind of college. St. John’s was entirely British at this point; St. Anthony’s was United Nations, I lost count of them. It was a small college, it was much more egalitarian –although the professors had dinners by themselves, they had breakfast and lunch with us–. The disciplines were politics, sociology, anthropology, mainly, and history was basically modern, nineteenth-and twentieth-century. So, it was a very different atmosphere. I made friends with all sort of people from different places. One of my first friends was János Bak, who encouraged my interest in Hungarian history and we stayed in touch, until I gave the Natalie Davis Lectures in Budapest, in 2013, when he had long retired but was still around, and he died at ninety-something just a few years ago. And then there was an Ecuadorian historian with whom I am still in touch Juan Maiguashca. Over 60 years later, we are currently writing an article together for an Ecuadorian journal, 12 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE about the place of history and the future of history in the social sciences. He’ll turn my English into Spanish. I don’t have to worry about that. Q. Well, this is a relief for me too, being a Spanish scholar and rendering this interview for a Spanish Journal. We all know your intellectual and spiritual affection for the Spanish-Portuguese and Latin American scholarship. A. St. Antony’s was an exciting atmosphere and encouraged my interest in other disciplines rather than history. I had to pick a subject to research. The first I thought of was to do Jesuit history. I noticed that there was a huge literature on the first fifty years and then there was a gap. I got the sense that the generalate of Claudio Acquaviva around the turn of the sixteenth-seventeenth century could have been a crucial moment of transformation. I’d like to find out. I knew people in Campion Hall,2 and one of the Jesuits there wrote to Miguel Batllori, to ask him to ask the archivist in Rome whether it was possible for me to go and use the archive. Unfortunately, the archivist said no. He didn’t want people doing doctoral theses. He would have accepted post-docs. And so, I had to think about a topic again. I should say that I already had a supervisor. He happened to be the regius professor. That too was a rather amusing occasion. The regius professor used to see any intending PhD student in history just to ask them what they were doing. He didn’t have much else to do except to give his own lectures. There was no administration attached to being the regius. I didn’t know Hugh R. Trevor-Roper before, but he was an unusual lecturer. Right at the beginning of my career at Oxford, he gave one lecture. It was absolutely packed, every history don in Oxford in the front rows. Sometimes he was making rude remarks about people in the audience. That was very typical. When he talked about the ‘Jacobites’, he meant the followers of the medievalist E. F. Jacob, who was in the front row, that sort of thing. Anyway, I turned up in his office in the history faculty and he said «What do you want to do?». I told him. «Who do you want to supervise?». So, I named somebody. He told me something bad about her. So, I named somebody else. He told me something bad about him. I remember thinking: «I could go through all the history faculty and this man would enjoy telling me something bad about everybody». But more or less at the same time I realized that he wanted me to ask him. So, I started: «If you were interested...»; and I didn’t finish the sentence and he said: «Yes, I’ll do it». So, I had to report to him that I couldn’t go on with the Jesuits. He said: «What do you want to do instead?». I had become very interested, together with 2 Campion Hall is the Jesuit college at Oxford. AHIg 13 JAUME AURELL three or four friends, also graduate students, in meeting to talk about the history of historical writing. Just for fun. And I thought: Paolo Sarpi would make a good topic. Of course, Trevor-Roper loved this, because Paolo Sarpi hated the Jesuits and Trevor-Roper had a special thing against the Jesuits. Oxford gossip was that he had once thought of becoming a Catholic and went to Campion Hall for instruction and took against the people, against the church, whatever it was, and stopped. Q. And then I see it began a crucial period in your career: your interest in early modern Italian historiography. A. Mainly this was library research, though I did go to Venice at one point for a few manuscripts, and to meet Gaetano Cozzi who was the ‘doge’ of research on early-modern Venice at that time. He was a very charming and learned man. I started work on that, and I’d be situating Sarpi in a group of other historians. You had to give a tentative title too early, when you really didn’t know what you were writing about. It seems quite extraordinary looking back. I told Trevor-Roper that my title was New Trends in Historical Writing in Europe, 1500s to 1700s. I don’t think anyone else in Oxford would have accepted that. But he was perfectly happy. He liked the subject. In fact, I’m sure he tried to carve something doable out of it, where the centre was Sarpi and the historians with whom he corresponded, Jacques [Auguste] de Thou in France, William Camden in England, and a small number of people who had in common that they didn’t want to invent speeches, they wanted to reproduce documents, they wanted to be of practical-political use, rather than to write a moralising history and so on. And I got especially interested in the fact that Sarpi’s philosophy of history was that what happens on the surface is very different from what really happens. It is obsessive. I noticed he keeps using words like ‘occulta’ and ‘inganno’ and so on. And that was going to be a central theme. And then I saw this advertisement: one day Asa Briggs came to give a talk at a university society in Oxford and he talked about a university that was about to open, the University of Sussex and that it was going to be organized in an interdisciplinary way. 5. Sussex Q. So, we have here a fourth key place in your itinerary, after London, Oxford, and Singapore: Sussex. A. I was very excited about this. I wrote to Briggs asking: «How can I apply for a job?». And he said: «I will advertise in a few months; just watch journals like The Times Literary Supplement». The advertisement came up and I applied. 14 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE I’d gone to a seminar in Oxford, attracted because I didn’t understand the title. The title in the lecture list was Alienation. The two people running the seminar were the philosopher and novelist Irish Murdoch and a sociologist called Norman Birnbaum. So, I turned up and, Oxford style –I don’t think this happens elsewhere, even in Cambridge– the people who give the papers in the seminar are the audience. So, students have to volunteer to give papers. So, I volunteered to give a paper and I was assigned some books on factories in the United States and work on the assembly line. And I gave this paper where I was particularly interested in somebody who had interviewed the workers and their view on working conditions. One of them said: «They treat the men as if they were machines». So, some students at the seminar were puzzled that I was taking the views of the workers seriously, but Norman Birnbaum saw the point, so he was on my side and we started to make friends there. He heard I had applied for that University of Sussex that didn’t exist yet. And he said: «Well, I’ll write you an extra reference». I had my references from Trevor-Roper and Keith Thomas, but then this extra one probably turned the tide in my favour. They asked me questions in the interview that I found reasonably easy to talk about and then they said at the end: «If we appointed you, could you come in October?». I said: «Actually I hope to come a year later, to finish the doctorate in Oxford». And they said: «Don’t bother about that, you can just turn it into a book». They did appoint me and I did go right away and it was of course a very exciting experience, coming from the oldest university in England to the newest one in three hours. From one with too many traditions to one with no traditions at all. They appointed lots of people my age, 25, usually from Oxford and Cambridge, and of course a few senior people. We all had to design courses. So, the senior people was obviously designing their own courses, so they left us totally free to design our courses, something that had probably never happened in any other British university. And then we got very good students, especially the girls, because only 10% of Oxford and Cambridge students were girls –they had to go to women’s colleges and there weren’t many–. We also got in the news, Television cameras and so on. So that meant that lots of students applied. There were at least 20 people applying for each undergraduate place at Sussex. Some of the boys were working class but most of the girls were middle or upper class. And so there was a very curious social mix. Q. This gives us the opportunity to hear you say something about your experience as a university teacher, yesterday and today. A. I volunteered, among other things, to teach sociology as a way of learning more about it and of course that meant I was reading the books two or three AHIg 15 JAUME AURELL weeks before the students. Now I realize that that actually can be an advantage. People teach from their memories of the books for 20 years, and these memories get a bit vaguer, whereas I had only just read the texts myself. And then a couple of years later, when art history was brought in, and they needed somebody to teach the Renaissance temporarily while they found somebody to do it permanently, I volunteered again and did that for a couple of years. There were courses in history and literature which took the form of seminars and had to be directed by two professors, two teachers anyway, who had to come from two disciplines. I was teaching one on early-modern France, especially sixteenth-century France, and another one about science, poetry and religion in seventeenth-century England. We learnt an enormous amount from our colleagues in the seminar. For instance, how do you read a literary text? The professor of literature was explaining to the students how to do it and it was for me like a free lecture. Above all, when a text is written in the first person, don’t assume that it expresses the ideas of the author, the ‘I’ is a persona, a particular set of views adopted for a particular purpose which you have to find out, that sort of thing, so that was an education. If I learned anything about how to read texts it was from sixteen years at Sussex working all the time, some of the time, with people in literature, making friends with them. For the first ten years I wouldn’t have been anywhere else. I was asked to come back to Oxford, but I thought «No, it’s too soon, I don’t want to do this». And the University of Sussex was expanding, we were grabbing good professors from other universities. They were excited by the interdisciplinary enterprise. And then the money started not to flow so freely because the conservative government, especially under Mrs. Thatcher, was less interested in the universities, especially in the humanities. People were getting jobs in Sussex not because they believed in the ethos of the university, as in the past, but because they needed jobs. There wasn’t the same excitement, and it was harder to devise a new course, because the university was not expanding any more, and so your colleagues, the people you thought your friends, would find the best intellectual reasons why this course of yours should not happen, because there were only a few spaces for new courses. So, I learned a lot about how universities work and how a system which was completely informal the first year became quite bureaucratic before I left. Q. This is a very interesting thought, still applicable to universities nowadays. Can you tell us more about this experience? A. My first year in Sussex, I thought «Wouldn’t it be nice to have a master’s degree in the history of ideas?». I wrote the dean a plan on a single sheet of paper 16 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE knowing that –just a little bit like Churchill– if a busy dean would want to see only a few lines about it, not something elaborate. I walked into his office and then said «I’ve got a proposal» and I handed it to him. Briggs always read and thought, as well as writing, at extreme speed. I hadn’t reached the door before he had approved this new course. And that meant that it just happened. Of course, years later there would be committees and a decision whether or not to have this course, demanding more documentation and so on. Because other universities didn’t have courses in the history of ideas, we started to get people applying and then it was decided that there would be a degree in it separate from the history degree. A group of people with this interest became what they called a «subject-group» because we weren’t allowed to have departments or faculties, that was against the ethos of Sussex. We had big «schools of study» instead. I was in European Studies with people in literature philosophy and sociology and so on. But management consultants were called in after few years and recommended the formation of subject-groups to give people a disciplinary identity as well. Intellectual historians were asked to break off from the main body of history. There were four or five of us. We had a meeting to decide what to call ourselves: history of ideas or intellectual history. And one, this very witty historian of Victorian England, John Burrow, said «The beauty of calling ourselves intellectual historians is that it implies that all our colleagues in history are non-intellectual historians»; so we voted unanimously for this. Of course, it didn’t monopolize our teaching. I wouldn’t have really enjoyed that. It just meant that we invented some courses in intellectual history and the rest of the time we went on just teaching history or, in my case, some other subjects as well. And one day, I received a letter from a professor from an American university, asking whether there was the possibility of applying for a chair in intellectual history. He was called Richard Popkin, he was a very distinguished historian of scepticism. I had read his book on the subject. I wrote back saying «You need no introduction, but I need to explain that intellectual history is not a department, it is four or five of us teaching lots of other things. You know, so are you still interested?». He wasn’t really. For the MA, once I got this letter in very childish handwriting and in Germanic English, somebody wanting to do the MA, and it was signed Rudy Dutschke. His handwriting was bad because he had a bullet in his head that couldn’t be extracted, because of the gun attack suffered some time before, in which he was shot twice in the head and once in the shoulder. He was recovering from this. This was around 1968. I thought accepting him was a good idea, but AHIg 17 JAUME AURELL I had to send the application for approval which never came either from people senior to me in Sussex such as Briggs or didn’t come from the Home Secretary to allow him into the country. He went to Denmark instead, where they were more relaxed about having a German Marxist leader of protests living in their country. But it was quite an interesting moment. After sixteen years, I was less happy with Sussex that I had been at first. And then I got the message asking me to apply for a job in Cambridge. That is, one of my colleagues in intellectual history, Stefan Collini, who had come from Cambridge, had friends in the history faculty, and they transmitted this message. They couldn’t write to me directly; that would look like a breach of impartiality, but they could let it be known in this sort of way that they wanted me to apply. So, I applied, and got the job, and came here. When I was interviewed, it became very clear that I was being supported by the professors of African and Indian history, and that I was being opposed by the most powerful person in the History faculty, Geoffrey Elton, who of course was a pure political historian who didn’t believe that either Keith Thomas or Fernand Braudel were writing real history. And, of course, it was a committee and so they had to vote after I left. Cambridge is a terribly indiscreet place. I got the job but I was instantly telephoned by somebody on the committee to explain that the first time they voted they had split fifty-fifty so they had to meet again and then one of the people who voted on the Elton side discovered that Elton had said things like I had never had a graduate student which could be proved to be false and he was furious with Elton and voted the other way and so I came. 6. Cambridge Q. Here your fifth place, and the most durable of them: Cambridge. A. They offered me a shared room in the history faculty and the college offered me a big room here; so, of course, I took the big room here with the added advantage that I would never meet Geoffrey Elton. Although he was perfectly polite when one met him personally (and perfectly impolite, of course, when one was out of hearing). But then everything gets back to you, you see. Indiscretion is a virtue here in Cambridge. And then I had to readjust to a departmental system. I discovered a few good things which I didn’t know in advance. The first is that at an informal level there were people in lots of Cambridge faculties who wanted to have conversations with historians. Late in my career, when I counted up, I discovered I’d given seminar 18 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE papers in nine faculties here. That meant that someone in that faculty believed that history should be brought into what they were doing. What you couldn’t do was set up a joint course, taken by students in two faculties. The second thing I discovered was that eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds had an open mind, they hadn’t internalised the idea that history shouldn’t have contact with other subjects. But, in fact, I didn’t talk to them about sociology and anthropology. I just put books by people who were sociologists and anthropologists on the reading list for the weekly essay. I just said, «I think that Max Weber will actually be useful in your essay». So, they would read him, assimilate the ideas and make good use of them. There was no need to raise the question of disciplinary boundaries. The beauty of the Cambridge system is that you’re teaching one to one and nobody else knows what you are doing and nobody thinks they have the right to interfere with what you are doing, at that level. In that sense, you can undermine the system. But you can’t openly set up these joint courses. Maybe it would be possible by now, over 40 years later, to have an interdisciplinary seminar, but totally optional and mainly for graduate students. So, then it wouldn’t have to be examined. The problem is always going to be the level of examinations. Oxford went the other way, partly to counter the appeal of Sussex, and the Oxford response was to reform itself just the right amount but not too much. It admitted more women; and it set up a few courses in History with French, History with Politics, but very few people choose these courses, because the problem if you take a joint course, is that you are being taught by people in two faculties, each of whom thinks that you should perform at the level of full-time students of their faculty. So only really very good students who are prepared to work hard would sign up for such joint courses. And it is now the same system in Cambridge. We have now got some degrees in History plus something else, such as Politics. So those were just the minimum amounts of reform to attract good students back to Oxford and Cambridge. Another problem at of a new university such as Sussex was the decline of newness. Newness is a fast-wasting asset. For a couple of years, we had a lot of publicity for the Sussex experiment. Then television cameras were turned off. And then gradually we didn’t get quite so good students in Sussex, which I’m sure had been number three or four in the list of British universities when I first went; it has stabilized around number 45 now. It’s respectable, but not special. That was how I came to Cambridge. So, as far as my career and influences are concerned, that is most of it. Q. Can you tell us more about your experience on university teaching? A. Because I had this range of teaching at Sussex, I had to put the research I had done on Sarpi and other seventeenth-century historians on one side. A course AHIg 19 JAUME AURELL was invented for all humanities students, Introduction to History. And it was decided that there would be two alternative textbooks. Either they could sign up for Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, by R. H. Tawney, which meant that they could read Max Weber and all the controversy about the origin of capitalism. Or they could choose Jacob Burckhardt and The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, of course, which I knew almost by heart because just as I learned the Italian just by getting a copy of Machiavelli’s Prince in English and another one in Italian and trying to find the same sentence on both sides, so I did the same in German with Burckhardt. It means you end up remembering a big chunk of the text. I was lecturing on Burckhardt for this course, and teaching it in ‘tutorials’, because Sussex in those days worked like Oxford: you had an hour with two students and there were essays every week. Now, there are 15,000 students and the groups are of around twenty and they do a piece of written work only once every term. It is a totally different world. I liked two to one better than one-to-one, because I used to get the two students to argue. In the sixties, and this brings back the atmosphere of the sixties, I had by total chance, two students in one tutorial, one of whom was a member of the Communist Party, and the second was a Trotskyist. And they never stopped arguing and I did not have to do anything, I just sat there. That sums up a period. So, I was teaching the Renaissance. And then somebody from Oxford, John Hale, who specialized in the Renaissance, whose lectures I had been to as a student, he wrote to me and said that he had been asked to edit a series of books on the social history of culture. He asked me if I would write one on Italy from 1420 to 1540. It had to be between those dates because before 1420 he would ask somebody else, who was John Larner, who was teaching in Glasgow, whom I met and liked. We met a year later to talk about our two books. That meant that I put Paolo Sarpi on hold and started to work like mad about the Renaissance and so I became a reader at the Warburg Institute, this marvellous library, as you may know, where it has open shelves. The motto of the institute is «The book you really need is one you don’t know about yet, but it will be on the shelf next to the book that you do know about». And they organised the shelves with marvellous categories like «Return of Last World Emperor.» So, it is a real pleasure to work there. 7. Princeton Hopefully young researchers will not miss out on this experience. Digital media have obvious advantages, but I still enjoy the physical display of the books on the shelves, and the experience of visually locating the chain that one book leads to another. 20 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE Q. And then Princeton appeared on your intellectual horizon, and with it the entire American academic world. A. Out of the blue, in 1966, here comes a letter from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton: Am I interested in a fellowship there? What had happened? Lawrence Stone, whom I knew very well at Oxford although he was at a different college, even recommended me to work as his successor at Wadham College but that was the proposal I turned down, because I wanted to go to Sussex. But Stone approved of that too, because he had been appointed at a new university, York. But the trouble was that he had been appointed by the vice-chancellor (as the English call the rector). The vice-chancellor forgot to consult other colleagues, and therefore the senate voted against the appointment, not because it was Stone, but against the vice-chancellor. And so, Stone sadly didn’t have a job. He had resigned from Oxford. He hadn’t been appointed at York, and so he applied for Princeton and got the job. Stone’s professorship was called the Dodge professorship because of the carmaker. Trevor-Roper, whom I still used to visit regularly, could not resist saying «the appropriately named Dodge professor in Princeton», because the two scholars hated each other. Stone had spoken to Felix Gilbert about me. The Institute, or at least Gilbert, had the idea that there were too many senior people and not enough junior people coming as visiting fellows. And Stone said, «Ah, I know somebody who is interested in the Renaissance, so he might like this». And then I had to be interviewed. But I was interviewed in London, because Felix used to come every year to work at the British Library, still in the British Museum in those days. He interviewed me in his hotel room, just outside the BBC and we talked about the Renaissance and we talked about Paolo Sarpi and so I was invited. Suddenly I was going to be free from teaching and sitting in Princeton with nothing to do except work on my book. It was quite an experience, because art history had a separate library and the Renaissance was of course a major section. I would read a book and there would be footnotes with a reference to a book I did not know that sounded interesting. And very often all I had to do was to reach out. It was on the shelf, in the Warburg style, next to the one I did know about. That speeded things up tremendously. And there were art historians at the Institute and I could talk to them. Erwin Panofsky was still there, it was a year before he died. I went to a party and I met him. He asked what I was doing and I said a social history of the Renaissance. And he said «Oh, I do not care about society, I am only interested in what happens inside the painting». End of conversation. AHIg 21 JAUME AURELL But Millard Meiss was another specialist on Renaissance art and suggested books. And because I was going to write on the Renaissance as a cultural movement and not just art history, I talked to a historian of science there (Marshall Clagett), who was also very helpful, because he was very much against the positivist idea that you only look at the people in the fifteenth century who are doing something like modern science. He realised that I ought to be looking at alchemists, astrologers and so on. So once again, he helped me pick some indivuals from the six hundred people I was going to study in detail. Of course, in Oxford, I had written an essay about Lewis Namier, and I knew that prosopography had been invented by German classicists but that it was a method that anybody could use. And I thought ‘People are going to be a bit suspicious about the social history of the Renaissance. People will think it must be Marxist, because the only people that have done it were Friedrich Antal and Arnold Hauser who were definitely card-carrying Marxists. So, I need to persuade empiricist historians that my generalizations had some evidence. And so, I had this six hundred people, I was going to work on their biographies and indeed when I got back to Sussex, I put them all into a computer. Computers at the time were the size of a whole room and you put punched cards in them, but somebody else punched the cards for me. And then they printed out all of my correlations; and I had this huge sheet of paper that covered a whole wall in my flat. It was very useful. 8. Early Modern Historiography Q. How was your return to England? A. The book on the Renaissance came out in 1972. And I had time by then to write a couple of articles. One article on Paolo Sarpi was done for History Today, which was a popularizing journal. A second essay was written for Trevor-Roper, because he was editing a series called «great historians», including Sarpi, and he needed a selection from texts and an introduction. So, I put everything I knew about Sarpi into the introduction to this book, published in 1967 by Washington Square Press. They are no longer in business and the text was never reprinted. It is the only time I have published something I have translated. It was very interesting doing the translation. In fact, it was not the first translation of Sarpi, because in 1619 a man called Nathaniel Brent, who worked for the Archbishop of Canterbury, was involved in the smuggling of the manuscript out of Venice for publication in Italian (in London, to beat the Inquisition). And he had translated 22 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE it into English. Every time I had a problem, I went to see what Sir Nathaniel had done. And his Italian was no better than mine. He obviously found difficult what I also thought was difficult, so he was not much help. Anyway. I published these two essays on Sarpi and one article (which was going to be introduction to the doctoral thesis which I never completed), on the reception of ancient historians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how people started to read Livy and Sallust less and Tacitus and Polybius more. And I had the statistics of publications on these classic authors, so I was using quantitative evidence, as in my prosopography of the Renaissance.3 One of the good things Trevor-Roper did for me was that he introduced me to Arnaldo Momigliano, who was very friendly. At the Warburg Institute, Ernst Gombrich was bit suspicious of me because he thought I had gone to Wind’s seminars and the two scholars were enemies. But I told him that I knew his son Richard from when we were under-graduates in the same year and so he got a bit more friendly after that. Momigliano read my article on ancient historians and said «I know this already». I said: «If I can discover in a year what you know after with all your experience, I think it was worth doing it». In fact, he was a great supporter of mine, and invited me to various things, including, this was quite amusing, the annual conference of a society to study the Enlightenment, and it met in Pisa one year and there was section on historiography in the eighteenth century. I gave a paper about the idea of a feudal system. When does the phrase «feudal system» come into use, what did people mean by system, what did they mean by feudal, in the eighteenth century? And Pierre Vidal-Naquet was there, delighted. Franco Venturi was there too. He mentioned a source I had not thought of, an eighteenth-century English diplomat in Russia who thought that Russia was under the feudal system, so he used this phrase in a non-medieval context. Afterwards Momigliano said «Thank you for your ‘Analysis’». This was a deliberate reference to Annales, which he, unlike Geoffrey Elton, thought was a good thing. Momigliano introduced me to various classicists in Cambridge, he was good for that. So we had a conversation for twenty years; in a sense, it was the same conversation in instalments. Sometimes it would be in London, most often; sometimes in Pisa; and sometimes in Chicago. And he would always start as if he had left me five minutes before, even if it was six months. And he would invite 3 Burke is referring here to his influential article A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450-1700, in History and Theory, 5 (1966), pp. 135-152. AHIg 23 JAUME AURELL me to lunch and I would never know whether it would be in the cafeteria of University College London, where the food was horrible, or some quite nice Italian restaurant. He did not notice anyway. He would talk all the time and not realize what he was eating. Q. Tell us more about the great Momigliano, please. A. He was simultaneously a professor at University College London, the University of Pisa, that is, a place for graduates only, the Scuola Normale in Pisa, for which he had been expelled when Mussolini brought in the racist laws in 1938. And so, the Italians were embarrassed, and after the war they gave him his chair back without the obligation to reside in Italy. And then he was given this chair in Chicago as well. So, he had three chairs and he moved between them all the time. So that is why we never knew where we would be meeting. And he assumed that I knew much more about the ancient world than I did, so the problem was that I had to say things occasionally and I had to keep the bluff up before he realised that I had no idea of who he was talking about. But he was very pleased to find somebody working on the history of historical writing. At that point, it was still unusual. Just as British historians are more willing to entertain theory now than when I was a student, the same goes for concern with the history of historical thought and with working with other disciplines. Chronologically that brings us to 1972. I wrote the Renaissance book entirely from library research, from printed primary sources. For the next book I decided that I was going to find a reason to work in the archives. I might not decide to be a permanent archive historian but I needed to have the experience in order to decide. So, I needed a piece of research I could do fairly easily in a reasonably short time using an archive or two. At that point, I was teaching a course called Aristocracies and elites. It was an invention of Sussex to have a thematic course in history with case studies from different periods. And the students would write an essay; actually, I gave lectures on Chinese mandarins and Japanese Samurai. But I decided that for research I would work on the Venetian elite in the seventeenth century and simultaneously on the elite in Amsterdam. I had a little bit of Dutch, and I realised that if you know German, reading Dutch is never going to be a problem, and speaking is not a problem because 90% of the population speak good English. All I needed to do was to go to the Archivio de Stato in Venice, occasionally somewhere else to look at manuscripts, but mainly the Archivio de Stato, and the equivalent, in Amsterdam, the Gemeentearchief. I got a Leverhulme grant and I had a sabbatical coming up, so that was perfect. And it was prosopography again, but this time the material was mainly in manuscripts. 24 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 9. Venice and Amsterdam Q. I assume you are talking about your seminal book Venice and Amsterdam (1974). A. Yes. I looked at tax returns. In Venice I would have a big file of tax returns and alongside the returns of people with lots of money whom I was investigating, suddenly, Tintoretto’s tax return turned up, and it was just there, and of course I read it, it wasn’t in a frame or in a special box –probably it is by now, because too many art historians will have wanted to see it now that the social history of art has become respectable–. But it is very exciting this contact with manuscripts. And the first surprise was how much dust there is. And all the sand is still there that they used to dry the ink. Later in Milan I used notarial archives which I suspect I might be the first person to use in a century, my fingers would go black in five minutes, I had to keep rushing out to wash them. It was like a baptism of dust, to enter the guild of historians. Italy was very easy to work in, although it was very inefficient. The people who brought the documents had the right to these jobs because they had been badly injured in the war and had lost an arm or a leg, but of course that meant that they were not the best possible people to carry your documents. And often they brought the wrong ones. And when I complained they said «Well it is dark up there!». I can imagine the problem since there are kilometres of documents in the Venetian archive. But asking for things was easy, because I was fluent in Italian. The problem in the Dutch archive was that, although I knew they spoke English, I knew that they would not take me seriously if I asked for Dutch documents in any language except Dutch. Of course, I would not speak grammatically and I could see that they were looking at me pityingly and thinking «He’s never going to be able to understand a word of this». And the first documents from the sixteenth century, I was actually unable to read the handwriting. And then I thought, «I am studying the long seventeenth century. I am going to ask for the latest documents first». And they came in copperplate writing, anybody could read them, and when I got a hang of what the documents would look like then I went back to the earlier ones and discovered I could puzzle them out fairly quickly. I mean, you need some time to make an alphabet on your notepad of the particular way somebody writes As and Es and then you can do it. The book was presented by a publisher as if it was a general study about the two cities, but really, it was a monograph on two elites. I used some elite theory from Vilfredo Pareto to modern American political science (Robert Dahl) and tested a few generalizations. AHIg 25 JAUME AURELL And then I needed a new subject. And I thought «When I wrote the book on the Renaissance, I was extremely aware that most Italians at the time never participated in it. At a generous balance, maybe 10% of Italians knew something about the art in particular, humanism even less. What about the culture of the 90%, especially peasants?» 10. Popular Culture Q. Then, you were ready to create your influential field that historians know as «popular culture». A. I found almost by accident in the British Library some printed booklets of the sixteenth century which included mainly songs and the introduction to each item made it clear that these songs had been sung in the street before they were printed. And I thought that this was a gateway to popular culture in Italy. And I thought «At the popular level, the provinces are so different, I will have to make a regional study». Alternatively, after reading about folklore for preparation, I thought that the only alternative, since Italy was either too wide or too narrow as a subject in this case, is to study the whole of Europe, because as the folklorists made very clear, the same songs and stories migrated right across Europe, of course being adapted into different languages and sometimes into different situations. In Russia, for instance, St. Nicholas lost his contact with the sea, but they could still adapt the story. I could not resist the challenge of writing a book about early modern Europe which would not just deal with Western Europe but go as I announced in the introduction, from Galway to the Urals. It was a pleasure to mention Galway, my father’s family comes from there. And so, I decided that that was what I would do. I got another grant from the British Academy to go to Scandinavia, because I realised that popular culture had been taken much more seriously there either by historians or by folklorists who also studied history and were beginning to call themselves ethnologists (the idea of ‘folklore’ had become contaminated by the fact the ‘folk’ had been so important in Nazi Germany). I think that the idea, the word ‘folklore’ survived longer in Italy. This was another study of comparative history. In my previous book I had chosen Amsterdam and Venice not only because I wanted to spend a lot of time in the two cities but because I wanted to test what is it like to do comparative history. Are you looking for similarities, differences? And so on. And I enjoyed that very much. 26 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE Q. Or transferences, isn’t it? A. Oh, yes. Connections as well, although the great debate about comparative versus ‘entangled’ history had not started yet. That is where the discussion is now. So, I thought of my little book on Venice and Amsterdam as a case study in comparison, and the publisher asked me to edit a series of comparative studies, in which four or five where published. The book about popular culture was also a way of doing comparative history, and it would include the adventures of a particular folk tale as made its way across Europe. And then I developed these general theses that, first of all, in 1500, popular culture was everybody’s culture, including the nobles, including the priests, and so on. But some people had a second culture, because they had gone to university and knew Latin, and so on. But, between 1650 and 1800, there was a massive ‘withdrawal’ of the elites from popular culture, which they started to look down on. So much so, that when the Romantic movement arrived, the upper classes discovered popular culture as an exotic culture. And I liked the rhythm of that. And so, I started the book with the discovery in the nineteenth century and then I had the state of popular culture, and then the attempts to reform popular culture, partly for religious reasons, partly because it was too violent and town councils tried to stop carnival of getting out of hand, and so on. And then finally, the withdrawal from popular culture, and that would link up with where I started, with the Grimm brothers and other middle-class Germans writing down folk tales at the dictation of peasants and so on. Of course, I wasn’t the first person to write about popular culture.4 Edward Thompson had done it in the book about the working class, which led to a controversy among English Marxists because it gave an important role to culture, which a strict Marxist would deny. And so, it led to a war between cultural Marxists and economic Marxists. But of course, Edward Thompson, like Trevor-Roper, loved fights. They both thrived on this kind of thing. There was small number of histories of popular culture at this time. Jacques Le Goff had written articles; there was a book by Robert Mandrou; and then there were many early studies done by folklorists, in different countries. And so, I looked at these studies in all the languages I could read or, in some cases, more less decipher. I had a little bit of Polish, and of course, the books often had a summary in a foreign language and with the help of that I could understand a little bit more with the aid of my Polish 4 Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Temple Smith, London, 1978. AHIg 27 JAUME AURELL dictionary. Nobody else wanted to write about popular culture at the European level. Not then, not now. Q. Did you know at that time Mikhail Bakhtin? A. I used him, yes. He wrote about Russia and France. Usually, France. And his followers wrote about Russia. Notably, Dmitry Likhachev. Bakhtin’s Rabelais book came out in English for the first time in 1968. And in French and Spanish a little bit later. And I learned something about the Spanish reception because of Tomás Mantecón, whom you may know, who came to Cambridge to study for a year, wrote to me in advance and I kind of initiated him, how the library works and so on, and we’ve been in touch ever since. He edited this book on Bakhtin to which I contributed. I found it very useful. Later on, I discovered other books by Bakhtin, including the Dostoyevsky one, which I admire actually more, because I think he knew the background better. It was wonderful that he wanted to describe the social context for Rabelais, but I think he did not have the time, or the sources, to go into the cultural context as much as one needs. And so, one cannot help criticising him. And of course, his notion of «the people» is a very flexible one. It was very exciting to read him and also another Russian, Aaron Gurevich, whom I met in Moscow in 1991. I also met Bronislaw Geremek in the 1980s. He was assisting Lech Walesa in the Solidarity movement, but he was also teaching at the University of Warsaw. And we had a public discussion on Bakhtin and the extent to which one should interpret him as talking about one group of people or about one aspect of everybody. If you like, we may call it «the id» that comes out in carnival. My book on popular culture (unlike my Renaissance, when every three years there is another book), has no rivals so, luckily mine has survived and is still in print. The publishers of Popular culture have just written to me saying «You realise it will be the fiftieth anniversary of this book in 2028. We would like you to revise it for its fourth edition.» So I am going to do that. It is quite nice to think that one’s book will be available for half a century. After that, I got the job in Cambridge. And for a bit I only did small things. Keith Thomas wrote me the reference to get to Cambridge. So, I owed him. The next thing he says is «I’m editing a series of ‘past masters’, about major figures in European cultural history. Are you going to write the Leonardo volume or the Montaigne volume?» He didn’t say «Would you like to write?»; he knew I knew I owed him. So, I said «I don’t know enough about science, so I’m going for Montaigne». And I enjoyed writing it so much that when the Oxford editor of the series, Henry Hardy, said «Would you like to write another for us?», I said 28 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE «Yes, I want to write about Vico». Vico hadn’t been on their list, but they were very happy to accept it. Q. What a difficult author, Vico. A. Yes, one reason for writing was that I knew I had to deal with Vico because he was so important, but he was so hard to understand. If I write a book, I will have to go through that text so carefully, I will end up knowing what it is really about. And in some ways, the book was an anti-Berlin, because Isaiah Berlin thought that Vico was somebody from the nineteenth century who had been born too early. And one of the things I wanted to say is that he was a seventeenth century person who was born too late. He has that famous letter regretting that books in Latin were going down in price. He feels his world was disappearing. So, my thesis was that he could be post-Cartesian (because he attacked Descartes), more easily, because in a way he was pre-Cartesian. This was very different from Berlin, who wrote a review of me that he did not publish, I do not know why. His literary executor found it after his death, Henry Hardy. He wrote to me saying «I found this review of you! I’d like to publish it in the collection of Isaiah’s works», because he was publishing absolutely everything, «do you mind? Would you like to write a reply?» So, I was in the interesting situation of conducting a polite controversy with Isaiah after he was dead. It seems that Hans-Georg Gadamer read the book and liked it. His students had established something in Heidelberg, called the Gadamer Professor, you only went for a week to give four lectures. But, unfortunately, he died before I was invited. They wrote to me. They had note from him, that he would like me to be a Gadamer professor. And so, they invited me. It turned out that they had no idea who I was. The philosophers who had invited me were not the least interested in what I was doing, but these were lectures for the whole university and people from other disciplines came. And because my hosts were philosophers, I thought I would give lectures on theory. I gave one lecture on Michel de Certeau. It was clear in the discussion that the only people who had any idea of what I was talking about were the theologians. It was quite interesting! They read his secular work as well. And I gave another lecture on Gilberto Freyre because then I was working with my wife [Maria Lucia García Pallares] on him. The discussion showed that nobody in Heidelberg knew who he was and that they were not really interested in a Brazilian. There was a little bit of a prejudice there. Anyway, the result of that was that I thought «Why don’t I take advantage of my school days and read de Certeau in chronological order?» Because I had the suspicion that his sociological theory is influenced by theology and mysticism. And so it was. In fact, in his book that is most famous, especially in the United AHIg 29 JAUME AURELL States, the one about the everyday and the key concept of appropriation, he does refer to two Fathers of the Church, of course, Jerome and Augustine. And about appropriating from a Classical Antiquity book, baptising it. In fact, I found that the key concept of ‘re-employment’ (ré-emploi) was there in his early writing before it surfaced in his sociology. So, I wrote this up and sent it to a journal called Theoria and they published it.5 I was very pleased to have made a contribution to theory, even if it was only to the history of theory. And I found Michel de Certeau much more sympathique than the other Michel, Foucault, but he has to be read that as well. So, that’s got me to the 1980s, and I had acquired a taste for Italian archives, and I applied for a grant, which I got from the Economic and Social Research Committee in Britain, which allowed five years of spending part of the summer in Italian archives, and I proposed to write a social history of early-modern Italy. Q. Already we see that a pattern of your intellectual and academic itinerary is to move from intellectual history, bordering on philosophy, to more purely archival research. A. Yes. But then I discovered that I could not generalize, because the documentation differs so much between one region and another and indeed the economic, social and political structures vary so much that you cannot generalize about Italy at all in that period. What I could do was investigate certain problems in certain cities, so I published what was really a collection of essays and called them The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (1986). Using that phrase, «historical anthropology», which I keep saying should have been an «anthropological history», because history had to be the noun since you cannot do anthropological field work among dead people. Le Goff and company called it anthropologie historique but I prefer histoire anthropologique. 11. Representations of Power Q. We are now in the 1990s and you have relevant works as your Fabrication of Louis XIV (1992). A. Yes, at this point it’s about 1990, and I’m thinking what to do next. When I was in Sussex, I had been teaching a course called «Literature and Society in the Age of Louis XIV». I taught it with a very good man called Peter France, a 5 30 The Art of Re-Interpretation: Michel de Certeau, in Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 100 (2002), pp. 27-37. AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE marvellous name if you are going to be specialist in French studies. And he had written a book on the theatre of Racine.6 So, we taught the course together and the idea that, although the word ‘propaganda’ did not exist at that time, you can see that literature produced at the time is deliberately glorifying the king in all sorts of ways. We focused on literature, but in the nineties, when I thought I would go back to this topic, but I wanted to add images and say more about the political context that we did in the course in the early 1970s. At that time, politics was a background to the literature in the course, but now it was going to be the foreground. How important, for the regime, was the public presentation of Louis in all sorts of ways. And there was a bit of comparison which irritated some reviewers. I pointed out that Louis had his name printed in capital letters whenever it appeared as a way of boosting him. And I noted that Il Duce also did that. There were certain techniques which people think of unique to the twentieth century but they have, I would not say respectable ancestors, but they have ancestors in the seventeenth and it was not just the art of flattery though that comes into it when some poets wanted a pension from the king. But it is also a concern with a wide audience. If we call it the public, we have to realise that the public means, in the first place, other monarchs and their ambassadors, in the second place, the elite in France, and in the third place, posterity. Because the official gazette was actually interred in some public buildings A few centuries later it would be found and also a few medals in honour of Louis and so on. A conscious policy of impressing posterity with the king’s virtues. And, by coincidence, that was the time I was invited to have a year in Berlin at the Wissenschaftskolleg. It happened that it was the only time I have been in the right place at the right time, for witnessing historical events. We got there a month before the Wall collapsed. Just had time to visit East Berlin in the traditional manner, Check-point Charlie, compulsory exchange of money at the the official rate, and then it all collapsed. There was an interesting group at the École. There were two anthropologists: Maurice Godelier, from France, and André Béteille, who is Indian, despite his name. Then in the office next to me there was Robert Darnton, who I already knew. But it was great to have a year’s opportunity for daily conversation. A nice group. A book fetching service, which included books from France. If it is in Berlin, the librarian said, we’ll get it to you tomorrow, if it is in Germany, within a 6 Racine’s rhetoric, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965. AHIg 31 JAUME AURELL week, if it is from abroad, we will still get it from you but you might have to wait a bit. So that was fantastic. That was the groundwork for the book and I finished it a bit later, it came out in 1992. 12. History of Knowledge Q. I think it is also the period in which you approached global history and the history of knowledge. A. By that time, I had been asked to edit a volume for unesco. unesco reacted to the terrible, critical views that their first history of mankind had received. They decided to do it all again, not by Westerners all alone, but, if possible, always having regional sections written by somebody from that area. It was not ‘mankind’ anymore, it was going to be the history of ‘humanity’. And there was going to be an early modern volume. I had a letter from Charles Morazé, about which I was very pleased because as an admirer of Annales, I knew he was the first nineteenth century specialist who was in the group. And he said, «Come to Paris to meet me, I want you to help with the Early modern volume». It turned out that there would be a co-editor who was Turkish: Halil İnalcık. He was already the grand old man of studies about the Ottoman Empire. That meant he would look after the whole Muslim world, for which, given the controversies raging in it then and now, I was grateful. I was happy to deal with the Communist world. It did not produce the same problems: the unesco program was to combine regional chapters and thematic chapters. And they wanted us, as far as possible, unless it obviously did not fit in our period, to follow the pattern. And there was a need for a chapter called «Information and communication».7 Now, I did not know anybody that could write this at a world level, and I was very tempted, I thought, «Why don’t I do it?». And Halil would advise me about the Muslim world and I had read a lot of Chinese and Japanese history for fun, and I can get people to advise me on it as well, so why don’t I do it? And so, I did it. In the course of writing the chapter, I got a taste for the history of knowledge. And then, this is the early nineties, I’m invited to Groningen University to give a series of lectures named after a benefactor of the university, you might have heard of, and so I said yes. And there was a big dinner with Henk Vonhoff, the provincial governor of the province that Groningen University is in. He was ob- 7 32 In History of Humanity, UNESCO/ Routledge, London, 1999, vol. 5, pp. 117-24. AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE viously one of these big important people because when they were to serve dinner he asked for a glass of whisky and when it came the level was too low for him and he said he wanted a real glass of whisky. I did not talk to him very much. He was not interested at all in the lecture I was going to give anyway. So, I realised I was going to give the lecture not only, probably, to the professors and students of history, but to the whole university. It would be good if I could think of something that could appeal to people in different faculties. So, I thought, «a lecture on early modern knowledge, or maybe better, knowledges in the plural». And that is what I did. I talked about encyclopaedias, I talked about exploration and geographical knowledge, historical knowledge, what is now called ‘science’, the knowledge of artisans and the knowledge of natural philosophers and so on. And then they said they would like it to be a book. And so, I was happy to elaborate the lectures into a book, which Polity published,8 because my hosts realised the book would sell better in English than in Dutch, and they promised me a certain number of copies. 13. Marxism and Annales Q. We are almost at the present time, where you are still so active. Can we now go back to the intellectual and academic atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s, especially on your own training? I would like you to elaborate a little more on this. A. I went to Oxford in 1957, a three-year degree, which was a very good traditional training in how to be a historian. I think Oxford could be criticized for giving everybody the right training for people that are going to turn into professional historians. When you think of all the different things that the students are going to do, maybe presenting history to them in a different way might be better, but of course, for me it was ideal. The history that was dominant was political history and it was still history from above. You knew from the past exam papers that the majority of questions would be about that. There were three compulsory papers in English history; English, not British, compared to two in European. And then the other ones were your choice. So, everybody whether they liked it or not did three papers in English history (the medieval one, the early-modern one and then the really modern one, which ended in 1914). When we complained about it stopping so early, one of the professors said «But after that, there is no history: I remember that time!». But there was a bit of economic history and even less social history. 8 What Is the History of Knowledge?, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2016. AHIg 33 JAUME AURELL If you wanted to write social history in the late-nineteen-fifties, in England, there were only two places to publish it really. One was The Economic History Review. They took a broad view of what counts as economic, because they knew there was no proper social history journal. The other was Past and Present, a Marxist journal, still dominated by the Communist Party historians’ group. And I remember the paradox that, at a time when there were no Communist members of Parliament, because they never got enough votes, and that the members of the party in Britain were incredibly few (I mean, quite the opposite of France and Italy), the Communist Party formed a historians group in London that was very influential, that included Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Maurice Dobb, the group of medievalists from Birmingham that included Rodney Hilton, and the young Raphael Samuel, who went on to found a «history workshop» later. So, it was an incredibly galaxy of talent. If you were Marxist, you would try to write for Past and Present. And if not, you will try to get your social history into The Economic History Review. Keith Thomas was interested in the relation between history and anthropology. He was writing his big book about witchcraft, but it would not come out until 1971.9 Thomas is a Welshman, and they are often very secretive. He never spoke about anthropology to me until after 1960, when he came out, publishing an article called «History and Anthropology».10 His technique as a tutor was very interesting. He would set a political question, but he would hope or expect that we would see there was a social dimension and if not, he would talk about that. When I began being a tutor myself, I imitated this and in the act of imitating it I thought Keith has been imitating Christopher Hill all these years, but I had never realised it. And that would it the style of teaching in Oxford at that time. Q. All this highlights your connections with trends as diverse as the Annales, Marxism and anthropology. Can you tell us more about the influence of other historians on your training? A. The world changed while I was in Sussex. For me it changed very suddenly, because Sussex was open to social history. Asa Briggs was very far from sympathetic to Marxism, but he practised an alternative social history. Asa’s intellectual itinerary is quite interesting. He went to university at the beginning of the war. He went to Sidney Sussex college in Cambridge and (unofficially, at the same time) to the London School of Economics (which had been evacuated to 9 10 34 Religion and the Decline of Magic, Scribner, New York, 1971. In Past & Present, 24 (1963), pp. 3-24. AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE Cambridge) and he took advantage of this and secretly took another degree. So, he read history at Cambridge university and economics at the LSE. I think neither institution knew that he was also in the other. And he got two good degrees. I mean, he was incredible speedy worker, and he was said only to sleep four hours at night. He was always bursting with energy. I remember from Sussex, he would walk fast as well as thinking fast and so on. Q. Can we know more about the crucial influence of the Annales in your work? A. At Sussex there were social history courses from the start. We were encouraged to do it that way. And, in any case, I had discovered Annales, if not when I was an undergraduate, still when I was at Oxford. In fact, I had read a bit of Braudel, maybe not the whole book yet,11 when I was an undergraduate. And I was very impressed by it. I knew that it was very unlikely that any exam question to which that book was relevant would turn up, except one on Philip II, which could be twisted in the right direction. And so, Annales social history was doing rather well; after all the journal was sub-titled société and civilization. So, that was the situation. In fact, when I was writing the Renaissance book, I remember thinking to myself «How would historians in the Annales group tackle this particular subject?». It was only after I had written the book, a few years after, that Braudel started to publish things which included the Renaissance. So, it was not so surprising then that I would welcome the invitation from John Hale who was about to leave Oxford and go to another new university, Warwick, asking me to write a social history of the Renaissance and that I should say yes. And it is not surprising that my colleagues at Sussex approved the course on «Aristocracies and Elites» which led me to write Venice and Amsterdam. And there was a lot of sympathy from literary colleagues as well that I should want to write about popular culture. So, in that way my turn was part of a collective turn in a place where that collective turn was particularly obvious. So, I have always faced the alternatives of a Marxist social history or a non-Marxist one. But, in fact, I wanted to do a bit of each. Q. For many of us, especially medievalists and early modernists, the influence of the Annales has been great, especially in its first three generations. Personally, in my years of study during the 1980s, I remember looking forward to the reception of the works that historians such as Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, and Emmanuel Le Roy were publishing. They interested me not only for their renewed themes, but also for their original methodology and their brilliant narration. All this provided us with an aesthetic sense of 11 He refers to The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949). AHIg 35 JAUME AURELL historiography that we miss today. For all of us who have benefited so much from their influence, we would very much like to know your opinion about the legacy and the current situation of the School. Q. Like you, I have followed the journal and the new books by members of the group ever since I was a student at Oxford. I used to call myself a «fellow traveller» of Annales! About the situation today, I want to say various things. It is remarkable that a group of this kind has persisted for four generations, with innovations in each case. I much admire some individuals in the fourth generation, especially the late Bernard Lepetit, Antoine Lilti and Patrick Boucheron. I think that the group now plays a less important role than before, in part as the victim of its own success, since articles that would only have appeared in the review of the group (Annales) thirty or more years ago can now be found in the Revue Historique or the Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, among others. Meanwhile, French historians on the nineteenth century are still now in the forefront of innovation –for instance, the late Dominque Khalifa–. Q. Your connection with the Annales says a lot about your quality as a creative historian, but always attentive to the creations of others, whatever their intellectual orientation or ideological tendency. A. I have always admired Marx, but I would have never called myself a Marxist. That means you have to adhere to some orthodoxy and exclude alternative approaches. I have always been a pluralist. I have always been an eclectic. I believe if the different bits you assemble from different places and put together are consistent with one another, then you need to have no shame in calling yourself an eclectic. I would only condemn people who appear to hold two opposite opinions at the same time, which can happen. That’s the approach of Asa Briggs, who had made widely in anglophone sociology, and indeed about the time that I joined Sussex he published an article called «History and Sociology,» calling for cooperation. But it was the empiricist sort of sociology that most British sociologists were doing and curiously I do not believe Asa was aware of Norbert Elias at that time. He was physically there, he had not even retired at that point, but he was not very well known outside the University of Leicester. It seems incredible, but I am afraid it was true. Thanks to living into his nineties, he did actually become aware of being recognised at last, which was good. But first in the Netherlands and in Germany, and then in France, and then in Britain, and the in the United States. Actually, in the sixties, I did read his great work about the civilizing process, which was only available in German, and the only copy I could find was in the British Museum library. I had been tipped off because a history of Europe, written by 36 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE an Oxford Marxist, Patrick Gordon Walker, who later became Home Secretary in a Labour government, had mentioned that Elias wrote a social history of the fork and the handkerchief. And that sounded so exciting that the next time I was in London I got this book and read some of the most empirical parts of it. But I’m afraid that at that point I did not take in the Elias theory of history. That came later. Q. You have talked a lot about the influence of social history in your formative period, as a substitute for traditional political history. But you were also a pioneer of cultural history. A. I heard very little about cultural history, even the phrase, when I was an undergraduate, but I took a special subject called the Italian Renaissance. Of course, people working in the Renaissance were doing cultural history, and a lot of them even called it that. It was an international group writing about all this. I chose this special subject because it had art in it. But that did mean that I was introduced to cultural history as well as to social history. Which at that time I thought were separate but connected. So that my Renaissance book provided a sociology of culture and a Dutch reviewer mistook me for a sociologist, which I did not mind. Within cultural history, there have been all sorts of changes in that time, and I have tried not only to become aware of them but even to write about them. And the same in social history, including, of course, the micro-historical movement, led by Carlo Ginzburg, and then the rise of women’s history, meaning awareness of gender in history, in general, rather than just adding women. I have lived through all that. Maybe as a historian of the Renaissance and especially in the second edition, where I say more about women, I was proud to say that I discussed the social reasons why women were less prominent than men in art and learning. I also wrote more about women’s culture in the second edition of popular culture. Though I am sure that a lot of women still think that I have not written enough. There will be more in the next edition. So, I think basically I made my synthesis out of these different trends already in the sixties; and just added little bits to it, rather than going in any major new direction. 14. Social Sciences and Cultural Studies Q. Let me ask you two particular things now. What do you think about the connections and/or differentiations between humanities and social sciences? And the second, your opinion about cultural studies, created precisely in England at that time. AHIg 37 JAUME AURELL A. I have always been in favour of exchanges with different social sciences. And indeed, I have tried several different things. When I was an undergraduate, I had an essay to write about an archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. He had been president of my college before he became an archbishop. For this reason, his private diary was in the college library. But the manuscript was not in the library catalogue. But I knew it was there and I asked the librarian’s permission to look at it. He was my former tutor, Howard Colvin. It was funny, he said: «It is available in print; why do you want to look at the manuscript?». And I thought it was a very odd question, given the special excitement of looking at the manuscript. Anyway, he said yes, to humour me, and I did read it. And there were 30 dreams recorded, some of them about King Charles I, especially interesting. Now, in a common-sense way, I thought «Laud had an inferiority complex: low birth; low stature». They made jokes about people graduating when he was doctor: Cum Parvo Laude! So, he must have been sensitive to all that. And he had insecurity dreams: «I was hunting with King Charles. He asked for a drink. I brought him drink but in a silver cup», he said. «You know I always drink out of glass». So, Laud gets it wrong. That is a recurring theme in his diaries. I thought I would write an article about this. But I wanted professional advice. There was a «mental health centre» at the University of Sussex –I think, it would have a more euphemistic name now–. I wrote to the director with my text of the dreams and said: «Suppose you have a patient that told you these dreams, how would you diagnose him?». And this man, Anthony Ryle, circulated it to his colleagues in the centre and then they invited to lunch. Each one had a different interpretation. This was almost enough to destroy my faith, which was not very great, in psychoanalysis. The first person, he says: «You know that every time Laud mentions the King, he means his father». That was the Freudian’. And I said: «But he met the King every day, could not the King please be the King this once?». And the next one said: «Everyone in the dream represents an aspect of Laud himself». And so on. They contradicted one another. They were all very interesting, but I realised there was no consensus here. And then I also sent the dreams to somebody whose writing I admired, Anthony Storr, and he wrote to me with comments. But I was really interested in the sociology on the anthropology of the dream and what anthropologists were calling the «culture dream». There was this monograph on the Ojibwa Indians. To come of age, boys had to sit in a tree all night and have a dream, and their father would come and ask the next morning what did you dream. «Ah, that is no good: stay there and dream again». They were not told what the right dream was, but they found it; it 38 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE was a dream about the myths current in their culture. Once they had done that, then they told the story to the seniors and then they were initiated. So: is there a culture pattern dreaming in seventeenth-century England? I collected all the dreams I could; there were several different texts. My friend Alan Macfarlane, half an anthropologist, half a historian, edited a diary of a seventeenth-century clergyman with about thirty dreams. I gradually assembled a corpus of early modern dreams. It struck me that they were much more political than dreams of twentieth-century people, and there were monographs on that. So, I had something to check. And then I sent the article to the new Journal for Interdisciplinary History; it had just been founded by my friend Ted Rabb, whom I knew because I had been to Princeton, when he was in the History Department. It came back with the message, «The anonymous reviewer suggests that you do the following»: it was basically things I thought I could not do because I had not had psychoanalytic training. I wrote back to Rabb and told him, saying: «I suspect you sent it to Erik Erikson». And he admitted it: he had sent it to Erikson. And he sympathised with me, but he could not publish it unless I did what Erikson wanted. I would have liked to, but I could not. So I sent it to Annales, and they translated into French and published it right away.12 So, it was even better for me. It was republished in a French journal recently because there is this group of young historians and sociologists and anthropologists. They have founded a quarterly called Sensibilités. It is a thematic issue each time, and they had one on dreams.13 And they asked me, if they could reprint it together with an update on what has happened since 1973; and they published the two articles together. Very interesting group. I still like the idea of mentalité; but those that have rejected it, now go for Sensibilité. You could have both, but anyway, we have friendly disagreements about all that. Q. That was an interesting digression on your connection with psychoanalysis. What about economics, sociology, education, anthropology and geography? A. Economics. I’m sure, that economists need to know about history, as they did in the nineteenth century, just as economic historians need to know about economics. Which is not something I want to engage in personally. I am glad to see it. Sociology, I even taught it, as I say, and I have been in touch with a lot of sociologists beginning with David Riesman, because he was visiting professor at Sussex for a year in 1964. He enjoyed being in a new environment and he even 12 13 L’histoire sociale des rêves, in Annales, 28 (1973), pp. 329-342. 4 (2018) (thematic issue title: «La Société des Rêves»). AHIg 39 JAUME AURELL came to one of my lectures, because it was about education in the Renaissance; and he had this very strong interest in education. And I even asked him «Could I get a training analysis anywhere and have a scholarship to pay for it?» and he said «Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be possible». And so, I never developed further in that direction. Anthropology was the discipline that excited me the most; maybe that has something to do with having lived in that Malayan regiment; I mean, I loved reading accounts of field work. And I even remember as a graduate student, thinking: «Maybe I should really switch to anthropology». But then I thought, in those days, anthropology meant putting your tent in a village somewhere in Asia or Africa. I have never been able to put a tent up; there is a whole practical side which archaeologists and anthropologists need to have. A decade later, I could have done urban anthropology; I could have sat in a favela in Sao Paulo listening to people, but this approach had not yet emerged in 1960; it was an interesting later development, urban anthropology. The last discipline really for me was cultural geography. And then it turns out it is very like cultural history. Indeed, it is very hard to guess sometimes whether it was a historian or a geographer who wrote a particular book. Just as in the case of some historical sociologists, which side they came from is not clear, which is surely a good thing. So, basically, that is my relation to the social sciences, thinking of course, as other people do too, that sociology and anthropology should have amalgamated long ago. Q. And is history a part of humanities, or is it a part of social sciences? This is an important question for our audience, such as that of the Cultural Studies. A. Both. History is both art and science. We generalise, but we generalise at a different level from the grand generalisations. Of course, anthropologists have the same suspicion of grand generalisations that historians have. So, it means, very often, when you’re talking to one of them, that you cannot find a theoretical difference between him and yourself. So, that side does not worry me. And I do not care whether they say «social studies» or «social sciences.» Cultural Studies have been studies from the first in English. It is Kulturwissenschaften in German. And, of course, that term goes back a long way. Because, as I am reminded every time, almost, that I go to London, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg is now the Warburg Institute where I do so much of my reading in London. In England, you have to anglicize the pronunciation of Warburg’s name, but that’s the way it goes here. So, I regard myself as a cultural historian and I was inspired by Raymond Williams, already when I was writing the Renaissance book. When he published 40 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE Culture and Society,14 it was almost my Bible. This was before anything called Cultural Studies happened. Then I became aware that in University of Birmingham, Richard Hoggart,15 who I think was a literary critic, wrote his autobiography in the form of amateur sociology, and I think it is a bit overrated. He got together with a young man called Stuart Hall, whom at that point I had never heard of. Many years later I tried to get him into the British Academy. But it is very hard to get sociologists, or at least it was, as long as the sociologist Garry Runciman was there, because he always voted against all his colleagues. Stuart Hall, who was a Jamaican, was a brilliant sociologist and ethnographer. He read a lot of continental theory, though I think he never learned to read any foreign language. I remembered him carrying around Foucault in English translation. But through History Workshop: I got to know him a little. I was a regular attendant at History Workshop, and a great friend of Raphael Samuel, whom I felt was a kind of an older brother that I did not have. He always behaved to me as an elder brother. I was there the year that, in very dramatic surroundings, in the evening, in an Oxford church, lit only by lamp lights –imagine this– there was a roundtable, with Edward Thompson sitting next to somebody from the Birmingham group, Richard Johnson. And suddenly, to everybody’s surprise, Thompson launched an all-out attack on Richard, who was much younger than he was. He was reducing the other man’s style of Marxism to dust. It was so shocking that the chair of the debate actually got up and said «I am disassociating myself from Edward’s remarks.» So, it is the usual problem with Marxists of dividing into groups that then spend more energy fighting one another than fighting the enemy. I mean: see the history of Communist parties and so on. I did get to know for something about the Cultural Studies group and read several of the monographs which they made. There is one about education, Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (1979), about the way in which the working-class boys feel that is not right to take lessons seriously and they are unconsciously preparing themselves therefore for a life in unskilled labour. And they call the people that take the teacher seriously and work (in those days, you couldn’t use swear-words in sociological monographs), so the author said ‘Earholes’ meaning ‘Assholes’, of course, that way you would get past the censor. And there is another good monograph by somebody called Dick Hebdige 14 15 Chatto and Windus, London, 1958. Hoggart is the author of The Uses of Literacy, Chatto and Windus, London, 1957. AHIg 41 JAUME AURELL which was about cultural hybridity. 16 Neither of them went on to do anything very interesting afterwards. I don’t know whether if that is relevant or not. But two very good first monographs doing something quite new in sociology; and I appreciated all that. 15. History Today Q. How do you see the situation of cultural studies in the British tradition today? I would like to hear you particularly on the history and situation of postcolonial studies. A. They are now, but it’s disappeared from Birmingham. It was ejected from there, not long after sociology was closed down. Cultural studies migrated to the Open University and then was shut down again, about the time Stuart Hall retired. So, there is no continuity at that level. About the people that say they do cultural studies now, you can bet on it, more or less three or four to one, that they are in favour of all the other ‘studies’, of which I have now lost count. lgbtq studies, and what used to be just queer studies, and so on. And, of course, postcolonial studies have a long history, maybe, a bit longer even, than cultural studies. I got to know about that because I had a colleague in Sussex, a brilliant colleague, called Ranajit Guha, who stayed only for a few years. We used to say: «Ranajit is the most brilliant historian in our group but he is never going to publish anything since he talks it rather than writing it.» And it was true that while he was at Sussex, he did not publish. And then he took a job somewhere else, he lived in Vienna for a time; then he went back to India for a time and he founded Subaltern studies there. And having led it, he then moved on to Australia. And I think now; I think he may be a 100 now.17 He is still there living in Vienna with his Austrian wife. He had a taste for foreign women; he married a Pole, and got divorced and he hadn’t found anybody new when he came to Sussex. I had many conversations with him; so, in that way, I became aware of what was going on. But I don’t use his approach much because I do not work on any colonised place outside Britain except Brazil, where, surprisingly enough, 16 17 42 Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Methuen & Co., London, 1979. Burke was right, with characteristic chronological accuracy. At the time of our conversation Guha would have been 100 years old; but we did not know that he had died just a few days before: 28 April 2023 AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE although they like fashionable things, the historians have not taken much notice of postcolonial studies. It is very interesting, the history of postcolonial studies. The way it has been adopted in Europe with enthusiasm by the Irish, and then by the Austrians; or, more exactly, by people in the ex-Austrian empire. And, of course, it’s had an impact on Latin America. 16. Latin American Historiography Q. This is the last subject I wanted to deal with you, precisely. Can you say some words about Latin-American historiography? It is a difficulty topic and most of the audience of the journal is from Latin America. What do you feel that you can say about this? A. My knowledge is patchy and so I speak with more confidence of Brazil than anywhere else. I arrived in Brazil in 1986 to give some lectures. It already said something about the scene, that when Maria Lúcia was asked to find someone in England who would talk to her Faculty, the Faculty of Education in Sao Paulo, about the new history, they wanted, someone who would talk mainly about the French, but would not be French; and I thought, when I met people in the history department in São Paulo, that the French style was the orthodoxy, though they did not look at it uncritically. But I think it was the most powerful group. In some Spanish-American universities at that time, Marxism would still be on top. And indeed, when I was invited to give a lecture that year in another university in São Paulo, puc, they were all hard-line Marxists. I thought it so funny, that you had go to the Pontifical University to meet the Marxists. But then it was explained to me that that was the result of the military coup. The generals’ taking power in 1964, terminated the employment of left-wing people in the University of São Paulo and other universities. But they did not have power over the pontifical ones, which were open to the refugees. In fact, when I was talking about popular culture –that is what they invited me to talk about– I mentioned Gramsci and maybe I was not respectful enough, because there, people were quoting Gramsci as if it was the Bible. It was a funny experience. At Oxford, I remembered a group that quoted Marx like the Bible, but I had not come across it before with Gramsci. The Argentinians always want to be more sophisticated than anybody else, and they are the ones who can guarantee they had read the latest French. A few months ago, they had a symposium about Roger Chartier, which is now being AHIg 43 JAUME AURELL published in Prismas. They asked me to write a piece, which I rather enjoyed writing, on Chartier and popular culture.18 I had reread his work in chronological order and found that, up to 1982, he was using the phrase «popular culture» himself, although in 1981 he gave a talk in the United States criticising the concept, more or less promising not to use it again. I think that was just a hiatus; he sent an article to a journal which they took three years to publish. He had been converted from popular culture before the article came or so it looked. So I did an analysis and made a comparison between his approach and what other people call popular culture, including mine. I argued that he likes to start with objects, usually books, and see whether they move up and down in the social scale, and I like to start with people, like peasants, and then ask what culture do they have. And you get complementary results, but anyway things are a bit different. But if people had said «Somewhere in Latin-America they are going to ask you to write an article on Chartier, and guess which country», I’d say Argentina first time. On the other Latin American places, I really do not know them well enough. I have twice been in Colombia giving a series of lectures. Interestingly, Colombia and Argentina have medieval historians, when Brazil does not have any at all, as far as I know. But I think that must almost certainly be the result of Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz being a refugee and starting a school in Buenos Aires which interestingly continues to reproduce itself. Q. Mexico has an important historiographical tradition. I do not know if you have any experience there. A. I have been to Mexico a number of times and met a few Mexican historians, beginning with Silvio Zavala, whom I met through the UNESCO project, and later Enrique Florescano, who spent a year in Cambridge. So that is my relation really to Mexico. And I find certain Latin-American historians inspiring. The first one was another Mexican, Edmundo O’Gorman, I read his famous book about the invention of America and after that Gilberto Freyre, whom I did not have to wait to go to Brazil, that is an interesting story about Sussex. In 1965, when Freyre came to Europe to get an honorary degree from Germany, Briggs invited him to do the same thing in Sussex. My guess is that Briggs, although very well-read in some ways, had no idea who Gilberto Freyre was. But recently, maybe 1963, an Institute for Race Relations had been founded in Sussex, led by a Jamaican sociologist, Fernando Henriques, who has the reputation of only having written books and articles about sex. But he would have known 18 44 Roger Chartier y la historia de la cultura popular, in Prismas, 26 (2002), pp. 156-167. AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE about Freyre and he would have told Asa that this is an interesting man. So, Freyre came, and the day before he got the degree, he gave a lecture, in perfect English, on the racial factor in contemporary politics, which was all about mestizaje. I attended, but I was not important enough to be invited to the drinks afterwards, so I never met him, but I heard him. I had read his book Casa-Grande e Senzala (1933) when I was at St. Antony’s, because he was mentioned in a footnote in Braudel’s Mediterranean. I discovered that Braudel had spent three years in Brazil and that he had written a review article for Annales, which, very unlike Braudel, was enthusiastically praising somebody. So, and, this is kind of gossip, but I’ve heard it from Asa, so it is direct testimony. At the dinner, Asa was talking with Gilberto Freyre about their common interest in Victorian literature and he told me he was totally amazed, he thought Freyre knew the Victorian novelists better than he did. And when Asa wrote his Social History of England, I thought he was a little bit showing off and I did not quite believe it, but in the ‘Preface’, he says that the social historians who had most influenced him were Georges Duby and Gilberto Freyre. In any case, they do offer an alternative from the historical sociology, or English style sociology, that he practised earlier. So maybe it is true. But it was unusual that an Englishman writing about England for an English public should mention two foreigners like that. Q. Which historians or historical texts by Latin American authors would you highlight? A. I would certainly put Edmundo O’Gorman in the semi-final. And I am certainly going to put Casa-Grande e senzala (1933), and also Freyre’s next book, Sobrados e Mucambos (1936). Also the masterpiece by the Cuban Fernando Ortiz, his famous Contrapunteo Cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940). His approach to culture was similar to Freyre’s. I need to think a little bit more, because, there are probably some good Argentinians as well. Q. Jose Luis Romero, perhaps. A. Yes. And, indeed, there’s a funny story of how I came to read his History of Political Thought (1970). This story starts with the historian of historiography in Buenos Aires, Fernando Devoto, who wanted me to come and lecture on historiography in the middle of October when I could not leave Cambridge. And then one day he wrote and said that he was organising a conference on Romero. «You may or may not know who he is», he wrote –I did not know at that time–, «but we think you share interests with him and wonder whether you would like to read something by him and come to talk about him». And I was very intrigued by this, and so I said yes, I accept the conditions. He sent a whole shelf of books. AHIg 45 JAUME AURELL And the one that impressed me most was the one on political thought. It was extremely original, and I went and spoke about that. So, at the conference I met more Latin-American historians and what was not particularly successful was meeting Tulio Halperin Donghi. He was of course the grand old man of Latin American history at the time, but he made very critical remarks about other people all the time. And I checked with my friend Juan Maiguashca and he said «Yes, he’s always like that». For me it was both a privilege and an education to listen to Argentines discussing their own history, an experience I had in the 1970s with Italian historians at a conference organized by the publisher Einaudi, and more recently with Estonian historians at a conference organized by my friend Marek Tamm. In the Latin American case, the central importance of ethnicity is what differs most from the British tradition –not so much from the North American one, obviously– and I learned from this. 17. New Projects Q. Would you like to make a final comment, before ending this exciting conversation? A. It is good to be invited to think about oneself from a historical point of view, like what made one choose a certain career. Actually, I’m convinced that «playing soldiers», which I did like most British boys is what moved me first in that direction, because during the Second World War, it was always English versus Germans. And then the war ended, and I thought: what am I going to do? And somebody gave me Edward Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. It’s a rather old book (published in 1851), and it had these diagrams of battles. So, without necessarily reading much of the text, which was too difficult for me at that age, I would arrange soldiers for the battle, and then I got into reading books about military history when I was a little bit older. It is a bit ironic, because military history would be the last kind of history that I would have chosen to write about once I decided being a historian. I think maybe being in the army cured me. But it also gave me the idea that we need a social history of warfare; also a cultural history, and people now do it: I have a friend, Jay Winter, who practises that kind of history, focusing on the First World War. And I had great pleasure in inserting into the book on ignorance19 a chapter on ignorance on war. 19 46 Ignorance: A Global History, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 2023. AHIg A CONVERSATION WITH PETER BURKE AT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE Q. History of ignorance: your last book –at least for now. It is like a history of something that does not exist as such, in the sense that ignorance is a lack of something. A. The challenge was precisely to write the history of an absence. And I wrote imagining an old-fashioned empiricist historian looking over my shoulder saying all the time and saying all the time: «What are your sources?! What are your sources?!». Of course, there are indirect sources, but you had to exploit them in this way. They include what is cut out of encyclopaedias in successive editions and which books are removed from the library shelves and go into the basement, if they are not put in the dust bin. I gave a lecture in Medellin about «the intellectual history of rubbish»: what people call rubbish in different periods. In this new book I was concerned with, first of all, what people simply do not know; secondly, what people do not want to know, or deny; thirdly, what some people do not want other people to know, which is the history of cover-ups; there is so much material. The important thing is always the question you have in mind; to formulate the question you are looking for in all these projects. In your career, you have been able to approach some topics that other people do not see, does not look for, because they do not imagine that there is an historical question behind them. The philosopher put questions that are not evident for the others. The try to think about what for others is evident. So, the historians may enrich their work thinking this way. You can approach an object that nobody would think about such as ignorance or rubbish, or... and more and more! Q. I can imagine that you still have so many questions in mind that it is impossible to write all these projects. Am I right? A. I have a good concentration: when I decide to write about connoisseurship, for instance, as I am now doing, I am trying to think only about that. But then I wake up in the morning and notice, unconsciously notice, a link between people attributing paintings to Rembrandt and people deciding whether the donation of Constantine is a forgery or whatever. So, it would be a book that an art historian would not have written because it has got links to these other things that I have studied in the past. This is fantastic. So, it is really, this age is a very nice moment in life for an intellectual, for a person like us, who are always in the ways of the knowledge. You are managing; you are already present in the disciplines. * * * These last sentences perfectly exemplify the kind of person, intellectual, and character Burke is: at 86 years of age, he keeps his enthusiasm for history and his tireless AHIg 47 JAUME AURELL curiosity intact. After four intense hours of conversation, I look tired. He must be, but he does not look it. He stands up with enviable agility and shows me the way out, walking himself with short, brisk steps that catch my attention because of its agility. We said goodbye in the portico of Emmanuel College. He leaves too, with a determined step, in a different direction from mine. While I remain pensive, looking in the direction in which he is walking, he appears to me already absorbed in his thoughts, as if thinking about the next move. With his usual generosity, he once wrote about Braudel’s classic, The Mediterranean: «Fortunately, a few voices remain audible, among them the deep bass of Braudel.» We too hope that Peter’s own historiographical voice will sound for a long time to come among us. 48 AHIg