England!

1 June 2017

For two days, we four pilgrims marched around London, preparing to begin our long trek to Canterbury. On the 29^th (Anna’s birthday) we visited Westminster Abbey where Geoffrey Chaucer’s bones lie among the skeletons of poets, politicians and princes; more than 3000 people are buried there, including Handel, Newton and Darwin. We were there for several hours and stayed behind at closing to attend the evening vespers service so we could hear the choir. At the Red Lion, a classic English pub, we had meat pies for dinner followed by a very hearty rendition of “Happy Birthday to You,” with impressive harmonies from the congregation of diners.

         We spent the next morning at the Victoria and Albert Museum, an important place in the history of museums, with roots in the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, and then went to see “Twelfth Night” at the Globe Theatre. Along the way we visited “The George,” the last of the old medieval coaching inns. Next door was the site of the Tabard Inn, where Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered in the last decade of the 14^th century.

         At Oxford yesterday we went to the Pitt-Rivers Museum and will visit the Ashmolean today, two more keys to understanding the history of museums. We attended another vespers service, this time at the church of Christ College in Oxford, and we will head to Stratford this afternoon to see a production of “Julius Caesar” at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Whew! 

         We intend to attend as many choral performances as we can, as many Shakespeare plays as are being offered on our route, all Medieval Cathedrals that come within our ken, and walk along the ancient paths.

         As a nod to my pilgrimage of 20 years ago, I’m including here something I wrote then about the power of objects. My thoughts on the relationship between people and things was just being developed then, and it continues to resonate with me as I ponder and write about the history of museums.

Top: My companions on the pilgrimage.

Bottom: The gallery of casts at the V&A. Everything here is a reproduction, including the statue of David, which had to be censored with a plaster leaf during Victoria’s day. (There were hooks embedded in David’s hips on which the leaf could hang.)

From May 1997:  The Power of the Thing

         I believe that objects have a power almost magical.  It is not apparent in every object, though each holds the potential.  The keys to the power are memory, imagination, and faith.

         On my desk is a heavy glass prism.  At one time it was probably clear, but long ago it took on a purple cast.  A hundred years ago or more it was set into the deck of a ship.  It has a flat surface that lay flush with the planking of the deck, and a six-sided point that reflected light down into the ship’s cabin.  It was given to me by an old man in Maine who found it on a beach when he was a boy.  At that time it was still embedded in a piece of wood, the last relic of an unidentified shipwreck. 

         This object is like a time capsule.  It doesn’t matter to me that I know only the very last links in the specific chain of events that brought it from a glass factory to a shipyard, out to sea, crashing violently back to shore, and eventually onto my desk.  It represents more than itself.  Holding it in my hand, I can see schooners on the coast of Maine, cargos of lumber and rock and ice, great storms, ships lost, men afraid, women waiting with worry.  I have read many accounts of the seafaring past—shipboard journals, business papers, historical analyses—but this thing has a power that makes it tangible.  I touch the past when I hold it in my hands.

         I have powerful talismans of my personal history as well; some are mementos of family and friends, many more are souvenirs of travel.  Next to the prism on my desk are three rocks, one from the White Cliffs of Dover, one from the Brazos river in Texas, and one collected on my walk across England.  I also have shells from the Irish beach at Inch, coral from Bequia in the Caribbean and from Taiji in Japan, a whale barnacle from the Oregon Coast, and a sand dollar from a beach in my home state of Washington.  Each encapsulates the memory of when and where it was collected.  For me, these are more powerful than photographs.

         If I gave my collection of rocks and shells to someone else, they might have meaning as geological specimens, or as mementos of me, but the power that my memory gives them would be gone.  If the prism went to someone else without the knowledge of the shipwreck, it would merely be a paperweight. 

         I am intrigued by the attachment we have to artifacts, enough so that I have worked in museums and as a history teacher for almost twenty years.  My own area of research has been into the ethnological artifacts collected by American sailors in the Pacific Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  I began with an interest in the very different ways that two groups of people could look at the same artifact.  The native producer or user saw the club, paddle, mask, or spoon as familiar and functional; the foreign collector saw it not only as exotic, but used it to represent his personal adventure.  It was the difference between a group’s common perception and an individual’s personal memory.  If the collector died without telling his story, then the artifact could only be interpreted as part of the culture that made it.  And that is what happened to the vast majority of souvenirs brought back by American sailors.  I wanted to recover their stories, if possible.  Concentrating for over ten years on the collecting motives of a group made up almost entirely of teenage boys has its limitations, however.  What was the cultural foundation of their desire to collect?  How had they come to find the power of the artifact?  And what is the connection between personal memory and group memory?  I found my thoughts on the power of objects going back further in time and increasingly into the roles that faith and imagination, in addition to memory, play in determining their importance. 

         For Western Europeans, the concept that objects have power seems to have originated in the cult of religious relics.  Morbid and gothic though it sounds, small bits of human corpses were so powerful in the Middle Ages that they drew people halfway around the world at a time when travel was difficult, tedious, and dangerous.  I decided to further explore this interesting aspect of the past and consequently found myself one day in the middle of a field, in the middle of England, on my way—by foot—to Canterbury.

         I’m not a religious person, but I was intrigued by the idea of making a pilgrimage of the sort that was popular in medieval times.  The bones of saints, pieces of the true cross, holy roods, weeping statues, bloody towels, footsteps in stone, thorns and water, all called to the faithful to come and worship.  At pilgrimage sites throughout Europe and the Middle East, holy objects were on exhibit so that common people might experience a physical connection to heaven.  At some shrines, the bones could be fondled by the faithful; some tombs were built so that pilgrims could climb inside or under them for an ever closer physical proximity to the spiritual world. 

         In practice, it didn’t matter if the wood kissed by the pilgrim was really a piece of the true cross or a splinter from a chair.  If it was believed to be the true cross, then the connection was made.  The object transported the believer across the miles and years to Palestine and the crucifixion.  The magic happened.

The Pilgrimage Revisited

27 May 2017

Pre-Amble

Twenty years ago today I was in the middle of a long walk across England, following the pilgrimage path of the Wife of Bath character from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

On 29 May 1997, while I was at Dorking, I learned that Anna Apostolidis was born in Washington, D.C.  My great-niece, Anna was the first person born into the new generation of my family. I sent her a postcard and promised to bring her to England on her twentieth birthday. The time has arrived! Off we go tomorrow to recreate the pilgrimage, with some assistance from a car and two other companions, my sister Kathy and my niece Jeannie (Anna’s grandmother and mother). 

I kept a journal on my first pilgrimage, which I edited and submitted to a publisher. It didn’t get me a book deal, but through that effort I met Kit Ward, who became my agent. She suggested that I turn my non-fiction travel narrative into a novel and Paradise Walk was born.

For the purpose of this blog, I’m going to present my 20-year-old narrative, along with some current comments and pictures. Off we go! (I'll put my original text in blue.)

Picture: The path near Chawton (Jane Austen's house) in 1997. 

Introduction: “Wan that Aprille...”

         April Fools Day, 1997.  Eighteen inches of snow fell overnight.  I was up to my neck in the Canterbury Tales and, frankly, not a happy pilgrim.  The flowers of May seemed far away; England seemed far away; I had just discovered, too late, that I didn’t like the Wife of Bath; and I was locked into walking across England in six weeks time because I had blabbed about it so much that now there was no way out without looking like an idiot.  Fear stalked me in the final weeks of preparation—fear of physical pain, fear of being injured, but mostly the fear of embarrassment.  What if I couldn’t do it? 

         At the age of forty-one I wanted to mark a year that was a turning point in my life by doing something completely different; something that was physically challenging but also meaningful in some way.  My father had died a few months earlier at the age of eighty-two, and as I reflected on his life, I realized that the middle point had been the year I was born, when he was forty-one.  While my walk may have been part of some mid-life crisis, I was not so bold as to identify it as the middle point of my life, because I was also revisiting a lot of Jane Austen, and she died at forty-one. 

         I hadn’t read The Canterbury Tales since high school, but the Wife of Bath character seemed like a great framework on which to hang my adventure.  I remembered her as a big, earthy, adventuresome woman, a sort of proto-Feminist character (and not unlike myself, I thought).  A walk from Bath to Canterbury seemed doable in a month.  I sketched out a rough route and timetable, wrote a proposal to take a sabbatical from my teaching position, and laid plans through the winter for a long walk to begin in the middle of May.

         In retrospect, the logical way to begin preparing for a long walk is probably to do a lot of walking, but being a sedentary creature by both inclination and habit, I did most of my preparation by reading.  The first book was the greatest disappointment; when it came time to reacquaint myself with the Wife of Bath I found that I didn’t like her.  The things I had remembered were still there, she was big, earthy, and adventuresome, but Chaucer made all those things into jokes.  She was, in fact, the antithesis of the model woman of the medieval period.  She was also a book burner, the victim (and practitioner) of spousal abuse, and told a story about a rapist-knight in King Arthur’s court.  As I had planned my trip around her, this was something of a disappointment, but the tale did provide me with an opportunity to incorporate the Arthurian sites of southern England into my route, and I still had a fallback position in Elizabeth Bennet.

         There was no question about what I thought of Jane Austen’s heroine, because I have started each of the last twenty-five years by reading Pride and Prejudice.  Most recently I read it as I sat with my father in his last days.  Pride and Prejudice is like an old friend to me, and as Jane Austen’s life was largely lived along the trail between Bath and Canterbury, I thought that Elizabeth Bennet could provide a good counterpoint to the Wife of Bath. 

         These were the things on my mind as I bought several maps and began to plan a walk that would take thirty days.  The route would incorporate several of the great medieval pilgrimage sites:  Bath, Wells, Glastonbury, Shaftesbury, Salisbury, Winchester, Westminster, Canterbury; all the places mentioned in Canterbury Tales:  Southwark, Deptford, Greenwich, Rochester, Sittingbourne, Boughton, Harbledown and Canterbury; several of the King Arthur Sites:  Bath/Badon, Glastonbury, Cadbury, Broadchalke, Winchester; and the Jane Austen sites of Bath, Winchester, Chawton and London.  

         As a weaver and a traveller, Dame Alison would have found herself perfectly situated at Bath.  From nearby Bristol she would have departed for her voyages to the continent.  By the fourteenth century regular connections made it possible for a woman to travel in company to the coast of Spain, where the Wife, along with thousands of other English pilgrims visited the shrine of Santiago de Compostela.  On a voyage to Rotterdam she could have made her connection down the Rhine to Cologne to see the relics of the three kings.  And after visiting Rome she would have sailed from Venice for her three trips to Jerusalem.  Chaucer mentions her visits to each of these places.  Though he doesn’t mention any English pilgrimages besides Canterbury, she would also certainly have visited those important sites in her own neighborhood, Wells and Glastonbury, as well as those a bit further afield.  Her own route would almost certainly have been more direct to London than mine was, and we know that she rode a horse rather than walked.  Chaucer describes her as a good horsewoman, riding astride at a time most women rode side-saddle, and the earliest picture of her, in the Ellesmere manuscript, shows her comfortably sitting on the back of a horse, a whip in her hand, spurs on her feet

         I tried to get in a bit of a walk each day in the weeks before I left, but one thing or another generally got in the way, though I did make a walk of about two miles along the bike path in Woods Hole several times.  I bought two good pairs of shoes, each of which cost more than any pair of shoes I had ever owned.  The French Mephistos were touted as the best walking shoes by everyone I asked, and those and a pair of Nikes would, I figured, meet whatever surface came along.  I wore one or the other of them constantly for several weeks and had them comfortably broken in by the time I left.

         My pack was heavy with the extra shoes, a laptop computer (with a battery charger and electrical adapter), a medical kit, and several pounds of books and other research materials.  I brought only one change of clothes.  During the time that I was making these preparations, I read two books that greatly influenced the way I was thinking about my walk.  The first was Hilaire Belloc’s classic, The Old Road, the other was A. Wainwright’s Pennine Journey.  I also read The Canterbury Tales in a verse translation, a prose translation, and began to struggle through the original Middle English.

         Belloc would become important from Winchester westward for a few days, but Wainwright began to effect me immediately.  Wainwright is pretty much the doyen of English long-distance walkers.  He wrote some forty guide books on the subject and pioneered several routes, including a coast-to-coast walk from St. Bees Head to Robin Hood’s Bay.  (When I told people that I was going to walk across England, the first response was usually: “Are you going with a group?”  The second question was “Are you doing St. Bees Head to Robin Hood’s Bay?”)  When I began to consider making a walk, my friend Gaby Kaye gave me a copy of Wainwright’s book, A Pennine Journey: The Story of a Long Walk in 1938. 

         Wainwright effected me in three ways:  his description of himself as a walker made me realize how much I did not know about what I was doing;  he made me very afraid of bulls; and he made me reconsider again my evolving position on the Wife of Bath.  The truth is that Wainwright, while a stylish writer, is also a sexist pig, and his musings on women made me ponder again what Chaucer was up to, and how much the attitudes of English men had evolved in five hundred years.

         Wainwright wore a flannel suit on his walk, complete with vest & tie; he carried no other clothes, and slept in his suit at least twice.  He walked some twenty miles a day, in the process climbing, crossing, and descending ridges of 2000 feet.  He knew his pace so well, he claimed, that after a careful study of the map and the landscape, a quick glance at his watch would tell him his exact position.  Clearly Wainwright would not be my model.  Because I could walk two miles in my lunch hour, I presumed I could walk eight to ten miles a day without a problem—given that walking would be my primary occupation on this trip.  I rejected the advice of my brother and other detractors that I ought to walk eight to ten miles a day for a few weeks before setting out.  I had no idea what my pace was, I wasn’t sure I was going to even wear a watch, but I did share Wainwright’s love of maps.  His comments about women goaded me on.  Three different times he says women lack imagination, he never “witnessed genuine enthusiasm in one of them.”  (Sometimes there was the “pretense of it” but the “divine spark” was missing.)  According to Wainwright “it is the comparative deficiency in intellect that makes woman’s claim for equality with man pathetic.”  Women are “strangers to dependability” and “have not the rigid standards of men, nor the same loyalty.”  It comes as no surprise when Wainwright confides that he finds his own company “vastly entertaining.”  I liked Alison, the Wife of Bath, better for having read Wainwright.  What English women have had to put up with!

         Old friends Joan and Ron Gould offered me a base of operations from their home on Paradise Walk in London, a cellular phone to use in case of an emergency on the road, and a ride to Bath to get started.  I flew from Boston to Heathrow on the 14th of May 1997 filled with enthusiasm and trepidation. 

When Research Bogs Down 

Today I am wrestling with the problem of how much research is enough. I am writing a book about the history of museums that will survey 3000 years of collecting and display, and I’ve now spent almost six months researching the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612). I feel like I’m in some sort of Renaissance wormhole; it is really interesting but how do I get out of it? When is enough information enough? (At this point, this is a very rhetorical question—I know I am long past the point of having plenty of information on this guy. He should take up something like 2-3 pages in my book at most, and yet I have over 40 pages of notes, and I’m finding that as I pick up new sources they are repeating things about him that I already know.)

It is hard to shake a process that has worked on projects that are much more tightly focused than this one. When I wrote about American trade on the Northwest Coast at the turn of the nineteenth century, it was necessary to read all the primary sources that I could identify as well as all of the secondary literature. Capt. Sam Hill’s biography required that I read every single thing ever written by him or about him, in addition to the contextual works of historians working on related topics. I have developed certain habits that have worked well for me in those books: I read the source materials, mark the passages that I think I might quote directly or that have essential knowledge for background, then set them up on my bookstand and enter them into my computer. * (I am attaching a picture of my bookstand and computer on my table today, where I have dolled up my workspace with flowers and candles to entice me to stay in one place and work earnestly.)

After thirty years of following this practice, I now need to shake it up a bit. This week I must put Rudolf back into the ground where he belongs and move on. (I still have to deal with other royals too, because they were important collectors, but King Charles I of England has got to be dealt with much more expeditiously, and what about the Russians?) One of the important things to do now is back away from the details and see the book as a whole, and this section as one part of it. It is also crucial to acknowledge that everything I have learned won’t be in this book; my job as the author is to decide what you as the reader will find most interesting, and what will best bring my best grandiose notions forward.

If, when I have finished writing it and you have finished reading it, you find that you want to know more about Rudolf, I will recommend additional reading.

*I need to make a note here that this process frequently gives me real concerns about the potential of accidentally plagiarizing another writer. It is important that I use different fonts or colored fonts to keep their words separate from mine in my text files.