Historic Churches in Scotland

Well, standing at John Knox's house in Edinburgh is an interesting experience. Knox--Scottish reformer, friend of John Calvin, revolutionary, political activist, founder of the Presbyterian Church--is one of the pivotal figures in the history of the Protestant Reformation. He steered the Scottish church (the Kirk) away from Anglicanism, though he got some strategic support from reformers in England under Elizabeth I. But he had written a misogynist attack against Mary of Guise and her daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, "The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women," that offended Elizabeth I. He took intransigent and sometimes contradictory political positions, depending on the situation in which he found himself.

That may explain the difference I saw between historic churches in Scotland and those in Britain, though I really don't have enough evidence to pronounce anything definitively. In Britain, as my video blog shows, churches still have standing as places of worship, and the interpretive material connected with them really makes their devotional purpose explicit. In the Scottish historic churches I visited, there is really no attempt to describe or explain the reformation in Scotland. One gets little sense of the history or development of Protestant Christianity.

I am at a loss to explain this. Reform in Scotland was a messier, yet more theological, process than in Britain. Yet, from all I see, Scotland is a more secular place even than Britain, one of the most secular societies in Europe. But then again, I didn't go to Saint Andrews, and didn't visit any Highland churches.

Video Blog for August 2, 2010

Here is the video blog on my GCU Facebook site, for last week. Over the next few days, I'll have more to say about historic churches and religion in Britain and Scotland. I'll also be talking about the Highland moors and the Scottish outdoors.

English Serendipity

In my video blog, I mentioned two things, that I'd gone to Oxford, and that I'd seen the Codex Mendoza (above). I pointed to both this, and a picture of Shakespeare that I'd seen exhibited last year, as examples of serendipity--useful blind luck of the find.

Anyhow, I'm interested in the Codex Mendoza because sometime around 1587, Richard Hakluyt, my research subject, who was working in France at the time (spying for Sir Francis Walsingham?) received this manuscript from Andre Thevet, the Geographer Royal of France at the time. Interestingly, around this time, Thevet and Hakluyt may or may not have had a falling out, because Thevet accused Hakluyt and Martin Basanier of essentially stealing a narrative about a French colony in Florida from him. But they must have worked it out. The Codex Mendoza is an important Aztec manuscript: in fact, if you could see the writing on the illustration on the left page, it's Aztec spoken language in Roman characters at the top, the Aztec ideogram in the middle, and Spanish on the bottom. But Hakluyt couldn't get anyone to engrave the illustrations, so he didn't print it before his death in 1616. It came to his self-appointed literary heir, Samuel Purchas, with the rest of Hakluyt's manuscripts upon his death, and Purchas printed it in his collection Purchas his Pilgrimes. From there, the manuscript came into the possession of Robert Selden.

So imagine my surprise, when on just an informal visit to the Bodleian Library exhibit room with no idea that it was there, I see the codex on display in an exhibit of the donation of Robert Selden, an exhibit which was to close on the next day. One doesn't always get that kind of luck.

That was just like my luck with the Shakespeare portrait last year, when in walking around Stratford, I came to the mini-exhibit of this portrait and its provenance (narrative of transmission). The portrait had just been in the news at that time, and I got to see it in detail. I wasn't supposed to take pictures in either case, as it turns out, but I did. It's better to apologize than to ask for permission beforehand.

RSC As You Like It 2010

The RSC Trailer

Before you read the rest of this, take a look at the RSC's trailer for this production (click on the link above). Keep in mind that this is one of Shakespeare's comedies, in fact from what's sometimes called his "golden period," the sunniest ones he ever wrote.

I hate to break it to them, but it still turns out a comedy, even when you skin a dead rabbit on stage. Even when you put Touchstone into a straitjacket and crazyman pants. Even when songs that generally would be sung by Amiens and Touchstone are put into the mouth of noir-Jethro Tull costumed Jaques. Even when you make "The Lusty Horn" song into a nightmare sequence for Celia.

I mean, there are anxieties in this play, chief among them the Freudian (note anachronism) male anxiety about cuckolding, which the intelligence and female friendship of Celia and Rosalind do nothing to allay in the comic version. But nihilistic anxieties of the type that the changed stage business attempts aren't really convincing.

The structure and language are too strong to push against, even though the play with its "humorous" (in the Early Modern Renaissance sense of character determination) elements suggests a kind of dispositional determinism that gets subverted by the "conversion" plot. In fact, this interplay produces a kind of happy chaos in which anything can happen, and in which characters end up overcoming their dispositions.

This is also my favorite script of a play, in pretty much a tie with Midsummer Night's Dream. I'd forgotten just how witty it is when played by stage experts. So, the language is too exuberant to be tamed to nihilism as well. It's free play instead.

But different takes are always enjoyable, and the attempt to heighten the negative emotional tension between Celia and Rosalind actually worked to underline some elements that generally go unnoticed in the play when worked as a comedy (like the adjudication scene at the beginning of MSND; that verdict could be pretty serious for Hermia).

So, two thumbs up (as opposed to index and middle finger up, palm facing the gesturer. It's a British thing.).

Wicken Fen Odyssey (Redux)

Quick Note: Apparently I didn't write about our little odyssey last year, up the Southeast bank of the River Cam. But we did it. I promise.

For at least two years now, Chris has had a fixation with one of the last remaining wild fens (marshes) in the vicinity of Cambridge, Wicken Fen. Maybe it's because the visitor's center is called the Thorpe Visitor's Center (her maiden name). Cambridge lies at the edge of the Fens, which used to reach north to to King's Lynn from around Cambridge (http://www.cfsa.co.uk/denver_complexintroduction.htm). Wicken Fen is toward Ely, one of the major historic towns in the fens, and the year before last, Chris and I had bicycled to and from Ely. Of course, it's a 15 minute trip by train.

So now, we've been intrigued by the trails and towpaths that parallel the River Cam up to Wicken Fen. Allegedly, they are part of two major routes of the National Cycle Network, and a route from Cambridge to Newmarket (which Chris also wants to visit because of the horses) is also supposed to exist (http://www.cycle-route.com/routes/Cambridge_to_Newmarket-Cycle-Route-68.html).

Last year, we attempted Wicken Fen by the bike path leading out of Cambridge on the Northwest side of the river. Somewhere around Waterbeach last year, we switched sides of the river from northwest to southeast bank. They really should put out a mountain biking recommendation for that side of the river. With wide knobbys, it would be decent (outside of lifting the bikes over stiles), but with street tourers, not so much (see my post last year about it).

Well, this year, we decided to stay on the Northwest side, using Long Drove to get up to where the path supposedly begins in earnest again just on the other side of the river from Upware. Of course, there's no bridge there, so one would theoretically have to make about a 3-mile loop anyway, to get back down to Wicken Fen (then, again theoretically, on to Burwell, a scenic, interesting town, and on to Newmarket).

Alas, it was not to be. Another mountain bike recommendation is needed here, starting at the end of Long Drove. Again, city bikes, and this time we stood opposite a pub in Upware where we had had a meal last year. But we couldn't get there, nor could we face another mile and a half of jolting on what is in actuality a rough footpath. The panorama above commemorates the farthest point north that we got. That's Upware across there with those narrow boats. Sounded like a good party.

Instead, we turned back to Waterbeach, and to a nice pub there. The weather was partly cloudy and the wind flowed over the flat fenland. And so, the odyssey (and jinx) continues.

Love's Labours Lost and GCU Videos

I thought that I'd embed my GCU video blog posts in this site, for those of you who don't have, or want to have, Facebook accounts. I'll start with the July 5 one, go on to the July 11 one and finish with the one I did yesterday. After this, I'll just embed each video blog as I do it.

Now, to Love's Labours Lost: We saw the production at one of the Downing College interior courts, east of St. Catharine's. It was a bit hard to get to, as we had to go on a busy road next to Parker's Piece to find the college entrance. There happens to be bicycle parking well into the college itself, so we walked our bikes (which we'd just rented that morning) to the area, locked them, and went into the garden with our light supper of sushi. We'd spotted a bento box Japanese restaurant earlier in the week and though that a bento box apiece would be a great way to have dinner at garden Shakespeare. But bento boxes are only for lunch. . . . . So, in a compromise, we got sushi to take away: shrimp nigiri, cucumber roll, and cucumber and crab. Gotta love the wasabi and ginger (Jim only).

The production itself ended up being one of the better I've seen at Cambridge. As usual, the players interacted often with the audience, and as usual, made use of the natural features (in this case some intervening bushes and trees) to enhance the performance's visual values. I'm constantly amazed by how much can be done with very few props. The company numbered about 12 people, so several parts were doubled.

The players themselves do play to members of the audience; in this case, one of the male comic leads played to a pretty girl sitting in the front on the grass with her boyfriend. Another feature of these productions is the fact that the audience members bring beverages, which the actors sometimes share. In this production, several of the actors ventured into the audience for alcohol, and worked their responses to the drinks into the production.

LLL is an interesting early comedy of Shakespeare's; as its name implies, it doesn't end in marriage as most of his comedies do. This can lead to an interesting dilemma for actors and directors, in that the humor needs to be kept going, but the ending does not resolve the conflict. These players were especially adept at working that ironic register in the production, while keeping the mood light. The Don Armando character, I think, hit just the right note (the rest of the audience apparently thought so too, since the cast got a good ovation at the end), but the Berowne character ended up being a little too, let's call it "precious," since he's one of the main characters who is supposed to be hopelessly in love with the French ladies.

Outside playing is interesting in another way in Britain--one never knows when it will rain. The performance started out under partly cloudy skies, and remained so until the end. But we did get lightly rained on several times during the performance (lucky Chris and I had brought our rain jackets). The upside to this was about act three, when the players were playing under an evening rainbow, which remained in the sky for at least 15 minutes.

As I say, an excellent production, well-received, then home on bicycles with generator lights, through the club-hopping crowds, under a spectacular fireworks show from the Shakespeare performance at King's College at about 10:15. One takes one's life in one's hands to ride at that time of night, but the fireworks were worth it, almost 4th of July level.

Students and I had a chance to go to the Parker Manuscript Library at Corpus Christi College today, thanks to the other professors, Asa Mittman and Albrecht Classen. Professor Classen showed several manuscripts of English and Irish pilgrimage narratives, including The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and The Voyage of Saint Brendan. We also had a chance to tour the exhibit and the main meeting room. Photography is prohibited there.

In the afternoon, Dr. Mittman took his class over to examine some medieval maps and bestiaries. He knew the librarian well, and explained that this is the best collection of medieval manuscripts in English in the world, in his opinion. I don't doubt it. The Parker Library has also digitized almost its entire manuscript collection, which can be seen at this link: http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/parker/actions/page.do?forward=home. Here's a picture of the Matthew Paris manuscript we saw above from that website. One can't go on using "a once-in-a-lifetime chance" when talking about this experience, but it can be unique for professors as well as students. Certainly it was a unique experience for me to hear an art historian talk about the beauty of these medieval manuscripts and the meanings and symbolism of the maps contained in them.

First Week at Cambridge/London Excursion/Nate and Tana

This is my first try at putting video into my blog. Nate and Tana came to visit from Oxford this week, just after the first week of classes. They came with us to Henry IV, Part 1 at the London Globe Theater. It was great to see them again, after almost a year. They seem to be doing quite well, and are making the most of their time, it seems. Above is a bit of London before we went into the play. It's been both a smooth and a bittersweet start to the program, as we begin our last year as director couple.

We met Nate and Tana in London as we went into the National Observatory for a special presentation of Early Modern maps; they'd trained in from Oxford, and had been dropped about half a mile from the Observatory (and our bus). After the presentation at the National Observatory, we were dropped off at the Embankment, where we crossed on the Golden Jubilee pedestrian bridge and walked down the South Bank to the Globe. The performance was great, and we all took the bus back late to Cambridge.

Thwarted in our attempt to drive to Leeds Castle in Kent, we ended up going to Ely instead, and touring the town and cathedral. Yesterday, we went to the Orchard in Granchester (twice in one year for Chris and me), and enjoyed (so far as that is possible) the unseasonably hot weather by canoeing (not punting) the Cam. We took in an entertaining 3-person history of Britain production in the Corpus Christi Playhouse, but almost had an Arizona sweatlodge experience (you all know what I mean) when the ushers would not open the doors or windows during the performance. Today, we made a tour of Trinity and St. John's colleges.

The Fitzwilliam Museum (above) is one of the best in the world, and the four of us spent a morning there. It is a unique feeling to stand near 4000-year-old antiquities; they have one granite sarcophagus that one can stand right next to, look at the scribing on the stone, and think "The hands that carved this have been lifeless for four millennia." To be confronted with this level of human antiquity and culture is to realize how small one really is, and how short one's life. One can gain perspective in other ways than by looking at and thinking about the stars.

Oh, one more thing about the Fitz--lots of paintings. This time as I wandered through (I did spend most of my time at the local history exhibit [it's amazing the things they've dug up in town and dredged from the river] and in the ancient cultures section) I noticed the beginning of what we would think of as landscape at the middle of the 18th century, though I did notice one bird's-eye view of the city of Florence (I think) from the 1450s. There really is a change in the way people saw things between the medieval and the Augustan periods in England.

Charles Darwin at the Cambridge University Library

I just went to see the exhibit of manuscripts, letters, and specimens from the voyage of the Beagle, a trip of almost 5 years (1831-36) from which Charles Darwin derived the data that would result in the theory of evolution 20 years later. One tends to think of theorizers as people who sit in laboratories or libraries and write, but it's clear that Darwin used what the exhibit called his "gap year" to exhaustively examine the botany, biology and geology of especially South America, but also the Pacific. He managed to understand the importance of the ecosystem as environment.

When one considers the tensions arising from the theory of evolution through natural selection, it's interesting to think that it stands on such a wealth of observation, maybe the most comprehensive in the history of biology. And to see family letters, drawings, and specimens, as well as travel diaries, gives a sense of the richness of this episode in Darwin's life (as well as a sense of richness and complexity for the viewer of the exhibit). It's especially interesting that he almost didn't go; his father, a doctor, was against the idea at first. Darwin himself also saw it as a large and perhaps fruitless investment of time.

Merry Wives of Windsor

Sorry no pictures, but we did see the Merry Wives of Windsor last night. This was my first night of garden Shakespeare this year, because of the nasty way the weather has of downpouring at right about the start of the shows (7:30 p.m.). One student, Amanda Rowe, met us in Kings College garden, which I had never been in before.

The college gardens are one of those hidden traditions that make Cambridge colleges different than those of the U.S. Normally, these gardens are closed to non-college members. When gardens are opened, they evidence the British genius with this art form--lush, manicured lawns, bordered by a profusion of colorful flowers and manicured woodland. As a further surprise, one of the Kings buildings that borders the garden was a rather daring modern block of rooms, with plenty of glass block and metal railings. One can't even see this building from any public thoroughfare. Actually, in a correction, one can see the back of this building from a public road, but the back is completely conventional.

Anyhow, the production was excellent. In many ways, it's Shakespeare as it should be seen--outside, with minimal props and an exuberant cast that is also doing other productions of other Shakespeare plays at the same time. Now Merry Wives is extremely topical--after the success of Henry IV parts 1 and 2, Elizabeth commanded another play with Falstaff in it. Here are the topical bits: it's set in Windsor, the site of one of Elizabeth's palaces, and it's placed in the present time (that is, Elizabethan present time). It's city comedy, in that it deals with social relationships and sexual mores of smart, "sophisticated," urban folks. Absolutely a puff piece, with Falstaff taking center stage, and at least two characters from the Henry IV sequence appearing (Mistress Quickly, Justice Shallow, and maybe the innkeeper, though I'm not sure about this last).

The playing was right where it should be: lots of burlesque, overacting, making a big point of jokes and puns, and so on. Again, the acting fitted the structure and content of the play.

A final word about Shakespeare as he "should" be seen--I just mean that in an "historically authentic" kind of way. We'll never be able to experience what an Elizabethan audience did in the way they did (we have too much subsequent media history, for one thing), but it's nice to see how it's done with many of the same strictures as the 1590's--few props, no real scenery, good costumes, a small acting company, gender bending. Of course, no spotlights in Shakespeare (we had those), and the gender-bending was all the other way, with women taking some of the men's roles, as opposed to the other way around.

The days dwindle down . . .

I almost forgot--I went to the Pepys Library in Magdalene College yesterday. I've been in Magdalene's first court before, and I think I found out where C.S. Lewis's rooms were there, but I've forgotten. Anyhow, it turns out that Pepys was a naval administrator during the Restoration, and his collection includes Hakluyt (both the Principal Navigations (2nd ed.) and the Divers Voyages), as well as Purchas's Pilgrimage and Pilgrimes. But, perhaps more importantly, the library has a manuscript book (illustrated) about the shipwright's art from the mid-16th century. I note that the National Maritime Museum claims not to have any real sense of ship plans from before the mid 1600's, so I wonder if the manuscript contains any important illustrations. If I could get my students into that library, however, we'd have a rich printed manuscript and printed book trove there. I also didn't check to see if Pepys had a de Bry of some type. I'd better look at the catalog.

Last night, the farewell dinner and reception, in the pouring rain. We ended up in the Old Combination Room for the reception before dinner, and in the Senior Combination Room for the dinner itself. The students have been great this year, and the faculty members the most involved in my experience. We just had a couple of issues that just came up last night: one student managed to lose her keys down a grate in the sidewalk, and confronted the porter in tears about it (thinking that she'd have to pay a lot of money to replace it). However, the grate she lost the keys down was actually college property, so the next morning we had one of the maintenance men get it out.

Tonight, The Merry Wives of Windsor, if the weather holds. I don't think I've ever seen a rainier summer here.

The Cotswolds and Ancient Books

Fighting a cold took up much of my weekend. We did, however, get out to the Cotswolds on Sunday, with Roots Tours out of Cambridge (consider this a true plug for the company). These 14-person van tours get one into out-of-the-way places of scenic beauty. The Cotswolds are, in fact, a true beauty spot, with the added advantage of being convenient to London and Oxford. Though the hills rise only about 3000 feet above sea level, the effect is still startling when one sees signs for 17 percent grades on paved roads. Even so, we saw many touring bicyclists on our route.

Trout streams, old mills (above), Upper and Lower Slaughter (which is actually derived from the term "Sloe Tree," not the term for butchery), the highest point in the Cottswolds, and the spa town of Cheltenham. It was a great day.
























Yesterday, we had the annual chance to get our hands on (literally) items from Saint Catharine's collection of rare books. My personal favorite is a 1625 copy of Samuel Purchas's Pilgrimes, a collection of travel narratives. But I also like the Ptolemaic atlas from 1511 and the Mercator atlas from 1623 (yes, I know he was dead by then, but I mean his maps). This is always a highlight of Cambridge, and a unique opportunity that Paul Hartle has arranged for us. There's no other library or museum in the U.S. or U.K. where we could do the same.

Liverpool

Today (Saturday) is a quiet day. After coming down with the sniffles that the students had come down with earlier in the program, Chris and I have elected to keep quiet until tomorrow, when we take a trip to the Cotswolds with Roots Travel. It's amazing to think that we have reached the last week of the program. It is even more amazing to think back on the "non-summer" that we have experienced here, as opposed to the record-breaking warmth and dryness of Phoenix and other parts of the West. But I look out of my window here at the cloudy sky and the saturated colors of the garden.

We had great luck, however, in one of the longest trips that the program has ever taken, to Liverpool, to the Museum of Slavery on Albert Dock. This visit has relevance both to Eddie Mallot's class on post-colonial Shakespeare, and to my Early Modern exploration class, which treats the beginnings of English involvement in the African slave trade of the Portuguese and Spanish with America.



This is our guide, Stephen, with Professor Mallot. We had arrived maybe a half hour later than we'd intended to, having driven through the pouring rain and having had one maintenance stop. This caused some lack of focus, as students rushed to get a bite for lunch during our tour. The museum is small enough that we needed to split our group into two smaller units, one led by Stephen and one led by another guide.

But there is, of course, an irony in Liverpool; besides being the largest slavery port in England by a number of measures, it is also the birthplace of the Beatles. The Beatles Experience Museum, which Chris and I had a chance to tour, was in its own way very culturally informative. For the most part, the exhibits were both interesting and accurate. The complex nature of the Beatles' early career, their beginning popularity in Germany, and their roots in the Mersey folk music, Skiffle, were well explained.

Their years of popularity corresponded with our grammar school and teen years, so some of the history prompted personal memories and cultural comparisons between British Beatlemania and American. Things got a bit poignant and political at the end, however, with commemorative exhibits of the last years of, especially, John Lennon and George Harrison. Among one of the interesting political things was the way both Paul's first wife and Heather Mills had been "disappeared" from his biography. Only Linda remains. By the way, who was the "5th Beatle"? I don't know, since they changed personnel during their time as the Quarrymen, were associated with Brian Epstein as a manager, and changed a drummer before Ringo. So--6 Beatles? 7? I don't know.

Down the dock from the museum and free if one went to the museum was the Fab 4-D Beatles Show, a "Smellovision" extravaganza, by which I mean, we got 3-D glasses, the chairs tilted, shook and dropped with the bus ride, and when the bus became a yellow submarine, water was sprayed on us. Actually, it was fun. In addition to the show, John Lennon's first wife and his son Julian had put up an alternative exhibit of his life to support their charitable endeavors. This exhibit idealized Lennon less than the Beatles Experience museum, and gave the experience of the time from an alternative point of view.

We finished the day with a walking tour to The Cavern, a rebuild of one of the early clubs in which the Beatles (and Quarrymen--go see the museum) played. There were lots of tourists young and old, there for the experience, and we got one of those serendipities--a cover duo playing Beatles tunes. Since it was a pub, some of the audience had lost their inhibitions (and their ear for pitch), and there was an enthusiastic sing-along. I do have video of the students singing along, but haven't included it here, for privacy reasons. But here is Chris at The Cavern (by the way, her favorite Beatle was Paul. I think that's supposed to mean something.).

Stratford, Dunwich, and Southwold

We did the annual trip to Stratford and Warwick on Thursday of last week, then Chris and I took the bikes to Southwold, on the Suffolk coast for Friday and Saturday nights, coming home Sunday evening.

Warwick is an under-rated town, I think. I spent some time in the churchyard of Saint Mary's College Church, which I think is the largest parish church in England, though I may be wrong. I'm especially interested in this church since it is the place where Robert Dudley, the first first Earl of Leicester (yes, that should be two "first"s because I've seen another first Earl of Leicester that wasn't him). One thing that began to strike me, as it struck me also in Dunwich and Southwold, is that these parish churches were centers of their communities in ways that modern churches aren't. Each church has an attached graveyard, with stones dating back two and three hundred years. (In another off-the-wall observation, outside gravestones seem to only remain legible for about 300 years without special cleaning. I've not seen one yet whose inscriptions I can read that dates from before the 18th century. That's not the case with inside markers.) Oh, another difference--people are actually buried in the church: under the floor, in the walls, in the crypt below. Not only is Robert Dudley buried there, but there's also mention of his secret ex-wife Douglass Sheffield, who became Hakluyt's patroness of Wetheringsett. Anyhow, one gets the sense that churches were actually about the end, as well as the beginning, of life. One gets less of a sense of that from modern churches, at least in America.

The Shakespeare production, The Winter's Tale, was well done, but I can't say that I really like the play itself. As well, some of the scenery and costuming (making the pastoral landscape out of fallen books, for example) had a kind of ambiguous symbolic significance. Before the production, we had dinner with Paul and Wendy Hartle, and Diane Facinelli. Ginny Grainger from the RSC also stopped by to see us, in the interval of a conference with some Ohio teachers. The play ended at about 11:15 p.m., then we walked back to the bus. We didn't get into Cambridge until 1 a.m.

This made getting up, packing and getting out to the train station by 8:45 kind of a chore. Because we hadn't bought tickets in advance, we had to wait until 9:45 anyway. It was raining as we left, and rained more fiercely all the way into Suffolk. After a final burst, it stopped at about the time we got off the train to ride to Southwold. We rode to Southwold with a British family group that has a house in the town. I'll primarily give some pictures here to show the town, but it's generally unspoiled and more upscale than Brighton. We were some of the few non-Britons in town, you know, the "odd Americans" that one of the service staff at a pub where we ate said the town gets. ("We get mostly British people here; just the odd American.") So I said that he was right, that we are pretty odd. He was embarrassed. Anyhow, I'll paste some pictures below, which will describe better than anything I can say. We visited Dunwich, which had been an important medieval town before it began crumbling into the sea. I think some early Romantic woman sonneteer wrote about this town and the poignancy of its crumbling, but I can't remember her name. I (though not Chris) went up in the lighthouse in the center of the town, and got a good panorama.





















































Besides the panorama from the lighthouse, there are two views of Southwold from the pier, one of which shows our B&B, the Avondale (good place to stay). The gravestone is right on the edge of the sand cliff in Dunwich, and that's me with my feet in the North Sea, and Chris at the ruined priory in Dunwich, now being used as a horse pasture and chicken shelter.

Oh, I forgot to mention that we had great weather during our stay in Southwold, and did a loop out to some nature preserves by Dunwich on Saturday. As we got about half-way back to Cambridge, it began to rain. We got home at about 9 p.m. after pedaling in rain to get there.

Week 3 and the SPRI

Week three has begun auspiciously--no real computer problems, good media in the classroom, and a visit to the Scot Polar Research Institute library. This year, the institute museum is being completely refurbished, so we looked at our materials to the accompaniment of hammer drills. It was still great, and it is exciting to see some of the students get excited over the historical and archaeological materials. One student began to ask more general questions about the institute and evidenced a more general interest in things polar. Here we are with the materials, and here I am with one of Frobisher's returned samples.





This will also be my first real post about the weather; the weekend ended up rainy, as did most of the day Monday and Tuesday morning. This has now been the coldest summer we've spent here so far (I've worn few of my short-sleeve shirts), all the more ironic because until we got here, it was unseasonably hot and dry. Between rain and wind, there's been little temptation to set up badminton.

We did have an interesting lunch with the Bjorks and Robert Wardie (Classics professor at Saint Catharine's, and a fellow bicyclist), along with a number of Mary and Bob Bjork's students. We went to a sandwich shop off the market square at 12:30, and faced a 45 minute wait for an inside table. Sensing a letup in the rain, we decided on some umbrella-covered outside tables. Of course, as soon as we got our sandwiches, the downpour began again in earnest. Oh, well.

To Brandon and Thetford Forest

Today, Chris figured out a great trip to Brandon and Thetford Forest (above see her by a mausoleum built by one of the estate owners. He's not buried there any more). We started late in the morning, and only needed to take 20 minutes by train. The forest itself is bisected (kind of) by one B road (B1106), which separates the Brandon Country Park from the forest proper. I just tried to upload the PDF map, but it didn't work. For some reason I can't get a link to work either. Just try Thetford Forest bicycle map, if you're interested.

Anyhow, we took the green and blue trails around the perimeter of the High Forest Lodge section, and the Brandon Country Park section. It was all good double-track, not too muddy. Judging from the mountain bikers we saw (we were on hybrid bikes), there are some really muddy spots. Chris saw one red deer, and we read that this used to be heath grassland that they actually warrened rabbits on part of. In the early 1800's, the land was enclosed and planted with pines. The picture below lets you know what the forest was like. The ferns in the undergrowth were almost shoulder-height.


















This is the home of flint, since mesolithic times, and for a time was the gunflint capital of Britain (they made flints for flintlock pistols and rifles). Maybe that's why there are so many gun ranges around this part of the country (called the Brecks). This is me, on the right, two feet into the danger zone.

The other interesting thing--the weather. The weather was slated to be cloudy today, with intermittent rain, but nobody said we'd be sleeted on in the middle of July. But it was all good; we had our rain jackets. Then it was sunny. Then it rained a little more. As we crossed through a mountain bike racecourse, it rained hard again. When we got to tea at the Brandon Country Park pavilion at 3, it was sunny. I had my sunglasses out and back in maybe 20 times. A great ride. Brandon (the town) was quiet on a Sunday afternoon, so we waited for the train, and got back to Cambridge in 20 minutes. It took us almost as long to buy groceries for tonight and tomorrow and pedal back to the flat as it did to take the train back from Brandon.

As I began to write this entry, a sudden torrential downpour drenched Cambridge. Lucky it didn't happen 45 minutes earlier.

The End of Week 2: Our Trip to Glastonbury

The week ended interestingly, with a trip to Glastonbury, with a side trip to Stonehenge. At the top is a panorama of the ruined abbey of Glastonbury. Glastonbury itself is an interesting town, in that it has a syncretistic conglomeration of Christian, pagan, and New Age elements. The accretion of legends surrounding the sacred well (probably Druidic, appropriated by Christian pilgrims), the Arthurian legend (pre-Christian, Christianized in the Middle Ages), and the Abbey itself (disbanded with extreme prejudice under Henry VIII) actually validates further something I wrote about in my doctoral dissertation about the accretion of significances to holy sites in pilgrimage narratives.

As a rationalist, I tend to look somewhat disparagingly at uncritical outpourings of mystical feeling, of which there were a lot at Glastonbury. I've got a picture of myself at Arthur's grave, which I didn't mean to be entirely disrespectful to him, but the whole legendary, people-laying-on-Arthur's-grave business got to me a bit.



We climbed a hill above town after seeing the Chalice Well, where the Holy Grail is supposed to be interred (lots of explanation for why the water runs kind of red). The Tor has a tower at the top and supposedly housed a pre-Christian shrine. While we were up there some pretty sickly-looking hippie kid was lying on one of the (possible) sarcophagi up there. Lots of Sedona-like psychic energy vortices, apparently.



Compared to this, Stonehenge was relatively tame, with only one creative anachronism kind of guy keeping vigil. I didn't ask him why, but the National Trust intends to do some significant work at the site, routing the major through road and the access to the site in tunnels, so that the original topography and space can be recreated. I don't know why that was bad, and didn't ask him.

I guess people have gotten out of the idea of Stonehenge being an ancient observatory, as I learned as a kid. Instead it's now thought to be a sacred site of some type, maybe a seasonal temple designed to commemorate the winter and summer solstices and equinoxes. In a book I have about time as a concept (sorry, no title, but it's not here in Britain), the authors talk about the importance to agricultural pre-Christian religion of being in the right place at the right time for celestial happenings. It dovetails very well with the exhibit at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, which points out that until the advent of atomic clocks, the concept of time was very much tied to the movement of heavenly bodies and the cycle of the seasons. Something interesting, I think, to be written on the uses of time in human culture.



Also interesting was the carved glyph by the sacred spring at Glastonbury, which looks like some Native American pictographs I've seen.

The speculative explanations of Stonehenge put me in mind of Circlestone, in the Superstition Mountains. Though the scale is nothing like Stonehenge, the same agriculturally-based orientations obtain, and Circlestone probably had the same function.

In the Bowels of Week 2

This is probably not the best time to write about my experiences of the last few days. I've had more than my share of technical difficulties today; I'd meant to be remotely present at a committee meeting, and downloaded Skype for that reason, but network connectivity problems (I think) kept blowing me offline. It's a cautionary tale for those who blithely believe that working remotely is always easy. It didn't help that I was having classroom technical difficulties of the same type as well. Teaching with technology is wonderful when it works, but when you can't get connected . . . no maps, no Google Earth . . .

But enough of that. We also did without computers this week on purpose, and the weather cooperated. The two pictures at the top are of our hands-on navigation exercise. I'm hoping it gave students a better sense of what it might have been like for Early Modern seaborne explorers, who were probably lost a good deal of the time. The risks they ran are almost inconceivable to modern people, yet their lives on land were probably not that much safer, what with risks from childhood diseases, infection, plagues, violence, war, and so on. London's population grew exponentially during this period, even though the city's birthrate was far outpaced by its death rate. Lots of immigrants from the country.




Chris also did the program's annual hike to Grantchester, which I had to miss because of my computer work. These are just a few of the students, sipping there. The hikers also managed to find a local youth hangout near the river, complete with informational sign and exhibitionist revelers. No pictures of that, apparently.

To Audley End and Saffron Walden

Today began our mini-adventures this year. Last year, we'd intended to bicycle out to a small medieval market town near Cambridge, Saffron Walden. Since we intend to rent bicycles tomorrow, Chris planned a day trip to the town today by train instead. Just outside the town is a stately home, owned now by the National Trust, Audley End (above). The main wing of the house dates from 1603, with the two side wings later. The grounds were designed by Capability Brown, and include a millrace, what looks like an electricity-generating dam, and faux antiquities. Here are Chris and Diane (who came with us) in front of the Temple of Concord, an important faux viewpoint from the house.



We had walked a mile and a half from the train station to Audley End, about a mile on the grounds and in the house, and then a mile or so into the town, where we saw the market square, the ruins of the keep of a castle, the historical museum, and several historic buildings dating from the Elizabethan period or before.

Audley End itself is probably one of the more beautiful great houses I've seen; what sets it apart are two things: first, cases of taxidermy and other geographical collections (shells, rocks and so on), by a Victorian collector, and second, the excellent windows that generally flood the huge house and its large rooms with light. The 11,000 volume library wasn't bad either. Here are Chris and Diane in the Saffron Walden market square.



After Audley End, we decided to get tea (but really dessert). After touring the town, we stopped in a pub for dinner. The taxi company, very busy, picked us up at 8:15 and we arrived on the platform just in time for the train back to Cambridge. We did walk the mile and a half from the train station back to Chad's, however.

The Globe on 9 July

Interesting trip to the National Maritime Museum and the Globe Theater on Thursday--first, we were treated to an hour-and-a-half of traffic stoppage on the M11, making us very late to the NMM. However, Richard Dunn and Gillian Hutchinson took time out of their busy schedules (and, I suspect, their lunch hours) to present their lectures anyway. Though we were in a low-security part of the museum, and didn't see the instruments and maps that we normally see, the presentations were excellent and the students were interested.

We'd intended to drop the students at the Embankment and let them make their various ways through London to the hostels that some of them planned to stay in over the weekend. However, with the time crunch, we dropped them at the South Bank and essentially guarded their luggage at the Globe until curtain time. Given the size of some of the student bags, it was probably technically not allowed for them to take the bags into the theater (but there was no cloakroom either). But they weren't stopped or forced to leave.

The performance was A Midsummer Night's Dream, a parallel one to last year, but much different. Last year's performance tried for more emotional tension and had more special effects. This one used few special effects and a very small cast, doubling and even tripling the parts. Some of the doublings were standard: Theseus/Hippolyta/Oberon/Titania, Philostrate/Puck; others less so (doubling the mechanicals and the lovers).

The performance was set in a sexy version of the 1920's, which fit at some level, given the general modernist and yet Freudian mood of the period. Puck, played by a woman, was especially--um, how do I say this?--seductive. She did, however, use the kewpie-doll flapper voice for both her rude mechanical character (Snout, the lion), and Puck.

I figure I'll just post a couple of pictures of us in the audience, since we weren't supposed to take pics of the performance . . .