Today I stumbled across this 1970 article: The Severed Head of Charles I of England Its Use as a Political Stimulus. Loaded with great 17th & 18th century political images. Not much in the way of analysis, but I'm not an art historian. Perhaps the argument was too subtle for me to discern.
I stumbled on the article (rather than Charles's head) because today was The Day. The one day all quarter that we Western Civants lecture on whatever it is we actually love, know and study. In my case, 17th century England. Especially the middle bit of the century. You know. The bit where Diggers try to dig, Levellers try to level, and, yes, the anointed head of an anointed king gets the chop.
I stumbled on the article (rather than Charles's head) because today was The Day. The one day all quarter that we Western Civants lecture on whatever it is we actually love, know and study. In my case, 17th century England. Especially the middle bit of the century. You know. The bit where Diggers try to dig, Levellers try to level, and, yes, the anointed head of an anointed king gets the chop.
I had a long, conceptual love affair with English puritanism, one that lasted longer than any of my actual relationships. And whenever I have had to teach it--the English or New English kind-- it's always gone badly. I've rambled on, the kids have looked bored, and even slapping up an overhead showing a contemporary painting of Charles's severed head hasn't really helped much.
So this time around I dreaded The Day. I went back and forth on how to revise my old lecture. I dawdled and procrastinated (never a challenge for me, of course) on putting together the PowerPoints. When today arrived, my PowerPoints were a mess-- text-heavy, weighted down with bullet-points, and the only multi bit of media was a JPEG of the Magna
Carta.But I think it went well. The students were alert, oriented in time and place, answering questions and laughing at my jokes. I started with the Magna Carta and went through to the Triennial Act, telling the story of Parliament and emphasizing three factors: Property rights, Protestantism and its (invented) nemesis, Popery (I can never resist alliteration). They went a little dull-eyed at the beginning, but began to liven up with the developing English ideology that tied government participation via Parliament to Protestantism (and the demonizing of Catholicism that went with it--especially the demonizing of Catholicism that went with it). I pulled them with me through the exploration of how England differed from France, and factors that made it more difficult to transition to absolution-- no need for a standing army, no exemptions from taxation, Parliament's brief over both taxation and legislation--making it more of a challenge to Bourbonishly divide and conquer noble institutions, and the complexity of ruling both England and Scotland.
I managed a pretty simple summary of the differences between puritans and ceremonialists without ever mentioning surplices. And compared the way Charles and Laud shifted the episcopacy towards ceremonialism to the way Presidents can stack the supreme court with like-minded justices. When we got to the New Model Army, they were pretty much with me.
When I wrapped it up, I had an inspiration: I asked them if they knew about President Kennedy and his Catholicism. I went over how there were Americans in the sixties genuinely afraid that a Catholic president would sacrifice the nation's interests to the commands of the pope. Then I pulled them back to the English Bill of Rights, the idea of popery, the way Protestantism became associated in English minds with national loyalty and the freedoms of constitutional government, and the way we inherited both England's constitutional model & its protestant prejudices.
And that's the Survey Lecture Holy Grail for me-- tying the (relatively) distant European past to a (near enough) contemporary facet of the American present, and getting the students to make the connection. Here's hoping I can manage it again.
Or at least remember this particular shtick for next time.
