I was born in India, and spent most of my time from early
childhood until I was in my twenties studying music: I have played the sitar (which I learnt from Uma
Shankar Mishra), israaj, tabla
(which I studied with B S Ramanna and Shabbir Nisar), and later violin and viola, and studied both North Indian
and Western
classical music (the former quite intensively, the latter relatively
cursorily). I started learning German at sixteen, mainly because of my interest
in music, but as I got familiar with the language, I became increasingly
fascinated by in the literature too. After two years of learning German and six
weeks spent in Germany on a scholarship from the Goethe Institut, I began to
work as a freelance translator, and I also started teaching music. It became
increasingly apparent, however, that for a variety of reasons, life as a
professional musician was not for me; and commercial translating, while paying
well, was not really the way I wanted to live my life. This realisation led to
my move from
I took a very wide range of courses as a graduate student, ranging from early modern social and gender history to Old Norse heroic poetry. I have tried to maintain an interdisciplinary approach to the study of medieval culture, in which the ‘discipline’ is as important as the ‘inter’; for this reason, I have strived to acquire a thorough grounding in the auxiliary disciplines (palaeography, diplomatics and textual criticism), in historical research of various kinds (social, intellectual, economic), and in philology (in the broadest sense, including the study of both languages and literatures). I am concerned, primarily, with trying to understand what I believe to be the fundamental aspects of medieval culture and society. Many of the questions I choose to ask are, in different ways, still relevant today; my interest in the past is, while hopefully not teleological, unabashedly fuelled by a desire to understand something fundamental about human nature, and thus I hope (without wishing to be crudely utilitarian in any way) that a better understanding of medieval people might also provide some wisdom about human society today as well. I was inspired as a teenager by the works of Eric Hobsbawm, Johan Huizinga, and E. P. Thompson, and though I cannot claim either any particular affinity with their methods, interests, or approach, nor, obviously, any aspiration to their greatness, something of that inspiration remains with me still, in that I do my best to combine my interests in literature and culture with an understanding of the historical bases of that literature and culture; and I remain deeply interested in the experiences and travails of ordinary people, to the extent that I believe it is a responsibility of the historian to ensure that they—the silent majority of the past—are not forgotten in our increasingly unremembering age.
My doctoral dissertation was an effort (inevitably not entirely successful) to understand some ways of remembering: I examined the ways in which historians writing about the new political entities formed after the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the west used concepts of the past, and to what purpose. The post-Roman world in western Europe inherited three broad means of conceptualising the past: Biblical, Roman, and ‘barbarian’ (the concept of the barbarian is far too complex to discuss here, and wikipedia is, I fear, not to be trusted with such things). The first two are relatively well-documented (though much needs to be done on understanding their use by medieval historians); the barbarian past remains a shadowy sceptre for us, visible only through the lens of Latin, Christian learning. My main focus was how this barbarian past was accessed, and integrated into a notion of history that was primarily Roman and Biblical. The ideas formulated during this period remained, in many cases, very influential for the whole of the middle ages, and indeed often still have an influence today: it is important to remember, North America, that people do still care, in France and Germany, about whether or not Charlemagne was ‘German’ or ‘French’! Concepts of identity and nationhood first vaguely articulated in the middle ages have often been used in the times since, but unfortunately, there has been a lot of confusion of medieval and modern concepts, leading to rather woolly and unnecessarily anachronistic readings of medieval views of identity. In my work, I tried to understand not so much the ‘facts’, such as they are, but rather the emotive and political content and function of historiography: why was a certain past remembered, and not others, what functions did it have, and what did people feel about their past(s)? (I haven’t yet got round to turning this into a book, but I will, I will… Any readers who have written a dissertation themselves will recognise the scars concealed in these lines!)
Concurrent with my dissertation, I continued my work on literature,
primarily Old Norse and Middle High German literature; one fruit of this was a
recently published monograph (September 2011) that examines the historical
value of the Old Norse
kings’ sagas (narratives about medieval Scandinavian, primarily Norwegian, kings), non-native influence in
Scandinavian historiography, and the uses of the past in medieval
Another long-term project concerns medieval economic history. It’s boring (for most people), I know—but I believe that understanding the basics of human existence is a fundamental part of historical research. The medieval literature that I love would not have been possible without the economic conditions in which it was produced, not least because for it to be written, the patrons required a certain amount of wealth. Inspired by a graduate seminar taught by Lawrin Armstrong, I have been working for the past little (all right: actually far too long) while on a paper on the transition to capitalism in medieval and early modern Europe, in which I compare developments in Germany and England between the tenth and eighteenth centuries. This paper revisits the ‘Brenner debate’ in the light of the last 25 years’ scholarship, and attempts to reformulate the question as to how and why modern capitalism originated. The subject is rather too complicated to summarise quickly here, but I hope to have an extended abstract linked here whenever I next update this page. This will hopefully be followed by a paper reviewing the so-called Great Divergence debate in the light of recent scholarship and, in particular, in the light of my own findings about Europe in the very long run. Eventually, I would hope to work on a project examining social and economic transformation in Germany from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries in comparative perspective; and as I work on this topic, I get increasingly interested in the history of histories (and theories) of capitalism, and I hope that at some point something will come out of this interest. This would tie in to something else I find increasingly fascinating: the culture of early capitalism. The interest in this derives, at least in part, from the present moment in our economic, social, and cultural history, and from the fact that I am more and more convinced that the transformation of social relations to capitalism was not solely, perhaps not even primarily, an economic or materialist development, but had to do fundamentally with mentality and culture. At a rather more down-to-earth level, and connected with my interest in producing work that is also pedagogically useful, I would like at some point (if I ever actually manage to find some time) to put together a collection of primary sources (in translation) for early medieval economic history. From my work on this subject, I’ve found that the primary sources, not being intended for economic historians, are often very hard to find, scattered all over the place in the most unlikely of works; many of them are published in periodicals or series that are not easily accessible, and some have not been edited for a very long time indeed, making them even more difficult to locate. A collection would provide a useful tool both for students and for practicing historians, since it could put the important sources in one place, and provide brief introductions to the problems of the various different kinds of material (e.g. Carolingian polyptychs; cartularies; hagiographies; coins and other archaeological finds), as well as a brief discussion of some of the problems involved in understanding an translating this material. This would, I hope, be coupled with a synthesis (though hopefully not quite a ‘textbook’) on medieval (or pre-modern) Germany, something I keep thinking about, and for which I already have an outline, but alas no time to write it. It is certainly an important desideratum: there exists no good synthesis in English of medieval German history, and even in German, there is nothing up-to-date that really balances the various aspects—economic, social, political, cultural—in one volume.
The past is one thing; one of the greatest concerns of
people in the past, as in the present, was and is: the future. Where do we go
when we die, how do we ensure it’s a good place, and how do we control or
influence the actions of those who remain alive after us? This can, in a very
general sense, be called the social and cultural history of death, and of
attitudes to it. For medieval people, the concern with death was more important
than we can imagine, since Christian theology was, for much of the period,
based on the notion of an afterlife, and on ways of ensuring that one had a
‘good death’ so that one would be among the elect on the Day of Judgement.
Perhaps especially in the late medieval period, after the devastation of the
plagues, the concern with death becomes a very prominent theme in art and
literature; from this period, we also have an increase in numbers of
documentary sources, the most important of which are the hundreds of wills
extant from many urban centres of Europe. I first started working on death as
an undergraduate, with a paper on the Totentanz-texts, Johannes
von Tepl’s Ackermann,
and Luther’s sermons. I
became dissatisfied with what I perceived as a disconnect between the artistic
and theological responses to death, and the facts of everyday life: I was not
convinced that the wholly negative view of life so prevalent in most works
dealing with death from the later middle ages was necessarily shared by most
ordinary people, even when they were at the point of death. This lead me to
start thinking about other kinds of sources from which I could get some idea of
people’s reactions to death at a more quotidian level. The result of my work is
an as yet unpublished paper on the wills of Braunschweig, which I need
to expand with consideration of wills and other sources stretching into the
sixteenth century (I have so far only worked with fourteenth-century material),
to provide a study preliminary to what I hope will be a larger study of lay
religious practice in late medieval and early modern Germany. As I have by now
worked on a number of different sources, ranging from artworks and literary
texts, through funeral sermons and theological tracts, to wills, I am beginning
to get some idea of how I could approach a social and cultural history of
death, or more broadly, study lay religious practice in my period, using
responses to the fact of death as one of the main kinds of evidence. At some
point, I hope to be able to work on a large project on this subject, examining
theological and literary texts, art, and also, more importantly, and central to
my purpose, evidence of a more quotidian kind, such as letters, wills, funeral
orations and sermons, biographies and autobiographies, and in some cases also
chronicles. Any conclusions would, of course, have to be examined against the
backdrop of what is known of economic, demographic and social conditions at the
time. I’m hoping I’ll be able to work on the period roughly between 1200–1700,
since this would allow me to test the evidence for changes caused by the
Reformation, and perhaps provide some additional depth to what we know of how
this series of events affected the lives of people in German-speaking