Greg Jenner's Blog

SUGGESTED READING

If you’ve enjoyed this book, and you’d like to know more about the subjects covered, here are some reading recommendations you might like. I’ve tried to prioritise things which are affordable, accessibly written, and available without a university library login, but sometimes the only sources I consulted were academic journal articles or PhD theses. Happy reading!

CHAPTER 1: FACT OR FICTION?

Did Anne Boleyn Have Three Nipples? My History Teacher Said This Was Used As Evidence Of Witchcraft Against Her At Her Trial Stephanie Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the ScreenSusan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: In Search of the Tudors’ Most Notorious Queen

 2. Is It True That A Dead Pope Was Put On Trial?

John Julius Norwich, The Popes: A History Chris Wickham, Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900–1150 (this book is more scholarly in tone) Who Was The Richest Person That Ever Lived And What Made Him Or Her So Rich?  John Kampfner, The Rich: From Slaves to Super-Yachts: A 2,000-Year History (this is more of a satirical, journalistic sweep through the story of modern oligarchs and how they compare to History’s wealthiest people, but it has some enjoyable stories)Modern biographies of Mansa Musa tend to be a bit sensationalist, and repeat debunked myths, so may I instead recommend François-Xavier Fauvelle’s book The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages which is very readableGreg Steinmetz, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger Philip Beresford & William D. Rubinstein, The Richest of the Rich: The Wealthiest 250 People in Britain since 1066 – this is a little dated now, but it was compiled by a History professor and the editor of the ‘Sunday Times Rich List’. Are You Fed Up With People Saying “Atlantis Proves Aliens Are Real”? Ronald H. Fritze, Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions Stephen P. Kershaw, A Brief History of Atlantis: Plato’s Ideal State

 

CHAPTER 2: ORIGINS & FIRSTS

When was the first joke book written and were there any funny ones in it? –Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up Jim Holt, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes

      6. When was the first Monday?

Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week – this is scholarly stuff, but interesting  What conditions did the Windrush generation meet when they arrived in the UK? David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People In Britain Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal When did birthdays start being a thing people celebrated or even remembered? Katheryn Argentsinger, ‘Birthday Rituals: Friends and Patrons in Roman Poetry and Cult’ in Classical Antiquity, Oct., 1992, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Oct., 1992) – sorry, properly academic, this one!

CHAPTER 3: HEALTH & MEDICINE

How Did Women Manage Their Periods Before The 20th Century? Elissa Stein, Susan Kim, Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England – an academic book, and pricey too, but really interestingLook up Professor Helen King for lots of interesting work on ancient ideas of medicine and women’s medicine – she blogs and broadcasts regularly, even if her academic writing is harder to accessHas Hay-Fever Always Been An Allergy, Or Do We Only Suffer From It Now That We Live In Cities? Mark Jackson, Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady Did European People Really Eat Ground-Up Mummies?Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians What Is The Strangest (And On The Surface Most Incredulous) Medical Procedure That Turned Out To Be Medically Sound ?Charles G. Gross, A Hole in the Head: More Tales in the History of NeuroscienceHarold Ellis, A Brief History of Surgery 13 . Apart From The Modern Age, In Which Period In History Would We Have Been Best Able To Deal With A Zombie Causing Virus ?Neil Price, The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

CHAPTER 4: FOOD

Who Was the First Vegetarian? Colin Spencer, Vegetarianism: A History How Old Is Curry? Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Exotic England: The Making of a Curious Nation

  Who Invented Meringue and Why?

Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food

  How Did Early Humans Discover How to Make Bread?

William Rubel, Bread: A Global History

CHAPTER 5: HISTORIOGRAPHY

I’m A Zoologist And We Like Dinosaurs A LOT. But These Are ‘Prehistoric’. So, When Did ‘History’ Begin? Chris Gosden, Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction H. Carr, What Is History? – a definitive classic, but a little dryHelen Carr & Suzannah Lipscomb (editors), What Is History Now? – a new book featuring thoughtful essays from lots of eminent public historians Who Names Historical Periods? And What Will Future Historians Call Us, Given That ‘Elizabethan’ Is Already Taken? Helen Carr & Suzannah Lipscomb (editors), What Is History Now? – a new book featuring thoughtful essays from lots of eminent public historiansJacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History Into Periods?

    20. What Are Some Of The Greatest ‘Lost Texts’ From History That We Know Existed, But Haven’t Survived?

Stuart Kelly, The Book of Lost Books, An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You Will Never Read   What’s Your Favourite Historical “What If?” – Asked by DaveMark Millar, Superman: Red Son – a classic comic book, asking what would have happened if Superman had crash-landed in Soviet Ukraine instead?Catherine Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction Richard J. Evans, Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History – not the easiest to read, but Evans is a powerful thinker

CHAPTER 6: ANIMALS & NATURE

Why is the Devil a goat? Robert Munchembled, A History of the Devil: From the Middle Ages to the Present

 23. When and Why did we Start Keeping Hamsters as Pets?

Michael R. Murphy, ‘History of Syrian Golden Hamster’, inI. Siegel, The Hamster: Reproduction and Behaviour How Much Horse Faeces And Urine Was Created Per Day In London During The Reign Of Henry VIII, And What Was Done With It All?   Peter Edwards , The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England Leona J Skelton, Sanitation in Urban Britain, 1560-1700 Hannah Velten, Beastly London: A History of Animals in the City

 25. When and where were seeds first sold in packets, and by whom? What did people use before then?

Roderick Floud, An Economic History of the English GardenPeter Frankopan, The Silk Roads Amy Bess Williams Miller, Shaker Herbs: A History and a Compendium Thomas J. Mickey, America’s Romance with the English Garden Malcolm Thick, ‘Garden seeds in England before the late eighteenth century – II, The Trade in Seeds to 1760’   Are there any trees in history that have had a big impact/funny stories? – Simon Wills, A History of Trees Jonathan Drori, Around The World in 80 Trees

CHAPTER 7: FASHION & BEAUTY

What are some of the strangest qualities ever considered signs of great beauty and why? Gretchen E. Henderson, Ugliness, A Cultural HistoryUmberto Eco, On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea – written by one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century, it’s not an easy read but it is fascinatingRebecca M. Herzig, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal   Why do Greek statues have small penises? David M. Friedman, A Mind of its Own: A Cultural History of the PenisPaul Chrystal, In Bed with the Ancient Greeks When did high heels come into fashion and why are they found mainly on women’s shoes? Elizabeth Semmelhack, Shoes: The Meaning of Style   Which beauty treatment ended up becoming the most dangerous or deadly? Sarah Jane Downing, Beauty and Cosmetics – 1550 to 1950 Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery

CHAPTER 8: IDEAS & TECHNOLOGY

Who Invented Maths? John Stillwell, Mathematics and Its History: A Concise Edition Eleanor Robson and Jacqueline Stedall (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics – pretty academic stuff, this…This is a great website: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/ You may also enjoy the writing of Alex Bellos, who has the knack for making maths lively for the uninitiated

      32. When were mirrors invented and did people know what they looked like before then?

Mark Pendergrast, Mirror Mirror, A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection Sabine Melchior-Bonnet , The Mirror: A History   Who first had the idea of actually going to the moon or another planet? Did they have any idea how?   Barbara J. Shapiro, John Wilkins, 1614-72 – an old book that you might need to get second hand, but it’s a good study of his ideasJohn Wilkins, A discourse concerning a new world & another planet in 2 bookes – you can read this online   How can you tell that the earliest Stone Age tools are actually tools, and not just rocks?   John C. Whittaker, Flintknapping: Making and Understanding Stone Tools

CHAPTER 9: NATIONS & EMPIRES

China is massive. If the Emperor died, or a new law was passed, how long did it take for news to reach everyone ?   Mark Edward Lewis & Timothy Brook, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire (History of Imperial China): The Tang Dynasty Timothy Brook, ‘Communications and Commerce’ in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 8: The Ming Dynasty, Part 2: 1368-1644 ) Denis C. Twitchett, Frederick W. Mote)   Did Genghis Khan plant trees wherever he went? Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads John Man, The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China Why is Italy called Italy? Vincent Cronin, Italy: A History Charles L. Killinger, The History of ItalyDavid Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples   How did the modern boundaries of African nations come to be? Paul Nugent, Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa – a chunky academic publication, but the most up-to-date scholarshipSteven Press, Rogue Empires: Conmen and Contracts in Europe’s Scramble for Africa – a bit too reliant on the European sources and perspective, but worth a readSee also academic articles by Camille Lefebvre and Anthony Asiwaju

CHAPTER 10: WARS & BATTLES

Why Did the Ashanti People Keep a Golden Stool? – Asked by Nana PokuD. McLeod, The Asante – out of print and a bit dated, but worth a lookMy BBC podcast You’re Dead To Me has an episode about the Asante featuring the museum curator and art historian Dr Gus Casely-Hayford and the British-Ghanaian comedian Sophie DukerYou can see beautiful examples of Asante stools in the online collections of many major museums   Why are there so many penises shown on the Bayeux Tapestry, although mainly for horses? – Asked by Pat   David Musgrove & Michael Lewis, The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry: Unravelling the Norman Conquest Carola Hicks, The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece   What is the least consequential, but most famous battle that’s entered the public consciousness? — Asked by Iain   Anne Curry, Agincourt: A New History Juliet Barker, Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the BattleStephen Cooper, Agincourt, Myth and Reality 1415-2015   A boyhood question to which I never received a satisfactory answer… How did knights in full armour satisfy their need to go to the toilet?   Christopher Gravett & Chris McNab, The Medieval Knight – suitable for younger readers tooDonald Larocca, How to Read European Armor (Metropolitan Museum of Art) – an art historian’s guide to the history of how armour evolved

CHAPTER 11: LANGUAGE & COMMUNICATION

When was sign language first used in the UK, and when was the first hearing aid created? – Asked by DanalarGerald Shea, The Language of Light, A History of Silent VoicesJaipreet Virdi, Medicalizing Deafness: Aural Surgery in Victorian Britain Katie Booth, The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer (Edited), The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education   How did empires from different continents communicate? Were there translators? – Asked by Thomas

·      Frances Karttunen, Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors

·      Ruth Rowland, Interpreters as Diplomats: A Diplomatic History of the Role of Interpreters in World Politics

Lucas Christopoulos, ‘Hellenes and Romans in Ancient China’, Sino-Platonic Papers, Number 230, August 2012, pp. 44Rachel Mairs. “‘TRANSLATOR, TRADITOR’: THE INTERPRETER AS TRAITOR IN CLASSICAL TRADITION.” Greece & Rome, vol. 58, no. 1, 2011Kayoko Takeda & Jesus Baigorri-Jalón (editors), New Insights in the History of Interpreting

 

Where do names for places in other languages come from? For example, London vs Londres, Munich vs München – is there an official system in place?   John Everett-Heath, Place Names of the World: Historical Context, Meanings and Changes  Adrian Room, Placenames of the World: Origins and Meanings of the Names for 6,600 Countries, Cities, Territories, Natural Features, and Historic Sites   How do we know what people’s accents and languages sounded like in the past? Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language David Crystal , The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation Joshua C. Kendall, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture Sidney Allen, Vox Latina 2nd ed: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin

CHAPTER 12: HISTORY IN POP CULTURE

Which popular historical films are the most accurate and do you get annoyed when you know how wrong they’ve got something? Alex von Tunzelmann, Reel History: The World According to the Movies   What did the Flintstones get right about the Stone Age? Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and ArtRoland Ennos, The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped The Whole Of Human History Francis Pryor , Scenes from Prehistoric Life: From the Ice Age to the Coming of the Romans: One Million Years of Life in the British Isles   Why do we care so much about the Tudors in England? Asked by Nick   Cliff Davies, ‘Is Tudor England a myth?’, University of Oxford,

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2012-05-29-tudor-england-myth  

Basil Glynn ‘The Tudors’ in The British Monarchy on Screen, (ed. Mandy Merck)

 

Which people from history would you hire for an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist? Henry ‘Box’ Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain Joseph Needham, Heavenly Clockwork: The Great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China – an old book in reprint, rather dated but full of fascinating technical infoBennetta Jules-Rosette , Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image – there are countless books about this extraordinary woman, but they are all unreliable. This is a better attempt to analyse her life and how she portrayed herselfAn essay on Mary Jane Richards (Mary Bowser) by the novelist who wrote about her https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-vanishing-black-woman-spy-reappears/ Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-century Formosan Hoax Russell Braddon, Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

 

 

The post ASK A HISTORIAN – Suggested Reading & Select Bibliography appeared first on Greg Jenner.

I’ve just made a 3 hour BBC Radio 4 Extra documentary called Hilarious Histories: What’s So Funny About The Past? about how comedy writers have used history as source material. It’s a fun programme which you can hear on BBC Sounds here

But to promote the programme, I also wrote this short blog about my favourite historical comedies when I was growing up. Hope you like it!

The post My favourite historical comedies! appeared first on Greg Jenner.

Hello, I’m normally a fairly upbeat chap and, if you follow my career, you’ll know I try quite hard to make history entertaining and enjoyable. I am not above writing a gratuitous fart joke (or seven). But please forgive me for this more serious, and painful, post. I’m in a strange mood while writing it, and there’s a lot on my mind. Namely, the Holocaust.

It’s Passover Week in the Jewish calendar, a time with considerable emotional heft for those of the Jewish faith, but that hasn’t stopped a trio of political figures from three separate nations uttering some truly appalling things. It began with the UK Labour Party somewhat feebly chastising Ken Livingstone for wrongly asserting that Hitler supported Zionism (he didn’t). The idiocy baton was then passed to America, where the White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, clumsily compared Syrian President Assad to Hitler, noting that the former was worse because Hitler didn’t gas his own people. This was a monumentally stupid misstatement, one for which he has now apologised, but it is deeply regrettable that forgetting about the Holocaust in Passover Week is par for the course from the shambolic Trump administration.

But perhaps the more dangerous utterance this week was not a spokesman’s stupid blunder, or the stale opinions of a semi-retired controversialist, but was from the mouth of a potential future leader of France. Marine Le Pen, who has worked hard to try and detoxify her father’s dangerous right wing party (Le Front National) denied that France’s authorities had been complicit in the rounding up of French Jews during the Nazi occupation of WW2. This is a fact of history proven many times over by historians, and one officially endorsed by the French state since 1995. Her malicious denial is not just factually incorrect, it’s downright disgusting.

As it happens, I’m equally as interested in the politics of France as I am in those of the USA. I am, you see, half-French (my weird hair and fondness for stripy t-shirts is probably a bit of a giveaway). But, if I’m honest, I’ve never known that much about my French heritage beyond my grandparents’ generation. It’s only recently that my mother and aunt have been able to show me family trees and documents that reveal the truth of what happened to our family before the 1950s. Just last month, we realised our 19th century ancestors also included several generations of Italians, my favourite of them being a Milanese ice cream maker, so that was a rather charming discovery.

The sharper revelation arrived on January 20th, during Donald Trump’s inaugural address to the American people. As I winced at his ugly oratory, and cheered myself up by retweeting droll barbs on Twitter, an email popped into my inbox from my mother. I quickly opened it, forgetting what it was she had promised to send me. Immediately it made me cry.  There in black and white was a series of scanned documents listing the details of my great-grandfather’s transportation to Auschwitz.

Scroll forward to this week, and — in another strange coincidence of depressing American rhetoric and painful family history — members of my family were visiting the Shoah Memorial in Paris just as Sean Spicer was making his Hitler blunder. This important museum is dedicated to remembering French Jews whose lives were destroyed by the Holocaust. And there, on the wall among a collage of smiling faces in black & white, was a photo of my great-aunt posing with another Jewish girl, in happier times. I’m not going to share the photo, or tell you her name, because that is too personal. But let me tell you what happened to her, and to her father — the man whose transportation records I had recently seen for the first time.

She was a Jew living in France, born to Algerian and Tunisian immigrants, and a week before her 16th birthday she was deported to a Polish concentration camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau. This was July 1944, and I don’t know when she’d been rounded up, or how long she’d been held in the infamous Parisian internment camp at Drancy. The arrests of French Jews had begun in 1941, and, until July 1943, Drancy had been administrated by collaborating French police. That summer, however, the SS officer Alois Brunner had arrived to take over, and it was under his tenure that the brutality escalated (Brunner was never brought to justice for his crimes, though he was convicted in absentia). My great-aunt was probably arrested and detained by her own countrymen, but she was deported to a deathcamp on the orders of a Nazi. Marine Le Pen would have you forget the first part of that sentence. Don’t let her. Miraculously, this young woman survived the horrors. Decades later, I would meet her a handful of times, and would find it puzzling that she wasn’t closer to her older sister, my grandmother. It’s only now that I understand why.

Years before the hulking menace of occupation and concentration camps, the family had already been touched by tragedy. Their Tunisian mother had died when they were little girls, and their Algerian father – my great-grandfather – had seemingly decided against being a single parent. Instead, the sisters (who were aged just 4 and 9), were separated for several months, sent to live on different farms far away from the city, before being permanently placed in the Rothschild orphanage in Paris to be raised by caring strangers.  Their father went back to work, probably in a jeweller’s workshop. Grieving for their mother, and with those long months of early separation doing its sad work, it seems the sisters were never able to form a strong bond. Perhaps the 5-year age gap was just too big.

By the time Nazi tanks rolled across the fields of France, my grandmother – the older of the two – had left the care of the home, but remained at the orphanage as a member of the kitchen staff. In the meantime, their widowed father had embarked on a love affair with a French woman. At some point the relationship turned sour. When the French police began rounding up Jews, it was his vengeful ex-lover who betrayed him to the police. He too was interned at Drancy. On November 20th 1943, four days before his 55th birthday, he was put on a train to Auschwitz where he was subsequently murdered in Hitler’s unspeakably evil policy known euphemistically as the Final Solution. His crime was being a Jew.

It’s estimated that 6 million people were annihilated in the Holocaust, a chilling word which means “entirely burned” in Greek. Not all of these victims were Jews: other targeted groups included LGBT people, those with physical disabilities or learning difficulties, people of colour, political opponents to Hitler’s rule, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma Gypsies, ethnic Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, resistance fighters, petty criminals, and many more. It’s thought that France’s Jewish victims numbered 76,000, of whom roughly 11,000 were children. About 65,000 of that total number were initially held at Drancy before transportation to the deathcamps. Only 2,000 returned alive, my great-aunt being one of them.

Given the mammoth scale of death in the Holocaust, we might view 76,000 victims as fewer than we would have expected in a nation the size of France. Thankfully, some had been able to flee the country before the authorities snared them, often aided by those non-Jews who found the escalating atmosphere of anti-Semitism to be morally abhorrent. Today these compassionate souls, who risked much to offer salvation to the persecuted, are known in France as ‘les Justes’. In Israel they are venerated as the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’. Sadly, my family received no such help.

All the same, my grandmother was never caught by the Nazis. She was 19 when the arrests began, and – presumably having already heard of her father’s fate – had tried to warn her younger sister to keep a low profile. It did not work. The orphanage was raided and we know what happened next. Instead, my grandmother spent the whole period of Nazi occupation living in anxious safety, wondering if she’d ever see her family again. In 1945, upon the liberation of the concentration camps, she was told to go to a nearby Parisian hotel where a welcome surprise awaited her. It was her 17 year old sister, back from hell on earth. It’s gut-wrenching to know that, in her final years, my grandmother (we called her Mamie) quietly admitted she wished it had been her father instead.

Our beloved, complicated Mamie died in 2013, just hours after my fiancée and I had travelled urgently to Paris to show her the engagement ring and invite her to our wedding. We knew she was ill, but had no warning that it was the end. She’d endured so much in life, I genuinely thought she’d make it to see us walk up the aisle, a whole year later. In hindsight, I realise she knew otherwise. It goes without saying that I wouldn’t exist to write this if Hitler had got his way, so you might expect the telling of this tragic story to have been a crucial part of my upbringing – a family ritual of pained appreciation for what did not come to pass. But no. This is all confusingly new to me.

Despite being a 34 year old professional historian, only now am I learning the terrible specifics of my family’s experiences in history’s most infamous atrocity. How on earth did I not know this stuff already? Well, the reasons are quite straightforward. As a wounded France got back to its feet, my grandmother married a nice French Catholic man who – worried about her future safety – asked her to change faith to France’s preferred choice. After all, Jews had always been under suspicion, long before the Holocaust, and who knew what the future would bring? They raised two daughters (my mother and my aunt) not as North African scholars of the Torah, but as middle class Catholic schoolgirls with wimple-wearing nuns for teachers. My mother then moved to England and married my vaguely C of E father, meaning my brother and I were raised with no religion at all.

Consequently, all of us grew up with no understanding of Jewish culture, and found it amusingly odd when my grandmother would exclaim “Mazel Tov!” at moments of joy. Alas, my Gallic language skills are patchy at best, having grown up as a stubbornly reluctant Frenchman (until 1998 delivered footballing glory for France, and my own feelings of patriotism unexpectedly blossomed). So, I never had those deep and meaningful conversations with my grandmother. But, even if I had done so, she rarely talked to us about her horrific youth, only having opened up to her daughters. In response to this revelation, my French aunt began exploring our Jewish heritage through her artistic exploits (she’s always been a talented painter), but my mother didn’t feel ready to follow this path. The fact that we were in England meant it never quite sunk in for me. I grew up knowing WW2 had been traumatic for Mamie, but the specifics were hazy.

It’s only since my grandmother’s death that the rest of us have started to investigate what must have been an extraordinarily traumatic wound. I can only imagine the conflicting emotions she must have felt when she saw her sister at social occasions, such as Christmas (a festival she must only have adopted in her 20s?), and I know from my mother’s reports of growing up in the same house that sometimes it all became too much. There were mental health episodes that required professional care away from the family home, and many years later – after my grandfather had died – she would stay with us in England for a fortnight or more, every summer, during which she often demonstrated a certain flair for the dramatic. I always thought she was just very, very French. And she was. But now I realise there was so much more bubbling away under the surface. Mamie carried her past with her every day, as do we all, and yet it was not a burden I inherited. Her past was not passed on when she passed on.

This happens sometimes. History’s legacy is everywhere in the modern world. THEN is the largest constituent part of what makes up NOW – it’s everywhere we look, it’s the inherited words we speak, the ancient streets we walk, the old buildings we gather in, the timeless style of clothes we wear, the eternal ideas we carry in our minds. We dwell in the culture forged by our ancestors, their voices echo in our conversations. Yet, alas, we don’t always realise it. Each new generation arrives with less to remember than their parents, instead acquiring their own new knowledge and experiences to fill the mental gap. Sometimes society forgets, or stops caring, about what was once considered to be vital information.

In 1995, President Jacques Chirac admitted in a speech that France had been complicit in the rounding up and transportation of Jews. In 2017, Marine Le Pen tried to weasel her way out of that truth because her shallow brand of jingoism won’t accommodate such national shame. This has angered me twice: once as historian and once as a descendant of the victims. What scares me most is that some will have believed her. Memories can fade so fast. Fifty years ago, the Boer War remained a big deal because veterans still slowly pottered around the streets of Britain. Now? Nothing…

We have already lost the WW1 generation, and next year’s armistice centenary will be the grand finale, after which public interest will gradually wither through each passing decade. Soon we will lose the WW2 generation, and yet already we see alarming Holocaust revisionism doing big numbers on Google searches. The sinister pushback has already commenced. It’s easier to lie when there are fewer witnesses to discredit your bullshit, and once they are gone it becomes the duty of historians to keep these human experiences in the public’s mind. Often we have less success than we’d like. Historians don’t get as much airtime as politicians.

And so I come back around to Spicer, Livingstone and Le Pen. When politicians stand before us and lie, or speak confidently despite their ignorance, we must resist the seduction of their language. In times of complexity, simplicity is tempting. A leader who offers soundbite solutions is enthralling. Podium rhetoric can seemingly solve anything when life is hard and money is tight. But such quick fixes are mirages in the desert. The past was vastly complex, and modern politics isn’t much simpler. When politicians invoke the past in their campaign speeches, we must not implicitly assume they know what they’re talking about.

Le Pen is a toxic demagogue in waiting, and her comments were deliberate deniallism, but that’s not to say all politicians are evil bastards, or shit-for-brains numpties – I tend to be fairly romantic about the idea of public service, and many of them work tirelessly to serve their constituents. If they are ever wrong, often it is born of ignorance, not cynicism. But wrongness is still a bladed weapon, all the same. We have to immunize ourselves against these lubricated lies that slip so easily into our perception of the world. When we hear some grand claim in a speech, or see a convincing meme in our social media timeline, we owe it to ourselves to check it against a reliable source. In such a case as Spicer, Livingstone and Le Pen (is it me, or does that not sound like a disreputable law firm in a Dickens novel?), many historians on Twitter were quick to fact-check the dangerous errors, and they will often give up their time to answer genuine questions from the public, particularly pertaining to national politics.

It’s not our fault if we are misled by the speech we encounter. After all, this stuff is hard. There’s a reason historians and scientists spend years studying a single subject. To understand the complex interconnectedness of cause and effect requires more than a cursory glance at Wikipedia, or some graph on Twitter. Even after a lifetime of scrutiny, historians can still scratch their heads in frustration at the tantalising unknowability of lost eras. We also disagree over the same evidence, so there isn’t always a single definitive truth anyway. The mountain of things I do not know about the past is mind-bogglingly enormous — and reading history is pretty much all I do, every day.

This week, it was my family’s truth which was corrupted by dangerous political speech. Next week it will be someone else’s. But the fallacious statements from Livingstone, Spicer, and Le Pen were successfully challenged thanks to the combined efforts of eyewitnesses, historians, and the survivors themselves, all of whom contributed over the years to help build up an understanding of what happened in the Holocaust. In the Shoah Memorial in Paris — and other institutions like it — there are documents, photos, diaries, and carefully-assembled rosters of names, dates, and places; the weight of evidence that defies denialists.

In all walks of life there are people who dedicate their lives to curating and interpreting such evidence, so that the rest of us can know things. They number in their ranks not just historians, but also journalists, scientists, legal scholars, and many more. Often they will debate passionately amongst themselves, and sometimes we won’t subscribe to their ideas, choosing instead those of their rival colleagues. This is ok. Provided they build their arguments on verifiable evidence, disagreement over interpretation is a healthy democracy at work.

Now, however, we find ourselves drowning in a torrent of fake news and deliberate disinformation that has no relation to truth whatsoever. It must be said, I worry about this a lot, frequently wringing my hands over New Scientist articles about confirmation bias and the psychology of conspiratorial thinking. But, thanks to the labours of those who care about facts, the truth will always float to the surface. Let us paddle over to it, and cling to its reassuring buoyancy while we figure out what the hell to do with all the bullshitters.

Thanks for reading this.

Greg

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Hi, I was recently asked in an interview when in history was the greatest time to be alive? It’s a very difficult question to answer, so I rambled on a bit, but – when pushed – I thought a person would have had a good shot of a decent life in Bronze Age India, during the time of the Harappans.
Click the link to read my full answer. 

 

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Hi!

I saw BBC sports journalist Dan Walker tweet this lovely joke about the Great British Bake Off this morning, and it instantly got me thinking.

In terms of very expensive tents, history is full of them – Genghis Khan had one, and so did King Xerxes of Persia (it was captured by the enemy, thank you Tom Holland for that nugget of trivia). But the most expensive tent of 2016 is that lovely white marquee acquired by Channel 4 for a reported £75m, spread over three years. And one which will come without Mel, Sue and Mary (Paul Hollywood is living up to his big bucks surname).

But is that the most amount of money ever spent on a tent-based spectacle? If we forgive the technicalities, and forget that there were many tents and pavilions at Henry VIII’s Field of Cloth of Gold diplomatic shindig with his frenemy Francis I of France in 1520, then let’s have some fun by putting this political extravaganza up against BBC One’s primetime cake TV behemoth.

Is it possible to work out which cost more?

Well…

The Field of Cloth of Gold was a dual-funded endeavour, with both France and England throwing cash at it with extraordinary lavishness (and some might say recklessness). King Francis I spent 400,000 livres (£40,000 in Tudor money) on this 2-week spectacle. But the crown later sold off lots of the fabric and accoutrements in 1543, recouping 125,000 livres.  So, let’s be generous and say he only spent £27,000 / 275,000 livres. The annual royal expenditure in running the court, in 1523, was 543,800 livres. But, in terms of the wider French economy, the field of Cloth of Gold cost about 1/8 of the state’s annual budget. That is a huge amount.

King Henry VIII, never one for modesty, spent £36,000 on the festivities – more than his royal household’s entire annual expenditure, and more than 1/3 of England’s total annual income of £90,000. By Tudor standards, that is CRAZY MONEY.

In summary, the Field of Cloth of Gold – with all its trappings (including wine fountain and gold-encrusted monkeys, obviously) – cost £63,000 in Tudor money. But now for the really hard bit. Trying to measure equivalent value across the centuries is an almost impossible task, there really is no accurate way to do it. There are loads of different techniques, and they all give hugely varying results, so please forgive this next section in its crudeness. I’m not an economic historian, and this is a very blunt calculation hastily cobbled together on a wet Thursday morning.

In modern money, a RPI currency converter that measures inflation on the National Archives website converts £63,000 in Tudor money into £32.3m (it only goes up to 2005, so I then calculated the inflation over the last decade and added it on) – but this is a very confusing measure that does little to represent the buying power in an economy. These days £32.3m will buy you a large mansion in London, or a pretty good premier league striker. But in Tudor times, £63,000 (or £32.3m if we trust the National Archives) would have equated to enough cash to hire 2.1m labourers for a day, or buy 165,000 cows or 45,000 horses.

By contrast, with a modern labourer earning £100 per day, Channel 4 could now only afford to pay 750,000 labourers for a day with their 3 year £75m GBBO budget. I’m not sure what the going rate is for a cow. Sorry. {UPDATE: apparently it’s £1100 per cow on average, according to Twitter’s own @LeahFHardy}

Right, then. Though it’s impossible to accurately measure like-for-like with historical price conversion (not least because there was a big spike in food prices in the mid-1500s), in terms of wage comparison then we could tent-atively say GBBO’s tent is three times less expensive than the Field of Cloth of Gold.

But this is pretty misleading. In terms of the total economy, and ignoring much more useful measures like GDP, the Field of Cloth of Gold cost the proportion of government revenue equivalent to what our respective governments spend now on Welfare and the NHS. More than a third of all its cash went on a 2-week festival.  Basically, if we held it again today, it would cost hundreds of billions. It would even cost way more than the Millennium Dome (which looks like a tent but is, in fact, a permanent structure). Now, obviously, it wouldn’t actually cost anything like those projects, and that’s the annoying problem of measuring money across the centuries, but you know what I mean.

{UPDATE:} Here’s a very useful contribution from BBC Newnight’s Policy Editor Chris Cook (@xtophercook on twitter) that shows just how many ways there are to compare historical monetary values, all of them bafflingly different in their outcome. But, basically, Henry VIII’s tent cost a lot of cash.  

So, at £25m per year, the Great British Bake Off is a bargain! Sort of…

 

WANT MORE FUN COMPARISONS BETWEEN TODAY AND THE PAST? CHECK OUT MY BOOK – AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK, KINDLE AND AUDIOBOOK 

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Versailles on BBC2 – does it need to be historically accurate to be enjoyable?

VERSAILLES – VICTORIA – POLDARK – RIPPER STREET – PEAKY BLINDERS – MAD MEN – REIGN –

LINCOLN – THE BIG SHORT – SPOTLIGHT – BRAVEHEART – THE IMITATION GAME – THE BUTLER

These are all high profile historical dramas/films. But here’s a question for you:

“…should TV dramas & movies be historically accurate?”

——————————————————–

As you may know, I work as a Historical Adviser to TV shows set in the past — Horrible Histories has been my life for the past 8 years, and this requires a decent knowledge of world history from the Stone Age to the Phone Age, but I’ve also worked on a few historical TV dramas about specific periods of history where my job is to deliver highly focused contextual information to the production team.

The challenges of making these sort of programmes are numerous, and I lecture about them sometimes in British universities, but there are central issues that always come up. The most obvious example is the question that divides opinion wherever you go: is this TV drama historically accurate? And does that matter?

It’s a massive red button topic. Many people, particularly journalists writing newspaper reviews of history dramas, think that historical accuracy is among the most important metrics for measuring a programme’s quality, alongside whether it’s any good. But these reviewers are rarely trained historians. While many historians will agree with them, and I’ve had many a heated debate about Braveheart and The Imitation Game (great films, bad history), such historians will also often acknowledge that it’s also incredibly difficult to even define what we mean when we talk about historical accuracy. History is constantly being rewritten, because it is not the same thing as the past.

On this exact subject, I was interviewed recently by BBC History Magazine for their podcast. In the discussion, I was joined by the excellent Dr Hannah Greig (the expert adviser to BBC’s smash-hit drama Poldark), and we tackled a lot of the big issues that arise when making historical TV dramas.

You may be surprised by our answers. It’s an hour long podcast, and a fairly serious conversation (I’m usually a bit more jokey, but I get quite nerdy when I talk about this subject). But I hope we might lead you to re-examine what you think about historical dramas and the question of historical accuracy.

Thanks, hope you enjoy it!

Greg

And here’s your link to the podcast.

The post Should TV Dramas & Films Be Historically Accurate? appeared first on Greg Jenner.

VERSAILLES – VICTORIA – POLDARK – RIPPER STREET – PEAKY BLINDERS – MAD MEN – REIGN –

LINCOLN – THE BIG SHORT – SPOTLIGHT – BRAVEHEART – THE IMITATION GAME – THE BUTLER

These are all high profile historical dramas/films. But here’s a question for you:

“…should TV dramas & movies be historically accurate?”

——————————————————–

As you may know, I work as a Historical Adviser to TV shows set in the past — Horrible Histories has been my life for the past 8 years, and this requires a decent knowledge of world history from the Stone Age to the Phone Age, but I’ve also worked on a few historical TV dramas about specific periods of history where my job is to deliver highly focused contextual information to the production team.

The challenges of making these sort of programmes are numerous, and I lecture about them sometimes in British universities, but there are central issues that always come up. The most obvious example is the question that divides opinion wherever you go: is this TV drama historically accurate? And does that matter?

It’s a massive red button topic. Many people, particularly journalists writing newspaper reviews of history dramas, think that historical accuracy is among the most important metrics for measuring a programme’s quality, alongside whether it’s any good. But these reviewers are rarely trained historians. While many historians will agree with them, and I’ve had many a heated debate about Braveheart and The Imitation Game (great films, bad history), such historians will also often acknowledge that it’s also incredibly difficult to even define what we mean when we talk about historical accuracy. History is constantly being rewritten, because it is not the same thing as the past.

On this exact subject, I was interviewed recently by BBC History Magazine for their podcast. In the discussion, I was joined by the excellent Dr Hannah Greig (the expert adviser to BBC’s smash-hit drama Poldark), and we tackled a lot of the big issues that arise when making historical TV dramas.

You may be surprised by our answers. It’s an hour long podcast, and a fairly serious conversation (I’m usually a bit more jokey, but I get quite nerdy when I talk about this subject). But I hope we might lead you to re-examine what you think about historical dramas and the question of historical accuracy.

Thanks, hope you enjoy it!

Greg

And here’s your link to the podcast.

The post Should TV Dramas Be Historically Accurate? appeared first on Greg Jenner.

Introduction

Hello! Hopefully you’ve enjoyed watching BBC Two’s Versailles TV drama. Coming from the quills of noted showrunners David Wolstencroft and Simon Mirren, both known for gripping series with a conspiratorial bent (i.e. Spooks), it was no surprise when this drama arrived with a hearty dollop of sex, violence, tension, and intrigue. Speaking as a neutral TV viewer, I loved it – the Versailles TV drama is visually spectacular, but also underpinned by some tight plotting, powerful performances and punchy dialogue. Regardless of its historical content, it’s good telly.

If you watched the broadcasts on BBC Two, you may have seen me and Prof Kate Williams presenting a short discussion show after every episode. That was us wearing our historian hats, but even then we aimed to avoid giving away plot spoilers, and didn’t want to pour cold water on the exciting drama with historical nit-picking. Our goal was to provide better context for the viewer. However, now that the series is over, this feels like a better opportunity to explore some of the ways in which the Versailles TV drama deviated from historical reality.

Firstly, let’s be clear that historical dramas don’t need to be accurate. It’s nice when they are, but it’s not their purpose – drama is entertainment, not educational programming. Representing the past with careful verisimilitude, while also making watchable telly, is a rare and difficult feat. The past was messy. Stories, however, require rigid structure. In the case of Versailles, it’s a series grounded in broader historical truths, but one in which chronology has been manipulated and key characters invented so as to produce a stronger narrative. When events are debated by historians, it understandably dramatises the raciest interpretation of those contested events. More tellingly, it also conjures up its own entirely fictional subplot – though this is loosely based on the real conspiracy of Louis de Rohan and Gilles du Hamel de Latreaumont.

So, given that it’s a thrilling blend of ‘DID HAPPEN!’ ‘MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED!’ ‘DIDN’T HAPPEN!’ then you may be wondering what was poetic license, and what was taken from the pages of history? Hopefully this will help.

Versailles TV Drama: Premise

The series follows King Louis XIV of France as he tries to quash the rebellious nobility by trapping them in the luxurious cage of his new palace – his father’s old hunting lodge at Versailles. In the drama, which is set between 1667 and 1670, we first meet King Louis when he is 29 years old. This seems young, but he had already reigned for 25 years by this point. Or had he? Let’s be clear, Louis wasn’t calling the shots as a four year-old boy, and he was still heavily advised by his mother and her chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, after he reached his legal majority aged 13. It required both of their deaths for King Louis’ political power to be unshackled.

So, despite many years in power, at the start of the Versailles TV drama we find a King who only now is outlining his political goals, and looking to reshape France in his image. Throughout the series, almost all of the action is staged at Versailles: the palace under construction. Indeed, for totally justifiable reasons, the showrunners have made the palace both a key character in its own right and, also, a metaphor for Louis’ psychological development. As the scaffolds go up, so too is Louis constructing himself. Aged 15 he was already dancing in ballets while dressed as the Sun King, but now he is trying to physically, and mentally, embody that persona.

The duality of Versailles and Louis is a fascinating focus for a story, but one that cheats on the history a bit. In reality, Versailles wasn’t the main royal residence until 1682, and would only have been occupied for a couple of months at a time. But if I were writing this series, I would have set the whole thing in Versailles too. It makes for a better story.

Invented Characters



Given the plot twists, and need for thrilling jeopardy, some crucial characters in the series are wholly invented, thereby allowing the showrunners to bump them off without altering history. The fictional villains comprise the conspiratorial Duke of Cassel; the Protestant Béatrice de Claremont (and her innocent daughter, Sophie); Mike, the masked assassin who colludes with Louis de Rohan; and the back-stabbing Montcourt who slaughters the (also fictional) Parthenay family on the roads near Versailles.

Fabien Marchal is entirely fictional

Louis’ fictional allies include the psychopathically effective head of security, Fabien Marchal, who is alarmingly fond of hammers and eye-gouging; his one-armed gardener, Jacques – a sort of a horticultural Obi Wan Kenobi, often dispensing wisdom in plant metaphors – and, of course, the King’s overworked medical advisers, Dr. Masson and his talented daughter Claudine. In reality, no woman every practised medicine at the court – Louis’ real doctor at this time was called Antoine Vallot.

Real Characters

However, the Versailles TV drama is also populated by many real people from Louis’ actual court. His mother (Queen Anne, seen dying in a flashback); Spanish wife (Queen Marie-Thérèse); brother (Philippe, Duke of Orléans); English sister-in-law (Henriette-Anne, or ‘Minette’); outgoing mistress (Louise de La Vallière); incoming mistress (Athénaïs de Montespan); loyal valet (Bontemps); son (the kidnapped Dauphin); chief advisors (Colbert & Louvois – though Louvois was much younger in reality); and – most thrillingly – the treacherous old friend (Louis de Rohan, a former childhood pal who really did join a northern plot to kidnap the Dauphin and murder the King).

Was Aniaba of Issigny a genuine African prince?

We might also make special mention of Prince Annabar (Aniaba of Issigny) who turns up in the historical sources, but is a bit of a conundrum. There are some doubts as to whether he was a genuine African prince, but we know Louis treated him as the real deal and eventually supported his claim to the throne in Senegal. However, this wasn’t until 1700, by which time Aniaba had been in France for several years. In the episode we are told he arrives for a trade deal and leaves almost immediately.

Highlights of Invention

This also brings us onto the black baby, born in front of a shocked crowd in episode one. Various gossipy chroniclers recounted this tale, but all of their scurrilous stories date to several decades after the event. Crucially, none of them implicated Prince Aniaba by name: that is a modern writerly invention. So, where does the ‘black baby’ story come from?

Queen Marie-Thérèse’s ‘dark’ baby was, in all likelihood, born premature with her skin a violent purple hue – she died soon after, perhaps of oxygen deprivation during delivery. In the drama we then see the Queen’s scandalous child being given to the nunnery, and the death is faked. This is a conflation of a separate story. As far as we can tell, a real black baby was indeed taken from the palace to a convent, and grew up to become the infamous Black Nun of Moret. Her portrait was painted by the King’s artist, and, as an adult, she was apparently visited by the King and his court, suggesting she knew who her father was! But the implication here was that the Black Nun was Louis’ lovechild, not Marie-Thérèse’s.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Louis had affairs with perhaps as many as 20 women in his life, and was likely responsible for as many pregnancies. Tragically, miscarriages and infant death was horribly common for Louis’ lovers. The Queen fell pregnant six times, yet only the dauphin survived to adulthood. Louise de La Vallière bore Louis five children, but the first three never reached their third birthdays. The King’s brother, Philippe, certainly preferred sex with men, but he did his marital duty often enough to see Henriette-Anne’s body ravaged by eight pregnancies in nine years – with only two daughters outliving their tragic mother.

In of the most compelling strands in the narrative, the Versailles TV drama depicts Louis frequently sleeping with Henriette, his beautiful and charming sister-in-law, much to the outrage of his emotionally conflicted brother. Though the pair did indeed embark on an intense flirtation in their youth, sex between them would have been considered full incest under Catholic law of the time. A sister-in-law was simply a sister in the eyes of the Pope. Furthermore, the sexless affair was long since over by 1667, when the drama starts, though the King undoubtedly felt strong emotions for her right up until her sad demise.

This painful death, rendered so horrible in the Versailles TV drama, is now known to have been due to natural causes – perhaps a perforated ulcer. Accusations of poison in the series finale, however, are well-grounded in historical evidence. At the time, the finger of blame was emphatically pointed at an assassination, though not by the evil Dutch or Louis de Rohan. Instead, it was Philippe’s snarky lover, the Chevalier de Lorraine, who was the alleged villain, having already been jailed in Lyon and then exiled to Rome for contributing so much tension to Henriette-Anne and Philippe’s tempestuous marriage.

The drama successfully captures how Louis maintained several relationships at once. He was said to always return to the Queen’s bed at night, cheekily blaming a mountain of paperwork for his tardiness, but he had usually been cavorting with Louise or Athénaïs. Louis loved the thrill of the chase when it came to beautiful, charming women – but he did tend to wander off to pastures new when they fell pregnant, only to return when they got their figures back. A virginal Louise de La Vallière had initially been a decoy to allow Louis to see Henriette-Anne without tongues wagging, but he soon fell for the younger woman. After a few years, and five pregnancies, Louise herself noticing the King’s interest in her was waning, and enlisted the help of her lady-in-waiting, Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan to try and woo the King back on her behalf. This backfired. The buxom and charismatic stole Athénaïs Louis’ affections for herself, despite being already married with kids.

Athénaïs de Montespan really did steal Louis’ affections

In the Versailles TV drama we see her earning Louis’ trust, and a spot in his bed, by coercing the imaginary Duke of Cassel to come to court, and winning big at the card table. Only the latter is true (she was a talented gambler). History tells us her seduction of the King began in 1667 but was fairly old-fashioned in its techniques: catching his eye, dancing with him, making him laugh, and then revealing herself to be an energetic lover in the sack. This spelled the end for Louise de La Vallière’s hopes. She was left behind when Louis went to war in the Spanish Netherlands, though other women were allowed to join him. Louise, panicking that she was being frozen out, raced after him; but Louis sent her back to Paris. Game over. They were done.

Guilt-ridden and hurt, Louise de La Vallière is depicted in the TV series as a self-flagellating victim of Louis’ coldness. This is largely true, she really was deeply devout and struggled to reconcile her love for him with her Godly morality. When it was just her and the Queen sharing Louis’ bed, it appeared manageable – because Louis was divinely appointed by God, perhaps it seemed to her as a form of heavenly worship to sleep with the King – but the arrival of Athénaïs broke that spell. Louise begged for forgiveness from the Queen and, full of anguish, made repeated escapes to the nearby convent. In reality, Louis callously made her wait until 1674 until he released her to a life of perpetual prayer – in the TV series she makes her exit five years earlier.

Louis’ illness is depicted much later in the TV series

Something else which happened much earlier was Louis’ dramatic illness. In the Versailles TV drama, this strikes him in 1669; he becomes delirious and composes a new ballet (as you do!). The prognosis is so serious that the emergency council gathers to pick the regent to rule on the dauphin’s behalf. In truth, Louis was prone to various digestive problems but avoided serious illness for many decades. The near-fatal moment in his youth was not endured at Versailles, but was a bout of typhoid contracted while on military campaign in Mardijk when aged just 20. His life was not endangered again until many years later, when painful surgery on his rectum became a strange court spectacle.

And, on the topic of timeline changes, something depicted in the drama that happened considerably later in history was the arranged marriage between the Dutch leader William of Orange and the young English princess, Mary – a scene we see after Henriette has succeeded in negotiating the treaty of Dover with her brother, Charles II of England. This Anglo-Dutch marriage occurred in 1677, not 1670, and famously resulted in the couple becoming the only co-monarchs in British history when they invaded during the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 to become William III and Mary II of England.






Conclusion

In summary, the Versailles TV series is a rewarding watch for the historian, because it’s fun to spot the real events and enjoy their dramatization. Professor Kate Williams and I mainly engaged with these “yes, that really happened!” moments in our BBC Two discussion programme Inside Versailles, but – as you hopefully now realise – several historical concessions were also made to heighten the storytelling.

In general, the producers largely avoided placing real historical people in false situations, and instead skilfully constructed a fictional conspiracy narrative (built from mainly fictional characters) within the wider historical framework. The result is a pretty fair portrayal of King Louis XIV and his court, within which a much darker secret is played out for our entertainment… but, crucially, one that is seemingly never recorded for posterity. In short, the show’s creators, David Wolstencroft and Simon Mirren, make dramatic hay from the historian’s favourite adage: “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. Just because Cassel, Montcourt, and Béatrice de Claremont didn’t exist doesn’t mean something else like this *MIGHT* have happened, and then was covered up!

If you’ve got any questions or comments for Greg, tweet him @Greg_Jenner.

ENJOYED THIS BLOG? THEN YOU MIGHT LIKE GREG’S FUNNY BOOK ABOUT THE HISTORY OF DAILY LIFE,  A MILLION YEARS IN A DAY.  CHECK OUT THE VIDEO BELOW FOR A QUICK SUMMARY OF WHAT IT’S ABOUT.

AND HERE’S A QUICK VIDEO REVIEW OF THE BOOK BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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Bonjour!

I assume you’ve come here because you’re a fan of the VERSAILLES TV drama? If you’re in the UK, maybe you saw me co-hosting INSIDE VERSAILLES – (Watch here on YouTube) with Professor Kate Williams on BBC2. This was the after-show discussion, where we were joined by expert historians to talk through the historical background of each episode.

But now that series 1 of VERSAILLES has ended, I’ve written a much more detailed blog on the historical accuracy of the series. The blog has kindly been hosted by the BBC, so click the link and it’ll take you there.

Thanks, and Bonsoir!

Greg

The post The Real History Behind The VERSAILLES TV Drama appeared first on Greg Jenner.

Yesterday was #NationalWineDay, so I thought I’d post an extract from my book A Million Years In A Day on the surprising history of Champagne. If you enjoy this chapter, I hope you’ll perhaps take a look at the rest of the book, which charts the history of daily life across a modern Saturday. It’s fun, honest!

7 p.m.

A Champagne Aperitif

Tonight we’re hosting a little party to celebrate the birthday of a good friend, and as our guests arrive, looking glam and chipper as they come through to the dining room, we proffer a glass of champagne to each of them. After all, champers is the default drink of the celebratory gathering – but it wasn’t always so.

THE DEVIL’S WINE

Here’s a lovely story for you. On 4 August 1693, an aged Benedictine monk by the name of Dom Pierre Perignon was standing in the winery at the Abbey of Hautvillers with a grin plastered across his face. Shouting excitedly for his monastic brothers to gather around him, he declared ‘come quickly! I am drinking the stars!’ He had every right to be thrilled. After years of experimentation, he had finally cracked the secret to producing fizzy champagne. Alas, this charming anecdote is mostly bollocks. The idea that Dom Perignon set out to invent fizzy white wine is a nineteenth-century marketing myth, and the origins of the world’s most luxurious drink derive from a combination of accidental discovery, and – to my French mother’s undoubted horror – the ingenuity of the English.

Champagne is not a specific type of wine, it’s actually a French wine-producing region – Spanish Cava and Italian Prosecco are fairly similar drinks – and medieval champagnes were still in nature and greyish in colour, rather than lightly sparkling whites. Though well respected at the time, they didn’t match the exalted reputation of Bordeaux’s superior offerings, but because they were grown in close proximity to the king-crowning cathedral of Reims, Champagne’s winegrowers could at least rely on royal patronage. Okay, so champagne’s origins were decent but not spectacular, but can we assume it became the first ever sparkling wine? Nope, that honour went to the Blanquette de Limoux produced in 1531 by the Benedictine monks of St Hilaire, not far from the southern fortress city of Carcassonne. And no, Dom Perignon didn’t learn his craft there either, that’s just one of the several mini-myths compacted into the ‘drinking the stars’ propaganda campaign. Pardonne-moi, maman!

In truth, the bubbles currently effervescing in our glass were actually the bane of Dom Perignon’s life, and the reason he hated them was because they were a symptom of failure in the manufacturing process. Sparkling champagne was an infuriating anomaly – to him, it was le vin du diable (the Devil’s wine) – but we now know that it wasn’t Satanic meddling to blame, but instead a quirk of organic chemistry. The northerly Champagne region succumbs to chilly winters, and the yearly frosts were temporarily pausing the yeast-based chemical reaction that turns sugar into alcohol, meaning the fermentation process, thought to be finished by autumn, was actually biding its time. When the new vintage was bottled in March, the summer sunshine reactivated the dormant yeasts, producing a sudden surge of carbon dioxide inside the bottle, and therefore bubbles.

But, it gets worse. Due to the poor quality of French glass-making, this internal pressure caused some of the bottles to explode, which was a costly and embarrassing disaster for Dom Perignon, and also forced those entering the cellars to wear protective padding and an iron face-mask, to stop them being blinded. Those bottles that didn’t shatter – perhaps because the oiled hemp rag, or wood stopper, placed in the top wasn’t airtight – were hurriedly shipped off to customers in France, but, more importantly, also found their way into England. When it arrived off the boat, the champagne was often re-bottled by the English to ensure its longer lifespan, but their bottles were produced in hotter furnaces that burned sea-coal instead of wood, resulting in tougher glass. Crucially, they also preferred airtight cork stoppers instead of rags, meaning something novel soon occurred – the gently effervescent wine became increasingly fizzy, as the gas pushed against the tougher walls of its glass and cork prison.

With bubbles being a symptom of poor quality control, you might think the English would have reacted stroppily to being sold dodgy goods by their on/off enemies, but the sparkles were greeted as a thrilling novelty in King Charles II’s party-mad Blighty. Dom Perignon was certainly dedicated to improving the quality of wine production, and had successfully produced a still white wine from red grapes, and was experimenting with blended grape varieties, but at no point was he expecting overseas orders to flood in for the Devil’s wine. However, before long, his refined French clientele also began requesting bubbly champers, and the puzzled monk was forced to adapt.

ROYAL FIZZ

By the time Dom Perignon died in 1715, his vineyards were producing both still and sparkling wines, but it was the latter which was poured into the Duc D’Orleans’ cup when he became Regent of France in that same year. This was the launch-point, the moment when champagne first won celebrity acclaim, and soon upwardly mobile merchants began sniffing out business opportunities in the sparkle trade. Nicolas Ruinart, the nephew of Dom Perignon’s close friend, Dom Thierry Ruinart, established the first champagne marque in 1729, and was followed in 1743 by an enterprising wool-dealer called Claude Moët who somehow snared King Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour as a loyal customer. Her proclamation that: ‘champagne is the only wine that leaves a woman looking beautiful after drinking it’ was the kind of incredible PR that you just couldn’t buy in the eighteenth century. As other merchants eagerly leapt into the bubble-biz, it became clear that a small aristocratic market would not support all these new wineries. Champagne would have to broaden its customer demographic.

Having finally discovered the secret of toughened glass and corks, champagne growers could ship their wine to far-flung places without the bottles spontaneously exploding like badly wired grenades. By the end of the century, champagne was gliding down the elegant gullets of Tsar Peter the Great and America’s own republican superhero George Washington. It was suddenly the drink of power, elegance and luxury, but people didn’t have to be a monarch to slurp it. Indeed, nineteenth-century advertising campaigns cunningly traded on the perceived opulence, yet carefully aimed their product at the rising middle classes. That said, some marques were forever out of reach – Cristal, produced by Louis Roederer, was bottled exclusively for the Tsars of Russia, and remained unavailable to the hoi polloi until the end of the Second World War.

Tonight, we are not enjoying Cristal – it’s still affordable only to rappers and footballers – but when we sauntered down the supermarket alcohol isle, hunting for a bottle, we were able to choose from a broad range. The once sweet grey wine of medieval France is now available as the saccharine doux and demi-sec, or the dry sec and brut, or even the über-dry extra-brut. And, of course, there are those made from white grapes (blancs de blancs), those from red (blancs de noirs), the alluringly pink rosés, and the esteemed cuvée de prestige made predominantly from a single year’s vintage. But one unchangeable thing that clearly defines champers is its fizziness. Bubbles are to champagne what headbands are to 1980s stadium rock – the defining, thrilling essence without which the experience becomes immediately disappointing.

So, with glasses charged, let’s drink to the birthday girl and get

the evening under way.

Thanks for reading! To learn more fun historical trivia about your daily life, click the book covers below.

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