Buying books for the Oxford Union

I am a long standing member of the Library committee at the Oxford Union - almost fifteen years in two sessions - and I was asked recently to prepare a list of suggested books for the History list which we were to recommend for purchase to the membership this week.

My aim was to fill gaps in the collection. This was partly based on my recent teaching work this term, on what I felt would complete or continue series we already have and with the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War some relevant books about that. I also aimed for what would appeal to both students and to the the more general readers among the membership.  For these latter reasons I thought I would share it  with readers and recommend the books to them in case they are interestedin the topics covered. Apart from replacement copy of the text of a medieval chronicle the books I suggested - and which were accepted - are:   

J.F. Webb and D.H.Farmer (eds) The Age of Bede  Penguin Classics  
A valuable set of saints' lives in translation - including those of St Cuthbert and St Wilfrid
 

Michelle P. Brown  The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Early Medieval World  British Museum Publications   
This places the Gospels in their historic context of seventh and eighth century Britain.

Sarah Foot  Athelstan: The First King of England  Yale UP 
We collect the biographies in this established series, and this is an important book for historians working on the period; the other year I heard a wonderful lecture from the author, who is Regius Professor at of Ecclesiastical History at Christ Church, on the life of the King.

Edmund King King Stephen  Yale UP  
In the same series , and again an important work for understanding the Anarchy and twelfth century England.

David Abulafia The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms: The struggle for dominion 1200-1500 Routledge  
A useful text book by a leading historian of the region and the period

Malcolm Vale The Origins of the Hundred Years War: The Angevin Legacy 1250-1340  OUP
It turned out I had missed this book which was already on the Union catalogue - I think I probably recommended it years ago. An excellent interpretive account . 

Christopher Fletcher Richard II: manhood, youth and politics 1377-1399  OUP

A potentially interesting reinterpretation of the reign in the light of the clash between the King and an older political elite, and questioning the depiction of him as effeminate.

Giles Tremlett Catherine of Aragon: Henry's Spanish Queen  Faber and Faber
The most recent biography of the Queen, by a British journalist based in Madrid.

Derek Beales  Joseph II:  Against the World 1780-1790  CUP  

We already have volume I of this major biography covering his life up to the death of his mother the Empress Maria Theresa in 1780.

Piers Paul Read The Dreyfus Affair   Bloomsbury 
I was given this as a birthday present the other year - a comprehensive account of one of the most divisive and significant events if the history of France since 1870.

          
Muriel E Chamberlain Pax Britannica? Britain's Foreign Policy 1789-1914  Pearson reprint
This ties in with some of the teaching I have been doing this term, and links foreign policy to domestic political and social dvelopments. 

R.J.W.Evans and H. Pogge van Strandmann (eds) The Coming of the First World War   OUP

A well established classic account by distingushed experts of the events leading up to 1914 

H. Afflerbach and D. Stevenson (eds) An Improbable War?: The Outbreak of World War I and European Political culture before 1914  Berghalen NY
Highly recommended by a student the book questions many received ideas about the war's causes, especially the notion of "inevitability."      

Greg King and Sue Woolmans The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the murder that changed the World  Macmillan  

A new biography of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, and of the fate of their family after the murders in 1914.Well illustrated and with new material from the Hohenburg family

I had hoped to include a secondhand copy of J.R.Strayer's The Reign of Philip the Fair, published by Princeton UP in 1980, but the affordable copy I found online had disappeared before I could submit the list to the Libraraian-in- charge. I shall have to keep looking out for this as it is the standard work in English on this very important figure and reign.

In addition I had been asked last week to look at Alec Ryrie Being Protestant in Reformation Britain  OUP and to advise on its possible purchase, it having been recommended by a member. This looks a very valuable contribution to our understanding of the mindset of the era. Prof Ryrie draws on English and Scottish sources for the period 1540-1640, and I can see this becoming a counterpart to Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars. We agreed to buy this as well, so all in all a good number of additions to the Library were proposed by the Committee.



 

Commemorating King Louis XVI

Today is the anniversary of the guillotining of King Louis XVI in 1793. French Royalism has had a somewhat chequered history ever since 1830, but it retains perhaps more vitality than many outside the country might credit it with. Last year the Radical Royalist blog had a post with a link to a list of the many Masses offered in France and elsewhere for the King on or close to the anniversary. It can be read here.

King Louis XVI in 1786 

Portrait by A-F Callet

Image: fr.wikipedia.org

King Louis XVI faced an almost impossible task in governing a country with so many vested interests as Ancien Regime France. Most people saw the need for some kind of reform, from the King (and indeed his grandfather King Louis XV) downwards. The problem was that no-one in the establishment wanted their particular privileges removed or diminished and, once cracks appeared in the facade of the system, the Third Estate - which was hardly a unified set of interests  - could, and were, manipulated to more and more radical solutions by a section of the political intelligentsia.

Reform on the lines adopted by so many other eighteenth century monarchs, usually misnamed Enlightened despots - they were neither, but rather reformist monarchs formed in a traditional model of social organisation - was needed in France. The realm had become complacent and the system increasingly ossified; what had worked under King Louis XIV no longer worked as well under his great-great-great grandson. Trying to achieve such reforms as the revolutionaries attempted to do so rapidly in such sweeping changes was illusory and destabilising. Ironically Queen Marie Antoinette's brother the Emperor Joseph II pursued an often radical agenda in his reforing urge to change his domains, and there the conservative forces eventually put a brake on him. The Emperor in some of his rhetoric and actions looked at times very like the more moderate French revolutionaries. In other words the urge to reform was strong, but the issue was how who was in charge and how they responded to the situation facing them.

What was no doubt needed from King Louis XV and King Louis XVI was a commitment to reform they, it must, be admitted, did not possess to the extent that was needed, and able ministers who were backed by the Crown. 

What most certainly was not needed was the loss of control and the rapid and chaotic spread of revolutionary and millenarian ideas as happened from 1789, and the destructive mania that destroyed so much of value in the frequently vain quest for a new dispensation.

King Louis XVI might not in even different circumstances have been a great King, but he, and his family and realm, most certainly did not deserve the fate which overtook him and them, and which still scars the country. Like King Charles I in England or Bl. Charles of Austria he acquired a dignity in his fate which impressed contemporaries and should impress us now.