Reading recommendations: The discursive (aka waffly) prototype
You, serenely enjoying your recommended reading
aka Peder Severin Krøyer, Mary reading in the garden, 1891
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kroyer_photo_Mary.jpg
Well gosh - this is exciting…!
Peder Severin Krøyer, Roses, 1893
Skagen, Skagens Museum, SKM1851: https://skagenskunstmuseer.dk/en/works/roses/
Many of you have requested reading suggestions. We’ve done what we can along the way, but decided that it was time put together an actual list, which will be updated regularly with details of books which may be of interest for our courses.
As Denizens of Wright History are an educated and culturally savvy species (naturellement!), willing to recommend books which they have found useful, this is also a space for your recommendations.
The plan is to build a smörgåsbord of various types of history and historical fiction. Let’s see how it works out!
We need to make two official announcements before proceeding.
Manicule Duffy respectfully directs your attention to this very important point
aka Image from The Maastricht Hours, C14¼
London, British Library, Stowe MS 17, f.193r: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=stowe_ms_17_fs001r
The whole manuscript is available for your perusal, courtesy of the British Library’s magnificent digitization project - vide: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Stowe_MS_17
First, please note that this page contains affiliate links. This means that should you click through and make a purchase, we earn a small commission on qualifying purchases – at no extra cost to you.
Other purveyors of books are, of course, available, but any support via the Amazon Associates program will be very welcome - every little helps!
Thank you in advance for following the links to help us keep on doing what we do.
A saintly pointer to direct your attention to this disclaimer
aka Reliquary arm, French, C12½, 75:1949, St Louis Art Museum, St Louis, MI: https://www.slam.org/collection/objects/37378/
Secondly, we hope that you will follow any recommendations in the spirit in which they are intended, and won’t hold us personally responsible if you do not enjoy any purchase.
Berthe Morisot, The Mother and Sister of the Artist, 1869/1870
Washington, National Gallery of Art, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.186: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.46661.html
NB This reading list is in its infancy. For now, I’m just going to post links to books which have been mentioned, as quickly as possible and with minimal explication or ceremony, in order to get them out to you asap. Please forgive the higgledy-pigglediness for now. I’ll work out how to make it more professional as soon as I can. Thank you for bearing with me!
Regardless of whether you buy via these affiliate links or elsewhere, we hope that you find this page useful.
Let the suggestions commence…
Happy reading!
It seems appropriate to start with one of Robert’s trusted go-to books, so voila:
Next, for our first historical fiction entry, a hearty recommendation from Penny:
“For those of you gripped by the Romans a good read about J C's assassination Peter Stothard's 'The Last Assassin'. It captures the febrile, volatile climate pre and post the event - or at least what I imagine such a climate to be - well. A book for a glass of red in the evening.”
What more could one want?!
More heartily recommended historical fiction, courtesy of Charles, which may be of particular interest to past and present Byzantium cohorts:
Charles’ recommendation reminded Penny of this, which also sounds super:*
*[Hmm… I’m beginning to see a drawback to compiling this list. I want to buy everything!]
Hat-tip to Sylvie for this recommendation during the inaugural outing of Art Nouveau last term:
Moving from historical fiction for now, Brigid has found this especially helpful during the current Civilisations of the Ancient World…
…which reminded us of others in the series which we’ve found especially useful over the years, namely…
…& this:*
*[As I was getting this link, Amazon helpfully reminded me that I last purchased this in 2006. That will have been when I was applying for what would be my first temporary lectureship - for a whole semester! - and had to get up to scratch pretty smartish on a field I’d hitherto managed to mostly avoid. Aaahhh… it was a stressful time, but so very exciting, as I got onto the second rung of the so-elusive and ridiculously-evasive academic career ladder!]
Hmm… I’m not sure I like the look of the sort of linking I’ve been doing thus far. It makes the page rather unwieldy. I wonder whether this might be better… John Haywood, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings
It certainly looks better to me, but that may well be simply because I spent many years compiling reading lists, and this way looks more like one (albeit without the full publication details, meticulously presented according to house style as I did when I was in academia. Gosh, how my students loved the attention I insisted they should pay to that detail…!).
But if you prefer the images with the details, including price at point of posting, before you click through, I’ll keep doing that.
I’ll do the remainder of today’s batch the second way. Please let me know which you prefer!
Anywaaay… Where was I? Ah yes…
For art history in general, Yvonne recommends Rainer & Rose-Marie Hagen, What Great Paintings Say: 100 masterpieces in detail as especially and regularly useful. Hopefully Robert won’t see this, as it could be a handy birthday present… [ssshhh… don’t tell him!]
Alas, the recommendation which Dee made during Luminists and Realists to an excellent book which she’d got at the museum itself (having enjoyed the course’s images, which were new to many of us, we were all most envious!) - The Skagen Painters (Introduction to The Skagen Painters and Skagen Museum) - is currently priced at £199. No really. (I searched other places for it too, and they’re all around that.) I mean… obviously if you’re adamant that you want it, I’ll happily supply the link by return, but I’m guessing that it might be possible to actually take a trip to the museum and see what they have as the current equivalent for not much more of an investment. I include it here nevertheless, lest you should happen to spot a cheaper copy in a second-hand bargain bin somewhere.
Also during Luminists and Realists somebody (apologies - I can’t remember who it was) recommended Gabriele Finaldi, et al., Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light – the catalogue for the National Gallery’s 2019 exhibition. It’s still spendy, but of course most exhibition catalogues are - and with good reason! Robert can confirm that it is indeed worth splashing out for, as I took the plunge and ordered it for him. Enough gorgeous stuff therein, I gather, for him to want to do another course!
Aha. I’ve just thought of a third way of presenting recommendations. Please let me know which you prefer!
Yvonne and Chris also recommend this, as full of lovely photos of paintings and detailed text - Patricia G. Berman, In Another Light: Danish painting in the nineteenth century.
Update (20 March): A bump for this from Penny (see comments below), as well as another recommendation…
…for this: Sorolla: The Masterworks, by Blanca Pons-Sorolla, aka the great-granddaughter of the man himself!
Last week’s Civilisations also yielded several hearty recommendations. Forgive me - I can’t remember who recommended the first book, as I was eyebrow-deep in boring admin and although I thought I’d remember… (you can guess the rest. Was it maybe Lynn…?). I do, however, remember that it was highly commended, so voila: Kevin Sinclair, The Yellow River: A 5000 year journey through China.
Similar enthusiasm from Yvonne and Chris for this, which, we learnt, presents the development of Chinese script in its historical context, and how our understanding of its earliest forms has been changed in the light of archaeological work, in a very readable way: Cecilia Lindqvist, China: Empire of Living Symbols. Especially good on the oracle stones and bronzes, apparently!
From slightly further back in the term (it may even have been at the end of last term), two things which touch on discussions on many courses - most recently sundry Romes, Civilisations of the Ancient World and Thieves, Scholars, and Dilettanti - highly recommended by Brigid: Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution …
Update: Today’s History of York session reminded me of a wonderful book, which gives a rare glimpse into what the twists and turns of the sixteenth-century Reformation meant to people beyond the corridors of power: Eamon Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath. We suspect that many of you will enjoy this one!
Update (5 March): This weekend’s Japan meets the West session reminded me that those of you who - like us - couldn’t make the recent Hokusai exhibition may be interested in a couple of related books, namely: Roger Keyes and Timothy Clark, Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave …
Shiane noted that Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Lion House: The coming of a king, on Suleyman the Magnificent, sounds intriguing. It’s still hot off the press, but having googled, it seems that the reviews across various media (including those which seldom agree on anything!) are remarkably positive, so it certainly sounds worth scouting out.
Update (20 March): A bump for this from Penny as a jolly good read (see comments below).
Also, I finally found where I’d written the note of Robert Hughes’ Rome - recommended by Penny as very well-written.
Update (20 March): Two more recs from Penny, which will be relevant to future courses…
Also by Robert Hughes, and equally commended: The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change.
… and “in a similar vein”, Philip Hook’s recent Art of the Extreme 1905-1914: The European Art World 1905-1914.
Update (15 March). Some more highly recommended historical fiction from Sue, namely Mary Renault's trilogy of the life of Alexander the Great: Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games (this link is to a compendium, but they’re also available separately).
These two volumes about Theseus are, I gather “equally gripping”: The King Must Die and The Bull From The Sea. Robert adds that he grew up on Mary Renault’s books, and he’s sure I’ll really enjoy them. Oh dear… more on the must-buy list!!
Update (21 March): During this evening’s EMAA, Tina recommended Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth, as giving an interesting depiction of various aspects of a cathedral being built in the twelfth century (this link is to a bundle of all 4, but they’re available individually too). I confess I’ve not read it, but I did use the DVD of the 2010 TV adaptation, which my students always found jolly useful.
Update (1 April): In the light of our recent post in which we had Wrightington Towers as a temporary outpost of Poveglia - Venice’s “plague island” - a recommendation from Ian in which the island and Venice as a whole are key to the plot: David Hewson’s Carnival for The Dead.
Radio 4’s current Book of the Week - Richard Cohen’s very imminent Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past - generated some conversation at the top of today’s Rome 3 session. I’ve yet to tune in, let alone order the book, but shall do as asap. Personally, I have some initial potential reservations, but it’s getting very good reviews, and his choice of historians is very good (including Geoffrey of Monmouth, who is lined up as the focus for a later Joanna course, should the format prove of interest to you), so I’m looking forward to having those potential reservations soundly refuted!*
*[Update (1 April): Hmmm… Having mostly listened to the R4 adaptation (it’s possible - ahem - that I listened to it as I was bedding down, so I might just have been a bit sleepy and not paying entirely rapt attention at all points), my reservations are not yet dispelled. This may, of course, be due to R4’s editing (the book runs at 708 pages). And yet… I’m keeping the link here in case any of you have further intel. I’d be very happy to be corrected!
Discussion of this prompted me to mention an excellent book which I have long admired and heartily recommended to many generations of my students: John Arnold’s History: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions). It’s not doing the same as Cohen’s apparently is, but if you do read it you’ll see what prompted me to mention it just now. Regardless, it was going to go on the reading suggestions for my imminent course, so this rec is simply a little earlier than originally planned! Over the years, I’ve found OUP’s VSI series to be generally excellent. I’ll add some specific links to others I’ve found especially useful here as soon as I’ve worked out how to make this page more readable.
And two recommendations from Roberto, emerging from this evening’s Impressionists session (and other iterations of The Impressionists, but we didn’t have a Reading Recommendations page then), each of which has some incredibly moving and revealing moments: Jean Renoir’s Renoir, My Father…
…and Richard Kendall (ed.), Monet by Himself
Update (31 May): Voila a whump of additions, which have accumulated in the last few weeks as I’ve been distracted by recording and boring end-of-year financial stuff. I AM going to tame this reading list, somehow, very soon. For now, though…
First up today, Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, which Sylvie remembered having read some years ago and thought might be of interest to past and present Renaissance Denizens.
It rang vague alarm bells for me, so I did a bit more hunting around. It has won a gazillion good reviews and major prizes and is, by all accounts, is a stonkingly good read, but it’s not without its problems - not least that its core theme is something to which people often subscribe, whether unwittingly or not, namely that “their” period (in the sense of “when they are living" and/or “their chosen period of academic specialism”) is The One, before which everyone was lumpen, misled, superstitious, mistaken, unenlightened, hoodwinked, corrupt, ”in the dark”, &/or whatever.
This is by no means exclusive to works from or about the Italian Renaissance, but it’s undeniable that this particular renaissance (that’s right, folks - it’s *a* renaissance, i.e. one of many, rather then The Renaissance) provides an especially hot hotbed. Vide, for example, a C14 Tuscan proto-humanist poet, a C16 Tuscan polymath writing biographies of Italian artists, just about every C16 church “reformer” you care to mention, an C18 French philosophe, an C18 English MP writing a monumental history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, a C19 Swiss historian (subsequently seen as the “father” of cultural history) writing a history of the Italian Renaissance, or, indeed, a C20/21 Shakespearean and literary history Harvard professor (who is, incidentally, one of the founders of an academic approach to the past which, I discovered a few years into my academic apprenticeship, chimed heavily with how I approached my own research. I was shocked to find that I was apparently “a something-ist” without knowing it! Anyway. I digress…). For less ad hoc responses, see here and here.
With all that having been said, though, I’m still definitely going to read this at some point, and am certain that I’ll enjoy it. If you beat me to it, do please let me know what you think!
Perhaps less controversially…Richard Lloyd’s The Heart of the Renaissance: The Stories of the Art of Florence. Written by an enthusiastic long-time lover of Florence rather than an academic, this is highly recommended by Shiane - not least for its illustrations.
Our final Renaissance rec today is courtesy of Diana: Ross King’s The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance. It is, I gather, a real page-turner!
Moving on to the Age of Improvement, voila, one of Robert’s regular go-to books, which is a classic, and available in many editions (ergo a strong candidate for being a second-hand bargain find!): W G Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape.
Further, Susan highly commends Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future 1730-1810., as fascinating, and still more readable in the light of this term’s sessions!
Additionally, in the light of discussion of Dickens in one session, several people have asked for recommended contemporaneous fiction which features the trends of the period covered by the course.* Most of you will probably already have at least some on your bookshelves, but lest you should like to beef up this section of your library, you could do worse than Dickens’ Dombey and Son or Hard Times, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South or Cranford, or George Eliot’s Middlemarch. On a less highbrow note, I thought that the latest series of BBC’s Gentleman Jack conveyed some of the themes of this course rather well and without, for the most part, doing it in a shoehorn way.
*[NB Each of these is, of course, available in many many editions and formats. I include links here to the Penguin Classics editions simply because when I was first getting into Proper Literature as a young’un, it seemed to me that shelf upon shelf of Penguin Classics must surely be the epitome of a well-read home. My tastes and any inferences I might make from bookshelves have changed significantly since then (and let’s not get started on the shelves of yellow spines, where I keep my considerably more spendy Oxford Medieval Texts. Ahem.), but I still get a Proustian buzz from my Penguin Classics.]
Next up, a recommendation from Lynn for those of you who enjoyed Civilisations of the Ancient World: Thames and Hudson’s Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods, by David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce. I’m ashamed to say that I lost the note of this, and only just found it buried in a word document in which I’d stashed it temporarily (maaan, I searched through my folders for ages), so I can’t remember the specifics of the recommendation - sorry, Lynn! - but hey. Who can’t use another T & H in their collection?!
Moving back to the artsier course recommendations….
During one discussion in last term’s Impressionists, Heather came across Harriet Scott Chessman’s Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper. It is, it seems, in the popular historical fiction vein of imagining the inner life of the muse and/or ‘the less famous one’. None of us has read it, so this is entirely on spec, but it is at the very least an interesting proposition!
And rounding off today’s update, this from Penny (see also her comment below): Desmond Morris (yup. That Desmond Morris), The Lives of the Surrealists. It was news to us that he was part of the surrealist scene, and this is now definitely on Robert’s wish-list!
Also highly recommended by Penny is this: Cat Jarman, River Kings: The Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads. Its subtitle alone suggests it relevance to several recent and upcoming courses!
Finally for now, advance notice of the text that will form the ‘spine’ of my summer course (yet to be named, but in development) on twelfth-century England: The Life of Christina of Markyate. [Update (31 May): Alas, this will not be going ahead over the summer as planned, as the time I’d carved out for prep and design was reallocated to learning how to sort catch-up recording. I’m going to do my damnedest not to commit to any other time-consuming innovations before I’ve sorted this course. Let’s see how that works out, eh…?] I first encountered and was fascinated by Christina in my first year of undergraduate study, and have regularly returned to her since - as the focus of my MA dissertation, and subsequently in teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels as soon as I was able to design my own courses in academia. The “Christina” we meet in this narrative is certainly remarkable, but this course is not about the historical Christina. Instead, we’ll use her Life* as a window through which we might tease out what people valued in twelfth-century England, and how they were thinking about the implications of the Norman Conquest in subsequent generations.
*[a vita (Life) is a hagiographical narrative, generally composed to demonstrate the sanctity of its subject. Don’t worry - this edition is in translation, so no Latin is required! I’ve also chosen it because it’s in a handy - and cheap - OWC edition. Plus it’s relatively short!]
Hmm. I seem to have effectively started drafting the course blurb here, so I’ll stop now (it’s late, and it’s time to put the laptop away and get supper for us both). For now, if you think that you might like the idea of a different type of course, which consists of a combination of “lectures” on general contexts (e.g. saints and sanctity, monasticism) and informal discussion based on a few hours’ reading per week (think a cross between an undergrad seminar and a book club), but want to see if you can bear the text before committing to registering, you now have the link!
Phew! So voila, the first rough version of a Wright History reading list! I hope that it is at least making a useful start!