Lisa Jardine: How History Can Inform Spending Cuts
[Lisa Jardine is professor of Renaissance Studies and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London.]
The new academic year has begun, and I am preparing my graduate classes. So I have been reading again one of the great, lasting works of history-writing, Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages....
Huizinga is a master story-teller whose material is drawn from the everyday detail, literature and poetry of the late Middle Ages, and who weaves documented incident and event into a richly varied tapestry of the forms of "life, art and thought" of ordinary people in France and Holland in the 14th and 15th Centuries.
Here is how he captures the way in which, in the 15th Century, the "cruel reality" of inevitable physical suffering and violent death was compensated for by the use of elaborate rituals and exaggerated displays of public grief. These, according to Huizinga, "made life an art", transforming grim experience to make it tolerable....
Since 2009, political discussion in Britain has been dominated by massive deficits and deep cuts to be made in public spending. The October Comprehensive Spending Review - announced by George Osborne at the time of his Budget in June - is almost upon us. In the public sector, prospects look grim. Preparations are being made for reductions in government funding of somewhere between 25% and 40%. More than once I have heard it said that we are entering, for a period, "the valley of the shadow of death". There is a prevailing sense of inevitability about the across-the-board austerity that will follow.
But what Huizinga reminds us is that beneath the big sweep of history lie myriad individual stories which can be retrieved and articulated by those in a position to give them a voice. In Huizinga's terms, there will be a period, once the figures, the pie-charts, graphs and budgets are released, when there is room for further intensive deliberations to determine what their consequences will be on the ground....
Read entire article at BBC News
The new academic year has begun, and I am preparing my graduate classes. So I have been reading again one of the great, lasting works of history-writing, Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages....
Huizinga is a master story-teller whose material is drawn from the everyday detail, literature and poetry of the late Middle Ages, and who weaves documented incident and event into a richly varied tapestry of the forms of "life, art and thought" of ordinary people in France and Holland in the 14th and 15th Centuries.
Here is how he captures the way in which, in the 15th Century, the "cruel reality" of inevitable physical suffering and violent death was compensated for by the use of elaborate rituals and exaggerated displays of public grief. These, according to Huizinga, "made life an art", transforming grim experience to make it tolerable....
Since 2009, political discussion in Britain has been dominated by massive deficits and deep cuts to be made in public spending. The October Comprehensive Spending Review - announced by George Osborne at the time of his Budget in June - is almost upon us. In the public sector, prospects look grim. Preparations are being made for reductions in government funding of somewhere between 25% and 40%. More than once I have heard it said that we are entering, for a period, "the valley of the shadow of death". There is a prevailing sense of inevitability about the across-the-board austerity that will follow.
But what Huizinga reminds us is that beneath the big sweep of history lie myriad individual stories which can be retrieved and articulated by those in a position to give them a voice. In Huizinga's terms, there will be a period, once the figures, the pie-charts, graphs and budgets are released, when there is room for further intensive deliberations to determine what their consequences will be on the ground....