Miles Pattenden

We live in an age that worships data. If Covid-19 has taught us nothing else, it is that arguments advanced via assertions of statistical significance are practically impervious to criticism. Naturally, quantitative-minded academics have become the high priests of this religion, and they now seem to think they are the authorities on everything. When they cynically use trendy tools to legitimise what are really very old preconceptions, it is as if the linguistic turn and those other movements that sought to ground scholarship in careful, close-read qualitative analysis of texts and contexts never happened. At least, that is the impression one gets from reading this somewhat surreal contribution to debate about the significance of the European Middle Ages from American political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. 

Oxford is not what it was once. We scholars swot too hard. Even the Bullingdon has lost its brio. It’s hardly surprising that this Age of Hooper has ushered in a cottage industry of aesthetes’ nostalgia, for many sense that the time when students could still be boys, and boys could be Sebastian Flyte, was just more fun. No reports, recorded lectures, or Research Assessment Exercises to interrupt the heady days of evensong, buggery, and cocktails (to paraphrase Maurice Bowra’s infamous utterance).

We live in an age that worships data. If Covid-19 has taught us nothing else, it is that arguments advanced via assertions of statistical significance are practically impervious to criticism. Naturally, quantitative-minded academics have become the high priests of this religion, and they now seem to think they are the authorities on everything. When they cynically use trendy tools to legitimise what are really very old preconceptions, it is as if the linguistic turn and those other movements that sought to ground scholarship in careful, close-read qualitative analysis of texts and contexts never happened. At least, that is the impression one gets from reading this somewhat surreal contribution to debate about the significance of the European Middle Ages from American political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.

Few Australians today will have heard of the Empress Maria Theresa (1717–80). And yet this queen of Hungary and Bohemia, archduchess of Austria, ruler of Mantua and Milan, who was also grand duchess of Tuscany and Holy Roman Empress by marriage, bestrode the eighteenth-century stage like a dumpy colossus. The mother of some sixteen children, she styled herself as matriarch for a nation, while the marriages she arranged for her children saw her emerge as a Queen Victoria-like figure: the central node in contemporary Europe’s game of thrones. 

To kidnap one pope might be regarded as unfortunate; to kidnap two looks like a pattern of abusive behaviour. Ambrogio A. Caiani tells the story of Napoleon’s second papal hostage-taking: an audacious 1809 plot to whisk Pius VII (1742–1823) from Rome in the dead of night and to break his stubborn resolve through physical isolation and intrusive surveillance.