Wilfrid Prest

Traditional academic festschrifts often lack coherence and consistency, especially when the honorand’s former students and colleagues, as more or less duty-bound contributors, share little in common beyond that association ...

With the advent of digital technology and the Internet, traditional paper-based scholarship appears increasingly threatened with redundancy, if not total obsolescence. This may help to explain current interest in the various techniques adopted by early modern natural philosophers and scholars who struggled to cope with the diverse and rapidly expanding bodies of data at their disposal.

Notwithstanding occasional media focus on misbehaving students or senior members, the residential colleges and halls dotted around or about most Australian university campuses keep a low profile. Their influence has undoubtedly declined since the early twentieth century, when as many as one quarter of Melbourne’s enrolled undergraduate population, and a much higher proportion of full-time students, were attached to Trinity and Janet Clarke Hall, Ormond or Queen’s. But the collegiate ideal to which all these institutions aspire, more or less, still provides a vital alternative to the regrettably prevailing view of higher education as mere vocational training – especially now, when the future viability of universities themselves is called increasingly into question.

If modern politicians rely excessively on pollsters and spin doctors, what should we say of the trust which their medieval and Renaissance predecessors placed in diviners and soothsayers? Among the most famous of these latter practitioners was ‘Dr’ John Dee, born just six years before Henry VIII’s youngest daughter, who availed herself of his services even before she succeeded to the throne as Queen Elizabeth I. Alchemist, antiquary, astrologer, astronomer, geographer, magician, mathematician, political adviser, seer, spirit-raiser, and theorist of empire: the full dimensions and scope of Dee’s omnidisciplinarity are not easily conveyed. Dee moreover inhabited a world ‘saturated with magic [...] not so much a world that we have lost, but more a strange, unfamiliar place that few modern readers can imagine’, to quote his latest biographer.

Australian universities have long taught early modern (c.1500–1750) English/British and European history, but with Alexandra Walsham’s recent appointment as the first female to occupy a Cambridge history chair, there are now (with Oxford’s Lyndal Roper) two Melbourne-trained early modernist Oxbridge professors ...

The opening sentence of Norman Davies’ blockbuster Europe: A History (1996) notes that ‘History can be written at any magnification’. Yet the superlative asserted in the title of John Hirst’s latest book does bring one up, well, short. Its claim is plainly contestable – how about ‘Plato to NATO’ (the irreverent shorthand for once-fashionable US undergraduate ‘Western Civ.’ survey courses)? Moreover, Hirst makes no pretence of giving us Europe from go to whoa. Commencing with the ‘Ancient Greeks’ (omitting Minoans and Myceneans), he concludes around 1800 with the French Revolution and Napoleon, because the lecture course at La Trobe University from which his book derives went no further. These lectures were first offered ‘to students in Australia who had had too much Australian history and knew too little about the civilisation of which they are a part’. This is a remarkable statement from a distinguished historian of Australia, even granted the growing recognition that what usually passes for ‘Australian history’ cannot in and of itself meet all the cultural, educational and intellectual needs of Australian students.

A new book by the most learned, original and witty historian now living and writing in England – conceivably in English – is a rare treat. Because Keith Thomas’s academic career commenced in 1950s Oxford, it scarcely mattered that his first monograph – the prizewinning, much-acclaimed Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) – only appeared when its author was in his late thirties. For ‘publish or perish’ still then seemed little more than a joke, except across the Atlantic, where some of my senior colleagues in the history department at Johns Hopkins had doubts about inviting an apparently ‘unpublished’ Mr Thomas to read a paper early in 1971. (Not all knew his historiographical essays in the TLS and elsewhere, let alone his pioneering forays into gender history).

In life, timing is everything. Charles Darwin’s classifications of the species appeared in England at a moment when religious dogmatism was not powerful enough to suppress his notions about evolution. In the 1940s Alfred Kinsey turned his attention from gall wasps to the scrutiny of human sexual behaviour. He would not have got away with it in rural Indiana but for chance events, including a great university president (Herman Wells), who defended his work and was probably himself homosexual.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Australia is suffering a litigation explosion. Newspapers have been full of reports of supposedly undeserving plaintiffs receiving million-dollar damages awards; governments have introduced legislation to limit pay-outs; local authorities and volunteer organisations have cancelled events due to concerns over public liability; and insurers have blamed rising premiums on unsustainable damages awards. Even the courts have joined the chorus: several leading judges recently declared the justice system to be in crisis due to increasing litigiousness, lawyers who stir up claims and a judiciary that has, according to one recently retired judge, ‘enjoyed playing Santa Claus’.