My historian self

I have to admit, I find it hard to describe in five words or less what I do as an historian, or how I think. My main focus is the Middle Ages, but I don't see places or times as discrete stand-alone things for isolated study. I love looking at linkages and cross influences. I want to know how the past has helped form us, and how our perception of the past has helped form us. I am totally curious as to how we see ourselves, and how our self-perception changes the way we perceive history and describe it.

My biggest obsession is culture. Not just high culture – but the stuff we carry round with us everywhere every day.

I love finding out the history of it, and I love exploring different facets of it. My friends have taken to sending me emails saying “You need this” which give details of how rap affects some groups, or where a new fad comes from. Some aspects of this obsession are food, festivals, folkdance. But I also love to identify issues like liminality and temporal awareness. Long words are good, complex concepts are even better. The dynamics of cultural change over time are best of all.

In my untidy little world, culture is far more idiosyncratic than most of us like to think. There is an almost-visible filter for everything we do and everything we see, and that is ourselves.

This makes cultural accuracy, and discovering the precise and determined finer points of other people's culture a terribly relative thing. What happens if you think that the way the individual does something is the way the crowd does something?

A filter of our personal experience and how we interpret it applies to everything we do, and everything we select. The trouble with this cultural approach is that it opens the door to an avalanche of information. The minute you try to sort out what the filters are, you open those doors. And that is what my research is about – and what a lot of my teaching is concerned with. Sorting out that avalanche of information and making sense of it. Trying to work out how it affects our lives, and where we fit with our pasts.

If you want to know more, take a look at my non-fiction bibliography (which is never entirely up-to-date, alas) and, for fun, check out some of my web articles or my food history blog.

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