‘I WANT MY STUDENTS TO LEAVE THE CLASSROOM LOVING MEDIEVAL HISTORY’
An exclusive interview with medievalist Professor Justine Firnhaber-Baker
In the last few months I’ve been thinking a lot about the Capetians: the dynasty who ruled medieval France from the late tenth to fourteenth centuries, bringing their kingdom out of the doldrums and making France a major power in Christian Europe.
This weekend I reviewed Catherine Hanley’s 1217, the story of Louis the Lion (i.e. the future Louis VIII) attempting to conquer England during the waning days of King John and the chaotic early minority of Henry III. (You can read that review here.)
Later this month listeners to my Sony Music podcast This Is History will have rather an exciting Capetian related surprise - details to follow very soon.
Then there’s my favourite nonfiction book of the year so far, which I have been trumpeting on this newsletter. Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s House of Lilies is everything good popular history should be: entertaining, scholarly, readable and fun.
So I am thrilled to say that Justine has agreed to indulge some of my nerdy questions about her terrific book. We discussed how to write engaging popular history, similarities between the Capetians and the Plantagenets, and why the Norman Conquest was almost as much of a disaster for France as it was for Saxon England.
Our conversation is below. Enjoy!
DJ: In House of Lilies you pull off a wonderful feat: telling the story of a royal dynasty across many generations without sacrificing the intimate, anecdotal side to storytelling that (in my opinion, at any rate) is the secret sauce for great popular history. How did you approach the huge task of narrating the story of the Capetians?
JF-B: House of Lilies was my first stab at popular history, but it came very naturally to me to write in this engaging and more personal style. I think that’s because I have a lot of practice with stories and storytelling. The sources I have most relied on as a scholar are stories – sometimes written up as chronicles, but more often encountered as shorter narratives in judicial sources like witness testimony that give a window onto people’s lives. And as a professor, I want my students to leave my classroom not just knowing some medieval history but loving it as well. Once students get started on the Capetians, that usually happens quite naturally, but I keep their attention by throwing in a memorable anecdote here or there – if it’s funny or disgusting or shocking, so much the better. (Medieval teachers taught students to improve their recall by tying specific memories to graphic images, so I feel like this is totally defensible pedagogic practice!)
DJ: Can you give us a snapshot of what France looked like when Hugh Capet became king in the late tenth century? Was the title of king even worth the name?
JF-B: What a mess! At least, it looks like that if you’re used to stable borders and clear lines of authority, which the kingdom definitely did not have in 987. It was fragmented into territories ruled by great lords, like dukes and counts, who were constantly at war with one another. The kingdom wasn’t even really sovereign. Called West Francia at the time, it was the westernmost part of Charlemagne’s empire that was broken up in 843 to end a war among his grandsons. Nominally, West Francia was under the imperial authority of the Ottonian dynasty, which had replaced Charlemagne’s dynasty in East Francia. Even within West Francia, Hugh Capet didn’t rule with anything like the authority that even someone like Henry II of England later did, let alone with the absolutism of a Louis XIV. Being crowned and anointed with a special oil supposedly sent from heaven did set Hugh apart, but he still had to fight for his kingdom and fend off challenges from other great lords throughout his reign.
DJ: In the eleventh century the Norman conquest of England plonked English kings right on the doorstep of Paris - as it were. How much of a problem was it for the Capetians to have dukes of Normandy suddenly invested with rival royal power of their own?
JF-B: The Norman Conquest was almost as much of a disaster for the Capetians as it was for Harold Godwinson.
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