In history classes, students often have little interaction with source material from the past. My memories of sources at school are confined to a few WWII documents that had been neatly transcribed and edited in my textbook and maybe, on a good day, a propaganda poster or two.

Textbooks are, of course, crucial for helping students digest the massive historiographies that accompany the study of major periods and events in history. Teachers can also have little room to integrate unconventional primary sources into packed and sometimes rigid curricula.

However, this means that the original relics of our past often go unexamined in favour of dry textbook summaries. I believe that encountering real historical sources, whether it’s through handling them directly or just through looking, allows us to understand and interact with the past in different and often richer ways. Sources can also be of value simply for their power to delight us, whether through their strangeness or their familiarity.

Today, I want to share just three sources, from three different contexts. The only thing that unites them is that each one has brought me delight recently and perhaps that each is a bit unusual, at least compared to the typical sources we study at school.

1. Onfim’s Drawings (c. 1260)

Onfim’s drawings look like the doodles of a typical 7-year-old boy. The notable thing about this source is that Onfim was born over 700 years ago in medieval Russia and that, rather than drawing with pen and paper, he carved his pictures on bark from local birch trees.

Seventeen fragments of bark have been attributed to Onfim. Some appear to be school exercises like practising the alphabet or copying out psalms. However, alongside text, Onfim often drew scenes involving animals and people. His imaginative designs included his father, classmates, teacher and himself. One of the most well-known drawings depicts a strange creature with the caption ‘I am a beast’. In another, captioned ‘Onfim’, the child has portrayed himself as an armed warrior on horseback.

These artefacts were discovered in modern-day Novgorod during the 1950s and were preserved due to the low oxygen levels of the region’s clay soil. So even if Onfim’s mum and dad observed the typical parental habit of secretly throwing out their child’s drawings, we can at least thank the soil for protecting them long enough for us to enjoy today.

This source provides a rare and touching insight into ordinary life in the Middle Ages, showing how the creativity and imagination of childhood transcends time and place.

2. The Book Wheel (1588)

The book wheel was invented in the 16^th century by the Italian engineer, Agostino Ramelli. It helped readers to switch seamlessly between the books in their collections, facilitating the swift retrieval of information, as well as comparison between different texts. Ramelli’s creation can be understood as an attempt to help readers navigate the deluge of printed material that became available in the 16^th century. It was therefore linked to another, more significant, invention of the early modern period: the printing press.

Europe’s first printing press was created by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany around 1440. The emergence of print on the continent precipitated a huge wave of book production over the coming decades. Within 60 years of Gutenberg’s invention, European presses had printed more books than had been produced since the fall of the Roman Empire. In the 16^th century the book trade continued to grow, with 150 million books published for a European population of only 80 million people. The historian, Elizabeth Eisenstein, argues that the printing press fundamentally changed the “literary diet” of readers, putting them into contact with a much greater and more diverse range of texts.

Ramelli’s book wheel was very much a product of its time, a response to a fundamental shift in the accessibility of information. One article compares the technology of the book wheel to our modern-day ability to switch between tabs on web browsers. Ramelli’s invention therefore enriches comparisons between print and the internet as historic information revolutions.

3. ‘France in the Year 2000’ (c. 1900)

My final source is a series of illustrations created around 1900, which imagined what society would look like a century later, in the year 2000. The images were principally drawn by the French artist Jean-Marc Côté and were printed on cigar boxes. For the most part, Côté’s illustrations imagined cutting-edge technologies, presenting an idyllic image of a future centred around ease and leisure.

Some of the predictions in the series were fairly accurate or, at least, have echoes of technologies that did eventually appear. One depicts an ‘electric scrubbing machine’, which resembles an electric mop or vacuum cleaner. Another shows a farmer tinkering with buttons and levers to complete mechanised agricultural work.

An image from the series that my students particularly enjoyed depicts a teacher feeding books into a machine, which then transmits information to students through wired headphones. Although this exact mechanism did not come to pass, it certainly recalls 21^st century text-to-speech technologies.

Other illustrations by Côté appear more far-fetched. One depicts a group using flying machines to play a game of tennis, while several show people using sea creatures for transport and for elaborate sporting activities. However, even these especially whimsical images resonate with the huge advances made in both aircraft and underwater technologies during the 20th century.

This source is striking for its largely optimistic view of futuristic technologies, and inevitably begs the questions, what will the world look like 100 years from today? and can we afford to be quite so optimistic about how technology will shape our future society?

One of the drawbacks of not having won a seven-year fellowship at All Souls College is that I now have a big girl job instead. The interest I once had in writing about history has been supplanted by my newfound dedication to writing emails.

On the plus side, I’m now a seasoned and semi-proficient email writer, who no longer spends entire afternoons weighing up the pros and cons of different email sign-offs (I’ve cut it down to five minutes tops).

I’ve also been paralysed by the fear that corporate talk has pervaded my language to the point that I can no longer be trusted to write anything else. I recently caught myself beginning a (double) text with the phrase ‘just a quick follow-up’ and, soon after, informing friends that I would be able to ‘confirm lunch plans by EOD’. The tone of my communications, I worry, has been irreparably reconfigured for sending passive aggressive chase emails and terse Slack channel messages.

Ironically, part 2 of this piece was the bit I actually wanted to write in the first place. Part 1 was a necessary bit of scene-setting. Now, it’s been over six months since I actually took the All Souls exam and it’s a bit of a haze, but here’s my attempt to reconstruct some of what I wrote.

Luckily, All Souls actively recommends that applicants write summaries of their answers soon after the exams. They advise this in case you end up one of the few candidates shortlisted and invited to a ‘viva voce examination’. In other words, a 25-minute interrogation about your exam answers in front of fifty(!) All Souls Fellows.

Dutifully – and, on reflection, optimistically – I followed the advice. Except that I was so exhausted and sick of writing at the end of back-to-back exam days that instead of summarising my answers in writing, I recorded a series of rambling voice notes instead. Listening back to these now it’s apparent that, even then, I wasn’t entirely convinced by my answers. At points in the narration, I’m quite explicit about the quality of my responses – ‘then things started to get a bit lost’, ‘I don’t really know what I was trying to achieve with that’ – and my tone of voice becomes abjectly apologetic.

To recap, the All Souls exam involves two ‘specialist’ papers (for me, history papers) and two ‘general’ papers. Most of my history essays were pretty commonplace, but it was in the general papers that things began to unravel.

At the time, I do remember thinking that some of my general paper arguments were a little unorthodox, but looking back now, they were just unhinged.

In my defence, though, the questions were kind of unhinged themselves. Whoever set the papers must have been indulging in the academic equivalent of

So before we get into my answers, here are a few honourable mentions for most unnerving questions:

1. To deny that Bach is better than Britney is simply to play into the hands of consumer capitalism.’ Discuss.

I had a lot to say about Britney, but markedly less to say about Bach, and I worried that this would quickly become apparent if I attempted an essay on the topic.

2. Would the capacity to lay eggs change the debate on abortion?

It’s safe to say that GSCE religious studies hadn’t prepared me for this.

3. ‘We should be no less horrified at the idea of eating a dead chicken than at the idea of eating live monkey brains.’ Discuss.

The question wasn’t necessarily that daunting but, Pret chicken Caesar and bacon baguette still making it’s way through my system, I didn’t have the stomach for it.

So what questions did I decide I was equipped to answer? …

WHAT IS LOVE?

Yes, I, a woman who has arguably never been in love, decided that this was MY moment.

Initially I scoffed at the idea that anyone would attempt this question. But then, something terrible happened. The chorus of Haddaway’s ‘What Is Love’ started playing on repeat in my head and, soon, I couldn’t focus on anything else: the earworm compelled me to answer.

I started off by pointing out that love is often a site of contestation. The very act of posing the question ‘What is love?’ suggests that it’s open to multiple and potentially conflicting perspectives. Love, I wrote, is not the seamless merging of bodies, minds and souls presented in Plato’s Symposium. Confession: I’ve never actually read Plato’s Symposium but I did once listen to a whole In Our Time episode on it so I might as well have?

I argued that two contrasting literary genres in the medieval period – ‘courtly love’ and ‘courts of love’ – reflect love’s fundamentally contested nature.

In courtly love literature, a man purses an aloof female object of desire. She is typically uninterested or sometimes actively concerned by his attention, but he continues pursuit of his ‘love’ relentlessly. This dynamic finds a more extreme parallel in medieval pastourelle poems, comedic lyrics that depict a knight becoming enamoured with and subsequently sexually assaulting a peasant woman. The farce of the pastourelle lay precisely in the disjunction between the attitudes of the two parties. What the chivalric gentleman calls love, the peasant woman calls threat.

The courts of love genre approached love from a different perspective. These literary works depicted female subjects bringing their personal amorous woes to law courts and seeking redress, as well as – often – making a collective case for womankind and their treatment by men. This literary trope was reflected in the reality of the medieval English legal system, with records showing that women brought hundreds of amorous complaints against male defendants to royal jurisdictions.

While medieval men treated courtly love as a law unto itself, medieval women actively sought to bring objective legal standards into the domain of romance as a means of securing protection and official remedy.

I thought I was getting somewhere with this essay but things started to unravel when I went on a long tangent comparing medieval knights to modern-day incels. I’m still no closer to figuring out what love is.

‘ACADEMICS ARE LIKE PRIESTS: THEY DISGUISE TRUISMS IN JARGON TO CLAIM AUTHORITY OVER OTHERS.’ DISCUSS.

My answer was based around an identity that I claimed problematised the discrete categories of academic and priest implied by the question’s opening simile: namely, the preponderance of priest-academics (i.e. individuals who were both academics and clergymen) in pre-modern Europe. I used notable priest-academics of the Reformation (Calvin, Vermigli, Knox, Goodman, etc.) to test and ultimately refute the claim that both priests and academics ‘disguise truisms in jargon to claim authority over others’. Perhaps stress had awoken my dormant Church of England upbringing or perhaps I was simply running out of things to say but, as my answer went on, I found myself becoming strangely and belligerently protective over priests, finishing on some variation of the point that ‘academics could learn a lot from priests actually!!’.

I was pretty smug about my approach to the question at the time, but looking back, I’m sure at least five people in the room thought they’d had the same brilliantly original idea.

‘SATIRISING THE SUPER RICH IS NOT ART; IT IS SHOOTING FISH IN A BARREL.’ DISCUSS.

The problem with my attempt at this question was that I’d spent the period before the exam consuming significantly more Netflix than I had novels.

As a consequence, about four fifths of my answer was dedicated to me explaining that Squid Game, Succession, White Lotus and Triangle of Sadness were, in fact, super good, and the other fifth making tenuous connections between my watch history and an obscure Tudor poet called John Skelton.

Needless to say, my conclusion that ‘the fish might be more slippery than we think’ (yes, I actually wrote this) didn’t pack enough rhetorical punch to save my argument’s lack of evidentiary quality.

HISTORICISE SHAME.

I decided to write about women’s shame and its fleshy manifestations. There are genuinely intelligent things to say about this topic and lots of very impressive literature has been written on it but, by this point in the exam, brain rot had well and truly set in. I could try to reconstruct my answer but I think my ‘plan’ speaks for itself:

Whatever I had to say about hiding tampons, I have a sneaking suspicion that it failed to impress the All Souls dons.

A couple of months ago, I took ‘the hardest exam in the world’ – at least partly of my own volition. Masochistic, I know.

I say partly, because I was cajoled into taking it by my former professors: they, eager to see one of their students succeed at the test, and I, desperate, as ever, to impress them.

The entrance exam for All Souls College, Oxford attracts over 150 applicants every year, the vast majority of whom will have been awarded high firsts in their undergraduate degrees at the university. Typically, just two of them – and sometimes, according to the college, none – are awarded places as All Souls ‘fellows’.

To the disappointment of my professors, I did not become an All Souls fellow – which, I’m sure, after you discover how I answered the exam questions, won’t surprise you. But the benefits for successful applicants are enviable: an All Souls fellow gets a free room in the college, fully-funded tuition, and an annual stipend for seven years. If that wasn’t enough, I hear they also get to attend some very fancy dinners.

You might have come across articles with headlines like mine, which publish questions from the All Souls exam, but I’ve seen few accounts from people who’ve actually done it, so I thought I would share my experience and how I answered the questions.

Before we get into that though, some history!

The All Souls exam is, in keeping with the theme of this Substack, an anachronistic institution: quaint and ritualistic, it feels – like many things in Oxford – as though it belongs to another time.

All Souls College was founded in 1438 to commemorate victims of the Hundred Years’ War (its full name is College of the Souls of All the Faithful Departed). The entrance exam has been around since 1878, though it’s only been open to women since 1979.

In the past, one paper saw examinees receive a card with a single word on it, about which they were then expected to write coherently for three hours. Mercifully, they dropped that part in 2010.

Now, the examination is comprised of four three-hour papers, which are taken over the course of two days: two papers in your specialist subject (most likely the one you have a degree in, so, in my case, history), and another two – extremely daunting ­– ‘general’ papers.

I woke up at 5:40 to catch the 7am train from London to Oxford. The women’s dress code for the exam was the ‘equivalent attire’ to a suit and tie, and academic gowns were mandatory. In the absence of alternatives, I reluctantly put on my old school uniform – a scratchy white blouse and a pair of shapeless black trousers – and stuffed my gown – still faintly stained from post-finals festivities – into my rucksack.

At Paddington Station, I saw a girl who had already donned a well-ironed gown and did my best not to make eye contact. Once we reached Oxford, the people in gowns multiplied and, sleepily, I followed their trail to the examination centre in the north of the city.

Once we reached the exam hall, about half my fellow examinees pulled out detailed notes, which they began studying intensely, while the rest started loud conversations about their latest research projects. I was left awkwardly between the two groups, unsure of what to do with myself.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m far from above these bookish tendencies. Usually, I’d have been among those immersed in fervid note-reading until the very last minute. But I’d been told by my professors that there was no point in revising for the All Souls exam, and that, in preparation, I should read exclusively to improve my style. I was advised not to revise the content of my courses and instructed, instead, to read the LRB (‘if it didn’t bore me too much’), The Spectator (‘avoid the culture wars invectives’), and some Orwell and Trevor-Roper, as well as, vaguely, to ‘ponder things like the rehanging of the National Portrait Gallery’.

In the midst of jobs applications, I hadn’t got round to revising, reading for style or much ‘pondering’, and unlike the examinees who’d already started their Master’s degrees, I didn’t have any research to monologue about. So I sat alone, stopping briefly to chat to my friend Antonio – a charming and eccentric international student from Northern Italy, who, as a teenager, used to paint model army miniatures, and now dresses in beautifully-made ties and waistcoats.

Once Antonio had moved on to speak to his fellow Master’s students, I checked my phone so I could look as though I was reading something. There, I found an enigmatic email from one of my professors:

‘Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.

G.’

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*Stay tuned for pt. 2 to read about the unhinged questions that were set and how I answered them…*

We’ve all heard horror stories about romance scams.

A widow falls for the handsome man who messaged her on eharmony. He works ‘out of town’ on ‘important business projects’ but checks in with sweet and thoughtful texts, and soon they’re calling every night. Later down the line, talk of ‘money troubles’ begins – and you know the rest…

These crimes are particularly tragic because they prey on the vulnerabilities of people just wanting to love and be loved. They’re also becoming increasingly prevalent because the expanding social media and dating site landscape is ripe for romance scammers to exploit. Lloyds Bank reported a 30% increase in romance frauds last year.

In the US, the FBI website defines the schemes as an exclusively online phenomenon: ‘Romance scams occur when a criminal adopts a fake online identity to gain a victim’s affection and trust. The scammer then uses the illusion of a romantic or close relationship to manipulate and/or steal from the victim’.

But the romance scam epidemic is not new to the digital age.

Medieval romance scams

I came across medieval romance fraud accidentally.

Earlier this year, I was doing research on women’s petitions at The National Archives and was on the lookout for complaints made by women against men. Trawling through the database for the medieval court of Chancery, I kept seeing phrases like ‘feigned marriage contract’, ‘goods obtained on promise of marriage’ and ‘desertion’.

Medieval women were getting screwed over by calculated criminals too.

Today, I’m going to recount the romance scams brought to court by two of these women, Alianore Lunte and Margaret Grymmesby. They’ll help demonstrate what’s changed about romance scams over the centuries, as well as what’s stayed the same.

Alianore Lunte

Alianore Lunte was a widow from Essex. That’s about all we know of her background. On some date between 1475 and 1485, she complained to Chancery that she had been the victim of a scam carried out by a man named John Mynton.1

She alleged that John had expressed ‘often and many desires to the intent of matrimony’ and as a result she had ‘delivered unto the same John the substance of all her goods’. He knew that this was the entirety of the wealth she possessed. But now, John ‘denied his aforesaid promise’ of marriage yet was refusing to return her goods back to her. She did not mince her words about John: he was ‘a false and deceptive dissimulator neither dreading god nor the king’s laws’.

The accusations got worse. Alianore wasn’t John’s first victim: he had deceived other women using the same ‘sinister means’. And, Alianore revealed, ‘John has a wife’! Yet he had been ‘affirming and calling himself a single man’ to all these ‘diverse’ women. Alianore asked that John be forced to appear before the court to ‘answer there unto the said promises’ he had made.

This petition may have been written over 500 years ago, but when you read it, Alianore’s distress and desperation are palpable.

Medieval widows, like Alianore, were even more vulnerable to predatory suitors than they are today. This is because, under the law, they were in a uniquely financially advantageous position compared to other groups of women and so became targets for avaricious men.

When a woman married in medieval England, she became a femme couverte, meaning she was legally dependent on her husband and that any lands or property she possessed were granted to him for the duration of the marriage. Maidens, single women under the age of 21, were equally dependent on their fathers. And single women over 21, besides nuns, were relatively rare.

A widow, however, was entitled under common law to a third of her late husband’s property as it stood at his death. This meant she had the potential to amass a significant independent fortune. While we don’t know how large Alianore’s inheritance from her late husband was, it’s clear that John Mynton decided it was worth defrauding her.

What’s particularly interesting about this petition is the detail that Alianore knew John had done the same thing to other women. John resembles the career romance fraudsters of the present-day, who are able to target several people on dating apps at once. In turn, Alianore’s knowledge of his past crimes against women echoes modern cases where women discover with horror that they aren’t the only one: think, the Netflix documentary, The Tinder Swindler, where victim Ayleen Koeleman realised she’d been scammed after she saw an exposé about what her ‘boyfriend’ had done to two other women.

Margaret Grymmesby

Margaret Grymmesby made her complaint against Reginald Cobham at some point between 1386 and 1411.

Margaret was a German woman and somehow she had met the English Reginald in Strasburg. He had ‘boasted himself to be the son of the Lord of Cobham and how he had very great inheritance in England’. Believing ‘his fraudulent words’, Margaret went with him from Strasburg to England, bringing goods worth £200 (a lot in this period!) with her. They stayed together for some time in Essex (coincidentally the same location as Alianore Lunte’s case: I don’t think Essex was actually the medieval romance scam capital…). But then, one day, Reginald ‘took all the goods… and carried them away with him saying that he had another wife at home’.

Margaret was left alone and penniless in a foreign country, utterly helpless.

The international dimension in this case is striking. Today, it is common for fraudsters to operate from abroad, taking advantage of the worldwide web. But instead of sending the money to a different country by bank transfer, Margaret physically brought her valuable goods with her – perhaps testament to Reginald’s level of skill as a conman.

Reginald’s tactic of pretending to be the son of a Lord with ‘very great inheritance’ shows how little some of the tactics employed by romance scammers have changed. According to a 2023 report by the Federal Trade Commission, ‘I’ve come into some money or gold’ is one of successful romance scammers’ ‘favourite lies’, with 7% of them using it. Again, the fact that Reginald was able to tell these lies in-person, rather than relying on online anonymity, indicates impressive skill, but also extreme callousness.

Finally, 2 scam-related recommendations…

1. The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies (a fun new BBC show about a romance scammer and the women determined to take him down — you can watch on iPlayer).

2. Sweet Bobby (if you haven’t listened to the hit Tortoise podcast yet, you’re in for a wild ride — you can listen wherever you get your podcasts).

A foreign royal wife with a penchant for acting and a horde of vitriolic detractors: no, I’m not talking about Meghan Markle (yet). Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of King Charles I, was a French Catholic living in Protestant England. She became the target of a 17^th-century hate campaign led by Puritans, who attacked her religious beliefs and her supposedly loose morals.

In this piece, I’ll be considering the parallels between Meghan Markle and Henrietta Maria’s cases and delving into the societal forces behind the censure both women have faced.

High-profile haters: William Prynne and Jeremy Clarkson

In 1633, a barrister named William Prynne had his ears chopped at King Charles I’s command. Prynne’s crime? Well, among other things, his pamphlet against stage plays, Histriomastix, implied that Queen Henrietta Maria was a ‘whore’. Copies of the pamphlet were also gathered and burnt.

Jeremy Clarkson didn’t have his ears cut off after the column he wrote about Meghan Markle last December: to refresh your memory, that’s when he expressed his desire that Markle be paraded naked down the streets with crowds chanting ‘Shame!’ and throwing ‘lumps of excrement’ at her. There was no newspaper burning either, though The Sun did remove the article from the internet and Clarkson apologised. In June this year, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) also ruled that Clarkson’s article had discriminated against Meghan as a woman, the first time the regulator has upheld a complaint of sexism.

Prynne and Clarkson’s texts have misogynistic elements in common. The aspect of Histriomastix that was thought to allude most pointedly to Henrietta Maria was an index entry entitled, ‘Women actors, notorious whores’, which decried ‘any Christian women… so more then whorishly impudent, as to act… in the presence of sundry men and women’. At the time of writing, Henrietta Maria – who was something of an amateur theatre enthusiast – was rehearsing for the presentation of a new play with her ladies.

Clarkson, meanwhile, echoing Prynne’s equation of ‘women actors’ and ‘notorious whores’, suggested that Markle – of hit legal drama Suits fame – had ‘used some vivid bedroom promises to turn [Prince Harry] into a warrior of woke’.

Culture wars

The contexts behind Clarkson and Prynne’s attacks, and the wider animosity targeted at Markle and Henrietta Maria, are significant. Each occurred at the height of so-called ‘culture wars’ (a term that historians have long used to analyse discord in 17^th-century England, as well as in other historical periods).

As you can imagine, the culture wars of 17^th-century England were fought along very different battle lines to today’s: for a start, they were religious at their core.

In the early 17^th century, the main tensions were between Laudians and Puritans. Laudianism, taking its name from its chief instigator, Archbishop William Laud, was at this stage the dominant reform movement within the Church of England. Laudianism was mistrusted by followers of Puritanism – a rival movement committed to purging England of Catholic traditions and influences – because of its alleged resemblance to pre-Reformation Catholicism.

Puritan religious sentiments went hand-in-hand with a series of ethical stances and prohibitions – and it is the presence of such polarised value judgements that conjures associations with today’s culture wars. Puritans thought a lot of common cultural practices were bad  (or, in their terms, sinful). When they came into power under Oliver Cromwell later in the century, they banned makeup, sports, colourful dresses and even Christmas. They also banned stage plays, a favoured form of entertainment at Charles I’s court and the subject of William Prynne’s one thousand – that’s right, one thousand – page pamphlet.

The fact that the Laudian establishment punished Prynne so severely for his diatribe in 1633 is testament to the high political stakes of the 17^th-century culture wars, with one judge at Prynne’s trial remarking that his text threatened ‘to effect disobedience to the state, and a general dislike unto all governments’. There was great anxiety about the relatively new medium of printed pamphlets, concerning the potential they had to be written, and widely read and acted upon by members of the general public.

Today’s culture wars closely rival the intensity and gravity of those four hundred years ago.

Yet describing the opposing ideologies in today’s culture wars is a challenging endeavour, not least because it seems as though practically every contemporary issue or event is fodder for conflict. It certainly isn’t possible to map either ‘side’ – let’s call them ‘the woke’ and ‘the anti-woke’ for the sake of simplicity – onto the models of Laudians and Puritans.

But there are two key hallmarks shared between the 17^th and 21^st-century culture wars, which hold the key to explaining why Meghan Markle and Henrietta Maria both came to be cast by their detractors as representatives of rival – and threatening – belief systems.

Othering

Markle and Henrietta Maria each experienced treatment as ‘others’ who had managed to infiltrate the royal establishment. Being a Catholic royal wife in 17^th century England and being a black royal wife under the scrutiny of today’s global press and social media landscapes clearly do not represent the same experiences of othering. But ‘us and them’ mentalities are a feature of all culture wars and help explain why certain individuals become targets of disapprobation, as well as the form that disapprobation takes.

Henrietta Maria faced suspicion and critique from the moment she arrived in England as Charles I’s French Catholic bride. Her public image wasn’t helped by the fact that she never had a coronation – a vital ritual for establishing legitimacy – because she was unwilling to participate in Church of England ceremonies. There was also early anxiety about the couple’s future heirs and the potential that they might be educated into Catholicism by their mother.

And things only got progressively worse. As the historian Carolyn Harris puts it, ‘the queen’s household was widely regarded… as a site of foreign intrigues, conversion to Catholicism, and moral transgression’. In 1643, Henrietta Maria was impeached by the House of Commons, accused of opposing her husband’s subjects. A letter from 1642, in which Henrietta Maria anticipates the impending impeachment, reveals her striking lucidity about her antagonists’ motives:

‘[T]heir design was to separate me from the king my lord… they have publicly accused me, and by name, as having wished to overthrow the laws and religion of the country… and upon that, affirmed that as long as ever I remained with the king, the state would be in danger…’

Henrietta Maria saw that, as a Catholic amid the culture wars, she would never be fully trusted by the British public. She also knew that her enemies would not rest until they had used whatever means necessary to break her relationship.

When the news broke of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s relationship in 2016, Markle became subject to what Afua Hirsch has described as ‘frequent and cryptic references’ to her race in the media. There was the Daily Mail headline, ‘Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton: Gang-scarred home of her mother revealed – so will he be dropping by for tea?’, among others. In November 2016, Prince Harry’s communications secretary issued a statement highlighting ‘the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web articles’.

Since then, media commentary on Markle has morphed into a major culture wars discourse, an issue of ‘us and them’, reflective of what one research paper describes as ‘her existential challenge to the normative racial, class, national and gendered attributes associated with British royalty’. Meanwhile, the level of racist abuse directed at Markle on social media has intensified.

Before she even met Prince Harry, Markle had written about her experiences of being treated as ‘other’ in an article entitled, ‘Meghan Markle: I’m More Than An Other’. Here, she discussed her identity as a biracial woman, racial tensions in the US, and divisive media spin and stereotypes in contemporary culture.

Markle could not have known what was going to happen next. But the article had a real prescience to it, anticipating that whatever she did once she became connected to Prince Harry, there were cultural forces beyond her control that would try to force her into the ‘other’ box.

Gender

While the ways in which Markle and Henrietta Maria’s experienced othering were very different, the parallels between their experiences as royal women are striking.

Fear of female proximity to power is a tale as old as time. At several points in her marriage to Charles I, Henrietta Maria was perceived by the public as dominating her husband, and was regularly accused of attempting to convert him to Catholicism. Markle, too, is accused of dominating her husband, and converting him – as Clarkson had it – to be ‘a warrior of woke’. Prince Harry was framed by Clarkson as the pitiful victim, Markle’s ‘glove puppet’, and she the villainous manipulator, ‘her arm so far up his bottom, she can use her fingers to alter his facial expressions’.

These are two different culture wars, but the frenzy over the idea of the women holding influence in national or royal affairs is the same.

In the 17^th-century, William Prynne’s attack was based in particularly virulent Puritan attitudes towards women; in the 21st century, it’s still puritanical. Henrietta Maria was condemned by Prynne as a ‘whore’ and faced serious accusations of infidelity; Meghan Markle’s sexual history has been interrogated in the press and there is a whole corner of the internet dedicated to putting out sexualised posts against her.

As Helen Lewis points out, both Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton have been ‘conscripted’ to the culture wars against their will, pitted against each other and forced to represent two different sides.

In Henrietta Maria’s time, the woman she was pitted against time and time again was King Charles’ sister, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, like Kate Middleton, was cast as the epitome of English virtue and the right sort of woman to sit on a throne. There were even suggestions she should be named heir instead of Charles and Henrietta Maria’s children.

What Lewis calls ‘the architecture of misogyny’ experienced by royal women has remained firmly in place during the intervening four hundred or so years between Henrietta Maria and Markle’s times.

Final thoughts

‘I hate her on a cellular level’: this line from Jeremy Clarkson’s article might just as well have been written by one of Queen Henrietta Maria’s Puritan enemies (well, if they had known what cells were before 1665…).

The hate, in both cases, feels visceral. It is an explosive sentiment that is rooted in cultural conflicts much bigger than the individual women. They both became vessels to be filled with the uncertainty, paranoia and polarisation live in society at any given moment.

In the 17th-century, culture wars turned to bloody Civil War, with one side triumphing — at least temporarily — when Charles I’s head was cut off. Let’s hope for a more peaceful resolution to today’s conflicts.

Key reading

• Barbara Lewalski, ‘Milton's Comus and the Politics of Masquing’ in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, 296–320 (for reading on William Prynne)

• Bernard Capp, England's Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and Its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660

• Carolyn Harris, Queenship and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Henrietta Maria and Marie Antoinette

• Afua Hirsch, ‘When Meghan Weds Harry, Britain’s Relationship with Race Will Change for Ever’, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/27/prince-harry-meghan-markle-britishness-monarchy-relevant

• Helen Lewis, ‘Meghan, Kate, and the Architecture of Misogyny’, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/01/meghan-markle-kate-middleton-royals-culture-war/604981/

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We are living in the post-truth era.

In 2016 – the year of the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election victory – post-truth was the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year: an adjective ‘relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals’. That was just the start. Since 2016, anxieties about post-truth politics and culture have escalated, particularly with the ever-increasing verisimilitude of deepfakes and other AI-generated distortions.

The term post-truth presupposes a paradigm shift: it implies that before the recent move towards fakery and fabrication, truth was an immutable standard governing human civilisation. But what if an emphasis on the significance of objective truth claims is itself the product of a relatively new outlook in the scheme of human history? The linguistic history of truth shows that the word has not always been defined in its modern sense as ‘conformity to fact’. There was also a pre-truth era: a time when the boundary between fact and fiction was even more permeable than in the post-truth present.

Medieval understandings of truth

In fourteenth-century England, truth was understood differently. The dominant definition of the word was an ethical and essentially subjective one, synonymous with notions of personal integrity, fidelity and honesty. It was only in the late fourteenth century that truth took on its modern intellectual sense, denoting conformity to / statements of fact.

The dominant medieval understanding of truth as an ethical rather than intellectual quality was reflected in the practical usage of language: the historian Michael Clanchy points out that ‘the distinction between fact and fiction in writing… would not have been as sharp to medieval people, although they were very conscious of the moral difference between truth and falsehood’. In this period, truth was a moral characteristic that an individual could possess. When Chaucer wrote, ‘trouthe is the hyeste thyng that man may kepe’, he meant something like maintaining one’s integrity, not keeping a written record of facts.

In A Crisis of Truth (1999), the historian Richard Firth Green, provides an explanation of how the shift from the medieval ethical to the modern intellectual understanding of truth occurred. He argues that it was rooted in the shift from oral to written culture, itself fuelled by the growth of a centralised bureaucracy and its standardised legal procedures: ‘the rapid spread of vernacular literacy in the Ricardian period [ie in the reign of Richard II], driven in large part by the bureaucratic and legal demands of an increasingly authoritarian government, brought about a fundamental shift in popular attitudes to the nature of evidence and proof’. Green identifies that ‘the paradigmatic situation’ behind the transformation of truth’s meaning was ‘the shift… from a truth that resides in people to one located in documents’ [emphasis mine]. This new, intellectual definition of truth crystallised during the Enlightenment era, fuelled by the cult of reason and the scientific revolution’s emphasis on empirical verification.

Parallels between the pre-truth and post-truth eras

1.     Subjective realities

Today, the earlier, subjective conception of truth is returning to the fore. We can see this phenomenon on both the right and the left of the political spectrum. First came alternative facts – statements that are presented as true but tend to contradict a more widely accepted or verifiable ‘truth’. Then, there are the newly popular phrases, ‘my truth’ or ‘your truth’. Like the medieval, ethical sense of truth, these phrases imply that truth is relative to individual subject positions rather than being determined by objective standards. Truth in the phrase ‘my truth’ is not the opposite of error but, rather, the opposite of deceit – it expresses, ‘I am honestly recounting my lived experience’, not ‘I am giving you an accurate record of the commonly accepted facts’.  

Funnily enough, though we might consider ‘my truth’  to be a peculiar modern invention, the phrase ‘my trouthe’ actually appears repeatedly in Middle English literature – for instance, the line ‘my trouthe wol I kepe, I wol nat lye’ in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale. Arguably in this example ‘my trouthe’ means something more like ‘my word’ or ‘my honour’ than it does ‘my personal and subjective account’. But when people use the phrase ‘my truth’ today there is a comparable sense that the account is legitimised by the individual ethical credentials of the speaker, by their personal claims to honour and integrity.

2.     Populist rhetoric

Given the post-truth era’s emphasis on the subject, it is no surprise that it has gone hand-in-hand with an explosion of populism and tribalism.

But Richard Firth Green’s explanation of the medieval shift from an ethical to an intellectual understanding of truth adds further dimension to the link between post-truth and populist politics. Remember that Green argues the change was fuelled by an expanding state and its bureaucratic machinery, shifting the locus of truth from people to documents. Today, there are two key principles at the heart of the populist playbook: on the one hand, rejection of ‘the establishment elite’ and their corrupt and obfuscating bureaucratic procedures; on the other, celebration of ‘the people’ and their capacity to establish a new social and ethical order.

In a sense, then, populists today are imagining a reversal of the processes that first brought about the modern, intellectual understanding of truth in the fourteenth century: stop trusting in what government documents tell you and start trusting in ‘the people’!

The reversion back to a pre-truth consensus in our post-truth present is fuelled by populism. But it’s a symbiotic relationship because the more we lean into a mistrust of official information, the more of a foothold populist figures can gain on our conception of reality.

It is no wonder that conspiracy theories – today’s version of medieval magic and mythology – have moved from the underground to the mainstream. An April 2023 survey for King’s College London found that 1/4 of the UK population believe Covid was a hoax and about 1/3 that the cost of living crisis is a government plot to control the public. It seems a sizeable chunk of the British public is more inclined to believe the ‘truth’ of internet personalities than that of the government.

Final thoughts

We may be returning to a pre-modern conception of the word truth – eschewing documented facts in favour of subjective realities. But the world has changed since the fourteenth century. In medieval England, common moral standards were derived from shared faith in Christian and chivalric ideologies. But today, we live in the absence of such shared structures of belief, necessary to underpin a viable ethical conception of truth.

Even more significantly, trust is no longer, as it was in the medieval period, based primarily in the word of our neighbours and local communities. In the 21^st century, the capacity to reach others with information has been democratised. The dawn of social media – and its propensity to act as a breeding ground for extremism – means that today we need think much more carefully about who we choose to believe in.

Key reading

• Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (1999)

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