Section 6: On Teaching And Learning

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On Teaching & Learning

Pedagogy from the Pulpit: John Mill’s Chapel Lectures and their Historical Setting by Natasha Bailey

I. Introduction

The textual scholar and longstanding Principal of St Edmund Hall John Mill (1645-1707) is renowned for his edition of the New Testament (1707), which the historian Eric Carlsson recently described as “Far and away the single most decisive contribution to eighteenth-century textual criticism”.1 But surprisingly little has been written on the scholarship or ideas of this Oxford luminary. Perhaps a reason for this is that Mill left very few examples of discursive work from which we could easily extract ideological information, with even the extended Prolegomena to his edition being notoriously cautious and historical. A little more has been said about Mill’s role as Principal of St Edmund Hall (1685-1707), where he embarked upon a disciplinary reformation, for which he was celebrated in some quarters and resented in others. One of his aims was to encourage students to improve their Greek, and he achieved this in part through delivering sermons and lectures on the Septuagint and New Testament in the recently consecrated chapel. Helpfully for us, a fascinating but overlooked set of notes on Mill’s pulpit lectures is preserved in a manuscript in the British Library (BL Harley 6941); this allows us to dig into his teaching methods and the ideas that he imparted to students. As we’ll see, Mill taught a subtly contextualist mode of scriptural hermeneutics, not only to help students interpret the Bible accurately (a prerequisite for becoming a theologian!), but also to foreground his own views on church hierarchy and spiritual authority. While the historian Adam Fox noted that Mill’s lectures were “orthodox without effort”, I hope to show that some contentious views lurked behind his neutral façade, adding polemical colour to learning in the Hall.2

II. Pulpit Pedagogy

A brief comment on the notes is first in order. Although Fox has pointed out that they appear to be in the hand of the notorious diarist Thomas Hearne, who matriculated at the Hall in 1696, the bulk of the notes were copied from the dictations of an obscure student named James Hammond, who matriculated in 1693 and took his MA in 1700. While the notes are undated, they were therefore certainly produced after 1693, and probably after 1696, when Hearne entered the Hall and Hammond stepped up his divinity studies. The notes consist of words, phrases, and occasionally verses from scripture in Greek, which are followed by Mill’s explanations of their meaning in English. The lectures were given “in chapel after morning and evening prayers”. The fact that the notes fill up sixteen large folio pages suggests that, most likely, they were the product of several sessions and perhaps a term.

1 Eric Carlsson, ‘Johann Salomo Semler, the German Enlightenment, and Protestant Theology’s Historical Turn’ (2006) unpublished PhD thesis, p. 307. 2 Adam Fox, John Mill and Richard Bentley: A Study of the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, 1675-1729 (Oxford, 1954), p. 24.

Unlike Heads of Colleges, the incomes of Principals of Halls such as Mill depended on room rents, and thus on attracting students. Mill was committed to this task, and his success is evident from the fact that his dues rose from £54 to £90 per annum between 1685 and 1690, remaining at that level until 1700. Reflecting on Mill’s achievement, Hearne remarked in 1706 that he had turned the Hall into a “Fanatick Seminary” – for better or worse.3 Either way, when Hammond and Hearne were students, St Edmund Hall was a vibrant theological hub, and so we can presume that many attended Mill’s morning and evening lectures.

III. Teaching the Bible

The period from c. 1670-1710 witnessed a striking shift in English theological teaching away from the foregrounding of doctrinal principles via ‘systems’ or ‘bodies’ of divinity (i.e. guides to the beliefs that had been extracted from scripture) and towards an emphasis on establishing such principles through the study of scripture itself. The notes on Mill’s lectures – which embody the transition towards this form of studying scripture – are among the earliest and most revealing instances that I have come across of how contextualist and philological approaches to the Bible were implemented in pedagogic sessions. Mill, we can glimpse from the notes, encouraged his pupils to determine the sense of Biblical terms with reference to the broader historical context. He dwelt, for example, on aspects of Jewish and near-eastern culture, explicating the meaning of terms that relate to rituals, feasts, geographic regions, and monuments. On occasion, he then used such information to propose revisionist readings of the text. For instance, he taught students to interpret Ezra 6.11 as referring not, as in the King James Bible, to a man being hanged from timber, but to his being impaled on a stake. As Mill pointed out, such a punishment “was (& is) a custom much used by the Eastern nations, & likewise by the Romans, & is remembered by Juvenal &c” (f. 194r). The last comment is also a helpful reminder that it was often via reading classical poetry that early modern scholars such as Mill gleaned insights into sacred history. Not only did Mill guide students towards embracing contextualist re-readings, but he also promoted a linguistically oriented approach that led him to make other subtle alterations to received readings of the Bible, at times for polemical ends. Given that the majority of students at Oxford and Cambridge were destined to enter the Church of England, teaching them how to come to its aid (i.e. to shore up its fundamental doctrines) in theological controversies was a key concern for any tutor. An interesting but subtle instance of how Mill’s apologetic goals shaped his interpretations can be seen in his exposition of several passages relating to the Trinity, the nature of which was an especially contested issue during the 1690s. The King James Bible had translated 1 Peter 3.18 as “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit”. Mill took this to imply that the Holy Spirit and Christ were one (f. 195v). He also concluded that in Romans 6.4, a statement on Christ’s Resurrection, “διὰ τῆς δόξης τοῦ πατρός”, meant that Christ rose “by the Power of ye Father”, instead of the more common translation of “δόξης” as “glory”(in the King James Bible: “by the glory of ye Father”).

The implications of such manoeuvres might seem opaque, but from Mill’s lecture the student was led to conclude that in the New Testament “the Resurrection of our Lord is ascribed to each of ye 3 persons of ye Trinity”: in 1 Peter 3.18 to the Holy Ghost, in Romans 6.4 to God, and in John 10.18 to Christ. Suggesting that he had some success, the manuscript contains a marginal addition stating that all “ye Apostles believed the trinity & so ’twas all one” (f. 195v). Mill had done his job for now, in a tangible instance of how textual criticism was harnessed to prop up doctrinal orthodoxy.

IV: Power to the Bishops

While the Trinity debate was high stakes, it was dwarfed in the 1690s, when Mill’s lectures were delivered, by discussions about the nature of episcopacy (a church governed by bishops), church-state relations, and the non-juring controversy. The Non-Jurors were a group of Church of England clergy and laity who, considering themselves bound by their oath of loyalty to King James II, refused to take the Oath of Allegiance to William III and Mary II after they came to the throne in 1688. Aside from an unwillingness to swear the Oath of Allegiance to William and Mary, a major problem with Non-Jurors was their desire to claim special powers for the Church, grounded in scripture and the Church Fathers. Mill was circumspect on such divisive matters – and was known for his shifting allegiances – but the notes in Harley 6941 reveal that he was not an entirely neutral actor in post-Revolutionary England. This may help to explain why he shielded in the Hall several theologians who were sympathetic to the Non-Jurors, including the Königsberg-born Biblical scholar John Ernest Grabe. arguments about episcopal power is found in his comments on John 20.21: “Then said Jesus to them [the apostles] again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you”. From this statement, Mill was convinced that the Saviour bestowed a divine power upon the Apostles and that “our Lord intended it for their successors & so from Generation to Generation while the World endures”. This language resounds strikingly with the theologian and scholar Edward Stillingfleet’s mid-1680s celebration of the institution of episcopacy. Stillingfleet believed the episcopacy was based on the “Apostolical Succession” and set to endure until “the World’s End”.4

Elsewhere, Mill cited the early Christian author Tertullian’s view that the “successors of the apostles” (i.e. bishops) possessed an “inherent” authority thanks to the “vicarious power of the spirit”. He also seems to have embraced Tertullian’s belief that the episcopate was responsible for providing a historically verifiable genealogy or pedigree of doctrine. As recorded in the notes, Mill held that since bishops were to “that Office ordained by the Apostles themselves, & these were to ordain others, & so on”, “it comes to pass that Episcopacy is absolutely necessary & inherent to Christianity”, with only bishops, whose authority stemmed from the Apostles, having the authority to divulge the true meaning of scripture. By presenting his students with this view, Mill guided them to the conclusion that only ordained members of the Church of England could shape and guard the true interpretation of scripture; given that the universities were the training grounds for the Church, they too played an essential role in that truth-defining mission. Mill feared that without episcopacy – and, by extension, without universities –

“the Christian Religion cannot subsist” (f. 198r). Although this was not an uncommon view in late-seventeenthcentury Oxford, the non-juring threat made such pronouncements more contentious than they might otherwise have been.

One of Mill’s conclusions that could have proven especially controversial was that contemporary bishops possessed a power “wholly distinct from & independent of any civil or secular Power or Authority whatever, & this is a Power of Preaching the Word of God, a Power of Administering the Sacraments, a Power of Ordaining fit persons to the Ministry” (f. 198r). Mill’s use of the word “authority” in relation to clerical power is particularly striking, as becomes clear when we turn to the final pages of the notes, which are on the topic of absolution.

Although the Book of Common Prayer extended the right to absolve sins to Church of England bishops, absolution was counted among the Church’s five rites; it was not, as it was by Roman Catholics, deemed a sacrament. Mill does not discuss this point specifically, but he does deploy a crucial distinction between ‘authoritative’ and ‘declarative’ power in the context of absolutions. In Mill’s day, it was generally held in the Church of England that bishops absolved declaratively: they pronounced (or declared) someone free from sin. However, it was believed that God alone knew whether the sinner was truly repentant and thus God alone had the power to truly absolve. In this sense, the Bishop’s authority was sometimes described as ‘indicative’ or ‘conditional’. By contrast, authoritative absolution referred to the belief that bishops could absolve sins directly; bishops who made authoritative absolutions were, in other words, making a judgment about whether someone was truly repentant. Accordingly, these absolutions were sometimes described as being ‘judicial’, ‘unconditional’, or ‘imperative’ in nature. There had been considerable debate within the Catholic Church about whether bishops possessed declarative or authoritative power to absolve, with Pope Gregory I, the sixth-century Bishop of Rome, famously concluding, contra the opinion of St Jerome, that “all Priests were made God’s Vicegerents here on earth, in his name to retain and forgive sins, not declaratively only, but judicially” (to quote the seventeenth-century divine Anthony Sparrow).5

Given its proximity to Roman Catholicism, the idea that priestly absolution could rest on imperative or judicial power was becoming swiftly associated with the Non-Jurors in Mill’s day, as the historian Brent Sirota has shown.6 Indeed, in 1696 – right around the time that Mill delivered his lectures – a national scandal erupted when three ‘discharged’ (non-juring) clergymen absolved two Jacobites (i.e. supporters of the deposed James II) for conspiring to foment an insurrection in the Midlands with the aim of paving the way for the assassination of William III.

This act sparked a controversy about whether priests did indeed have special jurisdiction when it came to absolutions performed outside of communion and confession. Several decades later, the Erastian

7 theologian and Bishop of Bangor

5 Anthony Sparrow, A Sermon Concerning Confession of Sins, and the Power of Absolution (London, 1637), pp. 15-16. 6 Brent Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New

Haven, 2014), pp. 161-4. 7 One who favours the authority of the state over the church, from the Swiss theologian Thomas Erastus (15241583).

Benjamin Hoadly unambiguously linked the notion of ‘Authoritative Absolution’ with the Non-Jurors in his Preservative Against the Principles and Practices of the Non-Jurors (1717), writing that an “infallible Absolution cannot belong to Fallible Men”8 .

Yet while, according to the Harley 6941 notes, Mill made the standard assertion that bishops had ‘declarative’ or ‘hypothetical’ power to absolve sins at communion and confession, he provocatively added that they had “Authoritative” power of “a higher strain” that allowed them to absolve sins at visitations (f. 199v). No doubt aware of the implications of his claim, Mill quickly nuanced it, clarifying that a bishop’s power at visitations “in effect is declarative too”, since even they “cannot divine the thoughts of mens hearts”. By suggesting that bishops may possess an unconditional power to absolve at visitations but that this power hinged on the sinner being truly repentant (a knowledge reserved for God alone), Mill perhaps hoped to appeal to both non-juring divines and more tolerant churchmen, for whom the very language of priestly ‘authority’ had become suspect.

V. Insider Learning

Mill’s Trinitarianism and caution about imputing authoritative power to bishops might serve to reinforce the prevailing picture of him among historians as a ‘Whiggish’ individual who willingly lent a hand to the prevailing orthodoxy and swam with the current, being thus deserving of his nickname ‘Johnny Wind-Mill’. But, despite Mill’s political neutrality, the notes that I have discussed here reveal that he had strongly-held ecclesiastical views, which would themselves have been interpreted as political. It’s notable, in this regard, that Mill brought one lecture to a close with the pronouncement that the only legitimate clerics were those who had “come into a constant succession from the Apostles on whom the Saviour of ye world & founder of our Religion breathed the Holy Ghost”, and, echoing John 10.1, lambasted non-ordained preachers as “thieves & Robbers”, “exceedingly different from us” (f. 199v). It is also telling that Hammond, in 1715, vacated his rectory in East Sussex for refusing to swear the oaths of allegiance, thus becoming himself a Non-Juror. While we can only speculate, it is not unlikely that several other youthful attendees of Mill’s chapel lectures may have met similar fates.

Borne out by Hammond’s dictations, Mill’s contribution to philological scholarship (as the culmination of an extensive liberal arts education) was, to a significant extent, designed to help defend his version of ‘ancient’ ecclesiastical government and the episcopalian church of his day, which, with its emphasis on a learned clergy, remained one of the chief patrons of academic research. Protecting this system was one of the surest means by which Mill could safeguard his favoured, humanistic approach to learning, and, in a rather practical sense, his job. Natasha Bailey (New College)

The White Rose Window by Alex Lloyd

The White Rose Project is a research and engagement initiative led by Dr Alexandra Lloyd, Fellow by Special Election in German. It was founded in 2018 and works to bring the story of the anti-Nazi student resistance group the ‘White Rose’ (‘Die Weiße Rose’) to English-speaking audiences. Each year, as part of our work, we run a translation project with a group of undergraduates. In previous years, students translated the White Rose resistance pamphlets and excerpts from their private letters and diaries. These have been published in Defying Hitler: The White Rose Pamphlets (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2022). This year, instead of translating between German and English, we explored ‘creative translation’, adapting the pamphlets into new works, including poetry, prose, drama, and artwork. The students’ work was displayed in a window on the High Street in Oxford, thanks to the generosity of St Edmund Hall. The White Rose Window showcased the students’ translations and provided information about the resistance. It was launched in June 2022, exactly 80 years since the first White Rose pamphlets were written, printed, and disseminated. The Oxford students’ translations are imaginative responses to, and interpretations of, real events and people as encountered in interviews and primary sources. They explore the courage and conviction of students who, 80 years ago in Germany, stood up to fascism and used the written word to resist. ‘Wortwahl’ by Anna Cooper (Jesus, 2020, Modern Languages) Es scheint so, aber es ist nicht so: first there was the word, and the word was

– geschändet, or geblendet, in einem Nebel leerer Phrasen zu ersticken, quickened, in an attempt to be fixed, under the ink-stained fingers at the typewriter. They are fickle things, these deutschen Worte, all too easily ausgequetscht, abgedroschen, verdreht. They must wring them out, mop up the blood of this Ausgeburt der Hölle, and put them to better use.

Wo soll das hinaus? Der Tag der Abrechnung snaps at their heels, waits an der Tür – there is no greater urgency than that of guilt. Mitleid turned to Mitschuld, and noch mehr Schuld an sich laden – schuldig, schuldig, schuldig! Someone must count the dead – it has fallen on them to deliver (mit dieser Wortwahl) das Volk, to plead – wir bitten Sie, dieses Blatt mit möglichst vielene Durchschlägen abzuschreiben und weiterzuverteilen! To take back the language, untwist it from its corrupted distortions, purify it, and yourself.

Jetzt stehen wir vor dem Ende, in an atrium, a sharpened blade, in ein geistiges Gefängnis gesteckt. Der Schnitter steht, waits, for it is die Zeit der Ernte, indeed: he cuts people for wheat, and their words from the space

between thought and air, between hand and mouth, or the lining of a jacket pocket.

Wo soll das hinaus? You cannot eat your words, not once they have slipped from your tongue – they sit silent and heavy, with Hybris, or Räche, or Menschheit (take your pick). They cannot follow you to the axe, they stay behind, hover, live on, neither burned nor torn to ribbons, diese Wortwahl: deadly, and yet never dead, condemning, instead of condemned.

Alex Lloyd, Fellow by Special Election and College Lecturer in German

‘keine Ruhe!’ Haley Flower (Somerville, 2020, Modern Languages)

On the History of the Oxford History Syllabus by Nicholas Davidson

I have taught in three English universities during my career, and was involved in extensive debates about syllabus reform in two of them, including Oxford. From that perspective, I can empathize with the comment of Felix Markham, a Fellow and Tutor in History at Hertford College from 1931 to 1973: “the recasting of syllabuses is a painful and laborious process”.9 Yet the history of the History syllabus at Oxford, before and during my years at the Hall, reveals a lot about the thinking of both students and tutors, and perhaps also something about the evolution of the University’s educational priorities more generally. For, as John Burrow, Professor of European Thought at Oxford in the later 1990s, suggested, “one of the ways in which a society reveals itself, and its assumptions and beliefs about its own character and destiny, is by its attitudes to and uses of its past”.10

A combined School of Law and Modern History had been established by Congregation in April 1850; the two subjects were separated institutionally only in 1872, when William Stubbs was Regius Professor of History at the University. It was his successor, Edward Augustus Freeman, who confidently claimed that it “is surely a practical truth that history is simply past politics and that politics is simply present history”11 – a formulation he first used in a lecture at Birmingham in 1880, and one he liked so much that he repeated it routinely thereafter. Sir John Seeley, Freeman’s opposite number at Cambridge, had been thinking along similar lines ten years earlier when he declared that history was “the school of statesmanship”.12 By the later-nineteenth century, then, History was viewed as an especially suitable training for politicians, or, as the Victorians phrased it, ‘for men of affairs’. Even in the 1920s and 30s, it was often assumed that most Oxford graduates in History would proceed to a career in public life. Little wonder, then, that the History syllabus at Oxford after 1872 was dominated by papers in English history, and after an initial introductory term, by the study of English political and constitutional history: a story that was usually presented as characterized by the gradual advance of political liberty. The emphasis was on the history of the institutions (especially Parliament) that were seen as embodying that liberty, and on the continuity of English history from the Anglo-Saxons to the nineteenth century. And those priorities continued to dominate the syllabus until the 1960s, when Finalists were still required to study English history in three compulsory papers ‘from the beginnings’ to 1914, alongside one paper in European history, a compulsory paper on the political thought of a select few writers (especially Aristotle, Hobbes, and Rousseau), two documentbased Special Subjects, and a General Paper, described by Alan Macfarlane, who studied History at Worcester College in 1960-1963 (one of his tutors was the Hall’s George Ramsay) as “a theory paper,

9 F.M.H. Markham, ‘Arts and Sciences in the University’, The Oxford Magazine, 78 (1959-60), p. 309.

and … a chance to reflect on more general issues”.13

In truth, the History syllabus at most British universities founded before 1960 was very similar: the Oxford model had been very influential. By the beginning of that decade, however, some academics in the Faculty were beginning to express doubts. In 1963, Michael (now Lord) Beloff, who graduated in History at Magdalen that summer, suggested that the local debate had been “sparked off”

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by Richard (later Sir Richard) Southern, who in his Inaugural Lecture as Chichele Professor of Modern History two years earlier had questioned whether the syllabus inherited from the Victorians could serve any longer as a subject suitable even for “practical men”.15 But Southern was not alone. Lawrence Stone, who taught in Oxford from 1947 until his move to Princeton in 1963, had discussed the need for reform the year before. And in 1961, John Cooper, a Fellow in History at Trinity since the 1930s, also expressed misgivings about the curriculum’s emphasis on the “history of liberty”, and argued that students should spend more time studying cultures other than their own, as “unique” and “non-comparable” examples of human experience.16

In part, no doubt, such reservations arose from the tutors’ own research, from their widening intellectual interests, and from their familiarity with the historical literature published after 1945. Southern argued in 1961 that “Historical facts, for many of us at least, simply do not arrange themselves in the way which Stubbs and his contemporaries found so illuminating”.17 Constitutional history, he said, while still necessary, now served mainly as a way into the more valuable study of “the thoughts and visions, moods and emotions and devotions” of the past.18 Calls for change in Oxford may also have been prompted by wider shifts in the understanding of Britain’s role in the world as it disengaged from its colonies, and by competition from the first wave of new universities, such as Sussex and York, that were now offering more flexible and interdisciplinary courses of historical study. And while some tutors did continue to defend the established History syllabus in Oxford, appeals for reform were soon also received from students.

Many published studies of student activism in the 60s and 70s focus on events outside the UK: in the US or France, for example, or in Italy, where questions about syllabus reform and the purpose of a university education were especially prominent. But the UK had its student unrest too; unrest that reflected significant changes in the size and character of the British student population. Student numbers at UK universities increased by almost five times between 1938 and 1970. Oxford’s student population alone had more than doubled in that period, and continued to rise thereafter, leading to evident pressures on accommodation and facilities in the city. Student funding arrangements were also transformed, following the report of the Anderson Committee in 1960, so that British residents admitted to first-degree

13 A. Macfarlane, Oxford Undergraduate, 1960-3, p. 463, available online at www.alanmacfarlane.com/ autobiography/OXFORD%20UNDERGRADUATE.pdf.

14 M. Beloff, ‘Looking-Glass Logic: The History Syllabus re-examined’, Isis, 30 (October 1963), p. 22.

15 R.W. Southern, ‘The Shape and Substance of Academic History’, in R.J. Bartlett (ed.), History and Historians: Selected Papers of R.W. Southern (Oxford, 2004), p. 100.

university courses from 1962 received partially means-tested grants from public funds to cover maintenance costs and tuition fees. This measure in turn helped to transform the social makeup of the student population in universities, and many undergraduates from the early 60s were the first in their family to go to university. Following the Family Law Reform Act of 1969, the legal age of majority in England was lowered to 18 in January 1970; students were now legally adults, and universities no longer stood in loco parentis. By the end of the 60s, therefore, students, now both legally and to an extent financially independent, and perhaps conscious too of their greater strength in numbers, had an interest in securing a larger role for themselves in their institutions.

In Oxford, the more public student protests focused on demands for a central Students’ Union, and for greater representation on University committees and boards. Hilaire Belloc had proposed the latter as early as 1893 in a motion at the Oxford Union when he was studying History at Balliol (the motion passed, by 114 votes to 70). It was supported nationally in 1968 by the UK Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, and in the following year by Oxford’s own Committee on Relations with Junior Members (the medievalist Barbara Harvey, now an Emeritus Fellow of Somerville, was on that committee), which recommended that new joint bodies of students and academics should be established in each subject to allow for regular discussion of curricula, teaching arrangements, and assessment.

But while pressure in Oxford from tutors and students for change in several academic subjects can be traced from at least the early 60s, it was for the most part a more decorous and co-operative process than in Italy. In Michaelmas term 1961, a petition signed by over 500 History students was presented to the Faculty calling for an extensive reform of the syllabus. Later that term, the Oxford University History Society held a joint meeting with the Stubbs Society, at which Asa (later Lord) Briggs, formerly a Fellow of Worcester and by then a professor at Sussex, led a discussion on “what a history syllabus ought to cover”.19 Several tutors were present, including Felix Markham, Lawrence Stone, and Keith (later, Sir Keith) Thomas, a Fellow of St John’s, as well as graduate students Tim Mason, later a Fellow of St Peter’s, and Peter Burke, later a Professor of History at Cambridge. A report of the discussion was subsequently sent to the Faculty Board, and a second student petition, again urging major changes, was submitted in 1962. By then, the Faculty had appointed a committee to examine the matter, and discussions in person and in print continued, among both tutors and students. The committee issued two reports, in 1963 and 1965, each enriched by evidence drawn from questionnaires sent to a random sample of students.

The changes suggested by tutors and students in the early and mid-60s can be grouped fairly broadly under three headings. First, that the syllabus should become less Anglo-centric, and that the opportunity to study papers on European and extra-European history should be increased. There was also pressure to reduce the number of compulsory ‘outline’ papers, which covered the history of a designated geographical area over several centuries, in order to make room for more thematic papers, especially papers focused on social, economic, or cultural history. Themes suggested included the

history of science or art, of the slave trade, of gender, and of belief; such courses could furthermore take advantage of insights that other academic disciplines were now able to add to the historians’ understanding. There were demands too for some variation in the methods of assessment used by the Faculty in Finals, and in particular for the introduction of a thesis based on each student’s own selfdirected research, for which more targeted training in historical methods might also be made available.

The practical outcome of what Keith Thomas characterized at the time as “the unending discussion of syllabus reform”

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was initially, however, fairly modest. By the end of the 60s, Finalists could replace one paper on English history with an additional paper in European history; and the end date of the modern outline paper in English history was extended to 1939. But the list of more focused Special and Further Subjects had started to grow, allowing over time for an increase in the geographic range and the number of non-political history options available. From 1968, it was possible for students to submit an optional thesis for their degree assessment.

Further such incremental changes were introduced in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. The end-date of the most modern outline papers was extended to 1964, and by 1989, Finalists had a choice of seventeen non-British history outline papers (including two on US history and one on ‘Europe and the Wider World, 18151914’). The number, and the thematic and geographical variety, of both Special and Further Subjects also increased; and in 1989, the old paper on Political Thought was split into three chronological periods, which were added to the Further Subjects. In the same year, the compulsory ‘General Paper’ was refocused more explicitly on methodological questions, and retitled ‘Comparative History and Historiography’; from 1999, it was assessed by a submitted essay. By the early 90s, the ‘English’ history outlines had also been relabelled as papers in British history, and students were required to take one British or non-British outline from each of the three broad post-ancient history periods: medieval, early modern, and modern. By the start of the new century, therefore, many of the reforms first proposed in the 60s had been implemented. Three further significant decisions were taken by the Faculty in 2004: that the Comparative History and Historiography paper was renamed ‘Disciplines of History’; that Finalists should be required to submit a thesis (rather than simply having the option to do so); and that the number of papers on non-European history should as an explicit ambition continue to expand. The full realization of the third objective would obviously be practicable only when we were able to hire the necessary additional specialists to teach a full range of new papers. But in 2015, after two special Faculty meetings and a ballot of all our established teaching staff, it became clear that there was now clear support for a further major review of the syllabus and of our assessment methods.

Finalists since 2020 have therefore been required, in addition to the Disciplines paper and their thesis, to study two remodelled outline papers or ‘Theme’ papers – one each from a choice (in 2022) of nine in British history and eighteen in European or World history. The ‘Theme’ papers are designed, as one Faculty document explains, to encourage the study of “an issue or problem in depth

across chronological and geographic boundaries”.21 The options to date have included, for example, papers on the history of war, religion, technology, and notions of identity, in each case across at least two of the medieval, early modern, or modern periods. My own contribution to this set of papers – initially developed with the help of some of my doctoral and post-doctoral students – explored Catholicism as a global religion, from the sixteenth to the end of the twentieth centuries. Students are still required to study two document-based subjects: a “Further Subject”, selected now from a list of thirty-six options, of which ten are primarily British or Irish in focus, and a “Special Subject”, selected from thirty-three options, of which eleven are primarily British or Irish. There is also now a slightly different balance of assessment between the second and third years, as the assessment of the second-year British history papers is by submitted essays rather than by a final exam. And across the three years of the full degree, students must now take two British, two European, and one World history papers, and study at least one of their four British, European, and World History papers from each of three main chronological groups, medieval, early modern, and modern. In retrospect, it is remarkable how prescient the syllabus reforms proposed in the 1960s were. That it took so long for the regulations to catch up with those aspirations can be explained in part, at least, because appointment decisions (especially for college and joint college and Faculty appointments) must usually reflect immediate teaching needs. The notable decision in the early 2000s to “go global”, for instance, was made at a time when – although many tutors were happy to shift some of their teaching energy into that new geographical dimension – the Faculty needed more specialists to design the new thematic papers. And the process of reform continues: the latest reforms were reviewed by surveys of both staff and student opinion in 2021-2022; the responses, alongside a careful analysis of the relevant statistical information, will be discussed further in the coming year. Whether the nineteenth-century founders of the Faculty would have approved of our most recent reforms is hard to say. But Lord Acton – a Fellow of All Souls from 1890, and Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge from 1895 to 1902 – would, I think, have understood our intentions: for History, he once wrote, “must be our deliverer not only from the undue influence of other times, but from the undue influence of our own … it promotes the faculty of resistance to contemporary surroundings by familiarity with other ages and other orbits of thought”.22 My own experience of university teaching leads me to suspect that the current Oxford syllabus meets his dictum as thoroughly and as effectively as Acton could have wished.

Nicholas Davidson, Emeritus Fellow

On the Joys of Being a Development Economist by John Knight

Coming from South Africa at a time when many African countries were achieving independence, I decided to become a development economist. I still am. My research in vacations has taken me to many countries in Africa and elsewhere,

and increasingly to China, which may well have the most interesting economy in the world. It is an ill-wind that blows nobody any good. In 1989, when I was supervising some bright Chinese students wanting to learn modern research methods, the event of that year meant that some did not want to return to China then. Opportunities for research opened, and I was able to join the China Household Income Project (CHIP), then jointly directed by the President of Magdalen College. This has given, and still gives, me access to excellent national surveys which I could develop with research hypotheses in mind. My most recent book posed the biggest research question: why has China grown so fast?23 However, I did not abandon Africa, choosing research topics that were central for each economy I studied: education in East Africa, macroeconomic mismanagement in Zimbabwe, and unemployment in South Africa. Whenever I have conducted fieldwork, I have grabbed opportunities to visit wonderful places, like the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi, the Murchison Falls on the Nile, and some of China’s amazing scenery. Sometimes I landed in situations more humorous afterwards than at the time. For instance, on the approaches to the Himalayas I misunderstood Google advice about blood pressure at high altitude, fainted on a mountain trail, and ended up in a remote local hospital. And up Ever White Mountain, right on the Chinese border, I wandered into North Korea by mistake to get a better photo of the deep blue caldera lake surrounded by a rim of snowy peaks and was only rescued by people yelling for me to run back. In fieldwork for an ambitious and innovative project on the economic benefits of secondary education in Kenya and Tanzania, funded by the World Bank, I drove my team of student interviewers to visit yet another employer. We arrived at the gate and were promptly arrested by the heavily armed guards. The factory had been robbed the week before, and the newly appointed guardians decided that we were coming back for a second helping. Professor John Knight, Emeritus Fellow

Time Flies when you’re Having Fun by Tom Crawford

Whilst it has been fantastic to be back doing in-person events over the past twelve months, I certainly don’t appreciate how fast the time has gone! Following almost two years of pent-up demand for outreach events, to say I’ve been busy recently would be an understatement… What was perhaps the biggest success of the year, however, was in fact an online video: a recording of me taking a GCSE Maths Exam. The idea follows on from the success of my A-level Maths Exam video last year, with both videos now having over one million views apiece. If you feel like reminiscing about school maths, or just simply laughing at my attempts to rack my brain to remember my circle theorems, then do check out the video here: www. youtube.com/watch?v=hQVcv-T7IiY

Following talks at the British Science Festival in Chelmsford and Maths Week Ireland, October saw the first ever performance of a maths-based variety show as part of the Oxford Science and Ideas Festival. Most performers were former or current students of mine at Teddy Hall, and the idea was to present maths in never-before-seen contexts. Joshua Ryman’s stand-up comedy and Siddiq Islam’s maths love song were particular highlights – you can watch recordings of both at the links below: Stand-up comedy: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Bx9C44dZgrE Maths love song: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RFxqCnefqG0 Events at pace continued aplenty into November with a school visit to Bullers Wood in Bromley living long in the memory. Never before have I seen a group of students more excited to be doing maths – although I’m pretty sure it may have had something to do with watching one of their teachers attempt to run the 100m in under seventeen seconds. Exactly why we were doing this I’ll leave up to your imagination, but the feeling of immense joy at the success of the event reminded me just why in-person events are so important. I was also able to attend to attend the Football Social Summit at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome as an invited speaker to present my mathematical algorithm for determining the greatest footballer of all time. In fact, as a result of this appearance I’ve since been working with Serie A and the English Football League on various projects that aim to bring maths to the beautiful game. Any opportunity to increase engagement with the subject is invaluable, but being able to do it through the world’s most popular – and my favourite – sport, really is the jackpot. Look out for the results of these collaborations over the coming year. Following the usual busy admissions period, filming for one of my favourite projects of the year began in January, culminating in the release of the video ‘How hard is the Oxford Interview?’ with YouTuber Mike Boyd in March 2022. You may recall the first video we made together in November 2020 where Mike sat the Oxford Maths Admissions Test – now at almost three million views – and the second instalment in the series, which sees Mike take part in an admissions interview with Teddy Maths Fellow Olivier Riordan. The video is designed as a resource for candidates, demonstrating what we are looking for in potential students, and helping to demystify the interview process. You can watch it here: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qxM7Dr5iPWA Inspired by working on this video with Mike, I also recorded two videos for my own YouTube channel which break down past admissions interview questions. The first asks how many times the digit ‘1’ appears when writing out the numbers 1 through to 999, whilst the second talks about the optimal size for a tin of cat food. You can watch both videos – and have a go at the problems for yourself – using the links below:

Number of 1’s: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=TPJALVOkvzQ Cat food tin: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5VaoZ2oKYcs Two of the biggest live events of the year also took place in March, beginning with my talk on the ‘Million-dollar Equations’ at New Scientist Live in Manchester. I also took part in a Q&A session at the event discussing my outreach work, which saw some fantastic questions from students as young as six! However, the real highlight

in terms of live performances came later in the month where I took to the stage at London’s Soho Theatre for back-toback sell-out performances at Maths Inspiration. Discussing my research into the spread of ocean pollution to a 1000-strong theatre audience is not something I ever thought possible, and I can only hope that the students enjoyed it as much as I did! Another personal milestone was reached in May as I passed 100,000 subscribers to the ‘Tom Rocks Maths’ YouTube channel. This is deemed large enough for YouTube to send me a congratulatory letter and an award called the ‘silver play button’ to commemorate the achievement. Next up is a ‘gold play button’ and the small matter of one million subscribers – wish me luck!

As things began to wind down in June and July ahead of the summer vacation, I was asked by The House (Parliament’s in-house publication) to set some maths puzzles to accompany an article by Baroness Garden on the importance of maths education. This was a decidedly difficult task, given the range of mathematical ability and interest amongst the audience, and so I settled on three questions, listed with difficulty ratings of easy, medium and hard. You can try the puzzles for yourself and read Baroness Garden’s excellent article here: www. politicshome.com/thehouse/article/ maths-challenge Across the year I have also been fortunate enough to continue to work with the Numberphile YouTube channel – the largest maths platform on the internet with over four million subscribers. The video ‘A Problem with Rectangles’ is a personal favourite as we break down an admissions interview question I used in the 2020 and 2021 cycles. Try it for yourself here: www. youtube.com/watch?v=VZ25tZ9z6uI Finally, I want to leave you all with a closing video of a great personal triumph. As an avid runner, and former student of both Oxford and Cambridge, I decided to undertake the task of running between the two cities. Accompanied by my brother and my dad on the support bike, we began at Queens’ College Cambridge at 9am, and finished at St Edmund Hall Oxford around 6pm the following day. In total we were moving for around thirteen hours and covered 127km. I hope that watching me limp through the final metres as I cross over Magdalen bridge with the final destination in sight will fill you with the same sense of homecoming that only the Hall can generate. Floreat Aula! www. youtube.com/watch?v=5m38mlYlL3U Dr Tom Crawford, Early-Career Teaching and Outreach Fellow in Mathematics

Teaching Medieval History with History Teachers by Emily Winkler

A Diary of Collaboration and Co-Creation at Teddy Hall

In 2019 I started work at the History Faculty as Principal Investigator of a research project in medieval history, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project, entitled ‘The Search for Parity: Rulers, Relationships, and the Remote Past in Britain’s Chronicles, c.1100–1300’, explores historical thinking in medieval Britain. My Co-Investigator Nia Jones and I are working on unpublished and littleknown medieval texts in Welsh, Latin, and French.

The medieval authors of these texts, working mainly in England and Wales, had quite a lot to say about Britain’s history, much of which challenged the solidity of national boundaries — as well as the solidarity of political feeling on either side of a colonial encounter. Nia and I are writing a book about these writers’ thinking, using the ancient Roman past as a case study for their ideas about history. These works deserve a larger audience, in part because they force us to rethink many common myths about the Middle Ages. As part of our project, Nia and I led a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme at St Edmund Hall for schoolteachers, entitled ‘Conquest Histories and Remembrance’. We teamed up with the Historical Association (HA) to advertise the two-day seminar nationwide for teachers interested in the medieval period, conquest, colonial worlds, and the history of warfare. Our hope was to reach school students across the UK by working with their teachers. We wanted to introduce educators to a rich range of primary sources, offering new ways of teaching the human side of medieval history through writing and imagination. Nia and I designed a programme that introduced our project research, especially around themes of concord, commemoration, and compassion in medieval works, in order to help teachers develop resources for wider use in schools.

Eight teachers from around the UK, seven of whom hail from state schools, were selected for the programme after a competitive application process. Lockdown began shortly after the selection, but all eight teachers remained keen to attend virtually. The CPD took place 17–18 July 2020, and as the picture shows, all of us enjoyed going back to school for history without leaving our living rooms!

Nia and I arranged the day to include short lectures about our work, followed by a rotation of twenty-minute primary source tutorials with one of us per two or three teachers. Meanwhile, Helen Snelson, an experienced teacher educator from the HA, tuned in and offered mentoring, feedback, and discussion on teaching methods and lesson design in the ‘bye’

sessions. Luke Maw, Student Recruitment and Progression Manager, offered a talk and Q&A session on Teddy Hall’s schools outreach and Oxford admissions for History. Several of the teachers had explained that one of their main goals is to inspire students to study History at university, or to help them aspire to go to university. We even had a virtual drinks reception with history-themed icebreaker questions, including: ‘Which medieval person would you most like to invite to join us at happy hour tonight, and why?’. We designed the CPD to offer teachers the materials, stimulus, and discussion so they could go on and design new lesson plans for medieval history, based on primary sources. Over the next few weeks, we arranged regular virtual chats to discuss ideas while teachers drafted new lessons. Over the following academic year, teachers ran trials of their resources in the classroom, and made revisions based on how the students responded. The pandemic made teaching the lessons challenging: some lessons were postponed a year, some ran virtually, and some took place masked in classrooms. But the student response was lively and varied, as we learned from the teachers. For example, the Mercian earl Morcar may have lost much to the Normans in the eleventh century, but he captured students’ imaginations in today’s classrooms. By following his career, students found their way into thinking about what England was like after 1066. Other Key Stage 3 students were amazed to learn that the real heir to the throne in 1066, Edgar the Ætheling, was probably about their age when he stood against his competitors to hold on to his dynastic birthright. That got them thinking about what it meant to be twelve or thirteen years old in medieval England. Still more students hadn’t realized how important women were in the political culture of medieval Britain, or were amazed to learn about the varied reactions to the conquest in Wales, France, and beyond. And some students connected with the medieval past when they learned that medieval writers also knew the Greek myths—the same Greek myths they learned about in school, or read about in fiction and histories outside of school. These students were fascinated by Jupiter and Theseus, and so was William of Poitiers, when he connected William the Conqueror to these ancient figures. The medieval world had many cultures, all different from our own. But in the stories they turned to in order to tell their own tales, perhaps they weren’t so different after all.

Once the teachers complete trials and revisions, their lessons will be published on the HA website for use by teachers countrywide. One resource by local Oxford teacher Holly Hiscox was published in May, and three more will go live this year. Thanks to policy changes and a receding pandemic, Nia and I were able to host the teachers in Oxford from 28–29 March 2022 for a two-day follow-up colloquium. Six of the eight teachers were able to join us at St Edmund Hall, and to meet their colleagues in person. We discussed history, teaching, and creating classroom resources. Nia and I shared our latest research and some new primary sources, and we all discussed how these might relate to teaching. Each teacher presented the resources they have worked on over the past couple of years (completed, in-progress, and planned) to their peers. They shared their experiences of writing resources and trialling them. Over tea, coffee, and lunch, we all got to know each other in 3D — a refreshing change from the

2D virtual world in which we had all met two years before. After the Monday afternoon sessions, we brought the teachers on a torch-lit tour of Teddy Hall’s twelfth-century crypt. In climbing down to see those elegant Romanesque arches with their whimsical carvings, we were entering into the same past whose words we had just been reading moments before. We peeked inside the Library above, with its lofty ceilings making quiet space for thought. We admired the Library’s inner door: the Norman arch, grasped firmly in those quirky carven beaks these last nine hundred years. After a reception of drinks, crisps, and convivial conversation, we retired to the Old Library for a candlelit dinner. Surrounded by books, we discussed everything from demystifying Oxbridge admissions to what history we would teach if we could choose any subject — as long as it wasn’t one we already knew well. One teacher treated us to a dramatic reading from an old book, declaimed from the balcony. It was a book by someone who had explored new lands a few centuries ago. In listening, we were exploring, too. The teachers stayed overnight in the newly renovated Besse Building, and we picked up with more morning sessions. We concluded by discussing plans for future collaborations, and how to bring more medieval primary sources to students and teachers around the country. Making the past accessible to teachers and students, in its own words, is an ongoing interest of mine. Over the next few years I look forward to finding ways of doing so by continuing to work with teachers. It has been a privilege to embark on these team projects for history at Teddy Hall these last few years. Please feel free to get in touch with me if you have an interest in history or education at all levels and would like to learn more! Contact Emily at: emily.winkler@history. ox.ac.uk Emily Winkler, Fellow by Special Election (2019–2022) and John Cowdrey Junior Research Fellow in History (2015–2018)