What makes life worth living? “Charity”, St Paul says, in the King James version – “love” in more modern translations. Happiness, most say. “Without love no happiness”, said Milton, turning the two answers into one. A friend of mine, close to death, made a long journey to see the Rothko exhibition at the Tate. He had no doubt there could be no better way to spend what might have been his last day. At such times our choices say a great deal about who we are; much of the rest of the time our answers are not to be trusted. Keith Thomas’s book looks at the answers to this question between 1530 and 1780. He excludes, as far as he can, getting to heaven (in which he has little interest) and the life of learning (which he has discussed elsewhere). He also omits wine, women and song, along with hawks, hounds and horses. That leaves military prowess, work, wealth, reputation, friendship and fame – which is certainly plenty to be getting on with.
Thomas starts by defending himself against the charge of anachronism. “Self-fulfilment” is a nineteenth-century word, with no early modern equivalent. When Roger North became Attorney General, in the late seventeenth century, his brother said “his condition of life was like that of a plant set in a proper soil, growing up from small beginning into expanded employment”. Here, says Thomas, “we can see something approaching the modern concept of self-realization”. Except, of course, for the fact that plants are not self-reflexive.
But Thomas is certainly right to think that early modern men and women did think that life should have a purpose – Aristotle had told them so. Where, increasingly, they differed from Aristotle was in thinking that any purpose would do. All classical and medieval philosophers thought there was a hierarchy of goods that one might choose to pursue, and that there was only one summum bonum. Even the Epicureans, who thought that the purpose of life was eudaimonia (felicity), thought that there was a right and a wrong way to go about obtaining it. Self-restraint, not self-indulgence, was the key. This great tradition was broken in the mid-seventeenth century, and a small linguistic change marks the break point: people stopped talking about felicity, and began to talk about happiness.
Thomas Hobbes was sure that every sensible person must want personal security. But after that, one could equally well choose tennis, poetry, or wealth. As Bentham later put it, push-pin was of equal value with music. There is, Hobbes said, no “summum bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers”. Nor, in Hobbes’s scheme of things, much prospect of happiness, for desire was constantly succeeded by desire. There was only one real end, and that was death. At the heart of Thomas’s account is this revolutionary moment, the first triumph of relativism. But Thomas leaves us with a chicken-and-egg story. Did Hobbes reach the view that “there is no such thing in the world” as “an utmost end” because he was an Englishman, caught up in a world where the old aristocratic values of valour and honour were increasingly under attack? Or did the English (or at least the godless English) become relativists because they read too much Hobbes, Locke and Bentham, and too little Aristotle and Epicurus? Reading Thomas is a profoundly puzzling experience: we see the world changing in front of our eyes, but we don’t know why. The only way of tackling this problem would be by a comparative study – to compare, perhaps, the reception of Epicurus in England and in France.
There is another curious feature to the book. Its recurrent theme is the replacement of aristocratic values by bourgeois values, and one might expect Thomas to seek to give both viewpoints fair treatment. But he can scarcely hide his impatience with aristocratic culture. The idea that “the supreme end of life” might be “the performance of deeds of military prowess” seems simply incomprehensible to him. He quotes Barnaby Barnes holding forth on the delights of slaughtering the enemy, only to conclude “What fun indeed!”. As for the aristocracy’s idea of honour, “their claim to sole occupancy of the moral high ground rested upon a gross misrepresentation of the outlook of their inferiors” – surely true, although one might equally claim that plenty of scholarly and pacific humanists made a good living out of misrepresenting the aristocracy.
Thomas’s book ends with John Dryden’s “bleak but defiant” translation of Horace:
Not Heav’n’ itself upon the past has pow’r;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
Thomas has had more than an hour. He was born in 1933, was President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford from 1986 to 2000, knighted in 1988, President of the British Academy (1993–7), and for many years a key figure in the supervision of Oxford University Press.
He made his reputation with Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), which was followed by Man and the Natural World (1983). This, which is only Thomas’s third book, is a revised version of the Ford lectures he delivered in Oxford in 2000, the year he officially retired. His account of “What made life worth living?”, coming at the end of his own career (and more than fifty years after his first major publication), is bound to be seen both as an invitation to us to reflect on our own lives, and as Thomas’s meditation on a life well lived. It is hard not to suspect, for example, that he identifies with “Dr Prideaux, Rector of Exeter College between 1612 and 1642, [who] kept the old leather breeches he had worn as a young man in order to show his pupils the social depths from which his diligence had raised him. It was said that three men in his college lost their lives in vain attempts to emulate his industry”.
For thirty years or so, Thomas was generally accepted as the world’s most distinguished and most influential historian of early modern England, and he was universally acknowledged as the dominant figure in the Oxford history faculty. A quarter-century in the making, this book should be good. And it is. But it is also distinctly peculiar. “At times”, Thomas tells us in the introduction, “my text comes close to a collage of quotations.” The word collage does not quite prepare us for what is to follow: “mosaic” would be better. Thomas rarely devotes more than a sentence to an author, a text, or an event. There are only two long quotations in the whole book: one, from Richard Baxter, has to be long, as it imitates how women go on and on when they are gossiping. Only once does he burst out of these self-imposed constraints, when he devotes a dozen sentences to the story of Pepys and his coach. “This poignant episode” (Pepys’s delight in his coach was intense but short-lived) is an object lesson in how vanity is inseparable from anxiety and remorse.
For the most part, though, this is history as tessellation. If John Pocock, who is engaged in writing an account of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall which is longer than the Decline and Fall itself, stands at one extreme of the historical profession, Thomas has now placed himself at the other.
The texture of the book reflects the author’s method of working. He reads voraciously and indiscriminately (“I try to read everything”), and copies out telling phrases he notes onto pads of paper. Thus when Thomas tells us that John Donne, in one of his sermons, says that “work” is “a word that implies difficulty, and pain, and labour, and is accompanied with some loathness, with some colluctation [ie, struggling]” it is a reasonable guess that he has come across this quotation by the elementary procedure of reading all twelve volumes of Donne’s sermons. It so happens that I too have read all Donne’s sermons, but I read them in order to understand Donne’s theology. I find it hard to imagine what it would be like to read them for Donne’s passing references to daily life, to courtship and children’s toys, to holidays and labour, to sickness and health – to read them, as it were, constantly against the grain. And harder still to imagine what it would be like to realize that hundreds and hundreds of such volumes would need to be read before one could construct a paragraph on, say, the ostentations of the wealthy. But that is how Thomas has worked, and the resulting pages of notes are then cut up and put in envelopes with labels such as “Clothes” or “Dirt”. When he wants to write, he empties out an envelope and begins to arrange the quotations, clipping them into place on sheets of paper.
Thomas’s life mission has been to incorporate the Bodleian Library, or at least the books in it published between 1530 and 1780. Not surprisingly, in a lecture to the British Academy on the learned life, he paused over early modern scholars who described themselves as living libraries or walking dictionaries or speaking concordances, providing a handful of examples laboriously collected over the years. By chance I’ve just come across another one in my reading: John Mair, in 1530, who writes of exploring the bookshelves of his mind, a metaphor less cramped and congested than most references to living, or walking or speaking libraries. But now you only have to tap the key phrases into the search engine of Early English Books on Line or of Google Book to come up with more examples – computers are in the process of ingesting whole libraries for us, so that the ambition to become a living library no longer makes much sense. On the other hand, no one will ever know early modern England again as intimately, as immediately, as exhaustively, as Keith Thomas now does.
In truth, what we have here is an elaborate commonplace book: Collector, non auctor, ego sum – “I am the collector, not the author,” he tells us. One does not turn to a commonplace book to find problematic texts interpreted. In the same lecture on the learned life, Thomas said “We are all relativists now”. I don’t think he meant it of himself – the point of the lecture is to defend the value of learning. But I’ve already given more space to interpreting this one phrase than he gives to any problem of interpretation in his new book. Nor does one turn to a commonplace book to find an argument. Thomas made his reputation in the 1960s by maintaining that history should have a closer relationship with the social sciences, particularly anthropology. He wanted a history that would provide both arguments and explanations. We find few of them here. It is only at the midpoint that he first expresses disagreement with the work of other historians (on sexual defamation cases in the Church courts), and around the same point that he first rejects a classic explanation – the Weber–Tawney thesis on Puritanism and capitalism. What Thomas aims at is a description of self-fulfilment and self-realization in early modern England which is so obviously a pure distillation of the evidence that it requires no polemical defence, and provokes no disagreement. His aim is to convince the reader that there is no fragment of evidence with which he is not familiar, but that all these tiny fragments naturally find their place within an overall argument that is so obvious as to be indisputable.
I do not mean to suggest that Thomas has read his sources uncritically: the endnotes show that his mastery of the secondary literature is just as remarkable as his control of the primary sources, and this reading has certainly directed his note-taking. When he tells us that early modern labourers tended to idle on Monday (which was treated as an honorary saint’s day, St Monday), and push themselves hard later in the week, “like modern students writing weekly essays”, the accompanying endnote is one of a series pointing to a dense literature on changing attitudes to leisure and labour. But Thomas rarely cites the secondary literature in order to take sides, or to show that what he has to say has never been said before.
This effacement, both of himself and of his contemporaries, has produced a book which is a delight to read. Dry, sardonic, pithy, constantly interesting, Thomas has managed to find a style which enables him to carry a vast amount of learning seemingly effortlessly. His book has some of the characteristics of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), in that it is capacious, tolerant, endlessly learned, but it is slimmer, sleeker and more user-friendly than that baggy portmanteau. It is hard, indeed, to imagine a better introduction to the early modern world. It will be immediately and universally recognized as indispensable, not just for historians, but for anyone with an interest in the past. At first sight all that seems to be missing is a health warning – trying to emulate Thomas’s industry might endanger your life.
Let us be clear, though, that Thomas has made a series of fundamental choices, and that those choices place him at odds with the main trends in historical scholarship over the past forty years (trends he himself summarized very fairly in an article in the TLS, October 13, 2006). He is, in language invented by J. H. Hexter in the course of a famous assault on Thomas’s graduate supervisor, Christopher Hill, a “lumper” not a “splitter”. Where other historians have embraced microhistory and aspired to see the universe in a grain of sand, Thomas brings you the beach and announces that it is made of sand through and through. Where others have tried to reconstruct in detail the life of a single village, Thomas treats England as if it were one community, not many contrasting communities (Contrasting Communities is the title of an influential book by a Cambridge historian, Margaret Spufford, published in 1974). Where others have insisted that the main route to the study of a foreign culture is through the study of language and the identification of different discourses, Thomas frankly acknowledges that this is not his approach. Indeed he gives an outsider’s account of what the study of discourse is all about. He thinks that discourses are “established conventions” and that language is a resource which constrains what can be said – as if words were ill-fitting clothes within which thoughts are confined. While of course the claim is that language and thought are so inseparable that we can never see how our language constrains our thought, and cannot ever step outside the conventions that do not confine us because they define us. In the years between the publication of Religion and the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World, many historians (and literary critics too) turned from Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson to Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Clifford Geertz – Natalie Zemon Davis is an obvious and admirable example. Thomas largely abandoned R. H. Tawney, Hill and Thompson, but he did not set out to emulate Foucault, Ladurie, or Geertz.
We can guess at what happened to Thomas. In the 1960s, he thought that historians should learn from anthropologists, and the anthropologist they should learn from was E. E. Evans-Pritchard, whose great book was Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937). Thomas’s imagination was caught by the first part of that book, which provided a structural-functionalist account of witchcraft – in Religion and the Decline of Magic he argued that witchcraft accusations resulted from conflicting views regarding entitlement to charity. But Evans-Pritchard was more than a simple structural- functionalist. The second part of his book, on the infallibility of Zande oracles, along with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), inspired Peter Winch’s Idea of a Social Science (1958). Had Thomas read Evans-Pritchard through Winch, he would have taken what is called “the linguistic turn” ahead of everyone else. The third part of Evans-Pritchard’s book described how witch-doctors learnt to fake cures. Evans-Pritchard explained that many Zande recognized that some witch doctors are quacks; but not even the most sceptical was willing to conclude that all of them were frauds. Early modern England was different: some adventurous individuals had broken free of what Evans-Pritchard calls “the web of belief” (a web which he hastened to insist did not imprison the Zande but defined who they were). Others only pretended to be caught up in it. Most early modern English men and women claimed to believe in heaven and hell, but Thomas joins Sir Thomas Browne and Thomas Hobbes in suspecting that the majority of them were simply paying lip- service. Here conventions did function as constraints. It is as if Thomas had jumped from the beginning of Evans-Pritchard’s book to the end without reading the middle.
There is, or seems to be, a simple explanation for this. Fashionable historians in the 1970s (such as Davis, who moved to Princeton, where Geertz was based) went in one bound from soft Marxism to poststructuralism. But Oxford anthropology had an intellectual life of its own, and in the early 70s structural-functionalism was supplanted by the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas. This structuralism appeared to be inimical to history – although Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons (1997) eventually showed that these appearances were deceptive. For Thomas, who was a decade older than Clark, the road forward, as far as methodology was concerned, appeared to be blocked. Cambridge historians, who had never read Evans-Pritchard or Lévi-Strauss, but many of whom had read Wittgenstein and Winch, entered the brave new world of discourse (but not the world of Geertzian microhistory); Oxford historians did not. The Ends of Life, like Man and the Natural World before it, is the product of this intellectual blockage.
Thomas started his career standing for everything that Geoffrey Elton was opposed to: instead of letting the facts speak for themselves he wanted to turn history into a social science. Indeed Thomas has himself said that he was one of the targets of Elton’s The Practice of History (1967). But he ends his career relying – or at least appearing to rely, if you stick to the text and ignore the endnotes – on the sort of untheoretical immersion in the sources that Elton advocated. Meanwhile it is the pupils, not of Christopher Hill or Keith Thomas, but of Elton’s great Cambridge rival, Jack Plumb – Quentin Skinner, Simon Schama, Sir David Cannadine, Linda Colley, John Brewer, the late Roy Porter, thoughtful readers of Foucault every one – who have become the public faces of early modern history. It need not have ended like this – there is already a reference to Foucault’s history of madness buried in the footnotes of Thomas’s classic essay on “History and Anthropology” (1963). Who in Cambridge had heard of Foucault in 1963?
But perhaps what really constrained Thomas was not the collapse of structural-functionalism, not any deep hostility to postmodernism (perhaps he does include himself when he says “We are all relativists now”), not even his loyalty to Oxford as against Cambridge, but, quite simply, his method of working. No matter how often he rearranged the contents of his envelopes, the result would never be a Geertzian thick description, or a Foucaldian anecdote, let alone the life of an entire village community, a Montaillou or a Terling. By the early 1970s, Keith Thomas’s envelopes were bulging with unwritten books: it was too late to begin again. Hence the “bleak but defiant” ending to this book, encapsulated in Dryden’s line: “Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have liv’d today”.
Keith Thomas
THE ENDS OF LIFE
Roads to fulfilment in early modern England
393pp. Oxford University Press.
