It's an odd moment in time.
I recently read Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning
Wolf Hall, a novel based on the life of Thomas Cromwell, and am now engrossed in
Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, by Tristram Hunt. And have being researching the English Civil War for a book.
It felt extraordinary to be reading and writing all this at the same time that the Pope suddenly announced completely out of the lapis blue that Anglicans who wish to become part of the Church of Rome will be very welcome.
The earth shuddered. I felt it.
Here am I reading about the Reformation one moment and then in another reading of its - arguable - end.
Was it inevitable?
Reading
Building Jerusalem, funnily enough, makes one believe it was. The two topics may not seem to be linked, but of course one of the most visible and lasting legacies of the Victorian city is its Gothic architecture, designed by men (almost entirely) who pined for the lost glories of a past embodied by the medieval Church.
The German Romantic, and then Pugin and his colleagues profoundly regretted the cultural loss of Catholic ritual and the medieval religious aesthetic, just as conservative commentators like Carlyle (and possibly Tony Abbott!) longed for the return of the social structures that bound medieval communities together.
It was the great clash between the Industrial Revolution and rationalist/utilitarian thought, and romanticism. (One might also argue that it's easy to agitate for the return of the great barons when you're not a peasant farmer, although whether 15th century peasant farmers had a worse time of it than 19th century cotton mill workers it'd be hard to say.)
I'm endlessly fascinated by the play between these ideas: between Enlightenment and science; and Romanticism and the sublime. One won the day in practical terms, while the other won the battle for hearts and minds - or at least fond memory.
The process is embodied in some ways by
Wolf Hall, wherein Thomas More - the revered friend of Erasmus, Renaissance man and martyr, who clearly won the sainted memory battle - comes across as a finicky, heartless and needlessly stubborn old git.
Cromwell, on the other hand - the rationalist lawyer usually painted as the evil power behind Henry's throne, destroyer of the Faith, and chopper-off of queenly heads - is the focus of the novel and in spite of being far from saintly wins the reader's empathy.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of the great battle was the French Revolution in which we can see the two ideas at war, along with a great many others, and it splattered both rationalism and Romanticism in their political senses against the walls of history and belief.
Perhaps Danton and Robespierre are the Cromwell and More of the 18th century...
and as I write that I realise that Mantell has described both fatal duets - better than anyone else.
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