Chapter 2 The Italy 1200–1700 Seminar

Membership and content

Membership and attendance of the Seminar went through several distinct phases, which could be classified as early, middle and late Rubinstein, and post-Rubinstein. The four people who attended the very first meeting on 14 October 1949 were a mixed group, none of them studying Florence, which was central to Rubinstein’s career, and only one of them even a member of the University of London. Daniel Waley (1921–2017) was still a PhD student at Cambridge, working on medieval Orvieto. He became a lecturer, at the LSE from 1952, and subsequently one of the major historians of non-Florentine communal Italy. He was the author of, among many works, the standard textbook, The Italian City Republics, now in its fifth edition.⁷ Fanny MacRobert (1922–2000) was another Cambridge student, then recently married and living in London: her topic was German imperial towns in the fifteenth century.⁸ She later became a schoolteacher. Dione Clementi (1914–2010), daughter of a former colonial governor, had worked at the wartime code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park and in 1949 was studying for her Oxford DPhil on twelfth-century Sicily; later she taught at Queen Mary College and published numerous studies of the political and constitutional histories of Sicily, southern Italy and England. Only the last member was actually studying for a London PhD, on the manuscripts of the Venetian cardinal Pietro Bembo: Daniel S. Duncan (d. 2002), who, despite not completing his PhD or publishing very much, did become head of department first at Birkbeck College, then (1966) at the University of Western Australia.⁹ Both Waley and Duncan had served in the British army in Italy in the Second World War, and in both cases this inspired their choice of Italian history and literature as a career. The diffuse interests of this group are perhaps unsurprising: Rubinstein was not yet supervising doctoral students (his first was Rosemary Devonshire Jones, whose study of a Florentine diplomat and politician was completed in 1958).

Four attenders remained the average for the next decade, the maximum being eight. We should not be surprised at such numbers: students making it through to postgraduate study in Italian medieval history were few in the 1950s. In 1959–60, there were four members again: Waley, a permanent presence at the Seminar until the early 1960s; Alison Brown (Dyson in those days), then studying for her MA; ‘Tilly’ De La Mare (1932–2001), a Warburg PhD student of Florentine book producers; and the fourth was a former student at the Warburg whose PhD thesis had discussed a humanist treatise on ‘famous men’. Brown went on to a successful career at Royal Holloway College, and her interests most closely paralleled those of Rubinstein: Florentine politics, the Medici and Renaissance political thought. De la Mare became assistant librarian at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (1964–88) and then a distinguished professor of palaeography at King’s College London, with special interest in Florentine humanistic books and book collectors. In the intervening years, other Florentinists had come and gone, such as Louis Marks (1928–2010), who in later life went on to a more high-profile career as a screenwriter and drama producer for the BBC, drawing on his historical knowledge to set an episode of Dr Who in fifteenth-century Italy.

The content in these early years seems to have been determined by Rubinstein’s own experience as a student in Berlin in the 1930s, attending seminars which ‘focused on discussion of texts’. In his own valedictory, retrospective talk delivered in 1996, Rubinstein recalled that:

Members of the Seminar did not read papers but collaborated on the discussion of texts – interpretation and philological criticism thereof. Members of the Seminar had to work quite hard … It was customary for professors to choose for their seminar’s subjects connected with the work they themselves were doing. (Elam, contemporaneous notes on Nicolai’s seminar paper).

Such content, however, did not fit the context of graduate studies in London: ‘The Seminar was originally text-based, but this didn’t work well: too few people and other members too busy to prepare’ (Elam). So, about 1954, Rubinstein adopted the system of speakers giving papers.

In the early 1960s, the Seminar seems to have been close to expiring. In 1962–3 it ran only in the summer term with one attender (according to the register: that person does not recall this). The Seminar did not meet in 1963–4, as Rubinstein was at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton for the year. When it restarted in the autumn of 1964, the old core had disappeared (some only temporarily). This marked the start of a new phase. New members in the mid and late 1960s were PhD students, mostly supervised by Nicolai Rubinstein and with topics in Florentine history: studies of Florentine politicians, writers, preachers or art patronage. Diana Webb recalls that in the late 1960s, membership ‘consisted of three married couples and me’. Two of these couples were Dale and Bill Kent,¹⁰ and Bob and Jane Black. The third, as Jane Black recalls, was ‘Ann and Christopher Fuller, who have long dropped out of the scene [and] were regular attenders, Ann working very productively on the church of Santo Spirito and its patrons, Christopher on Florentine preachers.’ All of this group were studying fifteenth-century Florence, under the supervision of Rubinstein: political alignments 1427–34 (Dale Kent, PhD 1971), three elite families 1427–1530 (Bill Kent, 1971), a Florentine humanist and chancellor (Bob Black, 1974), political ideas in a work on ‘civil life’ (Jane Black, 1969); most of their theses were published as monographs. Indeed, prominent careers as Renaissance historians lay ahead for some of these: the Australian Kents became professors, first at La Trobe and later at California Riverside (Dale) and at Monash (Bill), and produced ground-breaking works on Florentine families, and on Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici; the Chicagoan Robert Black became professor at Leeds and wrote major new studies of Renaissance education. This group represented a significant shift in the Seminar’s social profile: away from Oxbridge, towards the world. Numbers at the Seminar grew each year, from six in 1967–8 to eleven in 1969–70 and reaching twenty by 1974–5.

The content of the Seminar in this period was closely connected with the professor’s own work, as Jane Black, who attended from 1967, recalled:

The emphasis was VERY Florentine, what with Nicolai’s own preference and the overpowering presence of the Kents. The interchange was usually about particular fifteenth-century Florentine families … The contributions consisted of people’s last thesis chapter, not always riveting. Discussions were pretty technical … Daniel Waley was a regular attender, sitting in a corner with unspoken impatience.

Such impatience arose from tension between the special status of Florentine history and a plethora of other historiographies in medieval Italy. Views from inside and outside Florence did not always coincide. Former students also recall frustration with the content: Jill Moore said that at first,

the focus was overwhelmingly, stultifyingly, on a very short period of Florentine history, and as far as I could tell, I was the only person round the table working on a different period and a different area of Italy … Nicolai was very much in charge (though kindly), and the Kents were clearly head prefects.

The dominance of Rubinstein’s students continued into the 1970s, as recalled by Robertson: ‘I have a memory that it was a mostly a mix of Nicolai’s postgraduates past and present who gave papers plus others’ (he mentions Sydney Anglo, in particular, a memorable paper on duelling).

Across the Seminar’s first fifty-six years (1949–2005) a total of 841 people signed the register. That figure needs some glossing: it is likely that some attenders failed to sign (Bernadette Paton recalls thinking that signing was only for ‘Important People’); some signed illegibly; and from a certain date the register seems to include the speaker. Nevertheless, this is an impressive body of scholars. Of these 841, the gender of 174 is unclear. Of the remaining 668, 393 (59 per cent) were women and 275 were men. This female dominance might be surprising, but it existed almost from the beginning. The attenders were evenly split between men and women in 1949, and a female superiority in numbers soon set in: three out five in 1955–6, six out of eight in 1956–7, three out of three in 1961–2. It may be that the ‘femininity’ of modern language student-cohorts explains this preponderance.¹¹ What is also striking from this total is the growth of new entrants: listing members by date of first attendance, the numbers are in single figures until the mid-1970s, but in double figures every year after 1978–9, over twenty every year between 1983 and 2003, over thirty every year between 1990 and 1995, reaching over fifty in two of those years. The number of students and scholars being newly drawn to this Seminar kept expanding in the central Rubinstein years, a testimony to his reputation, to the range and quality of the speakers, and to the relevance and popularity of Italian studies. Also important in the expansion was the inclusion of art-historical topics attracting art historians: Rubinstein himself noted that ‘in 1969–70 there would have been no question of art historians attending the Seminar; by 1976 it had become routine’ (Elam, notes on Rubinstein’s retirement speech in 1996). At this period, funding for PhD study was more generous and more available, and choice of topic and supervisor less constrained than they later became.

The heyday of the Seminar under Rubinstein (and his eventual co-convenor David Chambers) was the 1970s and 80s, and this lasted into the 1990s: a solid core of Florentine historians, students of that city’s society, politics and art/architecture, and with new members replacing erstwhile pillars such as the Kents. There was though also a consistent number of non-Florentinists, whether working on Siena (Peter Denley) or further afield on non-republican Italy such as Ferrara or Mantua, or on cognate disciplines such as archaeology. Once again, there were PhD students or postdocs from outside London, whether from Oxford or Cambridge (Denley, Elam) or from as far as Keele, thirsty for a kind of focused research debate that their own universities were unable to provide. ‘As a Junior Research Fellow at King’s College Cambridge (1972–76), I longed to experience the Seminar, and I finally plucked up courage to write to “Professor Rubinstein”, whom I had not met, to ask if I could attend’ (Elam). Art historians who attended tended to be those more interested in documents: ‘We were art historians, but we wanted to be historians at the same level as [real] historians’ (Haines).

Several of our respondents have conveyed to us their impressions of the character of the Seminar’s programmes under Rubinstein: that the content was mainly Florentine, or that it was mainly political history, reflecting the major (but not exclusive) interests of the organizer – it is said, for example, that Nicolai was not interested in religion – or that the content was conservative and not interested in newer topics in social/cultural history or in new historiographical methods. According to Lauro Martines, ‘Nicolai was not at home with discussions about social structure … and the varieties of unconventional historical investigation … [He] was wedded to the study of traditional political sources’. The earliest topic-lists that we have – from the late 1970s – do not wholly support these impressions. The balance between Florence and Italy, and between the political and the artistic, intellectual and economic did vary. In the spring term of 1977–8 three papers on Florentine humanist manuscripts, economy and topography were outnumbered by papers on central Italy and Mantua (art, confraternities and princely servants), and there were two other papers on non-Florentine topics. It may however be that the normal balance was the reverse: in the following term, only two papers looked outside Florence (John Law on Verona, Daniel Waley on the Roman region), and in the second term of 1981–2 five out of six papers addressed Florentine topics. Religion was certainly not neglected: the first session in October 1981 featured Rubinstein himself talking about reform of the religious orders in fifteenth-century Italy. Other religious topics followed too: Franciscan sermons (1981), piety and print (1981), church reform (1982), saints (1983) and confraternities (1978, 1980). There were papers on non-Florentine topics, such as frescoes in Cortona, tombs in Venice, Jews in Naples, and on non-political topics, such as Greek translations, Sicilian aristocrats, and wives’ claims against insolvent husbands. It is true that there was a solid Florentine political theme: the politics of Dante’s Inferno, the politics of Savonarola’s sermons, the term ‘politicus’ itself in Renaissance Italy (Rubinstein’s own paper). And repeated attention to Lorenzo de’ Medici: his library, his relations with Siena, his posthumous image. But the politics were not always Florentine – the papal states make an appearance – and the Florentine topics were not always political – taxation and education appear too. Nevertheless, the impression was certainly taken that ‘Tuscany was the centre of the world as far as the Seminar was concerned’ (Wright). And there is more force to the suggestion that newer historical interests and methods were not represented – for example, women’s history, subaltern history, popular history, quantitative history – though Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1939) did once give a paper. Instead, there was a focus on individual, male historical actors – Lorenzo de’ Medici, Dante, Savonarola, Machiavelli – or on institutions and monuments; but this was also because there were few scholars working on newer or alternative topics in British universities, and the seminars were not funded to bring in researchers from abroad.

It was in the mid-1990s that a supplementary seminar, ‘Themes in Italian Renaissance History’, conceived by Alison Brown and run in conjunction with Stefan (‘Larry’) Epstein and Dean, gave voice to fresher topics and non-British voices.¹² For five years, this themed seminar ran in the summer term on topics such as bodies, space, rules, groups and identities, and drew in speakers from France, Italy, Australia and the USA (Christiane Klapisch, Elizabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Andrea Zorzi, Ottavia Niccoli, Julius Kirshner, and others), as well as the UK.

When Rubinstein retired from convening the (parent) Seminar in 1996, the convenorship passed to Dean and Lowe, who were joined by a third convenor, first Alison Wright, art historian at UCL (until 2005), then Georgia Clarke, architectural historian at the Courtauld, and latterly (from 2009) by Serena Ferente, socio-political historian then at King’s, now at Amsterdam. Frequent changes in the convenorship group reflected broader pressures on colleagues to participate more in their own local, departmental activities: these pressures came as academics and institutions adapted to the disintegration of the federal University of London (2007–19), and to the regularity of national research assessment exercises (2001, 2008, 2014), protecting the visibility of departmental research,¹³ but needlessly duplicating and impoverishing the central facility. At this point there was a second major replacement of membership (see above). As a group of convenors, we did try to do things differently: fewer established figures, more early career scholars; more female speakers; minimal formalities; space for research students to ask questions; less focus on Florence and the Medici; sessions devoted to short presentations of research problems or to commemorative re-readings of works by recently deceased scholars, such as Rubinstein himself, or Don Weinstein.

The years after 2003 showed a strong contrast with the period 1986–92. The first and obvious observation is a rebalancing of the gender of speakers: only in a few terms were men now in a majority as speakers; in most terms, female speakers outnumbered them, and in 2010 the Seminar witnessed its first all-female programme. A second major observation is the absence of traditional political history in the papers presented, along with a clear move away from Florence as a major theme of the Seminar. The few overtly political papers were now more addressed to larger political processes (‘state-building’, ‘urban systems of conflict’) rather than specific historical moments or actors (though ‘Caterina Sforza as political strategist’ certainly fell into that category). It is true that at least one paper per term dealt with some aspect of Florentine history, and Machiavelli remained a definite favourite, but topics were now much less likely to focus on the Medici, more likely to address questions in that city’s social history, such as women, children, trousseaux or working-class fashion. Religion and humanism continued as minor themes, whether picking up old debates on ‘civic humanism’ or thinking afresh about the relation between humanism and diplomacy, while papers on religion turned away from institutional church history and more to religious practice (miraculous images, private devotion, ‘following in the footsteps of Christ’). The Seminar broadened its geographical range and expanded its inclusion of new kinds of cultural and social history. Naples, the South and Sicily became more regular topics: Neapolitan tombs, paintings, garden architecture and rape trials; southern lordships; government payment registers in Sicily. Previously untouched parts of northern Italy were now visited: sermons in Udine; a lady-in-waiting at the court of Savoy; trials, poisons and authors in Rome. Chronology broadened too: fewer papers on the fifteenth century (by far the majority in the 1980s), more on the sixteenth-seventeenth. New material history (armour, trinkets), performance (street-singers, ‘charlatans’ and ‘male bodies on display’) and broader socio-cultural history (the Renaissance tomato) were more to the fore. The working class came into better focus, whether it be the homes of Sienese artisans or the clothing choices of poorer Florentines. Historians at the Seminar also became more aware of theoretical and methodological issues, shown in the titles of two papers, ‘How to read …’ (ambassadorial reports, letters). The word ‘theory’ makes its first appearance in a title in 2003, ‘ideology’ in 2005, ‘sexuality’ in 2016 (rather belated, some might think). Women’s history continued its ascent: for a while every term brought new findings on the position, experience, objects or representation of women across Italy and from various classes. Geographical range was extended to consider Italians abroad and foreigners in Italy: Italian merchants in England, a Persian in Florence, Balkan émigrés in the south, Greeks in Ancona, the Genoese around the Black Sea. The kind of art history that discussed individual works and their origins or patronage was joined by more challenging attempts to look outside the frame: looking at the plinth not the statue, or the photographic reproduction not the artwork in situ. Finally, in a more playful spirit, a joint meeting with the European History 1150–1550 Seminar saw Dean ‘trounce’ (his word) David Carpenter in a debate ‘Which country holds the record for records?’ An unmistakable sense of going beyond old boundaries is the cumulative effect of the Seminar in the twenty-first century.

Seminar programmes are of course always a combination of the convenors’ preferences and the availability of speakers, and there is a risk in drawing broader conclusions from them. Nevertheless, it can reasonably be argued that behind the fissiparity of topics in the first decades of this century lie broader explanatory developments in academia: the end of grand narratives, processes of decentring, the death of the canon, greater methodological awareness, decolonization.

An important final aspect to the membership is the shifting balance between regular and irregular attenders. For the first three decades (1949–78), all of the attenders attended most of the sessions: they were ‘members’ of the Seminar in a real and regular sense. The change to a different attendance pattern occurred suddenly and permanently in 1979–80, when only ten attenders, out of a total for the year of fifty-four, attended over half the sessions, and nineteen attended only once. This was perhaps the result of a more expansive menu of topics, as explained above; and it was certainly the start of a bifurcated membership: a core of about ten, a periphery of many more, occasional attenders attracted by topic or speaker. The Seminar thus assumed a different identity and function: no longer the professor and his friends, colleagues and students, but a broader constituency of historians and interested parties.

Reminiscences

Reminiscences of forty-two attenders from across the life span of the Seminar form the basis of the second section of the chapter.¹⁴ This personal and qualitative material provides a very different feel to an analysis of topics and speakers, gradually building a composite amalgam of how people later remembered and made sense of their experience of attending. Many commented on why they attended and what benefits they felt they accrued from doing so. The gender split of respondents – unplanned – was almost exactly half and half: twenty-two reminiscences from women and twenty from men. The early years and the most recent decades are the least well represented, while the middle period has generated more comment. Of the early years, two respondents first attended in the 1940s (Waley and Clementi), one in the 1950s (Alison Brown), and several sets of reminiscences emanate from respondents who first attended in the 1960s (Pesman Cooper, Webb, Jane Black, Bob Black, Dale Kent, Bill Kent, Moore and Pepper). The majority of the reminiscences focus on the period when Rubinstein was convenor; one reason for this is perhaps because Rubinstein is safely dead whereas the subsequent convenors are still all alive. Because Rubinstein is dead, however, there has been a tendency in some cases to write in hagiographical terms of his stewardship; attempts have been made to counter this by focusing on anecdote.

Virtually all of these reminiscences were written years after the seminar meetings they described, and what was written was undoubtedly coloured by lives and careers in the period in-between. Some attenders continued in academic life whereas others did not, as has been flagged earlier. Yet, for both sets, attendance at the Seminar came in retrospect to appear a watershed period in which they had imbibed (in most cases) or fought (in a few cases) the essential characteristics embodied by Rubinstein’s approach to Italian Renaissance history. This might not have been the case had they been asked for reminiscences immediately after their attendance; memory adjustment is often evident. Another factor affecting the reminiscences is that Rubinstein’s social networks were principally founded on his academic interests. Many of the attenders were or became lifelong friends of his, and were hardly impartial observers (Boucher raises this, as does Lippincott who remembers driving Rubinstein home in her Fiat 126 as she lived in the same block of flats as him in Hampstead), although it is worth stressing that friendship with Rubinstein was also in its way a hallmark of the Seminar during the years in which he was in charge. Rubinstein’s position as founder of the Seminar in 1949, and his very long stewardship to 1996, meant that for forty-seven years the Seminar was considered his creation, his fiefdom. Several attenders (Elam, Kraye, Marchand) reflected on the speech Rubinstein gave on his ‘retirement’ from the Seminar on 8 December 1996, in which he linked the way he ran the Seminar at the IHR to his formative experiences attending pro-seminars at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin in the early 1930s. Emphasizing his and the Seminar’s lineage to great pre-war German institutions and scholarship was crucial (Marchand said Rubinstein ‘described the German seminar as though it were yesterday’), but so too was difference, as he took account both of local conditions in England and of the constantly changing zeitgeist. The refugee both recreated and adjusted the tried and tested procedures he had witnessed in his youth in Berlin to fit with new circumstances in London.

Attenders were split over Rubinstein’s stance on hierarchy. To everyone at the Seminar from at least the 1970s (it is not clear before this date – Bill Kent remembers calling him Professor Rubinstein), Nicolai chose to be ‘Nicolai’, and never Professor Rubinstein, which was clearly different to how teachers were addressed in 1930s Berlin. There was also a difference in how students behaved in relation to their teachers. As Rubinstein commented, ‘No-one [at the IHR seminar] stood up for me’, meaning no-one stood up when he entered the room as was the custom for a professor in Berlin. Yet Sam Cohn remembers the seating arrangements in 1975: there were ‘three hierarchical circular rows … with the professors in the inner chamber, ringed by a second seating of university lecturers and readers … and then the hoi polloi of graduate students’. When Cohn raised his hand to ask a question, Rubinstein mistook it for a request to leave the room to go to the lavatory. This is countered by Bernadette Paton’s memory of the Seminar in 1981–2 as ‘a very egalitarian event … students and lecturers were all in together, the famous and the obscure given equal weight both in invitations to speak and at question time’. Wright in the late 1980s ‘found the atmosphere quite generous – no-one really hogging the question time and certainly sympathetic to a “youngster”’. Maybe the key to interpretation lies in the dating, and habits changed as the effects of the 1960s social revolution percolated into broader social relations in the course of the 1970s. Several early attenders who were PhD students reported being ‘nervous’ or ‘terrified’ or ‘intimidated’ by the Seminar in general (Pesman Cooper, Jane Black, Clarke), which impeded them from asking a question. Other attenders could be wary of the ‘devastatingly hostile questions, often ending with an expressive sniff’ (Elam) of another well-known combative attender, or remembered ‘the biting force’ conveyed by the word ‘quite’ (Cohn), or remembered a full-frontal attack (Denley); but these occurrences were acknowledged to be rare. One attender from the early 1970s, on the other hand, when the group was still small, remembered the ‘marvellous discussions with Nicolai, Daniel Waley … [and] John Hale’ (Fox). A later attender described the question time as ‘Civilized. Deference to Nicolai always seemed to keep things … under control’ (Knox), and this experience of the Seminar was echoed by others. Several attenders commented very favourably on the atmosphere and running of the IHR Seminar in comparison to other seminars they had known, either the director’s seminar at the Warburg (Knox, Chambers, Lowe) or the medieval seminar at Oxford (Dean, Chambers, Paton) or the lack of relevant seminars in Cambridge – ‘there wasn’t much going on at Cambridge in the Renaissance field’ – or even the Courtauld in the late 1970s and 1980s (Elam). ‘Although we never spoke of inclusivity or porosity in the 1970s, those were characteristics of the seminar’ (Lillie).

In the field of Italian medieval and Renaissance history, Rubinstein’s IHR Seminar was ‘celebrated’¹⁵ or even ‘legendary’ (Kovesi), probably by the early 1970s, and not just in the United Kingdom, or in Europe, or in North America, but also in Australia, from which country he had a stream of PhD students.¹⁶ Descriptions of the focus of the Seminar’s meetings may be contested, with a clear split between those working on Florence and those with non-Florentine interests – ‘the Seminar was fundamental intellectually for those who spoke and those who attended’ (Elam) versus ‘soporific … anything but intellectually stimulating’ (Moore) – but nearly everyone agreed on their social power, with comments ranging from ‘the only venue for bringing together people in London interested in the Renaissance’ (Clarke), ‘a kind of club’ (Boucher), ‘a regular slot in which to feel part of a multi-generational scholarly community’ (Lowe) to ‘a very useful opportunity to catch up with friends who were scattered across the UK at various universities’ (Lippincott). What they provided seems clear. First and foremost, they provided ‘a sense of identity as an historian of Italy’ (Dean) and a community of scholars: ‘we were drawn in by the special sense of shared purpose and scholarly enquiry he created for and within the group’ (Lillie). News of interest to the group was passed on at the Seminar. This could be exciting – such as success in applications for jobs – or sad: on 21 January 1982, after a paper by Elizabeth McGrath, on Medici allegories in Vasari’s frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio, Rubinstein announced that Rosemary Devonshire Jones, his first PhD student, was dead (Lowe).

There is a strong sense that an inner circle at the Seminar was performing for the benefit of an outer circle of PhD students and younger scholars. Rubinstein taught by example, believing that thus would best practice be transmitted. ‘Week after week, it [the Seminar] taught the outer circle what scholarship was and how it should be presented’ (O’Malley). Rubinstein aimed for rigour. ‘The formal discipline of the Nicolai seminar encouraged us all to be at our absolute scholarly, critical best’ (Kovesi). He was a living example of the benefits of deep and continuous archival research, and analysis of archival documents lay at the heart of his version of what Italian Renaissance history was. So, the Seminar was ‘an introduction to archival research’ (Jane Black) or ‘a launch pad for archival work in Italy, where novices like myself gained some inkling of the strange crevices of deep research from scholars who had immersed themselves in documents for decades’ (Lillie). During the first years, the Seminar’s meetings had often consisted of an examination of an archival text (Bill Kent),¹⁷ a practice resuscitated in part by the research clinics instituted by Dean and Lowe in the 2010s. These occasions, when attenders brought a research problem to be examined in detail by all those present, proved memorably effective, and were remembered by both convenors as amongst the best meetings they held. Documentary and textual analysis remained a leitmotif throughout, with papers that failed to do this being discussed more critically or altogether disparaged.

Another area of disagreement revolves around the extent to which the Seminar straightforwardly provided training for PhD students under Rubinstein’s aegis. While some argue that it did (Chambers), at least in a meticulous technical sense (Bill Kent), others saw it as more of an arena than a training ground. The entry point for PhD students was high, as most received little or no formal palaeographical training, and what they learnt in the Seminar was not how to read a document but how to make sense of it and extract meaning from it, how to discuss or analyse it after they had read it. Research methods and skills were otherwise not addressed (except in one term’s programme on ‘Varieties of sources and techniques for research’, 1996), and learning was passive rather than participatory. One attender, very early in his research, and on Rubinstein’s advice, approached the direttrice of the Sala di manoscritti in the Biblioteca nazionale in Florence to ask the meaning of a particular contraction, to be told witheringly it meant ‘et’ (Black). Another fondly recalled a speaker who said, ‘he only liked “scruffy” manuscripts and talked about a very scruffy one’ (Holberton).

Meetings of the Seminar – instead of focusing on training – concentrated instead on Italian medieval and Renaissance history or history of art in action, allowing attenders to listen to and meet some of the most established scholars in the field, as well as giving PhD students the opportunity to test their hypotheses in front of an informed audience. Virtually everyone in the field in the UK was invited to give a paper – although years later Philip Jones claimed he had never been invited but that ‘Trevor Dean had instead given a paper representing a “Jonesian” point of view’ – but some were invited more often than others. One of the draws of the Seminar by the 1970s was its wide range of speakers: the attenders remembered a steady stream of Italians (Carlo Ginzburg, Domenico Maffei, Maria Monica Donato, Giovanni Ciappelli), often giving their paper in Italian, and many of the famous names from America came from the late 1960s onwards (Myron Gilmore, Felix Gilbert, David Herlihy, Melissa Bullard, Gene Brucker, Don Weinstein, Rudolph Bell, Richard Goldthwaite, Julius Kirshner, John Najemy, Tony Molho). Italians attached to the Warburg also swelled the numbers of speakers and attenders, ‘loving the association with Nicolai that the seminars offered’ (Ian Jones). These traditions continued – and, in the case of Italian speakers, expanded – after regime change, given impetus by the addition of the first Italian to become a seminar convenor, Serena Ferente.

One drawback of this discussion so far is that it has followed the ‘great men of history’ model by prioritizing Rubinstein, not least because most of the reminiscences focused on his stewardship. It is undoubtedly the case that his personality, his investment in the Seminar, and the longevity of his rule all led to a deep identification of it with him, or him with it. Yet even during this period there was another very significant player: the setting of the IHR. The space in which the Seminar was enacted has heavily influenced attenders’ experiences, seeping into their consciousness in a similar way to the content of the papers. In some attenders’ minds, the space influenced the memories, even if the room itself changed, from the Ecclesiastical History Room to the Low Countries Room to the British History Room to the Local History Room to two different rooms in the basement of the IHR, even with a period in exile in two further seminar rooms in Senate House (these last few perches were after Rubinstein’s tenure). Peregrinations notwithstanding, the space (or lack of it) made a lasting impression. ‘It seems always to have been hot, from the press of bodies and the unregulatable heating’ (O’Malley), ‘it took place in the very narrow very brown and green European History Room, then later in a barnlike space on the first floor’ (Robertson), ‘the rooms in which we met, lined with books, were usually small and cramped, dominated by dark green tables and with extraordinarily ugly stacking chairs of green metal with blue plastic upholstery’ (Elam), ‘you had to sit awkwardly, perched on the sort of bench-step that ran along the shelving … the only place to rest the eyes always seemed to be the Acta of Requesens’ (Dean). Often commented upon by members of the Seminar was the fact that the books in most of these rooms were not relevant to the topics under discussion, and seemed to have been assigned almost as a form of provocation – but Italy I and Italy II were far too small to accommodate talks.

Social mores dictated that, after the IHR, seminar members went to the pub, where many memorable and half-remembered discussions ensued. These too constituted a form of training. Attenders in the 1960s remembered going to the Museum Tavern on Great Russell Street and the original Pizza Express where there was a juke-box (Webb), but mostly the reminiscences coalesce around conversations in the University Tavern (now the College Arms) on Store Street, the haunt from the 1970s until its makeover in the 1980s, which was notably ‘grubby’ (Beverly Brown) and unglamorous. Sociability seeped through the pores of the Seminar, leading in a couple of cases (Jane and Bob Black, Wright and Marchand) to marriage. A third couple, having only met briefly, re-met there and later married (Zervas and Hirst). In addition, the Seminar led to notable academic partnerships, such as Dean and Lowe, and Chambers and Dean. Even without academic collaboration, the Seminar provided the occasion for meeting like-minded scholars and many lifelong friendships were forged after a first encounter there (Cohn and Lillie, Martines and Cohn). When new convenors took over in the 1990s, perhaps with a greater interest in the quality of wine, more convivial spots were found at the bar in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) on Malet Street and at the Life-Goddess in Store Street.

Yet the Seminar did not exist in a Rubinstein-only vacuum. It has had many convenors, all of whom introduced – or would have introduced – changes. Waley was apparently asked by Rubinstein whether he would share the running of the Seminar with him in the late 1960s, but a fortnight later he rescinded his offer, a change of mind explained by Waley ‘because he [Waley] was not always polite when someone read a rotten paper’. Rubinstein continued to run the Seminar by himself until the late 1970s, when he invited Chambers to be co-convenor. Chambers’s presence helped introduce changes, perhaps diluting Rubinstein’s Florentine bias (even though there is little sense of it in the topics discussed above) and introducing a wider variety of speakers – although his tenure as co-convenor coincided with a period when academic fashions were changing too. When asked if he felt all types of history had been included, Chambers responded, ‘There was no discussion of types of history. But this is a twenty-first-century question – it was not something thought of at the time’. Change through sharper boundary definition also occurred when the Seminar was involved in turf wars with other seminars, as chronological boundaries (with the Early Modern Italian History Seminar, founded by Robert Oresko) (Chambers and Pepper) and quotas of talks on Italian subjects (for the Early Modern European History Seminar, now European History 1500–1800) were imposed.

The importance of the Seminar for the study of Italian history in the UK cannot be overstated. This becomes clear if one asks what would have been different if the Seminar had not existed. Through all the vicissitudes of the transformation of universities from organizations fostering educational achievement to commercial enterprises with financial priorities, and the ever-changing fashions in academic history study and writing, the Seminar has maintained its focus on scholarly excellence and Bildung. In the absence of a relevant intellectual community in many university departments, it offered the possibility of an alternative group membership for students and scholars of medieval and Renaissance Italy. Perusing the names of the attenders of the Seminar, and analysing their scholarship, shows what an extraordinarily successful community of Italian historians it supported and nurtured.

Notes

1. 1.  Institute of Historical Research, Wohl Library: IHR 3/3/29 and IHR 3/3/30.

2. 2.  We thank David Chambers for the earliest programmes we have recovered.

3. 3.  Unless signalled otherwise, all the quotations have come from these solicited reminiscences.

4. 4.  P. Denley and C. Elam, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Nicolai Rubinstein’, in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, ed. P. Denley and C. Elam (London, 1988), pp. ix and xi–xiv; F. W. Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein, Teacher’, in Nicolai Rubinstein: In Memoriam, ed. F. W. Kent (Florence, 2005), pp. 35–45; C. Russell, ‘The Renaissance Comes to Bloomsbury: Studies in the Italian Renaissance in Twentieth-century London’, in The Art and Language of Power in Renaissance Florence: Essays for Alison Brown, ed. A. Bloch, C. James and C. Russell (Toronto, 2019), pp. 377–406; D. Kent, The Most I Could Be: A Renaissance Story (Melbourne, 2021).

5. 5.  On Rubinstein’s period in Oxford, see: K. Lowe, ‘ “I Shall Snuffle About and Make Relations”: Nicolai Rubinstein, the Historian of Renaissance Florence, in Oxford during the War’, in Ark of Civilization: Refugee Scholars and Oxford University, 1930–1945, ed. S. Crawford, K. Ulmschneider and J. Elsner (Oxford, 2017), pp. 220–33.

6. 6.  See N. Rubinstein, ‘Florentine Constitutionalism and Medici Ascendancy in the Fifteenth century’, in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. N. Rubinstein (London, 1968), pp. 442–62.

7. 7.  T. Dean, ‘Daniel Waley’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, xvii (2019), 305–24.

8. 8.  Newnham College Roll Letter (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 96–7. We thank Mary MacRobert for this information.

9. 9.  Birkbeck, University of London, Library Archives and Special Collections, Birkbeck College Annual Reports, 1954–65, GB 1832 BBK/10/1; University of Western Australia, University Archives, D. S. Duncan file. We are very grateful to Emma Illingworth at Birkbeck and Maria Carvalho at UWA for their help in tracing Donald Duncan.

10. 10.  Kent, The Most I Could Be, p. 108.

11. 11.  C. Evans, Language People: The Experience of Teaching and Learning Modern Languages in British Universities (Milton Keynes, 1988), p. 150.

12. 12.  For further details, see A. Brown, ‘Renaissance Bodies: A New Seminar on the Renaissance’, Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies, xxii (1994), 20–24.

13. 13.  J. Hamann, ‘The Visible Hand of Research Performance Assessment’, Higher Education, lxxii (2016), 761–79.

14. 14.  Reminiscences about the Seminar were provided by: Bob Black, Jane Black (formerly Warner), Bruce Boucher, Michael Bratchel, Alison Brown (formerly Dyson), Beverly Brown, David Chambers, Paula Clarke, Dione Clementi, Sam Cohn, Trevor Dean, Peter Denley, Caroline Elam, Robert Fox, Richard Goldthwaite, Peggy Haines, Paul Holberton, Charles Hope, Ian Jones, Philip Jones, Bill Kent, Dale Kent, Catherine Kovesi, Dilwyn Knox, Jill Kraye, Amanda Lillie, Kristen Lippincott, Kate Lowe, Eckart Marchand, Lauro Martines, Jill Moore, Mick O’Malley, Bernadette Paton, Simon Pepper, Ros Pesman Cooper, Charles Robertson, Camilla Russell, Daniel Waley, Diana Webb (formerly Barron), Claudia Wedepohl, Alison Wright and Diane Zervas.

15. 15.  C. Brooke ‘Obituary: Nicolai Rubinstein’, The Guardian, 26 August 2002: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/aug/26/guardianobituaries.obituaries [accessed 20 Jun. 2023].

16. 16.  Russell, ‘The Renaissance Comes to Bloomsbury’, pp. 377–406.

17. 17.  Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein, Teacher’, pp. 35–45.

References