Tom Shippey

Christopher Hill has shown literary critics the way before now. Many must have felt at least mildly chastened by his remarks in Milton and the English Revolution (1977), no less forceful for their studied moderation, on remembering the effects on Paradise Lost of censorship, fear, a social context in which men were hanged for expressing Miltonic opinions and judges expressed regret at not being able to order sentences of death by burning. Now Hill on Bunyan promises to carry out a similar work of rescue from those who would see the tinker-author as representing only ‘a timeless human condition’, as reaching no more than the status of ‘a great literary classic’. It is more truthful, more lively, and more interesting, Hill claims, to put Bunyan back into his ‘revolutionary age’, to see his books at once as products of local history, inhabited by real and substantially-documented men and women, and as reactions to national and social crisis with which even pampered armchair-reader moderns can uneasily identify.

A captious person might mutter that The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe is a little ‘hobbitical’: it reminds one of Professor Tolkien’s hobbits, who ‘liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions’. This would be unfair, in that it is a splendid volume, presenting contemporary scholarship to the general reader with care, grace, much thought and many illustrations; filled with things that most general readers won’t know at all, and that many specialist readers won’t have thought of. Still, it is sometimes possible to imagine the contributors putting down their pens, staring at their charts of ‘The Capetian Kings’ or ‘The Royal House of Jerusalem to 1187’ – ‘BALDWIN I (1100 – 1181) m. (1) Godvere of Tosni (2) daughter of T’oros (3) Adelaide, countess of Sicily’ – and getting up from their desks with a feeling of justified completion and a mutter of ‘well, that’s that!’ Here are the pedigrees; here the accounts of political pressures; here are the maps – possessions of the kings of France, trade routes to Islam, routes of Viking invasions – thus, so, black and white, and not otherwise.

As its title so obviously shows, the main thesis of Russell Miller’s book is that L. Ron Hubbard, inventor of Dianetics and founder of Scientology, was all his life an incorrigible liar. That being the case, it is a pity that the book starts off with a statement which sounds hypocritical at best. ‘I would like to be able to thank the officials of the Church of Scientology for their help in compiling this biography.’ Miller says in an Author’s Note, ‘but I am unable to do so because the price of their co-operation was effective control of the manuscript and it was a price I was unwilling to pay.’ I can believe that the Church of Scientology wouldn’t co-operate with Miller, and I can certainly believe that Miller had worked out that he didn’t need to co-operate with them. But it is hard to imagine that Miller ever had any rational expectation of official help, or any desire for it. This book is a hatchet job, aimed at one of the nastier aspects of American culture, just like Miller’s last two (on Playboy Hefner and on the ‘House of Getty’); and hatchet jobs aren’t meant to be balanced and judicious. Also, as all the world now knows, they can be marketed much more successfully if there is some official body around foolish enough to take offence. In his first paragraph, Miller is just striking a pose.

Science Fiction, it has been said, is always and necessarily a metaphoric reflection of some aspect of contemporary society. This sounds a depressingly goody-goody theory, the kind of thing which harassed critics make up in order to beat off supercilious remarks from colleagues in the common room. It is also all too clearly undisprovable. Even writers like H.P. Lovecraft have to have some contact with fellow humans, and therefore cannot quite keep contemporary society out of their books. The critic pointing at this with cries of justification may still be guilty of spotting the 1 per cent and letting the 99 go by. Is Science Fiction, then, always a metaphoric reflection of (or on) society? And what in this context might ‘metaphoric’ mean?

Professor Ladurie declares, near the beginning of this immensely detailed volume: ‘I hope in this study to bring to life the country people themselves.’ Such a reconstruction, he thinks, is bound to be fraught with difficulty, since so little attention has been focused on this stubborn main stratum of the pre-industrial population, the food producers themselves: ‘we know much more about “the way of life” of the Magdalenian hunters of Pincevent (8800 BC) than about the French peasants of 1450.’ Ladurie seems to be unnecessarily despondent here: this book shows how much there is to know, while his own previous books, especially Montaillou (1975) and Carnival (1979), have excelled in giving down-to-earth detail of an almost journalistic kind about popular risings and establishment repression. However, one can sympathise with his feelings. He is trying to anatomise some seven generations, with an average population of twenty million people, the overwhelming majority from the ‘peasant classes’. And the close, detailed, day-by-day written evidence, strikingly preserved in the Bishop of Pamier’s Inquisition Register, or the anonymous reports of the Archives Départementales de l’Isère, is simply not available. How can a ‘way of life’ be reconstructed?