Historically Speaking

July/August 2006 Historically Speaking 11 or inhabited in pre-Vatican II America? Orsi: One way of approaching the history of a particular culture of childhood is to begin with the anomalous, for instance with a story that you can't imagine a nun actually telling or a religious idea that is completely idiosyncratic. For example, I came across a widespread children's notion that God made priests forget everything that they just heard in confession. Kids made that up some place at some time, working with what the nuns told them about the seal of the confessional. They told this to each other. So this idea becomes an item for historical reflection , raising the question: What was it that children were so concerned about that caused them to generate this story? What does it disclose about children's fears, desires, and their experience of the confessional? Stephens: How will your work on the subject expand our knowledge of American religious history in general? Orsi: I agree that that's a question a historian of childhood has to ask. How does this contribute to the general historiography? To take one example , there was real pressure on American priests from the 1920s forward to be able to speak to children, to be able to address children in language they could understand, in part because there were so many children around, because Catholics insisted that their children go to church from a very early age. Priests became specialists in "boyology," and particular priests developed reputations, in some cases nationally, as being good with boys. Modern Catholic notions of clerical deportment, in other words, the style and delivery of clerical authority, developed in part in relation with children. Putting children back in the picture raises suggestive questions about the actual making of lived religious worlds and about adult lives. 1 George Marsden, "Christian Advocacy and the Rules of the Academic Game" in Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart, eds., Religious Advocacy andAmerican History (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997), 7. When Art Meets History: The Sale of King Charles Ts Art Collection Jerry Brotton There still remains a tendency within historical inquiry to marginalize visual artifacts, or at best to see them as passive reflections of larger social processes (think of how often Van Dyck's paintings are used as illustrations in this way). This tends to limit our understanding of how individuals in history used artifacts to make sense of their world. It also restricts our appreciation of how objects like pictures cross social, political, and cultural boundaries and are involved in the making of history (especially in an era that predates the public galleries and museums of the 18th and 19th centuries ). I came up against this problem while examining the dispersal of King Charles I's art collection in the years 1649-1654. Everyone who works in the field thinks they know the story of the so-called "Sale of the Century," which was also the title of Jonathan Brown and John Elliott's 2002 Prado exhibition and Yale University Press edited collection. Yet what struck me as I began my preliminary historiographical reading into the subject was that nobody had actually undertaken a systematic study Tintoretto, Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet, 1547. Spanish King Philip IV purchased this painting following Charles I's death. Reproduction from Evelyn March Phillipps, Tintoretto (Methuen & Co., 1911), 32. of what happened to Charles's art collection from the creation of the Rump Parliament through to the establishment of the Cromwellian Protectorate. Compounding this problem is the accretion of myth that grew up around the Commonwealth sale, especially after the successful restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Royalists and later historians of art were horrified at what they regarded as the sale's cultural vandalism. Writing in 1685, William Aglionby angrily denounced the sale, insisting that "had not the bloody-principled zealots, who are enemies to all the innocent pleasures of life, under the pretext of a reformed sanctity, destroyed both the best of kings, and the noblest of courts, we might to this day have seen these arts flourish amongst us." By this time Charles I was being recast as a saint and martyr...