SoS #20 | Roze Hentschell: St Pauls Cathedral during Shakespeare's time

Also available on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/c/SpeakingofShakespeare.
[See SEGMENTS below] Thomas Dabbs speaks with Roze Hentschell of Colorado State University about her recent book: 'St Paul's Cathedral Precinct in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Spatial Practices'.

LINKS:
The Virtual St Pauls Cathedral Project: https://vpcathedral.chass.ncsu.edu.
The Virtual Pauls Cross Project: https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu.

SEGMENTS:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:20 - St Paul’s Precinct in the Early Modern Period
00:09:52 - Virtual St Paul’s Project
00:16:22 - Relationships between pulpits, stages, and bookshops
00:17:09 - Going low with sermons and secular writing
00:19:38 - Non-discreet space within and without
00:22:33 - Going low with commercial aspects of the Cathedral
00:25:15 - Shopping bookshops, public responses, anxiety
00:30:55 - Masculinity and vice, in place out of place
00:39:00 - Shakespeare, more vice, and St Paul’s
00:43:37 - Roze’s book, Virtual St Paul’s, spawning more research
00:45:14 - Cloth and tapestry
00:50:15 - Roze’s work in administration: disciplinary boundaries
00:59:58 - Roze, motherhood, exercise, good habits
01:00:05 - The Mexican connection, educational background
01:02:12 - Return to the cathedral and changing spaces
01:05:00 - Paul’s Cross churchyard, bones and bookshops
01:11:35 - Roze’s future work, grounds for further research
01:17:30 - Closing remarks, Old St Paul’s and Culture

Transcript

This is Speaking of Shakespeare conversations about things shakespearean i'm Thomas Dabbs broadcasting from Aoyama  Gakuin University in central Tokyo this talk is with rose henschel professor of english and associate dean for academic programs at Colorado State University rose is also the author of a recent book saint paul's cathedral precinct in early modern literature and culture spatial practices this conversation should begin by making it abundantly clear that st paul's cathedral was far different in shape and form during the period that rose henschel examines in her book the current domed cathedral was designed by christopher wren and built after the cathedral's destruction by the great fire of london in 1666 the cathedral before ren was shaped much differently and would have looked much like it is depicted here in a recent reconstruction by the virtual saint paul's cathedral project we encourage our viewers and listeners to visit the virtual saint paul's cathedral project online to see and even experience what the cathedral grounds were like before wren if you are joining us on youtube and wish to listen to this program as a podcast you may click the link below to your favorite podcast platform if you are joining us via a podcast and wish to watch this program we are available on youtube under the search term speaking of shakespeare this series is funded with institutional support from aoyamagakuing university and also with the generous grant from the japan society for the promotion of science good afternoon it's your afternoon rose it is so good to see you it really really is and how is everything in colorado right now everything's beautiful it's a beautiful day here in colorado it's about 4pm and i'm just really thrilled to have a chance to talk to you today well i'm thrilled and we can have a competition to see who is more thrilled i don't want to waste any time before we get to your new book because it is new as far as academic books go extremely new and the title is saint paul's precinct in early modern literature and culture spatial practices and i know that you have through your career you have been working on well gender of course and dress cloth clothing those sorts of things and of course spatial what uh key words spatial practices this added to the title which is so important for that region so if you could just kind of bring us up to speed on on your book and what it's about and what uh a reader can expect well thank you first of all for giving me the opportunity i published the book it came out in july of 2020 really in the middle of the pandemic and talk about anticlimactic um it was really the the labor of 10 years at least and to have the book come out and not be able to promote it or go to conferences and talk about it or share my you know those 10 years of labor um felt a little strange and and some days i forget that i actually wrote the book and so i'm very grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to talk about it um and i and you know to be honest i did have to sort of read the book again or take the take a look at the book because um it is kind of faded into the background so um thanks again for giving me the opportunity i'm really thrilled so the book um is on st paul's precinct in the late 16th and early 17th century and when first of all i want to pause and define what we mean by precinct precinct is essentially the area around a building or a structure and in this time period and specifically with religious buildings it's the consecrated land or religious and religiously inflected land in and around the church or the cathedral proper so it's not necessarily only about the church itself but but the space and the uses of the space around the church the church yard as it were and so my the general argument of the book is that we are better able to understand this very thoroughly studied cathedral if we start paying attention to the daily users of the cathedral and not only the church users or those related to the cathedral's religious practices such as the clergy and the religious um administration or even the religious auditors right the people who went to go hear sermons or attend services in the in the parish churches but really the lay users the secular users who inhabited that space both as a neighborhood there were homes in the cathedral precinct there were businesses in the cathedral precinct there were the books books shops and the book sellers and then there were just sort of what we would call today loiters in the precinct and i believe that we can really understand or nuance our understanding of the cathedral if we better access those stories of the day the day-to-day users of the precinct including but beyond the cathedral employees so that's essentially the gist of the book and in particular i like to pay attention here and really in all my work to the embodied practices that's where that title spatial practices comes from of the users of the church what were they seeing what were they smelling what were they feeling how did they navigate from you know the churchyard back into the cathedral what was it like to have piles of horse manure literally in the name how did they manage that and how do they clean it up so those are the stories that really intrigue me and the title spatial practices actually comes from michelle sortoz the practices of everyday life in which he talks about all of our stories our spatial stories and that's really the angle i'm taking on again a very well studied a very thoroughly studied space in london um there's it's hard to imagine having you know the gumption to write another book on st paul's but i really realized that if i was able to kind of get at some of these stories i would we would all be able to learn a little bit more and understanding what source material could look like when we talk about polls not just historical records and archives but literature and letters and other sorts of things that we don't typically use when we do straight up historical research it's just wonderful now i have to confess we have not been able to and it's probably pandemic related i have not been able to get a copy i've been able to read as much as i can from previews online and you know i've i've been interested in the cathedral for years and have done some research in that area but i wanted for our listeners and viewers to understand that this is a enormous area inside the walls of the old city of london and what happened in there as you were saying goes well everything in london goes in and everything comes back out and there are direct connections for everybody archaeologists historians cultural historians gender theorists uh and in in terms of this uh podcast broadcast shakespeareans there are direct connections between that cathedral those bookshops all the gossip and all of the activity and the way those spaces were used direct relationships between that area and early modern drama and you know as well if not better than i uh how much influence uh that the well the let's start with the bookshops that's where you went for your raw material if you were a playwright but i am certain that that's where you went to overhear what people were talking about what was buzz what was the buzz and that's their word not our word that's so uh i am so appreciative and and so much looking forward to combing through perusing every word because you took on and i know from experience this goes into the abyss very quickly there's a lot of stuff here and you took on this uh incredible it's a herculean effort to look at the entire cathedral precinct and to have the courage and i'm sorry this is just true rose people will come after you you know from all kinds of directions if you're wrong on the smallest detail they're experts out there and you had the courage to take on this project and carry it through and i'm so happy you did uh you're with the saint paul's cathedral let's get the title right here the virtual saint paul's cathedral project headed up by john wall at nc state university tell us about that and tell us about what's happening in terms of being able to visualize online the research that you're putting out in print a wonderful combination there yes i would be very happy to tell you about that um i first of all appreciate your your characterization of my willingness to do this project as bravery um when some some would call it hutzpah or stupidity um and i think that that is one of the wonderful things about being a literary scholar is especially those of us that came up in the um sort of new historicist period is that we started to understand that we could do a lot of things um with with our methodologies and that we weren't necessarily confined to the realm of literature as amazing as it is and i certainly do discuss literature in my book um but i i really i think i bring a literary scholar's um perspective and sensibility to other source material and and that does rattle um theology scholars and and archaeologists um but i think that the emphasis on not trying to supplant anything that we're doing here or make a different claim that's a better claim or or a claim that's more right but you know the word i used earlier was nuance and i think that's ultimately what when we work in an historical scholarship is the best we can do right we'll never get the truth right especially about a building that no longer exists we can have shreds of truth um but we'll never really recapture the truth we have to be comfortable in living in the realm of um educated speculation and that leads me to answer your question about the st virtual saint paul's cathedral project that um digital humanities project um about 10 or 15 years in the making maybe 15 years it goes back to was the sort of brainchild of professor john wall at north carolina state um to bring to life uh what saint paul's cathedral looked and sounded like in the time period and through national endowment for humanity's grants and a whole lot of faith and passion he really worked with

actors who were able to recreate old pronunciation of sermons in particular john dunn sermons um he worked with the archaeologists who have worked on paul's sound technicians singers and really brought the sort of collective effort to re visualize paul's and the most important i would say the cornerstone of this is the data visualization of the cathedral itself based on the best knowledge that we have of what the cathedral looked like through a variety of sources he's done a fly around of the cathedral so you can actually see the cathedral from a 360 view from a bird's eye 360 view very recently they've created some of the interior spaces with the tombs and the monuments and earlier work was around the pulpit where the sermons were delivered and in particular he did a easter sermon that john dunn delivered and it's an amazing um rendition of what the sermon might have sounded like from up close from 100 yards back and maybe even another 100 yards beyond that you have ambient noise like seagulls we are finally reminded that st paul's was near a wharf next to the river and there's murmuring of the crowd and it really visualizes and through sound technology what i would love my book to also do in a sort of a textual way is to bring to life animate if you will the life of the cathedral beyond its um important status as the seat of the bishop of london well i've the sections that i've read i've noticed that you're very good at giving us an ambulatory feel if that's the right way to say it of walking through the cathedral which i think is extremely important and uh i also wanted to add to what you just said that the uh in terms of the original uh trying to bring back the as much as possible the uh to restore the original look and feel and smell and taste and whatever of the cathedral we uh a friend of our uh series of our program ben crystal uh has done the uh whose father david crystal is very famous he and ben worked some years ago and still are working on original pronunciation so ben read the sermons in this soundproof room he described to me that was sort of out of some sort of science fiction novel where you there's no sound at all except him speaking and he delivers the done sermon in original pronunciation and so it gets that precise and also looking at uh peter blaney you know years ago the precision with which he designed or gave us a look at that at the bookshops as they surrounded with the north east side of the cathedral and as your book points out you're getting two very many spaces two very large ones one the cathedral knave paul's walk which was would you say rose is a center for gossip and news more perhaps than a religious center most of the time everything that we've read and have all the records show that that's where you went if you wanted to catch up on the gossip and you could get you could get robbed there pretty quickly too uh yeah and also the church yard itself with the pulpit and i'm interested because i'm kind of on before shakespeare and early shakespeare those of us who are shakespeareans tend to go to the text and to the stage to the theater and those people who are in religious studies theologians tend to go to the cathedral and reformation theologians to paul's cross the outdoor pulpit where mary morrissey and other scholars have pointed out just how political these were how uh critical they were in the settlement period the elizabethan settlement but uh it's hard to show the crossover and how both are uh public speaking events very different the globe and uh you know of the shortage theaters up north and are very different from paul's cross very different purpose for going but it's the same kind of ambulatory auto auditory experience and you can hear when ben gives the sermon or john dunn gives the sermon you can you can you can imagine how that sound even bounced off the bookshops and there's this inner relation between print and public event and i think you've gotten that uh that's a lot that's a very very good point about the actual sort of the bouncing of the sound waves off of the bookstore i love that idea um one of the things that i i really work on with the sermon chapter is um the way in which the sermons themselves are sort of these hybrid texts and i i do that by focusing on the topics of some of the paul's cross sermons a sort of genre of the jeremiah in the salt in the paul's cross sermons of the sort of you know lamenting the sorry state of london and um you know telling everyone that they're sinners and um that london's gonna be like jerusalem and we've got to figure out how to get back on track and specifically the sermons at paul's cross that are taking aim at the sinners who are wearing sumptuous ostentatious clothing and so unlike the high high subjects that mary talks about and in terms of the political i go low which is often my my mode is i i talk about the sermons that are really um pointing out vicious behavior on the part of the audience and i talk about the sermons as hybrid texts in that way that they're borrowing quite heavily from satire of the period both formal satire formal verse satire but also the more popular pro satire and the kinds of rhetorical moves that these two texts make are quite similar um there's uh you know someone like thomas nash for example who's a secular writer writes in the vein of the sermons it's very um kind of polemical invective religiously informed likewise we have some sermonists whose sermons are very colorful in their descriptions of the sin and it makes you wonder like you seem to know a lot about that and so i talk about those texts as hybrid texts and i talk about them as um the point that the uh preachers are making isn't actually enabled by the setting of saint paul's because of the very reasons you've just mentioned of everything else that's going around st paul's the space of the pulpit was not a discrete space there wasn't a door to walk into people were walking in and out of the space um the one painting we have from the time period that i know you're familiar with professor dabs is the kipkin painting there's somebody on the margins whipping a dog there are people clearly not listening to the sermon there's a lot going on in in that actual image and so um the other thing that i think is important is that um it was just around the corner where most of the book shops were but even that wasn't a discrete space the bookshops led to um one of the i think an understudied part of the precinct which is the college of minor canons which was a gated area in the churchyard where originally it was the college of minor cannons where those associated with the males associated with the choir lived the adult nails but after the reformation they were allowed to marry and have wives and they were allowed to take on lodgers and this space became hugely problematic because we get all sorts of records around the bad behavior that was going on in those in the college of minor canons because they were letting in like catholic recusants and shady women and the vicars themselves were actually quite badly behaved and all this is written up in the um the uh bishops visitation records and so that's the place we typically look for really official type of information but anyone who's worked on um the saint paul's you know peter blaney and others who have worked on the details go to that to really read between the lines and um to get back to the point of the the um the hybrid you know nature of the sermon space um the one of my main points of the book is that we can't view spaces and activities as discrete in this time period um we have to understand the way that um spaces overlapped with each other constituted mutually this kind of cultural understanding of the precinct as a whole and really informed each other so the precincts are like the book star stahls are like the college of minor canons and you know in addition to things like a pissing wall right a a public site for urination and the precinct and gallows and a hillary and places of public shaming and execution these are all happening maybe not on the same day but in the same space and and to sort of talk about those activities as um standalone or discrete i think does a disservice to the complexity of the space and as you're intimating the theatricality of the space yes yes yes and i want to go low also and go into the commercial elements of this be a little bit uh i don't know post fugoen the uh the i i'm in my mind okay maybe in my mind only uh the the sermons that uh did uh much early on in the elizabethan period and even before but in the early elizabethan period to market religious material that was being sold at those bookshops and even though preachers you know cried out against the theater and that sort of thing of course they did they were in direct commercial competition with the theater but they also were of course uh you know i think genuine in there that a lot of bad things happen around theater you know uh let's face it and it was fun in that way too but uh that same marketing kind of technique where you're you're bouncing uh public uh proclamation public uh performance off of bookshops uh almost literally in sound creates this market so publishers can go into a venture markets of pleasure reading and toddle does it very early and william sears does it very early and they put out what were supposed to be uh instructive texts like uh you know avid and the metamorphosis or metamorphosis a golden golden's favorite uh a famous translation and uh and suddenly all of these plays start coming out with these obvious stories and shakespeare just follows sec really second generation after these earlier playwrights and they're following the same kind of line they're using that cathedral space to let's just face it pre-market get people into the theater oh you know the story of romeo and juliet from years ago you know three we we have what three almost three cent three centuries three decades of it everybody knows what happens but here we're going to put it on stage and uh and i think there were preaching events that were the same sorts of things they created texts people saw the text talked about them and then they would go see the preacher they were sort of celebrity type preachers at paul's cross so this is uh all this sort of same marketing model isn't it yes it is um and my favorite texts from the period um are are the secular authors like thomas decker who um satirize and there's many many satirists of saint paul's um i would call them affectionate satires because um of course they're poking fun at the people who as you said gossiped and were the newsmongers and and went maybe to uh to go see a sermon but they're not really there to be you know devout um and of course then they publish these books of satire in in the in the church yard so it is really a recursive um cycle in um decker's the gull's horn book there's a chapter on um the gull who's the sort of unwitting fool who wants a wannabe um wannabe gallant um and it's kind of like a conduct manual uh and one of the chapters the little mini chapters on how to how to be you know in paul's walk and this tiny detail which is um when you're done doing your turns inside the cathedral if you can read go to the book stalls and expound upon

your opinions about the books um and i'm actually not getting that exact right i used to know that um but essentially the sort of question is like we have all these shoppers now who are just shopping they're not they're not actually buying books to read because some of them actually can't read um but i that's one of the big points of my um church yard chapter is that paul's the spatial arrangements of the book stalls allowed for a new kind of consumerism that moves us beyond purchasing to shopping what we would call shopping um shopping and of course you're you're already kind of pointing in that direction of the advertisements um that other folks have talked at length about um book historians about how books were advertised how plays were advertised um and of course there's there's all of the advertisements um and people were competing for customers and some customers were not going to buy they were just going to browse and there's a lot of fun literature around um consternation of the browsers ben johnson hated that he hated having to you know uh pander to to the browsers because he didn't think they would understand his books anyway and so the sort of nervousness about what it is what does it mean if people don't know what they're buying if they're going just to see and sometimes they're just going to chat with each other it just disrupts this understanding of what commercialism had always been understood as you go to the butcher and you buy your piece of meat and then you leave or you go to the tailor and you might have a couple of choices but all of a sudden at paul's we have this sort of proliferation of choice i feel very i feel that very deeply in our in our current culture where there's just no end of options and that's how i imagine the shoppers must have inhabited that space is you know the book stalls it wasn't a book shop like you couldn't go in it wasn't a massive space these were crowded um both with product and with people and it couldn't have been a totally pleasant experience and you know likely the booksellers are yelling at you to either get out or buy their books and it must have been quite chaotic and i just love that idea of sort of this a marketplace but it's a different kind of buying experience for the the purchaser for the shopper but also created some deep anxiety on the part of the the publishers and the booksellers and authors that's a that's a wonderful point i have not really thought about that the anxiety uh the uh and the social anxiety with these uh young people uh and you we're gonna go into your uh men and vice ridden your edition in just a moment but i wanted to uh pick up on two things that you're talking about johnson lampoons these people and i think is every man out of his humor they're two it was clove and orange i think and they are expounding in paul's walk and they are mixing up things and making references to the wrong book here and there and it's totally absurd and it's totally unreadable for us you kind of had to be there to know who this guy was uh and you're talking about readers and uh david kressly talks about the semi-literate also but also you can if you can read you can tell your pal or a servant or whatever what happened in romeo and juliet you know there's a lot of oral transmission of what's happening in the books uh and and that sort of thing and a point that i'm looking at right right now and i don't think i'm going to have a lot of success i'm writing an article on the uh church art is a church yard it's a graveyard and i've been looking into that space you know not along with you know defecation uh and uh pissing alley and uh whatever pissing wall uh they're dead people uh right there it's and they're not they're not our dead where we are very tidy in in our times uh you know so uh there's that but i do want to move along a little bit here to your work uh i was i have here in my agenda uh to look at cloth and clothing and that sort of thing but i want to go first to um you you brought it up because you brought it up uh the masculinity and vice now this is uh an addition that you edited and also uh wrote the introduction to but also have looked at very closely the standards for young men in gender scholarship i don't see a lot about fashioning male behavior because yes it's a it's a man's world and women can't own property women can't do you know decisions on marriage i just noticed i'm teaching today i'm teaching midsummer night's dream and uh who is it hermia talks about giving up her patent her patent to a man she doesn't like or want to or whatever it's a legal term right i'm giving up i my father's wealth is going to be transferred to the man i marry never to me and the only thing i can the only agency i have in this choice is to marry somebody i love i want to be with right and so women are in that position of course but uh the idea of men always being toxic you know i kind of like to think of myself i'm a guy uh you point out that there there was a very strong system of of uh educational uh system to try to teach men how to behave well yes um and i will i will touch upon the previous edited collection but i i have really carried that forward um that sense of as you put it toxic masculinity or as amanda bailey who's my co-editor for that book and i initially um thought of the project as men behaving badly um which was a a sort of a comedy show in the 90s in the uk it was a show called men baby badly and um i i'm very interested in transgression transgressive behavior specifically on the part of men um because that has we have spilled a lot of ink rightfully on the perception of women as transgressive in the period and i think there's relatively less on the transgressive um actions of of men and the as you put it the sort of desire and the movement to constrain or control or educate and teach around comportment and what is proper behavior and i really carry that forward into this book where much of what i talk about are actions or activities or behavior that's out of place and i'm putting that in quotes it's tim cresswell's phrase he's a cultural geographer and he has a book called in place out of place specifically looking at how our relationship to space is almost always defined with a human behavior and often by human behavior that acts against or out of step with the expectations of how you're supposed to act in certain places and so the masculinity and the metropolis advice book our authors really explored that through subjects such as gambling and alcohol consumption drinking games how either sort of stage properties were managed there's some really cool authors i think really cool subjects um that the authors are dealing with and i've kind of carried that forward i didn't realize that um at the time as i was writing the saint paul's book but when i wrote the conclusion i realized like i'm just writing about men behaving badly again we have not only the sort of misuse of the interior space with the loiterers and the newsmongers and thomas i do talk a little bit about the monuments and the and the graves inside the cathedral proper um and how those graves were potentially misused but also when we take a step out even the choir boys right the choir boys who have very specific job to do which is to sing during even song and mountains and song service were doing crazy things like running out into the nave and collecting what's called spur money they would charge anyone wearing spurs because it was against the rules and they would get money from them and pocket it and um so there's all sorts of you know upset uh church officials saying that we've got to stop the kids from doing this they're leaving in the middle of the service we have an amazing detail of of the boys um urinating on the cathedral floor and sliding as if it was ice is the phrase um and generals generally speaking boys were you know boys then and now are gross and do really yucky things and there's a lot of um trying to control the young boys both the boys in the choir but also the boys who were pupils at st paul's grammar school um kind of controlling their days and controlling their behavior so it starts at quite a young age um and then when we move into as i mentioned before the vicars the cor the quiet the choristers um there's uh all sorts of sense sensors put on them because they are behaving quite badly um and they're mismanaging um everything but they're misusing the space primarily and ultimately what amanda bailey and i tried to do in that book was link um math the definition of masculinity was tied quite closely to the way that men moved through and embodied moved through space and embodied that space and so it was touching upon cultural geography that i really ended up kind of picking up that strain and moving forward with that so um the creation of london through the way that men in particular move through that space is well i wanted to supplement what you're saying here with the title of the books there'll be a cover shown here on the uh video version uh masculinity and the metropolis of vice 1550 1650 and yes amanda bailey and rose henschel uh so that was 2010 but it's uh the sections that i've read uh just uh resound right now it's it's it's all it's nothing nothing has changed in fact it might have in recent years gotten worse in terms of public behavior people we've seen of course you're american i am too and this is an international broadcast but uh there are some very ugly scenes recently in america people behaving badly that uh you would think uh and there have been uh good moments recently uh where you know in in any kind of argument dispute over politics and so forth uh a a way of doing a way of approaching people uh with whom you do not agree that might be more genteel more civilized uh more in the air you know in the area of civilized public debate now shakespeare i wanted to make this point too because shakespeare almost as a rule avoided the city it's just i've looked and looked and looked and every and a lot of people have uh and it's it's come out and a lot of scholar you know shakespeare was not a city playwright whereas johnson and uh marston and uh you know like there's a list a whole list of uh people who love the city and love to make fun of the city and i think some wound up in a jail because they were a little too city oriented and i think shakespeare uh avoided jail and uh primarily because he stayed away but you look just under the surface and you can see all these behaviors with that you're you're talking about in the cathedral precinct and also in terms of masculine you know bad behavior with with men the big one that came up earlier in my mind was ophelia uh admonishing politely her brother who's preaching to her you know and and saying and talking about the preachers who wreck not their read you do not practice what they preach and you were talking about the section of uh the uh northeast side the the cathedral where uh you had those uh people who were churchmen not practicing what they were preaching i will mention the one time st paul's cathedral shows up in shakespeare is in um henry the fourth part two falstaff is trying to find bardolph his servant and he's asking the page where he is um and he sort of reflects he said well i bought i bought him in paul's yeah yeah um that's where you go get a man and exactly and you you bring up and you know much more about it and i do the is it the sequi the sequi door the area where advertisements were were placed and that's that's where you you went if you needed a man and somebody to help you do something you could put up a notice like the classifieds i have noticed one other area but it's out of time richard uh the third i think there's a little pageant where they go the paul's is very briefly mentioned it has nothing to do with anything it's in fact one of the last places you would go if you were trying to make connections uh between uh 16th century and 17th century uh shakespearean period there are many other things and you know i'll just throw it out gallants at the beginning of romeo and juliet uh or wannabe gallants that you mentioned earlier uh getting into a fight in a public space mercutio acting out doing the queen mabs speech where is he zepharelli gets it right i think he's in an echo you know he's in he's surrounded by stone and he's in this echoing area where his voice is being amplified and he has an audience and he does this impromptu crazy speech right i just think that is drawn where else could it be drawn from in london you know moments like that and hamlet of course hamlet's um diatribe against the boy companies um that the little az um who you know are stealing the thunder of the adult playing companies um that is clearly a reference to the children of paul's and blackfriars um the queen's the queen's children and um there so yeah with shakespeare i i did look at my um index before this interview to remind myself what i had said about shakespeare in the book and i there's a handful right and so um and it's usually as you said just more of like a an analog right rather than a direct reference the bard off comment is funny because that's a that's a gag for the audience the audience it goes on to say after i bought bardolph and uh paul's if i had bought a horse in smithfield and married you know found a wife in the stews i would be horse manned and wived and the idea there is that you get what you pay for right yeah you go to smithfield you're going to get a bad horse and i and i you know i found that through research of people who work on um on animals and of course you don't want to go to the whore houses to get your a wife and then the you know analog there is that um maybe paul's is not such a great place to to uh hire your servant which that's you know that's a one piece of evidence we have that maybe it's like you know there's not not great uh options for for buying people not great not a great option uh you know you you're likely to pick up a thief uh according to and of course all the false staff and his crew are no better but the uh what big point i wanted to make about your book and in collaboration with the uh virtual saint paul's is that this i believe is a starting point uh or can be marked as a juncture where so much more research can be done now because you can point to your work uh if you are in any variety of fields and also be supplement that oh and by the way i'm giving i'm doing a paper for the shakespeare society of japan in two days three to two to two days i'm one day ahead of you i'm your wednesday my thursday but uh i'm do and you have saved me because i didn't know that the full cathedral i have a slide that has the old truncated version and so now i can fix that and be up to up to date but this is the point i'm making is that we can now show it and so i've been showing truncated versions and talks about shakespeare in this case an addition that appeared in uh paul's cross church yard and i wanted the audience to get the visual right because it's very hard but then again the visual can't uh lead you into the details of how uh and what you can do in print both collaborate so well and uh so we owe you great thanks because we can uh we can go to this book now and uh and also to the to the project well let's talk about clothing and cloth because that was your earlier work right out of graduate school i believe the culture of cloth in early modern england textual constructions of a national identity now those are some big words well thank you it is like going back in a time capsule to look at that book again it was it came out of my graduate dissertation at university of california santa barbara and i again worked on it for several more years and added another chapter to i did a full overhaul of that book um but but the colonel was there and and um i was reflecting today on the relationship or i guess the thread the threads that have stayed with me from that book and i think one of the the funnier ones is that i i seem to be unafraid of taking these like monolithic subjects like the british wool industry like maybe there's no other subject that has been written about more by historians um and saint paul's cathedral again very very well trod ground and deciding that that was okay and i wasn't going to be afraid of the historians and so in in that particular book i make the claim that especially by looking at the again popular literature prose drama um uh even pastoral literature in that book because of the the sheep and the wool connection that were able to understand that anxiety that was happening in the late 16th century around the crisis of the economy founded largely on what was happening in the world industry and the decline of the wall industry as the central uh commodity um uh we could better understand all of that through looking at literary and sort of more cultural texts and and that's ultimately that thread has stayed with me is um seeing what we know exactly nuance seeing what we know um about something that we think we know a lot about by looking at different sources and just to pick up on the thread of threads i end the st paul's book by talking about the study of saint paul's tapestry that we have these threads hundreds and hundreds of threads that sometimes interweave and make sense for us of a picture but then there's always something beyond the tapestry right it's pointing to like beyond the border of the tapestry is something that's just out of our reach just out of our sight and i know you're nodding because you totally get that and when you work on this something as complex and

complex and wonderful and complicated as st paul's you have to be comfortable with that kind of work and i think that while my my work on the cloth industry focused on how this literature helped create a national discourse around the cloth industry um it again was talking about a moment in crisis for the industry and and how um writers literary writers and other writers were navigating this sort of crisis and i think that's what's happening with paul paul's is a you know it's a norman cathedral that has had to endure the reformation and all of the whiplash of the reformation and is in terrible terrible shape which i think thomas when you and i initially met i was giving a paper on the fabric of the cathedral and the terrible um dilapidated condition it had fallen into and how do we who does this cathedral belong to who does who's going to pay for it why do we care those are um questions that i think are not only answered but we can assist in arriving in answers through looking at literature and more literary inflected texts with the full knowledge that many of our historical texts if you gave them to someone on the street they would say well this is a poem like this this supposedly like legitimate historical text is actually written in verse now that's a poem as far as i'm concerned so there's no easy um you know there's the lines between what is literature is very blurry in this time period and i think that that makes for um for historians can be confusing because they don't know how to approach a horrible poem like we do these poems are not good but you've got to figure out how to read them and what you're getting out of them and so i think that literary scholars really do bring um a methodology and a sensibility to this these tricky sources yeah they do and i was just thinking just as they had their spaces particularly in the cathedral we have created ours uh academically and by uh and we're moving in i'm segueing into your work as an administrator and uh you you have an overview now that i've never had uh as a you're an associate dean is that correct and so you are in charge of scheduling all of these classes you have this that what i probably a tsunami of of small projects you have to do and let's just face it i'm certain there's some uh personality there there are people you're dealing with people so not it's hard to make everybody happy all the time and uh so uh you can see how we have created sometimes and much too rigid the word in japanese is katai uh hard you know we have these wall don't step into my area you know don't even look over the fence into my backyard and some people are that protective the people you and i and we were talking about that earlier conference and uh at mcgill in montreal i think it was 2012 the saint paul's cross that uh torrance kirby hosted wow did i feel those those walls just disappear you know you have these guys like uh stan hope there you know as the gentleman john king uh and who unfortunately passed away recently and uh uh and all the others i i'm i'm leaving out names that i should include uh my uh my dear friend susan wabada and the all of these people who were just coming in from all areas and so supportive of each other and that could be that could be the the a goal and as an administrator do you see a possibility of creating that kind of a communal exchange between departments oh that's an amazing question um i was terrified at that conference because i knew that that there were people there that were in schools of divinity coming there were faculty from schools of divinity and i felt like as a literary scholar uh pretty ill-equipped to be having any sort of theological debates um i was quite terrified and and peter mccullough was also there a done scholar and also a sermon scholar um and i was also you know but anyway of course but you you described it perfectly because we were all forced to be in one room there were no concurrent sessions we forced is a bad word we were all invited to be in one room together for every single talk and we didn't get to pop out or you know go to a different panel um and and i think that is helping me get towards the answer to your question which is that getting people in a room who are coming from hopefully the same a problem or

an issue from really different perspectives and i think that saint paul's conference is a great example we were all talking about sermons at paul's cross but we were coming at it from different perspectives we had john schofield the archaeologist there we had john wall there who was just getting started on his virtual project and everyone was like what is this um and that is the way i approach my work as an administrator i'm the associate dean for academic programs i'm in the college of liberal arts we have 13 departments and 19 undergraduate programs and i'm supposed to oversee all the academic curriculum and and you know pro you know the i you know i i get to help departments do what they want to do but when we have to make headway on a problem the best solution and this was very difficult during the pandemic to get people in a room and sometimes it's a virtual room now and really my job is to define the problem and really let the faculty who are experts in their own field bring their expertise and and uh you know and and help us think through things um and yeah there's problems with like making sure that people don't talk too much or too loudly or you know aren't insulting each other but i do think that that's sort of a good approach to the way that i think of my administrative work is um how do we advance something how do we move something forward when we have to uh honor the the various disciplines that we come from and um not diminish or belittle but really honor those perspectives um so that we're all learning more i'm in a college with economics and ceramics right this is not an easy thing um but we really it's it's the only way forward at it especially at a complex like a large university is to land on on some page and i also the other thing that i i've my mantra is um consensus not unanimity we don't all have to come to the same conclusion but you know if if there's some sense that we're on the right track that feels pretty good yeah that's the japanese way by the way reaching consensus just that's that's the best you can do is to try to to forage as best you can a consensus because not everyone will ever agree uh but i i don't well we we need to as a very often talked about uh subject but juggling work and you're juggling not only work but two works you uh have completed recently a model a book on a monolithic topic while being in administration and doing what you were talking about while also being a mother of two teenage or almost teenage children i've already gone through this uh some in some ways teenage is better everybody says it's a horrible time but they you your kids are fairly independent but five years ago they were much younger and so you're you're having to do the mother thing and i read in one of your interviews that you're a runner are you still running no i'm i'm a former injured runner ah me too me too uh and i we we could cover a lot of but uh i had to go to uh walking uh meet you i'm i'm uh ambulatory now just like yeah and uh but love it and uh so uh you said that though exercise did help you clarify your daily duties how to to manage to take that time and uh you're in colorado we you know those of us outside you tend to see colorado as this kind of healthy place you know nice air uh lots of beautiful scenery and a lot of things to look at naturally uh and uh so is that still the case do you still uh yes i definitely try to get outside as much as possible i work on problems while i'm walking um and you know i you know my juggle is not unusual there are a lot of people out there doing the juggle and i i talk about in my acknowledgments to the saint paul's book that my my daughter was not even two years old when i started research on this book and i um was invited to come see the the library at the current st paul's um and joseph wisdom who's the librarian of saint paul's allowed me and my family to come in and i remember carrying her actually i didn't carry her because i also have a fear of ledges but my husband carried my daughter up the dean's staircase and um and it was just such a strange thing to be doing with this tiny child and so she really doesn't remember a time before i was working on this book and my son who is now 11 was born when i was in the early stages of writing the book and so um the my secret and it is no secret as as uh habit consistency and um embracing the early morning hours which i know you do too thomas i wake up i still do i wake up early morning the house is quiet um i i i may not get a lot done but i if i can do a half hour every day that i don't have to like if if i only work once a week i spend the first half hour of the next session figuring out where i left off but when i work you know just a little bit every day um it's and that that running really helped me with that running long distances is like you cannot run a marathon or a half marathon by walking out the door and doing it you have to put in that those little those little runs and so that's um you know finishing the book i also have you know a great friend who works in um an adjacent period she works on mexico but in the same time period and cares about things like sacred space and all of that and so just having a an interlocutor that is uh you know will help you talk through ideas has been really important to me but yeah some days i do just to be honest i do feel like i don't even understand how that got written um it does it did feel especially when i took on that administrative role that it was like an against all odds situation yeah well you did it you did it uh well and you brought up something that's interesting you your friend works on 16th and 17th century mexico is is that what yeah and there's a mexican connection in your uh in your line it's am i right yes yes right thank you for bringing that up also yes she works on she's an art historian so she works on aztec and post-colombian um codices um yes i'm i'm actually a mexican myself my mother is mexican was born in in the united states but both of her parents are mexican from the state of sonora and i grew up in southern california my grandfather was the mexican consul to the united states and he was very into mexican culture growing up that was really important to our family it still is and my mother now was lived lives in fort collins and moved here so i've got a little abuelita which is little grandmother for my kids now in town and i say little is because the sort of joke about mexican grandmothers is they just keep shrinking until they disappear and in my family they grow very old and so i look forward to a long a long a lot more years with my now 85 year old um mexican mama yeah wonderful that's a wonderful connection you seem to have and have inherited an administrative gene from your grandfather uh there so perhaps if there's such a thing yes so you grew up in california and you were though you were undergraduate at vassar i saw and uh so you moved to the northeast a long way from home as a young person and then went back to sort of an east-west thing you went back to santa barbara and ending up in colorado with that connection what a wonderful uh thing um i sort of uh in in my career the hubcaps i ended up in japan uh but uh but i'm glad i did i'm really happy that i did if you have in mind if you've gone to london or if you've seen pictures of current st paul's and i think there's a picture of it right behind my head it doesn't look like that in the 16th century it doesn't look anything like that as christopher wren's later rendering of the cathedral beautifully done of course but the cathedral you're talking about is a gothic like you said norman cathedral that um second point is that you don't finish a cathedral a cathedral is always in growth and and st paul's is no exception although there's this one juncture where ren comes in and just changes everything but i was before pre-pandemic there's a barcelona connection uh i'm married to um well i have a sort of spanish family now in a uh old age uh what my wife calls old persons marriage but uh we were both married before uh with children but uh so i've gotten to spend a lot of time in barcelona and of course the sagrada familia uh people will say well when are they going to finish it when are they when they're gonna and the answer is never the cathedral as soon as they finish whatever you know design they'll have to go back and start working on other areas i love that you brought that up because i did forget to mention that one of those major sort of theoretical um underpinnings of the saint paul's book is that um we can really only make sense of space if we understand it to be dynamic and not and and in flux and other cultural geographers work on this ellen tread in particular talks about space as a process and um it's such a useful way to think about cathedrals for the very reasons that you said they're always in in flux i talk a lot about that as about the you know the changes that were made to the fabric um to the pulpit to the you know houses were built against the cathedral then they were taken down and things that seem like they're there forever they're not um they get destroyed i talk about the fire in 1561. it's sort of the place where my book starts and i talk about the notre dame fire at the end of my conclusion um i was literally watching the footage of notre dame burning as i was finishing the last chapter of my book on on the fabric of the cathedral and i was like i had this weird reaction i had a very different reaction than most people which was like you know tears and sorrow i was like this fires happen in cathedrals and by the way that spire that broke down was victorian it wasn't medieval and so i my response to it was very weird because i i was more detached i i would say um yes of course it was a horrible thing that it burned down but um but there's very little in our lives um in terms of the built environment that is permanent and when you have something um like a cathedral it seems as you said monolithic it seems permanent because of you know everything but you know even that cathedral was not impervious to the great fire of london and um what is the the sonnet 55 what does shakespeare say um that something or the tombs of monuments can outlive this powerful rhyme and this idea is like that tombs and monuments are actually permanent but you know shakespeare lived in london he knew he knew that space was in flux all the time so i don't know if he was making a sly joke about that but um i i really appreciate this idea that like nothing really especially cathedrals is permanent because they're susceptible to age just like all of us but they're also susceptible to ideology and abuse and trash and i think that um it's just really important that we demystify what a cathedral is yeah and bombs and bombs bombs and bombs exactly i'm in uh tokyo now and you know whatever uh was here before world war ii that remains is you know very special the spaces change but i think in this cathedral that we've gotten a lot of it because you've you work on cloth to work on mask the uh toxic well the you know bad behavior and that sort of thing i think that we've kind of gotten uh rose a good picture of rose here and i'm hoping maybe we can do this again at some point but this is where we go to future i hope you don't have anything in the future i mean come on you just you just published a book um i um that is a good question i would i can point you to future work that i would like to have someone else do on st paul's um uh it is something i talk about in the conclusion so if that will entice you to uh your casting about for a research project out there i have some ideas for you um i did toy with the idea of doing a very short thing on the immediate

year after the great fire um what was happening at the cathedral because my understanding my wrong understanding was that everything truly burnt to the ground and there was nothing left and you know then i was reading a letter from christopher redd um talking about what the next steps were in terms of recovering from this horrible catastrophe and he signed it you know from the deanery at st paul so he was actually he had set up his office ah very good very good all right is that uh it's um 66 16 is that the yes yes the 1666 is and i think this letter that i was i happened upon was actually a um from 1667 or maybe even later 1666 is very soon after and there's several poems written about the fire and i just thought well that would be kind of fun just to do a little thing on the poems yeah and um because they referred to what's left and then i started to go down all the rabbit holes and i thought i can't do this so it's just so and and you were there you see in japan uh sometimes we are uh it's gotten much better with the digital you know kind of revolution the past couple of decades but uh sometimes we're just not there and you have a very fine library where you are and if it's not what in your life you can get it very quickly and in tokyo it's not quite as easy but i did want to give a bit of what basically from what they call the henricon reformation but basically from the point at which the uh the crown really was not supporting the church in rome which is mid fifth uh mid-1500s i told you before we the mid-1500s so we're over a century of a cathedral that was not really did not get backing so much from the crown except the short period during the marian period where they weren't able to do that much and then it's just going into decay over these years and that space is transforming during that time and in my view there are a lot of flowers blooming in there too beautiful things you know uh the dramas the poetry the the things that that that drew us into this business right when we were uh very young you know i was i almost say in every podcast i was supposed to be selling insurance somewhere you know i was supposed to be the guy who was good with people and i learned later that that doesn't help you much in business you know sometimes being bad with people is is better but uh everybody kind of marked me for business and i just you know this is transformation that we all went through and i'm sure that you went through the same sort of thing you know i'm marked for another path but then we get captured by it well um thomas you it's like i planted this but i am working on something um i'm co-editing a new book it is not in early modern literature or culture or st paul's or anything like that and it is called transformations transformations it is a edited collection with a colleague at georgia gwinnett college in georgia and it is about humanities scholars who either by uh will or happenstance have moved into or are thinking of moving into administrative positions and how we navigate that when we still want to keep our foot and our scholarship and our teaching and how we can call on our humanities training to help us be excellent administrators and uh that whether that's communication skills or writing or um people right um the work we do in the humanities really has you know has helped me in my role but that is the next big project um we've got a complete draft we're shopping it around to a press and so that'll be my um maybe my last thing i ever published it will not it will not you will not be able to stop the machine uh it will keep on churning as long as you live and that will be many many more years and uh so the uh i'm so happy to hear that you're stepping out of field because that's a good thing to do you know and it's a learning uh there's a learning curve when you thought when you start thinking about your audience not being the people we mentioned earlier at a conference are in our roughly speaking in our interdisciplinary area to a a larger a broader audience and uh i've tried it and done it i've done it uh then it's uh it's difficult to get people to read it but i think because it's instructional you know those were the first great books really you could argue that the bible is an instructional text so there's uh there's war there's romance you know all of those things but uh instructional i think some of the big sellers during that period were instructional texts and yeah and your your work on saint paul's i'll finish with this and please stay after we finish the uh uh interview i want to debrief a little bit with you but uh your work is done uh like i said i want to emphasize this i will be using your name this weekend because here go see go see rose and what she says right i can throw it out and i have an article that may be published where i i already have done it i've sent it out we'll see how how kind the readers are to my idea but uh there was so much you know you only have so much space and that you can now we can go to rose and and and we can go to uh the st paul's john walls project and that's that saves us and then we can focus on something else uh to what we wanted that little part and that's what i'm seeing is the future of your book being a very seminal to a lot of new scholarship that's what i'm hoping well that is very very kind i do want to give a plug to a new book that's just come out with paul grave it's called old saint paul's and culture it's edited by two young scholars shannon altman and jonathan buckner they're two scholars that work in london and it is it's an edited collection and it moves from the medieval st earthenwald up through the um the uh book stalls in the 17th century and the booksellers and so um it's really taking up the mantle of taking seriously cultural production and around paul's and i am a co-editor on the introduction i was very pleased to be brought into that project and i'm really excited to see that project come out because that's exactly what i hope will happen is my book is just a jumping off point and hopefully we'll just see other young scholars um and and maybe not so young scholars find something in there that i couldn't cover or i couldn't or i didn't get right and and figure out how to how to answer the questions that we've left open fine fine we all know the name of cleon brooks and probably uh for ninety percent of the reason is people talking about how cleon brooks was wrong right but uh i've forgotten them but i remember cleon brooks uh for some reason rose i i i know i'm speaking for our audience whether they're joining joining us by podcast or on youtube i know i'm speaking for them also my uh colleagues here in japan with the shakespeare society of japan some absolutely fabulous people i wish i could just name it would take too long but i wish i could name the wonderful people they're going to be so so happy to be able to meet you at least in this capacity over zoom and we just can't thank you enough thank you so much it's been a huge pleasure and an honor to be with you and to um have your listeners and viewers uh uh get to hear a little bit about this thanks so much i really appreciate it