DESERT HARVEST—Spring 2001
Vol. 9, No. 1

From the desk of the Associate Director
by Professor Susan C. Karant-Nunn

   Our spirits were at the mountaintops; so soon are they cast down. In the autumn newsletter, we joyfully described the highlights of the international conference, held at Hacienda del Sol, in honor of Professor Heiko A. Oberman on his seventieth birthday. Today I have the somber, indeed the grievous task of announcing that Heiko will die shortly, of melanoma. [At press time, we received the sad news that Heiko A. Oberman passed away on April 22.]
    Heiko's and my shared concern is to facilitate the students' smooth continuation of their studies. I am devoting myself foremost to this task. My own expertise in the social and cultural history of the German-speaking lands remains a strength of the Division. Of additional crucial importance, Dean Holly M. Smith has authorized the Division and the History Department's search for a historian of the French Reformation. As chair of the search committee, I am delighted to report that we have a pool containing a number of exemplary applicants. In 2002 we shall add a truly luminous colleague to our ranks.
    As part of its ordinary operation, the Division has always brought the great minds of our profession to Tucson so that our students might hear and consult them. In the past two years, quite in addition to the luminaries who spoke at the Symposium last October, we have had the honor of receiving among us Professor Bernard Roussel, Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the Sorbonne, Paris; Professor Andrew Pettegree, Director of the St. Andrews Reformation Studies Institute, Scotland; Professor Brad Gregory of Stanford University; Professor H. C. Erik Midelfort of the University of Virginia; Professor Irena Backus of the University of Geneva, Switzerland; and Regius Professor Emeritus Patrick Collinson of Cambridge University, England. The result of our own teaching and professional entertaining is a wealth of opportunity and advice for the future alumni of the Division. Heiko Oberman and I are enthusiastic members of the international community of learning. Using your gifts, I shall continue to bring stellar visitors to campus.
    A further jewel, as was announced at the Symposium, the Obermans have magnanimously given Heiko's vast and valuable library to the Division. The University will house this separately, in close proximity to our offices, so that students may have ready access to it. Once again, Dean Smith has demonstrated her support by providing a stipend for a graduate student to work on the Oberman collections.
    Under my stewardship, and incorporating Heiko's legacy, the Division will unquestionably retain its position among the handful of top centers for the study of the late Middle Ages and the Reformation. The underpinning of all will be the endowment of the Heiko A. Oberman Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation Studies. While it is clear that not everyone can make a gift that constitutes a high percentage of the $2 million required to endow a chair, all gifts add up. Achieving this endowment is a high priority of the Division. It will put us in first place in the field. It will enable us to suitably perpetuate the ideals of our matchless founder by bringing an additional internationally acclaimed colleague here to help us keep the desert in bloom.
    We grieve . . . and with your help we shall continue to build.

Professor Patrick Collinson: "The Reformation and the Birth of England"
by Victoria Clisham

   The annual Town and Gown lecture is always a highlight of our academic calendar. Each year, an eminent scholar graces our campus and presents a substantial lecture to both students and community members. This year we were treated to an erudite and entertaining lecture by Professor Patrick Collinson, C. B. E. Collinson, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, is best known for his world-renowned work on the Protestant Reformation in England. In his long and prolific career he has produced ground-breaking work on the Puritan movement in England, the development of English Protestantism, and changes in society and culture in sixteenth-century England. In his lecture on March 21 he spoke not only of Reformation England, but of the construction of England and Britain in the minds of thinkers from then until now.
    Collison began he presentation with various entertaining considerations of what the term 'Britain' connotes in the modern mind. He posed the question of how a nation which once possessed an Empire on which "the sun never set" has become transformed into one in which national sentiment manifests itself only in scenes of football violence. As he considered the history of this national development, Collinson took us back five hundred years to the England of the early modern period. Among other developments, he discussed the work of William Tyndale, whose English translation of the Bible Collinson sees as a fundamental moment in this gradual development. A truly dynamic speaker, Collinson had the packed auditorium howling with his comparisons of Tyndale's Bible, with all its colloquial phrases, and the more formal King James translation which was made almost one hundred years later. His talk examined the use of such translations in the formation of a national consciousness, and considered the development and disintegration of that consciousness in more recent centuries. With a subject that spanned Reformation history, British history, English literature and religion, Collinson's lecture drew listeners from diverse fields and backgrounds. These varied interests were reflected in the dynamic questions posed to our speaker at the end of his lecture.
    It has always been a special treat for Division students that the speaker for the Town and Gown series also comes to our Thursday-night seminar with the purpose of explaining what make him or her "tick" as an historian. This intensely personal question is designed to elicit from the guest as much as he is willing to divulge about the path of his career, the successes and failures he has encountered and the particular source of momentum which has kept him going on this tough journey. We duly gathered at the Oberman home to pose this multi-layered question to Professor Collinson, not anticipating the rich and open answer he would be willing to provide.
    He began by telling us the details of his early career, including the struggles he encountered in his initial forays into the academic job market. He went on to share with us aspects of the many years he and his wife, Elizabeth, had spent at the University of Sydney, Australia. Professor Collinson told us how they had journeyed there with their family and his mother, and fully intended to remain for the rest of his career. He also described the more sober side of academic politics, which led him eventually to leave Australia and return to the shores of his English home, where he took a job teaching at Kent for some years. He discussed the differences in educational levels between Australian and English students, and the vast contrasts he noticed in the customs of the two lands and their treatment of academics. From Kent he and his wife traveled to Cambridge, where Professor Collinson was appointed Regius Professor. Finally, from here they moved on to Sheffield, where they now make their permanent home. Retirement, however, seems to be a concept foreign to both Collinsons, who were travelling home after a week in Arizona in order to attend a conference at Cambridge in which Professor Collinson was delivering a keynote address.
    The rest of our Thursday evening was taken up with specific questions concerning Professor Collinson's own research. The students had the opportunity to ask questions about the theses he proposed in his various books and articles, and to clarify any issues that were previously unclear. This dynamic discussion allowed our guest to address a variety of probing questions on topics which spanned the length of his career in academia. As always, the week of the Town and Gown lecture was engaging and challenging. Professor Collinson was generous in revealing his own life and thorough in tackling the queries put to him. All present benefitted greatly from his openness and formidable scholarly expertise, while beneath a convivial surface seminar members grieved on realizing that this was Heiko Oberman's last evening in attendance.

"What makes you tick as an historian?"
Professor H. C. Erik Midelfort, University of Virginia
by Andrew Thomas

   On February 1, the renowned scholar Professor H. C. Erik Midelfort graced our Thursday-night seminar as its fiftieth distinguished guest. Professor Midelfort came to visit us from Mr. Jefferson's university in Charlottesville. At the University of Virginia he has established himself as a leading scholar in the history of medicine by skillfully combining the tools of psychology and history. This can be seen in his major works: Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684 (1972), Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (1994), and most recently, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (1999). Midelfort's interest in madness is "inherited" from his father. His father was a doctor and had hoped his son would be, too. In his statement on what makes him tick as an historian, Midelfort discussed how he shared his father's interest in medicine but became convinced that the most appropriate way to study medicine was to obtain a Ph.D. in history rather than a medical degree. Thus, he did eventually become a doctor as his father had hoped—a doctor of philosophy.
    He would make an excellent medical doctor, for a caring bedside-manner is evident in his work. He treats his historical subjects with as much attentiveness and respect as any patient could hope for from a physician. In a very real sense, his writings in the area of the history of medicine are not only a service to the field of history, but also to the field of ethics as he challenges us to be more compassionate towards those who suffer from ailments. Midelfort asks us to question modern assumptions about the naiveté of early modern peoples and our own smug self-assured "enlightenment." Similarly, he offers a convincing challenge to Michel Foucault's interpretation of the history of mental institutions by revealing that there was no "golden age" in early Europe for the insane before the bourgeoisie institutions of confinement made their mark. Midelfort's efforts have proven him to be a doctor with salutary advice to a public that sometimes needs a reminder of what it means to suffer.

"What makes you tick as an historian?"
Professor Irena Backus, University of Geneva, Switzerland
by Michael Bruening

   On March 8, the Division was honored to welcome Professor Irena Backus to Tucson to speak to the graduate seminar about her life and work. The author or editor of some fifty books and articles, Backus works in the Institute for Reformation History and is the world's foremost expert on the use of the Church Fathers in the Reformation period.
    She generously agreed to meet with the graduate students individually, where we talked about our personal research interests and she offered much good advice from her own unique perspective. These meetings are an invaluable part of the graduate student experience. Not only do they forge important personal contacts with internationally renowned scholars, but they also provide us with a fresh initial reaction to our research topics and can often suggest new ways to develop them.
    In the evening at the graduate seminar, Backus answered the time-honored question to visiting scholars: "What makes you tick as an historian?" She took us on a fascinating autobiographical journey from her childhood in communist Poland to her education in England, which culminated in a doctoral thesis at Oxford University on the influence of Theodore Beza on the English New Testament. After some initial difficulty landing an academic job, she was finally snatched up by Pierre Fraenkel at the Institute in Geneva to work on an edition of Martin Bucer's commentary on the Gospel of John. She has been in Geneva ever since.
    Afterwards, Backus took questions from the students about her publications. In addition to her interest in the Church Fathers, she has worked extensively on Reformation biblical exegesis and interpretations of the book of Revelation through the centuries.
    It was truly a rewarding evening during a semester that has seen an unusually large number of visiting historians. And on a personal note, I was particularly delighted to renew my acquaintance with Professor Backus, whom I first met two years ago while conducting research in Geneva. Visits from European scholars like her help to build bridges across the Atlantic Ocean, which are crucially important for the American scholar of European history, who must keep one foot on each continent.

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