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<\/a>As a young man, James A. Winn<\/a>\u00a0was often advised that he would have to choose. He could be a serious literary scholar or a professional flutist; it was not possible to be both. Winn proved them wrong. He is now a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English, director of BU\u2019s Center for the Humanities<\/a>\u2014and<\/i> a concert flutist and musicologist, with an appointment in the musicology department at the College of Fine Arts.<\/p>\nAn expert on English literature of the Restoration and the 18th century, Winn has written several books, among them Unsuspected Eloquence<\/i> (1981), a history of the relationship between poetry and music; John Dryden and His World<\/i> (1987), a prize-winning biography of the 17th-century poet (\u201cthe most important biography of Dryden ever written,\u201d according to a review in the New York Times Book Review<\/i>), and The Poetry of War<\/i> (2008), an examination of the works of artists ranging from Homer to Bruce Springsteen.<\/p>\n
In his most recent book, Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts<\/i><\/a>\u00a0(Oxford University Press, July 2014), Winn brings together his deep knowledge of both literature and music\u2014as well as the visual arts\u2014to examine the flowering of the arts during Anne\u2019s reign, from 1702 to 1714.<\/p>\n While Anne has often been portrayed as a sad, dull, weak monarch who failed to produce an heir, Winn brings her vividly to life as an accomplished court dancer, harpsichordist, and connoisseur of the arts with an astute understanding of the role that poetry, music, theater, painting, and architecture played in politics and court life.<\/p>\n He also analyzes works by composer George Frideric Handel, poet Alexander Pope, painter Godfrey Kneller, and architect Christopher Wren, as well as anonymous birthday odes, obscene lampoons, and novels about scandal.<\/p>\n With the help of Peter Sykes<\/a>, chair of the CFA historical performance department and director of BU\u2019s Baroque Orchestra, Winn arranged for a group of Boston musicians to record 28 pieces of music written for Queen Anne, and he has made those works available to readers on his book\u2019s companion website.<\/p>\n Winn\u2019s research for the book was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies<\/a>, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation<\/a>, and the National Endowment for the Humanities<\/a>.<\/p>\n BU Today<\/em> talked with Winn about why he thinks Queen Anne has been overlooked by other historians, his advocacy for an interdisciplinary approach to the humanities, and the importance of writing for a broad audience.<\/p>\n Winn:<\/strong> Queen Anne has certainly not gotten much credit for being effective as a monarch, which she was, as popular, which she certainly was, and as astute, which almost no one recognizes she was\u2014or, for that matter, as well-informed about the culture and arts, which she was.<\/p>\n I think her size is part of that. It\u2019s a sad truth that I think people look at the portraits of her and read about her and make that leap\u2014\u201cfat, therefore stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n My colleague at Loyola, Robert Bucholz<\/a>, a court historian, has a fine essay about Anne\u2019s body [\u201cThe Stomach of a Queen or Size Matters: Gender, Body Image, and the Historical Reputation of Queen Anne\u201d]. He says, and I agree with him, that you can tell a lot about a historian\u2019s attitude toward Anne by the words he or she uses to describe her body. If they say \u201cgross,\u201d \u201cobese,\u201d \u201cfat,\u201d then they\u2019re hostile to Anne. If they say \u201cplump,\u201d \u201cmaternal,\u201d etc., then maybe they\u2019re not quite as hostile.<\/p>\n Look, she was large, but let\u2019s remember that there\u2019s a double standard here. Certainly in the 18th century, lots of men were huge. Robert Walpole, the prime minister, ruled England for 40 years as the most powerful person in the country. He was enormously fat. There were portraits of him\u2014he could barely button his vest. That doesn\u2019t seem to have been a problem for him, but for poor Anne, especially starting in the 19th century, this got to be a mark against her.<\/p>\n Then, of course, there was her gender. Now you can say, and it was true, that Elizabeth I enjoys a big reputation\u2014a queen who understood power, a queen who defeated the Spanish Armada, who accomplished all these things, and Victoria has pretty good press, but somehow in between them, Anne has not gotten much attention.<\/p>\n I started out thinking about this book as being about the extraordinary flowering of culture that occurred during the 12 years of her reign. And then my hypothesis was, \u201cSurely the queen had something to do with this\u201d\u2014because there wasn\u2019t yet a sustaining commercial system that would have explained why these people were able to make the literature and painting and architecture and music that they made.<\/p>\n So I went looking for \u201cWhat does Anne know about the arts and does she, in fact, care? Was there a way she was making choices or funneling money to people or in general making the arts happen?\u201d And I found a lot.<\/p>\n With good reason.<\/p>\n She writes, \u201cI have been told the king does not care for plays.\u201d It\u2019s such a wonderful piece of irony. She knows perfectly well that he\u2019s never gone to the theater in his entire reign. He\u2019s a soldier; he doesn\u2019t care about the arts. But there has got to be either a ball where people learn an elaborate new dance, which is trouble, or they can bring in one of the theater companies and they\u2019ll just put on a play. Because Mary has died, Anne is now the official hostess for these events. She\u2019s trying to think what to do, so she writes this letter to Sarah. It\u2019s just a big private yuck between the two of them.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the way she is. That\u2019s why her sense of humor has been missed\u2014because it tends to be understated and ironic like that.<\/p>\n I did. I see her weaknesses and I see the pathos of her life and the way people kept trying to manipulate her, but I think she showed courage and a profound sense of duty. She could have blown off being queen\u2026and let the men run it. To some extent, some historical accounts of Anne claim that\u2019s what she did, but it\u2019s a bogus claim. She attended more meetings of the Privy Council and of the Treasury board than any monarch of her era.<\/p>\n Her uncle Charles couldn\u2019t be bothered to go to the meetings of the Treasury board. He was going to the play or hanging out with his mistresses. She was very conscientious, and again, you miss that in the kind of breezy dismissal by people who should know better.<\/p>\n You know, I have to say she\u2019s a ripe topic for feminists, and it\u2019s interesting they haven\u2019t picked up on her.<\/p>\n Yes, there\u2019s a wonderful moment\u2014there\u2019s a French marquis who\u2019s been captured; he\u2019s in the tower, he\u2019s a prisoner of war. They do prisoner exchanges regularly through the course of the War of the Spanish Succession\u2014this long war they fought against the French. Luttrell, the diarist, reports they were going to exchange him for the daughter of the English consul who\u2019d been captured at Leghorn by the French. But he didn\u2019t want to be exchanged for a woman. And so Anne says, \u201cFine, you can stay in jail. You think it\u2019s beneath you to be exchanged for the daughter of a diplomat? You can hang in the tower for a while and see how you feel about that.\u201d<\/p>\n You see what you want to see. Absolutely other scholars have read the letters, but everyone comes to even a body of archival material with their own prejudices, their own aims and goals. So what am I looking for? Well, above all else, I\u2019m looking for her to say somebody came and sang for her at court and had a beautiful voice or that she doesn\u2019t want to buy a painting that\u2019s been offered to her or she has or hasn\u2019t read a particular book. All those things appear. Somebody whose particular keen interest is in diplomacy would be looking for all references to the King of Denmark or something like that.<\/p>\n If the story we tell ourselves about the past is only about money and power, then we have very little access to how it felt to live at that time, whether that time is the Middle Ages in France or 18th-century England or 19th-century Japan. If our account of history censors, omits, leaves out, obliterates the arts, we\u2019re certainly falsifying the past, and one way of putting this that almost everyone can understand is that we\u2019re especially falsifying people\u2019s emotions.<\/p>\n The arts are a complex and sophisticated way of expressing, among other things, emotions. It\u2019s been my drive throughout my teaching career and throughout my writing career to try to see some pieces of history whole, or as whole as I can.<\/p>\n The moment for me that I often think about\u2014which was a moment of personal advice, not of intellectual content\u2014happened in my freshman year in college. I was 17, just off the Greyhound bus from Kentucky, eager and na\u00efve, and I had the good fortune to have as my faculty advisor a 29-year-old assistant professor named Robert Freeman, who went on to become for 30 years the head of the Eastman School of Music and then for 10 years the dean of fine arts at UT-Austin. A wonderful man.<\/p>\n I said to him, \u201cDo you think it would be possible for me\u2014not only here at Princeton as an undergraduate, but in life\u2014to be both a serious student of literature and a serious flute player?\u201d<\/p>\n And he rocked back in his chair and said, \u201cWhy not?\u201d And that \u201cWhy not?\u201d has sustained me for about 50 years now, because he believed I could do it. Many other people at later stages of my career urged me in quite specific terms to give up one or the other. They would say, \u201cYou play the flute well enough to do it, why are you messing about getting a PhD,\u201d or they\u2019d say, \u201cThis is for serious scholars, you can\u2019t waste it on playing the flute every day.\u201d<\/p>\n So it is the case that I have had two careers, as you can tell by looking at my schizophrenic website<\/a>. And because of that, I think I have been more open to the idea of looking at the past through more than one lens and trying to bring together what are normally thought of as materials pursued by one or another discipline and to bring them into conversation with each other.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think the right strategy for us as humanities faculty at a major research university is to fold our tents or to fall back on whining. I think we need to be supple and nimble and creative. We need to try to find ways to dramatize what we teach and why it\u2019s important for today\u2019s students. We need to remind our students, our colleagues, and the wider world of the function of the humanities, the study of what my theologian father once called \u201cthe wonder and worry of being human.<\/p>\n You apply for a grant to the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), the hit rate is six percent. We\u2019re trying to train the faculty that you don\u2019t always win the NEH, but also how you win. You don\u2019t write a grant proposal that makes sense to only the four other people in your subfield.<\/p>\n Right now, I am Mr. Broad Appeal. It\u2019s something I\u2019m able to do here with our resident humanities fellows. We have a seminar where they read each other\u2019s works in progress. I tell them, \u201cIf you can\u2019t write a chapter that the other eight people here are interested in, you\u2019re in trouble.\u201d You might be in religion, they might be in anthropology, but you want to write something that\u2019s at least of interest to other bright scholars, let alone the larger public.<\/p>\n They\u2019re marinated in their discipline. Some people never come up for air and shrug it off. It\u2019s partly the system\u2014peer-reviewed journals, the damn tenure process. By the time you get tenure, which takes longer and is farther out than it used to be, your first book is on the early Byzantine arch. Your second book is on the later Byzantine arch. Then you write a bunch of scholarly articles about special features of the Byzantine arch. It\u2019s not everybody else\u2019s fault that we have less of a public than we used to, and it has everything to do with why we don\u2019t have the funding we do. We need popularizers and people in academia fear popularizers. They fear they\u2019ll be superficial and they\u2019ll just do bumper stickers. My friend Simon Schama, I think he\u2019s done a world of good for history.<\/p>\n Skip Gates\u2014he was my colleague at Yale. Stephen Greenblatt. Jill Lepore. These are crossover artists. They are people who teach at a university, but can actually write an article in the New Yorker<\/i>. We need more of that. Every time something like this happens, it\u2019s good for the humanities. Right here at BU, my colleague Stephen Prothero<\/a>\u00a0has engaged a national audience in thinking about images of Jesus, and my colleague Charles Griswold<\/a>\u00a0has written a philosophical book about forgiveness, something we all need to consider at one time or another.<\/p>\n Watch video interviews with James A. Winn about Queen Anne posted by Oxford University Press:<\/em><\/p>\n Listen to James A. Winn\u2019s solo performance<\/a> of the Bach partita for flute at Marsh Chapel in October 2014.<\/em><\/p>\n A version of this story originally appeared on the BU Research<\/a> website.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"BU](\"\/federal\/files\/2015\/02\/Screen-Shot-2015-02-06-at-4.40.36-PM.png\")
<\/a>BU Today:<\/i> Your preface\u00a0 quotes a\u00a0 19th-century Victorian writer and editor describing Anne as \u201cugly, corpulent, gouty, sluggish, a glutton and a tippler.\u201d Why were other historians were so dismissive of her? Did you set out to rescue her?<\/h5>\nWhy have historians emphasized her size? Who cares?<\/h5>\n
You write about the role of the arts in these elaborate court rituals\u2014like birthday parties. Anne had to plan a birthday party for King William, whom she didn\u2019t like.<\/h5>\n
You write about how she had to plan this party and maybe she\u2019ll arrange for a play to be put on, and she writes a letter to her good friend Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough.<\/h5>\n
It\u2019s so dry.<\/h5>\n
It sounds like you really came to like and respect her.<\/h5>\n
Are these people who should know better mostly male historians?<\/h5>\n
You get into Anne and some of the gender politics of the time in your book.<\/h5>\n
Did other people see this correspondence and just overlook it?<\/h5>\n
Why are the arts a valuable lens through which to look at history?<\/h5>\n
Was this way of thinking inspired by one of your teachers early on or does it come from the fact that you\u2019re a literary scholar\u2014and an accomplished musician\u2014yourself?<\/h5>\n
You\u2019ve devoted your life to the humanities, but funding cuts and dropping enrollments have changed things. You spoke<\/a> at the University of Connecticut, urging scholars to make the case for the value of the humanities.<\/h5>\n
It\u2019s really hard to get research money in the humanities today.<\/h5>\n
Why do some people in academia seem to write only for other people in their disciplines?<\/h5>\n
What other popularizers from academia do you admire?<\/h5>\n
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