NL.05 — J. R. L. 'Roger' Highfield

"the creature appears before us . . ."

A version of the dispatch which follows was performed at “Mentors & Mentorly,” a social event hosted by Sanne de Boer and me at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Amsterdam on Friday, 5 April 2024. Surrounded by wine and beer, bread and cheese, a small group gathered to share stories about “mentorly” persons, places, moments in time, and objects that had made a difference in our lives; no one said “impactful”; almost everyone, Sanne and me included, had a hard time choosing, which fast emerged as part of the point, part of the exercise . . . . My warm thanks to Sanne and our NIAS colleagues.

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J. R.L. ‘Roger’ Highfield. “the creature appears before us . . .”

“Do come in!” A sonorous voice emanates from somewhere within. The voice of someone I've not yet met in person. It's Oxford, England, in the autumn of 1989. It's not yet the electronic age, there's no internet. No one here cares for telephones.

I'm new in town (as in life). Following his lead —the lead of the one with the voice— we two had been exchanging letters, our hand-written missives moving between our college pigeon-holes as often as twice-a-day. The carriers of the internal post, like the porters who guard the college gates and pigeon-holes, keep a rhythm within a system that feels timeless.

In his letters my interlocutor had already revealed himself to be a master of communication¹, the practitioner of a warm intellectual generosity —an intimacy of mind-and-person that I yearned for then and have longed to approximate. I still have his letters, the flourishes of his pen. The correspondence is lively and wide-ranging. He paid close attention, connecting the dots. "You may already know such-and-such an author" he'd hazard, "or such-and-such a book," putting me on to something at what felt like just the right moment. Quietly suggesting rather than expecting or commanding. My correspondent, someone I hadn't even met, was already thinking about me and my modest enterprises, imagining ways to help me forward.

What a standard he set for the communicators who (from my perspective) have followed in his wake. I see them, now, along a kind of mentorly thread, an odd string to which I’ll return.

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He suddenly appears from behind a bookcase, smallish and bent over, but large-headed and unusually alert. Possessed of an immense energy but somehow unhurried. A person in full attendance who knows that some things take time. He flashes a quick smile, peering at me briefly through wide eyeglasses. Then he pivots, more dexterously than I expect, and scuttles over to a wooden office chair near a desk, where he sits down. He's wearing a grey jacket over a v-necked sweater, over a collared shirt, checked, and a loose necktie. His chair has been turned outwards to face another, a leather arm chair, reassuringly scuffed.² There's an old board —perhaps a metre long, and soft and polished in the middle— resting against the armchair's side. He reads right here, I think, make-shift and perfect, with his book and notes resting on the board, laid across the arms of the chair. But not today. "That's where you go," he says, directing me with his eyes.

The late J. R. L. "Roger" Highfield (1922-2017), a distinguished historian of medieval Spain and a don in Merton College, Oxford, has recently retired. No sooner have I savoured the details of a bookish-studious clutter that seems to be an extension of his person, than I learn that he's not been here long. I'll never see the study he'd occupied for decades, "over the road," within the college's walls. "A fine reward for agreeing to write a history of the college," he shares. When I ask if he enjoyed that research (Walter de Merton, a chancellor to King Henry III and then then Edward I, established this academic community's first endowments in the 1260s), seemingly far from what I knew of his work on late medieval Spain, he smiles playfully, revealingly. "It was good for me," he says, in that captivating voice, "there's nothing more liberating than barging irresponsibly into someone else's field."

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“Will you have tea?,” Highfield inquires, his luxuriant eyebrows rising, as if he's asked me to report on a nest of spies. The only answer is yes.

Having tea allows me to behold its quasi-ritualistic preparation. Only now am I able to perceive that Highfield was setting a stage. The exchange of notes, the sharing of bits of information about each other, suggesting readings, even the pleasantries and arrangement of his chairs, were preparatory props for what could now unfold.

There is no talking as Highfield reaches to activate an electric kettle somewhere on the floor beside his desk. It must already have been filled with water and brought to boil in anticipation of my arrival, because it's ready in an instant. On a side table, between a pile of books and some journal offprints, stands a standard brownish tea pot, two tea cups in saucers, small crystal decanters for milk and sugar, and two silver spoons. “There's lemon, if you prefer” he says, indicating thin slices on a further dish. Highfield scoops a couple of tablespoons of pungent dark leaves out of large paper bag into the pot, adds hot water and closes the lid.

"Lapsang souchong," he intones, with a quick glance, gauging my interest, "from the seller in the Covered Market." I am rapt. He then produces —again, from somewhere down below, off stage— a tea cosy, which he fits loosely over the pot. It's a misshapen knitted contraption; outrageously bright and all tattered. The old cosy has seen better days. It fills me instantly with joy, and sets my mind racing. Highfield notices, the eyebrows raise again. I feel compelled to tell him more than I'm ready to share, and he fixes me with a gaze as I do so. His tea cosy reminds me of my paternal grandmother, I sputter, a Scot my sisters and I christened "Nurse Grandma," perhaps to distinguish her from another grandmother but also because of her dedication to a noble occupation. I had been transported back to her eleventh-floor apartment, Marquis Towers in downtown Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, where Nurse Grandma had always put just such a knitted monstrosity to use. "So colourful," I warble on, "but who knows how well they actually work. You know," I add self-consciously, "to keep the tea warm . . ."

Highfield leaves a pause.

"Well, Nurse Grandma was right," he eventually says, looking down. "It's one of my favourite things."

A few moments later, he suddenly grasps the top of the tea cosy and dramatically flings it into a corner of the room. My heart skips a beat, but I don't show it and I'm not missing a single detail. He pours the steaming tea into our cups through a red and white plastic strainer. Exactly the same kind of strainer is provided in Brown's Cafe, and across the land.

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It’s time to talk.

On that occasion, as on others, we sometimes talk of teachers and writers, and of different universities and their ways. I drink in the tales surrounding K. B. "Bruce" McFarlane, who had been Roger's tutor. But our conversations range across many other matters too, from his participation in the Allied invasion of Italy in the Second World War, to the then-embattled Mrs. Thatcher and her cronies. I now reflect that what we were doing, around and beyond our scholarly interests, was delving into and presenting our own lives and selves, into how each of us had come to be (so far at least!). Piecemeal we emerged, in the company of each other, alongside the slippery fragments of diversely uncultivated hopes, not a few regrets, and many silences.

Highfield was not my offical supervisor, not my director of research, not a "mentor proper." Crucially, the person who had been an Oxford history tutor *par excellence* —to hundreds, if not thousands, of solo students, and pairs of students, over many decades, the don who regularly took reading parties of undergraduate historians to Cornwall— was not my tutor.

I could talk with him differently.

Upon learning that I was planning to spend my first winter vacation from Oxford in Andalusia, in southern Spain, Highfield leapt up from his chair. He drew from his shelves not one of the seemingly numberless scholarly tomes he might have chosen to benefit one such as younger-me, but a readerly and absorbingly experiential book by one who thought autobiographically, Gerald Brenan's South from Granada (1957). I borrowed and read the book, over a few unforgettable days and nights, in las Alpujarras themselves. The mules, the garlic, the accidental; the unflinching descriptions not only of village characters and life but also of himself.

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Highfield thinks and speaks precisely.

But mostly he listens.

At telling junctures, interjecting the occasional "Oh yes!,"

in time with those rising eyebrows.

With a trace of a smile. Playful. Mischievous.

"Oh yes" is his "please, go on,"

his means of vanquishing trepidation,

of bringing out another,

encouraging his interlocutor forth.

His way of noticing a promising idea,

inchoate, unguarded,

of taking time to admire and consider

its revealing incompletion, the idea’s possibilities.

And only then to coax and charm it

—this proto-idea, this naked formulation, this fledgling— towards flight.

There is no gossip. "The person who calls others bullies," he observes, "is almost always a bully." Unkind words about another are not spoken, even if a few hints drop.

"A clever one," he lets simmer, "and needs watching."

"So-and-so was brilliant, a gorgeous thinker, but quite wild when young!," he says of another, "I wasn't the only one to fill in once or twice."

"She was smarter than all the rest," he says of still another scholar —someone we both had read but whom he had known long ago and in person— "and, soon enough, it [her brilliance] was no secret to anyone."

There is no tolerance for fakers of any stripe in Highfield's thoughtworld, no time for posers who spout but don't do the work. And little patience for prophets who spout mostly in self-promotion; spouting thus, spouting thus, again and again.

Highfield operates quietly, subtly, through attentive and artful conversation.

How much Philip Waller's recollection of Highfield's "selflessness," rejection of favouritism, and dedication to sharpening the "critical acumen" of all manner of students (and undergraduates in particular) rings true.³

Many if not most of us have an odd string of such figures in our lives. Usually they are persons, but also the shimmering places, moments and things of memory that stretch into our pasts. Beckoning us back, to think. It’s an ‘odd’ string because each of them is a knot, a node that exists in a space-time wildly different from that of their fellows, and each has been so differently influential. And yet they ask to be considered together, to be explored along a line, skipping, dipping, inviting reflection and connection. Each proved so able to deliver their version of an embrace but also a nudge, a tug as well as a jolt. So encouraging, but often not directly, not encouraging in a way one might expect. Deprived of the opportunity to consider the earlier characters along this unofficial mentorly string, I surely would have failed to appreciate the ones who appeared later. And so it is that in my own peculiar case, one of my father's friends, a bookish, readerly collector and sculptor of driftwood named Wellington Dawe begets John Stone, a colleague of my father, my parents’ friend, the one who made fifteen-year-old me the dishwasher for his catering business-on-the-side, the one who brought me a whisky and had time to talk. And so it is, too, that it’s the historian David C. Johnson who prepares the way for the subject at hand, a figure near the centre of my string, Roger Highfield. And so it is that Highfield, in turn, opens for me a capacity to recognise and contemplate the distinct possibilities of John H. Elliott, of Rolena Adorno and, most notably, of William B. Taylor. For me, there is a twisting thread running between Wellington Dawe and Bill Taylor.

Only in time is it possible to see the thread, the stringishness of it all. To discern within Roger Highfield's gently powerful ways an invitation towards not only a way of studying, but also of behaving, a way of carrying oneself in the world.

His example exceeded his studies and rooms; outside, as within, there is ample space for mirth and play. When I later visited him at home in North Oxford —a portion of my then young family in tow— my clearest memory from the day in question is of him perched at the top of a steep staircase, beaming through those glasses of his, and laughing his head off, as he sets off, rolling down, a chaos of coloured rubber balls, to the shrieking delight of my little sons.

Why me?, I wonder. Why me?, I continue to wonder. I was just tripping along when I came to know him, tripping along as I still feel I do. Why did he bother to pay attention to me? How could I have been so fortunate?

There was another time. Highfield had planned an excursion, and evening out. The two of us would join a famous professor of Spanish literature and culture for dinner in another college, Exeter. Ian Michael (who also wrote detective novels under the nom de plume of David Seraphim) would be presiding, a figure who cannot be captured here. Suffice it to say for present purposes that, even though a more colourful, generous, unpredictably quick-witted and loquacious Welsh raconteur is impossible to imagine, it wasn't Michael who stole the show that evening. Even in the magical space that was not his own, and when another exuberantly held forth, it was Roger Highfield who assumed the occasion's centre.

Here was the twilight edition of Highfield's art of listening, of the conversation, of the timely encouragement. The "oh yes" here, the "surely not" there, the mock-scandalised "oh my!" at just the right moment, these interjections were what relaxed and moved his table companions to greater heights. Highfield —the nearly silent director and connector, the benevolent puppeteer— had brought me there, to dine with Ian Michael. Yet another stage had been thoughtfully set, and there wasn’t a moment to lose.

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"There is no single early modern Hieronymite thinker more worth reading than Padre José de Sigüenza [1544-1606]," I remember Highfield saying at one point. The two of us again. Back in his rooms. "It was Sigüenza who trained the novices —the young monks— and he did it for years. Nothing about those young people got by him," Highfield continued, "and I always think that this is why his writings are full of surprises."

Little did I know then, that one day I'd be treading related paths, learning as much as I could about Hieronymite formation. Little did I know that I'd be sitting in Amsterdam, some thirty-five years later, reading a little each morning from José de Sigüenza's Life of St Jerome (1595).⁴

“El gran padre Sn. Gerónimo,” D. Blanco, litografía de Julio Donón, Madrid. Frontispiece, Vida de San Gerónimo ([1595], 1853)

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Highfield's broad interests, like his approach to "history" in the so-called late middle ages— stood out, and stands out still.⁵ His reading and experiences fed an abundant curiosity, about Spain and much else; he was less restricted, and considerably more open to "foreign" (non-English) approaches to history than his own teachers and training had been.⁶

While keenly aware of broader contexts and forces at play, Highfield excelled at finding individuals, whom he memorably set within and against the movement and structures of their time. Highfield was curious about people, the customary and readerly traditions from which they knowingly and unconsciously drew, and about the surviving fragments of evidence that might suggest their thoughts and actions. A fine example is his telling of the origins of the Order of St Jerome around the "ermita" of Nuestra Señora de Castañar (twenty kilometres from Toledo) in the mid-fourteenth century, including his memorable collective portrait of the Hieronymite "founders" (Fernando Yánez de Figueroa, Pedro Fernández Pecha, Alonso Pecha, and one "Fray Ramón") and exploration of their fundamental predicament: yearning for eremitic solitude and the divine while increasingly enmeshed with humanity and a dynamic world.⁷ Desires are unrequited, contradictions grow more accentuated, and responses partial. Nothing is quite as it seems, let alone how it would later be recorded. "History" often isn't what it is or was purported to be.

I wanted in the late-1980s, and still want today, to think and tell about pasts and presents in these open and related ways.

Way back when, back then, I might have told Highfield of a predecessor to Sigüenza on my desk.

There I am, reading the autobiography of Spanish mystic Teresa de Ávila. So slowly, bit by bit each morning, I’m trying to savour the language, the containers of her ideas and descriptions of experience.

“Oh yes, primary sources,” Highfield says —maybe pausing to fling the tea cosy, maybe not— “the primary source . . . . Suddenly, the creature appears before us.”

photograph credit: the memorial post by Merton College, Oxford. 18 October 2017

* Roger Highfield can be seen and heard (speaking about John Wycliffe) in Michael Wood’s “Story of England,” produced by the BBC and now available on YouTube.⁸ In this clip, and incredibly, for me, Highfield utters the word “creature.” Readers/Viewers/Listeners may wish to find the 40:56 minute-mark and follow to 42:21 in Wood’s “Story of England,” Episode 4 of 6: “Peasants Revolt to Tudors.”

** I'm grateful to the aforementioned Sanne de Boer and Glyn Redworth for comments and encouragement along a wending way to this piece. And I thank Sylvia Sellers-García for inspiration, for her characteristic brilliance as the two of us opened an ongoing discussion of mentorliness in an earlier, different context.

1. Others have singled out my subject as an extraordinary correspondent, an exploration to which I mean to return on another occasion.

2. I’d been prepared for this chair and its possibilities by its predecessor —as it were— a chair with pride of place and similar purpose in the office of David C. Johnson, professor of Latin American history at University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

3. Philip Waller, "Memorial Address for Dr. Roger Highfield," Merton College, Oxford, 21 October 2017.

4. Vida de San Gerónimo, doctor máximo de la Iglesia, segunda edición (Madrid: Imprenta de la Esperanza, [1595] 1853).

5. See for example, the recognition from many and notable quarters in Derek Lomax and David Mackenzie, eds. God and man in medieval Spain: essays in honour of J.R.L. Highfield (1989).]

6. A point underscored by Waller, "A Memorial Address.” See n. 3 above.

7. J. R. L. Highfield, "The Jeronymites in Spain, Their Patrons and Success, 1373-1516," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 34: 4 (1983), 513-533.

8. Warm thanks to Glyn Redworth ( my fellow historian of the Spanish world, and a friend and colleague of Highfield in Oxford) for directing me to this video, and for offering broader counsel as I prepared this dispatch.