Sir John Elliott
(23 June 1930 – 10 March 2022)
John Huxtable Elliott died last night in Oxford. A monumental loss. I share, below, a piece I penned (for publication in Spanish) two decades ago.
Espíritu, historiador y investigador de investigadores.*
Much of what has come to me in composing a short testimonio about Sir John Elliott as un espíritu, un historiador y un director / investigador de investigadores can, in fact, be captured in one scene.
It is 14 October 1991. Imagine a large lecture hall in the formal "Examination Schools" of Oxford University.
The room is filled with undergraduate historians, most of them first-year students. It is somehow a quintessentially Oxford moment as well as any university classroom on a first day. The audience seems simultaneously to aspire to great heights and to chew gum. They are a mix of blank faces and distraction at first, in waistcoats and strategically-torn bluejeans, with designer bookbags and red lipstick, clutching fountain pens and fiddling with their dreadlocks. A stir of attention as the newly arrived Regius Professor of Modern History glides by in long black gown, seeking a microphone at the front of the room. John Elliott's task, here, is a welcome and an invitation. His title: "The Study of History at Oxford." I was excited to hear this piece of encouragement, and I collect my thoughts from the few notes I scribbled that day.
Elliott congratulates his audience for their choice of "history" as a subject of concentration. They are not expecting such a beginning. But he has reflected on the fact that at least some of them feel a risk in choosing "history." They are counteracting parents, perhaps. More broadly, they are counteracting a tendency in late-Thatcherite England (and elsewhere), a utilitarian attitude toward learning. Elliott offers them a glimpse of another way, an idea of Learning to last a lifetime. And there is more. "An ahistorical society," he states, "is dangerous." He talks both about the unpredictability of social forces and about "inherited mental attitudes." He addresses the audience. The skills you will hone in the next four years, he stresses, will be "enabling." They can serve you in many ways, perhaps especially if you end up far from the practice of professional history. Elliott talks about a "social vision" encouraged in the student of history, about the power of reflection upon pasts in the present. Things such as the fall of empires and dogmas, as well as the re-assertions of fundamentalist religion and the nationalism of long-suppressed social groups need historical thinking. The study of history, he contends, can teach of these things, allowing us to ask questions and to understand people and events with a greater degree of sophistication. Ideas and movements and people do not disappear. They re-surface, they change, and are remembered and represented in multiple ways.
Elliott tells the students something of their course of study ahead. Historiography is our attention to the thinkers and writers who have shaped our own approaches. He reminds students not only to read and respect, but also to be restless before assumptions, and to reflect upon why certain kinds of writing moves them and others do not. When he turns to what might be achieved in "further and special subjects" he offers what amounts to a synthesis of the historical enterprise. He emphasises the central importance of students bringing their own, particular microscopes to bear on primary sources. Look at the source, he says. Think of context, of what is at stake. Challenge generalisations. Acknowledge, but —through an intimacy with the sources— get past the steady stream of secondary literature, test the all-embracing model and the provocative hypotheses. He talks about the humility and the confidence that simultaneously come from reading the texts and examining the paintings and other cultural expressions of past times. Elliott tells the students about an aim: a formulation which satisfies.
The past is a foreign country, but there is affinity shot through it. Dreadlocks seem to sway in enthusiasm as Elliott touches upon the critical, formative experience of travel and foreign languages for a student of history. Travel and languages are, of course, gateways to his own experience and formation as a historian of the early modern Spanish world, and to his enthusiasm for the challenge of comparative approaches, and he shares his particular educational path with the young students in the lecture hall. Travel and languages can begin to offer an antidote to dangers. Beware, he says, of insular thinking, of atomised pasts, of private universes detached from larger mental worlds, of unexamined notions of exceptionalism. He offers, instead, ideas of surprise and permeability. Elliott encourages these students to connect across what might seem like distinct readings, processes, and contexts. But he tells them also to isolate differences, to push beyond similarities, in considering their units of comparison.
I have no doubt that minds were swimming as the room emptied and people walked out into the Oxford night. But they must have been excited, too.
J. H. Elliott, the historian, is not a person I ever expected to meet. So it seemed to me as I began to study medieval and early modern history in Canada in the early and mid-1980s. I first discovered his words (The Old World and the New, Imperial Spain, and Europe Divided) at one of the long wooden tables in the Periodicals Reading Room of the Rutherford Library at the University of Alberta. It was the best place to read in Edmonton, and this was the best historical writing I had ever seen.
A few years later, after I had made my first pilgrimage (for that is what it felt like) to the Andes and my love affair with the Spanish world had intensified, Elliott was still words. It was only much later, and over time, that a person came into view —the one who would act as one of the ushers into the complicated dance of life and study, who would call with encouragement before a difficult day, genuinely inquire about me and mine, give a Oaxacan blanket as a gift, and help to welcome my first son Felix into the world (by asking if the baby "was named after Mendelssohn or Gilbert?" [when my eldest was named after the winning African American bellboy in Martin Amis's Money]).
But, early on, John was still words in books. He even told me later that he thought of projects in terms of books. But there are essays, too, a cluster of which have been conveniently gathered into Spain and Its World. They range from the mental world of Cortés, through the Hapsburg court and the paintings of Titian and Velázquez, to the relationship between Quevedo and the Count-Duke of Olivares, and beyond. J. H. Elliott is one of the humanistic scholars whose contributions have gradually unveiled early modern Spaniards and placed them within the broader historical experiences of Europe and the wider world. It is an invitation towards a broader, Erasmian view. He is part of a great tradition of British intellectuals who, in the declining years of Britain's own empire, have looked both abroad and within, stretching through entire fields of historical enquiry, writing in different directions yet seeming to encompass all. C. R. Boxer, E. P. Thompson, J. H. Elliott.[1]
I felt at that time that there was no getting behind the initials in place of his Christian names. One read such people; you did not meet them.
Yet I ended up in Oxford as a doctoral candidate. When I returned from a year of research in Peru (and was about to set off again for Sevilla and Roma), my adviser (Malcolm Deas, an expert on nineteenth-century Colombia) called me in to announce that J. H. Elliott was about to arrive as the new Regius Professor of Modern History. Deas was sharp and kind enough to suggest the obvious, that I should approach Elliott to see if he would agree to direct my dissertation. I did so in a letter (keep the safe distance!), and before long a meeting was set.
The person who wrote, and had seemed to reside on Parnassus, was about to take on a body. I recall the fear I experienced during our early meetings. Here was Elliott, principally a Europeanist, a master of sources I did not command, with his grand stretches across time and space. And here was me. At that time writing fanatically-detailed chapters about "religious" expressions of local fecundity and divinity amongst indigenous peoples of the Andes and about the Spanish churchmen who sought to patrol their emerging Christianities in the middle of the seventeenth century.
I wondered if he would be interested, if he would be persuaded to read me.
Read me, Elliott did. And more. He pushed me to think of the broader contexts into which the people and processes about which I was writing might feed. He encouraged the Andeanist within to become also a historian of the Spanish world.
As his readers well know, J. H. Elliott did not waste words. He practised the art of the mot juste, of the elegant turn of phrase, the meaningful transition between ideas, feeling the power of a pause, a suggestive silence.
He engaged with my emerging work with what seemed to be the same high standards he set for himself.
We did not always agree; our experiences of life and even our intellectual tastes were sometimes different, and they remained so. But Elliott, as a director de investigadores, has the capacity to look within the investigador before him, considering what the other is about, what the other was reaching for. In my case, he would issue challenges. The high standards, his example, became a kind of cliff to scale —even if I, like others, could ultimately choose my own paths of ascent. Elliott attacked my bad habits as a writer, telling me when he was not persuaded, and —although his compliments were often spare— also when he was fascinated. As an adviser, his judgments were confident and his commentaries straight to the point. One sometimes had to be tough to survive him.
In these rendezvous we had about my pieces of writing, he never spoke from behind a desk or beside a computer. This made a powerful impression. The meetings were meaningful and not rushed.
He would sit beside or across from me, in a chair. In order to talk and gesture more freely, to question me and point at paragraphs and sentences (and to decipher his own few annotations), and to consider my answers carefully.
It was in Elliott's own style —though I imagine he was emulating the best characteristics of teachers he had admired, was it Herbert Butterfield or Jaume Vicens Vives or someone else who was, in a sense, coming out from behind that desk?
The style, I hope, continues to bear fruit. If I have the space, I want to come out and sit with my students, pointing at their texts, interrupting them, checking a reference, not letting a lazy sentence alone!
Elliott invited students, other scholars, into a world of international scholarship, an extension of the early modern one he studied. He did that as a director of my dissertation, and John never stopped doing it as a generous colleague and friend. He invited students of history to climb out from their particular crevices of interest (be it England, Peru, New France, or whatever), to engage with larger contexts and ideas. Elliott led by example, the example of broad reading and thinking outside the crevice —making continuous connections which are somehow both judicious and explosive before received wisdom. Elliott is, in this sense, not a prototypically "British historian." More than anything, he reached outside and beyond, rejecting the “insular thinking” about which he warned the Oxford undergraduate history students. I have never heard such respectful tributes to the historical imaginations of others as the tributes which come from Elliott's lips, especially during his lectures. Tributes not only to John Lynch and Martin Hume, but also to Fernand Braudel, Jaume Vicens Vives, Marcel Bataillon, and Bartolomé Bennassar.
Moreover, Elliott's footnotes do not always betray the amount he clearly read in anthropology and the social sciences, among other things. His bookshelves told the tale.
The openness to areas of enquiry, to the comparisons which Elliott liked to call "mind-stretching" (a word I now apply only at key moments) is what astounds; and it set, again, a high standard to which others might aspire. John Elliott joined a select few scholars in having begun to engage deeply with the encounter between Europe and the Americas before it became a cottage industry.
Elliott took up the European imagination, exploring its ingredients, its needs, fantasies, and possibilities as these travelled (with massive transplantations of people) to and through (for them) uncharted territories. He identified and followed a great number of the threads of narrative which continue to draw much thought from his peers today. These threads focussed upon what, in the Spanish case, became “conquest” and its aftermaths, the consolidation of economic relationships and administrative structures, and also upon what “the Indies” came to be and mean, not only what purposes they served, but what all could happen there, in the Americas and an extra-European world. And Elliott investigated the diverse meanderings of Spanish narratives which centred especially upon indigenous peoples, and upon enslaved Africans transplanted to the Americas.
It has been the task of others in this volume to engage more directly with Elliott's written work than I have been asked to do in this testimonio. Yet how can I not push at how the boundaries between a kind of scholar and a kind of director de investigadores blur? In his expansive essay "The Discovery of America and the Discovery of Man," Elliott's attention to the Jesuit José de Acosta's admiration for Aztec parenting sits next to discussion of the multiple effects of European observers' (including Acosta's) fixation upon the Devil as an explanation for aspects of indigenous societies which proved difficult for these commentators to understand.[2]
In such moments, Elliott, as an exemplary writer and teacher, is not presiding over a master narrative, some story of a thinker's inevitable progress towards greater understanding. Rather, the historical subjects live and breathe, curiously, with their possibilities intact, within the constraints of empire and their brands of Spanish Christian presumption, among many other mental and contextual frames. It is no small privilege not only to have read, but also to have watched such thinking in action: John Elliott allowed the people in the pasts he studied to have their own presents.
[1] Elliott has reflected directly and powerfully on his subjective position, on his "certain sympathy" as a scholar. He writes, and has written, "as an Englishman living in the aftermath of the Second World War." And "the collective predicament of the last great imperial generation of Spaniards after the triumphs of the sixteenth century," he continues, "was not entirely dissimilar to the collective predicament of my own generation after the triumphs of the nineteenth and early twentieth." From the Preface to Spain and Its World 1500-1700: Selected Essays (New Haven and London, 1989), ix, ix-xiv.
[2] Reprinted in Elliott's Spain and Its World, 58-59, 42-69.
* these words, here lightly edited, were published originally in Spanish translation: "Espíritu, historiador y investigador de investigadores,” in John Elliott: El oficio de historiador, eds. Roberto Fernández, Antoni Pasarola y María José Vilalta (Lleida: Editorial Milenio, 2002), 155-61. Thanks to Dominique Deslandres for comments at the time of composition.
Gracias, friends.
You have captured the man and how he captured others' (historical) imagination only to set it free.