Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton: Trouble in the Walled City (Video)
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- Hey there, my name is Adam McKeown and I am an Associate Professor of English at Tulane
- and I am trying to make a video today to talk about my new book,
- Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton. Now I've tried to make this video about
- 17 times and each time it comes out so boring that I can barely even listen to it myself. So I decided I
- would just do it out here in my makeshift outdoor teaching area, which is my sort of medieval camp
- and just talk about why I wrote it. So the first question I was asked to address was: How I got this
- idea? Well I got this idea because I love the Renaissance. I love the 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th
- centuries and everything about them. You can tell I've got my Fire and Blood Targaryen shirt on
- even and I didn't even plan it that way. I love going to old cities in Europe and the
- Americas and just looking at them and I became fascinated with these new fortifications that
- were being built in the age of fire weapons. At the time when the medieval city walls were
- supposedly being torn down to make way for modern cities, they started indeed building
- bigger, more monstrous, more expensive walls than ever before. And I thought, wow, these things were
- changing everything about the renaissance. How did they affect the literature? I bet
- if I looked hard enough I will find out how, and Fortification and Its Discontents
- from Shakespeare to Milton is the result. The next question is: What were the challenges?
- The challenges, as in everything else in life, the hardest thing is also the thing that makes
- it possible. No one else is working in this field. There aren't any literary scholars who can talk
- much about fortifications of the renaissance or really military culture is beyond the basics.
- There's me and a handful of other folks are doing it and so I was writing this largely without being
- able to consult with other smart people, preferably smarter people, you know. So it's exciting
- to be out there at the forefront of knowledge, but it's also lonely and that was a challenge.
- Next question is: What influence do you think it will have? Well,
- now that is a good question. Literary scholarship tends to make a splash over the long haul.
- The first book I wrote on soldier poets in the age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan soldier poets.
- So the real title is English Mercuries if you want to see if it's available at your local bookstore.
- At first it made absolutely no impression on anyone except for a few reviewers, one of whom
- thought it would be cool to make fun of my picture. So it was actually not very influential, in fact
- it was the opposite of that in the first couple years. Within 10 years however, two other scholars
- wrote books on soldier poets in renaissance France and renaissance Spain, and they directly
- cited my book as its influence. So that book started a conversation about soldier poets
- and there had been no conversation about soldier poets before. So I would say that that book was
- extremely influential even though at first it didn't seem so. Fortification and Its
- Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton is going to be more influential, I suspect, because the fact
- is if you like the Renaissance and you like visiting cities that were built in the 16th
- and 17th centuries you're going to notice these extraordinarily elaborate fortification systems
- that they had to tear down suburbs to build, that took all the resources of kings to build.
- You're going to ask yourself: What are these things? Why did they build them? How did this affect
- people's lives? If you ask questions like that and go to the library you will find this book,
- which does not answer all those questions but it begins to frame the questions that will help you
- ask even smarter questions, and that's how knowledge gets built. So I suspect this book will
- be extremely influential over the long haul. What is next for me after this one? Well, every book
- you write builds on the one before. So this book is built on what was left over from English Mercuries.
- I left a lot out of this book because I wanted to get it out there and I also don't like reading
- particularly long books. So in this book I decided to not talk about the effort to rebuild Hadrian's
- Wall, which is the wall between England and Scotland in 1587, which is a wacky idea but they
- they thought it was a good idea. And the reason why I decided to leave it out is that it
- seemed to me more appropriate as the beginning of a larger book
- on waning sovereignty in early modern England. The claim of which is essentially that...
- smart people like Shakespeare and Spencer recognized that the world
- they lived in was getting too big and too complicated for kings to manage.
- And they could not think of an alternative, and so they were a little scared.
- I'll let you know how it goes. Maybe it'll be out in 10 years. And the last question is: If I
- could sum up Fortification and Its Discontents in one sentence, what would that sentence be?
- That's always a tricky question but I will do my best shooting from the hip.
- It is about a time when people in Europe and the Americas, European colonies in the
- Americas, were being asked to sacrifice just about everything in the interest of building
- safer cities. Cities that could resist high-powered armies carrying high-powered fire weapons.
- They were asked to sacrifice everything and change everything.
- And smart people like Shakespeare, and Spencer, and Winthrop, Champlain were asking themselves:
- Is this really necessary? What do we lose in the process? The book examines the literature of
- the period to try to answer those questions. Now, hopefully I've been able to talk about
- Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton in a way that makes you
- want to rush out to the bookstore and buy the remaining 20 copies available, if you're lucky.
- No, I'm joking. You can get it at Amazon, no doubt. But anyway, I hope you enjoyed the book. It was
- fun writing. It is fun creating knowledge. It is lonely creating knowledge. And so it is always a
- great time to be able to talk about your work with interested people like you. Thank you very much.
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