Katie Marshall: Katherine. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on Commonplace today. How are you?
Catherine Clarke: Yeah, I'm good. It's lovely to meet you, Katie, and great to be a guest on your brilliant podcast.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, lovely to meet you too. just your idea of bringing poetry into history really sort of resonated with me and thought it would make you a great guest on this podcast. So I was thinking, could you just introduce us to yourself and a bit about your work and what it would say on your commonplace book plate?
Catherine Clarke: Okay, so it's actually quite a big book plate. It's a bit wordy. So I'm a professor of history at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, where I direct, this is the wordy bit, Centre for the History of People, Place and Community, quite a mouthful. And as part of that, I'm director of the Victoria County History of England, which is an amazing project founded in 1899, which aims to write the history of every single place in England from the earliest times to the present day. But my background is also in English literature. I was a professor of English literature before I moved into history and I'm a writer. So my latest book, History of England in 25 Poems reflects that interest in bringing together cultural history and literature.
Katie Marshall: Great, thank you. And I really love the fact that your book was turned into a Radio 4 Book of the Week series, which really sort of brought those poems to life for us to hear them read by you. It was really lovely. ⁓ Yeah, brilliant opportunity. And it was this idea of sort of taking us into the minds and imaginations of people in the past. We're often thinking about these big social and political events in history, but I think what makes the poems you've chosen so ⁓ inspiring is that they're not neutral.
Catherine Clarke: Thank you, it was really exciting to do. Yeah.
Katie Marshall: they're not trying to give a sort of balanced view of the past. They're actually people's feelings about what was going on.
Catherine Clarke: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's part of the magic of doing history through poetry, that it takes us beyond, as you say, that kind of ⁓ events on a timeline or great men and battles version of history. And it takes us inside how people experienced moments in the past and their feelings, their imaginations. You poetry isn't always a document of what actually happened, but people's desires and fears and wishes and what people wanted to happen. So in the book, there are 25 chapters. And each chapter begins with a poem written between the eighth century and today. And ⁓ I think of those poems as a kind of portal or a time machine. you know, poetry, I think, does enable us to time travel directly into these different moments in the past. There's this kind of really immediate, really intimate connection with those people living and breathing through history. And, yeah, I mean, I think what you're also pointing to there, Katie, is a kind of magic around what poetry can do with scale. So some of those huge stories from history that we all know, I mean, for me, a great example is the Black Death, that, you know, we all know that story from the history books, but it's almost, it's almost unimaginably huge and cataclysmic, you know, 40 to 60 % of the population dead in the 14th century Black Death. How do we make sense of that? And I think, you know, those of us, we've lived through COVID, we know that those statistics never tell the full story. But one poem in the book, Pearl. written at the end of the 14th century is about one father's grief at the loss of his young daughter, dead probably from the plague. And the way that it just transforms that vast history into something so small, so intimate, but so powerful, the way it draws on our empathy, the way that poetry can make it about feeling history as well as just understanding it.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, exactly. And then we think of this as sort of maybe a new concept, but it's really not because you think about the Homeric tradition of telling the tales of the Trojan War going right back, that was told in the epic poetry form. So it really does have such a long and rich history.
Catherine Clarke: Yeah. I think that's a great point. And I think that's ⁓ that sense of, of, as you say, the genre within which we can do history. Our sense of that today is, is really has a very short chronological ambit and also our sense that maybe as, as academics and as researchers, we have to put feeling aside when we do history. I think, you know, it's really clear when we're looking for history and poetry. ⁓ how much our own affective and emotional response ⁓ is part of what we're doing.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, and sort of thinking about being able to connect with people ⁓ in the past through sort of universal experiences, if it's like, you know, the sort of vague references we can make between the plague and our experience of COVID. The history of emotions is an emerging field in historiography sort of from the 80s and 90s onwards. And more attention is being paid towards sort of people's belief systems and why they lived and they felt what they did. So in light of your work, how do you see this field developing?
Catherine Clarke: Yeah, well, ⁓ actually, you know, as a medievalist, I've always been really interested in history of emotions and medieval studies is one of the areas where that, really has a lot of its key early developments, the work of people like Barbara Rosenwein. What I think actually is what I hope and I think this will be the case is that in a few years, we might not talk about history of emotions as a separate field. We might not need a label for it because I think it will become so so normalised, so folded into the way that we do history, that it will be accepted that actually we can't understand the rest of history without understanding how people thought, how they felt at different moments in the past. I mean, that example, the poem Pearl ⁓ in my book from around 1390, you what I find remarkable about that is that in some ways the emotions are so familiar and recognisable. You know, it's both unimaginable but also... easy to relate to the pain, the agony, the anguish of a parent mourning the death of their child, but also some of it is so strange. You know, the way that the father having this, this dream vision that he writes about, he talks about the pain of the loss of his daughter is love danger, love danger, which is this word from courtly love, from the language of unrequited love, forbidden passion, it's erotic language. And that for me, just shows the power of really digging into history of emotions, that the strangeness of feeling in the past, that it is so culturally situated, that is something so alien to us today to use that erotic language, but it tells us so much about that moment.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, and it's also helping us to think of, we try to judge people in the past sometimes and by bringing their feelings into it more, it probably gives us more leniency of why people made the decisions they do. perhaps I wonder if it will make it into the way we teach history in schools at some point. I hope it does, because I think that, you know, that individual experience and that human connection, I think, would really change how people see history and where we begin from statistics, you know, and timelines to... what it was like in daily life for people and help them to really sort of see history differently.
Catherine Clarke: And for me, it feels like ⁓ a really big argument against, you know, the chat GPT way of doing history, you know, AI approaches to either reading literature ⁓ or doing history that actually, for me, whether it's reading a historical source or reading a poem, so much of the power, so much of the point and the purpose of that, right, is about our human connection, about that intimacy, about that empathy, and then, you know, what that might. prompt us or motivate us to do in our lives as well often. And you know this is something that is beyond the reach ⁓ of artificial intelligence and I think you know that human connection across time ⁓ is what I'm interested in in this particular book and I suppose across all my work as a historian.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, that's such an excellent point. That's definitely something we can never replace when we're looking at events in the past. So your book focuses on telling the history of England in 25 poems and national identity ⁓ is a notoriously slippery concept and poetry has often been used as a sort of vehicle for shaping ⁓ national identity and sort of predestined foundations. So if we think about the Septid Isle and that sort of fated green and pleasant land.
Catherine Clarke: Mm. you
Katie Marshall: For you, through England in 25 poems, did you sort of sense that there was a distinctly English style of poetry and when do you think an Englishness consciousness took root in literature?
Catherine Clarke: Oh my gosh, those are such good and really tricky questions. So, I mean, first of all, I should say that when this book was published at the start of September in 2025, it came out into a world in which people were putting England flags up lamp posts and painting them on mini roundabouts. And, you know, this fraught question of national identity or pride or jingoism or nationalism or the far right, you know, how we...
Katie Marshall: No.
Catherine Clarke: how we parse and separate those things, how they speak to each other. These were really, really live questions. And so I'm really glad to have the opportunity to sort of explain why England in the book. And it partly answers your question and you pointed to some of the reasons already. So there is a really distinct and legible tradition of writing England and shaping ideas of England and Englishness in poetry. You mentioned that imaginary of the green and pleasant land, English pastoral. that quote comes from Blake, from Jerusalem, but it goes back centuries before that really to the very earliest ⁓ English writing, you back to to to Bede in the eighth century, certainly. So that's one kind of tradition that I trace through the poetry and a very much sort of an English tradition. ⁓ There are other characteristics, I think, that I see in a distinctively English poetic tradition and obviously Wales and Scotland and Ireland, they have their own poetic traditions and histories to tell. But in English poetry, I'd point to that kind of characteristic wit and whimsy that crops up in a lot of the poetry. I've got to say fart jokes, even in poetry, you know, there's a very scatterlogical poem from the 17th century called Bumforda. That's one of my choices for the book. But actually, the earliest fart in the poem in the poems that I've chosen goes back to to the 1200s, kind of that's quite funny. But also I'd really point to that, I don't know if you'll know what I mean when I say that kind of characteristic pleasure of melancholy and a sense of nostalgia. I mean, what fascinates me is the second poem I've included in the book is an old English poem about the Battle of Malden, which was in the year 991, a battle against the Vikings attacking England at that time. and the poem was written really shortly afterwards and the energy of the poem is all around nostalgia for heroic values. know, England isn't what it used to be. You know, look back at, you know, to the good old days when England was a land of heroes and it could be that again. I just find it fascinating that one of these earliest formulations of England in poetry is about nostalgia. and its best days being in the past. How interesting that that has always been kind of baked into ideas of English identity in poetry.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, mean, the things you said sort of play into so many other areas as well. I you talk about that sort of pleasure and melancholy, that Berton's, know, anatomy of melancholy and those sort of texts that people enjoyed reading and sort of analysing themselves through their humoural system and their emotional state really shows us that we're not unique in that way at all.
Catherine Clarke: Yeah, absolutely, and you're pointing to the kind of, the technical language and underpinning of that idea of melancholy. But I think in something that, in a way that's far less technical and a lot of people will sort of recognise and feel, we might point to something like the poem Adelstrop that I chose in my book as a way into stories of the Great War and kind of a surprising way in because it's not usually thought of as a war poem, it's not full of... blood and bayonets and barbed wire and bullets. It's about that quiet moment at a railway station in the summer of 1914, when nothing happens, just this moment of stillness. It's almost a kind of anti-history choice, a moment of nothing happening and the sound of the birds singing. And that is, it's a heartbreaking poem when you understand that Edward Thomas wrote it a few months later, looking back. after war had been declared in a changed world and it was published a few days after he was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917. So it's heartbreaking and I cried when I wrote it and actually I barely got through reading it for the audiobook. ⁓ But it's also, I think it connects with this because it captures something of that pleasurable kind of frisson of melancholy that we've all felt in sort of a transient and fleeting moment and that's That's another part of the magic of poetry and history, isn't it? That a poem can take us into a sort of sweep of a century and tell a big story or inside a tiny moment like that, that we can just sit inside. Wow. I mean, that's just to me, that's amazing.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, it sort of makes us think about all the moments that people did just sort of sit still as we do in, you know, just in an ordinary day and just take stock of their life. It wasn't all big battles, events, it really, you know, we shouldn't need to remind ourselves, but somehow we do
Catherine Clarke: I think you're so right. And those are the kind of the moments that slip through the fingers of history often. And I think you're completely right that ⁓ moves in recent decades towards history of emotions, towards ⁓ history from below, different kinds of unofficial, of popular social histories, they're a really important move towards capturing the importance and then the value of understanding those kind of quiet little histories as well. And there are poems I included in my choice of 2025. There's a brilliant poem by Fleur Radcock that's inspired by a matchbox. Or there's Lewis Carroll when he was just 13. So he was still Charles Dodgson writing a funny poem called Rules and Regulations to entertain his younger siblings. It's kind of joking about, you know, schoolroom didacticism and rules for behaviour and mnemonics. And, you know, those are are little things. from them we can open up really big and revealing stories about periods.
Katie Marshall: So I think we'll touch a bit more later on sort of who gets to write these poems and obviously, know, all the thoughts that went unrecorded, but sort of your book spans such a massive time scale from the eighth century to the present day. So what areas did you really notice of change and continuity sort of across them, maybe motifs, the sort of language that was used, the subjects of what people were writing about and sort of who was recording their poetry?
Catherine Clarke: Hmm. Okay, that's a great question. Well, first of all, I'll come back to what you raised about that imaginary of the green and pleasant land, because that really was something that I thought I would find running across the centuries, having previously done research on the early Middle Ages and having found it there. And indeed I did. And I love the way that we find that kind of English pastoral inflected differently in different moments and used to make interventions in different historical contexts and made to do different kind of culture and political work. So you mentioned, you know, this sceptodial, the famous John of Gaunt speech from Shakespeare's Richard II, which so often, you know, we think of as a panegyric of England and Englishness because people forget that it actually runs on and it becomes this critique. It's made a shameful conquest of itself. This beautiful, Edenic England is corrupted. and ruined, it's a satire, it's a critique. But I looked at how that was used across time. But the most recent poem in the book, The Groundsman by Zafar Kunial from his 2022 collection, England's Green, that is in conversation with all those other expressions of English pastoral throughout the book. It's an amazing, gorgeous poem. It's a groundsman, retired. walking round the edge of an overgrown cricket pitch. And you know that cricket pitch is this small green beautifully tendered piece of earth. You know it could be England, it could be a page in a book, it could be a poem as well as this cricket pitch. And what's so brilliant about what Zafar Kunyal does is he's yeah he's in dialogue with all these different moments across time, all these different sources. But you know it's a poem that has its own meaning in this post-Brexit world, it's a poem that was published about a week after Queen Elizabeth II died, it spoke to this new moment of wondering about what England and Englishness is. And I suppose, yeah, throughout the book, we see that England has never been one thing, there's never been consensus. It's always changing over time. It's always contested within historical moments as well. Other kinds of change, obviously form, and you've pointed to that already, the change in the kind of... literary forms and textual forms that are available to people and that are part of the kind of cultural currency in different periods. So, you know, we start with Cadman's hymn written down by the venerable Bede, but that began as a song, as something oral, not something written down on the page. And actually it's got a really twisty history because Bede writes it down in Latin, even though it's sung in English and he has to kind of, it's translated back into English later on in its tradition. So oral cultures, then into kind of textual, literate cultures and all the different kind of forms over time. That's such a crucial part of change that changes what poetry is and the ideas that are expressed. So, you know, a broadside ballad from the 17th century, that's the brilliantly scatological Bumforda. And it's called Bumforda because the idea is, you know, broadside ballads are so cheap and disposable, they cost about the same as a small loaf of bread or a beer and you can use them and you can just chuck them away and lots of them were used to wipe bums and dropped down the privy, hence bumfodder so it's kind of a joke but you you're gonna get different kinds of writing doing different kinds of work for different audiences in something that's so cheap and disposable. You know, there's courtly poetry as well. So for me, a lot of that change is to do with changes of form and who it's connecting with, who it's speaking to. Your question about who gets to write poetry or make poetry is obviously just so important. And, you know, part of the ambition from the start for this book was that I wanted a diverse range of voices. And I'm really, proud of what I do have in the book. So there are... men and women, there are voices of different social status, people of colour, there's even that poem written by a child, written by Charles Dodgson. It was difficult. The further back you go, the harder it is to find that diversity of representation, because of who has access to literacy, whose words are retained in the archive. So, you know, there are real challenges. And I think it's still a work in progress for all of us as historians, isn't it, recovering those voices.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, you speak so wonderfully about both the challenges of joys of this sort of area of history, but ⁓ it's sort of like, it struck me that the word Carmen means both song, poem, and all of these sort of things are so intertwined. And as you say, broadside ballads, they'd be sung to people in the market square. So ephemeral print, poetry, song, know, public entertainment and history, these things are so intertwined and you can't really separate them once you get into it.
Catherine Clarke: Yeah. Yeah, and we think, you know, a lot of people and often I think we all think of poetry as something quite, as something in a book ⁓ or something quite highbrow. And, you know, that's obviously not the case in the culture of poetry today. know, amazing performance poets and, you know, kind of stand up, you know, performative poetry culture, which is brilliant. But I think, you know, it's really... ⁓ inspiring to go back to the past and be reminded that poetry is something living and lively and animate and for everyone as well.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, poetry I think has been used more than any other sort of written form as a form for people to express views that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to. was listening to a podcast recently that talked about sort of how poetry is used by women, especially sort of in Afghan culture, sort of the landai, that sort of tradition of complaint poetry and sort of women being able to express grief, rage and, you know, complain about things through poetry and say things they wouldn't ordinarily be able to. So I was thinking it'd be really great if you could talk a bit about gender and poetry and how did you find that it was sort of a very fruitful area for recovering women's voices and what sort of challenges did you find there as well?
Catherine Clarke: Yeah, yeah, it is a fruitful era and it's fascinating to hear about what you've been reading about. Yeah, so it's really fruitful, really revealing, but big challenges, particularly the further back we go. So as I said, I really wanted to include diverse voices in the book, but actually the first explicitly female voice in the book is the wife of Bath. who is a creation of Geoffrey Chaucer, she's fictional. It's Chaucer cosplaying, ventriloquising, being a woman, it's not really a woman at all. But I use that poem and the question that's at the heart of the Wife of Bath story, what do women want? What do women most desire? As a way, sort of through that text and past Chaucer to get into... histories of women's lives in the 14th century and also some of Chaucer's own complex entanglements with women in the period. ⁓ There are some really special and fascinating poems by women that I chose for the book. One of them would be Anne Askew's ballad that she wrote in Newgate Prison. This is the middle of the 16th century and Anne Askew was waiting to be burned at the stake. for heresy because of her views on the transubstantiation. So she didn't believe that the bread and wine in the mass literally turned into the body of Christ. She saw them as symbols and tokens. She'd already been ⁓ illegally tortured on the rack in the Tower of London. She was seriously injured. And she writes this remarkable poem looking ahead to her execution with defiance, but also with with joy. and hope and with this kind of radical compassion and mercy for the people who are sending her there. So it's obviously deeply political. We're looking at the end of Henry VIII's reign, the break from Rome, but this febrile ⁓ context of religious battles between religious change and conservatism. Now, it's locating Anne Askew's own words. We have records of her interrogations, her... her interrogation under torture that she left. And there are two poems attributed to her. This is one of them. But, you know, she has these really unreliable editors and narrators, John Bale, John Fox, and they kind of get in the way and they try to appropriate her words and make them do political things for them. So, you know, actually finding Anne's authentic words herself, connecting with them, you know, it's always something of a leap of faith. but I think, you know, so worthwhile. There are some other brilliant voices in the book. There's Anna Laetitia Barbold, her huge poem, 1811. There's a section of that in the book. This is this fearless anti-war reformist poem at the beginning of the 19th century. You know, she sees kind of forever war with France that has been dragging on for years. She sees the rise of America and the kind of move of power into the West. slipping into irrelevance maybe of England. Some of this maybe sounds a little bit relevant to us today and she writes this amazing poem that the bit that I reflect on actually she does this kind of time travel into the future where she imagines a future England in ruins and it's incredible it's like some kind of post-apocalyptic you know zombie sci-fi world this England in ruins it's incredible but she was cancelled for that. You you said, Katie, you sometimes poetry allows women to speak in ways that they might not be able to otherwise, but she it came at a cost for her. She was cancelled. She got terrible reviews. She was told that she should stick to her writing for children and writing hymns. So incredibly misogynist, actually, the response. There's Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote this incredible ⁓ activist poem against child labor in mines and factories right through to, you know, Grace Nicholls. and her poem Hurricane Hits England about the 1987 great storm and she's looking back on her Guyanese and British heritage and thinking about, you the impact of that wind rush generation on England in the 20th century. So some amazing stories from women, but always navigating, you know, those edges between what they're able to say and what's difficult to say and how they can express it. And sometimes poetry is the key to that. alternative kind of idiom and weigh in to a big public conversation, I think.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, you painted that picture so wonderfully of how dynamic women's voices are through poetry and a couple of things that stood out for me, especially with the Anaski poem, I see lot of parallels of those sort of themes of mercy and sort of almost self-deprecation. I think she says somewhere in it that she doesn't often write like this, she sort of starts with a disclaimer. It reminds me a lot of the poem that ⁓ Mary Queen of Scots wrote on her the final night before her execution to the King of France. That sort of, you know,
Catherine Clarke: Yeah. Yeah.
Katie Marshall: sort of extreme mercy that maybe she felt she was expected to to show as a woman.
Catherine Clarke: yeah, I think you're right to point to those kind of expectations and sort of tropes and formulae as well. So, know, that kind of, um, apologia, you know, not not often you start to write in prose nor yet in rhyme. That's kind of expected for a woman to say. And but also it's clever because, you know, Anne Askey was contrasting her kind of humble, honest, authentic, unpolished words with the kind of the flattery, the the slippery deceitful eloquence of her interrogators and her accusers. ⁓ And yeah, I think you're absolutely right that kind of adopting that position of mercy and compassion, obviously it's about channeling a kind of Christ-like ⁓ stance that imitatio Christi. ⁓ I think, you know, you've put your finger on something else that makes doing history through poetry a challenge. You've got to be aware of all these tropes and formulae that people particularly in in medieval and pre-modern and early modern contexts express themselves through this kind of patchwork of existing words, phrases, conventions, and it's sort of working through that is really interesting.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, so sort of as far back as Christian de Pizan, it's sort of like there's a protective armour for them to express themselves, but also there's an armour that we need to then remove to sort of access their authentic voice as far as that's possible as well.
Catherine Clarke: I love that idea. I love the idea of a protective armour. And I think that's it. Yeah, the poetry gives a bit of armour. It gives a bit sort of extraordinary kind of licence in terms of what a woman's voice can do. I love that, the idea of the armour. Yeah. Actually, Anne Askew talks about that, doesn't she? She talks about, you know, putting on the... Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And putting on the armour of God and a very biblical idea. But yeah, you know, I think that's an image that she is absolutely thinking with. I love that.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, very sort of Joan of Arc figure. Yeah. Yeah, that's such a wonderful thing to hear. So from sort of bringing back to our idea of a commonplace book, from the people that you've studied, could be a woman, could be, you know, any of the people that you've studied, whose commonplace book would you most like to have as a source as a kind of insight into their inner world past their poetry?
Catherine Clarke: Mm. So I think there could be no other choice for me, but it would have to be Mary Leaper. So she's one of the poets that I included in the book and I include an extract of her poem, Crumble Hall. So Mary Leaper is absolutely one of those remarkable women's voices and women's experiences that are often quite hard for us to reach today. So Mary Leaper was not an educated or wealthy or privileged woman. she worked in domestic service in the middle of the 18th century and she died actually at the age of 24 of measles. So, you know, it's a tragic story. The Crumble Hall is just actually a really funny and clever poem, but it's radical, it's political because Mary Leiper is kind of turning the genre of the country house poem upside down and she kind of goes underneath the typical country house poem. So instead of... being in the grand ⁓ parlour or in the ornamental gardens, she takes us into the kitchen and we see the servants at work, we see the hidden labour, we see her, her world, her domain as someone who worked in domestic service. Now she's brilliant, her poetry is clever, it's funny, it's so accomplished. But you know, she was sacked from the real life version of Crumble Hall for... apparently scribbling when she should have been turning the spit. So she, you know, she was in trouble for being a poet, I guess. And I would love to know what she was reading. I mean, we know that really everything that she read was likely in the library of her first employer, her first mistress, Susanna Jennings, when she first worked in domestic service at Western Hall. So this is, this is a servant being given permission by a enlightened mistress to dip into the library. And that's where Mary Leaper discovers poetry, it's where she discovers ⁓ her inspiration and kind of the tools of her trade. So I would love to know what she read. I'd love to see her excerpts, what caught her eye, what made her laugh, what shaped her own kind of comic satirical approach. I mean, really, Katie, I would love to sit down and... have a conversation with Mary Leeper, but having her commonplace book, I think, would be the closest I could get to that.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, from what you said, absolutely agree. And you'd almost be accessing two very different women from different backgrounds at the same time, because you'd be accessing the books that her mistress was reading and how she interpreted them herself as well and how class played into that. I think that would be fascinating.
Catherine Clarke: That's ⁓ such a great point. Yeah, it would almost be taking us into, I you know, I assume that Mary Leiper and Susanna Jennings had conversations around these books and in the library. So I love that. It takes us into a kind of women's sociability, women's relationships, this conversation and reading shared by women. Yeah.
Katie Marshall: I wonder what more she would have gone on to do if she'd been able to.
Catherine Clarke: I know, it's heartbreaking, isn't it? It's heartbreaking, yeah.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, so I think it's time that we move on to your commonplace book because I'm sure that you have some fascinating insights and luckily you can tell us all about it. So you've spoken a lot I know in other sort of talks you've done to do with your book about how evocative you found the physical form of the book and the process of researching and I know you've encountered a wormhole that sort of sparked your imagination for this book. So what would your commonplace book look like?
Catherine Clarke: Mm. Hmm, okay, so ⁓ I think it would be, I'd want a pocketbook, something that I could carry around with me and slip into a pocket. And I think it would be, it would have lots of things tucked between the pages. It would have dogged corners. I've only in recent years, Katie, I've let go of that need to keep all my books pristine and you know, I'm happy now for a book to be lived in. So my commonplace book, would be like a medieval florelegium or something like the the early medieval Exeter book with a wonderful kind of mixture of ⁓ copied in as a commonplace book before commonplace books, I suppose. yeah, I mean, hopefully you wouldn't have actual wormholes in it because that would mean that something was gobbling it up. But I hope that my commonplace book would be able to do the job metaphorically of giving me lots of wormholes into different moments and different places.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, I can relate on the wanting sort of a perfect book and moving away from that. something I've, yeah. Yeah, but the perfection is almost in a different way when you remember certain like, ⁓ I spilt something on that page or, know, it means more when you look back and you think it's such a big deal in the moment.
Catherine Clarke: It's hard work to let that go. Yeah, and the thing is, when I buy a lot of books secondhand, and the joy of getting a secondhand book is what other people have left in the book, isn't it? It is, that once I found a pressed flower between the pages of the book, or other people's markings, or other people's names, and the story of the book, and actually, I want to be part of that lovely ecosystem of leaving our traces in our books.
Katie Marshall: Yeah. Yeah, I remember studying marginalia and how, you know, you think about the 19th century and whitewashing all of those and how we're having to use technology now to recover the things that they thought were, you know, dirty books in a way. But we see them as, you know, giving us an insight into what people were thinking while they were reading. it's just perspective really.
Catherine Clarke: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because we're interested in, and we want to know how people read the books and how they understood them as well as what was put into them to start with. So, yeah, fascinating stuff.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, yeah. So thinking about sort of changing perspectives, is there a particular philosophy or perhaps a small quote that's had an impact for your life and has stuck with you?
Catherine Clarke: That's a lovely question, but it's really difficult. ⁓ I think I would cheat a bit. And I will say that the kind of the philosophy, including lots of very resonant and powerful and moving words that's had a big impact on me would come through kind of Christian tradition. I've sung in church choirs all my life. So the language of hymns. and prayers, particularly even song, think of the Book of Common Prayer, even song, think of the canticles, the Magnificat, the Nunc Demittis, Lord, now let us thou thy servant depart in peace, or the collect said even song, lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord. ⁓ Just very beautiful words that I'm not sure that, I mean, obviously they are part of a, they are words to live by. But I think those particular words out of that Book of Common Prayer liturgy and the hymns and the canticles that we sing around it, for me there's a real sense of peace and comfort, but also ⁓ connection across time. I think when you're saying those words, it feels like ⁓ history collapses. And there's just a moment and fellowship and intimacy and connection across time with all those people who've said those words in different places. So I suppose. they have a lot of the same power as a poem in that way. yeah, ⁓ I think anything that I might find in the English hymnal or the Book of Common Prayer ⁓ or some lovely English settings of canticles for even song, those would speak to that.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, I can definitely resonate with the sacred music because music is big part of my life and you know when I sing in a sacred space ⁓ you really feel sort of adding an extra sense to your place in history and sort of hearing your own voice in a place that heard so many other voices throughout history really sort of adds a new dimension to your experience of a place I've found.
Catherine Clarke: you're right I definitely definitely share that share that experience yeah it's really powerful yeah.
Katie Marshall: Yeah. So commonplace books obviously included a lot of literature, a lot of written word, but also they were very visual. So if you could preserve a photograph or a sort of paste a piece of artwork in your book, what would it be and why?
Catherine Clarke: Mm. ⁓ Well, I mean, I'd probably want to sneak quite a few photos in, know, family photos and bit of nostalgia that I could look back on, you know, not just things taken from the broader sort of cultural canon. I think if I if I was picking one image, as I'm going to cheat, couple of possibilities. One, I might go for a reproduction of the Hereford map of Mundi. So ⁓ the gorgeous round world map. that hangs in Hereford Cathedral made around the year 1300. Laid out differently for modern maps of course with Jerusalem right at the centre and as you'll know Katie, know medieval map I, Mundi, they are about mapping belief and culture and narrative and storytelling and history as much as what we would understand as geography today. So I think I could open that page in my commonplace book and look at it for hours because it's like a way, it's encyclopedic and it's like a way into a whole storytelling world. ⁓ Another image that I might have, I suppose, would sit quite nicely alongside it might be ⁓ one of Leslie Moffat Ward's paintings of a Dorset landscape. So this is where I live in Dorset and beautiful kind of earlier 20th century paintings, maybe his painting of Corv Castle or old Harry Rocks or Dorset cliffs and landscape because the colours are so vivid. They draw me into the place. They feel so so alive and also there's something just very moving about them I think so that's interesting isn't it a juxtaposition of two two different kinds of portals into place and those those images.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, definitely the map would give you a lot of things to think about in a single image. I think that's a very good choice, a very strategic one. No, not at all. So thinking sort of more audibly and perhaps, you know, might be the most difficult question for you, but is there a particular song or a poem that has resonated with you and what does it mean to you personally?
Catherine Clarke: Yeah. Is it a bit of a cheat? ⁓ So this is really hard and ⁓ I'm really gonna disappoint you in terms of a confident, assertive, single answer, Katie. I'm just gonna hedge and shift and cheat on this one. So poems, I might choose, actually, strangely, none of these were choices in the history of England in 25 poems, but maybe some John Donne or some Philip Larkin or some Seamus Heaney ⁓ or maybe... Maybe I could have, could I fit the whole of Beowulf in or a bit of Beowulf, which I find, you know, ⁓ endlessly fascinating and moving the way that even just the old English words themselves are time machines and take you into a different way of seeing the world. But ⁓ just so finely wrought and beautiful. ⁓ For a song, I'm not even going to start to think about kind of non-song music because that will just, there's too many rabbit holes there. But I think ⁓ possibly ⁓ a song made famous or sung by Fred Astaire would have to be in there. So big fan of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. And also I, ⁓ for a good 10 years in my life as a kind of as a student, when I was at school as a student, as an early career academic, I played piano in hotels as my side hustle. And I used to like a few kind of jazz standards. So maybe, I don't know, maybe The Way You Look Tonight by Jerome Kern, sung by Fred Astaire and possibly a Pet Shop Boys song. Maybe Being Boring or, you know, if I'm in a disco mood, maybe Always On My Mind.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, perfect. I think they're definitely on the same wavelength with those choices. I think it's interesting what you said about, you know, choosing something that's not in your academic work, because I was speaking to Christina Faraday and she chose an image, ⁓ sort of a Polaroid image, and she said she can't understand it that's why she loves it so much, because it just intrigues her. So yeah, think that, you know, commonplace book is the right place to keep that sort of thing. Yeah.
Catherine Clarke: Excellent. ⁓ lovely. ⁓ that's great. Yeah, and you want to keep going back to it, don't you? You don't want to feel like you've cracked it all already. Absolutely. Yeah.
Katie Marshall: Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So is there, ⁓ you can include a postcard in your commonplace book from a particular place anywhere in the world and where would that be that you can imagine yourself there when you look at it?
Catherine Clarke: So again, perhaps this doesn't feel ambitious enough because I'm not going very far, but I think I would love a postcard from Littlehaven in Pembrokeshire in Wales, where I spent lots and lots of childhood holidays and where I've gone back with several generations now of the family with my own kids. So, you know, love Wales. I lived in Wales for a while, loved the rocky coast of Pembrokeshire. I Little Haven on the Rocks, as we always used to used to call it when I was small. I think if possible, I'd like it to be an old postcard, you know, with the sky just a little bit too luridly blue and people in slightly dated fashions and old cars that I would have no idea how to identify, you know, parked up somewhere at the edge of the picture. And if I could, I'd even even better. I would love it if it was used and if it had someone else's message on the back. already because I love it when you pick up an old postcard in a charity shop or a brick-a-brack shop and it's got a fragment of somebody's holiday and some cryptic message on the family that takes us back doesn't it? Social history and history of emotions but that little... I was obsessed when I was a child whenever we took a ferry anywhere I was obsessed with trying to launch a message in a bottle. Never worked for me and you know I wouldn't like to think now about all the stuff I threw into the sea. I mean we're not talking millions!
Katie Marshall: Well you don't know, maybe they just didn't reply.
Catherine Clarke: Maybe, I love that Katie, maybe they're still out there and I'm yet to receive that reply, but I love that idea of those little fragmentary messages that can kind of turn up over time. that's my, sorry, rather long-winded answer to your question.
Katie Marshall: No, no, I like the idea that your commonplace book seems to be something quite layered. So it's a bit like, you know, sharing of the books. It's not just your commonplace book. It's got the marker of other people that you know, and that you don't know on it. Yeah.
Catherine Clarke: That's very, I hadn't thought of it like that, Katie, but I think you're absolutely, absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah.
Katie Marshall: Yeah. So ⁓ you can sort of record a book that you particularly enjoyed, perhaps something that somebody gave you or you discovered yourself by a fellow author or a sort classic book.
Catherine Clarke: Again, this is a really tricky one. you know, if you asked me this question last week or next week, you get a different answer, Katie, from my answer today. I suppose my most, my most now answer is that I've just finished reading The Dig by John Preston, having seen the film adaptation of it a few years ago. So this is the novel that's based on the story of the discovery of the Sutton who shipped burial in 1939. I loved the film adaptation on Netflix. And of course the novel's different and it's been on my to be read pile for ages and I loved it and I found it really moving and evocative. So that's the one I'd put in today. But you know, so many other kind of classics that I go back to, I guess I'd want to squeeze in a bit of Jane Austen and probably a bit of Tolkien as well.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, that's a nice combination actually. It's sort of obviously writing, you're spending a lot of time at your desk, but is there a recipe that you like to make regularly? Maybe something's been passed down or you just started making recently that you'd write down for future generations.
Catherine Clarke: So I love that question and yeah, I do have a definite answer to that. So it would be the recipe that I have on a scrap of paper, very smudged and bits of grease and stains on it in my mum's handwriting, but it was passed down from my grandma and it's called economy chocolate cake and it's a wartime recipe. So it replaces most of the fat with boiling water. It's very clever. So it's actually, it can be quite good for you comparatively for cake as well. just a little bit of margarine and boiling water. And it's the recipe that all through my childhood, my grandma used to make me my birthday cake. And since then, my mum has used to make birthday cakes for everyone in the family, my children, so her grandchildren. It's our go-to chocolate cake. I'm afraid now, Katie, it's not quite so economy and you know, it's not, now that we don't have rationing anymore, we do go a bit wild, so. we'll make double quantities and we'll sandwich it together with buttercream and we'll put chocolate on the top and make it quite indulgent. But it's a lovely recipe and you know, I'm feeling quite moved, you know, telling you about it because it absolutely connects generations of women in my family. I know my kids are going to make that recipe when they grow up. It comes out of a particular historical context and pressure comes out of rationing. ⁓ But curiously, it's become what expresses, it's the taste of celebration to our family I suppose.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, yeah and looking at that on paper and then making it is almost like poetry in motion I guess because you could see snapshots of each generation making it that's really wonderful to have. It doesn't matter if you're changing it, it's part of it.
Catherine Clarke: And isn't it... Yeah, exactly. We make the basic recipe the same. We just kind of jazz it up a little bit. what you said there, Katie, has made me think in a way that I haven't really before how much a recipe on the page looks like a poem. You it's almost like a found poem, isn't it? And yeah, that's definitely, definitely going to be in there.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, wonderful that you have that, that's right there. Yeah. What else could you include that's better than that? Yeah. So is there something, just one thing in your life that you're grateful for and is there one thing that you just hope to achieve by next year, this time?
Catherine Clarke: You So I'm really grateful at the moment that I'm on a short period of research leave, thanks to the School of Advanced Study where I work. So I really, you know, honestly, I check my privilege with that every single day. So I'm back to sort of the fuller aspects of my job at the end of April, but it's been wonderful to have time to think and write, work really hard, lots of writing, kind of beginning a new project that I can't really say very much about at the moment, but ⁓ I've been getting quite muddy with it. So this time next year, I would love that to have taken shape more and to have more of that written and maybe to be, to have a sense of how it might find its way out into the world.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, wonderful. Thank you. So you talked already about finding a press flower in a book that you once got. So I'm going to give you one wild card entry of something you can put in your book. Like it can be a press flower, another poem or a sketch, or sort of even just recording like an anecdote or a conversation that you've had that's remained with you.
Catherine Clarke: So again, this is something where there's definitely a particular thing that I would love to put in. So a few years ago, we went to my daughter's parents' evening at school. And you know, they put out their project books and their workbooks and you have a look through. And they'd been asked to do a piece of writing. So my daughter was eight at the time. And they'd been given the prompt just because. And then my daughter had filled in, I'm a girl. And then she'd... carried on writing and I'm going to read you what she wrote. She wrote, because I'm a girl, it doesn't mean I can't be adventurous. It doesn't mean I'm a coward. It doesn't mean I won't swim in deep water with seaweed and jellyfish. It doesn't mean I'm not fascinated by herbivore dung. So the herbivore dung is, you know, is an interesting angle, but actually that swim in deep water. that my eight-year-old daughter wrote. And I read it at a time when I was actually was moving from a role in English literature to my current role as a professor of history. And, you know, sometimes we do things in our careers that take us outside of our comfort zones, that involve newness and involve challenge and swim in deep water were the words that I wanted to hear, that I needed to hear. I have them now on a necklace and I think they're a strong contender for my first tattoo when that happens. So definitely my daughter's exhortation to swim in deep water with seaweed and jellyfish. Maybe I'll leave out the kind of communing with her before dung, but I would definitely tuck that in. Those are words to guide me.
Katie Marshall: Wow, definitely if you could include like an afterthought in your book, I think your daughter's poem would be an excellent addition. No, no. Wow, thank you so much for sharing that. That's really wonderful. And I've loved our conversation. I think it's been, you know, everything I hope it would be. And I've loved so much about you and yeah. ⁓
Catherine Clarke: But no pressed seaweed or herbivore dung, that would be just taking it too far, I think. Yeah, yeah. So. ⁓ thank you, Katie. What I've really loved is these lovely, insightful responses, the way that you've helped me see patterns in some of what I've presented you with. I love your idea of the kind of multi-layered commonplace book, and I shall reflect on so much of what you've given me in your responses to what I've talked about. Thank you.
Katie Marshall: Thank you, that's very kind of you to say. Yeah, I've loved it and I really, I look forward to seeing what you do next and yeah, and what you add to your commonplace book really. Yeah, thank you. It's been so wonderful to talk to you and I really recommend that people read your history of England in 25 poems. I think it will be really insightful and change the way that people look at history and a lot to reflect on definitely. Thank you so much, Catherine. Thank you.
Catherine Clarke: Likewise, Katie. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Thank you.
Catherine Clarke: Yeah, I'm good. It's lovely to meet you, Katie, and great to be a guest on your brilliant podcast.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, lovely to meet you too. just your idea of bringing poetry into history really sort of resonated with me and thought it would make you a great guest on this podcast. So I was thinking, could you just introduce us to yourself and a bit about your work and what it would say on your commonplace book plate?
Catherine Clarke: Okay, so it's actually quite a big book plate. It's a bit wordy. So I'm a professor of history at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, where I direct, this is the wordy bit, Centre for the History of People, Place and Community, quite a mouthful. And as part of that, I'm director of the Victoria County History of England, which is an amazing project founded in 1899, which aims to write the history of every single place in England from the earliest times to the present day. But my background is also in English literature. I was a professor of English literature before I moved into history and I'm a writer. So my latest book, History of England in 25 Poems reflects that interest in bringing together cultural history and literature.
Katie Marshall: Great, thank you. And I really love the fact that your book was turned into a Radio 4 Book of the Week series, which really sort of brought those poems to life for us to hear them read by you. It was really lovely. ⁓ Yeah, brilliant opportunity. And it was this idea of sort of taking us into the minds and imaginations of people in the past. We're often thinking about these big social and political events in history, but I think what makes the poems you've chosen so ⁓ inspiring is that they're not neutral.
Catherine Clarke: Thank you, it was really exciting to do. Yeah.
Katie Marshall: they're not trying to give a sort of balanced view of the past. They're actually people's feelings about what was going on.
Catherine Clarke: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's part of the magic of doing history through poetry, that it takes us beyond, as you say, that kind of ⁓ events on a timeline or great men and battles version of history. And it takes us inside how people experienced moments in the past and their feelings, their imaginations. You poetry isn't always a document of what actually happened, but people's desires and fears and wishes and what people wanted to happen. So in the book, there are 25 chapters. And each chapter begins with a poem written between the eighth century and today. And ⁓ I think of those poems as a kind of portal or a time machine. you know, poetry, I think, does enable us to time travel directly into these different moments in the past. There's this kind of really immediate, really intimate connection with those people living and breathing through history. And, yeah, I mean, I think what you're also pointing to there, Katie, is a kind of magic around what poetry can do with scale. So some of those huge stories from history that we all know, I mean, for me, a great example is the Black Death, that, you know, we all know that story from the history books, but it's almost, it's almost unimaginably huge and cataclysmic, you know, 40 to 60 % of the population dead in the 14th century Black Death. How do we make sense of that? And I think, you know, those of us, we've lived through COVID, we know that those statistics never tell the full story. But one poem in the book, Pearl. written at the end of the 14th century is about one father's grief at the loss of his young daughter, dead probably from the plague. And the way that it just transforms that vast history into something so small, so intimate, but so powerful, the way it draws on our empathy, the way that poetry can make it about feeling history as well as just understanding it.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, exactly. And then we think of this as sort of maybe a new concept, but it's really not because you think about the Homeric tradition of telling the tales of the Trojan War going right back, that was told in the epic poetry form. So it really does have such a long and rich history.
Catherine Clarke: Yeah. I think that's a great point. And I think that's ⁓ that sense of, of, as you say, the genre within which we can do history. Our sense of that today is, is really has a very short chronological ambit and also our sense that maybe as, as academics and as researchers, we have to put feeling aside when we do history. I think, you know, it's really clear when we're looking for history and poetry. ⁓ how much our own affective and emotional response ⁓ is part of what we're doing.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, and sort of thinking about being able to connect with people ⁓ in the past through sort of universal experiences, if it's like, you know, the sort of vague references we can make between the plague and our experience of COVID. The history of emotions is an emerging field in historiography sort of from the 80s and 90s onwards. And more attention is being paid towards sort of people's belief systems and why they lived and they felt what they did. So in light of your work, how do you see this field developing?
Catherine Clarke: Yeah, well, ⁓ actually, you know, as a medievalist, I've always been really interested in history of emotions and medieval studies is one of the areas where that, really has a lot of its key early developments, the work of people like Barbara Rosenwein. What I think actually is what I hope and I think this will be the case is that in a few years, we might not talk about history of emotions as a separate field. We might not need a label for it because I think it will become so so normalised, so folded into the way that we do history, that it will be accepted that actually we can't understand the rest of history without understanding how people thought, how they felt at different moments in the past. I mean, that example, the poem Pearl ⁓ in my book from around 1390, you what I find remarkable about that is that in some ways the emotions are so familiar and recognisable. You know, it's both unimaginable but also... easy to relate to the pain, the agony, the anguish of a parent mourning the death of their child, but also some of it is so strange. You know, the way that the father having this, this dream vision that he writes about, he talks about the pain of the loss of his daughter is love danger, love danger, which is this word from courtly love, from the language of unrequited love, forbidden passion, it's erotic language. And that for me, just shows the power of really digging into history of emotions, that the strangeness of feeling in the past, that it is so culturally situated, that is something so alien to us today to use that erotic language, but it tells us so much about that moment.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, and it's also helping us to think of, we try to judge people in the past sometimes and by bringing their feelings into it more, it probably gives us more leniency of why people made the decisions they do. perhaps I wonder if it will make it into the way we teach history in schools at some point. I hope it does, because I think that, you know, that individual experience and that human connection, I think, would really change how people see history and where we begin from statistics, you know, and timelines to... what it was like in daily life for people and help them to really sort of see history differently.
Catherine Clarke: And for me, it feels like ⁓ a really big argument against, you know, the chat GPT way of doing history, you know, AI approaches to either reading literature ⁓ or doing history that actually, for me, whether it's reading a historical source or reading a poem, so much of the power, so much of the point and the purpose of that, right, is about our human connection, about that intimacy, about that empathy, and then, you know, what that might. prompt us or motivate us to do in our lives as well often. And you know this is something that is beyond the reach ⁓ of artificial intelligence and I think you know that human connection across time ⁓ is what I'm interested in in this particular book and I suppose across all my work as a historian.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, that's such an excellent point. That's definitely something we can never replace when we're looking at events in the past. So your book focuses on telling the history of England in 25 poems and national identity ⁓ is a notoriously slippery concept and poetry has often been used as a sort of vehicle for shaping ⁓ national identity and sort of predestined foundations. So if we think about the Septid Isle and that sort of fated green and pleasant land.
Catherine Clarke: Mm. you
Katie Marshall: For you, through England in 25 poems, did you sort of sense that there was a distinctly English style of poetry and when do you think an Englishness consciousness took root in literature?
Catherine Clarke: Oh my gosh, those are such good and really tricky questions. So, I mean, first of all, I should say that when this book was published at the start of September in 2025, it came out into a world in which people were putting England flags up lamp posts and painting them on mini roundabouts. And, you know, this fraught question of national identity or pride or jingoism or nationalism or the far right, you know, how we...
Katie Marshall: No.
Catherine Clarke: how we parse and separate those things, how they speak to each other. These were really, really live questions. And so I'm really glad to have the opportunity to sort of explain why England in the book. And it partly answers your question and you pointed to some of the reasons already. So there is a really distinct and legible tradition of writing England and shaping ideas of England and Englishness in poetry. You mentioned that imaginary of the green and pleasant land, English pastoral. that quote comes from Blake, from Jerusalem, but it goes back centuries before that really to the very earliest ⁓ English writing, you back to to to Bede in the eighth century, certainly. So that's one kind of tradition that I trace through the poetry and a very much sort of an English tradition. ⁓ There are other characteristics, I think, that I see in a distinctively English poetic tradition and obviously Wales and Scotland and Ireland, they have their own poetic traditions and histories to tell. But in English poetry, I'd point to that kind of characteristic wit and whimsy that crops up in a lot of the poetry. I've got to say fart jokes, even in poetry, you know, there's a very scatterlogical poem from the 17th century called Bumforda. That's one of my choices for the book. But actually, the earliest fart in the poem in the poems that I've chosen goes back to to the 1200s, kind of that's quite funny. But also I'd really point to that, I don't know if you'll know what I mean when I say that kind of characteristic pleasure of melancholy and a sense of nostalgia. I mean, what fascinates me is the second poem I've included in the book is an old English poem about the Battle of Malden, which was in the year 991, a battle against the Vikings attacking England at that time. and the poem was written really shortly afterwards and the energy of the poem is all around nostalgia for heroic values. know, England isn't what it used to be. You know, look back at, you know, to the good old days when England was a land of heroes and it could be that again. I just find it fascinating that one of these earliest formulations of England in poetry is about nostalgia. and its best days being in the past. How interesting that that has always been kind of baked into ideas of English identity in poetry.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, mean, the things you said sort of play into so many other areas as well. I you talk about that sort of pleasure and melancholy, that Berton's, know, anatomy of melancholy and those sort of texts that people enjoyed reading and sort of analysing themselves through their humoural system and their emotional state really shows us that we're not unique in that way at all.
Catherine Clarke: Yeah, absolutely, and you're pointing to the kind of, the technical language and underpinning of that idea of melancholy. But I think in something that, in a way that's far less technical and a lot of people will sort of recognise and feel, we might point to something like the poem Adelstrop that I chose in my book as a way into stories of the Great War and kind of a surprising way in because it's not usually thought of as a war poem, it's not full of... blood and bayonets and barbed wire and bullets. It's about that quiet moment at a railway station in the summer of 1914, when nothing happens, just this moment of stillness. It's almost a kind of anti-history choice, a moment of nothing happening and the sound of the birds singing. And that is, it's a heartbreaking poem when you understand that Edward Thomas wrote it a few months later, looking back. after war had been declared in a changed world and it was published a few days after he was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917. So it's heartbreaking and I cried when I wrote it and actually I barely got through reading it for the audiobook. ⁓ But it's also, I think it connects with this because it captures something of that pleasurable kind of frisson of melancholy that we've all felt in sort of a transient and fleeting moment and that's That's another part of the magic of poetry and history, isn't it? That a poem can take us into a sort of sweep of a century and tell a big story or inside a tiny moment like that, that we can just sit inside. Wow. I mean, that's just to me, that's amazing.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, it sort of makes us think about all the moments that people did just sort of sit still as we do in, you know, just in an ordinary day and just take stock of their life. It wasn't all big battles, events, it really, you know, we shouldn't need to remind ourselves, but somehow we do
Catherine Clarke: I think you're so right. And those are the kind of the moments that slip through the fingers of history often. And I think you're completely right that ⁓ moves in recent decades towards history of emotions, towards ⁓ history from below, different kinds of unofficial, of popular social histories, they're a really important move towards capturing the importance and then the value of understanding those kind of quiet little histories as well. And there are poems I included in my choice of 2025. There's a brilliant poem by Fleur Radcock that's inspired by a matchbox. Or there's Lewis Carroll when he was just 13. So he was still Charles Dodgson writing a funny poem called Rules and Regulations to entertain his younger siblings. It's kind of joking about, you know, schoolroom didacticism and rules for behaviour and mnemonics. And, you know, those are are little things. from them we can open up really big and revealing stories about periods.
Katie Marshall: So I think we'll touch a bit more later on sort of who gets to write these poems and obviously, know, all the thoughts that went unrecorded, but sort of your book spans such a massive time scale from the eighth century to the present day. So what areas did you really notice of change and continuity sort of across them, maybe motifs, the sort of language that was used, the subjects of what people were writing about and sort of who was recording their poetry?
Catherine Clarke: Hmm. Okay, that's a great question. Well, first of all, I'll come back to what you raised about that imaginary of the green and pleasant land, because that really was something that I thought I would find running across the centuries, having previously done research on the early Middle Ages and having found it there. And indeed I did. And I love the way that we find that kind of English pastoral inflected differently in different moments and used to make interventions in different historical contexts and made to do different kind of culture and political work. So you mentioned, you know, this sceptodial, the famous John of Gaunt speech from Shakespeare's Richard II, which so often, you know, we think of as a panegyric of England and Englishness because people forget that it actually runs on and it becomes this critique. It's made a shameful conquest of itself. This beautiful, Edenic England is corrupted. and ruined, it's a satire, it's a critique. But I looked at how that was used across time. But the most recent poem in the book, The Groundsman by Zafar Kunial from his 2022 collection, England's Green, that is in conversation with all those other expressions of English pastoral throughout the book. It's an amazing, gorgeous poem. It's a groundsman, retired. walking round the edge of an overgrown cricket pitch. And you know that cricket pitch is this small green beautifully tendered piece of earth. You know it could be England, it could be a page in a book, it could be a poem as well as this cricket pitch. And what's so brilliant about what Zafar Kunyal does is he's yeah he's in dialogue with all these different moments across time, all these different sources. But you know it's a poem that has its own meaning in this post-Brexit world, it's a poem that was published about a week after Queen Elizabeth II died, it spoke to this new moment of wondering about what England and Englishness is. And I suppose, yeah, throughout the book, we see that England has never been one thing, there's never been consensus. It's always changing over time. It's always contested within historical moments as well. Other kinds of change, obviously form, and you've pointed to that already, the change in the kind of... literary forms and textual forms that are available to people and that are part of the kind of cultural currency in different periods. So, you know, we start with Cadman's hymn written down by the venerable Bede, but that began as a song, as something oral, not something written down on the page. And actually it's got a really twisty history because Bede writes it down in Latin, even though it's sung in English and he has to kind of, it's translated back into English later on in its tradition. So oral cultures, then into kind of textual, literate cultures and all the different kind of forms over time. That's such a crucial part of change that changes what poetry is and the ideas that are expressed. So, you know, a broadside ballad from the 17th century, that's the brilliantly scatological Bumforda. And it's called Bumforda because the idea is, you know, broadside ballads are so cheap and disposable, they cost about the same as a small loaf of bread or a beer and you can use them and you can just chuck them away and lots of them were used to wipe bums and dropped down the privy, hence bumfodder so it's kind of a joke but you you're gonna get different kinds of writing doing different kinds of work for different audiences in something that's so cheap and disposable. You know, there's courtly poetry as well. So for me, a lot of that change is to do with changes of form and who it's connecting with, who it's speaking to. Your question about who gets to write poetry or make poetry is obviously just so important. And, you know, part of the ambition from the start for this book was that I wanted a diverse range of voices. And I'm really, proud of what I do have in the book. So there are... men and women, there are voices of different social status, people of colour, there's even that poem written by a child, written by Charles Dodgson. It was difficult. The further back you go, the harder it is to find that diversity of representation, because of who has access to literacy, whose words are retained in the archive. So, you know, there are real challenges. And I think it's still a work in progress for all of us as historians, isn't it, recovering those voices.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, you speak so wonderfully about both the challenges of joys of this sort of area of history, but ⁓ it's sort of like, it struck me that the word Carmen means both song, poem, and all of these sort of things are so intertwined. And as you say, broadside ballads, they'd be sung to people in the market square. So ephemeral print, poetry, song, know, public entertainment and history, these things are so intertwined and you can't really separate them once you get into it.
Catherine Clarke: Yeah. Yeah, and we think, you know, a lot of people and often I think we all think of poetry as something quite, as something in a book ⁓ or something quite highbrow. And, you know, that's obviously not the case in the culture of poetry today. know, amazing performance poets and, you know, kind of stand up, you know, performative poetry culture, which is brilliant. But I think, you know, it's really... ⁓ inspiring to go back to the past and be reminded that poetry is something living and lively and animate and for everyone as well.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, poetry I think has been used more than any other sort of written form as a form for people to express views that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to. was listening to a podcast recently that talked about sort of how poetry is used by women, especially sort of in Afghan culture, sort of the landai, that sort of tradition of complaint poetry and sort of women being able to express grief, rage and, you know, complain about things through poetry and say things they wouldn't ordinarily be able to. So I was thinking it'd be really great if you could talk a bit about gender and poetry and how did you find that it was sort of a very fruitful area for recovering women's voices and what sort of challenges did you find there as well?
Catherine Clarke: Yeah, yeah, it is a fruitful era and it's fascinating to hear about what you've been reading about. Yeah, so it's really fruitful, really revealing, but big challenges, particularly the further back we go. So as I said, I really wanted to include diverse voices in the book, but actually the first explicitly female voice in the book is the wife of Bath. who is a creation of Geoffrey Chaucer, she's fictional. It's Chaucer cosplaying, ventriloquising, being a woman, it's not really a woman at all. But I use that poem and the question that's at the heart of the Wife of Bath story, what do women want? What do women most desire? As a way, sort of through that text and past Chaucer to get into... histories of women's lives in the 14th century and also some of Chaucer's own complex entanglements with women in the period. ⁓ There are some really special and fascinating poems by women that I chose for the book. One of them would be Anne Askew's ballad that she wrote in Newgate Prison. This is the middle of the 16th century and Anne Askew was waiting to be burned at the stake. for heresy because of her views on the transubstantiation. So she didn't believe that the bread and wine in the mass literally turned into the body of Christ. She saw them as symbols and tokens. She'd already been ⁓ illegally tortured on the rack in the Tower of London. She was seriously injured. And she writes this remarkable poem looking ahead to her execution with defiance, but also with with joy. and hope and with this kind of radical compassion and mercy for the people who are sending her there. So it's obviously deeply political. We're looking at the end of Henry VIII's reign, the break from Rome, but this febrile ⁓ context of religious battles between religious change and conservatism. Now, it's locating Anne Askew's own words. We have records of her interrogations, her... her interrogation under torture that she left. And there are two poems attributed to her. This is one of them. But, you know, she has these really unreliable editors and narrators, John Bale, John Fox, and they kind of get in the way and they try to appropriate her words and make them do political things for them. So, you know, actually finding Anne's authentic words herself, connecting with them, you know, it's always something of a leap of faith. but I think, you know, so worthwhile. There are some other brilliant voices in the book. There's Anna Laetitia Barbold, her huge poem, 1811. There's a section of that in the book. This is this fearless anti-war reformist poem at the beginning of the 19th century. You know, she sees kind of forever war with France that has been dragging on for years. She sees the rise of America and the kind of move of power into the West. slipping into irrelevance maybe of England. Some of this maybe sounds a little bit relevant to us today and she writes this amazing poem that the bit that I reflect on actually she does this kind of time travel into the future where she imagines a future England in ruins and it's incredible it's like some kind of post-apocalyptic you know zombie sci-fi world this England in ruins it's incredible but she was cancelled for that. You you said, Katie, you sometimes poetry allows women to speak in ways that they might not be able to otherwise, but she it came at a cost for her. She was cancelled. She got terrible reviews. She was told that she should stick to her writing for children and writing hymns. So incredibly misogynist, actually, the response. There's Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote this incredible ⁓ activist poem against child labor in mines and factories right through to, you know, Grace Nicholls. and her poem Hurricane Hits England about the 1987 great storm and she's looking back on her Guyanese and British heritage and thinking about, you the impact of that wind rush generation on England in the 20th century. So some amazing stories from women, but always navigating, you know, those edges between what they're able to say and what's difficult to say and how they can express it. And sometimes poetry is the key to that. alternative kind of idiom and weigh in to a big public conversation, I think.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, you painted that picture so wonderfully of how dynamic women's voices are through poetry and a couple of things that stood out for me, especially with the Anaski poem, I see lot of parallels of those sort of themes of mercy and sort of almost self-deprecation. I think she says somewhere in it that she doesn't often write like this, she sort of starts with a disclaimer. It reminds me a lot of the poem that ⁓ Mary Queen of Scots wrote on her the final night before her execution to the King of France. That sort of, you know,
Catherine Clarke: Yeah. Yeah.
Katie Marshall: sort of extreme mercy that maybe she felt she was expected to to show as a woman.
Catherine Clarke: yeah, I think you're right to point to those kind of expectations and sort of tropes and formulae as well. So, know, that kind of, um, apologia, you know, not not often you start to write in prose nor yet in rhyme. That's kind of expected for a woman to say. And but also it's clever because, you know, Anne Askey was contrasting her kind of humble, honest, authentic, unpolished words with the kind of the flattery, the the slippery deceitful eloquence of her interrogators and her accusers. ⁓ And yeah, I think you're absolutely right that kind of adopting that position of mercy and compassion, obviously it's about channeling a kind of Christ-like ⁓ stance that imitatio Christi. ⁓ I think, you know, you've put your finger on something else that makes doing history through poetry a challenge. You've got to be aware of all these tropes and formulae that people particularly in in medieval and pre-modern and early modern contexts express themselves through this kind of patchwork of existing words, phrases, conventions, and it's sort of working through that is really interesting.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, so sort of as far back as Christian de Pizan, it's sort of like there's a protective armour for them to express themselves, but also there's an armour that we need to then remove to sort of access their authentic voice as far as that's possible as well.
Catherine Clarke: I love that idea. I love the idea of a protective armour. And I think that's it. Yeah, the poetry gives a bit of armour. It gives a bit sort of extraordinary kind of licence in terms of what a woman's voice can do. I love that, the idea of the armour. Yeah. Actually, Anne Askew talks about that, doesn't she? She talks about, you know, putting on the... Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And putting on the armour of God and a very biblical idea. But yeah, you know, I think that's an image that she is absolutely thinking with. I love that.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, very sort of Joan of Arc figure. Yeah. Yeah, that's such a wonderful thing to hear. So from sort of bringing back to our idea of a commonplace book, from the people that you've studied, could be a woman, could be, you know, any of the people that you've studied, whose commonplace book would you most like to have as a source as a kind of insight into their inner world past their poetry?
Catherine Clarke: Mm. So I think there could be no other choice for me, but it would have to be Mary Leaper. So she's one of the poets that I included in the book and I include an extract of her poem, Crumble Hall. So Mary Leaper is absolutely one of those remarkable women's voices and women's experiences that are often quite hard for us to reach today. So Mary Leaper was not an educated or wealthy or privileged woman. she worked in domestic service in the middle of the 18th century and she died actually at the age of 24 of measles. So, you know, it's a tragic story. The Crumble Hall is just actually a really funny and clever poem, but it's radical, it's political because Mary Leiper is kind of turning the genre of the country house poem upside down and she kind of goes underneath the typical country house poem. So instead of... being in the grand ⁓ parlour or in the ornamental gardens, she takes us into the kitchen and we see the servants at work, we see the hidden labour, we see her, her world, her domain as someone who worked in domestic service. Now she's brilliant, her poetry is clever, it's funny, it's so accomplished. But you know, she was sacked from the real life version of Crumble Hall for... apparently scribbling when she should have been turning the spit. So she, you know, she was in trouble for being a poet, I guess. And I would love to know what she was reading. I mean, we know that really everything that she read was likely in the library of her first employer, her first mistress, Susanna Jennings, when she first worked in domestic service at Western Hall. So this is, this is a servant being given permission by a enlightened mistress to dip into the library. And that's where Mary Leaper discovers poetry, it's where she discovers ⁓ her inspiration and kind of the tools of her trade. So I would love to know what she read. I'd love to see her excerpts, what caught her eye, what made her laugh, what shaped her own kind of comic satirical approach. I mean, really, Katie, I would love to sit down and... have a conversation with Mary Leeper, but having her commonplace book, I think, would be the closest I could get to that.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, from what you said, absolutely agree. And you'd almost be accessing two very different women from different backgrounds at the same time, because you'd be accessing the books that her mistress was reading and how she interpreted them herself as well and how class played into that. I think that would be fascinating.
Catherine Clarke: That's ⁓ such a great point. Yeah, it would almost be taking us into, I you know, I assume that Mary Leiper and Susanna Jennings had conversations around these books and in the library. So I love that. It takes us into a kind of women's sociability, women's relationships, this conversation and reading shared by women. Yeah.
Katie Marshall: I wonder what more she would have gone on to do if she'd been able to.
Catherine Clarke: I know, it's heartbreaking, isn't it? It's heartbreaking, yeah.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, so I think it's time that we move on to your commonplace book because I'm sure that you have some fascinating insights and luckily you can tell us all about it. So you've spoken a lot I know in other sort of talks you've done to do with your book about how evocative you found the physical form of the book and the process of researching and I know you've encountered a wormhole that sort of sparked your imagination for this book. So what would your commonplace book look like?
Catherine Clarke: Mm. Hmm, okay, so ⁓ I think it would be, I'd want a pocketbook, something that I could carry around with me and slip into a pocket. And I think it would be, it would have lots of things tucked between the pages. It would have dogged corners. I've only in recent years, Katie, I've let go of that need to keep all my books pristine and you know, I'm happy now for a book to be lived in. So my commonplace book, would be like a medieval florelegium or something like the the early medieval Exeter book with a wonderful kind of mixture of ⁓ copied in as a commonplace book before commonplace books, I suppose. yeah, I mean, hopefully you wouldn't have actual wormholes in it because that would mean that something was gobbling it up. But I hope that my commonplace book would be able to do the job metaphorically of giving me lots of wormholes into different moments and different places.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, I can relate on the wanting sort of a perfect book and moving away from that. something I've, yeah. Yeah, but the perfection is almost in a different way when you remember certain like, ⁓ I spilt something on that page or, know, it means more when you look back and you think it's such a big deal in the moment.
Catherine Clarke: It's hard work to let that go. Yeah, and the thing is, when I buy a lot of books secondhand, and the joy of getting a secondhand book is what other people have left in the book, isn't it? It is, that once I found a pressed flower between the pages of the book, or other people's markings, or other people's names, and the story of the book, and actually, I want to be part of that lovely ecosystem of leaving our traces in our books.
Katie Marshall: Yeah. Yeah, I remember studying marginalia and how, you know, you think about the 19th century and whitewashing all of those and how we're having to use technology now to recover the things that they thought were, you know, dirty books in a way. But we see them as, you know, giving us an insight into what people were thinking while they were reading. it's just perspective really.
Catherine Clarke: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because we're interested in, and we want to know how people read the books and how they understood them as well as what was put into them to start with. So, yeah, fascinating stuff.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, yeah. So thinking about sort of changing perspectives, is there a particular philosophy or perhaps a small quote that's had an impact for your life and has stuck with you?
Catherine Clarke: That's a lovely question, but it's really difficult. ⁓ I think I would cheat a bit. And I will say that the kind of the philosophy, including lots of very resonant and powerful and moving words that's had a big impact on me would come through kind of Christian tradition. I've sung in church choirs all my life. So the language of hymns. and prayers, particularly even song, think of the Book of Common Prayer, even song, think of the canticles, the Magnificat, the Nunc Demittis, Lord, now let us thou thy servant depart in peace, or the collect said even song, lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord. ⁓ Just very beautiful words that I'm not sure that, I mean, obviously they are part of a, they are words to live by. But I think those particular words out of that Book of Common Prayer liturgy and the hymns and the canticles that we sing around it, for me there's a real sense of peace and comfort, but also ⁓ connection across time. I think when you're saying those words, it feels like ⁓ history collapses. And there's just a moment and fellowship and intimacy and connection across time with all those people who've said those words in different places. So I suppose. they have a lot of the same power as a poem in that way. yeah, ⁓ I think anything that I might find in the English hymnal or the Book of Common Prayer ⁓ or some lovely English settings of canticles for even song, those would speak to that.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, I can definitely resonate with the sacred music because music is big part of my life and you know when I sing in a sacred space ⁓ you really feel sort of adding an extra sense to your place in history and sort of hearing your own voice in a place that heard so many other voices throughout history really sort of adds a new dimension to your experience of a place I've found.
Catherine Clarke: you're right I definitely definitely share that share that experience yeah it's really powerful yeah.
Katie Marshall: Yeah. So commonplace books obviously included a lot of literature, a lot of written word, but also they were very visual. So if you could preserve a photograph or a sort of paste a piece of artwork in your book, what would it be and why?
Catherine Clarke: Mm. ⁓ Well, I mean, I'd probably want to sneak quite a few photos in, know, family photos and bit of nostalgia that I could look back on, you know, not just things taken from the broader sort of cultural canon. I think if I if I was picking one image, as I'm going to cheat, couple of possibilities. One, I might go for a reproduction of the Hereford map of Mundi. So ⁓ the gorgeous round world map. that hangs in Hereford Cathedral made around the year 1300. Laid out differently for modern maps of course with Jerusalem right at the centre and as you'll know Katie, know medieval map I, Mundi, they are about mapping belief and culture and narrative and storytelling and history as much as what we would understand as geography today. So I think I could open that page in my commonplace book and look at it for hours because it's like a way, it's encyclopedic and it's like a way into a whole storytelling world. ⁓ Another image that I might have, I suppose, would sit quite nicely alongside it might be ⁓ one of Leslie Moffat Ward's paintings of a Dorset landscape. So this is where I live in Dorset and beautiful kind of earlier 20th century paintings, maybe his painting of Corv Castle or old Harry Rocks or Dorset cliffs and landscape because the colours are so vivid. They draw me into the place. They feel so so alive and also there's something just very moving about them I think so that's interesting isn't it a juxtaposition of two two different kinds of portals into place and those those images.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, definitely the map would give you a lot of things to think about in a single image. I think that's a very good choice, a very strategic one. No, not at all. So thinking sort of more audibly and perhaps, you know, might be the most difficult question for you, but is there a particular song or a poem that has resonated with you and what does it mean to you personally?
Catherine Clarke: Yeah. Is it a bit of a cheat? ⁓ So this is really hard and ⁓ I'm really gonna disappoint you in terms of a confident, assertive, single answer, Katie. I'm just gonna hedge and shift and cheat on this one. So poems, I might choose, actually, strangely, none of these were choices in the history of England in 25 poems, but maybe some John Donne or some Philip Larkin or some Seamus Heaney ⁓ or maybe... Maybe I could have, could I fit the whole of Beowulf in or a bit of Beowulf, which I find, you know, ⁓ endlessly fascinating and moving the way that even just the old English words themselves are time machines and take you into a different way of seeing the world. But ⁓ just so finely wrought and beautiful. ⁓ For a song, I'm not even going to start to think about kind of non-song music because that will just, there's too many rabbit holes there. But I think ⁓ possibly ⁓ a song made famous or sung by Fred Astaire would have to be in there. So big fan of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. And also I, ⁓ for a good 10 years in my life as a kind of as a student, when I was at school as a student, as an early career academic, I played piano in hotels as my side hustle. And I used to like a few kind of jazz standards. So maybe, I don't know, maybe The Way You Look Tonight by Jerome Kern, sung by Fred Astaire and possibly a Pet Shop Boys song. Maybe Being Boring or, you know, if I'm in a disco mood, maybe Always On My Mind.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, perfect. I think they're definitely on the same wavelength with those choices. I think it's interesting what you said about, you know, choosing something that's not in your academic work, because I was speaking to Christina Faraday and she chose an image, ⁓ sort of a Polaroid image, and she said she can't understand it that's why she loves it so much, because it just intrigues her. So yeah, think that, you know, commonplace book is the right place to keep that sort of thing. Yeah.
Catherine Clarke: Excellent. ⁓ lovely. ⁓ that's great. Yeah, and you want to keep going back to it, don't you? You don't want to feel like you've cracked it all already. Absolutely. Yeah.
Katie Marshall: Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So is there, ⁓ you can include a postcard in your commonplace book from a particular place anywhere in the world and where would that be that you can imagine yourself there when you look at it?
Catherine Clarke: So again, perhaps this doesn't feel ambitious enough because I'm not going very far, but I think I would love a postcard from Littlehaven in Pembrokeshire in Wales, where I spent lots and lots of childhood holidays and where I've gone back with several generations now of the family with my own kids. So, you know, love Wales. I lived in Wales for a while, loved the rocky coast of Pembrokeshire. I Little Haven on the Rocks, as we always used to used to call it when I was small. I think if possible, I'd like it to be an old postcard, you know, with the sky just a little bit too luridly blue and people in slightly dated fashions and old cars that I would have no idea how to identify, you know, parked up somewhere at the edge of the picture. And if I could, I'd even even better. I would love it if it was used and if it had someone else's message on the back. already because I love it when you pick up an old postcard in a charity shop or a brick-a-brack shop and it's got a fragment of somebody's holiday and some cryptic message on the family that takes us back doesn't it? Social history and history of emotions but that little... I was obsessed when I was a child whenever we took a ferry anywhere I was obsessed with trying to launch a message in a bottle. Never worked for me and you know I wouldn't like to think now about all the stuff I threw into the sea. I mean we're not talking millions!
Katie Marshall: Well you don't know, maybe they just didn't reply.
Catherine Clarke: Maybe, I love that Katie, maybe they're still out there and I'm yet to receive that reply, but I love that idea of those little fragmentary messages that can kind of turn up over time. that's my, sorry, rather long-winded answer to your question.
Katie Marshall: No, no, I like the idea that your commonplace book seems to be something quite layered. So it's a bit like, you know, sharing of the books. It's not just your commonplace book. It's got the marker of other people that you know, and that you don't know on it. Yeah.
Catherine Clarke: That's very, I hadn't thought of it like that, Katie, but I think you're absolutely, absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah.
Katie Marshall: Yeah. So ⁓ you can sort of record a book that you particularly enjoyed, perhaps something that somebody gave you or you discovered yourself by a fellow author or a sort classic book.
Catherine Clarke: Again, this is a really tricky one. you know, if you asked me this question last week or next week, you get a different answer, Katie, from my answer today. I suppose my most, my most now answer is that I've just finished reading The Dig by John Preston, having seen the film adaptation of it a few years ago. So this is the novel that's based on the story of the discovery of the Sutton who shipped burial in 1939. I loved the film adaptation on Netflix. And of course the novel's different and it's been on my to be read pile for ages and I loved it and I found it really moving and evocative. So that's the one I'd put in today. But you know, so many other kind of classics that I go back to, I guess I'd want to squeeze in a bit of Jane Austen and probably a bit of Tolkien as well.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, that's a nice combination actually. It's sort of obviously writing, you're spending a lot of time at your desk, but is there a recipe that you like to make regularly? Maybe something's been passed down or you just started making recently that you'd write down for future generations.
Catherine Clarke: So I love that question and yeah, I do have a definite answer to that. So it would be the recipe that I have on a scrap of paper, very smudged and bits of grease and stains on it in my mum's handwriting, but it was passed down from my grandma and it's called economy chocolate cake and it's a wartime recipe. So it replaces most of the fat with boiling water. It's very clever. So it's actually, it can be quite good for you comparatively for cake as well. just a little bit of margarine and boiling water. And it's the recipe that all through my childhood, my grandma used to make me my birthday cake. And since then, my mum has used to make birthday cakes for everyone in the family, my children, so her grandchildren. It's our go-to chocolate cake. I'm afraid now, Katie, it's not quite so economy and you know, it's not, now that we don't have rationing anymore, we do go a bit wild, so. we'll make double quantities and we'll sandwich it together with buttercream and we'll put chocolate on the top and make it quite indulgent. But it's a lovely recipe and you know, I'm feeling quite moved, you know, telling you about it because it absolutely connects generations of women in my family. I know my kids are going to make that recipe when they grow up. It comes out of a particular historical context and pressure comes out of rationing. ⁓ But curiously, it's become what expresses, it's the taste of celebration to our family I suppose.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, yeah and looking at that on paper and then making it is almost like poetry in motion I guess because you could see snapshots of each generation making it that's really wonderful to have. It doesn't matter if you're changing it, it's part of it.
Catherine Clarke: And isn't it... Yeah, exactly. We make the basic recipe the same. We just kind of jazz it up a little bit. what you said there, Katie, has made me think in a way that I haven't really before how much a recipe on the page looks like a poem. You it's almost like a found poem, isn't it? And yeah, that's definitely, definitely going to be in there.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, wonderful that you have that, that's right there. Yeah. What else could you include that's better than that? Yeah. So is there something, just one thing in your life that you're grateful for and is there one thing that you just hope to achieve by next year, this time?
Catherine Clarke: You So I'm really grateful at the moment that I'm on a short period of research leave, thanks to the School of Advanced Study where I work. So I really, you know, honestly, I check my privilege with that every single day. So I'm back to sort of the fuller aspects of my job at the end of April, but it's been wonderful to have time to think and write, work really hard, lots of writing, kind of beginning a new project that I can't really say very much about at the moment, but ⁓ I've been getting quite muddy with it. So this time next year, I would love that to have taken shape more and to have more of that written and maybe to be, to have a sense of how it might find its way out into the world.
Katie Marshall: Yeah, wonderful. Thank you. So you talked already about finding a press flower in a book that you once got. So I'm going to give you one wild card entry of something you can put in your book. Like it can be a press flower, another poem or a sketch, or sort of even just recording like an anecdote or a conversation that you've had that's remained with you.
Catherine Clarke: So again, this is something where there's definitely a particular thing that I would love to put in. So a few years ago, we went to my daughter's parents' evening at school. And you know, they put out their project books and their workbooks and you have a look through. And they'd been asked to do a piece of writing. So my daughter was eight at the time. And they'd been given the prompt just because. And then my daughter had filled in, I'm a girl. And then she'd... carried on writing and I'm going to read you what she wrote. She wrote, because I'm a girl, it doesn't mean I can't be adventurous. It doesn't mean I'm a coward. It doesn't mean I won't swim in deep water with seaweed and jellyfish. It doesn't mean I'm not fascinated by herbivore dung. So the herbivore dung is, you know, is an interesting angle, but actually that swim in deep water. that my eight-year-old daughter wrote. And I read it at a time when I was actually was moving from a role in English literature to my current role as a professor of history. And, you know, sometimes we do things in our careers that take us outside of our comfort zones, that involve newness and involve challenge and swim in deep water were the words that I wanted to hear, that I needed to hear. I have them now on a necklace and I think they're a strong contender for my first tattoo when that happens. So definitely my daughter's exhortation to swim in deep water with seaweed and jellyfish. Maybe I'll leave out the kind of communing with her before dung, but I would definitely tuck that in. Those are words to guide me.
Katie Marshall: Wow, definitely if you could include like an afterthought in your book, I think your daughter's poem would be an excellent addition. No, no. Wow, thank you so much for sharing that. That's really wonderful. And I've loved our conversation. I think it's been, you know, everything I hope it would be. And I've loved so much about you and yeah. ⁓
Catherine Clarke: But no pressed seaweed or herbivore dung, that would be just taking it too far, I think. Yeah, yeah. So. ⁓ thank you, Katie. What I've really loved is these lovely, insightful responses, the way that you've helped me see patterns in some of what I've presented you with. I love your idea of the kind of multi-layered commonplace book, and I shall reflect on so much of what you've given me in your responses to what I've talked about. Thank you.
Katie Marshall: Thank you, that's very kind of you to say. Yeah, I've loved it and I really, I look forward to seeing what you do next and yeah, and what you add to your commonplace book really. Yeah, thank you. It's been so wonderful to talk to you and I really recommend that people read your history of England in 25 poems. I think it will be really insightful and change the way that people look at history and a lot to reflect on definitely. Thank you so much, Catherine. Thank you.
Catherine Clarke: Likewise, Katie. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Thank you.
