Transitions: A Historian's Memoir

As a rule, reading intellectual autobiographies can be a tepid experience. When not downright vindictive or self-promoting, the author often seems to hover effortlessly, like a hang glider, over the field, far above the sweat, the chill sense of ignorance, and the crashing through the undergrowth that accompanies the search for truth about the past. Such essays assume that thought begins only with the first graduate paper and continues, triumphantly, to the last honorary degree.Dame Averil Cameron's Transitions will have nothing to do with such a bloodless exercise. She imbeds her own, impressive intellectual trajectory in a living scene that stretches from postwar Britain to the worldwide crisis of today's universities. To read Transitions is to move from one vividly described landscape to another, each viewed by an incisive yet generous mind.We begin in Leek, a declining textile town in northern England. Leek was deemed to be “working class.” But its inhabitants were fiercely self-respecting. Averil's family reached out to any frail ladder to a wider world: a gifted teacher from a church school; a piano (so that music remained one of her great loves); and the heady wager of the examination for entrance for admission to an Oxford women's college.Averil won the wager, finding herself, in 1958, at Somerville College, in a crowded dining hall, resounding, somewhat forbiddingly, with upper-class “Oxford” accents. Soon, however, her gift for friendship brought her into a network of remarkable women, some of whom were the daughters of the great and the good of the liberal England of the late 1950s.Friendship, indeed, is one of the pervading themes of Transitions. Averil is not given to name-dropping. When she mentions a name, it is usually to record the beginning of a lasting friendship. Such friendships grew to create a tenacious network that eventually would spread from her days at Oxford, to London, Europe, and the United States.In the latter part of the book, we see this gift for concord at work. From 1992 to 2000, she was among the first women to become head of an Oxford college—she became warden of Keble College. We follow her in detail at work as the leader of a formerly fractious, all-male community to which she brought a rare degree of civility and, at times, plain fun (“I found it a pleasure to look down from High Table at the students evidently enjoying themselves”).It was against this crowded backdrop that Dame Averil pursued an equally adventurous intellectual itinerary. Her itinerary has been marked as well by a ceaseless widening of horizons—both in her own scholarship and in the circles of her friends and colleagues.Averil left Oxford with a healthy sense of her own ignorance (a primary virtue not bestowed on every scholar) and a thorough training in the classics. But, as taught in Oxford at that time, it was a lopsided training. Greek and Latin authors were taught in a strictly philological manner, as if they were so many crossword puzzles. Little regard was given to their literary quality and still less to their historical context. Such a meticulous grooming produced a happy few—young men and women capable of flirting in Greek elegies (“Those were innocent days”).Averil was determined to escape from that golden cage. To do so, she used the time-worn skills of a classicist to bring life to the stormy last centuries of the ancient world. Transitions is the record of her firm steps into the unknown. She began with Agathias, a little known Greek poet-historian of the very end of the sixth century CE. Then she went back to Procopius, the disabused observer of the tragic reign of Justinian (527–65). With a shrewd sense of consequentiality (a rare gift in any field), she then turned to the spiritual crisis of the age, revealed by the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary and later the cult of icons, ending with the rise of Islam. Taken together, her studies provide a vivid portrait of the emergence of an age—the coming of the Middle Ages to Byzantium and the Middle East.Not content with this achievement, after 1984 she entered into dialogue with literary critics in an attempt to understand the seemingly improbable process by which Christians came to talk and write themselves to the top of Greco-Roman culture, thereby forming a unique synthesis of pagan and Christian, which would lie at the root of medieval Byzantium. In a remarkable series of appeals to modern Western Europeans, she urged her readers to pay attention to the complex and long-enduring civilization that lay, barely noticed, on their doorstep.Transitions brings human life to this adventurous itinerary. It is shot through with the warmth of loyal friendships. Many of them were formed in the exciting days of the women's movement, as a remarkable cohort of women, most of them trained in the traditional manner (Averil among them), made their way through the pack ice of male dominance in the institutions of higher learning. Last but not least, it is a book mercifully free of self-congratulation. Averil is well aware of the role of chance and serendipity as she moved to explore hitherto unknown topics, one after the other. Hence the warmth of gratitude that characterizes her vivid sketches of those who helped her on the way.Altogether, Transitions gives an unrivaled impression of the complex honeycomb of institutions in modern Britain and elsewhere in which she has made her career with rare generosity and always with a human touch. It is a portrait of a pathbreaking scholar that can serve as an inspiration to us all as we face the troubled waters of today's academe.