The Last of the Humanists?

Summer Is Almost Over: A Memoir
by Bruce Mansfield
Barton Books, 2012, 200 pages, $30

For many of us, fifty years ago Modern History at the University of Sydney was dominated by the Early Modern Renaissance and Reformation course given by Bruce Mansfield and Ken Cable, in which Mansfield’s portrayal of the religious conflicts in Europe was deftly complemented by Cable’s treatment of British history. Few of us at the time realised that Mansfield was pioneering the study of Reformation history in Australia, or that Cable was skilfully charting a middle ground between the constitutional history that had come to dominate Tudor studies during his time at Cambridge, and portraying the great personalities of the period.

Mansfield built the narrative and discussion in his lectures around extracts from the writings of Luther, Erasmus, Calvin and other protagonists, cyclostyled copies of which were issued to every student at the first lecture. The documents were read out with understanding and sympathy, placed in context, and then woven into the argument of the lecture. Mansfield himself was a commanding figure, dark with piercing black eyes, six feet tall, immaculately clad in suit and gown. He spoke in soft, well-modulated tones expertly pitched to the microphone so that his voice filled the vast expanse of the Wallace Theatre. This was heady stuff to students who in the 1950s secondary system were often discouraged from reading too widely and never saw the text of an original source. Now following the passages and making our notes we not only came to understand how a historian used his sources, but were also given a unique insight into the discipline itself. Inevitably many of Mansfield’s students became fascinated by sixteenth-century religious history. Bob Scribner made a major contribution to Reformation studies, while Leighton Frappell completed a PhD on Luther historiography.

For me, teaching in the secondary schools and founding one of Australia’s first courses in Film History, it was the historian’s craft I learnt from Mansfield that was so precious, especially when I came to treat films as historical documents. Nearly twenty years after I had been his student I asked Bruce to give a seminar to my students in Film at Mitchell College of Advanced Education on the way a historian treats conventional sources. The idea was that we would then have a basis to explore how film was also a historical document. The seminar was one of the most exhilarating and productive of my teaching career. It mattered little that Mansfield’s examples were drawn mainly from the sixteenth century, with which my students were unfamiliar; the clarity of exposition made it easy for them to make the connection to film sources.

In 1959, when Bruce Mansfield was giving many of us our first lectures in History, he was at the beginning of an extraordinary career that led to his becoming co-founder of the Journal of Religious History, Foundation Professor of History and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Macquarie University and an internationally acclaimed Erasmus scholar. All this and more Mansfield describes in his long-awaited autobiography, Summer Is Almost Over.

The book opens with a tour de force, a description of the young Mansfield’s tour of Europe in 1947 as the New South Wales Presbyterian Church’s delegate to the Oslo Christian youth conference. He not only evokes the sights and sounds of a postwar Europe that he was seeing for the first time, but also describes the Christian beliefs and theology that were to shape his life. The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, addressing the conference on “Man’s Disorder and God’s Design” in a voice “far from mellifluous” with a “volcanic fluency and a high level of physical tension”, was crucial when he argued that “Christian hope helps us to work on without the alternative distractions of illusion and disillusionment”. Looking back, Mansfield sees this as “determining for my religious attitudes henceforth but also for my attitude to institutions, to politics, and to any public activity”.

When he went to Oslo he was still an undergraduate about to begin an honours year in History at the University of Sydney. Mansfield’s description of undergraduate life in the 1940s is delightful but far too brief. He does however make some pointed criticisms of the limited reading on which figures such as the young John M. Ward based their lectures. We will also probably have to wait for the unexpurgated version for a full account of Mansfield’s honourable part in ending the iniquitous “fresher” system at St Andrew’s College.

Most fascinating to my generation is the book’s account of the History Department in the 1950s and early 1960s. Mansfield describes in detail how he developed the famous commentary and discussion of documents. It was an approach many of us took into the high schools, but according to Ken Cable giving documents to first-year students was considered to be quite revolutionary at a time when survey courses were the norm.

There is an affectionate portrait of Marlay Stephen, who brought the world of nineteenth-century Britain vividly to life. We all delighted in his eccentricities—“You are here to do matrimony one, not a university course,” he is alleged to have barked at one girl he was advising on the subjects she was supposed to be taking. But I didn’t realise how troubled he was until I read Mansfield’s sensitive account. Equally sympathetic is his treatment of Duncan MacCallum. MacCallum was notorious for taking most of the year in his Australian History course to get the First Fleet to Australia. (In fairness, when I did the course the fleet arrived late in first term.) Mansfield points out that MacCallum was trying to bring original sources to his students and by doing that he was paying them an immense compliment. The problem was that he was at times hopelessly disorganised. Quotations from Historical Records of Australia were written on scraps of paper, and during his lectures MacCallum would frequently lose his place. For all this Mansfield cites occasions when he was a wise counsellor and a thoughtful colleague. I can also testify that MacCallum was on occasion a fine teacher. Mansfield also does overdue justice to the formidable Marjorie Jacobs, who in her brief time as Acting Head secured the funding and set up many of the new History courses.

Some of Mansfield’s former students, myself included, were worried when following his appointment as Foundation Professor of History at Macquarie University he was made Emeritus Professor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor. He was one of Australia’s great teachers and scholars and we thought he would be wasted as an administrator. As Mansfield explains it, he saw the move as a natural transition for one of Macquarie’s foundation staff. Certainly we at Mitchell College of Advanced Education had good reason to be grateful for his commitment to administration. Mansfield had been a member of our council since 1970, when the chairman was forced to resign. The chairman was a prominent local solicitor whose partner had plundered their practice’s trust funds. Our chairman had replaced the money but had not reported the partner. Even though his conduct had been entirely honourable he was struck off for what was essentially a technical breach. This had become a national scandal when the case was reported in the National Times. We needed a distinguished Chairman of Council urgently and Mansfield agreed to step into the breach. He proved to be a splendid chairman and in spite of his shyness presided over graduation ceremonies with dignity and aplomb. The passages describing how he was displaced by the vice-chairman, Fred Dobbin, when the council was stacked with political appointees, are the bitterest in the book. Mansfield’s departure also cost the college the services of the Foundation Principal, Sam Phillips. Unable to work with Dobbin, he retired. Happily the institution was able to make amends. After Mitchell was amalgamated into Charles Sturt University, Mansfield was appointed Deputy Chancellor.

By a delicious irony Bruce Mansfield established himself as a distinguished international scholar after becoming an administrator. He had made his name as an Australian historian with his biography of E.W. O’Sullivan. Summer Is Almost Over’s description of how he came to write a three-volume history on Erasmus’s reputation, a project that was to dominate the rest of his professional life, will be indispensable to any future account of historical scholarship in Australia.

As Mansfield explains in the introduction to the first volume, Phoenix of his Age: Interpretations of Erasmus 1550–1750, his approach was, to say the least, demanding. “Each writer [on Erasmus] belonged to his own world; his interpretation of Erasmus and his own social and cultural world must be related.” As the project developed, Mansfield was virtually writing an intellectual history of Europe. The second volume, Man On His Own, was reviewed by Hugh Trevor-Roper on the front page of the Times Literary Supplement. The long article took up many of the issues treated in the book and expanded the argument, but Trevor-Roper’s profound respect for Mansfield’s achievement is apparent in every line.

The passages describing the writing of the Erasmus volumes have a lightness and relaxation that are in marked contrast to the portrayal of the tensions and academic politicking that Mansfield had to cope with as Deputy Vice-Chancellor—one wonders how anyone had time to write a lecture. Although he was by all accounts a fine administrator it seems to have taken its toll. His “return to the trade”, as one friend put it, resulted in a final volume on Erasmus in the twentieth century and the delivery of the 1991 G.A. Wood Memorial Lecture in which he described the end of the liberal humanist tradition of teaching and writing history.

As part of the research for this review I asked Bruce to expand on his view of liberal humanist history. He believes that it is part of a rhetorical tradition, a persuasive discipline that poses moral questions. At the heart of his life as an academic is a commitment to teaching. “Your students are entitled to your first and best thoughts.” His first thought on tackling a subject is how he is going to explain it, and Mansfield believes universities are going to pay a heavy price for the current research-only appointments.

With the greatest respect to one of Australia’s great historians, I don’t believe liberal humanist history is lost. It is just no longer well represented in the universities. But those of us who still write in that tradition will find Summer Is Almost Over an invaluable guide to what it is to be a historian.