Day: 17 September 2007

It could hardly get any better than this – to stumble upon a post about Moscow in 1664 in a blog written by Cardinal Wolsey. The fact that it’s twenty minutes past eleven at night would make me doubt things, but no, this is true: while the life of Henry VIII is being adapted and re-adapted for the screen, his Humble Servant is blogging away “on Tudor history, medieval history, early-modern history and anything else that takes his fancy”.

All jokes aside, Cardinal Wolsey’s Today in History is a really interesting blog, which I haven’t read before. Having spent several years studying mid-Tudor history and specialising in the history of Edward VI’s reign, I was glad to find this post about child kings.

Thanks a lot to Cardinal Wolsey who got me started on remembering my Medieval and Early Modern History studies. I finally feel it is appropriate to tell the story that happened in Moscow in 2003. As you might know, in Russia we have predominantly oral exams, which involve learning a lot of facts, dates, names, definitions, etc., by heart. The exam is taken by a senior academic, who is often assisted by a junior member of staff. So, in my first (and by far the only) year of Ph.D. in History I assisted three or four times, and the final time it was during the summer exam session at the Early Modern History exam.

This 2nd year student had two questions: one on socio-economic history of England in the 16th c., another on the history of German Reformation. He knew his first question badly, and answering it to the senior examiner would have made no difference, as the main examiner was my supervisor, herself an English scholar.

We dragged through this first question, and then I finally “released” him from this turmoil and suggested he’d start answering his second question.

The student evidently thought that German Reformation was an easy question, and that since I was an English scholar I was therefore not a German scholar, so it wouldn’t be too difficult to impress me with some generic phrases. And thus, sitting opposite me at the desk, he almost struck a pose, and pronounced the first sentence that was supposed to start a memorable answer:

– Reformation in Germany was begun by Martin Luther King.

I made my best effort not to take a notice. Alas, the student heard what he said. He shrank and mumbled with a confused smile:

– I mean, simply Martin Luther.

One of my former teachers told me recently he thought this was a joke. It was, of course – except that it was true.