We are very sorry to learn of the death of the historian, Dame Jinty Nelson, who died on 14 October. Jinty was a superb and hugely respected historian of early medieval Europe and is widely known for her publications, which include The Frankish World, 750–900 (1996), Courts, Elites and Gendered Power in the Early Middle Ages (2007), and King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne (2019).

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1979, Jinty was appointed the Society’s first female President in November 2000. She served for four years and her RHS Presidential Lectures explored ‘England and the Continent in the Ninth Century’ via studies of ‘Ends and Beginnings’ (2002), ‘The Vikings and Others’ (2003), ‘Rights and Rituals’ (2004) and ‘Bodies and Minds’ (2005).

Her considerable contribution to the Society, and to the historical profession, is remembered by the Society’s Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowships, which are awarded annually to support innovative teaching.

Jinty’s own teaching career was wholly associated with King’s College London which she joined in 1970, becoming a Professor in 1993. Three years later she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In addition to her work for the Royal Historical Society, Jinty also served as President of the Ecclesiastical History Society and as a Vice-President of the British Academy.

Jinty Nelson – a memoir

by royalhistsoc | Oct 25, 2024 | General | 0 comments

The Royal Historical Society was deeply saddened to learn last week of the death of the historian and former RHS President, Dame Jinty Nelson FBA.

In this post, her close friend, colleague and fellow RHS Councillor, Professor Pauline Stafford, offers a memoir of Jinty as a champion of history, a teacher, scholar and collaborator with so many across the discipline.

We are very grateful to Professor Stafford for this article and her observations on Jinty Nelson as RHS President and Jinty’s enormous contribution to the Society. 

I first met Jinty Nelson around 50 years ago. We had both contributed essays to a collected volume and the editor had passed mine on to her. I received a letter from her full of warm enthusiasm, while quietly correcting a couple of points, together with an invitation to visit her at King’s next time I was in London. When I did so, we talked about family politics and women in the early middle ages, a shared historical interest, and, prompted by a picture of two small children on her desk, about being a working mother and academic. The connection was immediate, deep and long-lasting—friendship at first sight. Jinty had that effect on so many people. The warmth of her personality, her genuine and serious interest in other people and their work, meant that she acquired friends as other people acquire acquaintances. It was the magic of the ‘Jinty factor’ which she brought to all her professional activities, including her time as Royal Historical Society President.

Two decades later, in 1994, we were both elected to the Council of the Society in the same year. Four years later I became a Vice-President, and in 2000 Jinty was elected President – the first woman President. That ‘first’ was momentous. As Jinty herself said when she succeeded Peter Marshall in November 2000, ‘In the Council Room, the portraits of the presidential ancestors, en masse, can seem intimidating.’ What she did not add, but what we all knew, was that the gallery which hung over the Council table was entirely male. Wherever Council sits now, those presidential ancestors will look very different—and Jinty marks the turning point.

Jinty’s presidency was an outstanding one, particularly in turning the Society outwards towards its public role in the historical profession and in the defence of history.

The presidency was a role to which she proved herself entirely suited. But at the point of her election ‘suited’ was not how she found herself. No-one who knew Jinty would accuse her of being fashion-conscious. Jeans or walking trousers, shirt and gilet were her trademark garb—varying in weight by the seasons, and sometimes accompanied by a jaunty beret in tribute to her abiding love of France. Jinty’s wardrobe thus contained no clothes which she judged appropriate for the public face of the RHS which she would now present. So she decided she must have a trouser suit, and later a pair of tartan trews and a kilt were added—a nod to her pride in her Scottish ancestry. (The obligatory ‘L’ in J. L. Nelson stands for Laughland, her Scottish mother’s maiden name.) I have the kilt on good authority, but in 50 years I never saw her in a dress or skirt. The suit was worn on the formal occasions of public lectures. The signature jeans and gilet still featured at Council meetings.

Photograph by Fran Monks © Fran Monks www.franmonks.com

Jinty’s presidency was an outstanding one, particularly in turning the Society outwards towards its public role in the historical profession and in the defence of history. In this respect she continued the work of two other presidents, her immediate predecessors Rees Davies and Peter Marshall, whose importance she typically recognised when taking up her role. ‘If Peter Marshall thought it an impossible act to follow after Rees Davies, the successor’s successor is doubly daunted!’

But follow them she did, and with great distinction. She was determined to continue to expand the Fellowship, and the process of election was streamlined. Widening the reach of the Society within the profession also meant literally getting it out of London. She continued the practice of holding some of the Society’s lectures and the accompanying Council meeting at higher education institutions throughout the UK. Council members trooped off to Manchester, Aberystwyth, Newcastle, Kent—and to Sunderland, Greenwich, Oxford Brookes, the University of the West of England as Jinty continued Peter Marshall’s determination to extend the Society’s presence in the post-1992 new universities. Meetings with staff were part of those visits, important ways in which the Society became aware of the issues which affected those teaching the subject and the pressures and concerns they felt.

Teaching was one of her central and abiding interests. As Rick Trainor observed to me, ‘Encountering Jinty as President was my first contact with her and what particularly impressed me was that this quintessential scholar and university teacher thought it important—for herself and for all historians—to pay close attention to what was happening to history in schools, in teaching at all higher education institutions, and in defending the best aspects of UK academia from particular potentially negative Government policies.’

She was acutely aware how teaching—and not just in Higher Education—was essential to the health of the discipline. It was entirely appropriate that the Society endowed Teaching Fellowships in her name.

Under Jinty the Society concerned itself with the school curriculum, continuing and strengthening its links and activities with the Historical Association. In 2004, in the face of restructurings, closures and the loss of history posts, the RHS Teaching Policy Committee undertook a survey across all HE institutions to ‘provide reliable rather than anecdotal information about the health of our discipline and the challenges facing it.’ As Rick notes, she was acutely aware how teaching—and not just in Higher Education—was essential to the health of the discipline. It was entirely appropriate that the Society endowed Teaching Fellowships in her name.

When he took over as President from Jinty in November 2004, Martin Daunton paid tribute to her ‘determined efforts to ensure that the Society has a public face.’ Under her aegis a full review of the Society’s structures had been undertaken in autumn 2002 responding precisely to the ‘increasing number of public roles the Society performs and the broadening constituency it represents.’ Committees were reorganised ‘encouraging Council to be pro-active in decision making . . . rather than being merely responsive to demands from government  and funding bodies on proposals for change.’ That public role had been growing during the tenure of her immediate predecessors, increased exponentially during her years, and has continued to expand ever since.

One famous manifestation of this came in Spring 2003, in response to reported remarks of the then Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Charles Clarke: ‘I don’t mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them.’ Clarke claimed to have been misquoted, but a transcript of his remarks merely extended his negative assessment to history at university level: ‘I argue that what I described as the medieval concept of a community of scholars seeking truth is not in itself a justification for the state to put money into that.’

Jinty was predictably goaded and forthright in her response. It is worth quoting in full, as it sums up so much of what inspired her—as a teacher and historian, but also as RHS President:

Astonishment was my first reaction to Mr Clarke’s reported comments on the “ornamental purposes” of medieval historians. This is dismal dismissal.

 

But his assertion that the state should only pay for higher education that had “clear usefulness” is positively alarming. That Mr Clarke’s “usefulness” should refer to a concept of “the wider social and economic role of universities” which is crudely utilitarian and materialist is all too credible, because that is the main thrust of the white paper he issued in January.

 

It is Mr Clarke, not those of us engaged in university history or, I think, in the humanities generally, who must think again about usefulness. We university teachers and researchers are not self-absorbed elitists. We appreciate that a government has to concern itself with the nation’s material well-being. We have endorsed the desirability of widening access as one means of maximising social justice. But we reject passionately notions of well-being and justice that leave out humanity. However diverse historians’ specialisms may be, all of us think history useful because it promotes and imparts humane knowledge and understanding of what has made our world in the long- and short-term past, and hence of humankind’s problems and potentialities in the present and future.

 

How would senior citizens interested in genealogy or local history get along without universities’ outputs? We could justify funding the humanities on wealth-creation grounds too, of course: how would tourism or the heritage industry, publishing or the media, flourish without us? But the gist of our reply to Mr Clarke is that he has not yet grasped what a really useful higher education is all about.

Oh to have been a fly on the wall when Jinty and Harry Dickinson met the Secretary of State in 2004 to discuss the whole gamut of history teaching.

In his assessment of her presidency, Martin recognised the financial problems of the Society during her years, coinciding as they did with a bear market on the Stock Exchange. But, he added, the Society had enjoyed a ‘bull market intellectually and organisationally’, and, as he put it, ‘the Society has become truly sociable’.

That draws attention to something less tangible but equally if not more important than committee reorganisation or public discussions with Secretaries of State, namely the influence of Jinty’s own personality on her tenure, what I have called ‘the magic of the “Jinty factor”‘—her relations with people.

Hers were years of ever wider and closer work with other organisations concerned with the future of the discipline. Jinty was a natural collaborator.

Jinty was someone supremely interested in people: someone who listened carefully to what they said, who always took the time and trouble to know about the person with whom she was engaged. These were qualities which made her a great teacher: the outpouring of affection and appreciation on social media since her death is testimony to that. But they also played a crucial role in her success as the Society’s President. Hers were years of ever wider and closer work with other organisations concerned with the future of the discipline. Jinty was a natural collaborator. They influenced her attitude to the Society’s lecturers, and the long and warm introductions which Peter Mandler remembers ‘showing that she had read the work of the lecturer, AND appreciated its particular qualities, AND thought how it fitted into broader historiographical perspectives.’ They were manifest in all the Society’s activities and were undoubtedly a factor drawing others into its Fellowship and work.

I have said little about Jinty the scholar: proper consideration of that would make this memoir even longer than it is. She was undoubtedly an outstanding one, with a reputation which extended well beyond these shores—something else from which the Society benefited. Her usual form of publication was articles and papers, four collected volumes of which were published. That is a tribute to how much in demand she always was as a speaker, how much she was sought after for conferences—where her contributions were invariably sharp, illuminating and enriching. She could rarely bring herself to say no to these many demands on her time. The editors of the resulting volumes thus often faced the agony of her notoriously last-minute delivery; fortunately, the quality of what they finally received was always worth the nail-biting finishing stretch.

She was a co-founder of the Women’s History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research. She was a supporter of other women in their careers. Like others of her generation, she was a very important role model.

Jinty was a woman historian and a historian of women. She was one of a generation of women academics who, unlike most of those who taught us, were married and often had children. Was her work affected by that personal biography? In her study of women and family certainly. She was of major importance in bringing these to the centre of early medieval politics. Few would now write about those politics without including them. She was a co-founder of the Women’s History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research. She was a supporter of other women in their careers. Like others of her generation, she was a very important role model. But women’s history was only one of her interests. And she was always a historian, warm, supportive and approachable, but also acute and authoritative in her judgements on historians and the history they wrote.

Others, I hope, will write more about her work. But one thing which always struck me was how much the people of this remote past engaged her. It is difficult to study individuals in this period, but Jinty managed to make them live. It should come as no surprise that the only two monographs she published were both biographies, of Charlemagne and Charles the Bald. Who else would have noted the sound of the little feet of ‘the three-year-old show-stealer’ Charles the Bald as he pattered along in the stately procession of the court, or have had a section of a chapter in her great biography of Charlemagne entitled ‘How Charles lost his first first milk tooth’?

The past was once inhabited by physical people in real places, and Jinty was always aware of that. One holiday took us together around Frankish and Carolingian sites in the Low Countries, Germany and Northern France. On the visit to Nivelles, a venerable nunnery site, we hung around the church long enough to persuade the concierge to allow us entry to the crypt, which houses the skeleton of Charlemagne’s first wife, Himiltrud—obviously a very tall woman. Jinty was delighted and mused on what a fine couple she and the 6’3″ Charlemagne must have made. That same holiday took us to Echternach, where the crypt is all that survives of the early medieval church. Jinty sat there, quietly and long, deeply moved, absorbing herself in the place where once the English missionary Willibrord would have prayed.

But the enjoyment of the present did not escape her. While in Echternach, we stayed at a small hotel with a restaurant. Tucked away at the end of its unassuming menu we were astonished to discover the ‘Cellier du Patron’, a list of some very old and fine clarets, at unbelievably low prices. We attempted to do it justice during our brief stay. We later celebrated delivery of her Charlemagne manuscript with a bottle of white Burgundy—Corton Charlemagne. The name is connected to a story of his beard, the dribbling of red wine down it, and the resulting order of his wife that the offending vineyard should in future produce only white wine. Jinty was unaware of the alleged connection with the great man, but loved the legend. She also appreciated the wine.

Jinty Nelson (left) and Pauline Stafford

The President of the Royal Historical Society and Vice-President of the British Academy was also a member of the History Workshop editorial collective, and from a time when that organisation’s publication still subtitled itself a ‘Journal of Socialist and Feminist historians’.

Jinty had many roles, President of the Royal Historical Society among the most important public ones. There were other Jintys. The music lover who played Bach on her piano to the end. The family Jinty, who remembered in the Acknowledgements to her Charlemagne book children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews; photos of her children, grandchildren and her sister’s family surrounded her at home. Jinty the lifelong radical: holding hands in a ring of solidarity with the Greenham Common women; member of CND, long-term—if often critical—member of the Labour party. (Her mother was a Labour candidate for Blackpool.) The President of the Royal Historical Society and Vice-President of the British Academy was also a member of the History Workshop editorial collective, and from a time when that organisation’s publication still subtitled itself a ‘Journal of Socialist and Feminist historians’.

Had Jinty written this memoir she might have wanted to see herself as the proverbial ‘dwarf on the shoulders of giants’. She would certainly have stressed the significance especially of Rees Davies and Peter Marshall her predecessors. She would have wished to celebrate the members of Council who helped her achieve so much. She would undoubtedly have made special mention of her Executive Secretary, Joy McCarthy, who went far beyond clerical duties in her understanding of and contribution to the Society. All this would be correct. But Jinty belongs with the giants. The Society owes her a huge debt of gratitude.

About the author

Pauline Stafford is Professor Emerita at the University of Liverpool and Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds. Professor Stafford is a former Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society and currently an Honorary Vice-President.