"Lotharingia" by Simon Winder

 

A very personal history of the lands along the border between France and Germany, from the Benelux countries to Switzerland ("a region that is both the dozy back of beyond, and central to the fate of humanity"; Introduction) written by the funniest historian I have read (I also loved his Germania and I'm looking forward to Danubia). 

This book is made glorious by the utter and total irreverence that this historian shows towards the past. Repeatedly describing monuments as fantastically weird and grotesque, repeatedly showing that most wars aren't won but lost through one side being even more hopelessly incompetent than the other, he views the past through affectionate modern eyes, proving that people then were just like people nowadays, just trying to survive the hurricanes of history. 

Of course the patchwork madness of the Holy Roman Empire, representing everything from kingdoms down the individual monasteries, makes it easy to mock Lotharingaria for most of its history.

He's funny about himself, too, for example: "It does not reflect well on me that at an age which is for most boys an eye-rolling frenzy of coughed-over cigarettes and self-abuse I was enjoying making a little cardboard wheel go round." (Ch 8: Fencers and soap-boilers)

Selected Quotes:

• "Here I was in a bus filled with the great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of those who had experienced 'historical' events of various, terrible kinds and who were - with their jolly backpacks and untiring ability to laugh helplessly when one of their number farted - happily oblivious." (Introduction)
• "'Palatinate' in the sense of 'of the palace' ... indicated territory with special, defensive connotations, as in the County Palatine of Chester ... the French word 'paladin' has the same root." (Introduction)
• "Human life in much of Europe is dictated by trees. Pine and beech forests were the great enemies, their seeds creeping forward and within a generation stamping out any areas abandoned by humans." (Ch 1, Ice -sheets to Asterix)
• "Hildegard's ... cure for jaundice by carefully tying a stunned bat to your loins and waiting for it to die seems beyond improvement." (Ch 3, The Sybil of the Rhine)
• "Strasbourg became a great hub for reform ideas, but this was preceded by the inexplicable episode in 1518 when all together some four hundred people danced themselves to death.No plausible explanation has ever been given for what happened: people simply kept dancing until they had seizures or heart attacks." (Ch 6: The life and adventures of Charles V)
• "The nadir of his existence was probably being defeated while fighting in Brittany, pretending to be dead on the battlefield and then being unfortunately recognized." (Ch 6: The Oranges)
• "A very strange emblem of two burly mermen with their suffused and muscular tails interwined. It was completely impossible not to see this as an early-modern thumbs-up for male love, albeit of a specialized kind, but I fear it may just have been some tedious allegory of different rivers joining their courses." (Ch 7: Whitewash and clear glass)
• "Ferdinand's advisers flapped their arms about with excitement, not knowing whether to pray or self-flagellate first." (Ch 8: 'A harvest of joys')
• "Most famous was Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Royalist general, whose stylish clothing, corkscrew locks, soft-leather accessories and damn-your-eyes manner came to define Cavalier chic before the inevitable fashion change of Cromwell's no-more-Christmas, black-and-white collection." Ch 8: Elizabeth and her children)
• "How startling it would be to find an elaborate sculpture of a nymph on her way to the bath, with a sensible gown on and a little basket for her shampoo, rather than being 'surprised' in the bath in a skittish naked pose." (Ch 8: Uncle Toby's hobby-horse)
• "The series of civil wars that wrecked the British Isles from 1639 to 1653 killed a greater percentage of the population that the First World War." (Ch 8: 'Too late to be ambitious')
• "A bedlam of aristocratic spongers and weirdos who were not used to earning a living but who, cut off from their estates, soon ran out of money." (Ch 10: 'The old times have gone')
• "There is a pub partly on Dutch and partly on Belgian territory which, reflecting different licensing laws, allows you to keep drinking just by jumping over a line on the floor." (Ch 10: 'What is there to fear if you are a slave?')
• "Neutral Moresnet was so small that if there was a fire it had to call in the Prussian fire brigade." (Ch 11: Strange happenings underground)
• "Luxembourg battles with Edinburgh or Budapest in any Most Craggy City contest." (Ch 11: Grand Duchies, Empires and Kingdoms)
• "The Prussians would only ever pause because they assumed they were being led into a cunning trap, which in each case turned out to be simply a piece of rank incompetence." (Ch 12:Kilometre pigs)

September 2023; 470 pages