Peter Linehan
Well-liked scholar of medieval Spain who also edited the history of St John’s College, Cambridge
PETER LINEHAN, who has died aged 76, was in his generation the foremost Anglophone historian of medieval Spain; for 54 years a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, he was exceptionally productive as a researcher, but also never ceased to relish participation in all aspects of College life: as a teacher, a Tutor, and, for a highly entertaining decade, Dean in charge of student discipline.
Though some dons start their careers intending to sustain their interest in each of these disparate aspects of their vocation, few prove capable of doing so over a lifetime. What animated Linehan’s enduring success in both research and College duties was his novelist’s eye for a telling detail or foible.
He had a dowser’s capacity to divine a revealing absurdity. Once detected, he would savour exactly the right words to tap it most effectively. He wielded English prose, in writing and in conversation, with the precision of a Toledan foil. He wrote as he spoke, with an arch, teasing wit.
The elder son of John Linehan, stockbroker’s clerk, and his wife Kathleen (née Farrell), primary schoolteacher, Peter Anthony Linehan was born at Mortlake in London on July 11 1943; his parents were the children of Irish immigrants.
He was brought up and remained a practising Catholic, and went as a scholarship boy to St Benedict’s School, Ealing, where Chris Patten was a contemporary, and then, in 1961, on to St John’s with an entrance scholarship to read History, the first person in his family to attend university.
While still a schoolboy, he had made an epiphanic trip to Spain. Though he scarcely touched on Spanish history as an undergraduate, and specialised in the Middle Ages, he determined to write a doctorate on the history of the Second Republic. But it rapidly became clear that research on that subject would not be possible under Franco, so he turned instead to the ecclesiastical history of medieval Spain.
Even that proved difficult enough in practical terms. Not only did he have to fend off the suspicions of the security police at the implausibility of his explanation for his presence in the country, he also had to contend with those of ecclesiastical archivists.
They evinced a peculiarly clerical compound of xenophobia, obstruction, and idleness: little had changed since Richard Ford evoked in 1845 “the hungry or siestose canon [of Toledo] yawning at your elbow, and repenting of having unlocked the prison-door.”
In the 1960s, the archive at Toledo was open for one hour a day on weekdays other than feast days. Providentially, Linehan struck a tacit deal with an assistant archivist in Toledo, whom he would take for bibulous lunches after the archive had closed for the day. The assistant would return to the peace of the archive to snooze over his breviary; Linehan would covertly accompany him, and get to work.
The book which resulted, The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century, provoked a minor scandal when it was translated into Spanish. It showed that contrary to carefully cultivated myth, the medieval Spanish Church had not been the Pope’s best-drilled regiment, but a chaotic collection of insubordinate and conflicting institutions. The authorities could not fathom how Linehan had gained access to so many documents; it was rumoured that the canon archivist of Toledo suspected witchcraft.
Linehan took great pride in an episcopal pronouncement that he was an “enemy of the church”. In the upper echelons of the Spanish clergy in the 1960s, no great gap was perceived between the Middle Ages and the present.
His first book set his intellectual trajectory, not just in terms of undermining stalwartly defended official orthodoxies. All his work concentrated heavily on documentary evidence, much of which he unearthed for the first time. Vast amounts had not even been discovered, let alone edited.
He wrote more than a hundred articles, and initiated a project to publish treasures from the Toledan archive. His largest and most important book, History and
the Historians of Medieval
Spain, attempts to examine the whole sweep, from the conquest of Visigothic Spain by the Moors in 711 to the fall of the final Moorish redoubt, Granada, in 1492, and beyond.
It is not a straightforward history of the period, but of how Spanish historians have made sense of, or shaped, their medieval history, from the ninth century down to the post-franco era. It involves, for instance, unravelling the fiendishly complicated history of Spanish historical writing during the Middle Ages and later. Much of the evidence remains unedited, or worse, misleadingly edited.
This masterpiece was followed by an exercise of a totally different kind: an exposé of a mid-13th century scandal involving the inmates of a neighbouring friary and nunnery, entitled
The Ladies of Zamora,
though nicknamed by Linehan “Nuns in the Oven” (the convent oven being one venue for the illicit trysts). In terms of theme both books were in some ways very modern, but based on impeccable scholarship. There were many more, one published earlier this year, another still in press.
As editor of a massive history of St John’s College – a post-medieval foundation – he elected to write the 20th-century section. He claimed to have done so because the awareness of successive Masters that he was chronicling the College’s contemporary history made them nervous, and therefore inclined to support his bids to retain, long into retirement, his splendid set of rooms (over which, he relished recounting, a ghost could sometimes be heard).
But assuming the role of modern historian of St John’s also enabled him to write an elegy for a world which was being rapidly lost, for all sorts of regrettable reasons. He did his best to slow down that process. In Trollopian terms, he was very much an Archdeacon, with an acute nose for sniffing out Slope-ish cant.
He took his duties as a tutor extremely seriously – he believed that he remained a tutor for life, not just for three years. He was an extravagant and convivial host. As Dean, he was extraordinarily inventive in his punishment of miscreants, because he disliked the divisive effect of fines. A minor penalty involved standing in the middle of the lawn outside his set, begowned, and flapping the sleeves of one’s gown to frighten away the pigeons.
Occasionally he would lean out of his window and shout “more flapping” at slackers. Bemused tourists inferred that this was some arcane Cambridge custom. His inscrutable interrogations of suspects had Smiley-esque qualities, including the spectacles, but spiced with wry humour, and sucking on his pipe.
An undergraduate who had been apprehended in the small hours drawing an enormous penis in flour on a lawn was asked if he was one of “those religious fundamentalist chappies” currently featuring in the press. He was told that although the College was a multi-faith institution, which valued diversity, and which had extensive grounds, it simply did not have sufficient lawns for all undergraduates to draw their religious symbols on such a scale.
When the offender replied that he had not been drawing the symbol of his religion, he was asked: “Are you telling me, then, that you are just a p---k?” His desperate response that it had only been flour was met with “Ah, but was it self-raising flour?”
Academic honours flowed. The two which afforded him most pleasure were his Fellowship of the British Academy, and his honorary doctorate at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. The latter brought with it a sumptuous gown and a bonnet of such outlandish proportions that it had to be posted home. To Linehan’s chagrin it was lost in the post, but the thought of someone somewhere wearing it illegitimately afforded some consolation.
Linehan is survived by his wife Christine (née Callaghan), an editor, and their daughter and two sons. Many colleagues, tutees and pupils will also recall him with great fondness for the rest of the lives which he played no small part in shaping.
Peter Linehan, born July 11 1943, died July 9 2020