John Larner was one of a group of post-war British and American
historians who changed our perceptions of Italy during the Renaissance. He
then turned to the history of exploration and became an authority on Marco Polo
and Christopher Columbus.
The adopted son
of a schoolteacher mother and a father who worked as a park-keeper on Hampstead
Heath, Larner was a grammar-school boy from suburban London who after National Service gained a place at New College,
Oxford in 1951.
His mother died in his first year there (he had lost his father at the age of
nine) and it was a source of immense regret that he could never repay the
sacrifices she had made for his education. Instead he threw himself into his
work, received a first-class degree and was steered towards an interest in Italy by the
seminars on the Renaissance of his tutor, Harry Bell. Considered gifted enough
to pursue an academic career without a doctorate (commonly then considered an
unnecessary inconvenience) Larner received a
scholarship at the British School at Rome
in 1954.
By his own
admission, Larner did little work there in his first
two years. Instead he bought a scooter, explored Italy
and enjoyed the constant round of parties which were a feature of the British School in those days. At the end of two
years, just as he was allegedly considering a career as a fruit-and-wine
importer, he was offered a third year's scholarship. The considerable amount of
charm which must have been deployed to obtain that offer suggest that the Larner persona was now firmly in place. To the end of his
life he exuded a warmth and vitality that disguised his immense capacity for
hard work. He did not waste the chance he had been given.
The result was
The Lords of Romagna, published in English in 1965 and translated into Italian
in 1972. The regional study had become integral to research into Italian
history: but Larner was original in moving away from
fashionable Tuscany and Rome, to study the politics of a comparative
rural backwater.
Many earlier
historians saw the seizure of power by aristocratic families in the late 13th
century as the antithesis of the allegedly "democratic" communes; Larner saw it as an inevitable part of state building in
the late Middle Ages. As unsentimental about the signorie as he was about the commune, Larner
nevertheless portrayed them as the result of a professionalisation
of government rather than mere lawlessness. They also fulfilled an important
aspiration for local independence, both from the ambitions of universal rulers
such as Pope and Emperor, and also greedy neighbours.
The work struck a chord in Italy
and Larner became a minor celebrity, especially in Romagna.
By this time he
had taken a post at Glasgow
University. In the 1960s
and 1970s it was the home of talented young medievalists, including Michael Clanchy, Patrick Wormald and
J.A.F. Thomson. Larner was stimulated to produce Culture
and Society in Italy,
1290-1420 (1971).
The centrepiece of the book was a profound examination of
"The artist and society". Here Larner
displayed his full strength as a historian, combining a facility with archive
material and administrative records with an extraordinarily deep knowledge of
the arts, above all Italian literature. Through this he was able to appreciate
not just the development of the individual genius and technique, but also the
economic and political sinews which made it possible. For Larner
the emergence of the state was crucial for the elevation of the artist through
the transformation of the market for art and literature.
This was followed
in 1980 by Italy
in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, 1216-1380, a more conventional textbook
as part of a Longman series. Even here Larner took on
the difficult task of writing a general history of the whole peninsula, mainly
from primary sources, and paying due attention to the lives of women, children
and the poor. It was an intellectual tour de force and again Larner was paid the compliment of having his book
translated into Italian.
This work proved
to be Larner's last on mainstream Italian history. In
Glasgow he had
met and married Christina "Kirsty" Ross, herself a distinguished historian of Scottish witchcraft
with whom he had two sons, Gavin and Patrick (the latter was to die of
meningitis aged only 30). The couple's hospitality and parties in the West End
of Glasgow were legendary. But in 1983 Kirsty died of
cancer, leaving Larner bereft. His subsequent
relationship with Jane McCusker was a fresh start
which culminated in a happy marriage.
Perhaps because
of this as much as for any professional reason he decided on a drastic change
of direction in his research. He visited archives in Spain and published a series of
articles on Columbus, one of which, "North American Hero? Christopher
Columbus, 1702-2002", was to win the American Philosophical Society's
prestigious Henry Allen Moe Prize in 1993. Larner was
interested as much in the reception and use made of Columbus and his works as in the man himself,
and this laid the foundation for the reconciliation of his old and new research
interests.
His acclaimed Marco
Polo and the Discovery of the World (1999) combined a study of the man and
his journey overland to China
at the end of the 13th century, with the history of the production of a text
and an examination of its impact on the later world. Marco Polo's work has
always puzzled historians; the Venetian traveller
went east during the period of the Yuan dynasty, originally Mongols from the
Steppes. During a stay of 17 years he claimed to have made a detailed study of
the country and risen high in the Imperial government. Yet during all that time
he learnt little of the language and landmarks such as the Great Wall go
unmentioned in his reminiscences.
Larner showed that crude
theories of an elaborate hoax were simply wrong and that we have good reason to
believe Marco Polo. During his stay the Great Wall was in ruins (most of what
we see today is later rebuilding). A man from Italy surrounded by vast ancient
classical debris probably thought nothing of it. Knowledge of Chinese was less
important than that of Mongol, the language of the ruling class which Polo did
learn. Larner also closely examined textual evidence
of Columbus's knowledge of his forebear and
concluded that while Columbus
read Polo, it was not as a bookish would-be explorer making a scientific case
for funding before his trip westward, but afterwards as a simple sailor trying
to identify what it was he had discovered.
John Larner spent almost his entire career in Glasgow, a city he grew to love. The
university benefited from the cosmopolitan perspective of a sometimes
mischievous outsider. Only those familiar with the west of Scotland can
appreciate just how audacious Larner was in finishing
a lecture on Calvin half an hour early on the grounds that Calvin was neither
interesting nor important.
He was a genial
colleague and capable teacher and, although he could be critical, was
unfailingly polite. His own loud snore made him very concerned not to fall
asleep during research papers. During his colleagues' more tedious offerings he
would therefore sometimes challenge his neighbour to
a game of noughts and crosses. Deafness and an often
stated opinion that increasing administration made the job too much like hard
work led to his taking early retirement in 1994.
For all his
modesty and self-deprecatory humour, Larner was an important scholar who knew his own worth. As
an epitaph for himself he suggested updating the conclusion of Petrarch's last
letter: "You will find me to the end with my pen in my hand (or in my case
my fingers at the computer)." It was very nearly so.
John Patrick Larner, historian: born Southsea,
Hampshire 24 March 1930; Rome Medieval Scholar, British School at Rome 1954-57;
Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, then Reader in History, Glasgow University 1957-78,
Professor of History 1978-94 (Emeritus); married 1960 Kirsty
Ross (died 1983; one son, and one son deceased), 1991 Jane McCusker;
died Stirling 24 February 2008.