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[Narrator:] Elizabeth Topham of Westfield, New Jersey, has been spending a good part
of her senior year working on a problem in medieval history. Like Gerri, she looks forward
to teaching in college. For the next two years, she'll be studying in England at Oxford University.
She is one of two dozen especially gifted U.S. undergraduates to receive the much-coveted
Marshall scholarships, given by the British government for Anglo-American mutual assistance.
And now we'd like you to meet Elizabeth Topham. Liz, with so much of today's education being
directed to the field of science, physics in particular, and interest in the world of
tomorrow, why are you so interested in the world of yesterday, namely the Middle Ages?
[Liz:] Well I think that a great deal of the world of today, and probably of
tomorrow, too, can only be understood in terms of the world of yesterday. It may seem strange
to us at the current point to think of our system of law and many of our systems of moral
judgment coming directly from the Middle Ages, but I think this is true. You can trace the
descent, for example, of the English Common Law directly from the tenth to the twelfth
century right into our current constitution and our current system of jury trial.
[Narrator:] In many of the scholars' books on the Middle Ages you get the impression
of unity, cohesion, of people having their place, everything in its place, in contradistinction
to the twentieth century, which has been named the aspirin age, the age of anxiety, the age
of alienation, people not knowing where they're going, where they've come from... Do you find
this true in your studies?
[Liz:] No I don't. I think that perhaps you're oversimplifying the middle ages. I think that
this particular system, from let's say the tenth to the thirteenth century, you have
just as much if not more anxiety than you have currently. You have, for example, at
the end of the tenth century, a very real fear that God is going to destroy the world.
That man's sins are going to be visited upon him, and that not only the physical aspects
of death but the very horrible aspects of torture and hell are going to come upon him
immediately. Therefore you find men giving up all their hope in the world and giving
up also their real property in the world to appease God and to make a better situation
for themselves in Hell. Well, three centuries after this you have the Black Death visited
upon men. This again to the medieval mind is God's anger at man. And you find in works
of art at this particular period horrible representations of worms eating away human
bodies and even more horrible representations of demons carrying men off into flaming fire,
a very horrible, horrible thing, parallel, I think, and even worse than our fear of nuclear
bombs facing us now.
[Narrator:] Why are you doing so much research considering you're an undergraduate student, Liz?
[Liz:] Well, because I'm in history and because I don't think that history can be learned
in terms of classroom experience. You see, history is not really a series of names and
dates and events that have gone on in the past, but rather it's a process of mind which
involves being presented with a certain amount of evidence that has no inherent order in
it itself, but which you, as an historian, put your mind to and draw out, in order, as
I've tried to do in the charts here. And as you do this and impose a coherence and a new
meaning on this evidence, you have history, and that's what history means.