Bettany Hughes's Reading List

"This is a collection of chapters published by the British Museum Press. It was published in 1998, which was just at the time when I was starting to really consolidate all my research in this field. It was one of those moments when I was walking through the British Museum and I saw this book and thought, how fantastic, someone is thinking along the same lines as me. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . What is incredibly helpful about this book is that it deals with different kinds of goddesses, right from the very earliest examples in prehistory, going back to around 25,000 BC, and it looks at the goddesses in the Middle East and the early Israelite religion and then the slightly later British goddesses. This book is a very good place to start because it very intelligently does the beginning of the story. What is very useful about it is that it challenges what had become a kind of orthodoxy among people who study goddess worship. There was a very rose-tinted spectacle view of things that said that at one point in time goddesses were in charge and there was an almighty mother goddess. The world was at peace, matriarchy was the order of the day, everything was OK with human society. And of course the picture is much more subtle and varied and complex than that. The book is very good at looking in great depth at different traditions, but it doesn’t do so with a polemic or with an idealised view of the world. They talk about the goddesses of Çatalhöyük [in Neolithic Anatolia], which is one the earliest surviving cities that we know of. What is fascinating about it is that it is one of the first examples we have of people living together in a kind of proto-city. They have found both male and female figurines, and what is really striking is the potency of the female figures that are found there. It is almost like the birth of the goddess. She is not in charge but this is where we see her emerging. She is often beautifully fat. There is a very famous picture of this goddess figurine from Çatalhöyük where she is sitting with these wonderful big fat thighs and breasts and stomach, flanked by two big cats, probably leopards. So there is no denying her potency in a figurine like that. “Through early religions…goddesses are both wonderful and sexual and in charge of fertility, but also very scary and very closely connected with death.” But what I am fascinated by is that if you look at some of the other female figurines – and this is something I do a whole section on in Divine Women – you will see that although she is pregnant from the front, if you turn her slowly around the flesh starts to give way to bones and she becomes a skeleton from behind. I think that is really key because what that is doing is setting up a paradigm that you then see right through early religions, where goddesses are both wonderful and sexual and in charge of fertility, but also very scary and very closely connected with death. And my theory, as a mother, is that if you look at the infant mortality rates in ancient societies you will find that for every two children that were born one would be born dead – so it was 50-50 if they lived or were stillborn. Very close, and I think more than it just being about women dying in childbirth. There is this idea that women were thought to be creatures that could physically generate both life and death, and who could almost decide whether they were carrying life or death within them."

"This is a lovely book which is beautifully produced and very detailed. It puts the priestesses in the classical world in their prehistoric context and then it looks ahead to Christianity . One of the sections which really appeals to me is the discussion about the priestesses who were the keepers of keys of the temples in ancient Athens. These keys were huge great things. You see them carved on the headstones of women when they are buried. They are probably slightly magnified to make an impressive picture but nonetheless they were big things. They were almost like the starter handles to crank up cars. Exactly, and what is important to remember is that this was a very important position to have because temples were really the banks of the city. That is where all the treasures were stored, so these women were in charge of protecting the material physical wealth of the community. I really loved the fact that Joan focused on that because it was very clever and visual. It really brought into focus an aspect of priestess culture that we might not automatically think of. When you say priestesses it sort of conjures up women wafting about in flowing robes, but I think there is something much earthier going on. It is something you could inherit so you could get these dynasties of priests and priestesses. Often it was the aristocrats, it is what noble women did. And if you look right back to Bronze Age texts you can see it was a way of becoming wealthy. There is this fantastic collection of texts from the Hittites in Turkey and they talk about the kind of wealth that the priestess could inherit, and we are talking about huge amounts of stuff – like 150 male slaves. Yes, you didn’t have to be celibate so they almost certainly had children."

"This is a collection of fragments of Sappho’s poems. They are so beautiful, I would recommend them to anyone. Yes, she is concentrating on the fragments so you might get three words and then a gap, which makes the poems even more tantalising and mesmerising because that which is left is so beautiful. Sappho has such wonderful lines. She writes “My child is like golden flowers to me”, and is the first person to talk about love being bittersweet, although she is actually more apposite because she says it is sweet and then bitter, which is how love often ends up. Increasingly we think that she was a priestess for the goddess Aphrodite and one of the things she was trying to do was to coach young girls in the story of the goddess and how important love is in all its aspects. She comes from the island of Lesbos, which is where we get the word lesbian. And there is no doubt that the poetry is very erotic in the way it describes girls. But you have to think of it as a completely different sexual landscape back in the ancient world. So it is also possible that she was just being very sensual. She writes about the landscape and the girls in a similar way. Well, I think it is because she has got all these young girls in her care where they write love poems to one another. They do describe one another in very erotic terms, so it is possible that they had some kind of sexual relationship. Yes, and you have to understand that all these girls were being trained to be good wives so it wasn’t this little lesbian enclave. And this was a stage of their sexual and social development. It is almost like they are learning about love with one another and then they go into heterosexual marriage after that."

"Byzantium is one of the first ever monotheistic empires. It is incredibly influential. It always appears as a footnote in Western history but at the time it was in control of vast parts of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and at times North Africa. So this was a Greek Orthodox Christian Empire. It is interesting to see what you do in a monotheistic civilisation. It is the first time it has really happened to any full-blooded degree. The Romans became Christians very late in their development and the Byzantine Empire was set up in the fourth century as the new Christian capital of the new Roman world. “Mary the mother of Jesus was not just described as the mother of Jesus but as the actual mother of God himself, which is really amazing.” So suddenly you have a male God, and Jesus who is the Son of God as our chief representative. What the Byzantine empresses did, very cleverly, was to keep one foot in the pagan past. They used their old traditions, which believed in female deities, and took on the mantle in a monotheistic way. You have the great Empress Theodora who helped to build Hagia Sophia in Istanbul with her husband Justinian. She sits alongside Justinian as if she is the mother of God, making judgement in the heavenly court. By this time, interestingly, among the Byzantine empresses, Mary the mother of Jesus was not just described as the mother of Jesus but as the actual mother of God himself, which is really amazing. So that puts her in pole position, and the empresses really associate themselves with the cult of Mary. Here you have these flesh and blood women associating themselves with the divine."

"We are talking about very early Christianity here and it is a much neglected field of study to which Gary has contributed a great deal of scholarship. He is very balanced and doesn’t come to any conclusions for which there is no evidence. But he does point out that women had a much stronger role in the early church than the official versions tell us. Women were working as priests and possibly bishops in the early church. He doesn’t say there were definitely female bishops but I think there were. So if you want a book which pulls together all the evidence of what was actually going on in the church, it is a fantastically robust volume because this is the kind of topic that you can’t mess around with. He is great at putting all the evidence on the page. I think there is an initial killer blow, in that once Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire it means it suddenly goes from being a fledgling faith, which is primarily to do with social justice and nurtures women and their role, to something that has a massive territory and militarised infrastructure to call its own – it has soldiers and garrisons. The emperor is the head of the army and he is one of the key players and so it becomes a militarised religion rather than one that is standing outside society and trying to get in. That is a bit later, but the foot soldiers of Christ had more muscle than the priestesses of Christ. In Divine Women we interview an academic from Oxford who has collated 53 volumes on the women of Islam and there are thousands of named women there over the early years. He found huge numbers of women who not only taught the basic precepts of Islam but actually preached in the mosques of Medina, Cairo and even Jerusalem, which is a hugely different picture to that which we are used to of women being segregated in mosques and certainly not allowed to stand up and speak in them. But, actually, women were preaching. I think it is a mixture. Men were writing the books and that might be one of the reasons it has taken so long to come to light but also exactly the same thing happened to Islam that happened to Christianity. It went from being a radical new idea to something that is very consolidated and is as much about temporal power as spiritual power. That was a world which was run by men in secular terms so it was very easy to sideline the role of those early women. But if you go back to the early teaching of Mohammed, the scholar we spoke to from Oxford believes that those teachings envisaged a world where women did take a prominent role. If you look at all the deities of wisdom that there have been in the world, over 90% of them are female. So obviously, through time, people have thought that wisdom is something that belonged to the female of the species! I think that women do have the capacity for wisdom, which has been underplayed, and, thank goodness, increasingly we are allowed to give voice to our ideas. And maybe what our role is going to be is to act as a conduit for the divine force that is wisdom. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But who knows what will happen in organised religion. I’m not a prophet so I don’t know. But there is the notion that wisdom is something that binds the world, and makes us love it and not hate it. I think that if women are allowed to give voice to those ideas they can be their own kind of divine women."

"Well, it’s interesting that she calls it a classic murder mystery, because we did have some classic murder mysteries in front of us of the 108 to judge and this really stood out because of its differences. It is a murder mystery, and therefore it rattles along, but it’s also a philosophical contemplation on man’s relationship with the natural world, and our relationships to those that we deem to be marginal—at the edge of society—and how we react to them. So it’s incredibly saturated with thought throughout. The title is taken from lines of William Blake and there are passages throughout where characters celebrate Blake’s ideas and philosophies. So it’s incredibly rich, and it’s really transportive, both metaphysically and physically. You feel like you’re inhabiting the spaces and landscapes that are being described. We didn’t know what to expect, and we were all absolutely blown away by it. “Tokarczuk doesn’t seem to care about seducing the reader. She’s not using cheap tricks” We loved the fact that sometimes Tokarczuk doesn’t seem to care about seducing the reader. She’s not using cheap tricks to get the reader on board. And despite its rather bleak title, there’s a lot of humour in there. So yes, it’s a fantastically rich book. Absolutely. In the judges’ comment, we talked about Drive Your Plow as being an indictment of humanity in its casual corruption of the natural world. So it’s very of the moment."

"Yes, Celestial Bodies is a story of Oman, of worlds moving from a slave culture to a culture of skyscrapers. It focuses in on the story of three sisters and the way they each tangle (or not) with love. One of the things we loved about it is that it just was beautifully pieced together as a narrative and as an experience—almost like a kind of jigsaw puzzle or a mosaic, rather than as something more traditionally linear. And we thought it was really vital to, in a sense, lift the veil on a world that we don’t often hear about. It has a great energy to it because it comes from a time when both globally and locally there’s a shift. There’s an old world order that’s beginning to collapse, and a new world order that’s arriving. And it has a beautiful, poetic translation. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . We’ve got to remember that this is a prize for the translators as well as for the authors. It’s a really, really beautiful, translation. And it’s a light touch on a very complicated history. Lots of lines in it that are immediately memorable. There’s one which is one of the characters says: “We get to know ourselves better in new, strange places.” And that felt like a kind of beautiful maxim for the prize itself. Yes. I really hope that these books all become bestsellers as a result of being shortlisted. Absolutely. And, yeah, that’s right. Hopefully it will do both: both help those smaller presses, and also stimulate the larger publishing houses to realise the popularity and value of translated fiction."

"We had long discussions about this. Firstly, it’s fundamental to say that it was accepted by the administrators of the prize because it is published under both fiction and non-fiction categories, so it was considered eligible. We then had a really interesting, philosophical conversation about what fiction is and what it means. We were debating this ethically and linguistically and philosophically. At one point I found myself inspired to go back to the Proto-Indo-European roots of the word ‘fiction,’ looking back to when civilization itself starts, 6,000 or so years ago and beyond. It comes from a root that means ‘to shape or to form’ as well as ‘to feign.’ And neuroscientists are understanding that memory is incredibly important to imagination—we can’t imagine a new idea unless we access an experience or a memory of some kind—so actually the boundary between memory and imagination is much more porous than we realised previously, physiologically. “The boundary between memory and imagination is much more porous that we realised” So we thought that, actually, there’s a lot in this work that is obviously autofiction . And there’s so much imagination in there—that that’s why we were happy. It’s eligible, we were happy to engage with it as a work of literature, and I think that it’s one of those books that enriches your idea of what literature can do. It’s a really brilliant work. The rhythm of both the ideas in play and the words is incredibly seductive. Again there are some lines from it that are very pertinent to our discussion, about whether people think it’s okay to be there on a literature prize. Ernaux says: “The web,” as in the World Wide Web, “was the royal road for remembrance.” It’s this notion of what you do with memory. It discusses an incredibly important 60 years, and is a very important record of the female experience across those six decades. Totally. As a historian I recognize the importance of the period it deals with. The collapse of old powers and the emergence of new ones, of new ways of thinking. I think it does an extraordinary job as a record of the shared experience over those years. It’s also hugely, hugely enjoyable."

"It’s super quirky, this. A comic confrontation with mortality. It’s about a man who’s an expert in beards in films—a journeyman academic who thinks that his wife has been unfaithful to him, dreams it, and so takes off to Tokyo to find himself. There he meets somebody who’s trying to commit suicide, and together they travel to try to find the best location for this suicide. So it’s unexpected, the narrative, but makes a delightful book. Exquisitely written and exquisitely translated. One of the things that we really love about judging this prize is that because you have an author and a translator, you almost have double the energy there. I imagine it like a social dance. When you have a couple dancing, it’s kind of beautiful to watch. Both bring something to that dance. And this is one of those books where you really feel that; it really adds to the experience. That’s right. I think there’s a sort of idea that translators can either choose to just be mirrors of the work or to be activists, and actively engage and kind of improve, as in add to the work. That’s why it’s so central to have a translator on the panel who has understanding of nuances of that work. Inevitably, yes. We had books in 25 languages submitted for the prize, so we’d have to be a fairly extraordinary panel to speak all 25 of those! But I’m sure that’s the case and those are our limitations, but then what you have to do is then you have to inhabit the space as a reader; you have to try to use your own imagination to imagine the world that the author is trying to communicate. And feel if that’s both a fluid and a supple and a secure place that the translator has put you in to access that original work. Without exception, all of the shortlisted books—the translations—are wonderful works in and of themselves."

"Hugely ambitious: 500-odd pages, but my goodness, it rattled along. You really hurtle through the narrative. Again, there are moments here where both fiction and non-fiction graze—because the writer himself appears as the writer within the narrative, but it’s one of those books that really pounds your mind with every sentence. There’s beautiful rhythmic prose—again, an acute and lyrical translation—and it really unpacks how we unpack evidence about the story of the world. The fundamental thing is it’s based in Colombia and looks at a very turbulent recent political history there over the last 50 or 60 years. And it interrogates the conspiracy theories that arise from politics and from the understanding of politics today. So it felt incredibly relevant too: the power of populism and why we become the stories that we tell about ourselves and tell about others. Yeah, it’s really fascinating because there were very un-gendered conversations that we had about the works. It certainly was not a political or strategic move to have, as you say, five out of six authors women and all the translators women. It might be a by-product of the approach that I described before—a determination that we have to be really honest with ourselves about why we love a book, why it speaks to us. Are we being too particular? We’re reading for a huge number of people who we want to pick up and enjoy these books. “A recent study noted that only 26% of all translated fiction was written by women” So I think it was the way that we read, actually, rather than, as I said, it being any kind of mechanistic or strategic approach. But it’s interesting that that’s what’s happened. I think it’s really good news, because I know that there was a recent study that noted that only 26% of all translated fiction was written by women, so it’s fantastic that we’ve got all women represented here. Hopefully that’s a comment on the state of the business, rather than on our choices, the fact that there’s so many women being represented as translators."

"A story from Chile , mainly Santiago. It’s highly original, very political, with a totally wonderful use of words. The words are perfectly turned. It’s one of those books where the skill of the wordsmithery tumbles you into new stories, into shared experiences. Again, a very, very lyrical translation as well. The subject was fairly morbid—the moving of a corpse across national boundaries. It says something about the age we live in that the dead—often in car boots as a result of civil war or political conflict or oppression—appeared a number of times in a number of the books submitted. “The skill of the wordsmithery tumbles you into new stories” Fascinating that this was crowd-funded. There was an acuity, an overwhelming freshness that saturated every page. It appealed to us as a panel because it looked at historical memory, how we remember what’s happened to us, and how we respond to the memories that we inherit. It’s fundamentally about how children and the next generation try to escape shadows of all kinds, particularly political activism. So yeah, a lovely surprise of a work. I think it’s fantastic that our prize honours translators, both in a pecuniary sense and in terms of the plaudits—that they’re given in an equal way to the authors. That’s a really great thing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Translators have a very important job; they’re often working as kind of scouts. It’s quite often the translators who bring works to publishers, so they are very active within the industry. My overarching historical and philosophical approach to life is that, as a social species, we’re lucky enough to be the inheritors and recipients of so many different minds, and the workings of so many different minds, and the hopes and fears and ideas and ideals and inspirations of others. The fact that that’s played out so acutely in a translated work seems to be, in a way, a very good metaphor for how we should live our lives."