Lauren Working Communes with the Objects

Kate Carpenter 0:00
Welcome back to the Drafting the Past podcast. I'm Kate Carpenter, and in each episode, I'm joined by a historian to talk about how they research and write history. For today's episode, I spoke with Dr. Lauren Working, a historian whose work focuses on England's colonialism and interactions with Indigenous people in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Lauren Working 0:22
Such a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Kate.

Kate Carpenter 0:24
Lauren is a lecturer in early modern studies at the University of York. Alongside her research, she's committed to sharing historical knowledge with the public. In fact, as you'll hear in the interview, she was approached by a literary agent thanks to her work with the BBC. As a result, she published her new book, A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England with a trade press. In order to help her tell a story of the Atlantic world from both Indigenous American and colonial British perspectives, Lauren turned to objects. The result is a tactile and beautifully written history of a world of encounter and influence. We talked about the rewards and challenges of writing history through objects, and how Lauren brought so many people's experiences to the page, even when they were largely missing from the archive. Here's my conversation with Dr. Lauren Working.

Lauren Working 1:17
I've always loved to write. My favorite part of school was the free write sessions that we used to have. I remember falling over at recess once and skinning my knee, and the nurse asked if I wanted to go home, and I said no because it was writing class afterwards. So lots of fond memories of scribbling in notebooks and writing novels when I was 12 or 13. I grew up in Southern California and Seattle, but spent most of my summers in Switzerland, where I was born. And I chose to travel thousands of miles to go to university in a tiny medieval town in coastal Scotland for my undergraduate degree. So I think I've always kind of been itching to travel and to place myself in a position of outsidedness or in a position of the observer in some ways, so I guess it's not that surprising that I now read a lot of Tudor and Stuart travel literature.

Kate Carpenter 2:11
Well, let's start just with the basics of how you work. So, when and where do you like to do your writing?

Lauren Working 2:16
I work best in the mornings. I cannot work from home, and I the, my most recent book, A Golden World, is kind of the product of about 10 years of research. But writing the book, I did over a really concerted period of time during my research leave, and because that time is so precious and finite, I just spent all day every day working on it as long as I could. Once I get into the flow, very little can distract me. I put my phone in my bag. I try not to look at it. I just need a cup of coffee and a quiet office. Although saying that, I think a change of scene can be extremely helpful as well. So if I'm a bit stuck or getting tired of a nun-like existence of rigorous seclusion. I do like changing my writing environment sometimes. So, working in places that that have character, that have connections to the history that I'm writing. In the last few months of writing the book, I worked a lot in a place in York where I live called King's Manor, which is this charming medieval and Tudor property with wonderful Renaissance archways and staircases, and figures from my book, including James the Sixth and First and his son Charles the First, stayed there on their way from Edinburgh to London in the early 17th century. So I would see light filtering through old stained glass windows with Tudor heraldry on them, and and think about them doing the same, and then the distance between the centuries seems to narrow for a moment. I also love writing in coffee shops. I know some people hate this or find it unproductive, and it's a bit less of the culture in the UK, in some ways, to do that, but during research fellowships in the US at the Folger Shakespeare Library or the Yale Center for British Art, I love spending the afternoon writing in cozy local cafes to get past my afternoon slump.

Kate Carpenter 4:15
What kinds of tools do you like to use to organize your research and writing?

Lauren Working 4:20
I do not use any tools really other than Google Docs and pen and paper. I I like to think I'm a pretty well organized person, but in terms of how I research and write, I this is the one place where I'm kind of all over the place. I look at my writing sometimes, and I just think this is less legible than a 16th century commonplace book that has been revised and reorganized and repurposed over the decades. But just yeah, pages of notes and ideas and questions, you know, which which is all part of the the thinking process, but not very methodical. And I combine lots of handwritten notes with lots of Google Docs and lots of folders with visual material.

Kate Carpenter 5:08
Where in the research process do you think of yourself as starting the writing?

Lauren Working 5:12
I start pretty early on. I'm not the kind of person who can think through ideas in my head and then just write them down fully formed. So, like a sculptor, I have to kind of chip away at an idea until something from within reveals itself. So, I write to figure out the kind of argument I can make based on my sources, and then figure out what I'm missing and where I need to do some more reading and searching. And so, lots of writing and lots of revising as well.

Kate Carpenter 5:45
So, are you then sort of figuring it out as you go? Do you ever outline, or is it just a sort of?

Lauren Working 5:51
Yeah, I I used to outline obsessively, and then just found that things changed so much when I got to writing anyway that I still find it useful to make sketch out some outlines, and I always tell my students to do this as well. Or sometimes early on, kind of outlining different possibilities of you know how the the work might be shaped. But a a lot of the the shape of it really does come when I cut and just yeah reshape everything during the revision because I'm I read things aloud, I reread things obsessively. It it can take me hours every day to get back into the flow of writing because I'm looking back at things I've been writing in the days before. If I'm not in writing mode, that can take even longer. It can take hours or days before I feel like I can even write another sentence, but I really value, yeah, revision. It's comforting to know I've got something there to work with already. My partner is a poet and a lapsed academic, so he's also great at telling me when my writing isn't clear or could sound better when my metaphorical language is maybe a bit dense or unhelpful, or my metaphors are mixed. So I really tried to think about the structure of every sentence. And a very kind reviewer of my most recent book kind of mentioned the the lyricism of the prose, and that was a really big compliment for me.

Kate Carpenter 7:23
Yeah, absolutely, a well-deserved one. How did you decide that you wanted to publish a trade book this time?

Lauren Working 7:29
Yeah, I, in some ways, it was a little bit accidental. I kind of stumbled into it, and then got more and more excited by the prospect once it had started. But I did a few radio programs for the BBC, and kind of off the back of that, I was approached by multiple literary agents asking if I'd considered writing a book about Elizabethan England and colonialism for a broader audience. One program had been about the evidence of ruffs found on the Jamestown archeological site, for example. So, kind of using a quintessential signifier of of the Elizabethan era and thinking about what it might tell us about status and power in early colonial Virginia. So, from those initial conversations, I ended up going with the agent who I felt really understood my interests and and my my idea of where I wanted to take the book project, how I wanted to organize it. I remember really vividly. We were sitting on the terrace at Somerset House in London, so we were a stone's throw from where Anne of Denmark, James the First's wife, displayed her own cabinets of curiosities in the early 17th century, really near to where Walter Raleigh had hosted two Carolina Algonquin men in his mansion, and so we kind of talked about what the book might look like. And I started working on a proposal from there, and I was attracted to the idea of disseminating my ideas to a wider public because I felt that there was a growing interest in the UK around colonial histories, but that these often focused on the slave trade and also on the East India Company and its relationships to with Asia, and all of these are of course immensely important. And it's been amazing to see the projects and new interpretations and heritage sites and museum collections that have come out of these initiatives, but I did feel that there was a lack of knowledge about how Indigenous peoples' labor and knowledge contributed to the culture and esthetics of the Renaissance. And so, yeah, I mean, from there, lots of publishers were interested in the book, which was a really lucky position to be in, and it just involved some hard decisions about which press I wanted to go for in the end, but kind of tied to to my love of writing, I was drawn to publishing with Faber because my editor seemed really behind the project. She was happy to have the book be a bit unusual. It's not a strictly chronological story. A lot of trade editors. Kind of want that chronology because it is more helpful for for readers in a lot of ways. The travels of objects aren't perfectly linear, but part of the book is about disrupting easy narratives about the English going out and establishing a dominant presence in different parts of the Americas. So, having an editor on board who kind of understood that was really important.

Kate Carpenter 10:23
Did you find that writing a book intended for a trade audience versus an academic one, did that change your process?

Lauren Working 10:29
Yeah, it it's tricky because trade books, I mean, the editors want a lot of description. You know, they want a lot of scene setting, and we might not necessarily be used to doing that as historians working in academia, where I kind of needed to lean into descriptive detail. But at the same time, I think you know we're kind of trained to think that's a bit cringe or not very, you know, serious. And so I did find that I needed to kind of think about what my prose was going to look like, what kind of concessions to this different form of writing I would need to make, and which hills I kind of would die on and would not go, what routes I just wouldn't go down. But I did find myself trying to figure out what the weather was like in a particularly hot Elizabethan summer, so I could put myself in the shoes of the alchemist and translator Richard Eden as he set to work translating passages about Atlantic travel for his patrons, or watching videos about contemporary Inuit sealskin preparation to write more knowledgeably about the parkas that English privateers brought to Elizabethan London from Nunavit, and what is today Canada, and I think it did help me slow down a little bit and just spend a bit more time with sources. I think sometimes I get a bit greedy and I start to find evidence of something, and I just want to find more evidence of this and kind of look elsewhere and kind of collate all these materials together and build a bigger picture right away, and actually just sitting a bit more with various sources and seeing what I could learn from them and and get out of them was actually really beneficial.

Kate Carpenter 12:13
I want to talk more about the book and the research you did for it, so I actually will ask you if you're up for it to read this excerpt. This passage is called a "Guiiana Idoll of Gold and Copper."

Lauren Working 12:24
“In the summer of 1618, a fallen favourite facing death clambered into a rowboat and tried to flee to France. On his finger, he wore a diamond ring, a cherished gift from a long-dead queen, harking back to the days when he had been adored by Elizabeth herself. He also carried a less expensive object, one that had been crafted far from the artisans’ workshops of London: a copper-and-gold figure made by Indigenous metallurgists, acquired somewhere in the tropical forests of the Amazon.
This was Walter Ralegh’s second attempt at evading his captors, but it was a half-hearted one, and he was soon wrested back into custody. Several months later, he was dead, executed on the orders of Elizabeth’s successor, James I, who had always harboured contempt for him. When authorities drew up an inventory of everything Ralegh had been carrying with him at his arrest, the Indigenous artefact appeared first on the list. All we know of this figure is contained in these few words: ‘A Guiana Idoll of gold & copper.’ Likely a sacred entity, perhaps intended to be buried next to the body of a deceased ruler, it had travelled into a land whose beholders viewed it as an alien thing, used as evidence of the marvellous possibilities for precious metals in Arawak and Warao lands along the Orinoco Delta of what is now Venezuela.”

Kate Carpenter 13:49
So, part of the reason I chose this passage is because objects are at the heart of this book and of this history. And you mentioned specifically to me ahead of time how some of the objects you encountered, like this one, changed the way you saw some of these histories. So let's start with this one. Tell me how sort of the story of this object changed the way you approach this history.

Lauren Working 14:09
Yes. So I love this artifact, even though it no longer survives, and it is a bit of a a ghostly artifact. And we might discuss this a bit more later. But writing histories told through objects, you know, this is often something that's seen as quite grounding and quite accessible. But objects are also just so mysterious and kind of frustratingly so, and the kinds of evidence that they provide really varies. So, in some cases, in the book, in the case of the emeralds and the Cheapside hoard, for example, or in pieces of eight, we have tangible surviving objects that provide the starting point for historical inquiry. But in this case, the object is just this mention within a text. So we have this line from an inventory, and yet coming across it became the basis for my chapter. It was, coming across this amazing detail that Walter Raleigh had this indigenous artifact with him at his arrest in 1618, in those final months before he was beheaded, that really gave me a new approach through which to navigate his seminal book known as The Discovery of Guyana So the first thing I grappled with when I came across this inventory, which hasn't really, to my knowledge, been discussed by scholars before, is what this Guyana idol of gold and copper is. The description is given to us with a typical Protestant gloss. Idol is often, you know, dismissively or negatively used to describe what reformers viewed as a kind of pagan or non-Christian object, but the clue is in the mix of metals. So copper, gold alloy figures from the Americas are now known as tombagas, and so these these seven words scrawled in official state documentation led me to think more about Taíno and Arawakan metalworking techniques, and also just to look for more evidence of them in Elizabethan and Jacobean writing. So I found a couple other examples as well, and invited me to think a bit more about contrasting notions of value as they're understood by the different communities that Walter Raleigh kind of encounters during his travels as well. A lot of times, I think when we think about precious metals in the Renaissance imagination, the tendency is to think about mass resource extraction or mythical adventures like Raleigh's search for Manoa or El Dorado, and we think maybe a bit less about artisanal handiwork. So for me, the Tumbaga reference was an important corrective and reminding us that access to South American gold often involved indigenous agents, miners, refiners, go betweens, and that gold ore or copper gold alloys-they're often shaped like birds or like moons, they're not magically appearing from thin air like treasure in a fairy story. And so, following these copper gold figures in the writings of various travelers, I think encourages us to think of these spaces not just as these landscapes there to be exploited, as the English saw them, but through the indigenous hands who made visible that gold that Elizabethans are are coveting, so it really opens up. I think the English exposure to indigenous trade routes and longstanding metalworking practices, how they have their own currencies of trade and exchange along the Orinoco River and further afield, but also how indigenous artifacts are then present in Tudor London, carried by perhaps one of the best known names of the English Renaissance, and so I think it sheds light on the humans as well as the artifacts. I think I say in the introduction to my book, you know, that talking about objects is a way of talking about people, and Raleigh's account is full of rumors of gold, but it's also about establishing alliances with regional rulers. He writes about his discussions with Topiawari, the ruler of Aramaia. Topiawari's son is part of the exchange and comes to London with Raleigh. There's mentions of Martin the Arawakan, a boy who is christened Charles, who ends up in Chelsea in 1597. So, to me, that even just then revisiting better known references to Raleigh and his voyages in England kind of shifts, I think, the focus a bit. So, Falstaff in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor calls Mistress Page "a region in Guyana, all gold and bounty." And you know, perhaps audience members also thought of those Arawaks who accompanied Raleigh to London.

Kate Carpenter 18:50
You know, one of the things I really found remarkable in this book and that I loved is how how effective it is when you use these objects to bring parts of the world together, so that you're sort of telling the story from Europe and from the Americas, sort of at at once. They're very much side by side. It's not often, I find that sort of Atlantic world histories are still from one perspective or the other, kind of either standing in Europe, looking looking west, or vice versa. And I really like how using the objects allows you kind of to stand, so to speak, on both shores. What did it take to do that? What did it? I it seems easy when I read it, and I am certain that it was not in the writing and researching. So, what did it take to kind of bring both perspectives together?

Lauren Working 19:41
Yeah, this was this was difficult to do, but also one of my favorite parts of writing the book. And I guess the really short answer is a lot of research, and I'd never come across any mentions of the conditions of emerald mining in art history books, for example, describing emeralds in Tudor art. And yet, because emeralds come from a really specific region in Muzo and Wisca homelands in what is today Colombia, bringing those two spaces together through traveling emeralds seemed like such a good way of connecting labor and consumption. And so, it it did take having to study many, many different indigenous cultures and all their distinct ways of seeing the world, all the varying ways that they were impacted by and challenged and affected European attempts at colonizing their lands. I think my research took some inspiration from contemporary discourse about supply chains and commodity chains. During the pandemic, I listened to a lot of podcasts like Wardrobe Crises or Business of Fashion, which kind of outline debates within the fashion industry around networks of labor and production, and how the lives of workers and factories across the globe are connected to the things we consume and wear. And I'm really intrigued by where things are made and where they come from. I like clothing brands that are transparent about where their factories are, and it kind of baffles me, you know, that on one hand there's these amazing initiatives on the part of brands to make visible details of kind of environmental impacts and and you know the wages of garment workers, and then on the other hand, we live in a time of mind-boggling scales of production and waste colonialism. And in some ways, I kind of wanted to see if I could trace objects from their places of origin to where they end up, and to think about where and when consumers in Tudor and Stuart England might link American objects to their places of origins. When when was it beneficial or interesting to them to have those associations with the Americas? And when do certain resources kind of lose those associations along the way? So Elizabethans love indigenous-made featherwork, for example, and its associations with American cultures are a big part of their appeal, but then they're very keen to disassociate themselves from silver production because of the horrible known labor conditions in Potosí, in present-day Bolivia. So I kind of wanted to come to it a bit from that angle, thinking about how the Tudors, even when they don't have colonies themselves, are kind of dependent on colonial economies in the Atlantic. But also, it was really valuable for me to think about material belongings or artifacts in order to raise attention to indigenous knowledge, often women's knowledge, and making that visible in 17th century England, so this multi-layered storytelling became a way of trying to center or make room for indigenous ideas about land and memory and kinship, even in a history, a kind of domestic history of the of the Tudors and Stuarts. So, a basket sent to an English woman named Virginia, who's actually named after the Virginia Company because her father is so obsessed with it, but a basket sent to Virginia from the Algonquin Chesapeake can kind of encourage us to think about Virginia Company merchants and collecting practices, but it also becomes evidence of Algonquian women's expertise in England, and we might not know much about the the basket, but it tangibly brings the knowledge and labor of native women into a house in Cambridgeshire, carried through its husks and sweet grasses. So materials that are really intimately tied to native land, as well as its people, it's kind of carrying the stories and histories of a people in the way that the basket is patterned and woven. So, yeah, that kind of multi-storied, multi-perspectival approach. I kind of wanted to show how one person's commodity, whether it's a basket or a tobacco plant, or a beaver hat, is also another person's history, or kin, or ancestral knowledge.

Kate Carpenter 24:07
I have another question I want to ask, but first, I want to know: Do you do you ever think of yourself as an environmental historian? This felt like a very environmental history to me, but I don't think you describe yourself.

Lauren Working 24:17
No, the answer is no. I never have, and I and I love the work of environmental historians. I mean, I think it's yeah, it's such a fruitful approach and and way of thinking about things. And I guess you know, works like Christine DeLucia's Memory Lands is a book that kind of thinks about conflict, war, indigenous studies, but kind of through the environment, and so I suppose things like that are kind of in the back of my mind. But I've yeah haven't thought of myself as such.

Kate Carpenter 24:48
I am curious. I was curious reading, and even more so listening to you talk because, as we know, evidence of indigenous perspectives and practices is fragmentary at best in archives and in. Traditional archives and complicated, but the way you write about those perspectives and histories and contexts does not feel fragmentary in the book. It feels fully developed. How did you go about researching those perspectives?

Lauren Working 25:12
Yeah, this this was something I thought a lot about. We've been talking a lot about objects, artifacts. I think I used the word material belonging at one point, which I kind of use in the book as a as a way that's that moves around away from objects as perhaps kind of inactive or inert forces. But when writing about those belongings that have connections to indigenous communities, this was tricky because I don't want to misrepresent an artifact that I'm writing about or claim knowledge about it that I don't have. So it was important to me to really make clear in the book what my positionality is that I am qualified to write a history of Tudor and Stuart England. But equally, a key argument of the book is that this history can't be understood without understanding colonialism and the Anglo-Indigenous encounters that emerged as a result, the golden world of early modern London is deeply connected to English piracy projects and those transatlantic encounters that make Indigenous peoples and lands a part of English culture. And so, the best way for me to really go about doing this was to cite, but make clear that I'm not speaking for Indigenous communities, and instead that I'm kind of engaging with their work and the knowledge they have made known to us, those of us on who are outside their communities, it's kind of crazy to think, but I mean, most trade books about Tudor colonialism, they don't cite indigenous sources and and indigenous thinkers, and and the number of times I've been told, you know, how how can you cite indigenous peoples because there are no, you know, indigenous scholars who were writing about this material, you know, and so how can you bring them into the conversation? So, in terms of bringing artifacts to life for readers, in the cases where they are indigenous made, I try to defer to indigenous voices where possible. Every chapter cites knowledge holders from the relevant communities. So, in a chapter about seal skin garments, yes, I talk about English sailors and merchants describing Inuit parkas and kayaks. But a more comprehensive picture emerges if I also talk about the ulu, the tools used by women to prepare skins. If I quote contemporary Inuit makers speaking about the importance of seals in their culture, to write the chapter on on rakiok, a type of wood in the Carolinas, I watched films by Algonquin canoe makers about the significance of of wood and how canoes are carved. So it was really important to me, though though a big challenge in a trade book marketed to people who are interested in the world of Henry VIII and Elizabeth the First to show how it makes sense to bring in a Tupi artist working today in a chapter about habits of collecting Brazilian featherwork among courtiers in Tudor London.

Kate Carpenter 28:20
So, from a sort of purely practical craft perspective, one challenge to writing about objects or places or other things best experience through touch or sight or smell, translating those into words for readers and bringing them to life presents its own challenges. What were your approaches to bringing these objects to life?

Lauren Working 28:40
Well, as we've talked about, trade writing often deploys a lot of description. This was part of the fun, but it does take some getting used to. I think as we've been talking about going from a more academic description to one for a non-specialist reader, so I was always kind of worried about veering into the the kind of tacky or the the the obsessive kind of thick descriptions of things as well, so it was a balancing act. It kind of involved thinking like an archeologist and perhaps also some sometimes like a poet. So on one hand, I spent months on the Jamestown archeological site, not only handling objects but also reading detailed studies of various object findings, from clay tobacco pipes to animal bones and corn cobs, all kinds of practical information about length and weight and provenance of materials, etc. And so, the challenge was getting that balance right between providing necessary details about what an object looks like, or or ways, or how it sparkles in light, and addressing that. So what? In that sense of how this description fits into a bigger understanding of its context. Use or how it affected the person who wore the object, or who smoked it, or cultivated it, whatever the case may be. I teach a lot of Elizabethan literature, so I enjoyed kind of zooming into an object and thinking about its materiality, and then zooming out to its place in culture. So, how we might start with a description of a Massachusetts beaver before moving on to its afterlife as a hat, and then onto how beaver hats are satirized in plays at the Globe or Blackfriars Theater. When I was in the midst of revising the book, I spent a few days in London and Oxford, just sitting in front of the display glass in my favorite museums, just coming face to face with objects again, rereading museum labels, thinking about how early modern owners might have lived with these objects-silver bowls or emerald encased book covers, maps and globes, feather work-and as you say, I think there's something really affecting in that sense of of touch and of trying to recover for readers, especially those who haven't gone into a profession that involves holding lots of really old things, about what it feels like to touch the woven fibers of a feather work made 400 years ago, and also I think we're lucky to live in an age where so many materials are available digitally, but sometimes you need to commune with an object. Although I'm aware this makes me possibly sound like a very devout 17th century Catholic kneeling at a cabinet or something, but that that's something I was very aware of as well. That historic objects are wonderful, but there's a risk of kind of making them fetishistic too, and artifacts are important archival fragments. But I also undergird and kind of contextualize that with with many many kind of written sources as well. So lots of travel books and inventories and merchants' ledgers and state reports. So I do think we need all those different sources together to really understand those connected histories.

Kate Carpenter 32:08
Was it easier or harder to describe something like that Guyana idol, where you didn't actually have the object to look at, and you just had words to go on, or was did that? I'm just-that's a random.

Lauren Working 32:22
Yeah, no, I-I like that. I think it probably, in some ways, is easier. I don't know what that says about my brain. I'm sure art historians would be shocked and horrified, but I mean, I'm writing an exhibition catalog at the moment, or a piece of a catalog, and sometimes when the the object is right in front of you, there is something I don't know a bit trickier about getting that balance of conveying what's what's interesting and and kind of eye catching about it, but being kind of methodical in the way you talk about it at the same time.

Kate Carpenter 32:57
How did you find and decide on the objects that you would use to anchor these chapters.

Lauren Working 33:02
So I wanted objects that spanned the first half century or so of English colonial endeavors. So I knew I kind of wanted to span from the Middle Elizabethan era, particularly kind of the 1580s when England is at war with Spain and interests in the Atlantic are growing, and then to the 1630s and the kind of lead up to the English Civil Wars, so I tried to choose objects that would let me tell stories of encounter with lots of different indigenous groups. So not just the better known English encounters with Powhatans in Seneca Maca, for example, or the the Wampanoag in in Donland or New England, but also Tupi peoples in Brazil, or the the Mexica, the the Aztecs in Mesoamerica, and even the Miskitu in what is today Nicaragua and Honduras. I think not many people who who aren't scholars of this area, I think, know that Puritans were sending ships to settle islands off the coast of Nicaragua at the same time as they were sending settlers to Massachusetts Bay. So I tried to choose objects that opened up insights into many different kinds of encounters across many different locations in the Americas, while thinking about how these fit into the story of empire building and colonial consumption that I was also telling about early modern London. So I wanted chapters to seem in some way kind of recognizably or quintessentially Elizabethan or Jacobean, and then containing little twists or unexpected details. So the first chapter just seemed like I knew that that was the place I wanted to start with Martin Frobisher. So a story of an Elizabethan sea dog trying to find a Northwest Passage to Asia, who ends up plundering Canada for what he thinks is gold and is actually fool's gold. So that was just the perfect way to start a book called A Golden World But it also illustrated one of my key points so perfectly that we can follow the adventurer, and if we only follow in his footsteps, then we're kind of blinded to the two-way nature of exchange, where Inuit people and garments are also coming into London as a result. I then had to balance an attention to objects with storytelling and narrative development, so choosing what objects I needed to then spotlight those diverse encounters while also being broadly chronological was difficult. The book isn't meant to be comprehensive, so some objects just didn't make it into the book. If I if I found that I could already tell that story of cross cultural encounter with a different object, so I don't talk about certain dyes from the Americas because I already have a chapter about cochineal, or I would have loved to talk about whalebone, but then my chapter on pearls already drew links between Atlantic fishing and the elite body, that kind of thing. In terms of where I actually found the objects, you know, some are just old favorites that I've studied for years, ones that I've encountered through research and collaboration with with museums in the UK, especially so the the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Pitt Rivers, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, somewhere in US, based collections, including materials from anthropology departments, because I think there's still a bit of a divide between Indigenous and European art and kind of where they're displayed and where they find themselves in different institutions. Though luckily this is changing, and inspired by exhibitions and things as well. So I I kind of stumbled on an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara last December on the blood of the Nopal, so about cochineal, and it featured Zapotec artists' work with the substance and things, so yeah, a lot of working out kind of where the objects survive, where I can find representations of what objects may have looked like because they we don't have surviving examples. And the last thing I would say is just the the images included in the book as well. I think I, you know, I really try to get a sense of that representation and range. So I wanted someone flipping through the insets in the book to get a sense of its breadth and diversity.

Lauren Working 37:09
So there's beautiful court miniatures and still life paintings, but then there's also a 16th century watercolor of an enslaved African pearl diver, but also a painting by a Peruvian artist of the the Cimarrons or the Maroons, the community of previously enslaved African men and women who resisted Spanish oppression and lived in settlements with indigenous communities. There are plants and precious metals, but also indigenous-made artifacts from North, Central, and South America, so I really wanted that balance.

Kate Carpenter 37:45
It may seem like a small thing in the scheme of things, but I realized that there were no chapter numbers in this book, which is kind of unusual. Although I don't, I don't know why it's so unusual, and it has the effect of making it feel more like essays rather than, as you talked about, sort of like a chronological narrative, how did you think about structuring the book?

Lauren Working 38:06
Yeah, so this was an absolute aim. I I wanted readers to be able to come back to this book to revisit the chapters when and where they might come in handy. So I could imagine someone visiting a museum or a historic site and flipping to the chapter on gardens and plantations, or the chapter on women's patronage of travel books. Someone on social media recently cited a chapter in my book because she was going through a 17th century inventory and wanted to know more about where emeralds came from, and and I was very pleased to see that because that's exactly the kind of connections I want to help people make. I'm also part of a network in the UK for teachers who want to teach Indigenous histories and perspectives in schools, so I thought it would be useful to be able to recommend, say, the chapter on Roanoke or on animals as a way to bring in some of these histories within a unit like the Tudors on the government mandated curriculum. So yeah, I kind of wanted the the book to be broadly chronological, but to have each essay be able to stand on its its own as well. So each has its own kind of internal logic, its own conceits. The chapter on animals brings cabinets of curiosities and conversation with a strange plot by the Duke of Buckingham to get involved with the Caribbean. The chapter on Roanoke watercolors and the so-called Drake manuscript becomes a reflection on art history and Elizabethan portraiture and the uses of bad art and that kind of thing.

Kate Carpenter 39:46
Yeah, you mentioned that that teacher program, and it sort of leads to my next question, which is that I I wanted to know a little bit more about some of your public facing work and how you think about its relationship with book writing. So you mentioned earlier that some of the. In this book, first appeared on BBC Radio as as programs. We also know in your acknowledgements that you freelance for the National Portrait Gallery, which I thought was really interesting. How do you think about how those things shape your approach to writing history?

Lauren Working 40:14
Yeah, so I was selected as a New Generation Thinker for BBC Radio Three in 2021, and it's a scheme where 10 academics, although sadly due to funding cuts, I think it started out to five, are selected to work with producers and contribute to programming, and you gain experience in bringing academic research to non-specialist audiences. So that involved appearing on a few episodes of Free Thinking, which is more kind of a roundtable or panel discussion between various writers and artists. And then I was also commissioned to produce two episodes about fashion and colonialism for a series they were doing. I mentioned earlier the ruffs in Jamestown. Another one was called "Boy with a Pearl Earring, so I actually kept that chapter title in the book as well. And then I also wrote what the BBC calls little postcards or five minute insets into programs. So I did one on still life paintings, which again you can kind of see reflected in the book, and one on Thanksgiving. So I think in the publishing industry there is a sense that radio work can be kind of abridged trade writing, which is why I think I got interest in potentially writing a book after I did the radio programs. But one of the reasons I applied to the scheme, even though it involved an extremely mortifying round of kind of eliminations and elevator pitches and stage debates and like all these things that I would never want to kind of do of my own volition usually, but was because I felt that it would be good for me to step back from my work and see if I could talk about it in a way that might contribute to cultural conversations, and I kind of saw this as an area I needed to work on, and that maybe this was a good way of forcing myself to put myself out there a bit more, be able to talk about my work, trade book. I mean, trade book writing isn't for everyone, and I mean, for example, in the UK, our kind of mandatory research excellence framework assessment process, which I will not go into, that we're kind of beholden to for for kind of government support and funding and things, don't actually count trade books as a as like an output, as like a publication. So actually, the trade book is a way for me to kind of do more in that area of public engagement and impact, which is an area within it in some ways. But I I really enjoyed writing and presenting a program where I could talk about a 1630s cavalier poem about Madagascar in the same breath as I was reviewing artwork by a Senegalese artist in the V&A's Fashioning Masculinities exhibition, so I think doing that work for the BBC was and and kind of still is a valuable exercise in trying to put a finger on the pulse of the contemporary moment, but in a way that can also throw up other questions and concerns about my academic work. I think sometimes it's quite easy to become fixed or entrenched in certain preoccupations and ways of of looking at things. I won't say too much about the National Portrait Gallery, but I yeah I started freelancing for the London National Portrait Gallery back as a PhD student, and I delivered sessions on Tudor portraiture for the gallery's educational programming. So I was lecturing to school groups about the tutors, and it was really there where I got to kind of think a bit more about you know the amazing work that art historians are doing around scientific analysis and kind of just the tools that they have for zooming into portraits on microscopic levels and reading these reports on dyes and where the wood in a portrait is is coming from, and that kind of thing. So those that exposure to those resources and ways of thinking about portraits as material culture, at the same time as I was thinking about archeology and history, I think was was really formative.

Lauren Working 43:55
I also had to take the school groups then up into the galleries to talk to them about portraits, and that was again a really good exercise in like captivating an audience that may not even necessarily want to be there, and to to see how you could kind of bring them into the conversation in ways that engaged or or stimulated them. And then over the years, my work with the the NPG has kind of really developed into some other nice opportunities to do things like sit on one of their advisory boards for kind of thinking about empire in relation to the Tudors and Stuarts and and that kind of thing. So yeah, work that I hope will will continue because they've got just such a brilliant collection of portraits.

Kate Carpenter 44:37
In the last bit of our time, I'd like to ask you to share a little inspiration with listeners, so I'm wondering what the most influential writing advice is you've ever gotten.

Lauren Working 44:46
I love people's responses to this on your on your show, and I feel like nothing I say will will be anything that they haven't heard, and probably better put. But I think something that that actually I've been thinking about recently because. A mentor of mine mentioned it again to me, but made me think of of my PhD supervisor, who always just really encouraged me to write what I wanted to write, and not just what I felt that I should write. And this may sound evident, but when you know when you are starting out in your career, I think there can be a lot of pressure from, be it funding bodies or you know senior academics, not necessarily on purpose, but as to the direction that you should be taking your work. My supervisor doesn't have a mobile phone. I once had to call him at his hairdresser's to get through to him in advance of a meeting that we had scheduled. He was never very that impressed with kind of other activities and things I was doing other than researching, and I mean I I love public engagement projects. I'm working on one now with the National Trust, but I think what he was really getting at was the importance of guarding one's time and of giving oneself time to think about the sources and not to get distracted by what is trendy or popular or what others think you should be doing. So he he always encouraged me to read widely, to be receptive to ideas, to read histories outside your specialism or interest, to read novels, not not to get imprisoned by your niche. I think it it gets a bit dark and dusty in those architectural recesses otherwise.

Kate Carpenter 46:24
Who do you read for inspiration? Have you read any books recently that you would recommend?

Lauren Working 46:29
I have recently read finally Sarah E. Johnson's Encyclopedie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Mery's Intellectual World. It's a book about the 18th century Atlantic, so it's outside the scope of my expertise. But I really loved how Johnson turned a biography about an Enlightenment thinker into, as she as she puts it, a communal biography of all those free and enslaved people who made his life and works what they are. And there's a lot of kind of creative innovation in the book, you know, kind of playing with fonts, with images, with juxtaposition, that I think really encourages us to confront the choices that we make when we write the histories of others.

Kate Carpenter 47:18
As we wrap up here, I am curious to know: Will you write another trade book? Do you think there's more in your future?

Lauren Working 47:24
Well, my agent desperately wants to know the answer to this question. I've got few ideas up my sleeve, but I do. I would also like to write another academic book. So, I think my challenge-the challenge to me going forward-is how how to make that work? Whether or not concurrent projects that are quite different are are possible, but I think I will take a little bit of you know everything I've learned when writing the trade book, even when I turn to my academic writing from now on.

Kate Carpenter 47:54
Well, Dr. Lauren Working, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and talking about your writing process. Thank you, Kate. Thanks again to Dr. Lauren Working for joining me on this episode of the podcast. To get a copy of her book, A Golden World, which I highly recommend, look for the link in the show notes. You'll also find links to everything else we mentioned in this episode. Don't forget to sign up for the newsletter at draftingthepast.com so you don't miss all of the great new things we have coming this fall. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.