Professor Emeritus of French History, University of Cambridge

When Robert Tombs was invited to speak to Pharos, it was suggested he could speak on Brexit, Franco-British relations, or the culture wars. He decided to try all three. In this series, Prof Tombs analyses Brexit, why it happened, and what it means; how different policies towards European integration taken in Britain and France tell us much about the direction Europe has taken; and how Brexit’s diplomatic and economic impact may be small next to the cultural, social, and political consequences.

Filmed in St Edmund Hall's Old Library in November 2023, this series of lectures will be published online in May 2024.

Prof Robert Tombs is a distinguished historian, specialising in the history of Britain and France. He is Professor Emeritus of French History at Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College. His published works include The War Against Paris, 1871 (1981), That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (2006, with Isabelle Tombs); The English and Their History (2014), and This Sovereign Isle (2020). His writing appears regularly in The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, and The Times, and he is the editor of Briefings for Britain and History Reclaimed. In 2007, the French Government awarded Tombs the prestigious Ordre des Palmes Académiques 'for services rendered to French culture'. He was appointed to the Franco-British Council the following year.

In a famous statement, published before almost any serious scholarly work had been done on the history of same-sex relations in pre-modern Europe, Michel Foucault said that the homosexual, as a distinct type of person, was a purely modern phenomenon: in the past, people thought only in terms of sexual acts, not sexual identities. This lecture series tests the truth of that assertion, which has exerted such a strong influence on the whole historiography of the subject, and lays the ground work for a revisionary understanding of the history of sexuality in Europe.

The first lecture discusses the rich evidence which emerged, in the decades after Foucault wrote, from the archives of Italy and Spain. In many ways this seemed to prove him right. It revealed a world of activity by men who were happy to have sex with boys as well as women; generally, their behaviour carried no ‘identity’ implications, and it was unlike modern homosexuality in other ways too, not least the lack of sexual interest in other adult males. The second lecture investigates how such same-sex acts were conceptualised and dealt with by the religious and legal norms of the period; it does so not only for these Christian Mediterranean countries, but also for the Islamic societies of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. The third lecture turns to northern Europe, including England, and finds some significant divergences from the Mediterranean pattern. It also looks at European colonial societies, especially in the Americas, where some contrasts can be found between the colonies of the northern and southern European powers. The final lecture puts the evidence together, considers what it tells us about identities and subcultures, and offers a new account of what has been called the ‘emergence of modern homosexuality.

Recorded at Magdalen College in February-March 2024, this inaugural series of Pharos Monday Lectures will be published in May.

Sir Noel Malcolm FRSL FBA is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, a Founding Fellow of the Pharos Foundation, and one of the country's pre-eminent intellectual historians. He was foreign editor for The Spectator and a columnist for The Daily Telegraph before returning to academia. He is the author of twelve books, and the editor of the Clarendon edition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, for which he was awarded a British Academy medal. His latest work, Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Desire, 1400-1750 was published by Oxford University Press in November 2023.