Paul Christianson as Scholar and Teacher

Very few occasions in the life of an academic administrator, or even a professor, can be described as absolutely delightful. This is surely one of them. It gives me enormous pleasure to have the honour of introducing, on the occasion of his upcoming retirement, the senior historian of Tudor and Stuart Britain in Canada, and one of the most respected in North America and Britain, Paul Christianson. Paul now seems so indisputably Canadian, and so closely attached to Queen's, where he has taught since 1964, that one forgets his Minnesota origins. As someone who has met several of his extended family over the last twenty-five years, it is hard not to listen to a program like The Prairie Home Companion, or watch a film like Fargo without thinking of this, or of the Scandinavian heritage of which Paul is so proud. (I have been trying for the better part of three decades to understand the Danish grace that Paul habitually says before sitting down to eat.) However, Paul has now been in Canada for thirty-nine years, his entire academic career, and, atypically in this generation, all at the same institution. Thirty-nine years is a very long time. I was five years old when he started teaching; several people in this room were not yet born. In 1964 the world was recovering from the JFK assassination a year previously, Viet Nam was beginning to escalate under LBJ, and Lester Pearson had recently displaced John Diefenbaker as Canada's prime minister. Not unlike today, a Canadian liberal prime minister was supporting the UN and resisting an American president's urge to impose US foreign policy on an Asian country. The Beatles made their big splash on the Ed Sullivan show that year and Elvis was still svelte. In the movies, folks were watching Goldfinger, the third James Bond movie, and a Peter Sellers triple bill--The Worm of Henry Orient, and the Pink Panther and its sequel, A Shot in the Dark. TVs were still mainly black and white and The Outer Limits was still a hot show; computers took up entire buildings, and students played radios or perhaps hi-fis, not stereos or boom boxes. CDs and DVDs of course had not been heard of, Richard Nixon was a failed gubernatorial candidate, and Lyndon Johnson was, after the infamous daisy advertisement, about to trounce Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential contest. Paul would not be in Minnesota for that election, though I imagine he voted by proxy, since in September he started teaching, still ABD, at a small but old liberal arts university in eastern Ontario called Queen's. Most Canadian universities were a lot smaller then, just poised on the brink of the big 1960s baby boom expansion. Much more emphasis was placed on teaching, as opposed to research or publication, than there is now--a point I'll come back to a bit later. Paul would have met his first classes in that year, while trying to work on a thesis about the court of the Scottish King James VI under the supervision of the biographer of that king, David Harris Willson. As things turned out, that thesis never saw the light of day; somewhere along the way, Paul developed an interest in, one might say an evangelizing zeal for, the apocalyptic thought of the post-Reformation, pre-civil war era, which led to a revised thesis topic completed in 1971 (by now under Stanford Lehmberg, who had succeeded Willson at Minnesota). In due course that led to his first book, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto, 1978). This appeared during a difficult year for him in which his father grew ill and died unexpectedly. The book is memorable for having helped to open up a topic that then saw a number of other scholars follow suit, and for its psychedelic purple cover, perhaps a testament to the fact that it began life as a 60s thesis by a rather hippie-looking grad student with long hair and a beard, and that it had the word visions in the title. Reformers and Babylon was not, of course, Paul's first publication--there had been a number of articles previously--but it established him on his trajectory in the next twenty-five years towards becoming one of North America's most respected and careful intellectual and political historians. …

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