Review Number: 1913 Publish date: Thursday, 7 April, 2016 Author: Thomas Dixon ISBN: 9780199676057 Date of Publication: 2015 Price: £19.99 Pages: 456pp. Publisher: OUP Oxford Publisher url: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199676057.do Place of Publication: Oxford Reviewer: Hannah Rose Woods Published on Reviews in History (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews ) Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears Thomas Dixon’s Weeping Britannia is a tour through six centuries of British tears, from ‘extreme weeper’ Margery Kempe to the televised ‘sob-fests’ of Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor, via tear-stained judges, the emotionally extravagant novel of sensibility, supposedly stiff-upper-lipped politicians, and the bemused disdain of dry-eyed journalists observing the public outpourings of grief at the death of Princess Diana. Dixon sets out to dispel the ‘persistent myth’ of Britain as a nation of emotionally repressed stoics, writing that the stiff upper lip, far from being a constant element in the national character, emerged only in the late 19th century amid the militarism of the age of empire. The focus of much of Weeping Britannia, then, is to show how the shedding of tears, supposedly a universal human phenomenon, came to be seen as distinctly unBritish – an effeminate, weak and embarrassing display of emotional incontinence. In contrast, the medieval imagination could envisage tears as signs of holy thoughts and feelings, manifestations of religious devotion as well as human compassion. Public crying was characteristic of medieval Catholic piety: we are told that it was common for bishops to weep as they celebrated mass, and that the Pope ‘poured forth streams of tears’ as he delivered the eulogy of St Francis of Assisi, prompting the congregation to ‘bedew’ their clothes with their own weeping (pp. 24–5). Religious art and literature abounded with tears, which mingled with other spiritualised bodily fluids such as the milk of Mary and the blood of saints. The picture of the middle ages that Dixon creates is one drenched in socially-endorsed lachrymae, culminating in ‘the all-time “weeping champion” of recorded history’: the 15th-century mystic Margery Kempe, ‘a woman upstaged by her own tears’ (pp. 15–18). Kempe believed that her own tears, shed copiously and at the slightest provocation, represented those of Mary for the crucified Jesus, and served as lamentations for the sinfulness of worldly existence as well as a desire for the transcendent bliss of heaven. Kempe’s experience was as the extreme end of contemporary attitudes to weeping, and yet her account is illustrative of prevailing attitudes towards public as well as private displays of emotion, and of wider social meanings assigned to tears. Dixon identifies three subsequent turning points in British attitudes towards weeping; three moments in British history which ‘contributed more than any others to the idea