Encomium for Marvin A. Breslow

Encomium for Marvin A. Breslow

UMD Department of History alum Patrick Rael (BA 1988) has kindly shared with the Department his encomium for Marvin A. Breslow who passed away in 2024.  

I knew Marvin Breslow since my undergraduate days in the 1980s at the University of Maryland, where he taught courses on Tudor-Stuart history. He was my undergraduate advisor, who became a mentor and lifelong friend. I will always owe him more than I can say.

 
In professional circles, we often talk about our lineage. ‘Who supervised your doctoral thesis?’ What usually follows are proud recitations of major names in their fields, replete with endless accolades – Guggenheims, Pulitzers, MacArthurs. I’ve been blessed to have been taught by several such figures: Jim Horton, Ira Berlin, and Leon Litwack – all of whom have moved on now.

Marvin never ascended those heights. His was a more modest career, but perhaps no less impactful for that. Others can speak better to his life, which moved him from the Nebraska dairy farm of his birth to the hallowed halls of Harvard. Others can more efficiently document his scholarly achievements in understanding Puritan history. Others can speak to his long history of quiet campus leadership at the University of Maryland. I’d like to share why he was so special to me.

I was not a happy undergraduate. I probably needed a gap year or two – time to figure out what I really wanted and how hard I was willing to work for it. I started in engineering, for some reason I can neither remember nor fathom. That not working, I dropped out of school a few times, ever frustrated that I couldn’t live up to my own standards. I always wanted to be at the end of the process, basking in my success; Marvin helped me learn to appreciate the process itself.

 
I worked at video stores in those days, where free rentals let me explore an incredibly wide range of films. It wasn’t a future, but it wasn’t a bad way to pay the bills during academic time-outs. Marvin rented films from us. He remembered me from his survey course on Tudor-Stuart history, which was one of the few I did well in. As we encountered each other more and more in the video store, we talked about films and directors from Pedro Almodóvar to Peter Weir. Eventually he said I should come into his office and talk about getting back in school.
Marvin scraped me up and set me on the path. I wound up taking several more courses with him, and completed my research seminar (a requirement in the major) under his direction. It was on John Rogers and the Fifth Monarchy Men – a band of millennialist religious radicals who thrived during the English Civil War and interregnum. I was fascinated by this tumultuous time, when apocalyptic ideas fused with communitarian utopian ideals in such fascinating ways.

There was something about British history, and that period in particular, that always caught my attention. I wanted to understand the story of how we got to be – in all our beauty and ugliness. At that point, this was the history seemed most relevant for understanding our own national story – one I’d been raised to both appreciate and question.

 
I fell in love with the remarkable seventeenth century – a temporal way-station between the early modern and modern worlds. As I gradually learned more about the texture of early-modern English life, I became ever more fascinated with it all: religious controversies that intersected with popular politics, contests over massive constitutional issues on the relationship between individuals and the state, the expansion of European empire and all that it entailed – these were the matters that the great literary and artistic figures of the century addressed, from The Tempest to Pilgrim’s Progress.

 
More than that, I began to understand what it meant to develop a body of expertise (such as it was) in a specific topic. Under Marvin’s guidance we teased through the words of Muggletonians and Restorationists, Samuel Pepys and Gerrard Winstanley. We read scholars like Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lawrence Stone, and Kieth Thomas. I attended talks by E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill (what a thrill!). Marvin steered me toward courses in European intellectual history, where we read Descartes and Rousseau and the whole bunch. He made me aware of his incredibly talented colleagues, such as Gabrielle Spiegel, with whom I took transformative courses on medieval history. I developed a second major in English literature, focusing on Shakespeare with Sandy Mack and Milton with Jim Kerrigan. I learned about northern European painting in the Golden Age from Arthur Wheelock. I read French literature, from Moliere to Stendahl to Gide. I began feeling that I actually had a claim to knowing something about a particular time and place.

That germ of confidence meant everything to me. The rest of my life might be kind of a mess, but this was a direction. I may not have been able to figure out why I was here, but I came to understand that that concern was not just my own. Whether it be through classical philosophy or the literature of the drug experience, the humanities revealed to me that the problems we confronted – the problems I confronted – were not unique to this time and place, but were in fact universal. I was not entirely alone after all. The words of prior generations were our collective legacy, available even to a confused suburban punk. Anyone could claim them, simply by reading. I might even be able to participate in the conversation, and maybe even leave a small mark on it.
Marvin made all that possible for me. At a point when my own sense of self-worth felt hopelessly low, he saw my value. He cared. It came so naturally to him, always with exceptional grace and an easy-going lack of pretention. 
Ultimately, I completed my BA, then went on to a PhD at Berkeley, where I got to work with all those winners of Guggenheims and MacArthurs and whatnot. Somehow I managed to land a job at an incredible institution, where I’ve made a life that my twenty-year old self never would have dared to imagine. I have felt blessed every day, and I have quietly thanked Marvin Breslow for that every day. I was able to visit Marvin a couple times a year, and over brunches at the Parkway Deli in Silver Spring, I was able to express my gratitude.

I share parts of this story with students who are struggling. At a place like Bowdoin, which is chock full of high-flyers, it can be hard to feel like you’re the only one having a hard time. Maybe it helps some students to know that their professor was once in shoes very much like theirs. Regardless, every time a student visits for office hours, Marvin is with me, reminding me what a gift it is – to have a purpose, and one that lets me offer others a fraction of what he gave me.
Rest in peace, Marvin Breslow.

Patrick Rael (BA 1988)

Professor of History

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME